Southern Odyssey: Selected Writings by Sherwood Anderson

Mississippi Quarterly, The, Fall, 1998 by Martin Bidney

Southern Odyssey: Selected Writings by Sherwood Anderson, edited by Welford Dunaway Taylor and Charles E. Modlin. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. xxv, 251 pp. $29.95.

Everyone who cares about Anderson's life and work will be interested in this diverse compilation and will profit from its generally helpful commentary. The editors' aim is to present material, published (often in obscure venues) and unpublished, from Anderson's final phase--his last sixteen years (1924-1941), when he lived mostly in Troutdale, Virginia. Also included are items reflecting his fairly long sojourns in New Orleans in 1922 and 1924 (a 1920 stay of several months in Alabama had not much literary consequence). Because Anderson's focus of interest changed at various times, the book is organized both thematically and chronologically. Not all items are aesthetically impressive; Anderson's laconic style is better suited for hinting at depths in the personalities of intense but quiet people than for describing landscapes, where we would like to see more detail. Particularly the later selections, usually journalistic or political, are often of greater biographical than literary value. But that is not to dismiss them. The whole book, as a documentary biography of Anderson's Southern years, highlights a stage in his development of which most of us know far too little.

The initial celebration of the "primitive" life of the New Orleans French Quarter in Anderson's Double Dealer article and equally of the life of blacks in his Dark Laughter chapter strikes us as dated, of course, though it is well to remember that Anderson thought he himself was "rather primitive" (p. xxvii). We next find a letter to William Faulkner, in which Anderson refers to the two men's exchange of tall tales about "Al Jackson," a character they have jointly invented (allegedly descended from Andrew Jackson) who retreats to the incredibly damp Louisiana swamp country where he eventually raises sheep, which learn to swim and develop scales (p. 13). Of the well-known story "A Meeting South" we learn that the poet-protagonist David is based on Faulkner, whom Anderson got to know well in New Orleans. Some of Faulkner's lies about himself are incorporated as truths about the fictional David; it's hard to know whether Anderson believed Faulkner's dubious reminiscences or not, and it makes little difference (pp. 16-17). A final Vanity Fair article concludes Part I ("Discovering the South") with an impressionistic sketch.

Part 2, "The Southern Highlands," opens with a lively account of the building of Anderson's house at Troutdale (named "Ripshin" after the local creek), followed by a wonderful "Note on Story Telling," with its World War I tale, derived from a local raconteur, about an Italian-American soldier who visits his native village. The soldier's father, almost deaf and nearly blind, rushes out of the house, pushes the soldier and his friend out of the way, begins loading and shooting, shoots "a rooster, a goose, a pig, a goat, and then another pig," laughs and shouts and then bellows out, over and over, what seem to be the Italian words for "My son! A feast!" Anderson comments on the raconteur's art: "He did it with less words than any story teller I have ever heard. It was like Old Testament story telling" (p. 59). "Virginia Justice" and "Jug of Moon" are magazine stories of local color. An early version of "A Sentimental Journey," called simply "A Story," is nearly as powerful as the tales of Winesburg or A Death in the Woods: it tells of a mountain man who decides for once in his life to see the outside world, to sample lowland mining work with his son. But after laboring for a few weeks in the noisy mines, the two of them suddenly set out, with an irresistible, manic urgency, through deep snowdrifts to return to their home eighty miles away, man and boy "half insane with desire" for the white, silent hills (p. 75).

Part 3, "A Country Editor," contains pieces that Anderson wrote for two politically contrasting but otherwise similar newspapers, the Marion Democrat and the Republican Smyth County News, both of which he bought in Marion, Virginia, in 1927. In an unpublished piece he tells how he invented the fictional Buck Fever (of the business firm "Fever and Ague" [p. 93]) as a strategic mask so that he could be more pointedly satirical than in his own authorial persona. Most of the Part 3 pieces are regional travel descriptions, modest and undistinguished. But the two "Buck Fever" items are delightful, particularly the hilarious "Three Hens." "Baptist Foot-Washing Off," a satirically toned news story about the abrupt cancellation of this Baptist ceremony after one "offending brother" admits he voted for Al Smith, is fascinating but may perplex some (younger) readers. The commentary only states that Smith was a "democrat," which explains nothing; the problem for these theologically scrupulous foot-washers, of course, was Smith's Catholicism.

Part 4, "Southern Labor," provides background to Anderson's 1932 novel, Beyond Desire, which deals with labor conflicts in a North Carolina mill town. His sympathetic account of a strike in Elizabethton, Tennessee appeared in The Nation. In the unpublished "O Ye Poets" and "Night" Anderson's hypnotic, repetitive style proves the perfect tool to convey the pounding monotony of textile factory life as workers feel it. Additional journalistic reports on lumberjacking and tobacco marketing show Anderson's range as a serious, concerned observer of labor conditions. But the editors also note the haunting "dreamlike" strangeness of Anderson's recounted visit to a sugar refinery: "The final image, of a jealous woman chasing another with a cane knife amid the sweet smells of sugar," is "surreal" (p. 174).