Hobo Gone Babbitt

HELLO TOWNS !--Sherwood Anderson--Horace Liveright ($3).

When Sherwood Anderson wandered over the Virginia hills from his Troutdale farm to the town of Marion, the townsfolk, inquisitive, turned out to see the Famous Author. But when he wandered over again and bought their printshop, lock, stock and cuspidor, with its two weekly papers, their reaction was not so simple. They were proud that the Author should choose their town and their county newspapers for his own. But they were ashamed that he had been famed for a "filthy mind" and dreaded lest he turn it indecently loose in their respectable little papers. They were pleased that by his very presence Marion would attain a renown not unlike Dayton, Tenn., and Marion, Ohio. They were mortified that his intellectual friends should learn that Marion still had hog-zoning laws, that Marion edited both its Democratic and its Republican paper in one & the same shop.

Far from ridiculing Marion, Editor Anderson's friends have succumbed to his civic zeal. They have read, for example, his editorials exhorting Marion to support its Kiwanis band. Marion was flattered when Manhattan's great Otto Hermann Kahn, no Kiwanian, sent a check for $100.

With increasing satisfaction Marion, Va., realizes that Sherwood Anderson is no longer the sinister, black-haired hobo whose face the advertisements used to show marked by unspeakable passions, by furrows and pouches suggesting unmentionable artistic orgies. Sherwood Anderson has become a plump, benign, grey-haired citizen, radiating goodwill. Unlike Sinclair Lewis, baiter of smalltownsmen, Sherwood Anderson has said: "I like people just as they are. I do not want to change any one."

Disarmed, Marion has accepted him, and he is pleased. He writes: "Yesterday I drove my car down a street of our town I had never been on before. I did not know the street was there. Men hailed me. Women and children were sitting on doorsteps. 'It is our editor.' 'Well, you have been a long time getting down here.'

"When I drive on a country road in this county farmers or their wives call to me: 'Come in and get some cider, a basket of grapes, some sweet corn for dinner.' The women of the town and county keep the print shop fragrant with flowers. I have a place in this community. . . ."

In Hello Towns! Editor Anderson has collected editorials and news stories from his two weeklies, pitched them together with a few running comments, and produced the book-a-year which his enterprising Manhattan publisher demands. Some of the news stories are less news than story and are the more pleasing to an articulate citizen of Marion: "As for town and county news, we have usually heard it at the post office or drug-store two or three days before the Marion Democrat comes out. That, of course, adds to interest in the Democrat, as everybody wants to see how the thing looks in print."