Midwestern Primitive

THE PORTABLE SHERWOOD ANDERSON (631 pp.)--edited by Horace Gregory --Viking ($2).

One day in 1912 at the age of 36, Paint Manufacturer Sherwood Anderson strode out of his office and told his secretary cryptically: "I have been wading in a long river and my feet are wet." With that, he walked out of his factory in Elyria, Ohio, and down the railroad track. He never came back.

He went to Chicago and began to write of the things he found in "the long river" during his years as a stable boy, a factory worker, an ad writer, a maker of paints. In the next 29 years, up to his death in 1941, Anderson wrote one book, Winesburg, Ohio, that seems sure to endure, seven novels that will probably not last so well, and many fine stories.

Twilight Whistles. In The Portable Sherwood Anderson, Viking has collected seven stories from Winesburg, Ohio, the full text of the novel, Poor White, 20 letters, some editorials and news stories, and six of his later short stories, including I'm a Fool, The Egg, and the unforgettable A Meeting South.

In retrospect there seems no question that Anderson was a great writer and that Winesburg, Ohio is a great book. The private jokes that came into his later stories, the introduction of his friends into the stories, the lordly pronouncements on politics, the pose of being the simple smalltown wise man, unaffected and honest, and above all the air of regarding literature as the province of only a few choice spirits, make Anderson's work in his later years seem superficial. But 30 years after publication, Winesburg still retains its quaint and distinctive flavor, and summons up as powerfully as ever the twilight scenes of a small Midwestern town, the shy and tremulous meetings, the sudden, revelations, the moments of exaltation or sadness that pass like the whistle of the train.

Haven for Innocents. Anderson wrote of the simple and unknown people of Winesburg as if they were great generals or great statesmen. The laborious account in Poor White of Allie Mulberry, the village idiot who astonishes the townspeople by carving a ship and placing it in a bottle, is a bland parody of innumerable success stories. And the dreamlike progress of Hugh McVey from poor boy to great inventor has a fine native fancifulness. Anderson's picture of Winesburg seemed to his early critics--and to some early admirers, who read and fled to Paris --to be one of a typical, unenlightened, provincial community. It now seems a hideout, not for lawbreakers, but for the innocent; a haven for the excessively sensitive or the insufficiently practical; a refuge for those who have been run out of town (usually by mistake); a tolerant, disinterested community of citizens whose lives were spent not bothering anyone and asking only to be left alone.

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