The Writer as Victim

SHERWOOD ANDERSON (271 pp.)--Irving Howe--Sloane ($3.50).

SHERWOOD ANDERSON, HIS LIFE AND WORK (360 pp.)--James Schevill--University of Denver ($4).

Like most serious writers, Sherwood Anderson spent a lot of time and words trying to explain himself to other people and to himself. Like most such efforts, the results were imperfect. In Tar, A Story Teller's Story and Memoirs, he fumbled earnestly to understand what made him tick as boy, man, husband (four times), peripatetic adman and writer.

He became preoccupied with the problem of himself even in his letters: "This I do know--that the only thing that saves me from being a plain son-of-a-bitch is that I am as much as any man that ever lived--an artist ... It may all come to nothing. Everything I have done or may do may be forgotten in two generations."

Mixture In the Grain. In the ten years since Anderson's death, most of what he wrote has indeed been forgotten. But Winesburg, Ohio and a few splendid short stories (e.g., The Egg, Death in the Woods, I'm a Fool, I Want to Know Why) have given him a niche in U.S. writing that is peculiarly his own. Good or bad, his stuff was in the genuine American grain. Yet in the final summing up, Anderson wrote and lived uncertainly. Of his 24 books, only Winesburg, with its sadly luminous glances at small-town loneliness, had the impact that comes from a writer who has something to say and knows how to say it. His novels were badly constructed and sloppily written, his verse crude and graceless, the autobiographical writings an exasperating mixture of beauty and awkwardness. Anderson tried to be a bohemian and a businessman at the same time, a wanderer and a family man, a near-Communist and a decent democrat. The result was personal and intellectual confusion.

This week two full-length books tell the Anderson story and try to explain his failure in life and in writing. Author James Schevill's somewhat plodding account is more informative. Author Howe's Anderson is much abler as criticism, weighted though it is with psychoanalytical jargon and conjecture. Both agree that little of Anderson's considerable output has much permanent value; both argue that Anderson's failure was somehow the fault of the

U.S. as a nation. Writes Critic Howe: "Anderson's career must seem a dramatic instance of a gifted writer impoverished by a constricting culture . . ." Asks Biographer Schevill: "What was there in American life that prevented the artist's growth to maturity?"

Hoots & Circumstance. Blaming U.S. society for the failures of writers has become an occupational cliche with U.S. critics. Why the blame is justified is never made quite clear. From the information dug up by Howe and Schevill, it is obvious that Anderson was an unstable egotist whose uncertainties in life and in writing would likely have pursued him in any society. He was always short of money, but writers were deploring that condition before Columbus set sail.

It is true that the U.S. is full of busy people who don't care a hoot whether Writer X gets his cakes & ale or not. It is nonsense to cite that circumstance as an excuse for every exercise in bad prose and erratic behavior.

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