Anderson - Mid-American Chants

MID-AMERICAN CHANTS BY SHERWOOD ANDERSON

TO MARIONMARGARET ANDERSON THIS BOOK ISDEDICATED Sherwood Anderson (September 13,1876 March 8, 1941) was an American novelist and short story writer. His mostenduring work is the short story sequence Winesburg, Ohio . Writers he hasinfluenced include ErnestHemingway , William Faulkner , John Steinbeck , J. D. Salinger ,and Amos Oz , amongothers. and Emma S. Anderson. Anderson.

After Erwin's business failed, the family wasforced to move frequently, finally settling down at Clyde, Ohio , in1884. Partly as a result of these misfortunes, young Sherwood foundvarious odd jobs to help his family, which earned him the nickname"Jobby." He left school at age 14. Anderson moved to Chicago near his brother Karl's home andworked as a manual laborer until near the turn of the century, when he enlistedin the United States Army. He was called up but did not see action in Cubaduring the Spanish-American War. After the war, in 1900, he enrolled at WittenbergUniversity in Springfield, Ohio. Eventually he secured a job as a copywriter inChicago and became more successful.

In 1904, he married Cornelia Lane, the daughter of a wealthyOhio family. He fathered three children while living in Cleveland, Ohio, andlater Elyria, Ohio, where he managed a mail-order business and paintmanufacturing firms. In November 1912 he suffered a mental breakdown anddisappeared for four days. He was found in a drugstore in Cleveland, havingwalked almost thirty miles. Soon after, he left his position as president ofthe Anderson Manufacturing Co. in Elyria, Ohio, and left his wife and threesmall children to pursue the writer's life of creativity.

Anderson describedthe entire episode as "escaping from his materialistic existence,"which garnered praise from many young writers, who used his "courage"as an example. Anderson moved back to Chicago, working again for a publishingand advertising company. In 1914, he divorced Lane and married TennesseeMitchell.

Anderson's first novel, Windy McPherson's Son, waspublished in 1916, followed, three years later, by his second major work, MarchingMen. However, he is most famous for the collection of interrelated shortstories, which were published in 1919, known as Winesburg, Ohio . He claimed that"Hands", the opening story, was the first "real" story heever wrote.

Although his short stories were very successful, Anderson felt theneed to write novels. In 1920, he published Poor White ,which was rather successful. In 1923, Anderson published Many Marriages ,the themes of which he would carry over into much of his later writing. Thenovel had its detractors, but the reviews were, on the whole, positive. F.Scott Fitzgerald , for example, considered Many Marriagesto be Anderson's finest novel. Beginning in 1924, Anderson lived in the historic PontalbaApartments (540-B St.

Peter Street) adjoining Jackson Square in New Orleans.There, he and his wife entertained William F aulkner , Carl Sandburg , Edmund Wilson and other literary luminaries. Of Faulkner, in fact, he wrote his ambiguous andmoving short story "A Meeting South," and, in 1925, wrote Dark Laughter ,a novel rooted in his New Orleans experience. Although the book is now out ofprint (and was satirized by Ernest Hemingway in his novel The Torrents of Spring ), it wasAnderson's only bestseller.

Anderson's third marriage also failed, and he married EleanorCopenhaver in the late 1920s. They traveled and often studied together. In the1930s, Anderson published Death in the Woods, Puzzled America (abook of essays), and Kit Brandon, which was published in 1936.

Anderson dedicated his 1932 novel, Beyond Desire, toCopenhaver. Although he was much less influential in this final writing period,many of his more significant lines of prose were present in these works, whichwere generally considered sub-par compared to his other works. "Beyond Desire", set during the 1929 Loray Mill Strike in Gastonia, NC, resulted in yet another satirical mention by Ernest Hemingway .Hemingway included a minor character in his 1937 novel ToHave and Have Not who is an author. This character is workingon a novel of Gastonia.

Anderson died in Panama at the age of 64 while on a cruise toSouth America. An autopsy revealed that he had accidentally swallowed atoothpick (presumably in a martini olive), which had perforated his colon andcaused a fatal case of peritonitis.

He was buried at Round Hill Cemetery in Marion,Virginia. His epitaph reads, "Life, Not Death, is the GreatAdventure." Anderson's final home, known as Ripshin, still stands in Troutdale,Virginia, and may be toured by appointment.

I do notbelieve that we people of mid-western Amer ica,immersed as we are in affairs, hurried and harried through life by the terribleengineindustrialismhave come to the time of song. To me it seems that song be longs with and has its birthin the memory of older things than we know. In the beaten paths of life, whenmany generations of men have walked the streets of a city or wandered at nightin the hills of an old land, the singer aris es. The singer isneither young nor old but within him al ways there issomething that is very old.

The flavor of many lives lived and of many goneweary to the end of life creeps into his voice. Words run out beyond the powerof words. There is unworldly beauty in the song ofhim who sings out of the souls of peoples of old times and places but thatbeauty does not yet belong to us. In MiddleAmerica men are awakening. Like awkward and untrained boys we begin to turntoward maturity and with our awakening we hunger forsong. But in our towns and fields there are few memory haunted places.

Here westand in roaring city streets, on steaming coal heaps, in the shadow offactories from which come only the grinding roar of machines. We do not singbut mut ter in thedarkness. Our lips are cracked with dust and with the heat of furnaces. We but mutter and feel our way toward thepromise of song. For this bookof chants I ask only that it be allowed to stand stark against the backgroundof my own place and generati on. Honest Americans willnot demand beauty that is not yet native to our cities and fields.

In secret amillion men and women are trying, as I have tried here, to express the hungerwithin and I have dared to put these chants forth only because I hope and believe they may find an answering and clearer call in thehearts of other Mid-Americans. Sherwood Anderson. Chicago , February 1918 .

I am pr egnant with song. My bodyaches but do not betray me. I will sing songs and hide them away.

I will tearthem into bits and throw them in the street. The streets of my city are full ofdark holes. I will hide my songs in the holes of the streets. In the da rkness of the night Iawoke and the bands that bind me were broken. I was determined to bring oldthings into the land of the new. A sacred vessel I found and ran with it intothe fields, into the long fields where t he cornrustles.

All of the people of m y time werebound with chains. They had forgotten the long fields and the standing corn.They had forgotten the west winds. Into the cities my people had gathered. They had becomedizzy with words. Words had choked them. They could not breathe.

On my kne es I crawled before mypeople. I debased myself. The excretions of their bodies I took for my food.Into the ground I went and my body died. I emerged in the corn, in the longcornfields. My head arose and was touched by the west wind. The light of old thi ngs, of beautiful old things, awoke in me.

In thecornfields the sacred vessel is set up. I will renew in my people the worship of gods. I will setup for a king before them. A king shall arise before my people. Thesacred vessel shall be filled with the sweet oil ofthe corn. The flesh of my body is become good.

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