For lack of information, even the most complete existing biographical sources on Sherwood Anderson pass directly from an account of his marriage to Cornelia Platt Lane in Toledo, Ohio, on Monday, May 16, 1904, to their setting up housekeeping at 5854 Rosalie Court on the South Side of Chicago some weeks later. Although the Toledo Daily Blade reported on the day of the wedding that “Mr. and Mrs. Anderson will leave this evening for a wedding journey,” no information about the honeymoon period has been known to exist, despite the unusually large amount of documentation of Anderson’s life and career that has been retained or uncovered, much of it preserved in Chicago’s Newberry Library.

Several years ago, however, Mrs. Marion “Mimi” Anderson Spear, daughter of Sherwood and Cornelia, discovered among some papers left by her mother a unique and revealing document: a holograph manuscript that includes, along with several previously unknown early stories and sketches by Anderson, his detailed personal journal of the wedding trip itself, which between May 16 and June 2 took the Andersons by train to Cincinnati; to Oakdale, in southern Morgan County, Tennessee; to Chattanooga; and to Memphis, from which they traveled by steamboat on the Mississippi to St. Louis and the World’s Fair. This document not only fills a previously existing gap in Anderson’s biography but also, in both the journal and non-journal sections, provides early examples of Anderson’s imaginative writing from a period when almost nothing beyond some business-oriented essays in the house organ of his advertising agency has been known to survive.

The Manuscript

Both the journal of the wedding trip and the eight early stories and sketches are written in ink in a tall, narrow notebook (13 cm X 31.5 cm) of 90 lined sheets (180 pp.) originally bound in flexible brown cardboard. Today several of the sheets are loose; most of the cover has been torn away; and some pages at the front and back of the notebook are badly discolored and damaged, with a resulting loss –luckily insubstantial — of some text. Seventeen of the ninety sheets of the original notebook are missing altogether (counting from the front, sheets 12-23, 36, 37, 50, 61-62), but almost certainly these were not pages that Anderson had written anything on.

Anderson actually wrote his May-June 1904 journal entries beginning at the back of the notebook. Having filled up ten pages at the front with five earlier stories, sketches, and impressions of varying lengths, he made his first journal entry on a new first page, with the notebook turned over and upside down. In this position, the diary occupies 24 sheets or pp. [1]-[47]. For three non-journal pieces dealing with the wedding and honeymoon and written almost certainly in Oakdale, Tennessee, after the wedding, Anderson returned the notebook to its normal position and wrote them on pages immediately following the other five non-journal writings. The position of the three pieces written simultaneously with the journal (pp. [11]-[14]), relative to the other group of five pieces (pp. [1]-[10]), indicates a date of composition earlier than mid-May 1904 for the group of five. Only two of the eight pieces included were given titles; thus I have provided descriptive phrases or sentences (within brackets) to distinguish among them:

pp. [1]-[2] [Tramp killed by train found by girl]
pp. [3]-[5] “The Red Haired Woman”
pp. [5]-[8] “The Can Factory”
pp. [8]-[9] [Afternoon on a slow train]
p. [10] [Spring fever]
p. [11] [A Woman is like a river]
p. [12] [The wedding]
pp. [13]-[14] [Poem to the bride].
Cornelia Platt Lane

The essentials of Sherwood Anderson’s life, from his birth into a family of limited means in Camden, Ohio, on September 13, 1876, to his situation in 1904 as an up-and-coming Chicago advertising man of modest social and educational background, have been reasonably well documented and need not be repeated here. Little has been recorded, however, about the quite different background of his bride.

Cornelia Platt Lane was born May 16, 1877, into a well-to-do family of Toledo, Ohio, with ancestral ties to New England. Her first recorded American ancestor, William Lane, had arrived in Boston in 1651. She was the namesake of her paternal grandfather Cornelius B. Lane. Her father was Robert Heber Lane (called Heber), a prosperous Toledo wholesaler in shoes and rubbers; and her mother was Kate Pepple Lane, who had died in 1892 when Cornelia was fifteen. She was the eldest of five children, including Robert McNeill Lane (b. 1884), Margaret Lane (b. 1886), and two others who died in infancy or early childhood. Robert Heber Lane would marry his second wife Georgia (“Georgie”) Lacy in 1901 and father a second, much younger family of four sons.

After graduating from Toledo High School and spending a year at Shepardson College, Cornelia had entered the College for Women of Western Reserve University in Cleveland in 1896, where she received the Ph.B. degree in June 1900. While in college, she showed pronounced literary and historical interests, taking a substantial number of courses in English, history, and Latin, serving as a literary editor of the college annual, joining the Browning club, and writing for the college literary magazine. In June 1901, about a year after her graduation from college, she boarded the Red Star Line’s S. S. Vaderland in New York, bound for Cherbourg and Antwerp. During her eight months of travel and study in Europe, she would add a significant dimension to her acquaintance with the literature, language, and history that she knew previously only from college textbooks.

Landing at Antwerp about July 6, she was in Brussels the next day and reached Paris July 9. After a few days there, she left for Lugano, Switzerland; and by July 20 she was at Como in Northern Italy, with a railway pass that would take her to Milan, Genoa, Pisa, Naples, Rome, Florence, and Venice before she left Italy on August 7. She then passed through Innsbruck, Munich, Nuremberg, Frankfurt, and Cologne, and devoted August 21 through 29 to touring the Netherlands.

After spending the month of September in London, Cornelia was by early October back in Paris, where she lived at 7 Rue D’Assas until mid-February 1902. Judging from the programs and notes retained in a scrapbook, she seems to have attended concerts and theaters regularly and to have led an active social life among a circle of friends and acquaintances. She obtained admittance as a reader at the Bibliotheque Nationale; and it is likely that, beginning in November and December, she attended several classes at the Sorbonne during the winter. In mid-February, 1902, she toured Brittany before sailing from Cherbourg for home on the U.S.M.S. St. Louis.

Back in Toledo, Cornelia resumed living with her family in the Lane home at 2428 Robinwood Avenue, a quiet upper-class street. Her meeting Sherwood Anderson around May 1903, came about through a connection with Clyde, Ohio, where Anderson had grown up. A friend of Anderson’s from Clyde named Jane “Jennie” Bemis had married a man from Chicago named Charles Weeks; and the couple had settled in Toledo next door to the Lane home. Jennie Bemis Weeks and Cornelia became good friends; and when Sherwood, on one of his advertising trips, stopped off in Toledo to see Jennie, she introduced him to her friend Cornelia Lane. She and Sherwood corresponded after his return to Chicago, and presumably he made other visits over the following months. By early 1904 they were engaged to be married. On Saturday, May 7, the couple were honored at an “informal evening” given by Cornelia’s friend Eunice Alexander and attended by fifteen other couples.

Although Anderson’s social and educational attainments were at the time inferior to those of his intended bride, not only did his prospects in the world of advertising and business seem rosy; but he by this time had literary ambitions himself, and he and Cornelia shared strong interests in such authors as Stevenson, Carlyle, Browning, and Borrow. They were both attractive young adults in the bloom of early maturity. And as some of Anderson’s early writings printed here for the first time will show, his love and respect for Cornelia at the time were even more intensified by his idealized and romanticized idea of “woman” as something more unfathomable, “greater,” and more “earnest” than man.

Sadly, within a few years the great expectations of the spring of 1904 would fade for both, as her instincts for insuring a secure and respectable future for their three children came more and more into conflict with his equally strong urge to become an artist. Separation in 1914 would be followed by divorce in 1916. Although not part of the present story, it is worth remarking that Cornelia, who never remarried, went on through life with dignity, grace, and determination. She supported her children by teaching school, graciously encouraging them to respect and honor their father. She spent her last years living quietly near her daughter Marion Spear in Madison, North Carolina, where she died near the end of her ninetieth year in the spring of 1967 and where she is buried on a pleasant hilltop.

But all this was in the future when the young couple were married on May 16, 1904, (Cornelia’s twenty-seventh birthday) in her father’s house in Toledo. Featured prominently as the lead item in the “Social” column of that day’s Toledo Daily Blade, the wedding was small but traditional. The pastor of the First Baptist Church performed the ceremony, and Eunice Alexander at the piano played “the Lohengrin and Mendelssohn wedding music.” Margaret Lane, Cornelia’s sister, “attired in white,” was the bridesmaid; and Marco Morrow, Sherwood’s close friend and Chicago advertising agency associate, was best man. Anderson’s artist brother Karl came from New York and his sister Stella from Chicago to represent the Anderson family. Among the few other guests was Jennie Weeks, who had introduced the couple a year earlier. Cornelia’s gown was “a handsome creation of white chiffon,” and after the wedding supper, which followed the ceremony, she changed to “a dark blue tailored costume” for the wedding journey.

The Wedding Journey

The newlyweds boarded a late evening train for Cincinnati, where they stayed at the St. Nicholas Hotel and were “out about the city” on Tuesday, May 17. On Wednesday the 18th they traveled by the Cincinnati Southern Railway — the busy main line between Cincinnati and Chattanooga — to Oakdale, Tennessee, where they spent a full week of their honeymoon. Oakdale was in 1904 the site of the Cincinnati Southern’s main switching yards, on the east bank of the Emory River (earlier name “Babahatchie”) at the foot of Walden’s Ridge, one of the towering peaks of the Cumberland Mountains in rural Morgan County west of Knoxville.

Oakdale owed its prominence on the line to the fact that, in the days of steam engines, long trains going north from Chattanooga had to be broken up at Oakdale before attempting the steep grades north between Oakdale and Somerset, Kentucky. Since at the time as many as twenty trains an hour passed through Oakdale, it was the scene of much activity. Workers’ small frame homes and boardinghouses nestled thickly on the hillsides above the river and the tracks.

The Andersons stayed at the Babahatchie Inn, Oakdale’s most prominent hostelry and landmark. Situated facing the railroad tracks with a bend in the river at its back, this rambling, three-story Victorian structure with its distinctive square steeple mainly existed to house and feed the many trainsmen in Oakdale. Although the Babahatchie Inn became after 1906 for many years one of the most famous, largest, and best-kept of the Railroad YMCA’s, before that it was apparently an unkempt and unruly place. Before its cleaning and renovation under YMCA operation beginning in 1906, the Babahatchie is reported to have been the scene of drunken brawls, gamblings, and shootings; a place where the sheets might or might not be changed every thirty days; an inn where “Practically the only women who dared to enter … were those picked up by men along the road.”

It seems surprising that Anderson would have taken his cultured young bride to such a place. Although he reports in the journal that Cornelia did complain mildly about the place being “southern,” Anderson does not dwell on any negative aspects of their stay. Either the prevailing accounts of lawlessness and lack of respectability are exaggerated or the Andersons were not aware of all that went on. One reason for stopping may have been Anderson’s previous acquaintance with Oakdale. He would have passed through this hamlet more than once during his army service a few years previous, in 1898, as his unit was shuttled by train among encampments in the vicinity of Chattanooga and Knoxville. And he may have passed through Oakdale even more recently in his travels by rail as an advertising solicitor. Perhaps his earlier observations of the great natural beauty in this environment outweighed the consideration of less-than-ideal lodging accommodations.

As a rule a writer’s juvenilia have three characteristics: they are almost by definition of lesser quality than the later work; but they give indications of the excellence that later work would have; and they suggest some of the preoccupations of the mature writer and writing. Sherwood Anderson’s “Honeymoon Journal and Other Early Writings, 1904,” the newly available “juvenilia” of a twenty-seven-year-old advertising man and would-be artist, follow the rule closely. In his Introduction, Hilbert Campbell has ably discussed such matters as they apply to all these early writings. I add further comment on the major piece, the “Honeymoon Journal.”
It is clear that Anderson was not only intending a record of daily events and his thoughts about them but was trying to write his record well. The modern reader may be somewhat amused or put off, or even charmed, by the recurrent sentimentalism of attitude and style in the early sections, may find them too self-consciously “literary”; but one must accept that at this early stage in his development as a writer Anderson, an imitator like most beginners, seems to have drawn on the then current vogue of the sentimental personal essay. (Read as little as you can stand of the essays by Henry Van Dyke, Presbyterian clergyman and professor of English at Princeton, if you want the full flavor of this genre from one of its most popular practitioners.) The diction of the early sections is often too “elevated,” too formal for the more colloquial modern taste, that taste which the author of such books as Winesburg, Ohio and Horses and Men was to do much to form. The frequent personifications of nature are particularly noticeable.

In the distance a little water fall murmured
among the trees. The river continued its story.
Ah little river, you are the magic for all the
wonder of the hills. The moonlight sits grand
and gloomy on the mountain tops, but it casts its
golden heart into your little bosom at the last.
See there it lies the heart of the moon in the
bosom of the waters.

Actually as personifications of nature go this is done rather skillfully; and however dated this and other stylistic “ornaments” may seem, Anderson was already searching, if here among shopworn materials, for a language through which to express accurately inward states of feeling, a search which in more successful ways would strikingly characterize his whole literary career. Besides, he knew he was being sentimental and with justifiable reason: “It [is] right you know to be sentimental when you are young and on your wedding trip.” “Trip,” one notes, not the more formal “journey.”

Significantly, in the midst of this idyll of early married love by the river among the mountains — an idyll despite the un-idyllic heat and the “southernness” of the Babahatchie Inn — the newlyweds twice read Browning together, once specifically the dramatic monologue “Fra Lippo Lippi.” This self-revelation by the roistering Fra Lippo of course tells of a streetwise 15th-century boy become monk, artist, and lover of women who out of sheer delight in things of this world paints human bodies as they hideously or lusciously are, not as mere symbolic embodiments of the soul, whatever that is. Although Cornelia, who believed in and practiced absolute honesty, would be right in assigning “great common sense” to herself and “the fanciful and the unreal” to her husband, Anderson, who liked such raffish people as Browning’s Fra Lippo and excelled in the oral tale, would in his mature work use his “fancy,” his imagination, to create a poetic form of realism by which he revealed his human characters as they inwardly really were.

As though to illustrate what he could already do when released from the limitations of a borrowed form, Anderson’s outlook and language in the later sections of the “Honeymoon Journal” are quite different from the earlier, much less sentimental, much more direct. Sherwood and Cornelia have, as it were, ceased being groom and bride and become husband and wife, happily joined but not so much looking at each other in their own little universe as inspecting, still through his eyes of course, things which travelers through the upper South in 1904 might see. Incidents or scenes observed on the train to Memphis, on the harbor cruise, on the Ferd Herold pushing up river to St. Louis are not presented as picturesque or quaint as during the stay in Oakdale but as things to be reported exactly; indeed the final entry in the journal is hardly more than a catalogue of exhibits at the great St. Louis fair. The prose changes decisively; the personifications and the other stylistic ornaments largely disappear. In Memphis, for example, Anderson writes plainly and effectively about another river at night when he comments that their room at the Gayoso Hotel “looked out upon a little roof garden with a fountain in the middle and over beyond that lay the big moving river, very silvery and quiet in the moonlight,” a description of the Mississippi which Mark Twain, Huck Finn, and the mature Anderson himself would have approved of. Again, one evening in Memphis husband and wife talk in a little park about “a man and woman’s right attitude toward certain great problems of life,” and then Anderson writes with admirable simplicity and concreteness:

When we had dined on flannel cakes and
strawberries we walked home in the first
spatter of the coming rain. In the room
we sat on the edge of the bed in the dark
and continued our talk.

He had a long way yet to go, but as this second half of the “Honeymoon Journal” shows, Anderson had at least set foot on the road to Winesburg and beyond.

Walter B. Rideout
Harry Hayden Clark Emeritus Professor of English
The University of Wisconsin-Madison

Journal May 16 – June 2, 1904

May 16 [Monday]

Cincinnati

I think it best that I begin there. That was really the beginning of everything and in truth I knew but little of it and of what was going on about me until her hand dropped into mine and the minister pronounced us man and wife. Of course there were beautiful women there and some very good and gallant men but what of them. They were to go on the morrow about their business. [Some to] the making of pictures [or at] least to the writ[ing of] songs and others to the buying and selling and the wrangling of law cases in stuffy courtrooms. We, the woman and I, were to go on quite a different mission. To live a life together and to be brave and tender and kind. I dare say if ever our son reads this little story of our journey he will know in his heart [how] well we have done. … Let us hope [that he] will at least [think of us] with a great store [of affection].
I guess I should write of that night [on the train] as man and wife [when we were] all alone … in the darkness [and] silence. And it [was peaceful] for all the rattling [of the] train. We … ate sandwiches. A few stars came into the sky and looked at us and we did a deal of looking into each other’s eyes. There was a cynical fellow once who said it wasn’t good to get a sight of a naked human soul. Well I saw such a thing that night and it only made me the readier to believe in all humanity.

May 17 [Tuesday]

Cincinnati

Tonight we’ve been sitting in a big chair by the window. We’ve been out about the city during the day and I guess we’re both a bit tired. I don’t think we’ve really had a good talk since we’ve been married and when we try to talk we both sit[,] each looking into the other’s eyes and are silent.
Tonight there are street cars going up and down same as always and laden wagons rumble over the cobble stones. [It’s] a fairy land though. A [land] maybe we used to [live] in [,] she and I [,] but for all [that] a fairy land. I [rem]ember that when I was [a lit]tle boy and my mother [died] and I was tired from [sil]ent grief I went to [the] window at night and [felt] this same apartness [from] the rest of the living, [breath]ing world. Cornelia … had a new fine[ness envied by] shop girls and even [by] gaudy women with yellow hair when today we passed them on the street, and I know that some great womanly longing must have sprung into their hearts from the way their eyes followed her as we went along. It is very strange that both [of] us but realize our marriage in a dim half wondering sort of way and full a dozen times she has stopped on the street to say with a wonderful wonder in her voice, “Why Sherwood I’m your wife. I’m Mrs. Sherwood Anderson.”

We’re very spud, stopping at the St. Nicholas and paying 4 dollars a day for our room and tomorrow we’re going on. I wonder if we are hardened wretches or just very very wise. We haven’t been in the least embarrassed in each other’s presence. It quite takes my breath to think we’re not.

May 18 [Wednesday]

Oakdale, Tenn.

It’s good to get here among the hills and the evening is irresistible. Great Mountains see the glories of the skies and earth lifts up to look into the faces of the stars. It is night now and the hills are but dimly outlined against the sky. We went for a walk at evening and gathered blossoms from blackberry bushes. I dare say there will be less blackberries but at least we shall have a touch of color in our room.
The Inn here is a great barren breezy place that looks as though it had at one time aspired to be a fashionable hotel but growing discouraged gave itself over to the feeding and housing of trainsmen. A healthy good faced landlady, a mild gentlemanly host, a clerk who lingers half regretfully through the day and a host of Negroes, daughters cursing crippled trainsmen and dusty faced workmen make up the roster of the place. Linen, dining room and landlady are undeniably clean [but] the rest of the place is southern. We’ve an idea that if we stay we’ll clean and dust the room and we’ll probably stay. I seem to see it in the hills looking in at the windows and in her eyes and down below a little river has started a wonderful little story that I think we’ll want to hear more of. Cornelia is a bit out of patience at the natives because they have insisted on spoiling several beautiful pictures by stacking up tin cans but for all that she looks happy. We’ve both decided that we’re already far ahead on this marriage for if all the rest of our lives should be cast in bleak places we would still have this afternoon on the train left as food for happiness.

I’ve seen brides and grooms. They usually look hot, uncomfortable and ill at ease. They’re not. They’re just living in a world you know nothing of. The flying landscape, the good brown earth, the faces of people grave and gay are full of meaning to brides and grooms. You know Satan took Christ up into a high mountain and showed him the earth and the treasures thereof and was very properly rebuked. Christ owned all that and knew it and so also does the groom know it when he sits upon a railroad train going journeying with his bride. I wouldn’t be afraid to try that up into a high mountain business. No man would that had a bride.

May 19 [Thursday]

Oakdale

Of course we’ll never see this place. It is so made that one might spend a life time upon one of its hills looking at the play of lights on all the grandeur laid out before. This morning we reconnoitered. We went along a little path down past a sawmill and a dilapidated church. The sawmill was busy eating away at its logs but the church looked out of sorts and discouraged. I don’t blame the church. I would hate to try to be a church and preach sermons to men who live in sight of these hills. A razorback hog wallowed in the mire of an empty creek. It was very hot and very still. At long intervals a nice wind came down from the hills and tossed her hair about her face. She was very beautiful. In the evening we went to the store for stamps and fishing tackle. Long legged natives drawled under the light of the store’s lamps. We are finding the people very good here. Last night an old man, evidently a dependent of the landlord, brought warm water to our room and when I offered him a piece of money he refused it with great dignity.
I am charmed at the respect shown to Cornelia. She is the very Queen of the place and in her pretty gowns stirs the community of a graciousness that is too chivalrous to be so common a thing as curiosity. Tomorrow is to be our river day. The moon came out as we walked down the hill to the hotel. In the distance a little water fall murmured among the trees. The river continued its story. Ah little river, you are the magic for all the wonder of the hills. The moonlight sits grand and gloomy on the mountain tops, but it casts its golden heart into your little bosom at the last. See there it lies the heart of the moon in the bosom of the waters.

May 20 [Friday]

Oakdale

Little river Babahatchie, they have named you Emory but to us two you are still little Babahatchie (bubbling water). How gallantly the red boat sits upon your dancing body. The hills they are for truth but you little river you are for sentiment. “And the hills for all their grandeur must come down to the river to drink[,]” says the bride. It [is] right you know to be sentimental when you are young and on your wedding trip. We did not catch fish. We only sat under the bank at the foot of the mountain and dangled our lines in the water and looked at the running[,] laughing water. We had a little adventure too in trying to run a stretch of rapids and for just a moment Babahatchie showed her white teeth. She didn’t mean anything though. It was just a playful little toss of the head and a pretense of throwing the groom overboard to remind us that the sun doesn’t always shine even on the Babahatchie. Well, we’ve seen the sun and the water and the trees for another long day, we have idled in the shade and lay on our backs in the sand looking at the sky and listening to the wood sounds. It has been a good day, a bride and groom day, a day to begin a life on with courage and fortitude.
May 21 [Saturday]

Oakdale

I climbed one of the highest of the hills today. I suppose it lies a thousand feet above the level of the sea. A long journey for little Babahatchie. It was very fine up there on the hill lying on my back and watching the clouds in the sky. A bumblebee gowned in a wonderful yellow coat flew near me and stood on a flower close at hand. A gaudy butterfly called to pay his respects and in the dead leaves by my side a cricket sound of home and winter firesides. It was the first time I had been away from her since the wedding and I had time for a little review of myself. The hills stretched themselves in the afternoon sun and called to me to be sensible and leave introspection to eager eyed men down in the cities by the sea so I wrote a little note to her back at the hotel and had the rare enjoyment of roundly believing in myself for the next hour. Upon the side of the hill there were houses set in unexpected places and back of one of these and on a little level break in the climb a little fenced garden sat among the trees.
Last night we sat out in the moonlight and watched three geese go in single file and with great dignity down the road homeward bound. They were very majestic and very absurd. Tonight I had my first plunge into the waters of Babahatchie. I shan’t forget this little river. It was very cool and grateful to my hot body. Cornelia cheered me from the window, the people on a passing train leaned out and waved hands. Cornelia has decided that she is a woman of great common sense while I have put in my word for the fanciful and the unreal. I dare say that will make a great combination.

At evening we walked down over a little wooden bridge and along a half dry creek bed that finally merged into a street. It was a queer little uncertain hill climbing street that seemed half undecided where to stop. It surprised and pleased you that little street did, it was so toy like and half jesting in its purpose. To one used to walking in streets that stand up earnestly and make a great show of respectability this wee town’s end was wonderfully charming. You felt like stealing it and carrying it away in your pocket. We were in search of the doctor and found he had gone to tend an injured man[,] so after a few minutes[‘] talk with his rather uninteresting wife we went back down the toy street to wait for him in the moonlight by the wooden bridge. Tonight we had a very serious talk with the landlady. We have been a bit worried for fear no one about the Inn knew we were a bride and groom. We need not have worried. They had spotted us alighting from the train.

May 22 [Sunday]

Oakdale

Before breakfast this morning we had a very spirited discussion as to where grooming stopped and husbanding began. We decided to keep on at the grooming. Cornelia had a bad half hour about the house and the halls. It’s southern and it hurts her housewifely impulses. Down the track there is the ruins of a former hotel that once in yellow glory proclaimed itself the “German House.” Long since fallen from its Innly glories it is now occupied by a typical Tennessee family who have been so industrious in collecting dirt and children that some alterations in the house itself probably became necessary so a doorway was cut through the side of the house and the once famed “German House” that sat upon a hill became “The Germ House.” You can’t imagine how deliciously pat the name. It quite bowls you over. It put us in a laughing humor for an hour.
Up the track perhaps a mile and a half from the Inn[,] there sits a rock between the railroad track and the river that has got itself locally famous for its resemblance to the Sphinx. I suppose it is very like it. At any rate it is a very noble fellow. We came to take the old chap’s picture and we got two views of him. Then we went and sat under his mighty chin where the water swirls cool and sweet about his big neck. It was the most enchanted of spots. Across the river the hill arose a bank of green, at our feet were the whirling waters that told again the love story of the Babahatchie. Probably we were silly. At all odds we were deliriously happy. Trains went whirl[ing] past above our heads and up the stream there was a long hill half cultivated but we sat and talked of river Gods and Pan piping in the bushes. We threw stones in the water. We were a boy and a girl. We fancied a place where the water nymphs might come to bathe. I made a cup of my hand and gave her to drink and then we lay with our backs on the cool stones and made such nonsense rhymes as this:

“It was a lovely morn in May.
They by the river sat.
Her head upon his shoulder lay
Upon his head a hat.”

It was a terrific hot walk home but Oh what a dinner. Like farm hands[,] we ate it and Charley the colored boy had his reward. His oft repeated long drawled query “Have some aaaiges?” had an answering no from two tired heads.

It [is] ten o’clock and very quiet. The bride tired from hill climbing is asleep. The frogs croak hoarsely over in Babahatchie and a wind just kisses into movement the leaves of the trees. The little town is all abed. The moon and the quiet stars keep the vigil. In the west[,] a bank of clouds lays just over one of the hills. The moon shining over it has touched the whole hill with a living glory. At table tonight we had a long talk over realism in literature. I guess Cornelia is right. It’s a good thing to let the other fellow do. The discussion was of James Lane Allen and such books as “A Summer in Arcadia.”

[May 23] [Monday]

[Oakdale]

This morning we went to adventure further up the little street that looked down at us so invitingly the other night when we went to the doctor’s. It was a breathlessly hot morning. We sat in the shade at the top of the hill and read our Browning. Below us the saw mill sent up its occasional shriek of triumph as the good logs furnished it food. Down the road the teamsters stirred their creaking wagons loaded with logs. We lay in the shade and we[re] as happy as children.
On the way back to the Inn we stopped at the little store in the toy street and talked to the proprietor. He was a fellow of parts. A lean square modest young man who misused large words in his effort to arise to the dignity of an entertainer of city visitors. He has been a soldier and fought in the Philippines he told us and he talked quite entertainingly and with surprising modesty of his prowess in the far land. It was hard to think of the proprietor of this little store in the toy street with the saw mill just tantalizing the sleepy air as being a fellow of fire and sword. To go from this to that hot breathless land to swim rivers and wade swamps and to kill little brown men fleeing through the brush. And then to come back to the selling of calico and soft sugar. Well it isn’t a bad record. And it’s good to think of him as so clean and simple and ready to leave his adventuring.,p. Perhaps it made it different that there was someone waiting for him. He had a baby boy in his arms when I first saw him and I caught the flash of a blue calico gown in the little home back of the store. I’ve hardly got it all clear in my own mind but I think it’s something like this. In taking a wife[,] a man loses a certain fine spirit of adventure. He is no longer ready to risk his life or his last dollar on the turn of a card. He goes not willing[ly] to hunt little brown men through the swamps of Luzon. God has laid the hand of responsibility upon him and all the old hate and love and gamble spirit has been sobered into a quiet earnest wish to see the happy gleam in one pair of eyes.

We range the woods no more, nor shall we hunt in disquietude through the hot nights[‘] streets of cities looking for adventure but we’ll sit quietly by our fire and read our book. We too have been to our Philippines and seen the blood mark on the steel. We’ve been hot loving going and coming, ready to kiss, fight or die for a friend. Now we’ll try the other game. May God be as good to us as he has been to the store keeper on the toy street. Night with its mystery. Night with its stars. Carry this message for me. A man and woman love each other. They love God and they walk in cheerful belief in what their life holds. Give them the good brave life. There are only two of them, and they would really be true man and woman. Make it so happen.

May 24 [Tuesday]

Oakdale

It was hot today so that the mountain and [sky] took new shapes in the quivering light. We went across the red bridge and down a brown road and through a hot still dusty field with creepers catching about our legs. The bride rested in the shade while I reconnoitered. Yes[,] we could make it. And so down we went waist high through brown last year’s grass over a sand bar and out across an old river bed where the big round stones were scorching hot to the touch. We made a couch of branches of a sycamore tree. It was so hot that the water was almost maddening in its coaxing and so I went down along the gorge and undressed and laid my body in the current where Babahatchie comes tumbling down from a long rapids. Over to the right a mountain wall, topped with trees and great hanging piles of rock, rose a hundred and fifty feet from the river. Up the old river bed I could just see the white gown of the bride in the shade of the sycamore. Out behind me Babahatchie spread out after her headlong hurrying over the stones and lay cool and peaceful under the sun. The swift running water carried my body well out into the stream. The water ran along my back and formed a little eddy where my heels looked up. It was a happy morning. We had a turn at Fra Lippo Lippi when I got back from my swim and we enjoyed it for all the heat.
After dinner I got miserably sick and had the first experience of “being cherished” as the bride called it. The afternoon wore on til night with me swathed in wet towels and the bride looking very housewifely darning stockings.

For all the headache we had a fine evening in the moonlight. The night is probably the most lovely we have had. The moon grows larger nightly and there was the first red sunset we have seen here. The color was mostly in one pass between two mountain peaks. It was very beautiful and stilled us so that we walked in silent happiness. After we had gone to the room[,] I wanted candles for the journal and letters so I left her, the moonlight kissing her pillowed head and went down through the bushes and out over the wooden bridge to the store by the creek bed. I had to come back empty handed though and climb, my head beating with pain, up the side of the hill to the post office nestled high above the tracks. It was a very still night, with only the occasional cough of a freight engine to break the quietness. I got my candles and went home to sit by the open window where my eye could see her white gowned form. They weren’t real candles, only frivolous yellow, green and red little fellows such as children burn for making merry at Christmas time and it took five of them to make a working light, but they were better than the glaring electric light and burned very gallantly in the breathless night.

May 25 [Wednesday]

Chattanooga

Today was our day for leaving the hills and our little river. It was hot again and very quiet so that no leaf stirred in the trees on the hillside. We sat on the porch and looked at the hills and wondered if they would miss us. We out Marioned Marion packing the trunk and then we went and sat in the little parlor of the Inn and waited for the train. We did not sit in the parlor from choice. We sat there because we had been so oft invited that the thing became a sort of personal matter. To sit in the parlor at the Inn is, it would seem, a sort of implied compliment to the Hostess and the good woman did not deserve anything in the nature of a slight from us. She has been too kindly for us to be staggered by so small a matter at this late hour. And so we sat in the parlor where no doubt we disturbed ten million microbes in their hour of rest. The place was frightfully ugly. It was faded, it had a carpet upon its floor, and time had laid its brown hand over everything. The landlord gave me three fat cigars and the landlady gave us her blessing. From the rear seat of the train we saw our last of Babahatchie. We saw our last of our hills too and the Inn with our ten year old porter running down the track for a ten cent piece cast between the rails, but it was at the river we looked longingly for it was the river [that] had saved the place.
It isn’t the pleasantest thing riding on a train that is trying to recover a lost half hour and for one I wish they’d let the half hours go once they are fairly lost. We got coated with coal black and were forced to retire inside. The train ran up the beautiful valley of the Tennessee where fighting was in war times. It is yellow and brown now with thrifty plowed fields, and faithful following of the plow has given back all war ever took from the fields.

At Chattanooga we had some trouble with an avaricious hotel clerk who, grown fat and independent with carnival crowds, saw in us no more than victims to his greed. We fled. We took bags and baggage and struck off again into the hot streets and found lodging in another hotel.

In the evening, being well fed, we hurried off to the carnival. It was great fun. The crowd was immense and went along in happy good hearted freedom that quite won you. The bride was given no end of attention. First one young gallant would shower her with a handful of many colored bits of paper, then another would come with soft brush and brush it away. The barkers shouted in praise of the little shows. The skirt dancer lady danced and Lioto the Queen of beauty came out in her silver wings and exhibited herself free before the gaping crowd. The high diver did not dive nor did we see the Hippodrome (whatever that may be) but we saw the crowd, and such a crowd, how jocundly they went along and with what good natured freedom they showered favors upon your lady. When we came out of the carnival[,] we saw the negroes standing laughingly along the road in front. All this fun and no place for them, poor souls. They gamboled up and down in rude pretense of holiday merriment but for all their gamboling they made a pathetic little picture for us to carry away with us.

May 26 [Thursday]

Chattanooga

A hot day with crowds surging out of depots and joining the gaily bedecked people on the street. We went early for our shopping to buy a gift for Mrs. Crane, the landlady at Oakdale, and to find a little gold chain to hang our sweetheart ring about the groom’s neck. From ten-thirty until one-thirty we were hot at work getting the Collins story ready to go off. A drawling[,] good natured woman ran the machine and finally got it done acceptably, though it took a deal of chaffing on our part.
In the afternoon we moved out again though it was hot enough to frighten off all but the bravest. The streets were full for all that, showing that the people of Chattanooga are either very brave or very foolish. I prefer to think them very brave. They are a gallant, happy, fun-loving race, these southerners, with something quiet and earnest in their eyes. I’ve noticed that a quiet, fun-loving fellow is a very good sort to depend on either in trouble or in sunshine and really I suppose it is of quite as much importance to know how to have fun as it is to know how to make money.

We took the car to Lookout Mountain, and went through a section of the city reeking of negroes and negro shanties to the little station St. Elmo. The climb up the mountain is a hair raising affair. It calls for every shred of confidence you may have stored up in your breast for American engineers. The grade is 68 ft. to the 100, so we heard a blatant negro declare but it was a deal more like 100 to 68 for the last quarter mile. We stood on the back platform and speculated on the chances of the cable’s breaking til I think we both got a bit nervous. It would probably be absurd to try to keep in mind that picture from the summit by written words. The great glory of it so paints itself on the mind that the whole soul is stirred. The bride and groom sat on a stone at the edge of the mountain and took it in in installments, looking at each other in the intervals. They tried to imagine where the historic points might be and the groom had no little satisfaction in displaying his little store of historic knowledge.

They did not pick out a guide hurriedly from the crowd of noisy negroes, who held forth on their ability as guides, but went past them to where a little old negro sat quietly behind a dilapidated horse and him they engaged. He was a delightful fellow, that old negro. To look at him you might think him an ordinary black man. You might even imagine him whitewashing fences or driving a truck horse upon the street. His fine point is his unpretentiousness of character. You think you are buying the service of a guide and the ease and comfort of a carriage for your lady and for this you pay 50 cents, and then once away from the crowd about the incline station you suddenly discover that you have in fact bought the company of a brave man, or rather you have been made the confidant of a brave man. It is not a matter of buying. For this driver of summer visitors, this quiet darky of unpretentious mien is in very truth a man of battle. The smoke of camp fires hangs about his aged head, the light of battle is in his eye. In fancy you can see again the thin blue line creeping around the ridge of the mountain and hear again the loud alarum proclaiming the coming fight.

“Yes sah Massa! I’se suah seen hahd fightin. I stood heah on dis heah hill that dah and saw ebery las bit of that fight. I’se in Massa Bragg’s ahmy an went back down that gulch thah to keep the federal from a comin up. We got suhrounded ouh regiment did and was clean cut off. I guess we ah been gonahs sure only a citizen cum up and tol us and led us down Hickory Knob in de night time. Yessir Massa I’se one of de veah las men off dis mountain that day. Oh I’se seen hahd fightin Ah has.”

Poor old hero eking out an existence showing northern visitors over the scenes of his triumphs, and says the bride, “Poor citizen, to save a regiment and not even to have your name remembered.” We got a lot more than just information out of that old darky, there was a something intimate and personal about him. You could start a battle anywhere, at Atlanta, Corinth, Chicamauga, your guide immediately gave you unwritten history about the fight, built up a climax and then, like the fine old black hero he was, climbed at once into that climax himself.

We went back down the incline to our hotel and there we stayed for the night. The carnival did not tempt us. We had smelled the smoke of battles and were in no mood for frivolities.

The bride wishes me to record that in Chattanooga she saw the head of a horse that has eight legs.

May 27 [Friday]

Memphis

This has been a journeying day. We were abroad early and were soon on our way to the station with a negro carrying our grip ahead. It must have been a stout walk for the negro as our bag isn’t light. He did the job for ten cents and looked as though he might be thoroughly sick of his bargain before we arrived.
A rain had gone over the city during the night and a thick bank of clouds lay over the city as we ran out of the city and around the feet of Lookout. We weren’t sorry to leave Chattanooga. A carnival city always looks dissipated and unlovely in the morning light and no shouting young men hailed the bride as we went down the tired sleepy eyed street. The day was an ideal one for a railroad voyage. A thick bank of clouds with here and there a patch of blue covered the sky, the earth looked refreshed and alive under the influence of the rains, the train ran leisurely along and stopped at quiet little villages with negroes asleep along the sides of houses. We are in the genuine south now. The homes of the blacks have become more primitive and the big white wide porched pre slavery house appears now and then sitting back among the trees. We see the negro women at work in the fields. We pass little cabins with huge brick chimneys built against the side and rose bushes in full bloom by the door. At Limrock a characteristic group stood at the little post office waiting for the mail we were to bring. The hills disappeared and we ran into a rich well cultivated country with planted field[s] and men and horses at work in them. Click here to continue with the journal.

Introduction

These previously unknown essays, stories, and impressions, although few and brief, fill out somewhat the picture that we have of the young Sherwood Anderson from the writings being published in Agricultural Advertising at the same time, although beginning about the time of his marriage, the published pieces do both tend more toward tales and sketches (“fictions”) and express a more questioning attitude toward the business ethic that Anderson had earlier boosted somewhat uncritically. For we can sense in these newly discovered pieces a more philosophical and speculative young man, sensitive to the beauties of nature and the mysteries of life, more aware of language (“words” and “sentences”), more critical of the inhumanity of the machine age, and preoccupied in this spring of his forthcoming marriage with the idea of “woman.” In some hard-to-define way, Anderson’s relationship with Cornelia in the spring of 1904 unquestionably hastened the awakening of the imaginative and creative side of his nature.
Almost all these pieces mention spring, and it is probable that all were written during the spring of 1904, when Anderson was looking forward to (or savoring, in the later pieces) his marriage to Cornelia Lane. In the main, furthermore, they are about women, at a time when his other known writings have about them the strongly masculine flavor of the world of agricultural advertising. It becomes clear that his love and respect for Cornelia were intensified by an idealized and romanticized idea of “woman” as something more unfathomable, “greater,” and more “earnest” than man.

Anderson also expresses here several times the notion that in spring God both raises the sap in the trees and “commands” or “demands” of woman that she marry and reproduce, an idea that becomes applicable — even if only by coincidence — to his own May marriage. He expresses this idea not only in two or three of the pre-marriage pieces but also in the poem that he addresses to the “strangely unprepared” Cornelia after the marriage is consummated, comparing her suffering to that which he imagines is experienced by the budding trees in spring. Both nature and the bride are, furthermore, transformed by the experience into something more beautiful; and Anderson speculates, in both his journal and his poem, that the shop girls on the streets of Cincinnati see the “new” Cornelia and as a result are filled with “great womanly longing” and go “home all blessed for having seen your face.”

If such a view seems in a sense quaint and even chauvinistic, Anderson nevertheless presents it admiringly, wonderingly — even reverently — as a tribute to “woman” and her mysterious role in creation and the creative impulse. And her creative role is not limited to the biological. In “The Red Haired Woman,” for example, women are presented as having a gift for words, sentences, and “richness of phrasing,” a gift that the males do not understand and among themselves dismiss scornfully as “stuff” but which the male author, when alone, ponders wonderingly and approvingly as he walks home in the “warm April rain.” “The Red Haired Woman” is interesting also as an embryonic expression of Anderson’s own sensitivity to the nuances of “words” and “sentences” and to the power and rich possibilities that language can unlock.

Anderson’s expression of these ideas both foreshadows and contrasts with the recurring “womanhood theme” running through his more mature work. His own later relationships with women — even Cornelia — would become ever more complex. Never again would he be able to see “woman” as admiringly, optimistically, or simplistically as in these pieces from the spring of 1904, when he was both beginning to identify himself as a writer and about to be married to one whom he perceived to be the finest of these “great earnest” women, Cornelia Lane.

“The Can Factory” is a surprisingly forthright — almost impassioned — condemnation of the dehumanizing effects of the machine as utilized in a modern factory. This early statement of the destruction of both body and soul of the brutalized young women who “were never made for work in such a place” contrasts sharply with the assumption that Anderson, at this stage of his career, remained complacent about the values and glories of “business” success. “The Can Factory” also foreshadows the “machine age” concerns that became major themes in his work much later, in the early 1930s. As with the “woman” theme, this early statement of the social implications of factory work is much less complex and ambiguous in its (almost entirely negative) attitude toward the machine than that found in his later work.

Finally, “[Poem to the bride]” represents Anderson’s first known attempt to write poetry, an impulse that he first exercised publicly in Mid-American Chants , (1918). It is especially interesting to note the enterprising young businessman referring to himself as a “poet” as early as 1904.

Significance

Sherwood Anderson’s first publication was an essay, “The Farmer Wears Clothes,” printed in Agricultural Advertising in February, 1902; and this was followed by some twenty-nine other essays, sketches, or stories on the advertising profession in the same journal by mid-1905, in addition to two brief 1903 essays in The Reader, a small journal of the Bobbs-Merrill Company in Indianapolis. As long ago as 1951, James Schevill noted in Sherwood Anderson: His Life and Work that these essays “indicate that his interest in writing dates back to a much earlier period than has usually been thought to be the case, owing to his own statements in the so-called ‘autobiographical’ books” ; and according to Ray Lewis White, in his recent Sherwood Anderson: Early Writings, it was in this unpromising format that Anderson first gained experience in handling “the dramatic situations and interesting character presentation necessary to successful fiction.”
In this context, the significance of Anderson’s newly discovered manuscript journal and non-journal writings from the year 1904 is thus five-fold: (1) They reinforce the assumptions of scholars who have concluded that by the time of his marriage in 1904 Sherwood Anderson was already in the grips of an ambition to write, more loosely and uncertainly than at a later time to be sure, but gripped nevertheless. (2) Although largely conventional in language and sentiment, these writings do provide — more definitely than anything heretofore known — foreshadowings of several important concerns of the mature artist, such as sensitivity to nature, the “womanhood theme,” the social implications of the machine age, and an awareness of the power of words and sentences. (3) They fill a gap in our previous knowledge of Anderson’s biography. (4) Aside from a brief extant letter or two, they represent by far the earliest surviving group of holograph manuscripts of Anderson’s writings. (5) As Walter Rideout has demonstrated, the quality of Anderson’s prose changes “decisively” in the second half of the journal in a way that foreshadows his later accomplishments.

Whether these writings — which even Anderson himself may have forgotten about after many years of separation from Cornelia — were preserved by chance or design we shall never know. More certain is the happy result that these ninety-four-year-old documents allow us a vivid if unexpected glimpse of Sherwood Anderson the artist as a young man, walking “in silent happiness” beside his bride amid the natural beauties of the Tennessee hills and inspired to write about his adventures, his emotions, and his aspirations.

Pieces Pre-dating Mid-May, 1904

[Tramp killed by train found by girl]

A [tramp was run over] by a freight train [and his body] must have lain through two days among bushes alongside the tracks. His clothes were near torn from his body and his flesh was blue as you have seen dead frogs when you were a boy and went barefooted by the edge of a swamp.

A little girl going to school found him. She went quite close until she could see his dead eyes and then gathered up her dainty skirts and went on to school, stopping by the way to tell a trackman. “She wasn’t afraid and she wasn’t much concerned,” said the trackman to me. I stayed around and saw the little girl when she went home from school. She had brown eyes and she was talking of the day at school with a companion. I believe you were like that when you were a little girl. To be a little girl who can find a blue tramp dead by the tracks and still keep your mind on the business of the day is to be great I think. I remembered how I have torn myself [away from distractions] …how…kept to…school.

It is well [that after winter] comes spring with sap running through the veins of the trees, else how could that little brown eyed girl ever grow up to marry a man. He will tear his hair I dare say poor fellow and go half mad and she will look at him with those fine sure brown eyes. Strange thing is she’ll end by marrying him and then she’ll be the mother of a race of men. The spring shall not call to that woman in vain nor the demand of God that she pay back the life he has given her go unheeded. I wonder if the man will know?

The Red Haired Woman

I was at John McDermott’s last night. You’ll remember him, a tall yellow man that used to go whistling up the road toward town on summer evenings, and stop to wave his hand to us sitting on the hill. He left Meadowville a year before you did and now he’s married and settled down here. His wife is a pretty clear minded little thing with a way of using words in unexpected ways. You can’t imagine what a charming conversationalist. You are a tiptoe [not to] lose any of her sentences and you are all at sea when you try to catch the exact surprise of them.
When I got up to the house a neighbor woman was just leaving. A woman with red hair and blue eyes. When I was presented she looked straight into my eyes in a way that sent the color to my cheeks. She was the wife of a wealthy merchant who had a house across the street. When John came in a moment later she looked at him as she had at me and went across the street home.

Late at night when Mrs. John had retired we sat by the fire smoking and talking of fun we’d had and I asked John of this red haired woman.

“Tom, there’s a funny business about that woman,” he said. “Kate understands it I guess, and they’re friends but when I ask about it she only laughs and tells me I’d better stick to the law. Say, look this thing over and tell me what you think.” John went across the room and out of a drawer took a roll of manuscript. He threw it upon the table and I began to read. It was something about spring but there was no connection at all between some of the sentences. They just seem to have been set down with no thought of meaning, but such sentences. They sent the blood to your cheeks with their richness of phrasing, they were like and yet strangely unlike the talk I had heard in the mouth of my friend’s wife. “Who wrote this stuff,” I demanded, rolling up the manuscript and throwing it back upon the table. “It’s the red haired woman,” said John. “Kate got her to doing the stuff. Says it’s an outlet for her. But say, I feel mean about showing it to you. I guess I’d better leave this sort of thing to Kate, she seems to understand.”

As I came home again through the warm April rain I felt again the touch of that woman’s eyes and thought of how the world would be better if there were more Kates who understood.

[The Can Factory]

I went to a factory today where cans are made. A friend spent two hours with me going about in the plant. It is very wonderful. There are long rooms filled with the most marvelous machines that work with wonderful precision and speed. You could not imagine how rapidly the completed cans fell upon the long belt that counted them and then carried them off to be stored in boxes for shipment. A can was born every fraction of a second. It was perfect in shape, firmly soldered and thoroughly tested for leaks. Oh the world has made progress in the making of cans, but they pay for it. A heavy eyed man was my escort. He took me between long rows of machines where young girls punched covers from the sheeted tin. “Oh yes, they very often punch off a finger,” he said with stupid indifference. I wish every man and every woman in the world could have walked down between those long rows of crooked backed, tired faced girls. The millionaire and his wife, the farmer and his wife, the hunter from the northern woods, the Irishman working on the railroad, the clerk from Wall Street. I think if we could all file along past, say at five o’clock of a warm afternoon, and see the tired old faces, the ugly scowls, the pretense of laughter, and then stopping think what it would mean to us if one of those girls were our own children. And let’s even venture a more trying thought, think of one of those women bearing children. Of course I know that a man will get but small sympathy who protests. Fair minded enough men will go and report all within the law. The girls will be interviewed and perhaps express satisfaction with their occupation. The man who showed me through the place is a fair minded man and he met with grave indifference my suggestion that these girls were never made for such work in such a place. A fair minded man but asleep, a poor dead soul. I should as soon be the son of the woman there with an ugly little hunch on her back as the son of a man who through long association can see no harm in the sight of [a] woman bending all day over a machine for the making of cans.
But we have cheaper cans thereby — yes, thank God it is good to have cheap cans. I am very glad for cheap cans. I do not wonder that, old early in life, they sometimes walk out of factories and sell their poor bodies for a bit of finery and an early grave I think I should do that.

I got to thinking of it all this evening and I wondered if it would not be brave and wise to go out there again tomorrow and pick out one of those women and release her. Of course it couldn’t be done, she probably wouldn’t want to be released, for her poor soul also is buried in the hum of the shop. And five miles away the sun was throwing evening shadows through the branches of the trees, and the green of the grass was turning blue with the coming of night. And [it] is spring and the sap runs through the trees and the earth shakes with joyous birth pains. I wonder if there is an answering call in any of those thin little breasts. If God cries his message of spring and his command to woman kind so that it reaches even there?

[Afternoon on a slow train]

It is Sunday evening and I have prospects [of] a weary afternoon’s journey on a slow train. Now I am a lover of books, an apt or likely expression as a mouth filling name will hang in my memory for weeks and on this afternoon I had with me Stevenson’s Travels With A Donkey. I tell you this that you may know what matter of fellow was calling to me in his printed pages. I think it proof final of the impotency of books in the spring when I tell you that I was won entirely out of its pages by a crowd of lusty young ballplayers who crowded into the car with great mirth and the clatter of ball bats. I do not pretend to take upon my young shoulders the responsibility of a discussion as to the right and wrong of this matter of Sunday ball playing. I merely wish to tell you of the enjoyment I had in the jam of lusty youth that crowded the car and lifted up its voice in rollicking song. If they play ball with the vigor and sang-froid with which they sing I dare say they are successful. They called me from my book and I could not go back and during the afternoon I was compelled to tell one of them coldly to refrain from spitting under my seat.
So you see I became one of the party. I attracted attention and was pointed out. One young fellow with thick lips even went so far as to make a vulgar song about me but it was all at least human and gave a touch to my loneliness.

I have no desire to romance about a man who spits under his neighbor’s feet. I have indeed great contempt for him, but his society even when engaged in manufacturing a song about me is better than a certain kind of solitude.

[Spring fever]

There is a sort of aching that comes into the limbs of the young at this season of the year and for several days I have been a victim to this. I think it is by some called spring fever, but I think it is something more organic than a dullness in the flow of blood as this name in some way suggests. It is not attended by any laziness in my case but only by very acute pain. It has been my pleasure to account for it by a method of reasoning entirely my own.
Pieces Written Simultaneously With the Journal

[A woman is like a river]

The river here is wide and deep and very much in earnest about its journeying. It does not laugh as on the plains but talks seriously as it hurries over the stones. I think it is the hills that are the prime cause of this serious attitude of the river. I visited the place once with a woman. A woman is like a river, she laughs and hurries along in the plains between the grassy banks, but put her among the hills in big serious places of life and see how different her tone. She goes forward so much more bravely than would a man but she is the very river and the hills in her earnestness. Beware young man how you go light hearted to her there. And yet I think I should take my own new wife to the hills. It would not be a pleasant and light hearted wedding journey and in the early morning when she awoke by your side and the fog lay on the land you would need to be very sure of all the thoughts you had ever held of your woman for her eyes would be seeking and finding any deceit.
[The wedding]

The young man did not see the others as they came down the stairs, there was only the woman in the white gown. In the second as she stood poised on the last step he thought of the journey they two were to take together. Strangely enough the journey wonder grew and grew in his mind until the beating notes of the orchestra became as the waves upon the shore and here was this woman with the beautiful shoulders and fine eyes coming to him. He wondered if she knew after all what a bare beating along profitless shores all his journeying had come to in the past. He felt as though he ought to tell her how unkind he has been to the people who had come down to his boat and how his heart had gone black at the barrenness of his cargoes. Then his eyes close and the faces following the bride made a great wreath about her head and his courage came back as his love surged back into his heart. Great earnest woman, he cried in his heart, after all it is for you to mark the voyage of the ship and I shall be your crew to work for you.
[Poem to the bride]

There is a poem lurking in my heart
of you and how the night went on.
Of all the wonder of your courage.
Of the men that passed us on the streets.
You see I do not sing, I only know.
I know the struggle in your heart,
The sweet submission in your voice.
The tender wishing that your man do right
Dear journeying woman of my heart.
So tender and so strangely unprepared.

It is the spring dear heart you feel.
The trees feel so
and we stand by and call it beautiful.
I think they suffer just as you do now.
And dear the world sees that in you.
The shop girls that you pitied on the street
went home all blessed for having seen your face.

And that man who sleeps beside you in the night,
He knows so much of it that he can only wish to tell.
He sees the rivers and the towering hills
and then he looks at you and dear he understands.

God made him so, a speechless poet
who must write in this blank way
the words that might bring comfort to your heart.
He has so many little weaknesses
and now they all appear, and he is tossed about
and weak and still he understands.
And wants to sing to you and make you happy.

Let him try great woman.
He don’t care if all his words
are like these ragged lines.
Just grimly trying he may still succeed.

By Marion Anderson “Mimi” Spear

When I first saw this diary of a honeymoon it was tucked under a pile of clothing in a chest of drawers in my mother’s house. This was soon after her death. At first I believed I had run across a well-remembered book of amusing stories about the Anderson children that my mother used to read to us from time to time, much as many families turn to old picture albums to revive and enjoy old memories.

After I had turned the book around and discovered page after page in my father’s hard-to-read handwriting, I realized that something none of us knew about had fallen into my hands. Later that year my brother John and I spent painstaking hours transcribing the material. It moved ahead so slowly that I, at least, failed to grasp what a priceless piece of early family history had been discovered. Only after Hilbert Campbell’s careful study of the material and his time-consuming research into each facet of the story as it unfolded in the diary was I struck by the sadness of this idyll of young love portrayed in a 1904 honeymoon that marked the beginning of a marriage that probably never should have happened.

But it did. And that is why my bothers Bob and John, and I reaped the reward and some of the pain of being part of a divided household like no other, yet one from which we derived much of our outlook on life. From Cornelia, who took over the support and rearing of us three children, we grew to know the value of reading, self-reliance, integrity, and the belief that life can be fun, even when you are poor and part of an unconventional household. Actually we were not conscious of how terribly poor we were, but believe me, we were. No one we knew lived as we did with a mother who taught school for many years at pittance wages, and who had a father in absentia who wrote books. Sherwood visited occasionally in the company of his second wife, Tennessee Mitchell Anderson, who early on became one of our favorite adults. Everyone knows the story of my father’s many marriages, and, in each case, the new stepmother turned out to be a person we came to like and admire.

Cornelia was once described by a country woman friend of the family as “very close mouthed.” No one could have said it better. She never discussed her married life with us children, nor with scarcely anyone else as far as I know. Her only comment was “Your father always married first class women.”

Being the youngest, I do not remember living in a household where my father was present. The split in the marriage occurred not long after I came into the world so I have no memories of being with my father except when he visited our house during my childhood, on a trip abroad when I was about 16 during which I saw little of him as I was in boarding school, and later when, as a young woman, I visited at his home in Virginia.

There have been times when I felt some bitterness. This happened after I was grown and had a clearer perspective on my growing up years. I counted myself cheated by not having experienced the good values that come with growing up under the tutelage of a father as well as a mother. When one of these “attacks” hits home strongly enough, I take down one of Sherwood’s books from my library shelves. In these pages I find the values that have become mine, and I am always reminded of what a lucky life I have lived.

One way or another, I think the Anderson children grew up strongly influenced both by our mother’s courage and strong intellectual approach to life and by Sherwood’s pioneering in the thinking of his times, plus his strong affection for and identification with people who are exactly what they purport to be — no more, no less — simply genuine men and women.

This spring of 1991 marks 50 years since the death of Sherwood Anderson at the age of 65, much too soon for a man who loved life and its adventures as he did. I can only believe that had he lived longer we might have come to be much closer friends. Cornelia lived for many years in a tiny house we built next to ours until only a few days before her 90th birthday. During those final years when we had her close to us, she became more than my mother, in truth the best friend I ever had.