Kamil Turowski, a filmmaker born and reared in Poland, received the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Award on November 21, 1998, at the annual conference of the North Carolina Writers’ Network in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Born in the city of Lódz´, pronounced “woodj,” and hence nicknamed “HollyLódz´, because of the concentration of the Polish movie industry there, Turowski grew up exploring what he calls a polluted, grim, post-industrial region that his wife, Kasia Marciniak, refers to as a “land of darkness and obscurity.”
Forced by the political persecutions and regulations of martial law under the Communists in the early 1980s to remain in Lódz´, he took intellectual refuge at the University of Lódz´. As a student of the department of English philology, among British and American books and magazines that were inaccessible to the Polish public at large because of censorship, he completed his master’s thesis on the American non-fiction novel, “The New Journalism,” in the United States, and received a master’s of arts degree in 1989.

By that time, Turowski’s interests in visual narratives, which he had developed while writing and publishing the periodical Oko (means eye) single-handedly, had gained new ground at the National School of Film in Lódz´. There, as a student in the Cinematography Department, which was established and maintained by the state to promote socialist ideas among the masses, he used photographs to interpret some of the American texts he had studied at the University.

The still photography series, “The Road Not Taken,” transplanted Robert Frost’s classic poem from the rural United States of the turn of the century to the milieu of a modern television studio, winning the honor of the Best Still Photography Project at the School in 1990.

Two years later, Turowski’s film adaptation of Sherwood Anderson’s short story “Nobody Knows” from the collection Winesburg, Ohio received equally high praise. This interpretation in the black and white 35 mm. format transferred the literary representation of Anderson’s tale to the actual streets, courtyards, and buildings of what Turowski calls “the frighteningly devastated textures of the city of Lódz´, where smiles and happiness are seen as rarely as in the fictitious Winesburg, Ohio.”

Turowski and his wife first moved to Missoula, Montana, then later to Eugene, Oregon, where he presented his first film before the American public at the International Film Festival in 1994. A year later, the next screening of the film, at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, helped Turowski win a two-year scholarship from the Kociuszko Foundation in New York, and admission into the AFI graduate Cinematography Program. Turowski continued his still photography and literary projects. His photograph “The Spirit of the Gate” depicts what he call a metaphysical “possession” of an old courtyard gate, and it won him the Mayor’s Award for the Best Photograph of the Year 1996 in Eugene. The same year, Oxford University Press and Bloomsbury published the first editions of Turowski’s Polish-to-English translation of a testimony from the Holocaust, The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lódz´ Ghetto.

Turowski graduated from the American Film Institute with a degree of Master of Fine Arts in June 1998. The Sherwood Anderson Foundation awarded him the Grant as a recognition of the originality of his film adaptation of “Nobody Knows” and as a way to support his ambitious intention to bring the entire book of Winesburg, Ohio, to the silver screen. In fall of 1998, Turowski and his wife, Kaisa, moved their primary residence from Oregon to Athens, Ohio, where Kasia began her work as a Professor of Transnational Literature at Ohio University.

In addition to his work on the adaptation of Winesburg, Ohio, at least part of which he would like to see shot in his native Lódz´, Turowski is developing a photographic project, called Eastern European Visage, and an original feature movie script.

By Charles E. Modlin

From 1933 to 1940, Sherwood Anderson made several radio appearances. Recordings of these, like all other recordings of his voice, seem to have been lost, but in a few cases scripts of the broadcasts and a few of his notes about them survive. Two such texts relate to an appearance on the Heinz Magazine of the Air along with Amelia Earhart on October 2, 1936, exactly nine months before her plane crash. For this program Anderson was asked to prepare a script, for which he was paid $100. The thirty-minute program, consisting of music and Heinz soup commercials as well as interviews, was broadcast on the Columbia Broadcasting System at 11:00 A.M. and again at 3:00 P.M. The Earhart interview came first, and then, after the orchestra played “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” Anderson was introduced:

EDITOR: Sherwood Anderson is a great American writer who lives to see himself already named among the immortals. His stories have been called the truest that have sprung out of western soil. In his work he appears as both poet and prophet. Modest, simple, and sincere, he has retired to a small southern town, where he works in a cabin, thinking of himself, in his own words as “just a lay figure, sitting here writing.” From this retirement Sherwood Anderson emerges to contribute to the Heinz Magazine of the Air… Mr. Anderson.

MR. ANDERSON: As I continually wander up and down America, people say to me, “Ah, you are getting material for stories? And I always surprise them by saying, “No.” I do not seek stories. I try to avoid them. To find the story is not difficult. Telling it solidly and well and with some grace is another matter.

The adventure of the writer is one with people. We don’t seek stories, but we do want to know why. Why does this man run desperately across a field? Why is the woman crying? Why does the man with the beard laugh when there is nothing to laugh about? You sit with a group of people who are chattering. They are saying words and sentences but there is something else going on. Thoughts fly back and forth.

People are always saying one thing and really meaning another. Every house, every man and woman has a story. But to try to thread your way in the strange tangle of human relationships and impulses is always a delicate and difficult job. The writer can never tell what will set him off on a new trail. Some time ago, I was asked by Mr. Henry Morgenthau, our Secretary of the Treasury, to go to a certain trial of bootleggers and rumrunners in a Virginia mountain county. Mr. Morgenthau said, “These are good mountain people. I’d like the human side of their story told.”

I did try to tell it, in a magazine story, but I wasn’t satisfied. Certain figures I had seen, men and women, haunted me. They were like people standing in the street before my house shouting. “Tell our real story. Tell it all,” they seemed to shout. So I had to try again, in a full length novel called Kit Brandon I am publishing this month.

The writer’s adventures are never ending. There are so many people, so many stories. Sometimes I wish I could be sure of living three hundred years. There are enough stories packed away in me now to keep me writing day and night for at least that long. The writer’s life is always adventurous but it is also often bitterly disappointing. At least with me there are too many stories I should be telling that I am not man enough to tell.

But no man can be very dissatisfied with his life who has a job that, try as he will, he can never do as well as he would like.

EDITOR: Thank you, Mr. Anderson.

Anderson also made a few notes about his impressions of this 1936 broadcast, which survive in fragmentary form:

a system of signs controls us all.

Singers etc. appear at mikes C and B . . . jazz singers etc., the fellows who get off the advertising talk about Heinz soups etc. Singers and announcers come and go. Amelia sits at K while I am at F talking into the mike and I sit at K while she is at F talking.

The floor is so padded that no footsteps are heard. You must not even rustle the paper on which what you are to say is written. Amelia amused by it all. Me ditto. We grin at each other. Her husband stands near. He whispers to me. “It’s crazy,” he says, “but you should be in a movie studio nowadays.

“That’s my racket,” he says.

You do, for some obscure reason, get consciousness of the audience. You are nervous.

This is the Columbia Broadcasting Co. etc.

One of the vice presidents used to work with me out in Chicago.

Another man, an editor, used also to work with me.

People–from the orchestra, girl stenographers, a man who is a big official–all come up with books of mine to be autographed.

An oldish woman with a fine but tired face comes up. She speaks of A Story Teller’s Story. “Don’t get caught in this racket, will you?”

“No.”

“You would be amazed how many people in this crazy place wait for anything you write.”

A strange man comes. “I am a friend of Morley Callaghan. He loves you.”

I am pretty deeply touched by all this. I get my hat and go down the elevator into the street. What a strange world.

Notes

1. Letter from Clark H. Getts, August 6, 1936 (Newberry Library). The script, along with the manuscript following, are housed in Special Collections at the Newberry Library. They are reproduced here with their kind permission and that of the Sherwood Anderson Literary Estate Trust.
2. “City Gangs Enslave Moonshine Mountaineers,” Liberty 12 (2 Nov. 1935): 12-13.
3. Apparently the letters refer to a diagram showing the locations of the participants, but it has not survived.
4. George P. Putnam, publisher and explorer.
5. Canadian writer of fiction, who, Anderson wrote, felt “sorry for me because the public did not accept me more” (Sherwood Anderson’s Secret Love Letters, ed. Ray Lewis White [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991], 258.

By Judy Jo Small

Midwestern in origin, his name indelibly linked with the mythic Ohio town of Winesburg, Sherwood Anderson nevertheless spent a large part of his life in the South. “I can truly say that since I have been a grown man there has always been in me something that has called me south,” he told a Richmond audience in 1930. Anderson’s affection for Southern people and his deep interest in diverse facets of Southern culture are vividly illustrated in the new Southern Odyssey: Selected Writings by Sherwood Anderson.

This impressive collection of Anderson’s writings about the American South, edited by veteran scholars Welford Dunaway Taylor and Charles E. Modlin, includes both fiction and nonfiction texts. A few of the pieces are well known, but most of them have been previously either unpublished or widely scattered. Gathered together, these writings appear as a surprisingly significant body of work.

The book gives us Anderson’s vision of the South during decades when the Civil War was still a living memory and rural agrarianism was rapidly giving way to industrialization and the New Deal. Anderson never presumes that his is anything other than an outsider’s vision. Still, his sympathetic sensitivity to the lives of ordinary workers is keen. “I myself came from the working class. . . ,” he writes; “I am accepted by working people everywhere as one of themselves and am proud of that fact” (149). The book is filled with a remarkable array of portraits of southerners–coal miners, moonshiners, politicians and whores mingle here with lumberjacks and peanut kings, singers and fishermen, lawyers, idlers, old Confederate soldiers and hardboiled kids. Local color abounds, not only in descriptions of the South’s varied landscapes but also in courtroom scenes, the Kentucky Derby, tobacco auctions, Baptist foot-washing ceremonies, shoddy statues, labor strikes, and raw hard poverty. Anderson’s description of the South is impressionistic rather than incisive, yet the sum of his impressions is acute.

The worth of this important volume derives in large part from admirable editing. Judicious selection of Anderson’s writings is its hallmark. Its five-part organization highlights discrete phases of Anderson’s attention–the Deep South he discovered in New Orleans, the mountaineers he met in the Virginia highlands, his work as a small-town editor of two weekly newspapers, his activist concern for the plight of industrial laborers before the advent of unions, and his recognition of the New South emerging reluctantly along with TVA, big business, and an approaching World War. For each of the five sections and for every individual text, there is an informative headnote that provides vital context and continuity. Endnotes supply additional facts, and an index references names and titles.

The volume is highly readable, full of amusing anecdotes as well as earnest contemplative philosophy. It should be of interest to the general reader as well as to students of literature and southern culture.

Anderson’s view of southern race relations is honest and unblinking. Nevertheless, his understanding of African-American culture is on the whole shallow and romanticized. The yearning of a jaded city-dweller is apparent in his response to Negroes in New Orleans, whom he describes as “the only laborers I have ever seen in America who know how to laugh, sing and play in the act of doing hard physical labor”(3). His growing skepticism about this kind of sentimentality becomes evident in later essays in Southern Odyssey. Plainly, though, the South he came to know best was the culture of the Appalachian highlands. More than anywhere else, this was his Ithaca. He arrived there weary, wayworn, dazed from his wanderings; at last he came to recognize it as his true home.

To Andersonians, the varied voices of Anderson’s prose in these pieces make an interesting study. From folksy to sophisticated, his experimentation with style in his last two decades finds in this book a dramatic showcase.

Most of all, though, Southern Odyssey demonstrates Anderson’s deeply democratic sense of a place and a time set in the broad framework of human history. He sees a South ravaged by exploitation by the proud and powerful. He sees a South in need of fuller expression, in need of the artist. He admires the grace and dignity of ordinary southern people. He honors the beauty of the artistic creation he recognizes in the work of a dedicated southern stone cutter, storytellers, makers of machines. Ultimately, though, Anderson’s story of the South’s coming into modernity is but an instance of a much larger story. Everywhere in this volume, as in everything he wrote, is his abiding respect for humble folk engaged in the age-old struggle for life.

Judy Jo Small is professor of English at North Carolina State University and the author of A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Sherwood Anderson ( New York: G.K. Hall, 1994).

When Sherwood Anderson set sail from New York for his second trip to Europe in early December 1926 on the United States Lines S.S. President Roosevelt, he was accompanied by his third wife Elizabeth Prall Anderson, his son John (age 17), and his daughter Marion “Mimi” (age 15). Almost up to the sailing date, his plan had been to travel with his wife and son only. In later years, Mimi would remember “having been pulled out of class [in Michigan City, Indiana] by her mother only the day before and told she was going to Europe” (Townsend 241). Whether the suggestion that she go came from her father or from her mother Cornelia Anderson is not known; but this last-minute change of plan to include Mimi would prove to be both a complicating factor for the European stay and an important stimulus for a closer relationship over several years between Mimi and the father that she barely knew, having lived apart from him for practically her entire life.

Among the possible reasons for Anderson’s European trip in 1926-27, undertaken while he was still trying to get settled in a new home in southwest Virginia, biographers have suggested a desire to test the waters of his budding French reputation, an expectation of reinvigorating his creative powers, a need for “diversion,” or even an intention of doing something constructive for John, who wanted to be an artist (Schevill 236-37; Townsend 241). Whatever the reason or reasons, however, it has not usually been emphasized that the trip was not the result of a spur-of-the-moment decision. Anderson had been thinking about a trip to Paris at least as early as August 1925, mentioning several times to Gertrude Stein in his correspondence between August and December of that year his intention of seeing her in Paris “next fall” (Anderson/Stein 48-52). He wrote to her on April 25, 1926 that “we have our plans all made for coming to Europe in the fall, perhaps as late as November” (Anderson/Stein 53); and he was writing to Burton Emmett by November that “My son John -17 – is to join us in New York and go to Europe with us” (Selected Letters 87).

On the trip, after a short stay in England of which little is known except that he lunched with Frank Swinnerton and Arnold Bennett, Anderson and his party went on to Paris later in December. Other than his always pleasurable meetings with Gertrude Stein and receiving moderately good news about impending French publication of some of his work, Anderson’s Paris experience this time was largely unhappy, including spells of illness and depression and brief unsatisfactory contacts with James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway.

The clearest evidence that Mimi’s presence was proving to be at least a mild complicating factor, both socially and financially, is found in an early January letter, heretofore unpublished, from Elizabeth Prall Anderson to Cornelia Anderson, just at the time Mimi was being enrolled as a pupil at Cours du Parc Monceau, directed by Madame Illartein:

Hotel Reynard
4 Rue Reynard
Paris, France
January 4, 1926

My dear Cornelia: –

I’ve just come back from Mimi at her new school. We began to feel, as Sherwood has written I think, that our life was a little demoralizing for a child of fifteen as to hours and food and the age of her companions; so we felt that as we weren’t going to travel the best thing for her to do was to go to school where she would have a regular life and learn enough French so that it would really soak in at the same time.

As I suppose you know, there aren’t so many schools to choose from where I felt it safe to trust her, so though this is not as cheap as I’d hoped to find, it’s very good and she’ll have good food and a nice place to live in. She’ll need only her present simple clothes and that’s a blessing. Most of them ask for linen and uniforms and what not. It costs about three hundred and fifty dollars from today till the first of April. Of course, if we have to go home a little before that she’ll just be out that much. But I hope we can stay till then.

I think she’ll get a lot out of this new experience. She’s seen a good deal of girls just about her own age who are studying and who can speak French and she’s in a frame of mind to rival them if she possibly can, and it’s not a bad beginning. She’s a sweet little creature and I only hope she won’t get sophisticated too fast. I’d love to get her some pretty French clothes but, really, I think your money is much better spent like this.

My brother-in-law [Max Radin], who has a little daughter of sixteen, went with me to investigate the matter of schools and he liked this one we chose. He’s a professor at the University of California and has had a good deal of contact with schools of all sorts.

John is having a good time, I think. His French is coming on and I want to get him established in a pension where he’ll have to speak French at once so that he’ll be at home in Paris when we leave him in the Spring. I think he’s feeling just a little lost at present with so many new impressions all at once. His father is enjoying him greatly and I think they’re good for each other. Sherwood has had the flu for ten days or so and our plans were changed a good deal on that account. We may go to the south of France for a few weeks — or Sherwood may go alone — till he feels stronger.

I hope you are having a peaceful winter. And I hope, too, you’ll like our plans for both the children.

Yours sincerely,

Elizabeth Anderson

Sherwood then filled up the last page of the letter with financial calculations, from which we can conclude that Cornelia was paying all of Mimi’s expenses:

Dear Cornelia –

I feel very upset, going ahead to spend your money but with the absence of definite instructions rather have to.

We have spent on her a little over $400 so far.

School board, etc. $350

$750

about $250 to get her back home

$1000

Looks as though that was about how it would come out.

Have had to advance $150

$350

$500

Will need about $250 more

$750.00

Don’t know at all what you expected to have to put in.

This is about what E, myself. and John are spending each. It’s about as low as it can be done.

Sherwood

Leaving John and Mimi behind, Anderson and his wife sailed about March 3 for the return to America, apparently aboard the Hamburg-Amerika Line’s Cleveland, and reached New York on March 16. When his ship docked, Anderson was greeted by the news that his brother Earl had died earlier the same day in Newport, Rhode Island; and he and his brother Karl took the body by train to Clyde, Ohio, for a funeral and burial on March 19.

Before he returned to Virginia in early April, a brief lecture tour took Anderson to Memphis, Tennessee, to Madison, Wisconsin, and to New York City. He saw Cornelia in Chicago on March 28; and two days later he wrote to Mimi in Paris, “Saw your mother on Monday and she was mightily pleased with the story I could tell her of your progress” (unpublished letter). Although Anderson apparently hadn’t seen much of Mimi in Paris, the experience did in some way spur him to seek a closer relationship with his daughter than he had earlier enjoyed.

Mimi remained at school in Paris until June 1927. Whereas Anderson had not been in the habit of writing to her earlier in her life, he now began to write to her regularly, sending to her in Paris at least eleven letters between March and June, expressing his love for her, his pride in her accomplishments in the past months, his desire to see more of her, and his concern for her future. On June 15, for example, he wrote, “I am delighted that you have been able to get so much out of it all. You are all right — bless you. It certainly is grand for a dad to see a daughter take hold the way you have. …You have certainly won us” (unpublished letter).

In the years just ahead, furthermore, Anderson would continue to assist Mimi, to see her when he could in Chicago or Virginia, and to write to her frequently. Between 1929 and 1933, he wrote her some sixty letters as she progressed in her own life through attendance at the University of Chicago (1929-1932), marriage to Russell Spear (April 1932), the birth of her first child Karlyn (March 1933), and the apparently severe difficulties she experienced while attempting to establish a marriage and a family during these depression years. The really important consequence of Mimi’s being included in the trip to Europe was, therefore, the much closer relationship that Anderson enjoyed with his daughter for at least several years afterward.

Works Cited

Anderson, Sherwood. Selected Letters, ed. Charles E. Modlin. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984.
_________________. Unpublished letter to Marion Anderson, March 30, 1927.
__________________. Unpublished letter to Marion Anderson, June 15, 1927.
__________________ and Gertrude Stein. Correspondence and Personal Essays, ed. Ray Lewis White. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972.
Anderson, Elizabeth Prall. Unpublished letter to Cornelia Anderson, January 4, 1927.
Schevill, James. Sherwood Anderson: His Life and Work. Denver: University of Denver Press, 1951.
Townsend, Kim. Sherwood Anderson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.