(Editors’ note: The following is reprinted from the Chicago Daily Tribune, May 31, 1919. Winesburg, Ohio, was published in May 8, 1919. )

Sherwood Anderson, whose “Winesburg, O.” has just been published by Huebsch, tells here the story of his life:

“I was born in 1876 of Scotch-Irish parents in a little village in Ohio. My mother was tall and gaunt and silent, and after giving birth to seven children, died of overwork before reaching the age of forty.

“My father, a journeyman harness-maker of the old days, was a lovable, improvident fellow, inclined to stretch the truth, loving to swagger, and not averse to losing an occassional battle with the demon rum.

“Lord, but we were poor-too poor.

“As early as I can remember, I was on the streets of our town, sweeping out stores, mowing the lawns before houses, selling newspapers, taking care of horses belonging to families where there were no men, selling popcorn and peanuts to the crowds on Saturday afternoon-perpetually busy. I became known as “Jobby” Anderson because of my keenness for any job that presented itself.

“What education I got was picked up in the barrooms, the stores, in the street, and by the grace of certain lovable characters in our place who took me in hand, loaned me books, and talked to me through the evening about the old poets and story tellers.

“When I was 16 years old, I came to Chicago. For four or five yearsI worked as a common laborer and got myself caught in that vicious circle of things where a man cannot swagger before his fellows, is too tired to think, and too pitifully ashamed of his appearance to push out into the world.

“The Spanish war saved me from this. I enlisted, frankly not through patriotism-but in order to get out of my situation. To my amazement, when I returned to my home town to become a soldier, I was greeted as a hero-one who had given up a lucrative position in the city in order to fight for his country. My natural shrewdness led me to take advantage of this situation, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

“When I came back from the war, I got into the advertising business and have been a writer of advertising ever since, excepting for a few years, when I attempted to become a manufacturer and made a failure of it.

“The impulse that led me to write novels was the impulse for my own slavation. At the time I wrote my first novel I was just failing in my manufacturing adventure and losing a great deal of money for my friends. I worried. I found myself in the pitiful position of so many business men

“One day I sat down and began to write a novel. I liked it. To my amazement, I found that on paper I was entirely honest and sincere-a really likable, clear headed, decent fellow. At once, I knew that I would write novels the rest of my life, and I certainly shall.”

By Ray Lewis White

On March 11, 1932, Sherwood Anderson, fifty-five, left his rented room in Marion, Virginia, to begin another of the lecture tours by which he supported himself whenever his writings failed to sustain his modest needs. The author of Winesburg, Ohio (1919), The Triumph of the Egg (1921), and Horses and Men (1923) was still famous enough to draw to his lectures sufficient paying listeners to keep his tours profitable to himself and to his lecture agent; but Anderson dreaded the fatigue of extended train travel and the difficulty of lecturing enthusiastically before social clubs (especially women’s clubs) and academic audiences unresponsive to his increasingly revolutionary political concerns as the Great Depression of 1929 more and more seriously devastated America’s economically disadvantaged.

Having earlier in 1932 lectured in New York City and in Washington, D.C., Anderson on this western tour would travel thousands of miles and lecture in several cities, among them Detroit, Chicago, Evansville, Urbana, Tucson, Los Angeles, Portland, and Salt Lake City. Occasionally he would lecture more than once in a city; and in Los Angeles he would lecture to several groups, often speaking more than once each day. Then, defeated by his overwork in Los Angeles and depressed by his dislike of that plastic and meretricious city, Anderson on April 9 made his way north to San Francisco.

Sherwood Anderson’s 1932 stay in San Francisco, from April 9 through May 14, would prove to be among the happiest experiences of his life, for in San Francisco Anderson found a beautiful and exotic city, he met people friendly to the arts and to individualism tempered by social concern, and he found reunion with his fiancee and renewal of their secret love. For since 1929 Sherwood Anderson, yet legally tied to his third wife, had been in love with another woman — with a career social worker for the YWCA, a woman from a prominent family in Marion, Virginia, one who had returned the older writer’s love and had led him into sharing through his speeches and writings the radical economic concerns that she held. But, because Eleanor Copenhaver’s demanding research work in San Francisco for the YWCA involved a survey of the employed and unemployed working women of the area and because the YWCA was, despite its economic liberalism, a morally conservative organization, Eleanor had to be discreet in her travels and her meetings with Sherwood, for her employers could fire her for such immoral conduct as having an affair with a married man who was several years her senior and considered by the public to be religiously questionable and politically extremist.
In San Francisco, while Eleanor Copenhaver worked at her labor statistics, Sherwood Anderson enjoyed wandering over the lovely city and the Bay area; and he enjoyed meeting liberal writers, lawyers, newspaper editors, artists, and Bohemians. But his closest friendship in San Francisco developed with the booksellers and fine printers Leon Gelber and Theodore M. Lilienthal, who had in 1925 as The Lantern Press published Anderson’s small book The Modern Writer; and on April 25, 1932, Gelber and Lilienthal introduced Anderson to a young book illustrator and designer whom Anderson, always eager to meet young artists whose work and manner pleased him, cultivated over the rest of his stay in San Francisco.

The young artist whom Anderson met was Valenti Angelo, who at their first meeting told Anderson his life-story — of birth in 1896 in Tuscany; of his father’s disappearance to hunt for wealth in Brazil; of his sudden reappearance with money to bring his family to America in 1905; of their settling in Antioch, California, a town where young Valenti, though quite poor, became enamored of beautiful books and fine printing; of his onerous work in various factories in California; of his move to San Francisco to work in hotels and bakeries while absorbing the culture of the city; of his establishing a studio where he could learn to paint; and of his need to support himself through photo-engraving and, eventually, book design. In 1926, Angelo had met and begun working for Edwin and Robert Grabhorn, printers of fine books in San Francisco; and over the next six years the artist had designed for the Grabhorn brothers more than forty books and many broadsides and ephemera; and it was toward the end of his Grabhorn Press period that Angelo met and came to be influenced by Sherwood Anderson.

So much impressed was Anderson with the personality and art of Angelo that the writer at first introduction bought from the young man a painting of a factory workman with wife and child and a distant factory, a painting that Anderson liked so much that he placed it before him in his San Francisco hotel room while he began writing a lengthy attack on fellow writers and other artists blind to economic injustice and political repression.

So much did Sherwood Anderson, repeatedly visiting Valenti Angelo to admire his work, come to enjoy the art pieces on view that he commissioned the young artist to attempt in a medium new to him — in terra-cotta — a bust of Eleanor Copenhaver, his beloved, a busy woman who was yet able to find time in her work and her affair with Anderson to pose, reluctantly, several times at the Valenti home, where she, a modest woman who preferred to work for the disadvantaged more than to indulge herself in any attention to her appearance, was understandably nervous about sessions with the sculptor and his family and friends, a sculptor who time and again had to rework his model busts to capture her evanescent beauty . . . all the while the watching Sherwood Anderson longed to dip his own hands into the clay to sculpt the head and shoulders of his lover.

Not only did Anderson enjoy the admiration that he as a famous writer received from Valenti Angelo, but he strongly encouraged the young artist to devote himself, while still living by designing expensive books for buyers with rich tastes, to painting the subjects that he knew best and should most sympathize with — the workers in American factories who were more worthy of attention, Anderson believed, than landscapes or portraits or abstract designs. Whether Angelo had already by the spring of 1932 decided to leave book design to concentrate on his painting is unclear; but, already concerned with painting the factory workers and their families among whom he had lived, Angelo took Sherwood Anderson’s advice and followed that advice after Anderson had to leave San Francisco, on May 15, 1932, with the bust of Eleanor Copenhaver yet to be finished and fired and shipped to her family home in Marion, Virginia.

Although Valenti Angelo shipped to the east on May 31, 1932, what he called his terra-cotta “portrait” of Eleanor, the work for some reason did not reach Anderson and the Copenhaver family in Virginia until August 14, a delay which caused anxiety to the young sculptor who was still following in San Francisco Sherwood Anderson’s advice to paint mostly factory scenes. Impressed with the finished bust except for some details of the mouth, Anderson inexcusably did not acknowledge receipt of the package from San Francisco until October 4, several weeks after Angelo had nerved himself to ask the busy writer to contribute a statement of appreciation for the catalog of an exhibit of the painter’s work, an exhibit to be held in the Vickery Atkins and Torrey gallery in San Francisco. With less grace than could be desired, Anderson on October 21 responded to photographs of several Angelo paintings sent to him by Leon Gelber; and the letter that Anderson mailed to Gelber became, if belatedly, the introduction for the Angelo exhibit, mounted from November 14 through December 3:

A Letter From Sherwood Anderson

I hear that Valenti Angelo is to have an exhibition of paintings and drawings in San Francisco and I am writing this letter to say how much I admire the man and his work.

I was in San Francisco last year and for some weeks lived there, putting the finishing touches on a novel, and it was at that time that I first saw Angelo’s work. I have very little money but immediately bought one of his paintings and carried it off to my room. It stayed with me while I worked there and I brought it home to hang over my desk. I found the painting very warm & living and as the months passed it has grown more alive. It represents very perfectly what good painting means to me. Valenti Angelo has been touched and moved by men at work. These builders & miners & makers he sees with his painter’s eyes, connecting them with skies and hills and trees. There is surely here a connection — man and nature — man in the modern world we are making.

To get back the dignity of our living again. This man Valenti creating that in paint. Valenti’s painting got me and, as you know, I did try to express my appreciation and my belief in the only sensible direct way we can express it now — by immediately buying one of his paintings.

I think there is power of feeling in these paintings & that the power goes out of them into a room and returns into them. I think we Americans need this kind of painting and this kind of painter. I think we need such paintings in our houses. I do. They are reaching for some lost dignity in man and, in reaching, help bring it back.

Sherwood Anderson

In generous response to Sherwood Anderson’s exhibit tribute, Valenti Angelo mailed the author, with his appreciation and compliments, The Girl with the Bird, a painting of a girl holding a canary, a picture that Anderson had earlier suggested be called, after one of his own stories, The Triumph of the Egg. Then, after several months of no correspondence with Anderson, Angelo on September 23, 1933, mailed the writer a catalog of his second exhibition in San Francisco, with the statement that he had in his painting turned substantially away from “industrial subjects” — the kind of subjects that Anderson had in the past spring so strongly encouraged the painter to devote himself to.

It is possible that Sherwood Anderson and Valenti Angelo met again, after San Francisco, for Angelo moved himself and his family to New York City late in 1933; and Sherwood Anderson and his new wife, Eleanor Copenhaver Anderson, visited and worked in that city; but there are no records of a continuing friendship between the mutually admired and admiring artist and writer. Though intense, their fine association centered on a happy month in San Francisco in the spring of 1932.

Yet Valenti Angelo did maintain until his death in 1982 a good memory of Eleanor Copenhaver Anderson. When Angelo learned in 1975 of the forming of the Sherwood Anderson Society, he wrote Eleanor from his home back in San Francisco that “Sherwood should be remembered among the greats of America” and that “I often think of our meeting and the modeling of your portrait. That was a long, long time ago. . . .”

By David Spear 

(Editors’ note: David Spear, son of Marion “Mimi” Anderson Spear, Sherwood Anderson’s daughter, wrote this account of his visit in 1997, a year after his mother’s death, to Fairhope, Alabama. Spear was attempting to find the location of Anderson’s residence during the winter and spring of 1920, where he finished Poor White (1920) and began Many Marriages (1923). Just so the record is clear, Faulkner would not have visited Anderson there, since they first met in 1924.)

I had about given up hope. Finding the cabin in Fairhope where Sherwood Anderson once lived for a short period appeared to be at an end. I had covered most of Bay View Street where grand mansions are folded among the giant live oak trees overlooking Mobile Bay. But I had one more drive to check. One that led to an apartment complex. A building that stretched along the bay. A shabby looking colossus covered in cedar shakes turned orange and black. I parked between a Corvette and a Mercedes. There was a board walk leading to the bay at the northern end of the lot so I took to it. The fresh smell of treated pine was being pulled from the boards by a hot humid July sun.

In my hand I carried a zip-lock plastic bag, which held traces of gray ashes, a few of the remaining ashes of my mother, Mimi. Sherwood Anderson’s only daughter. I had my instructions from my sister, Karlyn, who had taken it upon herself to see that our mother’s ashes were scattered to the far points of the earth. When she last read me her distribution inventory sheet, it read as follows: Los Angeles (performed by Anna, granddaughter), San Francisco, Golden Gate Bridge (performed by me in 1996 on a windy day), Fire Island, New York (cousin Margaret Anderson), Sherwood Anderson’s grave in Marion, Virginia (my sister’s work), brother Robert’s grave, also in Marion, the croquet court at Ripshin, Virginia ( my sister again), my brother Mike’s garden in Richmond, Virginia, ( I ain’t through yet, she said to me on the phone when she gave me this list), Central Bridge, New York, (granddaughter Tippie), Key West, Florida. (by Karlyn), The Great Wall of China, Tian’amen Square in Beijing, and the Yangtze River (all done by my sister and her husband, Joe, on their recent trip to China. And of course there are a few ashes buried at the family grave site in Madison, North Carolina.

Out on the newly constructed dock, I looked at the water. It was the color of pale rose wine. There was some motion in it. Small waves. And there was the smell of sulphur. I don’t know if I should do this here, I was thinking. But I know it will change and it will cool down and water will clear up in the fall; the ashes will dissipate. So I opened the bag and waited for a gentle breeze and then I turned them loose. They filtered down like dust glimmering a bit in the sunlight until they caught the surface where they floated for a time. Finally they sank toward the “lodonous” bottom.

I turned to leave and my eye caught a small building. It was nestled beneath a three-story vacation home still under construction. I wanted a closer look but I was apprehensive, for there were private property signs posted everywhere. But I decided to look anyway. What the heck.

Soon enough my presence got the attention of a couple up the hill near the vacation home. They came walking rapidly and soon I was confronted.

“What do you want here?” asked the man. “What are you doing here?” chimed in his wife.

“I’m looking for a cabin where a famous person once lived. This little building looks as if it may be it.” The woman was tall. She had deep-set sharp blue eyes and high cheek bones. Possibly German extraction I thought. She stood in her Bermudas, with hands on her hips as if she might be surveying recent acquisitions. Definitely Germanic in manner, I thought.

“Anderson was his name. Sherwood Anderson.” I could see her wheels turning. Calvin Klein, Armani, Valentino, Banana Republic, Bill Blass, Prada, Sherwood Anderson?

“How did he make his money?” she said finally. She was doing comparatives now and looking at my bargain box trousers.

“Oh, he was a writer,” I said.

“Never heard of him.”

“People heard of him in the early part of this century,” I said, trying to defend his importance.

“What kind of stuff did he write? Was it like John Grisham’s stuff?”

“No. But he was a friend of William Faulkner.”

“Oh! yeah! Well, I have heard of him,” she said. Then she turned to her husband. “Frank! You heard of Faulkner, haven’t you?” Frank was expressionless.

“Not unless he sold real estate, honey. I don’t know him.”

“Well, there is a good possibility that he spent time here, sat inside this little building and wrote,” I said. “Anderson that is. And maybe Faulkner came to visit him here. And that would make it important historic real-estate if that is true.”

“We are debating whether to tear it down. I want it down,” she said. “Frank wants to turn it into a tool shed.”

“I hope you will leave it here,” I said. “Maybe sometime in the future it will be identified as the actual place where he lived and worked and it would be important.”

“Well,” she said, “if you can get some kind of proof, I’d like to see it. That might make a difference.”

They both had warmed a bit. I felt uncomfortable.

“You want to see our house?” she volunteered.

I didn’t want to see it.

“Thank you, but no,” I said. “I have to go.”

“Let me give you my card,” she said. “Hope you can find some proof.”

“They are all dead and gone now, and that may not be possible,” I said. “But thanks for your interest. Thank you for letting me walk around this place.”

“We’d let you in, but Frank nailed it shut. He holds on to everything, but I like to get rid of junk. Looks like a good place for snakes to hide to me.”

“Well, good-bye,” I said.

And I wandered back to the parking lot where it was hot. Hot enough to fry an egg on the pavement, and I wanted to get shed of that place.

By Tammy Greenwood

Tammy Greenwood, 1999 winner of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation award, has permitted us to publish Broken, the second chapter of her novel in progress, which she writes, is about a young woman dying of breast cancer. Throughout the novel she reflects on her fourteenth year when her mother abandoned the family and she wound up in an inappropriate relationship with her music teacher. She is now coming to terms with her culpability in the affair and his ultimate demise, as well as her mother’s abandonment, and finally her illness.)

If summer here were made of colored glass, this is the way the light would shine through the summer I turned fourteen: new leaves the green of dreams, fat June bugs’ metallic wings, and the color of breeze. Not spring. By early June, the mud of the dirt road leading from our house to the lake had dried up, leaving a path of quartz and mica under bare feet, shiny enough to make you imagine that diamonds instead of Fool’s Gold were piercing your winter skin. I picked the rocks up in handfuls and let the sun pour through my fists.

The road to the lake from our house was a corridor of green and sunlight, and after walking for two miles there was this: a yellow sail, the red hint of a lost kite, and the blue, blue of watery summer. Azure lake, white at the shore, and silvery fish. It was clean and bright here, not like at the murky pond with its sawdust bottom near our house. Here the shores were made of grass instead of dirt, and you could swim for hours without getting an earache. The sepia colors of the dark woods where we lived became brilliant, alive here, and this summer I wore bits of purple in my newly pierced ears. If summer here were made of colored glass, I would remember this one as amethyst.

The clarity of this summer is striking to me now. It seems that it would be clouded by everything that happened afterwards, but instead it hangs in my memory like a strand of colored glass beads: each bead a small gem, moments stolen and then strung together. Vivid. And intact. I keep it somewhere safe now, in a place where no one can find it, going over the beads like a rosary when I can’t sleep. And in my hands are the fragile remnants of the last summer that I believed the world to be a kind place. The last summer that I could see promise in something as simple as the curve of the moon. The last summer that I believed I knew mother.

My mother was an artist. That wasn’t her word; it was mine. But she was. She told people she was a housewife, a stay-at-home mom. And who would question that? She had a convincing story and the proof of no job, two children, and weathered hands. She was reluctant to talk about what she really did with her time. To strangers especially. But inside our home, we knew the magic she was capable of. To my brother Quinn and me, she was not only a mother but a sorceress. She made life incredible in a place that was otherwise unbearable. That is why my father loved her. And why I wanted to become her someday.

The shed behind our house was where she worked. There was only one bare bulb hanging down from a cord in the middle of the room, but sometimes she would stay in there until long past dark. I could see the shed light from my bedroom window, hear the music coming from the little radio she kept in there. It wasn’t a proper place for an artist; there was no heat in the winter other than the small electric space heater and no real way to keep cool in the summer. But she never complained. It was her place in the world, she said. She didn’t even mind the dirt floor or leaky roof. The smell of rotten wood or the one smudged window.

She was a collector of glass: fractured pieces she gathered from the shores of Lake Gormlaith, the town dump where Daddy worked, and other peoples’ trash. And in her shed, she transformed the slivers into stained glass panels that hung in every window of our house. She never bought the glass, though she could have in Quimby at the hobby shop; there were so many things already broken here. Beer bottles break when thrown, so do glasses and vases and lamps. Windows shatter with angry fists. Debris is easy in a place where people are sad.

We lived two miles up the road from Lake Gormlaith, away from the Vermont Life pictures of serenity and summer homes and ascending loons, deep in the woods where some people still managed without plumbing. We lived among those people whose poverty could be seen in the length of their faces, in their tired speech, and in the heaviness of their eyes. Everyone here was hungry. Everyone here knew too much about pain.

There was a time before, when Daddy and most of our neighbors worked at the furniture factory in Quimby, turning trees into pulp and pulp into plywood desks and night stands and entertainment centers. There was money enough then for Sunday breakfasts at the Miss Quimby Diner, new shoes from Payless, even a trip down to Boston or Atlantic City every couple of years. But when the furniture factory closed, the men didn’t have anywhere to go during the day anymore. There were no jobs to go to.

Arguments exploded like gun shots in these woods where there used to be only the silence of water. And when people weren’t yelling at each other, you could still hear the hushed angry whispers rushing through the tops of the trees. Desperate anger. Anger made out of empty pockets and empty refrigerators and empty promises. And so my mother gathered our neighbors’ destruction and made it into something good. She rearranged their fury into transparent miracles that only needed a little light to come alive. She kept the shards in an old card catalogue in the shed, each wooden drawer labeled by hue. By degree. Each row was a different color, and the first row was red. Poppy, ruby, scarlet. Crimson, maroon. Burgundy. Carmine and wine. You’d never know there were so many shades of anger.

Daddy was lucky. When he lost his job at the factory, he found a new one right away at the landfill in Quimby, collecting money from the summer people who brought their tidy bags of coffee grounds and banana peels in from their rented camps at Lake Gormlaith. By July, every camp on Gormlaith would be full, and the summer people made enough garbage to keep Daddy busy ten hours a day: mildewed bathing suits, broken water skis, watermelon rinds. Corn husks and inner tubes. In the summer, he came home smelling like other peoples’ garbage, but sometimes he would bring my mother some shimmering thing he’d found poking out of a trash bag, or buried under a pile of dirty diapers. He’d polish the pieces as if they were gems and offer her the broken bits in the same way.

Of course, there was pain in our house too. I would have to have been blind not to notice the sad way he extended his hand to her, and the reluctant way she accepted. I would have to have been deaf not to hear their careful arguments at night. My father’s job at the dump was a seasonal one, and we all knew that summer would eventually end. And as much as we despised them, we relied on the summer people. Soon enough they would return to their real homes in New York and Connecticut and Boston, taking their money and their trash with them. The end of summer was a desperate time, even for us. I knew that instead of shopping for new school clothes, I’d have to pick through the summer people’s leftovers dropped off at my Aunt Boo’s thrift shop. In the winter, every winter, he had to find someplace else to work.

The first couple of years after the furniture factory closed, he worked pumping gas at a friend’s station, but it closed when the big Shell station opened across the street. This year, he didn’t know where he would be working. My brother Quinn had taken a job at the Shop-N-Save as soon as he turned sixteen. But despite my mother’s pleas to please let her help, to find a job in town waiting tables or at one of the shops, Daddy insisted that she stay home, that he could do enough. He said that she hadn’t married a fool. That he would give her the world he’d promised when she first loved him. And this made her angry. In my room, I held a heavy pillow over my ear so that their words couldn’t find me. The slivers here weren’t made of glass but of her sighs and his tears. But my mother was a magician, and she could mend things.

What I choose to remember, the beads my fingers linger on, are these. The days when Daddy and Quinn were at work and my mother belonged to me. The days that we went hunting for glass. We made picnic lunches (cream cheese and cucumber sandwiches, bottles of Orange Crush or lemonade) and walked for hours, waiting for the sun to catch in the blue or green of something broken. Of course, sometimes we could walk all day without finding anything; some times the beach held nothing for us but tangled fishing lines, a soggy shoe, and wet plastic bags. But other times, we’d find piles of glass in the road, the glorious remnants of an accident. Or a perfect piece of cobalt that used to be a wine glass. Those days, we felt like explorers or pirates. And we would sit down under a tree and eat our junk food picnic as if we had been journeying for days without food, and count the shattered pieces as if they were medallions of gold.

Will you sing for me? she would ask later as we lay, bellies full and brown, on the blanket she had spread by the water.

And as I sang, she would close her eyes. Sometimes it scared me, how far away she seemed, as if my own voice could send her away. But when I stopped, when I swallowed the only beautiful thing I knew how to make, her eyes would flicker open again, and she would return to me. She was already farther away than any of us knew.

In the evenings, she would put the pieces we had found together. “Look,” she said.

I had tip-toed outside, past my father snoring softly on the couch, and our greyhound, Sleep, who was doing just that on the front porch, to the shed. It was July, and the air was loud with crickets and the distant sounds of fireworks. The Fourth of July wasn’t for two more days, but the summer people were impatient.

It was so warm I didn’t need the sweatshirt I had grabbed on my way out. The door to the shed was open and light spilled onto the wet grass. I could see my mother’s shadow moving across the walls inside. I knocked softly on the open door and peered in at her. She held up the pane of glass to the one bare bulb.

“Look.”

The glass was indigo: not quite black, not blue. But beyond that confused color was the certainty of ruby and emerald and amber. The verity of red and green and yellow. It was an explosion, but somehow still perfectly intact.

Outside, the air cracked and burned with Roman candles. And as I sat on the wobbly stool while my mother worked, I thought about the possibility of explosion. About calmness, and sudden detonation. Watching her hands work across the broken pieces, I felt almost sick with appreciation, but there was no way to tell her how much I needed her.

That night after I crept back into the house, nearly tripping over Sleep’s long body in the kitchen, that sickness stayed with me. It settled in my stomach and shoulders all through the night. If I’d been able to articulate that feeling, I might have realized that I missed her. Already, and she wasn’t even gone.

The next day was brilliant and we walked all the way to the lake to lie in the sun. The grassy place near the boat access area was littered with empty fireworks shells, burnt at the edges and quiet.

In the summer, we didn’t worry about what would happen when winter descended. In the summer we didn’t worry about money. About food in the cupboards or that my feet were growing so fast I would need new boots again once snow fell. In the summer, it was just me and my mother, searching for broken treasures in the mud.

The clarity of that summer still surprises me. Sunlight struggling through the green of new leaves. The marbled pink of a sunburn and tumblers filled with pink lemonade. I suppose the sun might have blinded me a little. With the beads of sunlight in my fingers, even now, I skip over the ones made of milky glass, the gray beads that would not let the light come through.

These were the days when Daddy didn’t go to work. The migraine days. The days when he closed his eyes and saw falling stars. On those days, my mother didn’t seem to know what to do. Normally, we would have walked to the lake or through the woods to the Pond where some of the best glass lay buried in dank mud. But with Daddy home, lying on the couch with a heating pad pressed against his temples, she stood in doorways, looking lost. On the migraine days, the TV was always on: game shows, soaps, talk shows. She pretended to be absorbed in programs I knew she had never watched before. She jumped every time the phone rang, because once when someone tried to sell her life insurance, Daddy grabbed the phone out of her hand and demanded, Who is this? When Daddy was home, we didn’t go hunting, because every time she walked near the door, Daddy would reach for her, asking, Where are you off to? And then she wouldn’t go anywhere. Not to the lake for picnics. Not even to the shed to work. But then Daddy’s migraine would disappear, as quickly as it came, and he would go back to work. And when he was gone, the light returned, and I had my mother back again. I suppose the sunlight blinded me a little, to the dark days.

There were other dark days like these, interspersed amid the more gentle colors (the green of grass after rain, the soft orange of peaches in a basket, and the violet of the sky outside my night window). But on these days, the gray days, I could see the worry in her face and in her hands. I could hear it just under the surface of her voice. At night I listened to their whispers, pretended that their voices belonged to crickets, to bullfrogs, to loons.

“We’re going to Quimby today,” she said one morning in late July.

“Hmmmm,” I nodded. I was busy pushing scrambled eggs across my plate, thinking about how I might ask her for a new pair of jeans for school. I had grown five inches since last summer; I was almost as tall as Daddy, and my clothes didn’t fit anymore. But today was the first day in two weeks that Daddy had gone to work. We didn’t have any money for new jeans.

“Piper?” she said.

I looked up from my plate.

She was standing in front of the sink in her nightgown, and the sun was shining through the sheer fabric. Inside the giant nightie, I could see how small she was. It embarrassed me. I looked back down at my plate.

“I think I’ll bring some of my pictures to the artists’ gallery,” she said softly, like a question.

I looked up again. She was running her fingers across the counter. Nervous.

“You should!” I said, surprised by my own voice.

“You think?” she asked, hopefully. “You think they might be able to sell them? Maybe to the summer people?”

That afternoon I helped her gather her stained glass panes and we took them to the artists’ gallery in Quimby. While she met with the owner in the back office, I wandered through the labyrinth of jewelry and sculptures and quilts and paintings. I was amazed by so much beauty in one place and wondered what it would feel like to be able to buy something. To reach into my pocket and pull out enough money for the velvet crazy quilt. How it might look spread across my old bed.

My mother was smiling when she emerged from the back room. The handsome owner of the shop had his hand on her back, as they walked back into the gallery. When she saw me, she smiled shyly. She blushed when he wrote her the check for the pieces and squeezed my hand tightly as we walked back to the car.

At the Miss Quimby Diner, she said, “Order anything you want. Anything!”

We got hamburgers and French fries smothered in gravy. I’d never tasted anything more wonderful. On the way home, I could still taste the salt on my lips. We rolled the windows down and sang, together, at the tops of our lungs.

But when she told Daddy that night at dinner, when she handed him the check like a gift, he turned silent. Quinn stared at his plate and disappeared into his room right after dinner. I didn’t know what to do with myself in all that quiet, and finally, reluctantly, I left them alone. And later, the words that crept under my door. Trust and cheat and whore wound their way into my dreams. He asked her, in whispers like pins ‘s, Do I have to watch you twenty-four hours a day? And I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to imagine what would happen to us if he never left the house again.

A month later, my mother stopped getting out of bed in the mornings. Daddy’s headaches were keeping him home for weeks at a time. Quinn was stealing milk from the Shop-N-Save, eggs and packages of sliced cheese. Summer was almost over, but the air was still hot. Sticky and stifling.

One morning, after Daddy hadn’t gone to work in three days, I thankfully awoke to the familiar sounds of his work boots shuffling across the linoleum, and the sound of Quinn cracking his back, twisting first left and then right. And finally, the rattle of Daddy’s truck disappearing with the two of them inside down the road. I waited until I couldn’t hear his tires crushing gravel anymore until I crawled out of bed.

I had taken to sleeping in one of my mother’s old slips to stay cool, and in the kitchen, in my mother’s tattered lingerie, I poured the last of the coffee into a mug. I wasn’t supposed to drink coffee, but today I didn’t care. I kicked the screen door open and went out to the porch. Sitting on the rusty porch swing in my mother’s slip, drinking the forbidden coffee, I pretended things weren’t falling apart. That it was just another summer day. But my mother would not get out of bed, and there were clouds caught in the tops of the trees.

Inside, I walked tentatively down the short hallway to the door to my mother’s room and peeked in.

“Morning Piper,” she smiled, rolling over to look at the clock.

I sat down on the bed, and she reached for me with her little hands, motioning for me to lie down next to her. Sometimes lately I felt like she was the child; she was so small. But when I lay down next to her and she put her little fingers in my hair, suddenly I was the kid again.

“Is it nice out?” she asked. Her breath was musty. I knew what she meant was, Is he gone?

I nodded. “It will be. It’s cloudy, but it’ll burn off.”

“Promise?” she asked softly.

I nodded.

“What do you want to do today?” She smiled.

I shrugged. She hadn’t wanted to do anything for weeks, and I didn’t want to get my hopes up.

“I told Gray’s sister I’d help her clean out the rest of his house. She said we can take anything we want.”

Gray Wilder was our closest neighbor. He lived about a quarter mile down the road from us, near the Pond. He had died that spring. He was the first dead person I knew. I was curious, and the idea of spending the day on an adventure with my mother thrilled me.

“I was thinking we might be able to find some things to sell at Boo’s,” she said.

My heart thudded dully in my ears. I wondered what Daddy would say if she came to him again with another check. My hands shook with the prospect of another night listening to those words. But she held me so tightly, I couldn’t say No. She needed this. She needed me to agree. And I missed her.

We walked to Gray Wilder’s house carrying suitcases, and the sky threatened rain. It felt like we were running away, but the suitcases were empty, and I wasn’t wearing any shoes. My mother walked slowly, noticing things: a late raspberry, the red almost brutal amongst all that green. A hornet’s nest in the top of a tree. With her gestures, she tried to make all of this beautiful – to distract me from the gutted out car over the bank near Gray Wilder’s house and the bag of trash somebody had dumped there. But my eyes lingered on the plastic Valentine candy box, empty aspirin bottle, and single filthy sneaker.

Gray Wilder’s house was a trailer on concrete blocks. It smelled like an outhouse when my mother finally found the key and let us in. I’d never been inside a dead person’s house before. Suddenly, I didn’t want to be there. We collected a few things from the living room: a clock made out of a lacquered piece of wood, a wicker magazine rack. Two candles made of layered wax that looked like a sunset. But the smell got to me soon, and while my mother scoured his garage for something worth something, I waited for her outside on a rock, picking the dead skin off my feet. The sky rumbled angrily.

After a long time, she finally came out with something wrapped up carefully in the pages of a dirty magazine. She unwrapped it quickly, tossing the crinkled pages on the ground. In her face I could see something like desperation, as if her very happiness depended on what was inside the glossy pictures of skin and hair and lipstick. I couldn’t help but stare at the fragments of women’s naked bodies, at their pubic hair, shaved into tiny triangles and at their swollen breasts, their colorless nipples. I made myself turn my away, looking up instead at the red glass vase in her hands.

“That’s pretty,” I said. I wanted her to know she had found it. The perfect thing that would save this day.

She set the vase on the rock next to me and looked at it. Without sun, the glass was dull and dark red, almost brown. I could smell rain coming. I could hear thunder somewhere not too far away.

“Boo will love it,” I said. “She will. She has all of those vases, the Depression glass ones, remember? But she doesn’t have any red ones. I bet we could get twenty dollars for it.” My words were tumbling, eager and clumsy.

She picked it up again, smiling, and ran her fingers across the rim. But she hesitated half way around, her smile fading. “There’s a chip in it.”

“Where?” I asked, as if it couldn’t be true. As if she could have mistaken this imperfection. I stood up, went to her, looked at the glass. The chip was small but certain. The vase wasn’t worth anything.

She set it back down on the rock and walked away from me, disappearing into the garage. I picked the vase up and cradled it, briefly, like an infant in my arms. I set it back down, embarrassed and felt the first cold drops of summer rain on my shoulder.

She was inside the garage for a long time. I could hear her feet shuffling across the dirt floor. When she came out again, she was carrying a hammer. My throat felt thick. She scooted me out of the way and contemplated the vase again.

I looked at her, and her face grew soft. In a glance, I asked her to please stop.

“It’s ruined,” she said, her eyes pleading with me. “Already.”

I stared at my hands. When I looked up again, she was standing over the vase with her eyes closed. When she swung the hammer back, her shoulder blades were sharp, like a bird’s wings at her back. And the vase made a sound like music when it shattered with one gentle blow.

Tears welled up in my eyes but did not fall. I blinked hard.

She sat down next to me and leaned her head on my shoulder without taking her eyes off the pile of crimson shards. There was no sun shining through the fragments. It was just a pile of glass.

And then she stood up and brushed the broken pieces into the palm of her hand. She looked at me sadly. “Sometimes things need to get broken,” she said.

I suppose I should have known then that it wouldn’t be much longer before she was gone. I should have seen the dull prisms in her eyes as we walked home in the rain with two suitcases filled with the dead man’s things. I should have noticed that all the sunlight had disappeared.

The only thing that remained of my mother after she left was glass: In every room, her glass paintings, her slivered pictures reminders that there was a time before. That there was a time when things were almost beautiful here. The pane that hung in the window over my bed was the last one she made before she left and never came back. She used every color in this one, and at the very center was a piece she kept in the crimson drawer in the shed: the bubble of red from the glass vase transformed into a small heart inside the chest of a bird without wings.

The summer I turned fourteen, she made me understand. In summertime, that it was not the glass that was beautiful, but the quality of light behind it. It was the sun, not the shards, that mattered. And when I peered through the heart (eyes squinted against the moon or sun), the world looked a different way. I imagined that this was the way she might have seen things. When I forgot the tilt of her head or the smell of her hair, I looked through the bird’s heart to the world outside my window and imagined that I was her and that this was what she saw.

And that fall, when she was already gone, autumn sunlight shone through the red and made spots like blood on my sheets.

By Hilbert H. Campbell

Perhaps the smaller “fugitive” publications of no other important American writer of the twentieth century have proven more elusive to would-be bibliographers than those of Sherwood Anderson. Since Raymond D. Gozzi’s bibliography of Anderson’s periodical appearances (1947) and Sheehy and Lohf’s Sherwood Anderson: A Bibliography (1960), scholars have continued to work toward a more complete list.

The most substantial lists of later additions have appeared in the bibliography of William A. Sutton’s The Road to Winesburg, 1972 (more than 50 early periodical and newspaper appearances); in Ray Lewis White’s Studies in Bibliography article in 1978, “Sherwood Anderson: Fugitive Pamphlets and Broadsides, 1918-1940” (17 items); and in “Sherwood Anderson: Additions to the Bibliography,” by Charles Modlin, Hilbert Campbell, and Kenichi Tekada, also published in Studies in Bibliography in 1986 (36 items).

Although by now certainly about all of Anderson’s publications must have been documented, a San Francisco bookseller’s advertisement on the internet in 1997 led me eventually to purchase at least one more of these “fugitives.”

The Cornfields, published in 1939 by the House of Russell in New York, is a four-page pamphlet with light green wrappers. It consists simply of a reprint of “The Cornfields,” the first poem in Mid-American Chants (1918), and a biographical note. It is an exact reprint, except that the original wording “sweet oil of the corn” emerges here as “sweet oil of corn.”

I can’t find any surviving correspondence between Anderson and the House of Russell. They may, however, have specialized in publishing poetry. The only ones of Anderson’s books mentioned by name in the biographical note are his two books of poetry; and the few other books published by the House of Russell that I have been able to locate are all books of poetry by relatively obscure authors.

If and when other previously undocumented Anderson “fugitives” should come to your attention, the editors of Sherwood Anderwon Review would like to know of them.

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.