By Will Schuck

In just nine months, the Sherwood Anderson Project has grown from an idea into a budding reality. Little did anyone know that a single meeting positively would change the course of the “project.”

In February 2001, while on my way to work at 6:30 a.m., I heard a spot on Kent State University’s radio broadcast about the university’s executive development program. I jotted down the phone number while driving in the dark with the hope that someone at Kent State could help me uncover the source of my dilemma: an inability to build public support for the Sherwood Anderson Project. After meeting with Dennis Ulrich, the director of Kent’s executive development program, one word stood out as the key to success: follow-up.

By regularly following up with those who showed an interest in the project, I found that a following naturally formed. In a month, eight people enlisted. We now have 42. But increasing numbers was (and is) not the mission of the group. Increasing awareness of Sherwood Anderson, cultivating an appreciation of his works and spreading knowledge of his life in Ohio was and is its mission. The group then began to focus its efforts in that direction. During this time, another critical relationship was formed. The Lorain County Historical Society agreed that Sherwood Anderson’s presence in Elyria and Cleveland was a little-known fact and something the public needed to know.

In 1999, in the spirit of Sherwood Anderson, I had formed a group for adult writers to bring them together and help them improve their craft. We quickly moved this program under the umbrella of the Sherwood Anderson Project and began “branding” it as our first literary program. The next step was to begin educating the local public about Sherwood Anderson. Thus, with the help of the Lorain County Historical Society, “Sherwood Anderson Day” was born.

In September 2001, Sherwood Anderson Day was held at the Lorain County Historical Society’s Hickories Museum. The museum is just blocks away from the site of Anderson’s Elyria paint factory and his 1906-1913 residence there. The event drew about 40 people and went a long way toward putting Anderson’s name in front of the public. Elyria Mayor Bill Grace even declared September 29, 2001 as Sherwood Anderson Day to commemorate the author’s arrival in Elyria. Mayor Grace also attended the event. The local media, as well, were open to publicizing the event and re-examining Anderson’s life and times in the area. A supportive Sunday editorial in Elyria’s Chronicle-Telegram ran the headline: “Anderson Center Sure Would Be Nice.” It was then that our group realized that “Sherwood Anderson Literary Center” would be a more fitting name for what we proposed to offer the community.

And just what were we proposing? In addition to the adult writers’ group and Sherwood Anderson Day, we would provide a summer writing camp for children, online tutoring, a series of author lectures, an informative web site, an Anderson book discussion group, writing workshops, and classroom presentations on Anderson’s life and works. And the list continues to grow.

The literary center has also become involved in supporting efforts in Clyde, Ohio, to re-establish and refresh Anderson’s reputation there. For instance, the Ohio Bicentennial Commission has approved our proposal for a historical marker in Clyde to commemorate Anderson and his works. Dorcas Harms of Storytown Tours in Clyde successfully gained support from the city. The city will provide $500 toward the cost of the marker and will designate a location for its placement. Others in Clyde have agreed to donate time and services to install and maintain the marker.

With a formal business plan developed and a core of eight committee leaders (including myself), the Sherwood Anderson Literary Center heads into 2002 with a bright future devoted to inspiring enthusiasm for the value of thoughtful reading and writing and promoting understanding of the life and work of Sherwood Anderson.

For details about the literary center and its activities, please visit www.sherwoodanderson.org. To make a financial contribution or to participate as a speaker or attendee at Sherwood Anderson Day 2002, please contact literary center Director Will Schuck at 440-933-0865 or wschuck67@hotmail.com or write to: The Sherwood Anderson Literary Center, c/o The Lorain County Historical Society, 509 Washington Ave., Elyria, OH 44035.

By Edith Brilliant

[Reprinted from the Sandusky Register, Sunday, August 29, 1926]

From grocery boy to novelist is the path that Sherwood Anderson, writer, has trod in his climb upward to his place of prominence in the “Who’s Who” of the world. Sherwood Anderson, although born at Camden, O., was a former Clyde, O., resident and the town is full of anecdotes about his life.

There’s a little cottage on Cherry St., the home of Miss Lucy Hurd, where Anderson used to come as a boy to play with his chum Herman Hurd, Miss Hurd’s brother. Miss Hurd remembers the boy as a tall, rather slim youth with black hair. He often came to visit her brother and he was known as a rather shiftless, carefree youngster.

Brother is Artist

None of his Clyde friends recall that he showed any remarkable talent for writing or anything else. But the “artistic” strain showed itself in his family in his two brothers, Carl and Ray. Carl Anderson is a painter of some fame and his work is frequently seen in magazine covers and commercial advertisement.

Anderson, however, had all the melodramatic background for the famous man. Clyde residents remember his father as a town ne’er-do-well. The mother, it is said, helped to support her family during the none too successful days of the head of the family. Young Anderson picked up anything he might do to earn a few extra pennies. When the Buckeye St. sewer construction was being laid in 1890 he was a waterboy. He delivered groceries for T. P. Hurd, the town grocer. He took care of the neighborhood furnaces and chopped the wood. Anderson was ambitious in a carefree way.

Had Several Trades

The father of the family plied a number of trades, including house painting, harness worker in Ervin Brothers Harness Store, and paper hanger.

Sherwood Anderson is only one of two already famous people produced by the little town while Anderson was a resident there. He went to school with John Emerson. Emerson recently married Anita Loos, famous for “Gentlemen Prefer Blonds.” Mr. Emerson has been a prominent figure in the theatrical world of New York and will soon picturize his wife’s novel.

But Clyde residents are not the only people who knew Sherwood Anderson in his teen years in Clyde. Mrs. J. D. Parker, wife of Dr. J. D. Parker of this city, often visited in Clyde and met Sherwood Anderson. Anderson often came to the home of Mrs. Parker’s sister, Mrs. W. E. Gillette, to pay court to Mrs. Parker’s younger sister, Miss Harriett Day, who is now Mrs. E. E. Messmer, Bowie, Texas.

When the Gillette family moved from Clyde, a number of letters written by Sherwood Anderson to the family were destroyed. The Gillette family and Mrs. Gillette’s younger sister were close friends of the Anderson family and especially with Sherwood Anderson and his sister Stella, who died a few years ago. When the family moved to Chicago, Mrs. Messmer visited the sister, Stella.

Remembered Clyde

Although absent from the community for 25 or more years, Anderson has retained a good memory of its inhabitants. A few years ago Sherwood Anderson was asked to appear before the Federation of Women’s Clubs in Toledo. Mrs. Gillette, who lived in Toledo and was a member of the Federation, remembered the boy who had become a famous man and attended his lecture. Following the lecture she stepped to the platform to shake hands with the boy who had been such a welcome visitor at her home in Clyde.

“Mother,” Sherwood Anderson cried as he recognized her and took her into his arms to kiss her and weep as he remembered the many times when Mrs. Gillette had been a real mother to him in the days in the town of Clyde.

Place in His Writings

Anderson’s life in Clyde is taking its place in literature. Winesburg, Ohio mentions Sandusky, Cedar Point, Monroeville and a number of other nearby towns and often refers to the rich vineyards of this district.

In “The Sad Horn Blowers,” appearing in Harper’s Magazine for February 1923, Mrs. Parker and many other people who are familiar with his life believe that he has pictured himself in the life of the small town. Anderson calls his town Monroeville but by the names used it is believed that the village pictured is really Clyde. The father in the story is a house painter like Anderson’s father. The familiar Clyde names used in the story are A. P. Wrigley, Mr. and Mrs. Bradshare, Mrs. Childers, Alfred Geiger, John Wyatt, Dr. Musgrave. Anderson also refers to Piety Hill and Maumee Pike.

The Anderson family are well remembered in Clyde. The children included Sherwood, Stella, Ray, and Carl. Before leaving Clyde, the sister, Stella, taught in the Clyde schools.

Anderson’s experiences were rich during his life in the town. His difficult life gave him hardships from the day he was old enough to assume any family responsibility. During the Spanish American War he served in the company that went from Clyde.

By Sherwood Anderson

Editors’ note: This is the second of two speeches Anderson delivered at a writers’ conference at the University of Colorado in Boulder, in 1937. This one, apparently entitled “The Obligations of the Writer,” was presented in the evening of August 10.

I think I shall have to make my second talk here at this conference more or less personal. I must have been in a rather reckless mood when I gave Mr. Davison the titles for the two formal talks he asked me to make out here. I would, if possible, rather like to make my two talks a little hang together. I am not talking off-hand. As you will see, I have a manuscript with me. I presume that all writers, and particularly the story teller type of writer, is inevitably also something of an actor. I know that I am. I think I have always tried to set for myself certain parts I am to play in life. I have tried to conceal this fact as much as possible, but almost all of my intimate friends are on to me. Some of the roles I have set for myself in life I have played miserably, and others I think I have played pretty well. I am so much the actor that often I ask myself the question-“Is there really any such person as Sherwood Anderson?” Not only am I an actor, but experience has taught me that I must also look rather like an actor. As it happens, I have a good many actor friends and often, when I am in New York, I go with one of these friends into the actors’ clubs, the Lambs or the Players, and inevitably the same thing happens to me. Men rush up to me. They greet me warmly. They grasp my hand.

“Why hello, Harry, old chap. I thought you were in Los Angeles.”

I might also say that formerly I was often taken for William Jennings Bryan and for Elbert Hubbard. There must have been a good deal of the actor in these men also.

And so being this thing, half the actor, half the writer, the actor in me must have a part to play. As a writer I am compelled to write the lines for the actor. Two or three times I have tried speaking on some set subject, offhand, and the experiment hasn’t come off. I have found myself too much going off into side alleys and losing my way. So I have prepared my lines to be spoken here. As I prepare them, I am at home, in a little cabin by a creek, where I do my work as a writer. The cabin is in the Virginia hill country. I have a secretary working with me. She sits at her desk taking down my golden words.

“Really, how wonderful this is going to sound,” I say to myself. “At last I am going to be an influence upon the young.”

Into my cabin in the Virginia hills come certain sounds. A chipmunk plays on a log, the birds sing. I can hear the chattering of a small stream over stones. A little wind blows in pine trees. I find that chipmunks, pine trees, and birds make a very good audience. They do not talk back, do not ask embarrassing questions, do not challenge my statements.

Perhaps I can best get at what I would like to say here by telling a little of my own personal experiences as a writer.

As I have already pointed out in another talk, there are, as I see it, two approaches to writing. A man may take this business of writing frankly as a way of making a living. He may look upon it in that way.

Or he may get at it in another way, taking it rather as a way of life, as a rather functional matter.

I think my own experiences, as a boy and young man, are not uncommon experiences with young American men. There have always been two impulses pulling at me. I might as well say frankly that I take myself as an artist type of man. I know no reason why I should be ashamed to take this position.

It may be that nowadays things are somewhat different from what they were in my own youth. I was a boy and young man before the period of the World War. I believe that the world War was rather disillusioning. A definite change may have come over the attitude taken by our present-day young men.

But when I was a boy and young man there were certain ideas always being pounded into me, often by people who wished me nothing less than the good life, and these ideas were all alike. They concerned what we call success. The idea was that a man should strive to be big, to be an important figure in life, if possible he was to develop his acquisitive talent, get rich.

I myself was born into a financially ruined family. We lived in a small house, in a rather shabby street, in a quite charming little Ohio town. There were a good many of us. A year or two ago I drove through this street on which stood the house where I spent my boyhood and young manhood. I was filled with curiosity and wonder. There were so many of us. “Where in the devil did we all sleep?” I asked myself. My own father was somewhat of a waster. He was a man who refused to take life too seriously. He was not what we called in Ohio a good provider.

However, I must say that the man had his good points. If he was a waster, he was a rather lovable waster. In my own books from time to time I have used the figure of this man a good deal and I think that on the whole I have hardly been fair to him. The man had a kind of inner gaiety. He could not take the fact that we had no butter to spread on our bread very seriously.

“Well, heaven and earth, you’ve got the bread, haven’t you?” he would say.

It is a little strange, I think, how the charm of such a man, leading such a life, sticks. As a boy I think I rather distrusted my father. He loved to get in the back of a small-town saloon with other so-called “no accounts” of the town and spend whole afternoons, when he should have been at work, providing for his children, seeing to their education, laying up money to send them through college, preparing them to associate with cultured people, such as I dare say are gathered together in this audience, in song singing and tale telling.

In my own boyhood and young manhood I became the thing we know so well here in America as a young hustler, a young go-getter. I made up my mind that whatever else I turned out to be, I wasn’t going to be like my own father. There were certain figures of men I had heard and read about, Garfield of my own state of Ohio, risen from canal boy to presidentother figures looming.

The city of Cleveland was nearby. We in our town read the Cleveland newspapers. I myself hurried through the streets selling them. Mr. John D. Rockefeller, who had already come up from poverty, having, as it happened, a father very like my own, was already a big figure in the state.

There were enough of such men, in my state and neighboring states. The newspapers praised them, magazines ran articles holding them up as rather ideal types of manhood. I made up my own mind I was going to be as much like them as I could.

How shall I describe it? I remember well another young man I met at about that time. We were both in business. We worked for the same firm. One day he said something to me.

“Anderson, you are a damned plausible cuss,” he said. “You are too damned slick,” he added. At the moment I rather succeeded in dismissing from my mind what the young man had said to me. I had put something over on him or I had put something over on someone else and he has seen through my operations.

“He is jealous of me,” I told myself. I tried to lay this salve over the wound he had given me.

However, what he had said did, in spite of all my efforts, rather rankle. The wound he has given me didn’t exactly heal. His words kept coming back into my mind, coming most often at night. I think it is very interesting, to any of us, to think back over our lives and realize how much we have sometimes been influenced by what at the moment seemed like chance remarks. You will see that I am making this talk something like a confession. The truth is that throughout my own boyhood and young manhood I had always been a little too plausible, a little too slick. I was proud of my ability to put something over on others. I did it to my own brothers, to my one sister, and to my boyhood friends. I rather enjoyed doing the thing to people and even yet I recall, often at night and always with a kind of shrinking, as though from an impending blow, certain things I did to my own sister, now dead. This whole matter came into my mind when I was trying to prepare this talk to be delivered out here because when I was in the act of preparing the talk, an old photograph, a family group, was sent to me by my brother’s daughter. I was trying, you see, to figure out how it had happened that I became a writer, what impulses had led me to become a writer. When I first began to write, I was no longer a young man. I was well into my thirties before I ever attempted to write a story.

I have spoken of an old photograph I received on a certain day this summer when I was trying to prepare this talk. In the photograph there my sister was. She was a rather beautiful and intelligent looking girl, surrounded in the photograph by her five brothers. I was already a little better dressed than the others. I had just a little forced myself in front of the others of the group.

And now as to my relations to my sister. I was always trying to put something over on her and usually I succeeded. The child would make a certain assertion. She had a certain belief. She was very positive about her belief. I listened to her.

“Ah! Now watch me. In two days I will make her say, and be just as positive about, the opposite of what she has just said.”

I went to work on her. I did not go at her directly, did not argue with her. I got up conversation, said all sorts of suggestive little things. Often I worked away at the job as though my life depended upon it. I concentrated on her. Usually I got her. I would make her change her mind and when I had done so I had a queer and, I must say, nasty feeling of triumph. I think now that I was practicing on my sister. It was a way of preparing myself for success in life. I practiced also on others. I think you will all see how such a talent, to make black seem like white, this practiced until one becomes efficient at it, plausible-even let us say slick-how all of this would be a tremendous help to a man in business.

I think it did help me in a way. I continued using the talent when I had got into business. I used it on others in the office where I worked and later I used it on bankers. Often by using it I managed to borrow quite large sums of money without much security. Presently I launched out into various enterprises. I promoted companies. I managed often to make another man take a risk, while, if there were any profits, I grabbed the major share of them.

And what has all this to do with the art of writing? Wait. Be patient. I hope I shall presently be able to come to that.

As you will see, I am taking the art of writing also as a way of life. The writer-and again let me say I am speaking of the writer in a sense of the tale teller-does not write just with his head. In reality he writes with his whole body.

I am trying to get at an approach to something by putting it on a rather personal plane. I am using certain facts and experiences out of my own life to try to illustrate my point.

I had got into business. I was an advertising man, a writer of advertisements. We all know that there are all kinds of commercial products being advertised. Some of these advertising products are worthwhile and others are worthless. The men who were selling these products depended upon us writers to bring them to the public. There was always-at least this is true of the time I was working at this job–an element of fraud. My own plausibility, and a kind of cleverness I had developed, helped me a good deal. I could sell my plausibility to others. I became rather a star man. Had I decided to stay in advertising, I think it possible that I might have made a good deal of money. Recently I saw, in a magazine devoted to advertising, an article on my own experience in this kind of life. The article cracked me up a good deal as a kind of wizard at the game.

But it was a game and I grew sick of it. I had a quite uncomfortable time for several years. I dare say I had become a rather well dressed, alert, bright young business man.

But there was something in me that realized that I was selling people out. I drank a good deal. I had affairs with women. I tried to lead the life of a young blade. I remember now that at that period in my life I thought a good deal about the life of my father whom I had formerly almost despised. Suddenly his life began to seem to have more point and purpose than my own. At any rate he had a great fondness for other men. He did not want to cheat them. I remember going home one day to my native village. I was passing through and spent the day there. This was at the height of my experience in being a successful young man. I was very well dressed. I walked with a certain alert determination through the streets. There was an older man who stopped me in the street. He had formerly owned a little hardware store in the town but had failed. He was a man who had had a good deal of trouble in life. His wife had died of a terrible disease and his only son, a young boy, had been killed by an accident. The son, a bright, playful fellow, had tried to hop on a freight train but had missed his footing. He was with several other boys and they were daring each other to jump aboard the train for a ride. The train was going rapidly and his body was thrown under the wheels and ground to pieces. The father had neglected his business. He had taken to drink. He was a former crony of my father. He stopped me on the street and spoke to me of my own father.

“You have misunderstood him,” he said. “He was a great fellow. What stories he used to tell.” I got from him the impression of my father as one who had understood the little hardware merchant when he was going to pieces. My father had been his friend, had tried to stand by him, had tried to make him forget the tragedy of his life.

Well, presently I decided to get out of advertising writing. I think my motives were not very clear. By a certain slickness and cleverness in writing for others, I was making money for them. Why not make the money for myself?

I am sure there was this idea and there was also another. Perhaps I thought there would be something cleaner, purer, better, in making goods for people rather than in helping others to buy and sell goods. I went home to my native state. I was full of ideas. I went from man to man raising money. I visited bankers. I did raise money and started a factory. It was a quite commonplace occupation I got into. I manufactured house paint.

But here again I found the same thing I had found as an advertising writer. I had to compete with other manufacturers of house paint. Some of our laws were not as rigid as they are now. We have all read stories of the beginnings of the lives of most of our successful men. I cheated a little on the materials I put into my product. I found that no one noticed and I cheated more.

It is a little difficult to tell exactly what happened to me at this time. I had my factory. I employed salesmen, I borrowed money at banks. I hurried through the streets. I was, I think, pretty much the type of the average successful young American man.

And then suddenly there came a change. I do not know exactly what happened to me. I had joined a golf club in the town and often spent an afternoon with other business men playing golf. Earlier in my life I had been a great reader but I had stopped reading. I was one day with a group of men in the clubhouse of a country club. We sat together for several hours drinking and talking. Suddenly a strange, blank feeling came over me. I was with men all much more successful than myself. It seemed to me suddenly that their lives were all empty and that my own life was the emptiest of all.

I got up and left them. Evening had come on and I went walking in country roads. From that moment I began to neglect my business. Day after day I walked about the country. I began to stop and talk to little farmers along the road. I got on a train and went away to the city and spent days wandering about the streets. It seems to me now that I had passed through a half insane period that must have lasted for two or three years. I did not want to be what I was becoming. Again I drank a good deal. There was, I think, a period when I might well have become a confirmed drunkard.

And then one day another change came. I was in my own house. I had become more or less estranged from the members of my own family and from my former friends. I was very lonely and I still think that one of the most significant things about our American life is our American loneliness. I remember that I went up into a small room at the top of my house and locked the door. I sat down at a desk in the room and began to write. An idea had come to me. I would like to make this idea clear if I can. I could not understand my own life and what was the matter with it. It seemed to me that, pretty much, I had only been doing all my life what older men had advised me to do when I was a boy. I had been struggling for material success in a world that puts great value upon material success.

The idea that had come to me was something like this. “I cannot understand my own life but perhaps it is because no man can think clearly about himself.” I had got the idea that it might be possible by attempting to create figures in an imaginative world to get through these figures a little better understanding of self.

And so I began to create imaginative figures. I took the figures of other imagined young men and put them through experiences I had been through. In order to avoid too much confusion in this process, I developed the trick of making them physically unlike myself. Now I have touched upon this point in another talk I have made here at this conference, have tried to point out how in changing the physical fact of a figure in the imaginative world, you change the figure quite completely. You make a separation that is very important. At least it was important to me.

I began writing and at first all my writing took the form of novels. I wanted if possible to create a quite complete picture of the individual in the kind of American life I myself had known. I wrote furiously. I thought little about style. I do not believe that at first I thought much about publication. I began a novel, sometimes writing forty, fifty, seventy-five thousand words, and then threw it aside. I began another. Now I no longer cared about drinking. I had become drunk with writing. More and more I neglected my business and one day, realizing that by my neglect of business I was being unfair to those who had invested money in it, I left the business and the town. And now here is something rather interesting. When I first went to my Ohio town to go into business, I was quite successful. For the first year or two there I made a good deal of money. I think that had I stayed faithful to the business, expanded it as it might well have been expanded, I might very well have become a rich man. Nowadays we in America think little of a man’s leaving a wife and children, but to walk off leaving perhaps some thousands of dollars seems to us a kind of insanity. Anyway I walked off. Afterwards, in fact up until the present moment, I have always made my living in a rather precarious way. I have been paid to come here and speak to you people, Quite often, when I am broke, I do what I am doing here. I go before people and talk to them. They pay me for it. As a writer I have never been a very successful man. Most of my books have never had much sale. However, I did have one novel that sold largely and with the money I bought a little farm and built a house to live in in Virginia. I think I can say that since the day when I walked down a railroad track, out of a certain Ohio town, leaving the business there for others to run, succeeding or failing with it, with but a few dollars in my pocket, making no claim to any future profits there might be in that business, I have led a rather full and happy life. I think that if I should die tomorrow, I could die feeling that life owed me little. I have collected rather richly as I went along.

And now as to the point of all this. There is a point. It is I think that the arts, any of the arts, rightly understood, rightly approached, are and should be, curative to the artist. Someone has said that the artist, in releasing himself, releases others. We all want this release. I think there is a good deal of absurd talk about a thing called genius. I do not believe in it much. I believe there is a certain value to be got out of my own experience. It is perhaps true that I, as an individual, could not have come to certain conclusions about living and the attitude toward life of the artist man if I had not had the experience of trying to succeed in another field. I think that right now in America it is more important to be little, with perhaps just a trifle flair to your littleness, than it is to be big and important. Personally I would rather be loved a bit in my home town than known to all the outside world. Perhaps I have merely come back to the point of view of my own father, a man I formerly thought a no-account. I would rather live in a hall bedroom to which there might come occasionally a friend or, if I am extremely fortunate, a woman who loves me, than to have a dozen big houses that would over-awe my friends.
I do not think you can shoot directly at happiness. I do think that sometimes, if the gods are good to you, you may incidentally get a touch of it. Everything in this world worthwhile shooting at is a little too subtle to be defined.

This, however, I believe is true. There are in this country and perhaps in this conference an infinite number of bright, talented young men and women. There is a job to be done. The opportunities before the American writer are certainly rich enough. The job that terribly wants doing is the creation of more and more understanding of man for man. I think that is the most important of the story tellers’ jobs. I certainly do not intend to pretend for a moment that I myself have always been faithful to this job. I have told something of my own personal history here merely to try to dispel a little the illusion that there is any particular happiness to be got out of success. I think what satisfaction there is that can be got out of life must be got in another way. I think you all know as well as I do what, from the artist’s point of view, is the real way.

By Doug Crandell

Author’s note: The novel Mother Belle is narrated by Lance Bancroft, a man in his late twenties who has never used his Bachelor’s degree in psychology, which he doubts is of any consequence. He is in the throes of a divorce and custody battle over his baby daughter after having moved from Indiana to Georgia so his wife, Sherry, could attend a master’s degree program. In Indiana, Lance was employed as a crop duster and has opted to work at Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport rather than use his psychology degree. In this story about the New South, Lance befriends an older man named George who himself is struggling with connecting with his troubled, adult daughter. Lance becomes embroiled in the life of George as well as his own attempts to stay in his baby’s life.

Chapter 3

We close up the apartment; George wants me to turn the dead bolt three times to make sure it’s aligned securely. He makes certain his boat-of-a-SUV is properly locked up. He almost begs for me to listen to the nifty chirp his key chain makes when the doors are all securely battened down. I am getting less and less patient. He says with a look of bewildered astonishment on his face, “Can you believe what they can do these days with those microwave chips?”

I take the few boxes from the back of the truck and try to set them on the doorstep, but George won’t have it. Then I try to tell him I’ll just put them inside the apartment, but he insists that I place the junk, which most people wouldn’t pay two dollars at a garage sale for the whole kit and caboodle, inside his dealer-ordained, vehicular equivalent of a bank vault. This activity allows George to once again show me his high-tech key gizmo and honestly, I am starting to wear down. While George has helped take my mind off what I have come to conceive as the equivalent of legal boils seeping over the heater vent in my new place, I can now feel his same presence bringing me back down to the reality of my upheaved life. I have to be at work in Atlanta in less than two hours for the four to twelve shift, and I still have to make the crucifying drive with George from my place to his subdivision in Austell, a twenty minute drive, at the least.

We get into the truck as George mumbles something about a newly added item in his house. I can hear the words “Alice” and “Laura” and something about a wall and a photograph and his mother, but my mind is now too mired down in the worry of Marie to make much sense of what he is yammering on about.

Inside the truck cab, with no place for me to go hide, George is still rambling. He says, “Is that okay?” He is looking at me as if I need to give him permission to pass through some guard gate. He arranges his brow queerly, repeats his question. “I said, is that okay Lance?” I shake my head yes, but then think twice about it. There have been a few times where I’ve agreed to something George has asked of me only to wind up and find myself a few weeks later at one of his union ticket raffles where I’ve offered, unbeknownst to me, to be the dope sitting in a dunk tank.

So I say, “Now, what George? What did you ask?” He smiles as if only he can understand such a forgetful young man as me. He says, “I asked if it would be okay if we picked up mother on the way? You know she lives just right off Cobb Parkway, at Simon’s Personal Care Home. I want her to see it too.” I don’t ask what the “it” he is referring to is, and contrary to what George assumes I know, I am unaware of just exactly where it is his mother lives. I am sure he has told me so on a number of occasions, but right now I am not interested in the location, only the added time it will take to pick up the poor creature that had the unfortunate experience of pushing such a big lunk from her loins.

I stumble, “No, it’s not a problem. I mean, sure, we can pick her up.” George gleams, sits back into the bench seat of the pickup as if he can only now truly enjoy the ride. We backfire out of the parking lot and sputter up to the four-way stop to Atlanta Road. At the blinking red light George leans over and tries to turn on the receiver. He says, “Lancie? Is it all right if we get some tunes going here?” It’s another attempt at trying to sound hip and with it. “I like that station where the two fellas are always razzin’ each other ’bout how the other is always screwing up.” I don’t have the faintest idea of who or what he is talking about. I never use the radio in my truck for precisely the reason George is trying to get us on the same FM wavelength now. I prefer the CDs of Martin Zellar and The Smiths over the irritating, adolescent hogwash George is now having trouble poking into fruition via the digital controls. The receiver in my truck is worth more than the truck itself. When he can’t seem to get the radio to make him appear wise to the scene, he says, “I had that dealer write right in the sales contract that he’d put me in a radio with knobs. I said, ‘listen here greenhorn, I want a radio in that van.'” He pauses, trying to name what it is he drives.

“Or whatever you call it. Truck, I guess is what it is, anyway, I said, ‘I want a radio I can tune without having to go to computer school to learn how to operate it.” I can’t remember seeing the radio in George’s SUV but I make a point of it to look when I get the chance; I can only imagine the ancient piece of crap the kid at the dealership had installed in the old guy’s van or truck or whatever you call it. I feel sorry for George as I think about the jokes the salesman must’ve made at his expense as some burnt-out auto-techie installed a dinosaur of a receiver into his newly purchased SUV.

I lean forward at the same time George rares back from the radio, out of the corner of my eye, I can see a slight crease of defeat at the corners of his mouth. Beaten, he goes like a lump back against the seat. I don’t allow myself to shake my head. I punch the neon buttons until I can hear the talk show I assume he is referring to. He almost claps his hands when the two bickering voices begin to issue forth from the static.

He says, “You mind turning it up?” The request takes nearly all of my patience. George has again worn me down. I poke the volume up a few notches, only to see a glimpse of George still straining to hear, a look of rocky effort in his squinted eyes. At least I hope that’s what he’s straining from. Among all the other personal tidbits George has so graciously bestowed upon me there is one I hope is not the cause of his strained affect. He’s told me that from time to time, which in George speak means as frequently as daily, he encounters bouts of, oh shall we say, gassy disturbances that he claims can hit him like a ton of bricks. “Anywhere, anytime Lancie and I mean big time.”

As I steer the truck around slow moving semis of pine logs, a never-ending road hazard here in Georgia, I nonchalantly try to get a gander at George to see if I need to make a quick pit stop for him so neither of us will be any the wiser, but he looks okay, fine even, as I race to beat a yellow light going, once, twice, three times a lady. We zoom through the intersection; George is smiling at the guys blabbering on the radio but manages to comment on my daredevil antics. “You little pooper you. You could of got us killed. Gaul-lee!” The first part of the comment seems as if he has once again been inside my head; only a few moments ago I thought he was the one worthy of such an excrementally appropriate title.

We take a few more daring turns and illegal lane passes, through a winding side street in a neighborhood that looks remarkably similar to the one George lives in and I’ve left behind. At the last light, before we turn left into the personal-care home George has said he hated to leave mother in but had no choice, he speaks up, tries to turn down the radio, and asks me for some help. The truck cab is quiet now.

“I guess I should let you know Lance that mother is a little on the senile side.” He looks at me as if to apologize, like he’s sorry he can’t do something about aging, fix it or annul its effects. George thinks he should have an answer for everything that has seriously gone wrong.

“Okay George, but aren’t they all. I mean don’t most of the folks there have a few mental stumbling blocks.” I say it as a statement but George can’t hear it; he thinks I am asking him a question, which is fair, but as soon as the words have left my mouth I want them back. There is nothing more George enjoys than a person willing to ask his opinion on family affairs, on questions of the heart, or for that matter, on any subject whatsoever.

He says, “Well, yes, most of the elderly there do have problems remembering first names or their wedding anniversaries (another chunk of bait tossed in the pool of Lancie to tempt a bite) but what I am talking about here is more than that. Mother is diagnosed with old-timers.” He stares at the light along with me, makes his face scrunch up with the feigned effort of trying to give me a more intellectual, technical explanation for his mother’s problems.

He says, “Let me put it this way Lancie, you could say mother is a few bricks short of a full load.” At first I think he is talking about his confessed back door problems, that the brick analogy is something that runs in the family, but I force my mind to pay attention and realize he is talking still about her mental functions. I turn left into the parking lot, a yellow power company truck honks at the way our two vehicles miss one another by only a hair.

After I park the truck and turn off the key George says, “Lancie could you stay here and I’ll go get her?”

I am not sure why George is asking me if this is all right with me; it’s his mother. Does he think I could simply walk into the throng of senior citizens and pick out the old woman from the masses because I know her son?

I say, “Sure George, I’ll stay here. I mean I’d love to go give it a whirl and see if I can pick mother Kramer out of all the others, but somebody has got to stay and listen.” I point to the radio.

George laughs, unsure of himself, and then tells me, “No, I mean, could you pull the truck up to the back door?” Now he’s the one pointing. “She won’t come out the front.” He pauses and looks at me, his bulbous hand on the door handle, ready and poised to go get mother. After a few moments of George looking at me warily I say, “What are you talking about George?”

“It’s just that mother is not all there, like I said, and she, well she may, at first that is, try to fight me.” I raise my eyebrows, and surprise myself by non-verbally asking George to spill his guts. The guy will tell me more than I want to know about his ass problems with the drop of a hat but now is holding back, ashamed or scared to make me privy to the fact that his mother has trouble leaving her home. He takes my goading cue, swallows a deep breath and blurts out: “Well last time she thought I was Hitler.” He says this with relieved frankness; the release allows him to gather the energy to go on.

“She thought I was Hitler and she…” He stops, takes another deep breath and lets the ugly cat out of the bag. “She offered me sexual favors if I’d spare her from the death chambers.” I did not need to hear this, but George has taken the plunge; he is pulling up on the door handle, leaving the truck with me spell bound inside. Before he slams the door shut he says, “It’s nothing really. The nurses say it’s just her darkest fears rising to the surface.” He looks at me for assurance, but I can’t help him. I am trying to get some awful images in my mind’s eye to retreat. And just like he is so good at doing, George seems to loosely know my thoughts. He says, “You know the mind is a funny thing.” He leaves. It is a funny thing, I say in my head, as I watch monstrous George, Mrs. Kramer’s only boy, lumber across the parking lot toward the glass sliding doors of the home. I conclude he must look like a mountain man coming through the doors to most of the old people inside. I imagine a few of the little shriveled up ladies screaming and pointing as he barges in the entryway. In my head they are crying, “Good Lord, Good Lord Almighty. It’s the devil in red plaid himself come to take us to hell!”

The brief movie snippet in my imagination has helped keep me from thinking about Marie and the foul papers lying on top of the register back in my empty new pad, but now I have a silent truck cab to deal with and while it makes me wonder about my own sanity, I begin to get antsy for George and his crazy, old-bird of a mother to pile into the front seat. It hurts to visualize Marie as a name on a legal document. She is so much more; she is not just a “minor child” as the papers read.

I feel hot around the collar of my neck. I start up the truck and rev it good a few times; I can see the hot exhaust billowing out from the tail pipe into the cold afternoon air. I have come to like the weather in Atlanta with its few really cold days of the year amounting to no more than a full week at most, but there has been an uncommon string of bitterly cold days which seem to have no end in sight, according to George that is, which I’ve also come to rely on in matters of weather and the price of nearly everything under the sun.

I pull up next to a taupe colored door with no handle on the outside; it’s close enough to the dumpster that I begin to wonder if there might be another back door George had been talking about. I look at my watch and get an instant ache of dread when I see I will have to go straight from George’s place to the airport for work. It means I will have to spend my entire shift worrying about what the legal papers really say; I’d wanted to go back to the apartment and get them so I’d be able to try to make sense out of them on my breaks at Hartsfield, but now I’ll have to go cold turkey for eight hours, go back to George’s after I get off at midnight, and pick him up so he can get his SUV. He’ll act as if he doesn’t want me to bother when I leave him there at his house with his mother, but then will have me paged at work (I gave him that number too) and ask me pretty please will I please swing by the house.

As I wait, I wonder if he’s told me if his mother stays over night. I make myself try to recall past conversations or rather the past meandering, zigzagging familial philosophical waxing and waning George does with me to see if I can pick up on some fragment about him and his mother’s sleep-overs. The Hitler/sexual favors comment sneaks into my brain and I hate myself for what I am so easily able to do with it.

I am about to back up the truck and circle the building to see if there is indeed another back door hidden somewhere, when I see the door I am parked beside ease open. George peeks his fat head out of the ever-widening crack. He looks both ways and then gives me a thumbs up. Are we kidnapping this old woman? Does George even have a living mother? Has he completely lost it from fantasizing about the good ole’ days with his dead wife Alice and is now so goofy he is willing to snatch up any woman no matter how old to fill the void? And finally, will this kidnapping not do me any great justice when it comes to a custody hearing? Will my accomplice role in the theft of an old woman to soothe the pain of a widowed aging husband endear me to the judge or further serve to make me out to be the villain in Sherry’s daytime soap opera? These thoughts are like piranha at the lobes of my consciousness as I try for the life of me to figure out why George is not moving from the door but continuing to give me a contrived thumbs-up.

I peer out at him from behind the windshield, trying to get him to do something. Then, like a surprise he is shy about showing me, he pulls from behind him, into the gray dull light of January, a small, frail thing of a woman, dressed in a poodle skirt and a matching fuzzy angora sweater, wearing in her chromatic hair a pink and lavender bow so big it seems to make her head fall forward from the sheer load of it.

George ushers her gently to the truck door; I reach over the seat and pop the handle because it sticks from the outside. He again sticks his tremendous head inside a door, this time saying, “She doesn’t usually dress this way Lancie. The good ladies in there at the help desk threw them all a 50’s style party with costumes and everything. They don’t get to keep them.”

He looks at me with water in his eyes from the cold, as if I am supposed to be impressed to the point of clapping. The old woman patiently stands behind him as a furry but benign figure; she doesn’t seem like she could even muster up the strength to talk, let alone get her speech ordered to the point of seducing what she thinks is evil incarnated, but that happens to be her very large son.

“George, aren’t you the one from the 50’s. She should be dressed as a flapper if they’re trying to bring back memories of her youth. In the 50’s she had to be worried about you fornicating with a loose girl and disgracing the whole Kramer family.” I think what I’ve said is funny, the first time since I got the papers that I feel on top of my game with George and I am not counting the shower curtain scare. But he looks displeased, tries to shield his mother from my vulgar talk; it’s the Alice in him. After he doesn’t seem to want to “get a kick out of me,” something he says every time I mock or poke fun at his expense, I realize I need to hurry this abduction up, if indeed that’s way it is.

I say, “You gonna let momma in or just stand there and hope the cold air will keep her from making you propositions.”

He frowns at me in a way I know is how his wife did when he sipped a beer or told an off-color joke, which is to say it contained some awful word like “pee-pee” or “derriere.” George moves aside, goes behind his mother and begins to verbally coax her into lifting one leg up. When the talking doesn’t seem to work, the old woman as motionless as the embroidered black dog on her sunken chest, he starts lifting her limbs for her. From where I am sitting, the poor creature appears as if she is a marionette in a poorly done show: after all, you can see the puppeteer clearly, and he is obviously jerking the wrong strings if what he wants is to get the doll to look as if she really is getting into a truck.

After several attempts George manages to get mother into the seat, but it’s me who has to ever so gently pull her over so she is positioned squarely in the middle of the truck. George climbs in and we are off, out of the parking lot and back onto the roads, heading to his place to get me a mattress and show mother “it.”
As I drive, George is holding her head with his mighty hand; she has quickly drifted off to sleep and is now leaning on his shoulder snoring, or rather, making shallow clicking noises in and about her chest; I glance at her curled figure. It’s for sure, the noise is coming from under the doggie some place.

I do a double-take now. George sees me trying to figure out what I am witnessing; mother’s hair is coming away from her head. I can see the under weaving of the wig. There is a two-inch space between her downy head and the meshy material of the pinkish colored piece. George whispers, “It’s a wig Lancie.”

I keep driving, but slower than what I had when we were en route to pick her up. The truck seems cold so I flip on the heater. Mother stirs when she feels the waft of warm air under her skirt. She stops making the clicking noise and snuggles up to her son and I wonder if in her failed, bald head she is back eighty years, in a chair with her own daddy. Or if she has ceased to dream, saving all the drama and weirdness of sleep for her next awake stint, which, according to my watch, will be right about the time we hit George’s driveway.

By Al Craz

Introduction

About four years ago teacher retirees in New York began a campaign to pass a COLA bill and protect their pensions. Inflation had cut them down big-time. So I wrote “The Old Teacher’s Story,” trying to inject some Anderson touches as a personal exercise. I tried for Anderson’s simple, folk tale approach, hoping that as in Anderson the simple begins to resonate in more complex and perhaps profound ways.
A county retiree newsletter published it. A COLA bill did not pass.

A few months ago, retirees again began a COLA campaign. I sent copies of the story to my reps in Albany. One called and asked permission to send a copy to the governor! “Sure,” I said.

Then, just a few days before a huge rally by retirees in Albany, the state teachers’ union published the story in their monthly newspaper, New York Teacher, circulation 435,000. I called and asked where they got it, and they said it was from a labor relations person.

The rally was a success. Retirees were promised a permanent COLA bill this year by the four most powerful politicians in New York.

A few days after, the union newspaper editors called and asked if my story were true. People were calling to ask where to send the “old teacher” a check. The spirit of Sherwood Anderson still lives!

When the old teacher retired after 35 years teaching in a public school, he felt good and said to his wife, “Let’s go!” So they took a little trip by car to the west and visited some national parks. “What a beautiful and great country it is,” the old teacher thought.

After that summer and fall passed, the old teacher fidgeted and decided to look for a job. Living on the pension would be tight. With inflation, things would get tighter without a cost of living adjustment. So he worked driving limousines and made a little supplement so he and his wife could eat out once a week in a small nearby restaurant.

That winter they planned a larger garden, and the old teacher went skiing once in awhile. They visited their two kids and the grandchildren. Occasionally the old teacher and his wife went to the city and heard the great music in the grand halls. They had always lived simply and these were good days.

Some years passed this way and the old teacher one June was in the garden and he realized he was tired and things weren’t quite right. His pension by now had shriveled because of inflation, higher taxes and bigger utility bills. If he and his wife took a little trip the tolls had all doubled or tripled, and gasoline was very expensive. The special trips to the city became impossible: parking spaces made more an hour than human beings; tickets, even a cheap restaurant, were beyond the old teacher’s reach. “Well,” thought the old teacher, “We will just have to give some things up.”

Summer he worked in the garden; the added vegetable garden came in handy. The old teacher knew the house needed new storms and screens, and painting. He had always figured he would do those things himself, but he was a bit tired now, and going up a ladder scared him a little. He did paint the living room and kitchen, though. “I must think of something,” he said to himself.

The house was theirs. they had created a fine garden over the many years. He trimmed everything, planted everything, cut the grass and kept it all alive and green. In the spring, tulips, daffodils and crocus flashed their colors against the green grass and shrubs. In summer, iris, phlox, lilies and hydrangea grew and flourished beneath his caring hands. When a grandchild was born he would plant a tree.

A patio behind the house overlooked the garden. “Our patio,” thought the old teacher. He and his wife could sit there before dinner in the summer under the old sycamores and have a drink, and hear the birds and see the flowers. Suddenly a dark thought–perhaps an intuition–flashed in the old teacher’s mind.

He lost the job driving limousines. Business was slow. But a nearby liquor store let him sweep up and straighten out the rows of bottles a few hours each week. He smiled quietly: “A master’s plus 60 sweeps clean.”

Sweeping one day, the old teacher remembered buying a case of champagne. “Probably for our 25th wedding anniversary,” he thought. “I was probably teaching college at night in those years. They were pretty good years.”

In the summer, the weeds lay beneath the lovely blossoms. And the old teacher tore them out before they grew high and shoved through the flowers to the sunlight. The ugly weeds sneaked beneath the swaying petaled stems, taking moisture and nutrients for themselves, away from the loveliness above. “There’s a story in this somewhere,” thought the old teacher, as he moved through the bed of flowers, carefully tearing out the hidden weeds.

One winter night after a simple dinner, the old teacher’s wife said, “The property taxes have gone up again. Over 30 percent the last years. Fuel oil is up again. We’re going to have to…” “I know,” said the old teacher. “Go into the savings.”

That winter was extra cold and long. The old teacher cut a lot of wood for a small woodstove in the living room. One night, standing in the bare garden, on a very cold, clear night, a full moon dazzling the snow, the old teacher carried an armful of cut wood toward the house.

Suddenly something grabbed at the inside of his chest and he stopped walking. He could hardly breathe. He waited. slowly his breathing became easier. The grabbing loosened and he continued into the house.

That night he lay awake in bed for a long time. Feeling alone and small in the dark, he thought about his old body and what was happening to it. He thought about the West. “Should have gone again. I wish I had skied more, traveled more…the lovely music…” and he slept.

The next morning blazed winter sunlight, brighter than summer because of the clarity and the new snow. The old teacher pored over the many books shelved neatly in the living room. “Ah! I knew I kept it. Death of a Salesman.” The old teacher flipped toward the end and found the lines, “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away…a man is not a piece of fruit! Now pay attention.”

“I must send these lines to my state senator and my assemblyman. They will read them and understand why…well, why we must keep our house. Especially now. We created it. It is our art, created for ourselves. How else can I tell them that? Perhaps there are no words. But they must know about houses. They must worry sometimes about their houses. They pay taxes. They must know…”

The old teacher scribbled Miller’s lines on a neat white sheet of paper and added, “We just want to keep our house.” He carefully placed the sheets in the two envelopes, sealed them and put on the expensive stamps. Then he walked to the red, white and blue mailbox with the brave eagle on it and mailed his letters to the Capitol.

That year, once again, the Capitol defeated the bill increasing pensions for retired teachers.

The next year, the weeds grew through the flowers.

Al Craz is a retired teacher and Anderson collector, residing in East Moriches, New York.

By Charles E. Modlin

Of the many unfinished manuscripts that Sherwood Anderson left behind, one of the most interesting is “Letters to Cynthia,” a rare experiment in epistolary fiction, which follows the adventures of a brother and sister as they venture outside their small Midwestern hometown and explore the bohemian intellectual worlds of New York and Chicago. It provides some detailed observations of the Chicago literary scene in the period following the publication of Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and explores a major theme in Anderson’s published works: the Midwesterner distracted away from his family and business toward the world of the arts. On a personal level, it also expresses a characteristic ambivalence toward the relative merits of country vs. city life, which Anderson retained throughout his life.

The fourteen-page manuscript,1 which is housed at the Newberry Library in Chicago, begins with a section in Anderson’s handwriting that introduces Sidney and Cynthia Adams. He is a pump manufacturer living in La Salle, Illinois, an actual town, 85 miles southwest of Chicago; she is his sister, who has gone off to live in Greenwich Village, New York. The narrator, purportedly Anderson himself, explains that he had met Sidney through writing advertising for the pump company. This part also includes a brief, incomplete letter from Sidney to Cynthia, which provides some background on their father and their recently deceased mother. The mother, “the stronger and sweeter” of the two, left her money to the children, and the father, who was originally from New England, has become moody and resentful.

The rest of the manuscript, which is typed, apparently by Anderson, consists of four detailed letters–three from Sidney to Cynthia and one from her to him. Sidney writes the first of these from the Auditorium Hotel in Chicago, staying over after seeing her off on the train to New York. He reports that he had visited Krock’s bookstore on Michigan Avenue and bought a copy of The Education of Henry Adams.2 Feeling culturally deprived, he asks Cynthia to write him the literary news from New York. “Sometimes,” he observes, “I think you and I have lived as isolated lives out there at La Salle as La Salle himself could have lived when he and his Indian guides first came into the country and set up housekeeping on Starved Rock.” He laments his own isolation at home now that Cynthia has gone. While he is happy with his wife, Hallie, she doesn’t fully share his interest in books, art, and music. He misses his long walks in the country with Cynthia and describes one particularly happy afternoon when she induced him to leave the office to go hiking in the Midwestern countryside. He recalls that “you kept laughing about nothing and so did I. It was an odd sort of afternoon for two Adamses to put in.”

The next letter, written by Cynthia after her arrival in New York, expresses her misgivings about leaving home. She wonders whether she has exaggerated the defects of life in La Salle and has already experienced petty irritations with the trendy airs of Greenwich Village as expressed by the friend with whom she is staying:

Fanny has grown to be what she calls “esthetic” since you thought her so charming years ago at college. Of course her hair is short but she’s careful to explain that her first haircut was contemporary with Mrs. Vernon Castle’s, when cutting one’s hair was something of a revolt; and that as to clothes, they take too much time from “the real things of life.” I suggested mildly that clothes were about as solid realities as I could grasp and that since you had to wear some sort, in any case, good ones took no more trouble than bad ones if one had any eye for such things. But she just sniffed at that. The truth is that she spends more than she should on rent and always feels too poor for clothes. That’s nothing to her detriment, but why pretend? I gathered that my idea was Middle Western, than which there is nothing lower in the eyes of the Village.

Despite her criticisms, Cynthia concludes that “Fanny and her friends are really kind and jolly and have some freedom and opportunities of companionship that we have always hungered for.”

Sidney answers Cynthia’s letter, again lamenting that she is unavailable, and Hallie too busy, to roam the countryside with him after work, which he has prized as a time to escape the small-town preoccupation with “the details of existence.” He expresses reservations about Fanny and hopes that Cynthia won’t bob her hair, since “An Adams doing that would be a rather funny notion, wouldn’t it?” He hopes that she will get beyond the Greenwich Village esthetes and find writers of genuine value. He mentions Floyd Dell, formerly the literary editor of the Chicago Evening Post, who in 1913 had come to New York to edit the Masses: “You will remember how we used to follow everything he said. I always thought there was something missing in him. He got us started reading Dreiser, you know. Do you suppose you will see Dreiser?”

Sidney’s next letter, written in two installments, is much longer, detailing what he calls his “Chicago adventure.” He writes the first part on the train returning home from Chicago, where he had gone to see about some improvements to the Adams pump. While there he went into a bookstore that was “the strangest place I have ever been in…a tiny room, hardly larger than the bathroom at our house here,” yet it excited him because it seemed to be “a hangout for political, religious and philosophical radicals.” Two men were there arguing–one “a heavy-featured, long-jawed man” and the other a tall Irishman with “the loose, somewhat slack mouth of the orator” and beautiful hands. The Irishman left after angering the other man, who, with “a bulldozing air about him,” called the Russian revolution “the greatest experiment for human freedom ever made” and, Sidney observes, “seemed somewhat sentimental on the subject of labor.” The proprietor, “a slender, sick-looking man,” afterwards identified the Irishman as Jim Larkin, controversial Irish labor leader, and the other man as Carl Sandburg, whose Chicago Poems (1916), Sidney recalls, “I got excited about a year ago, although, as I remember, you did not.”

While at the bookstore, he also met the proprietor’s blind wife and their daughter:

We were speaking of books and once the daughter, who at fourteen seemed to have read everything, turned to speak to me and at the same time tried to thrust a newly lighted cigarette into her mother’s mouth. She made rather wild stabs at the spot where her mother sat and struck her on the nose, the cheek and the forehead before the cigarette had found its way to its natural resting place.

They all laughed good naturedly over this rather grotesque incident and that permitted me to laugh with them.

In a “romantic” impulse, Sidney avoided revealing to these people his occupation as a pump manufacturer and, instead, told them that, like the family in “The Egg,” he left a chicken farm to come to town. His ambition, he told them, is to start a bookstore. The proprietor replied that he had been a minister in a Wisconsin before becoming a radical in “politics, religion, love and philosophy.” In the course of their conversation a policeman came in the shop to buy pamphlets by Robert Ingersoll and Clarence Darrow, and then they were joined by a young man who began a discussion of eroticism in modern fiction with the proprietor’s daughter. The girl, “talking eagerly, thrusting her body forward on the box on which she was seated,” made comments about relationships between men and women that, Sidney notes, left him “breathless” and feeling like “a thorough backwoodsman.”

Sidney buys two books–Waldo Frank’s Our America (1919) and Van Wyck Brooks’ America’s Coming of Age (1915)–and a ticket to a lecture that evening by the blind woman at the Dill Pickle, an actual speakeasy on the Near North Side, run by Jack Jones, a former labor organizer.3 Again resorting to duplicity, he wires Hallie that he is detained overnight by business. On the train going home the next day, he writes that he has begun reading The Education of Henry Adams and suggests that “there is another Adams, one Sidney Adams, who will be educated a little here.” He confesses, however, to a certain disappointment that “The poets, the new ones, I am afraid, do not look like the poets of our dreams,” and adds that “The poet Sandburg did smoke such awfully rank cigars.”

A day or so later, Sidney writes a long second installment of the letter from his office when “everyone but me is gone and I can just sit here, sometimes for hours, and have fancies.” After acknowledging feelings of guilt over his “innocent lie” to Hallie about having to stay overnight for business, he continues his account of his experience in Chicago. Arriving at the Dill Pickle, he entered “a long low room” where, in addition to the bookseller, his wife and daughter, seven people with “rather dull faces” sat waiting. The owner of the Dill Pickle invited Sidney to a meeting at which a Madame Freiburger was to speak on “Men who have made love to me.” A fat man introduced the blind woman as “the best mind on intellectual things of anyone in America,” and then sat down and dozed off.

The woman spoke on Dostoevsky, and by the time she finished, Adams writes, “I suppose I and the husband and the rowdy daughter, now sitting with her hands crossed and looking very demure and solemn, were the only ones in the audience not asleep.” Afterwards, Adams invited the three of them out to dinner. On the way the daughter spoke of marriage, stating “in a matter of fact tone” that she had no interest in marrying but that “In a year or two” she would “go in for some experimenting with lovers.” Later in the restaurant she spoke to him about her interest in Russia: “I will never be an intellectual like Mother and so I should be a woman of action. I wish I lived in Russia now. I would like nothing better than the chance to get out and fight for the liberation of the proletariat.”

After dinner they went to the family’s two-room apartment, which was strewn with “Smelly vegetable tins, an overflowing garbage can, women’s underwear lying about on chairs and even on the table among the unwashed dishes of the last meal.” Despite the mess Sidney observes that he felt oddly happy.

Just why I can’t say, dear sister. Is there something in me, a New England Adams, deeply at war with the notion of being an Adams and a son of New England? I wondered. “Is there something of the same sort in Cynthia too?” I asked myself. “Is that why she wanted to run off to New York and live in Greenwich Village?”

The blind woman began again to talk about Russian writers, this time with “an odd sort of fire and swing to everything she said” that had been lacking at the Dill Pickle, asserting that “the Russians had revolutionized all Western thought.” For the next three hours, he writes, “she ruled like a queen over the three other minds in the room and then I went stumbling down the dark stairway and after some little trouble found an elevated station from where I could take a train back into the Loop and back into the tone of the life I have always known.” The narrative ends at this point, and thus we never learn the ultimate fate of either of the Adamses, although Anderson in his introduction indicates that later on Cynthia is still living in New York when he meets her there, and he has established a close friendship with Sidney, frequently exchanging visits with him in La Salle and Chicago.

Dating the “Letters to Cynthia” is difficult because Anderson apparently made no mention of the work elsewhere, but a few internal clues would suggest a date of around 1920 or ’21. Of the books Sidney Adams mentions, the latest is Waldo Frank’s Our America, which appeared in late 1919. The time period of the story, however, may be somewhat earlier. In November 1920 the Radical Book Shop, located at 826 North Clark Street and clearly the model for the store Sidney visits, held an exhibition of Anderson’s paintings. The owners at that time were Thiem and Netta Cooper. On November 12, 1920, Anderson wrote that his show of watercolors was going on and that “there is a good deal of discussion as to whether I am insane, decadent, or a new note.”4 Many years later, Netta Cooper crustily recalled Anderson’s “bloody” paintings and his frequent visits to the store when he was “usually…displeased with [the] way his books were displayed–that is, not well, because [they were] not selling.”5

The Coopers, however, had only recently bought the shop and were not the models for the family described in “Letters to Cynthia.” Howard Udell, formerly a Unitarian minister, and his wife Lillian, who was blind, began the Radical Book Store in 1914. True to its name, it specialized in radical publications, and Sandburg and Larkin did in fact often go there. The Udells had two daughters, Phyllis and Geraldine. The younger one, Geraldine, appears to be the one Anderson depicted in “Letters to Cynthia.” In an interview in 1963 she recalled taking modern dance classes and piano lessons with Tennessee Mitchell, Anderson’s second wife. For the latter she went to the Andersons’ apartment on Division Street. She added that she knew Sherwood and enjoyed talking with him. She later became the business manager of Poetry magazine.6

Although Anderson was impressed by The Education of Henry Adams, which he first read in December 1918, and would go on later to include numerous allusions to it in his own autobiography, A Story Teller’s Story (1924), “Letters from Cynthia” shows little direct influence of it beyond the general theme of broadening one’s cultural horizons. Anderson in fact felt that his own region had certain advantages over Adams’s New England, asserting that “We do, I am sure, both live and die rather better in the Middle West. Nothing about us is as yet so completely and racially tired.”7 In an article published in 1918, a year after Anderson’s first visit to New York, he criticized writers and artists there as too ingrown and elitist: “In New York, when artists began to gather in groups about Washington Square, when Greenwich Village became their abiding place, the chance for a distinctive Manhattan literature went to the bow-wows.” In contrast, he wrote, Chicago writers and artists are fortunate to live in a city that is “sprawled out over the prairies” and, in going back and forth, they “rub elbows with the laborer, the clerk, the professional and business men.”8

Thus there is something that Anderson considers healthy and typically Midwestern in the mingling that takes place in “Letters to Cynthia” between the small-town manufacturer and the radical literary crowd in Chicago. However, Sidney at times seems overly impressionable, and the culture he finds in Chicago is thin. Many of the writers who had made up what Anderson called the “Robin’s Egg Renaissance”9 of previous years, such as Dell, Burton Rascoe, Margaret Anderson, Max Bodenheim, and Ernest Hemingway, were gone. Jim Larkin by November of 1920 was in prison in New York. Even though Sandburg was still around, he seems, as presented in “Letters,” rather affected. Sidney’s evening at the Dill Pickle is unappealing, although he does enjoy the woman’s stimulating talk at the house afterwards.

The story was left unfinished perhaps in part because Anderson was unsure of how to proceed with either Sidney or Cynthia. Eventually they would both likely tire of too much exposure to the excesses of those whom Anderson called the “Little Children of the Arts,”10 and even though Sidney may have outgrown the provinciality of LaSalle, he continues to enjoy the closeness of nature there.

Another factor that may have prevented the completion of the story was Anderson’s own mixed feelings toward city vs. country life. He was well aware of the advantages and drawbacks of both, but in 1920 his movements were for the most part away from the city as he spent the winter in Fairhope, Alabama, and the summer at Ephraim, Wisconsin, traveled frequently during the year to Owensboro, Kentucky, and moved in the fall to Palos Park, a small village near Chicago. After he left the Chicago area in 1922, he lived in New York, Reno, and New Orleans, then in 1926 settled in southwestern Virginia, spending much of the summer at his country home, Ripshin, and the small town of Marion. But he also traveled widely and stayed often in New York. Ultimately, it was in a balance of both city and country that Anderson himself found most satisfaction. Like Sidney Adams, he enjoyed them both in turn and knew, when he had enough of one, to light out for the other.

Notes

1. Quotations from “Letters to Cynthia” are used with the permission of the Sherwood Anderson Literary Estate Trust and the Newberry Library.
2. Privately printed in 1907 and published by Houghton Mifflin in 1918.
3. Anderson wrote about Jones in “Jack Jones-The Pickler,” Chicago Daily News, June 18, 1919, p. 12; and in Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs, ed. Ray Lewis White (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1969), 356-69.
4. Letters of Sherwood Anderson, ed. Howard Mumford Jones and Walter B. Rideout (Boston: Little Brown, 1953), 64.
5. Dale Kramer, Chicago Notebooks, Newberry Library.
6. Kramer Notebooks.
7. Letters, 43.
8. “Chicago Culture,” Chicago Daily News, Feb. 20, 1918, p. 7.
9. Memoirs, p. 317.
10. Memoirs, p. 347.

By Sherwood Anderson

Editor’s note: These impressions of the inauguration of Herbert Hoover, which took place on March 4, 1929, were published in Anderson’s Smyth County News, March 7, 1929, 1,4. The text is edited from a later typescript.

I had got into Washington from New York in the morning. The railroad yards were filled with trains. Our train moved forward a few hundred yards at a time. At last we got in. I lost myself in the crowd.

The crowd was centered about Pennsylvania Avenue. All along the streets, wherever there were a few feet of vacant space, a stand with seats had been put up. The side streets, coming into Pennsylvania Avenue, were roped off. Enterprising men had built a series of tents on trucks and had backed them into the street ends. The papers say there are three hundred thousand curious visitors, like me, in the city. How do the papers know such things? One paper says one hundred and fifty thousand, another three hundred thousand. Evidently they do not know. There is a vast crowd.

The little stores along Pennsylvania Avenue, down near the Capitol, have narrow windows facing the street. They have put two or three chairs that are for rent in each of the windows.

They are all rented. Middle aged women and girls sit in the chairs. They sit for hours patiently. Nothing happens. They look like wax figures. No woman can sit so, nowadays, without showing a great deal of leg. The legs are not particularly attractive.

It is a day when no pretty women are to be seen. It is odd about a man’s reactions to pretty women. It may be that on some days all women look pretty, and even lovely, while on others they nearly all look rather sad. Well, they never do all look pretty.

I have been wandering about with friends. Among them is a fair Russian aristocrat [Baroness Marie Louise Koskull]. She is tall, strong, magnificent. I keep thinking of the old days in Russia, the days of Gogol and Turgenev and of the Russian grand dukes. This fair, tall Russian woman has what the painter Renoir was always speaking of as “a skin that takes the light.” What a subject for a magnificent painting she would make.

She is speaking to me of the Americans in the crowd. She has lived a great deal in Europe. She says American crowds always impress her by their patience. “In Europe on such an occasion,” she says, “there would be all sorts of protesting organizations out marching.

“There would be the socialists, the anarchists, the labor people. They would march and shout, the police would rush upon them.

“At the same time there would be more gaiety. People would dress in brighter colors, they would dance and sing.”

The Baroness has got an idea that the Americans have no nerves. “There are no neurotics here, are there?” she asks, and I laugh.

I think of the queer little outbreaks of neuroticism all about me, everywhere I go, of my own neuroticism.

In a European city, on such a gala occasion, everyone would be sitting in comfortable chairs, in the sidewalk cafes. They would be drinking wine. There would be little or no drunkenness.

I see a good many drunken people in this crowd. These drunken young men brush against us. They laugh. One of them says he slept the night before in a park in Washington. (It must have been cold sleeping.) Obviously he is lying. I like imaginative liars. He says that during the night a squirrel bit him. The others in his party gather about me and laugh. They have all been bitten by the same squirrel. They can just stand on their legs. “You have got the squirrel in your pocket now,” I suggest to the man who had addressed me. “Yes,” he says. He invites me to go somewhere with him, to also be bitten by the squirrel, but I decline.

Pennsylvania Avenue is a broad street. It runs straight down from the White House to the Capitol. Once it was lined with trees but there are no trees now. The street has been roped off with heavy wire ropes.

Cars are going with terrific speed along the avenue, forty, fifty, sixty miles an hour. Along the street, on the broad sidewalks, among the crowd, move strange figures.

Tall Indians, dressed in their former war regalia, go past. They are magnificent creatures. There are innumerable people, evidently intent on getting into the picture pages of the newspapers. Young girls have put on Texas cowboy hats. There are no marks of the plains on them. Their cheeks are not wind-burned. The accommodating newspaper photographers, mingling with the crowd, are glad to take pictures. A little flapper with a pert face tells the newspaper men that they would all feel better on a bronco on the plains than on the pavement. The newspaper man takes it down. It is wonderful what the movies have done for our civilization. I look closely at the flapper. She is a stenographer. There is a way you can tell by looking at the hands.

And, at that, stenographers have lovely hands. So have waitresses for that matter. Women who work have, almost without exception, lovely expressive hands.

O, how well dressed are the women of an American crowd. Where do all these furs come from? Who pays for them? The men look tired. They must have to work hard to pay for all these furs. Untold thousands of animals slaughtered. Many of the furs are imitations but the real ones are seen by the thousands.

In the street within the wire ropes there is a roar and bustle. Police rush past at sixty miles an hour. They are in cars and on motorcycles. Gaudily dressed diplomats are passing. Now there comes a troop of cavalry. The horses are beautiful. The faces of the soldiers are set and stern looking.

It may be they are like the cowgirls from Texas. The movies may have taught them their trade.

Surely the officers are not inspired. Living the life of a military man does not make for a sensitive face. The faces of the officers look dull.

The politicians in their tall black hats have dull faces. The officers are wearing all of their medals. The breasts of some of the officers are loaded with decorations.

Most of the politicians have piggish-looking faces. They are amazingly fat.

I have followed the crowd and have gone to see the inauguration. The skies are grey and cold. Mr. Hoover and Mr. Coolidge have gone to the Capitol in a slow moving car. Mr. Coolidge looks happy. It is as though he were saying to himself”This lets me out. Now I can go freely about. People will bow to me. ‘Good morning, Mr. President.’ I can keep out of trouble.” He bows to the right and left. Walking beside me is a man in a hunter’s jacket and a coonskin cap. He tells me he is impersonating Daniel Boone for the Governor of Pennsylvania. We pass a statue of General Grant and talk about it. “He was a good man all right,” the Pennsylvania Daniel Boone says. “Let’s see, wasn’t he President once? Or was he just a general.”

“He was both. Poor man, he was both,” I say and laugh.

In the Capitol grounds a vast crowd has gathered. We cannot hear the words of the new President. He is talking about prohibition, as we learn later from the newspapers. Near me a political marching club is passing a bottle of whiskey from hand to hand. They drink openly, without attempt at concealment. They also are from Pennsylvania.

It has begun to rain now and, although the crowd stands patiently in the rain, hearing nothing, I go away. I have lunch in a side street, away from the crowd. When I come back into Pennsylvania Avenue the bands, the sailors, the soldiers, the marching clubs–all their gay feathers drooping-are marching patiently. It rains harder and harder. Four huge airships float in the air above. They nose their way slowly through the mist. The crowd sits patiently in the rain. I hear no cheers, although tomorrow the newspapers will speak of “cheering crowds.”

As there is no place to get dry and as my friends have long since gone to their homes, I go to a movie house. It is the only place I can find to sit. The hotel lobbies are crowded.

On the screen they are showing the ideal American woman. She is called “Miss America.” She spends her time putting on and taking off expensive clothes. We see her in bed in her bedroom, at tea, in the theater. She wears pajamas, tea gowns, bathing suits, party gowns without number. The women in the theater watch her breathlessly. Their eyes are filled with envy.

When I come out of the theater, the parade is over. It still rains. The new president has gone to his home in the White House. The Washington newspapers take a great amount of space to tell about the gowns worn by the various wives of the new men, just come into power.

By Will Schuck

“Write an electronic communication vehicles study,” my boss said. “I need it for a meeting one week from tomorrow.”

Having written for the trade press for nine years, much like Sherwood Anderson had in his days at Long-Critchfield, I had developed a style was standard modern newsroom: inverted pyramid. Put the important stuff first and the unimportant stuff last.

I had also written corporate expenditure policies in my career. This experience stiffened my style, knocking out about all the creative element that was left. Surely, an “electronic communication vehicles study” would benefit from such a background. Or so I thought.

Diligently, I scribbled down a list of our company’s electronic (non-print) communication vehicles: e-mail, intranet, voicemail, videoconferencing, and the human resources information database. Next was to conduct interviews with the “owners” of each vehicle to find out the details: Who has access? How is it maintained? What is its purpose? Who is the audience? How does one use it? And so on.

After four days, I was quite proud of myself. I had interviewed all the electronic communication vehicle owners and documented the information in an organized format. I even photocopied and three-hole-punched the document and put it in a black binder with tab dividers. Boy, it looked slick.

I put the report on my boss’s desk a day early while she was at an offsite meeting. I went home on time and bragged to my wife how well I did the job. I lay on the couch that evening after our son went to bed and continued reading Kim Townsend’s Sherwood Anderson. Life was great.

The next day, as I sat in my ergonomic office chair pursuing completion of the next project on my list, my boss stood in my cubicle opening. Her hands were on
her hips. The black binder with the tab dividers was under her arm. She didn’t say a word. I pretended not to see her right away, giving her the chance to have the first word. Of course, she came to congratulate me.

“This is not what I wanted, AT ALL,” she thundered. Fear penetrated me as I turned my head from my computer screen to look up at her. My throat tightened as I stammered to say, “What do you mean?”

“This is not right,” she began in stern but softer tones. “No doubt you went to a lot of effort to gather this information. But the way it’s presented just is not right. It’s far too academic or something.”

This was the story of my life. Professors told me I sounded too much like Hemingway before I ever read him. High school and college girlfriends left me because I was “too nice.” Now, my Electronic Communication Vehicles Study was “too academic.” I wasn’t going to guess what “or something” meant. I was furious but buried my wrath until she left with “I want it re-written by
tomorrow and I want it to be more user-friendly.”

“User-friendly!” I went for a shaky walk around the floor wishing I could make a phone call or tell someone in the office how angry I felt. I ended up going to the men’s room to cool off.

As I sat in a stall, assuming the position of The Thinker, I quietly thought of appropriate forms of revenge, like quitting. Realizing I couldn’t do that, I began to think of Sherwood Anderson when he walked out of his Elyria office and followed the railroad tracks to Cleveland. Here I was in Cleveland, feeling the same pressure to produce. Suddenly, I had it.

I marched back to my desk, opened a new document, and started typing away. This would put her in the corner! Her meeting was tomorrow and she had to use whatever I produced.

I typed into the evening, crumbing-up my keyboard by eating lunch and dinner at my desk. The words seemed to come naturally, sounding just like one of Anderson’s “reason why” advertisements.I had read in Townsend’s biography the night before. As Townsend described the ad copy, “It is the word of a writer trying to create a voice that makes you feel he is talking directly to you, in words that you can trust.” As Anderson himself put it in the ad, “Every word of this book is written under my personal supervision. As you and I may never meet face to face I give you my word now that what is written in this book is true in spirit and in fact.”

Like Anderson, I pleaded with the reader (or “user” as my boss liked to say) about the importance of the information in my Electronic Communication Vehicles Guide. I
reasoned with the reader-user that this information would make him the star of his department because now he had the keys to understanding how the company’s electronic communication vehicles work, to whom they are delivered and who is the intended audience of each. I personally guaranteed the compilation’s accuracy by applying dates to each section of information, promising an annual
update and putting my name first on the report’s outside front cover.

I heard Anderson’s voice urging me on as I wrote. “Muttered” and “damned” were the only words I refused from him as he took over for me at the keyboard.

When Anderson finished dictating to me and I stopped typing, I felt relieved, like I had come clean about my feelings for my boss and the project. This was a real gamble, and could mean my getting fired, but I didn’t care. To me, it was just one project in a heap of paper I produced since I began writing for a living nearly 10 years ago.

It was done. All that was left was to print a copy and put it in my boss’s red “urgent” folder. Then, I could sleep on the bus ride home. As I lifted the still-warm 30-some pages from the output tray and slid them into her in-box, I
trotted to the elevator and slipped away.

The next day was like a scene from the film “Groundhog Day.” I again sat in my ergonomic office chair pursuing completion of the next project on my list. My boss again stood in my cubicle opening. Her hands were on her hips. The black binder with the tab dividers was under her arm. She didn’t say a word. I pretended not to see her right away, giving her the chance to have the first word. Of course, she came to fire me.

“This is JUST what I wanted!” she thundered. Fear penetrated me as I turned my head from my computer screen to look up at her. My throat tightened as I
stammered to say, “What do you mean?”

“This is perfect!” she began. “No doubt you went to a lot of effort to rewrite this. It’s just perfect! What inspired you?”

I didn’t dare to tell her. I only hoped that this was the beginning of the new story of my life. Career-wise, with Anderson as my muse, perhaps I’d stop feeling like the stifled George Willard of Winesburg, Ohio. Anderson had given me a voice and a confidence that would carry me through the next corporate assignment (a field communications guide) and, six months later, to a promotion.

Thank you, Sherwood. You saved my career.

Will Schuck is a corporate communications writer living in Avon Lake, Ohio. He is director of The Anderson Project, a community literacy center planned for Elyria, Ohio.