Product Description
Publisher: New York, John LanePublication date: 1917Notes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be numerous typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes.When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Great for a scholar; tough sledding for this general reader
Over the years, I've greatly enjoyed Sherwood Anderson's short stories, especially those in Winesburg, Ohio and Triumph of the Egg (the latter with growing pleasure and admiration over the years); hisrelationships with other writers like Dreiser, Faulkner and Hemingway; and the oddities of his career, including his death by toothpick.

It was exciting to see that "The New York Times" had chosen his Memoirs as edited by Ray Lewis White as one of the best books of 1969. Unfortunately, reading the book delivered much less pleasure than I had hoped for.

White obviously spent an enormous amount of time and effort plowing through thousands of pages of Anderson's notes and records, many of them written during the last nine years of his life in preparation for a formal memoir. White also relied extensively on Paul Rosenfeld's authorized "Memoirs" (1942), and spoke with many of the people Anderson came in contact with during a long and exciting life. (Gore Vidal wrote in September 1968, commenting on White's work on Vidal's own papers: "At all times he has had my sympathy, even awe, as he worked his way through a career that has endured for a quarter century." NYTimes, September 1, 1968.)

White had several objectives in his Herculean task.

First, White believed too much emphasis had been placed on "Winesburg, Ohio"; in his opinion other works were just as important; White writes: "There can be few more wonderful tales in literature than Anderson's stories of his doomed sister Stella; the miserable poet Carnevali; the lonely old actress Mary and the dogs in the forest, and his own extended, almost mythic search - in middle life - for meaning in human existence."

Second, White wanted to let Anderson speak for himself; Rosenfeld had substantially re-written much of Anderson's work. White tried to "present Anderson true", without the modifications introduced by Rosenfeld.

White wrote: "The aim here, unlike Paul Rosenfeld's, was not to make a selection of scattered sentences and paragraphs into a conventional `unified' story but, instead, to present the essays in a form as complete as possible and as Sherwood Anderson wrote them."

I personally found the "true" Anderson often repetitive, elliptical, unreliable and frankly boring. Anderson wrote: "Time is a slippery thing. Time sequence is meaningless. I have to tell my stories of the people and events of my life as they come into my head."

And, again: "Facts elude me. I cannot remember dates. When I try to deal in facts, at once I begin to lie. I can't help it. . . . I will not, cannot, to achieve what I want, tell things in chronological order. Rather, I shall tell the tale as though you, the reader, were a personal friend. We are walking together, let's say, on a country road. . . ."

Stream of consciousness can be fascinating and enlightening but can also be exhausting. Especially here where Anderson writes: "I wonder if I am now romanticizing .. if my present imagination of the incident is at all correct ... Myth or no myth, let it stand."

[One and a half carping notes: White peppered Anderson's text with "explanatory" footnotes:"John L. Sullivan, boxing champion", "Greta Garbo, Swedish born actress", "Charles Lindbergh, American aviator", etc. I kept expecting White to footnote "Sherwood Anderson, American writer." Itwould have spiced up matters if there were just a bit of humor from time to time; Anderson (and White) are unfailingly serious throughout.]

Third, White wanted to capture the essence of Anderson's thought: "If there is any value in the telling, in this fragmentary way, of my own adventures of living, the thing to be striven for is frankness. I have not begun with babyhood, moved on into childhood, young manhood, etc., not so much wanting to make the picture of the life of a man as a certain period in American life.

"My own interest is people... My joy has been in the constant little contacts with people, conversations between others overheard, sometimes sitting for hours in some little salon in some own, visiting courts, strolling in streets, going, whenever possible, now into the home of some rich man, now to sit in the kitchen with some worker. However, I cannot avoid myself. You will find here, in my book, many notes of my own reactions, to men, to women, and when these are told, I shall be trying to tell them also with all the frankness possible to me. I shall try to put down my own hatreds, moments of bitterness, moments of tenderness too. A man should occasionally, it seems to me, arise from among us, strip himself, stand naked before his fellows."

Except for my New Year's resolution, I would have given up on this book, and instead re-read Anderson's collections of short stories. I enjoy the way Anderson's stories focus on causal relations, complexity of motivation and psychology. Anderson's writing benefits, I believe, from the restrictions of the short story form.

The book is a triumph of scholarship and essential for the student ofAnderson's work (certainly worth five stars). As a general reader devoted to pleasure Anderson's writing was too much of a good thing. My rating is a compromise between scholarship and pleasure.

2008 Addendum. I've continued to enjoy re-reading Anderson's short stories but haven't been tempted to return to his memoirs. "Winesburg, Ohio" now strikes me as mawkish and superficial but with a core of humanity. "Triumph of the Egg" seems to me a real masterwork, dark, deep and compelling. (I've put a number of my favorite Anderson quotations from the "Memoirs" and other reading in the first Comment.)

One interesting development since 1969 is the creation of Sherwood Anderson Foundation using royalties from Anderson's work to help authors. From its website: "Anderson helped both William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway get published when they were getting started. Faulkner reportedly asked Anderson to read his manuscript and Anderson replied, "Look, I'll send it to my publisher, as long as I don't have to read it." Joke or not, he knew talent when he saw it and wasted no time supporting it. It should be mentioned that both writers later parodied Anderson's work -- Faulkner with Mosquitoes: A Novel and Hemingway with The TORRENTS OF SPRING. Faulkner and Anderson were later reconciled."

Robert C. Ross 1971 2008

Note: This is one of twelve NY Times "Editors' Choice" books for 1969; see first Comment.
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Product Description
"A group of tales of Ohio small town life" at the close of the last century. This book was supposed to be a simple book, but one of the most perceptive critics, Walter B. Rideout, has concluded that its simplicity is quite complicated. 511 Pages ... Read more