A Retired Acrobat Falls under the Spell of a Teenage Girl
Lynne Sharon Schwartz is the author of Rough Strife, a novel published in 1980. In that book she chronicles twenty-some years of a marriage between two bright, educated, talented people. For some obscure reason, I don’t know why, I had little interest in reading the book when it appeared. I suppose—terrible confession!—I wondered what on earth this writer could tell me about a relationship between a university mathematics professor (Caroline) whose specialty is knot theory, and a foundation executive (Ivan), that could be of fundamental interest to me. After all—understand I had read some of the reviews—their children did not come along until some years after the marriage; Caroline and Ivan had time and energy and means to pursue their own lives and careers. On the surface of things, it seemed located in a landscape that was all too familiar—and yet totally foreign.
But I’m happy to say I read the novel, and I thought it was stunning. On the evidence of that book alone I’d say Schwartz is one of our better novelists. So what could the author do for an encore, a year after Rough Strife, that could measure up to the fierce pleasures of the first novel? Probably nothing.
Let me say that Balancing Acts is not a disappointment. But it suffers by the inevitable comparisons to the first book. For me, it does not have the cutting edges of Rough Strife, nor the full and scrupulously drawn characters who sometimes act in a willful and even capricious manner and often against their own seeming best interests—just like real people often act. The book does not have the relentless drive and the occasional breath-stopping places of that first novel. It is a good book, but is not a great or even a particularly memorable book. I don’t say this to disparage. Most good novels are just that—“good,” not great, and not always memorable.
Max Fried is a seventy-four-year-old widower recovering from the effects of a massive heart attack who goes to live in a residence that, in the part of the country I come from, we used to call an “old folks home.” But this is not your basic old folks home. This place is more tony, and it’s called Pleasure Knolls Semi-Service Apartments for Senior Citizens. It is located in Westchester County, New York. In his other life, the rich and fulfilling life he had before retirement and old age, Max Fried was a circus acrobat, a high-wire artist who performed with his wife, Susie. Those gone circus days are of course the good old days; and the metaphor of the title has in part to do with Max’s trying to accommodate his grim, semi-invalided present reality with the halcyon times of his youth under the big top. Not surprisingly, the best writing in the book occurs when the author is writing about events and situations that have taken place in that other life.
Now comes Alison Markman, a precocious thirteen-year-old whose life intersects with Max’s at the local junior high school where Max has a temporary-help job coaching would-be acrobats. Alison is an aspiring writer who has journals filled with adolescent adventure stuff and nonsense. She sees gruff old Max as a figure of romance and mystery, and she develops this terrific crush.
I’m not giving anything away when I say the crush she has on him indirectly brings about his demise. Fueled by her association with Max and her dreams of escaping what she feels is a dreary home life, Alison decides to run away and join a circus. There is a pursuit scene to Madison Square Garden and then on to Penn Station. The pursuers include Max and his sweetheart and neighbor at Pleasure Knolls, Lettie; and Alison’s parents, Josh and Wanda, who, quite understandably, can’t comprehend what in the world is going on with their daughter. Alison is reunited with her parents. But the strain proves too much for Max, and he collapses and dies. But his death does not diminish us in any essential way. It is not unexpected, or tragic, or finally even untimely. He simply falls dead. Lettie has to pick up her own life, and Alison is back home with her parents, where a thirteen-year-old belongs. In the final chapter, Lettie and Alison meet over ice-cream sodas and talk about Max and about things in general.
Go ahead and read Balancing Acts. But if you do, make sure you also read Rough Strife, if you haven’t already. And catch Lynne Schwartz’s next novel.
Balancing Acts by Lynne Sharon Schwartz. New York: Harper & Row, 1981.
“Fame Is No Good, Take It from Me”
I love the stories and tales in Winesburg, Ohio—most of them, at any rate, I love. And I love a handful or so of Sherwood Anderson’s other short stories. I think his best stories are as good as any around. Winesburg, Ohio (which was written in a Chicago tenement, based on people he knew there, not in Ohio) is taught in colleges and universities throughout the land, as it should be. One or another of his stories turns up in every anthology of American short fiction. But, beyond this, there isn’t a whole lot else of Anderson’s that is read today. His poems are long gone. His novels, books of essays and articles, the autobiographical writings, the memoirs and the book of plays—everything else seems to have passed into a dimly lighted zone that hardly anyone enters any longer.
After having just finished the Selected Letters, I think “S.A.”—as he sometimes signed off on his letters—would be the first person to shrug his shoulders and say, “What did you expect?” He knew he’d written one book, at least, that would have staying power. People said he had written an American classic in Winesburg, and he was inclined to go along with that opinion. He made his reputation on that work, published in 1919. But what of the work between then and 1941, when he died? Something happened, and everyone knew it. The change in his work, and in the way the critics treated him (the “deep sea thinkers,” Anderson called them), began as early as 1925, signalled by the young Ernest Hemingway’s patronizing letters and followed up by his ill-natured parody of Anderson, The Torrents of Spring. Within a year after the publication of Dark Laughter in 1925, Anderson found himself reading his literary obituary in magazines. He said the attacks didn’t bother him. But they did. In a letter to Burton Emmett, a benefactor, he said they made him “sick to my soul.” To John Peale Bishop, one of his critics, he wrote, “your suspicion that my own mind is like one of those gray towns out here is, I am afraid, profoundly true.”
But Anderson had always considered writing a form of therapy, and he kept on writing, despite what the critics had to say. “Writing helped me to live—it still helps me that way,” he wrote to Floyd Dell in 1920. Writing was a cure for the “disease called living.” He’d had one serious nervous collapse when a mail-order business he’d helped start went bankrupt. The date for his breakdown is precisely given as November 28, 1912. But two months later he was back in harness. He went to work for an advertising firm in Chicago to support his wife and three children and wrote stories and novels at night, sometimes falling asleep at the kitchen table. In 1914 some of his work began appearing in the little magazines of the day; and in 1916 he published his first novel, Windy McPherson’s Son. In that year he divorced his wife, left his children, remarried, and began what he hoped would be a new life. He was able to give up advertising work. But his finances were such that for much of the next twenty years he worried that he might have to go back into advertising. To supplement his income he took to the lecture platform and, in his last years, appeared at several writers’ conferences. On occasion he found himself having to accept money under humiliating circumstances from a wealthy man, and then from the man’s widow.
Meanwhile, he kept turning out books and had plans for dozens more. Some of the books that, maybe happily, never materialized include a book on the history of the Mississippi, children’s books (the idea of writing a “child book” had appealed to him as early as 1919 and was to persist until shortly before his death), and books on “modern industry.” From time to time in the letters, Anderson makes mention of one or another of these ideas, and this will be footnoted to the effect that “Anderson did not undertake this project.” Nevertheless, work did pour from his typewriter. He could write eight or ten or twelve thousand words at a stretch. And then lie down and sleep “like a dead man.” And then get up and work some more.
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p; After Winesburg he was famous but at best it was a mixed blessing. In 1927 he wrote to his brother, the painter Karl Anderson, that he thought fame was detrimental to the artist. To a schoolteacher from Washington, D.C., who sent Anderson a check for twenty-five dollars with a request that he critique two of her stories, he wrote, “Fame is no good, my dear. Take it from me.” And in 1930, in another letter to Burton Emmett, he said, “I do not want attention centered on me. If I could work the rest of my life unknown, unnoticed by those who make current opinion, I would be happier.”
Like it or not, however, he was famous. But he was in the position of a sitting duck. Everybody who came along, from hack journalist to hack playwright, and assorted magazine writers who weren’t worth a patch on his pants, could take a potshot. He lived in the long shadows thrown by his more glamorous and successful—and, ultimately, more interesting—contemporaries. And he could never forgive them, or himself, for this state of affairs.
He urged Roger Sergel, an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh who was asking for advice about writing, to “Keep it loose. Keep it loose.” He felt that most writers fail because “they aren’t at bottom storytellers. They have theories about writing, notions about style, often real writing ability, but they do not tell the story—straight out—bang.” He once threw a novel out of a car window in the Ozarks and another out of a hotel room window in Chicago because the work wasn’t “clear straightforward storytelling.” He distrusted “technique” and what he called “cleverness” in writers. The truth is, he seemed to be a little put out with most of them, with the exception of Thomas Wolfe. In September 1937, he wrote to Wolfe, “I love your guts, Tom. You are one who is O.K.” But Joyce, a “gloomy Irishman,… makes my bones ache. He’s up the wrong tree or I’m an egg.” Ezra Pound struck Anderson as “an empty man without fire.” He thought it was “very depressing” that Sinclair Lewis received the Nobel Prize. And after the publication of Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa, he wrote to his friend, the actor-director Jasper Deeter, that he thought Hemingway had “got into a kind of romanticizing of the so-called real … a kind of ecstasy over elephant dung, killing, death, etc., etc. And then he talks about writing the perfect sentence—something of that sort. Isn’t that rot?”
Anderson hadn’t read The Grapes of Wrath when he met the young John Steinbeck in November 1939, but he wrote from Fresno to Lewis Galantière that he thought Steinbeck looked like “a truck driver on his day off.” He went on to remark that the situation in the labor camps “is in no way different from what is going on all over the country,” and attributed the great popularity of the book to the fact that it “localizes a situation that is universal.” It’s clear that he didn’t like the star-bright attention that was being paid to Steinbeck at the time.
Anderson was born in Camden, Ohio, in 1876, but grew up mostly in Clyde, a little town near Cleveland. His father was a drifter who moved the family “whenever the rent came due.” For years Anderson took whatever manual labor jobs he could find until he put on a different sort of collar and went into advertising. He had, he said, “cunning.” He could “handle people, make them do as I please, be what I wanted them to be.… the truth is I was a smooth son of a bitch.” But he knew firsthand the underbelly of small town life in mid-America; and he wrote about it better, and with more fidelity and sympathy, than any American writer before him—and most of them since his time. Small towns and small lives were his subject matter. He loved America, and things American, with a devotion that, even at this remove, I find touching. “I love this country,” he will say in his letters. And, “God, how I love this country.” His heart, and his abiding interests—and his true genius—were rooted in rural areas and with country people and their ways. This from a letter to Waldo Frank in 1919: “It was delightful to sit in the grandstand among the farmers, off for a day’s vacation, and see the trotting and pacing races. The horses were beautiful as were also the fine steers, bulls, pigs and sheep on show in the exhibition sheds.” In a letter to George Church, written in 1927, he said, “What I really want to do—my purpose in writing—is to grow eloquent again about this country—I want to tell you how the streams sound at night—how quiet it is—the sound the wind makes in the pines.”
He thought the best thing he’d ever written was his short story “The Egg.” In addition to this, his favorite stories were “The Untold Lie,” “Hands,” “Out of Nowhere into Nothing,” “I Want to Know Why,” and “I’m a Fool.” At the very least I would add to this list “Death in the Woods” and “The Man Who Became a Woman.”
With the one novel that made him some money, Dark Laughter, he bought himself a farm in Troutdale, Virginia. But he was a restless man, a true American wanderer, who couldn’t stay in one place. From 1919 until his death in February 1941 from peritonitis, on board a ship bound for South America (where he hoped to “get out of one of the bigger cities and into a town of five or ten thousand and perhaps stay in such a town for some months”), he was all over this country. He lived and worked in New York, California, Virginia, Texas, Alabama, Wisconsin, Kansas, Arizona, Michigan, Colorado, Florida—forty or fifty different residences in all—with time out for trips to Europe and Mexico. It helped that he “adored” hotels. “Even the worst of hotel life is so good compared with family life.” He found a particular hotel in Kansas City very much to his liking: “full of little ham actors, prize fighters, ballplayers, whores and auto salesmen on their uppers. Lord God what gaudy people. I love them.”
He was a prolific letter writer. Most of the 201 letters that make up this collection are being published for the first time. An earlier book, Letters of Sherwood Anderson, edited by Howard Mumford Jones and including 401 letters, was published in 1953. And there is the easily accessible group of letters in The Portable Sherwood Anderson that Horace Gregory edited in 1949.
The Newberry Library in Chicago holds over five thousand Anderson letters, and this collection has provided the nucleus for the present selection. But the editor, Charles E. Modlin, has also chosen letters from twenty-three other institutions, as well as from private individuals, “reserved” letters that have only recently been made available. He has chosen well, the letters dealing about equally with personal and professional concerns. And there was plenty going on in Anderson’s life on both counts. This volume alone maps the life of a unique American writer, one whose presence is still felt in the plain-talk, straightforward fiction of many of today’s writers.
These letters go a long way toward bringing Sherwood Anderson into the full light, where he belongs. To be sure, they are not letters written in the grand tradition of Letters, with one eye aimed at the recipient and the other on posterity. Nor are they “tailored” to match the personality of the recipient. Some of them were written in longhand, and Anderson apologized for this. If I have any reservation, it is that there tends to be a sameness of tone that hangs over them. And I think the fact that he didn’t use contractions in his writing helps contribute to their seemingly subdued, formal, even elegiac manner. Reading these letters, we learn some things about Anderson and his work. But, finally, one comes away with the feeling that this man who didn’t often show his emotions is very much like one of his stoic characters—holding back, unable to speak his mind or bare his heart.
In 1939, a year and a half before his death, he wrote to Roger Sergel about a new book he was starting: “I’m trying again. A man has to begin over and over … to try to think and feel only in the very limited field, the house on the street, the man at the corner drugstore.”
He was a brave man and a good writer—estimable qualities in these days or any other.
Gaston Gallimard, the French publisher, had acquired the rights to Winesburg but didn’t publish the book immediately. Finally, after several years, Anderson was in Paris and went to see the distinguished president of the firm.
“Is it a good book?” Gallimard asked Anderson.
“You’re damn right it is,” Anderson answered.
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“Well, then, if it’s good, it will still be good when we do publish it.”
Anderson’s best work is still good. He might have penned his own epitaph when he wrote, “I have written a few stories that are like stones laid along the highway. They have solidity and will stay there.”
Selected Letters by Sherwood Anderson, edited by Charles E. Modlin. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984.
Coming of Age, Going to Pieces
In 1954, after surviving two plane crashes in Africa and being reported dead, Ernest Hemingway had the unique experience of being able to read his own obituaries. I was in my teens, barely old enough to have a driver’s license, but I can remember seeing his picture on the front page of our evening newspaper, grinning as he held a copy of a paper with his picture and a banner headline announcing his death. I’d heard his name in my high school English class, and I had a friend who, like me, wanted to write and who managed to work Hemingway’s name into just about every conversation we had. But at the time I’d never read anything the man had written. (I was busy reading Thomas B. Costain, among others.) Seeing Hemingway on the front page, reading about his exploits and accomplishments, and his recent brush with death, was heady and glamorous stuff. But there were no wars I could get to even if I’d wanted to, and Africa, not to mention Paris, Pamplona, Key West, Cuba, even New York City, seemed as far away as the moon to me. Still, I think my resolve to be a writer was strengthened by seeing Hemingway’s picture on the front page. So I was indebted to him even then, if for the wrong reasons.
Soon after the accidents in Africa, Hemingway, musing on his life, wrote, “The most complicated subject that I know, since I am a man, is a man’s life.” The search for Ernest Hemingway goes on. It’s almost twenty-five years since the writer, seriously ill, paranoid and despondent, suffering from loss of memory brought about by electroshock treatments during two successive confinements at the Mayo Clinic, blew his head away with a shotgun. Mary Welsh Hemingway, his fourth wife, asleep in the upstairs master bedroom of the Hemingway residence in Ketchum, Idaho, was awakened on the morning of July 2, 1961, by what she thought were the sounds of “a couple of drawers banging shut.” Edmund Wilson best expressed the general sense of shock and diminishment after his death: “It is as if a whole corner of my generation had suddenly and horribly collapsed.”