Dark and Lonely

Last week in the Blue Ridge foothills at Marion, Va., a coffin was lowered into a grave. In it was the burly body and curious brain of Sherwood Anderson, paint manufacturer, ad writer, editor, short-story teller, novelist, poet, American. The grave had had to wait more than two weeks. Anderson died at Colon, Panama

Canal Zone, last month. He had sailed from Manhattan on the same ship with Playwright Thornton Wilder, who is on a cultural mission to Latin America. At sea Anderson fell ill, 48 hours later had to be carried ashore at Colon on a stretcher.

Three days later he died of an abdominal obstruction and peritonitis -- "right on schedule," said one of the Colon hospital men, explaining that people with such trouble usually live just five days.

Anderson the artist, too, died about on time. Critics had begun to point at the mediocrity of his recent work. It did not matter, for his job was done. And if an American writer's job is to reveal Americans to themselves, Anderson had done his greatly.

As a boy he had lived like Windy McPherson's son, on the wrong side of the railroad tracks in Clyde, Ohio. With a boy's keen eyes he had seen the hates, passions and queer lives that lie just be hind the drab fagade of a small U. S.

town. As a man he set down what he saw with simplicity, truth and understanding in a series of great short stories -- Winesburg, Ohio; The Triumph of the Egg; Horses and Men, and half-great novels --Windy McPherson's Son; Poor White; Dark Laughter. No first-rate U. S. writer since Walt Whitman has spent so much time just sitting and listening to people talk--drummers, race-track touts, rivermen, politicos, farmers, railroaders, tramps, trulls and small-town merchants. Since Whitman stood ";there in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim," few U. S. writers have been so conscious of the physical body of mid-American earth, its mountainous musculature, its pumping rivers, the chokingly hot or numbingly cold prairies whose distance envelops the lonely villages and their lonely people like night. No poet since Whitman gave such authentic voice to that haunting, dark, mid-continental loneliness.

One day in 1913 Anderson left his desk in his Elyria, Ohio paint factory, declared "I have been wading in a long river and my feet are wet," and never came back.

For the next 20 years he told Americans things about themselves they had never quite understood before. After the first sensational impact of Winesburg, Ohio (1919), critics began to suggest that his characters were fantastic, that he was obsessed with sex, that his version of Ohio life was not a new kind of realism, but romantic. Anderson could have answered what the Russian peasants say: ";We are the dark people, we live in the dark villages." On that lonely darkness he tried all his life to shed light.

Critics smiled skeptically at old Jesse Bentley, who wanted to sacrifice a lamb to God on the hills along Wine Creek.

They forgot the Labadists performing their rites under cover of the thick Maryland night or the angel Moroni revealing the gold plates of Mormon to Joseph Smith in the hills south of Lake Ontario.

Critics smiled too at the Winesburg minister who was nightly tempted to climb into his steeple and play Peeping Tom on Schoolteacher Kate Swift. They did not know the sun-baked prairie where men, women and boys work all the hot dusty day in the fields and villages, and when released are pursued by strange longings which they chalk up in public places after dark. Critics smiled at the way Anderson's characters are forever springing through cornfields or dashing down the railroad tracks in the middle of the night. But Anderson understood that Americans are a people on the march--always fleeing the city, fleeing the farm, seeking to be alone, trying to escape loneliness.

When Sherwood Anderson had written his way out of his own loneliness, he found he had nothing more to say. Famous and prosperous, he left the penumbra of the villages. For a while the Communists got hold of him and used him. He never knew what they were talking about but enjoyed sitting around mid-Manhattan bars, drinking beer with them. In 1927 he bought two papers in Marion, one Republican, one Democratic, and settled down to the life of a country editor. He was a big shot in the town, and the side of Sherwood Anderson that was sociable, a little vain and flashy, had its innings.

"Anderson is like the family coach horse," Novelist William Faulkner once said; "He's dependable, you can trust him to take the children to Sunday school safely.

But he's got a glossy coat and a little sporting blood." No one knows exactly why he went to South America. Some thought he might have been on an unofficial mission to Chile, sent by his good friend Henry Wallace, of whom Anderson wrote a strange, ambiguous sketch in No Swank. More probably, like many another American, he had just gone wandering about, looking for other people to talk to, another place to be alone.

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