Sherwood Anderson: An American as Artist

“For all my egotism,” wrote Sherwood Anderson at the end of his life, “I know I am but a minor figure.” This self-estimate is both accurate and sincere: it comes, in the Memoirs, directly after an eager tribute to those writers of the past whom Anderson most admired. Yet it was characteristic of his feeling for the creative life that even when he was most humble about his work he was proud to be doing it. In some ways the minor artist needs the buttress of pride more than the major one: he must believe that his career, in its fragmentary achievement no less than its integrity of conduct, is intrinsically worthy. This pride—the pride which permits the minor artist to place himself in fraternal relation to past greatness even as he realizes the limitations of his own work—Anderson had.

The pity of it was, however, that in his last years he found it so hard to preserve that pride. How graciously a culture accepts its minor artists is one gauge of its health. A secure culture, organically related to its own past and yet forever modulating it, will quickly assimilate the minor artist’s vision and will honor and bolster him during his lifetime. But American culture—committed as it is to a highly competitive ethic, a systematic suspicion of the past and an uneasy depreciation of the frankly minor work—could hardly bolster Anderson once his imagination had begun to falter. At first it overvalued him, perhaps even turned his head, and then it ignored him as if he were unobtrusively dead; but on neither occasion could it fortify his taste or direct him with affectionate severity to what was best in his work. It was a culture with a depressingly short memory and it behaved as if that short memory were its outstanding virtue; in its frenetic quest for novelty it was always searching for new heroes to elevate, always discarding artists as if they were bankrupts defeated by stronger rivals (its most favored author, Ernest Hemingway, saw literature as a vast boxing tournament), and always rediscovering artists who should never have been forgotten. In so discontinuous a culture a writer like Anderson, who had only a slight capacity for detachment or self-protection, was certain to be wounded as he had once been praised. It is for this reason, though hardly for this reason alone, that his literary career seems representative of the effort of so many Americans to become artists.