A Salesman Who Got Control Of A Factory: Sherwood Anderson in Elyria, Ohio (Part II of a Series)

I eased my car beneath a railroad overpass, slowed down outside a chain link fence and stopped. A few scattered raindrops fell, and the occasional rubbery grind of the windshield wipers punctuated the engine’s steady purr. Before me loomed the bulk of the BASF chemical factory in Elyria, Ohio. There’s nothing here to indicate this site’s significance for American literature. But for the student of literary history, and of Sherwood Anderson in particular, this place has significance. Here is where Anderson’s factory once stood, the factory he walked away from on Thanksgiving Day in 1912 in what has become one of the most legendary incidents in twentieth century American literary history—the man of business chucking it all and giving himself over to a life of art, publishing seven years later his classic work Winesburg, Ohio.

As the legend goes, Anderson simply walked out of the office after opening some mail and headed down the railroad tracks, abandoning commerce for a life of letters. The reality is another matter. He did walk away from this place, although in a dissociative fugue state—in short, a real psychiatric emergency. Anderson liked the story about turning his back on America’s business culture, but his subsequent hospitalization or inability to give his name when he wandered into a Cleveland drugstore several days later—these he was understandably reluctant to discuss.

I snapped a few quick photos of the BASF building for these posts on Anderson in Elyria. Several hours of rain had cooled the late July air. I took a couple of minutes to study the site. I had arrived in Elyria during a heavy rain in the late afternoon of July 26, 2018 and checked into my hotel, then drove around looking for landmarks related to his time in town. Out of sight behind the BASF building is the Black River. An old photograph of Anderson’s factory with the Black River rolling past it came to mind as I sat there. I tried to graft that image onto what I saw before me.

The location’s enduring industrial presence made me feel that Anderson’s time there isn’t far from our own. BASF’s chemical production focus even felt oddly appropriate—the most famous product of Anderson’s factory was his roofing preservative called “Roof-Fix.” The stolid bulk of the factory building, the fence around it, the delivery bay, telephone poles, utility wires—all of this evoked the world of industry: strict protocols, profits, shareholders, wages, invoices, state and federal regulations. It’s a more complex version of what Anderson knew in an earlier form as a bicycle factory worker in Clyde, as a cold storage warehouseman in Chicago, and as a factory president on this site.

But how did Anderson the budding industrial captain become the man who wrote Winesburg, Ohio? What happened that led him to leave Elyria and this role behind? Anderson is unique in American letters for having this kind of business career, and the two worlds seem so far apart. Whenever I think of Anderson at his factory on the Black River in Elyria, Ohio, I am always struck by the element of doubleness in Anderson’s story. For me this bifurcation is represented by two different photographs of him.

The first photo is one of Alfred Steiglitz’s famous portraits of the writer: a melancholy looking man with piercing eyes and tousled hair, gazing back at us from 1923. This is the author who became a Modernist pioneer with Winesburg, Ohio. For readers familiar with his work, Winesburg, Ohio evokes a long-ago time of corn fields, freight trains and village streets–a Midwestern hamlet where men congregate outside stores by day and the lamplighter makes his rounds by night. Beneath the surface of this rural world are the lost souls inhabiting the village who long for connection, love, and acceptance.

What a contrast to the man of sixteen years before: “The Roof-Fix Man of Elyria, Ohio,” a young businessman drumming up trade in the vibrant first decade of the American Century. This side of Anderson is represented by the photo of the handsome young businessman that accompanied one of his trade magazine articles and was later used in a company catalogue for the Anderson Manufacturing Company in Elyria.

This earlier Anderson, the one who ran a factory, socialized at the Elyria country club, and wrote articles with titles such as “The Hot Young ‘Un and The Cold Old ‘Un”  and “The Sales Master and the Selling Organization” for advertising trade journals, seems light years removed from the writer who influenced Hemingway and Faulkner. Yet the writer was emerging even while Anderson pursued business success, first in Chicago, and later in Cleveland and Elyria.

By day he was immersed in business responsibilities, a man on the run from the poverty and uncertainty of his childhood and youth. But by night he wrote long hours, giving voice to the characters and images that had arisen within him, often working into the early morning. Over time the tension became too much. His dramatic flight from his plant in November of 1912 was the result of an emotional breakdown that caused suffering for both Anderson and his wife and children.

The two men are one. Anderson’s flight from the business world helped make the creative writer. He knew firsthand the spiritual costs that came with “making it” in America—he was one of those businessmen who drank and caroused with his fellows, but was miserable deep down—and we can go even further. Anderson had to live this life and shed this skin before he could write Winesburg, Ohio and the other works that sealed his legacy as a groundbreaking force in American literature. Anderson knew well how lives could become stunted and empty. If ever there was a witness to people who lived lives of what Henry David Thoreau called “quiet desperation,” it was Sherwood Anderson.

As someone deeply interested in Anderson’s life and career, it was important for me to visit Elyria and get a feel for his time there–to see where his factory stood, to see what buildings and landmarks he would have known still remained. Two years earlier I had visited his hometown of Clyde, Ohio. Now it was time to see Elyria. I wanted to stick my arms down into the muck and mire of history and see what I could pull out.

Often when Anderson’s story is told, his business career is referenced in shorthand style as something he left behind, a phase of life better known by its supposed ending then its full tenure—that ending being his sudden decision to walk out of his plant and wander almost forty miles on foot in a fugue state until he turned up in Cleveland, unable to remember his own name. The truth about Anderson’s business career is another matter. Anderson spent nearly twenty-two years in advertising and business. His business career began with work as an advertising copywriter in Chicago in 1900. He devoted six years total to work in mail order business and manufacturing in Cleveland and Elyria. Even after leaving Elyria in early 1913, he returned to advertising work from 1913 to 1922. Anderson knew the business world and spent a considerable amount of his adult life in it.

What was different for him after Elyria was that he had found himself. He still needed to pay his bills and support his wife and children, but he was able to better function in business because he was pursuing his artistic vocation. It also helped that Anderson was just a regular employee. He was no longer the executive, a role he was unsuited for, and he could churn out his ad copy and then turn his attention to his real work of creating fiction and, for a short time in 1917-1918, poetry. Art had replaced commerce. Like so many artists then and now, Anderson struggled with the demands of earning a living while pursuing his art, finding time to write in the margins of a busy life. Anderson’s time in the business world reminds me that we all have different sides to our personalities and a variety of talents. While Anderson was temperamentally unsuited to the executive role, he was actually a quite effective “organization man” as salesman and copywriter. He would later describe himself as “a salesman who got control of a factory” when he worked in Elyria.

It was only in 1922 that Anderson left copywriting and lived solely by his pen. His 1925 novel Dark Laughter, generally considered one of Anderson’s weakest works, was a surprise bestseller, enabling him to build a home he called Ripshin on land he purchased near Marion, Virginia, where he moved in 1926. But the home took a lot of the money he made with Dark Laughter, and Anderson wanted a reliable source of income, so he went into a different kind of business, albeit a writing-related one. He purchased two newspapers in Marion, one Democrat and one Republican, hired a man from each party to write editorials for his respective paper and set himself up as editor of both and contributed material of his own. Anderson later sold the papers to his son Robert.

The genesis of Anderson’s business career and his hunger to grab the main chance is found in his childhood. He was born in Camden, Ohio on September 13, 1876, the son of a harness maker. His father had a steady business for a while, but he began to drink heavily and spend more time in taverns telling tales of his Civil War service than he did working, leaving his wife to take in washing to keep the family solvent. While the Anderson family never starved, life was tough in the household, and Anderson and his older brother Karl began working at an early age to help their mother.

Anderson had worked a variety of jobs by the time he became an advertising copywriter. As William Sutton notes in his book The Road To Winesburg: A Mosaic of the Imaginative Life of Sherwood Anderson, Anderson during his years in Clyde had been “water boy, cow-driver, groom, delivery boy, errand boy, corn-cutter, worker in the cabbage fields, worker in the bicycle factory, laborer, printer’s devil, painter, and sweeper in a doctor’s office.” Anderson logged long hours on the Clyde streets and train station platforms selling newspapers. He was later a soldier in the Spanish-American War, a warehouseman in Chicago and a factory hand in Erie, Pennsylvania. During his childhood and youth, Anderson had been so relentless in his pursuit of a dollar that locals nicknamed him “Jobby.” Anderson still found time to read books. He was also exposed to a rich culture of oral storytelling on the streets of Clyde and in the surrounding farmland. But the idea of a literary career was still many years away.

Hunger and poverty dogged Anderson through the early decades of his life. Even as an older man he felt dread when winter returned, remembering the discomfort that cold weather brought to an impoverished household. Anderson the boy longed for prosperity and success. After his mother died in 1895, he went to Chicago, the Midwestern city that promised wealth and glory, but could only find work in a cold storage warehouse. He tried to go to business school at night, but often fell asleep in class after the long hours of manual labor. When the chance came to return to Clyde and join his National Guard unit in the Spanish-American War, he eagerly deserted the warehouse. Eager to impress his townsmen that he had made some success in Chicago, he got off the train some miles from his hometown of Clyde and bought a new suit of clothes.

Anderson’s fortunes changed after the war. His business career began in 1902 when he was hired as an advertising solicitor for a company in Chicago. Anderson was twenty-five years old and fresh off a year of schooling at Wittenberg Academy after his war service. His sojourn in the cold storage warehouse made Anderson realize he needed more schooling if he wanted to move beyond manual labor. Anderson entered Wittenberg to complete his high school education, which was intermittent during his years in Clyde. A speech Anderson gave at commencement so impressed an advertising man in the audience named Harry Simmons that he offered Anderson a job. Anderson finally had an opening into a bigger world. He took the opportunity and moved to Chicago to work as an advertising solicitor for the Mast-Crowell-Kirkpatrick Company. After a short time with this company, Anderson got a position as a copywriter with a firm called the Frank B. White Company. Here Anderson wrote ad copy for agricultural products. In 1904, the Frank B. White Company became part of the Long-Critchfield Corporation, which Anderson would work for until he relocated to Elyria, Ohio.

It was also during this time that Anderson began writing more extensively outside of his day-to-day ad copy assignments. He began contributing articles and essays to a advertising trade publication called Agricultural Advertising. Many of these pieces concern the arts of selling, professional etiquette and ethics, and the value of business culture. This kind of work can be considered a first stage or prologue to Anderson’s writing career, and in a later post in this series I will briefly examine these early writings as a foreground to what Anderson wrote during his time in Elyria. Although ephemeral in nature, these were an important apprenticeship in his writing career, because in the years he wrote them he moved from reflective essays to pieces in which he created fictional characters to illustrate some point about business or advertising. In effect, he began to create short stories of a kind.

In 1904 Anderson married Cornelia Platt Lane of Toledo, Ohio, the daughter of a wealthy businessman. Cornelia was educated, a graduate of the College for Women of Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio who had also toured Europe and studied for a while in Paris. Anderson seemed to be on his way. He had a good job and a promising marriage.

While at Long-Critchfield, Anderson worked on an account for the United Factories company in Cleveland, Ohio. United Factories was a kind of “factory combine,” a mail order business selling products made by different companies. The firm first sold only buggy tops and seats, then added more agricultural products to their mail-order business. Anderson impressed George Bottger, the head of United Factories. Sensing opportunity, Anderson proposed joining the firm and handling all promotional and advertising work. Anderson also boldly offered that he become a partner and receive a bonus after a year’s time if he boosted the firm’s business revenues significantly. Bottger accepted.

ANDERSON’S TIME AT UNITED FACTORIES:

Anderson was made president of the United Factories company. The title was honorary—Anderson’s main responsibility was overseeing sales and advertising rather than running the whole firm. George Bottger continued as general manager and oversaw many of the day-to-day operations. Bottger had previously worked for a Cleveland businessman named Edwin D. Cray who ran a company manufacturing carriage hardware. It was Cray who put up the money to start a mail order firm specializing in seats and tops for buggies.

Anderson and Cornelia moved to Cleveland on September 3, 1906 —Labor Day–and the young company “president” got to work composing advertising copy and revising company catalogs and other publications. The company operated in a sort of clearinghouse fashion—orders were sent to headquarters in Cleveland, which were sent on to factories but mailed out in United Factories packaging. In addition to his office duties, Anderson also traveled with Cray through the Midwest drumming up business. One such trip took him to Elyria, Ohio, where he would relocate in a short time.

Anderson was determined to succeed in business and eager to assured customers that he and the firm would be accountable. In a roofing catalog for 1906, below the picture of Anderson he had used in his “Business Types” essay, he wrote the following:

I promise as a decent man trying to be square that every man, rich or poor, small or large, shall have a square deal from my company.

Every work of this book was written under my supervision, and for it I am responsible to you.

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.

I stand ready to do what is right by you, the buyer, and if you at any time buy anything of the factories whose goods are sold through our catalogs, and if you are not satisfied, you can feel free about taking the matter up with me personally, and I promise you that I will not delegate the matter to a clerk or pile up words to confuse you, but will satisfy you with what you have bought or return every penny of your money no matter what we lose by it.

It’s a potent statement—one that Anderson, to his considerable stress and aggravation—would have to make good on.

One of the products marketed by United Factories was an incubator for chicken eggs. Anderson wrote enthusiastic copy promoting this item, which sold well. But a mechanical defect in two of the larger sized incubators resulted in fumes leaking into the incubator and killing the chicken embryos. Some six hundred letters poured into the firm expressing anger at the malfunctioning products, and Anderson had to respond to each one given his “My Word To You” pledge and refund their money. Anderson was a sincere and sensitive man and felt a lot of guilt over what had happened, although the fault belonged to the manufacturer. Anderson was particularly distressed by some of the letters that detailed the stymied hopes of those who had purchased them. Anderson’s business partner George Bottger recalled a half century later an especially poignant letter from a one-armed woman who washed laundry for a living—not unlike Anderson’s mother–who had hoped to earn extra money with her incubator.

Anderson was near a breaking point. One employee was worried that Anderson “would not last five years” given his levels of stress and constant smoking. Add to this the fact that Cornelia was pregnant: their first son, Robert Lane, arrived on August 16, 1907. The breaking point—a forerunner of his later fugue episode in 1912—happened sometime that summer, possibly not long after Robert Lane’s birth. Anderson had some form of nervous breakdown and vanished from work and home for a period of time. He was later found “wandering around in the woods,” according to George Bottger.

Bottger took over Anderson’s responsibilities as Anderson was in rough shape. This coincided with the end of Anderson’s trial year, and Anderson left United Factories. Bottger years later could not recall the series of steps involving Anderson’s departure, but he felt it was voluntary. Despite this emotionally exhausing experience, Anderson was determined to to continue in business, and it didn’t seem to hurt his friendship with Bottger, who later spent some time in Elyria helping Anderson get his new venture under way.

ANDERSON MANUFACTURING COMPANY:

Anderson and his wife and son relocated to Elyria in September of 1907. Elyria was, and still is, an attractive town southwest of Cleveland. Established by New Englanders in 1817, it was for much of its early decades a kind of nineteenth century bedroom community with attractive homes and tree-shaded streets. Limited manufacturing appeared there after the Civil War, but the town’s dynamic growth really began after U.S. Steel established factories in South Lorain, which was only fifteen minutes away by interurban street car. By the early 1900s the city was engaged in promoting itself as a manufacturing site. Within the first decade a number of industries were established, including an auto manufacturer, and the population rose from 8,791 in 1900 to 14, 825 by 1910.

Local boosters touted not only the city’s new manufacturing base, but also its hospital (where Anderson’s daughter Marion was born), library, churches, and fraternal organizations. The town was also proud of its beautiful Cascade Park based around the two falls of the northward flowing Black River. Anderson arrived in Elyria looking to make a fresh start in business. Here he would depart, a man determined to follow a different route. Here Anderson would come face to face with who he really was. Elyria is an important place in the story of Sherwood Anderson, as important in its own way as Chicago, Illinois and Clyde, Ohio.

Anderson and his family first lived in an apartment building called The Gray, which was torn down earlier in the current century, and later moved to a house at 229 East Seventh Street, which still stands. It was in the attic of 229 East Seventh Street that Anderson eventually began scribbling in the late night hours. Anderson set up shop in a brick building that was part of the former Topliff & Ely plant. Anderson had installed his company on a site that was part of Elyria’s earliest manufacturing history. John A. Topliff had established a carriage and wagon shop in town in the mid nineteenth century and later created the Topliff and Ely Company with another Elyria businessman named George Ely. They constructed their Black River factory in 1870 and began manufacturing bow sockets for buggies, then expanded production to include items such as sewing tables and buggy tops, items which they shipped both domestically and overseas. Topliff & Ely was likely the first firm in Elyria to export goods outside the United States.

There is some mystery as to how Anderson financed this venture in Elyria. His wife Cornelia later said, “At first we put up our money, which was mostly air. Then there was stock.” Anderson’s childhood friend Clifton Paden may have put up money. Paden later adopted the name John Emerson. He was a Hollywood movie producer who married novelist and screenwriter Anita Loos, famous for writing the novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which was adapted for the screen and starred Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis. Another investor may have been Walter Brooks, who owned the factory building Anderson rented and possibly used the offer of backing to persuade Anderson to locate his business at the Topliff & Ely plant.

Regardless of how the company was financed, by the fall of 1907 the Anderson Manufacturing Company was established in Elyria, Ohio.

ROOF-FIX AND “COMMERCIAL DEMOCRACY”:

The Anderson Manufacturing Company wasn’t manufacturing anything just yet. Like the United Factories concern in Cleveland, the Anderson Manufacturing Company was first a mail order business. Its specialty was Roof-Fix, the product Anderson would famously be associated with. Roof-Fix—Anderson coined the name—was a kind of heavy duty paint used for roof repair. It was a kind of short-term solution a farmer, businessman, or homeowner would use until the time came for the roof to be replaced. The paint was directly applied to porous areas. I would suspect that in some instances problem areas that were patched or boarded over would likely receive a layer of Roof-Fix as a sealant. “Roof-Fix carried us to Elyria,” Cornelia Anderson recalled years later.

In one of his ads, Anderson wrote that Roof-Fix would “put any old, leaky, wornout, rusty, tin, iron, steel, paper, felt, gravel or shingle roof in perfect condition, and keep it in perfect condition for 5 cents per square foot per year.”  Anderson’s company bought Roof-Fix in bulk from a manufacturer in Cleveland, then sold it in five gallon tins for forty cents a gallon, which was five times the manufacturer’s cost. It was originally sold directly from the factory, but later was available through paint and hardware dealers.  Later the product would be manufactured in Elyria. One year later Anderson added a knife sharpener to the company’s wares along with other items, such as a glass razor hone and ironing board springs.

Business picked up more in the late summer of 1909. The Elyria Evening-Telegram reported that Anderson had acquired “the plant and good will” of the Wilcoxson Paint Company, a Lorain paint manufacturing firm. The firm’s founder, L.L. “Daddy” Wilcoxson, and his general manufacturer, Waldo Purcell, relocated to Elyria to help oversee operations of the paint company, which was now known as the Anderson Paint Company. By January of 1910 the paint manufacturing equipment was installed at the Topliff & Ely plant and Roof-Fix was being manufactured there as well. Anderson seemed to be on his way.

There would be yet another business venture in Elyria. Anderson developed a plan called “Commercial Democracy,” which involved selling stock in the paint products division of his company. In 1909 Anderson began running this ad in a publication called The Rural New Yorker:

“LET ME START YOU IN BUSINESS!”

“I will furnish the capital and advertising. I want one sincere, earnest man in every town and township. Farmers, Mechanics, Builders, Small businessmen, any one anxious to improve his condition. Address Anderson Mfg. Co, Dept. d. 35, Elyria, Ohio.”

The ad ran for about a year, with the only change being that interested applicants should write to “Commercial Democracy” instead of the Anderson Manufacturing Company. One noteworthy aspect of this venture is that Anderson’s writing skills were again put to use. Writing and business were intertwined for Anderson. There are no extant copies of this publication, but Anderson began writing and publishing a series of pamphlets with the idea of promoting Commercial Democracy and the sale of stock. His brother Karl recalled that Anderson printed some pamphlets for advertising, and Cornelia Anderson said Anderson used a fictional persona in these writings using “Daddy” Wilcoxson as a model. This character seems to have been a kind of cornball salesman kind of figure who attempted to speak in a more highfalutin manner that only underscored his homespun nature.

What I find noteworthy here is that once again Anderson was using the power of language and story to advance his interests. Walter Rideout stated in his biography of Anderson that, as he did in Chicago, Anderson was “linking creative writing with his business interests. It is not too much to assert that at this point the future career was again beginning to develop symbiotically out of his present one.”

Anderson, who was very much the divided man during this time in Elyria, seems to have been of two minds on the subject of Commercial Democracy. On one hand, he was interested in making more money. But there was an element in Anderson that was progressive, that was interested in cooperative action leading to social change. During the 1930s he would become immensely interested in the unionization occurring in southern mills as well as New Deal programs to improve life for the average American. The fact that Anderson began his novel Marching Men during his time in Elyria is suggestive and interesting given the nature of what he hoped for with Commercial Democracy.

One of Anderson’s good friends in town was a liberal Republican city official named Perry Williams. Anderson discussed his interest in Commercial Democracy with Williams, who wrote an editorial praising Anderson’s plan. In his editorial, Williams wrote that businesses are often operated “on a pretty thoroughly monarchical basis” in which “the many exist for the benefit of the few.” However, “Anderson says that this despotic way of running business is all wrong and that it is thoroughly practicable to make a business entity out of every worker, just as every voter is a political entity.” Later in his Memoirs, Anderson stated that his interest in Commercial Democracy sprang from an interest in Socialistic ideas and the notion of creating a “cooperative commonwealth.”

Anderson later claimed that Commercial Democracy had increased his business by ‘one hundred percent” in the period from March of 1910 to March of 1911. Anderson had certainly impressed men in Elyria. An Elyria doctor named Saunders, who bought stock in Anderson’s company, felt confident in Anderson’s powers as a salesman “We thought we had a world-beater,” he said. “We thought we were going to put Sherwin-Williams out of business.” Prominent men in Elyria backed Anderson in the creation of a company that, as Walter Rideout wrote, combined “profit sharing with more conventional business features.” The Anderson Paint Company and the Anderson Manufacturing Company were merged in what became the American Merchants Company, although the names of the two earlier companies continued to appear in local advertisements. The American Merchants Company was incorporated in the state of Ohio on November 20, 1911, a year before Anderson had his breakdown.

Walter Rideout wrote, “The company was capitalized at $200,000 divided into two thousand shares of stock for which seventeen local investors subscribed $24,000, the remainder to be sold to local dealers ‘the country over and thus interest them especially in the sale of the company’s products through their receiving a portion of the company’s earnings.’ ” Anderson was not one of the five men who signed the Articles of Incorporation. Rideout notes that Anderson ‘subscribed to no stock himself but was allowed $25,000 in common stock as president and general manager of the firm, an arrangement that provided him considerable potential profit at no cost of investment.”

ANDERSON AS BOSS:

Anderson seems to have generally been well liked by some of his employees. The scholar William Sutton interviewed people who worked for Anderson and recorded what he found in his book The Road To Winesburg. A secretary at United Factories described him as a good looking, neatly dressed man who seemed to like his job and understood his responsibilities. She added that he had a good sense of humor, laughed often, and his good nature inspired devotion from her.  One employee saw him as a typical hardworking businessman who expected others to work hard. Other described him with phrases such as “swell fellow,” or a “grand man” who was friendly and “had an understanding way with a beginner.” Anderson’s first wife Cornelia, who always spoke well if somewhat formally of Anderson in public or with scholars, stated that “Mr. Anderson was good for people, and they were the better for contact with him.”

There are contrasting views of Anderson as a boss, one of which comes from the man himself. Anderson later wrote that he had gone from being a “slow-moving dreamy boy” to “a crisp thing that hurried to an office, sat at a big desk, rang bells, got suddenly and sometimes nastily executive,” who “worked long hours in a factory office, surrounded by a cloud of young women stenographers, dictating form letters for hours at a stretch, getting up very plausible-sounding form letters that went out in thousands.” William Sutton cites testimony from a secretary in Elyria whose account of her time at the company corresponds with this stricter side of Anderson.

She said that he was ambitious and that all of the employees worked hard. The office conditions were spartan and the work day very regimented. She described the office as having long pine benches on which the women sat. She said Anderson “never wanted to spend money to make the office presentable. He was a strict economist.” The schedule was not unlike some workplaces today. The day ran from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.. with a half hour for lunch and a fifteen minute break at 10 a.m. The workers had to get permission to leave at any time other than the break or lunch. Mrs. Yost said that Anderson was “kindly but impersonal and insisted that the girls give every effort to their work.” Anderson didn’t say much to them outside of his dictation other than “good morning” and sometimes neglected to say that.

Anderson was a man with many different sides to his character, and perceptions of him were varied. Any individual will not be liked by everyone, and some found aspects of his personality off-putting. Someone who was at his core a sensitive and perceptive artist like Anderson would strike some as strange. One business associated described Anderson as “an eccentric, a dreamer, an agnostic..He didn’t seem to live in the same world with us.” Another man stated that “there was a feeling that Anderson was very erratic. He was very modernistic in his views of life.”  Sutton wrote, “His banker remembered him as pleasant, aloof, moody, self-contained, and rather strange over-all. These opinions tally with Cornelia’s recollection that he was usually at variance with the conventional attitude but that his relations with the town were good.”

Anderson was a complex man, and the descriptions bear this out. Happy-go-lucky. “Very moody.” “A kidder.” “Pleasant, modest, rather deferential in manner.” Charming. “A fine, upstanding man.” Self-centered. “….a complete absence of bluff or self-dramatization in his conversation.” “Easy to know, ordinary, and a bit on the slouchy side as a dresser.” Many factors can influence someone’s perception of another: age, gender, past experience, personality style, tendencies to introversion or extraversion, power relationships, intuition. Anderson was no different from anyone else in that others around him viewed him through the lenses shaped by their own personalities and values.

And yet what I find so suggestive about the different takes on Anderson is that they hint at the deep burdens roiling him. I believe that they evoke a man struggling to bring a deeper, truer side of himself to the surface—the artist who could go deep into reverie, see below the surface of lives, and render those insights in works of singular and powerful fiction. Anderson did enjoy other people and spending time with them. He relished the hours when he was a boy hanging around the trainers and swipes at the race track or the salesmen and townsmen of Clyde. Anderson valued speaking with people of varied backgrounds and sometimes found that what they told him suggested stories. But he seems to have been playing a part when he entered business, that of the affable salesman whose joshing and good nature around the boys was mostly surface. He played pool at the Elks, golf at the country club, and smoked and drank with the other men in the saloon. He played his role in his community and did everything he “was supposed to do so he could buy happiness” as John Mellencamp would sing years later, but the emptiness in him was deep. He was prone to spells of vagueness and distraction. Sometimes he would stop in the middle of dictation as his mind wandered and the secretary would lean over and shut off the dictating machine. By 1912, Anderson was living in two different worlds—that of his work and family life and that of the creative writer who sealed himself away in an attic room feverishly composing.

Years later, in a 1938 letter to a man named George Freitag, Anderson would write the following: “The men employed with me, the business men, many of them successful and even rich, were like the laborers, gamblers, soldiers, race track swipes, I had formerly known, Their guards down, often over drinks, they told me the same stories of tangled thwarted lives. How could I throw glamour over such lives. I couldn’t.” By 1912 Anderson felt “tangled and thwarted.” A breaking point would soon arrive.

His career as company president came to an end with his fugue journey to Cleveland. He was hospitalized in Cleveland for a time, then recovered at home. It was clear he could no longer continue in this role. He asked for his old job back with Long-Critchfield in Chicago and relocated there in early 1913 while Cornelia remained behind in Elyria with the children until they could join him.

The men who worked with Anderson “mostly picked up after him,” noted Walter Rideout in his biography of the writer. Anderson apparently helped with the sale of the Roof-Fix portion of the firm’s business to Cleveland’s G.E. Conkey Company. The American Merchant Company’s remaining house and barn paint was also sold. According to Rideout, “The Purcell Paint Company soon listed itself as successor to American Merchants, and Anderson’s great scheme for a business triumph legally ended on the following September 20 when the stockholders met and dissolved the American Merchants Company.” By this time Anderson was in Chicago, writing ad copy to make a living and developing friendships with other artists and writers in the city. Anderson would eventually return twice to Elyria. One was brief–a short train stopover. The other was deliberate, made many years later by auto when he returned in the company of his last wife Eleanor Copenhaver Anderson.

I was fortunate that the weather cleared overnight after my arrival and good weather returned for the full day I spent in the city, making it easier to explore Elyria on foot and reflect on his time there.  I spent some time walking in the area near the BASF factory site. The site is a short distance from the downtown area, but of sufficient distance to seem remote. There is a vacant train station near the factory, and there was little activity in the area. The rail bed has been elevated since Anderson’s time, creating an overpass near the BASF entrance. A couple of times I walked down the street beneath the railroad overpass and looked at the factory. I was cautious, not wanting to draw attention to myself. In our age of heightened security and terrorism, someone observing a place like this and taking pictures can arouse suspicion.

I found the quietness of the area somewhat unnerving, but somehow appropriate given the anxiety and torment Anderson undoubtedly felt at this place, especially as his double life began to take a toll on him.

The area beneath the overpass felt eerie. There were large puddles beneath it. It was dim and had a stuffy, unpleasant chemical kind of odor. It struck me as an appropriate symbol of the dark side of our industrial society—anonymous, mechanical, divorced from the earth, the kind of place where you would find a dead body. But I thought also of this place decades earlier, of Anderson walking here from his home on 227 East Seventh Street, a sharply dressed young businessman, his heels clicking on the pavement below him. Sometimes his brother Earl, who lived for a while in the Anderson home and worked at the factory, walked with him.

Later that afternoon I drove a short distance up the road to where the Amtrak platform is located. There is an old railroad building nearby where freight was once handled. I walked up to the railroad tracks and stared back in the direction of the BASF plant and thought about Anderson wandering off on that cold November morning more than a century before. As I stood there in the sunshine of a beautiful summer’s day, the past felt close around me: the past of old Ohio, the past of industrial Elyria in the early years of the American Century.

Anderson came to Elyria with faith that he could make a go of it as a young businessman. The dream went sour, but it was out of his time there that Anderson began a quest to become who he truly was. By the time he left the city, those dreams of industrial profit had long faded, replaced by something greater—a desire and a willingness to explore his inner depths and give voice to the stirrings inside him and write the stories he needed to tell. This birth was painful as any birth is, but it was in this place that the vital confrontation occurred, and from this confrontation a bold new voice in American letters emerged.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PATRICK KERIN

 

A note to readers: this series began in November of 2018. The deaths of my father and then my mother-in-law occurred shortly after along with a job change, and while my interest in Anderson remained as strong as ever, I found it hard to pick up the thread of this series. I’m glad to be back at work on it. The following posts will examine Anderson’s social life in Elyria, his breakdown and fugue walk to Cleveland, what he wrote while in Elyria and his return visits to the city. To those who have supported this blog through the years and even made financial donations,  I am deeply grateful. I look forward to writing and posting the rest of this series on Sherwood Anderson in Elyria.

Resources:

Sherwood Anderson: A Writer In America–Volume I by Walter B. Rideout with an Introduction by Charles Modlin. The University of Wisconsin Press. Madison, Wisconsin. 2006.

The Road To Winesburg: A Mosaic of the Imaginative Life of Sherwood Anderson by William A. Sutton. The Scarecrow Press, Inc. Metuchen, New Jersey. 1972.

Sherwood Anderson by Kim Townsend. Houghton Mifflin Company. Boston, Massachusetts. 1987.

Images of America: Elyria. William L. Bird and Robert R. Ebert on behalf of the Lorain County Historical Society. Arcadia Publishing. Charleston, South Carolina. 2014.