The Travail of His Soul: Sherwood Anderson and Elyria, Ohio–Part Three of a Series

A solitary figure walks along a railroad in late November of 1912. He is a slim, handsome, dark haired man of thirty-six. His dress shoes are scuffed and muddied; his tie is askew. He walks fixedly ahead, stopping here and there to look around him or up at the sun peeking from the edges of clouds. He gnaws at a shriveled ear of corn found in some field stubble. Occasionally he hears the shuttling sound of a freight train in the distance and walks  away from the tracks until it roars past him. It is a strange sight, this man walking beside the railroad. He looks like he belongs in an office rather than wandering the rail bed in rural northeastern Ohio.

Only two days before, on November 28, he was in an office—his own, located in a factory building miles behind him on the Black River in Elyria, Ohio. He is president of the Anderson Manufacturing Company, but he has embraced a new vocation. For months now, after the work day ends, he writes late into the night in the attic of his home, turning out pages of prose, trying to find his way, his voice. Characters and stories crowd his mind. Day after day he returns to his office, where the demands of business eat away at him. It has become too much. He has entered a fugue state and begun wandering through the Ohio countryside. Back in Elyria his wife, family, and friends worry about him.

November 28, 1912 was Thanksgiving Day in the United States. It was a working holiday for most Americans then, much as Veterans Day or Presidents Day are in our time. Sherwood Anderson arrived at his office at his usual hour on Thanksgiving Day. He opened some mail, than spoke briefly and cryptically to his secretary. He mentioned his feet being wet, then he left his office. His secretary watched him trudging eastward along the tracks. Several days later he wandered into a drugstore in Cleveland, Ohio, bearded, disheveled, and disoriented, unable to identify himself. The pharmacist sensed something wrong. Anderson handed him a notebook. The man saw Anderson’s name inside it and contacted one of Anderson’s Elyria business associates listed in its pages.

Anderson was hospitalized for several days and released. After this incident he wouldn’t remain long in Elyria. He separated from his business, relocated to Chicago and resumed his earlier occupation of advertising copywriter. Anderson earned money writing copy even after his first books were published. Seven years after his breakdown his innovative short story collection Winesburg, Ohio appeared. This book is widely considered an early twentieth century American masterpiece, a work that influenced writers such as Faulkner and Hemingway. In the wake of his breakdown episode, Anderson devoted himself to literature, eventually creating a remarkable body of work that included novels, three other important short story collections, essays, and works of memoir and journalism. Ultimately his breakdown, painful as it was for him and his family—and no doubt embarrassing at some level for Anderson—was a turning point that catapulted him into a new life. This moment had a long foreground.

Anderson, a born fictionist, would later claim he consciously walked away from it all—business, prosperity, and community standing—in the name of art. It’s a mythic story of a sort of American Adam, a man born again into a life of art and making a clean break with business. I can see why he wanted to believe it. It sounded far better than admitting he suffered through a mental health crisis. But the evidence suggests he had an emotional breakdown and entered a fugue state in which he wandered, cut off from his normal modes of functioning, nearly forty miles during four days. For years he pursued a conventional dream of wealth and success. But during his time in Elyria, he felt rumblings below the surface calling him to a different life. Anderson could no longer be a businessman. He would–he must— be an artist.

This post examines Anderson’s social and everyday life in Elyria. It is a part of a series I began years ago after visiting the town where he lived from 1907 to early 1913. It is a portrait of his time there and the writer he was becoming as emotional, business, and social pressures intensified and overwhelmed him. Here he faced his true self and found he couldn’t continue as he had. Elyria is important in the Anderson narrative.

While his creative vocation was a long time in the making, in Elyria it took shape and gathered steam. Anderson began writing his first two novels—Marching Men and Windy McPherson’s Son–in the upstairs room in his Elyria home. Less than four years after his fugue walk, Windy McPherson’s Son appeared in print in 1916, Marching Men in 1917 and Winesburg, Ohio in 1919.

It was a big leap Anderson took in deciding to become a writer. He was thirty-six years old, a father, husband, and employer. He abandoned a dream of money and security that began in childhood. Anderson’s upbringing was marked by hardship and poverty. His dream was the age-old pursuit of money as a means to a better life: not just enough to get by, but real prosperity to banish forever the threat of hunger and deprivation he knew as a boy and young man. In a letter he wrote later in life, Anderson mentioned how often the men in his hometown of Clyde talked of money. “Money makes the mare go,” Anderson quoted them as saying.

Anderson was born in Camden, Ohio in Preble County on September 13, 1876, the year of America’s centennial and eleven years after the conclusion of the Civil War. The Ohio of his upbringing was barely removed from the frontier. Only eighty-six years before his birth, the fledgling post-Revolution army under General Arthur St. Clair passed through this region en route to what is now Fort Recovery, Ohio, sixty miles northwest of  Camden. St. Clair’s force was decimated by a pan-Indian confederacy on November 4, 1791 in a battle commonly referred to as “St. Clair’s Defeat.”

 

 

 

 

This battle was both the worst defeat ever suffered by an American army and its worst defeat by a Native American force, far worse than the slaughter of Custer’s command at Little Big Horn in Anderson’s birth year of 1876. A few years later another army under Mad Anthony Wayne marched through the same area near Camden. This force crushed American Indian resistance in Ohio at Fallen Timbers near the Michigan border. The Ohio country was on the path to settlement. Ohio became a state in 1803, and five years later Anderson’s paternal grandfather, James Anderson, arrived in West Union, Ohio in Adams County at the age of eleven with his parents. The family had emigrated from Pennsylvania.

Settlement in Ohio proceeded rapidly. Intensive development of agriculture along with internal improvements such as roads and canals contributed to the state’s wealth and vitality. Industry also developed in Ohio, and the cities of Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo, and Dayton expanded. But despite the rise of factories, foundries, and mills, the state was primarily agricultural and rural through much of the nineteenth century. This world—the small town agrarian Midwest—was one Anderson knew intimately and one he saw changed in his lifetime.

It was a world governed by the seasons and the rising and setting of the sun. It was home to tradesmen, farmers, and craftsmen, a world that eventually disappeared as America entered the twentieth century and became increasingly industrialized. This Midwestern world—“the Valley of Democracy”–was central to Anderson’s character and work. He was shaped by it, and in turn the farms and towns and cities and people of the Midwest would recur in his writing.

Anderson experienced firsthand the rise of mechanization and industrialism. As a young man he worked in a bicycle factory in Clyde, Ohio and later in a Chicago warehouse. He found both experiences draining and demoralizing. The transition from an agrarian society to an industrial one—and its effect on people and communities–is an important element in Anderson’s work. Anderson recognized the importance of the machine and its dangers in American life. It was a lifelong concern of his. Concurrent with the rise of industrialism was the growth of  advertising and public relations, a field Anderson worked in and grew to detest over time. Anderson’s life was deeply enmeshed with the industrial system and the advertising industry during his years in Elyria. He had gone from labor to management. Over time he found the position untenable.

Anderson’s employment began early in life. His father, Irwin Anderson, a Civil War veteran and once steady workman, became an improvident provider as Sherwood entered adolescence. Early in his marriage Irwin was a skilled harness maker who owned his own business, but later spent more time drinking and telling Civil War stories in saloons or participating in amateur theatricals than working. Eager to help his suffering mother and impoverished family, Anderson worked so many varied jobs around his hometown of Clyde as a youth and young man that people called him “Jobby.” Other children in the family also worked. Anderson’s schooling was irregular.

The family had shelter and food, but life was hard. His mother took in washing to help pay the bills. Even as an older man Anderson dreaded the onset of winter, and one of his most poignant childhood memories was that of his mother Emma rubbing lard into his dry, cracked hands on a cold winter evening. The family split up after she died on May 10, 1895. Anderson’s father moved away to Indiana, eventually married another woman and had a son who died relatively young. Irwin Anderson died at the Soldiers Home in Dayton, Ohio on May 23, 1919. Anderson never saw his father again after Irwin left Clyde.

After his mother’s death Anderson went to Chicago where he worked in a cold storage warehouse by day and took business classes at night. Exhausted from long hours of manual labor, Anderson often fell asleep in the warm classroom. He didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. America’s war with Spain offered an escape. He quit his job and returned to Clyde to ship out with his Ohio National Guard unit. Anderson’s unit never saw combat, but encampments in the American south and Cuba gave him time to reflect on his life and had a broadening influence. Realizing he needed more education, he finished the equivalent of high school at the Wittenberg Academy in Springfield, Ohio after his military service.

During his time at Wittenberg, Anderson roomed at a boarding house called The Oaks. A man named Harry Simmons occasionally took his meals there. Simmons was an advertising manager for the Crowell Publishing Company, which was then headquartered in Springfield. Simmons befriended Anderson and heard Anderson’s commencement speech in June of 1900. Simmons was impressed and offered him a job at the Chicago office of the Woman’s Home Companion, a Crowell publication.

After a brief time with this publication, Anderson joined an advertising agency that later merged with the Long-Critchfield Company. He worked for Long-Critchfield before becoming a company president in Cleveland and Elyria, then worked for them again in Chicago after his breakdown.

Anderson had joined the middle class. He not only found business success—he married a wealthy woman in 1904. Cornelia Platt Lane was the daughter of a rich businessman in Toledo, Ohio. Intelligent and cultivated, she was a university graduate who had enjoyed a grand tour of Europe and studied at the Sorbonne. His new life must have been dizzying for him. Anderson had moved far beyond the hardscrabble world of his upbringing. He embraced his newfound opportunities.

Anderson and Cornelia relocated to Cleveland when he took a position with United Factories Company, a mail order firm. He was there from the fall of 1906 through the late summer of 1907. He then moved to Elyria in September 1907 to become president of the Anderson Manufacturing Company. Sherwood Anderson, the poor boy from Clyde, Ohio, was now an established and serious man of business. For a number of years this business world seemed to suit Anderson, at least on the surface. Anderson could play the game. He was a cordial, easygoing man who charmed people and seemed the image of the steady young businessman.

He could also be one of the boys, at ease in masculine company while sharing a drink with other men at a bar or camping in the woods near the Black River. Anderson knew the world of men from his experience as soldier, farmhand, and laborer, and much of his childhood and youth was spent on the streets of Clyde, Ohio, listening to the village talk of farmers, racetrack workers, and salesmen. But the fugue episode of 1912 highlights a division in Anderson’s character visible early in life, a division that shot to the surface in Elyria and shook up his earlier plans. The penetrating eyes of Anderson in Edward Steichen’s portraits of him testify to a depth of character and soul that took shape long before.

Early in life Anderson displayed a powerful sensitivity and a capacity for careful observation. His long hours wandering through Clyde selling papers and doing other odd jobs were an education in human nature. At times he caught glimpses of behavior that starkly contrasted with the cultivated public images people presented to others. One time a prosperous local farmer who bought Anderson’s papers gave him a five-dollar bill–a significant sum of money then, especially for a child–when Anderson noticed him entering a carriage in an alley with a woman not his wife. Another time, standing near a window, he saw a local druggist and his wife, both naked, chasing each other around their house and laughing, then a short time later saw the man at his usual spot behind his store counter greeting customers.

The world of illicit sex beneath the staid surface of Clyde and its families was an aspect of small town life that would surface in Anderson’s work, particularly Winesburg, Ohio, and make him controversial in his time. In his Memoirs, he writes, “There were in our town, as in all towns, certain women and girls. They were known as ‘pushovers.’  They were ‘putting out.’ Men met them in the evening on a side street of the town. The automobile had not yet come yet but almost every man in town owned a horse and buggy.”

He then relates the story of “Sneaky Pete,” a bitter, unmarried man who lived with his mother and was denied membership in the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), a prominent veterans organization of the time, for being a bounty jumper during the Civil War. A bounty jumper was a man who enlisted in a Union army unit, collected the bonus or bounty for enlisting, then deserted. Anderson writes that Sneaky Pete had a “morning roll call” that “spread terror through the town.”

Pete had a game he played with some of the clerks sweeping in front of their stores in the morning. One of the clerks would call out the name of a certain man in town, and Pete, walking the railroad tracks, called out the name of the girl he was with. Anderson explains that someone had likely slipped Pete this information earlier. The wives who were making breakfasts would stop their work to listen to the call and response of Pete and the clerks. “It was all very cruel,” Anderson writes. “It got Sneaky Pete into endless fights but he did not mind. Well the G.A.R. wouldn’t take him in. There was something wrong with his war record. He was having a good time. He was getting even. Some man of the town always slipping him the dirt of the town.”

Anderson possessed a deep sensitivity and compassion. During the time Anderson worked in a Clyde bicycle factory he was often repelled by the sexual talk of the other men, sensing the insecurity and shallowness behind their behavior. While he desired women and occasionally went with prostitutes, even as a married man in Elyria, he still yearned for beauty and honest emotional connection with women. He sensed the loneliness and desperation behind the public faces of his townspeople. His own duplicities and capacity for “slickness” and phoniness caused him no end of torment.

The hardworking young “Jobby” was also subject to long periods of daydreaming and lethargy and liked to read books. He alternated between vigorous bouts of labor and and periods of introspection and profound self-absorption. In his Memoirs he recreates a conversation with a man who seems based on his boyhood friend Herman Hurd. The friend, Anderson writes, noticed Anderson absorbed by the talk of people around him while at other times falling into deep reverie. Anderson describes the following conversation:

“What was I like then? What was your impression?” I asked and he told me that he remembered me only as a lazy fellow, sitting on the curb on the Main Street or before the little frame hotel at evening, listening to the tales told by a traveling man. Or I sat with my back against a barn wall listening to men talking within a barn or women gossiping in the kitchen of a nearby house.

“But whose barn? We had no barn to our house.”

“No. It was our barn. You would be listening to my sisters and to mother talking in our kitchen.”

“Ah! And so I was at it even then?”

“I would come out of the house. I wanted you to go play ball with me or to go with me to bring home the cows.”

“I remember your sitting there, your eyes glassy, and that I walked over and stood before you. I shouted but you did not hear. I had to lean over and hit you before I could get your attention.”

“With a book in your hand you were ten times worse.”

“But,” I protested, “I was called ‘Jobby.’ ”

“You were both a hustler and bone lazy,” he said. “I do, now that you speak of it, remember periods of intense activity, when you worked feverishly at any job you could get. You used to go about at such times declaring your determination to be a rich man, the most powerful man in the state, and when we others laughed you wanted to fight.”

And so, if the two things had been in me at the beginning it was evident that later the hustler had won and I remember now that after I had become a manufacturer I once visited my home town and that people spoke of the change in me. There was an old carriage builder who stopped me on the street. I was about to hurry past. “Stop,” he cried. “There isn’t any fire.” I stopped and we talked, I speaking of my fine prospects in life, and he said to me, stepping a little away and looking…

“Why you have changed,” he said. “When you were here, a kid here, you used to pull your words and now you speak crisply. And you look so like a hustler and when you were here you were always sitting lost in your dreams.”

 

Psychological disturbances were also present during his adolescence. Anderson occasionally experienced moments when he felt disconnected to his body. He related one story of lying beneath a tree and feeling his life going away from him, drifting away into the clouds, sensing that if he continued he would die but then coming to and swiftly retreating back into his body on the ground.

Anderson biographer Kim Townsend, drawing on the work of psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan, writes “Psychological wisdom would have it that these are ‘fugue’ states. Occurring in ‘preadolescent and adolescent phases of development,’ as Henry (sic) Stack Sullivan describes them, they are prolonged spells of ‘dreaming-while-awake,’ in which ‘the relationships with circumambient reality and with the meanings to which things attach from one’s past is, to a certain extent, fundamentally and as absolutely suspended as it is when one is asleep.’ ” Townsend noted that, “the episodes stopped when he was about sixteen. He never did know just what had happened to him. Nor did he ever make the connection, but they had stopped only to recur, more intensely, more dramatically, twenty years later when he was a seemingly successful business and family man in another Ohio community.”

A foretaste of Anderson’s 1912 breakdown occurred when he worked for United Factories in Cleveland, Ohio. After a period of successful enterprise, the company began receiving customer complaints about an incubator manufactured elsewhere but marketed by United Factories. Returns and angry letters flooded in from customers. Anderson had made glowing promises in his advertising literature about keeping his word to each customer, so he followed through by dealing directly with each case. His stress increased and he began smoking heavily. He disappeared and was found wandering disoriented through a woods some miles from his home.

In the aftermath of this incident, Anderson cut his ties with the Cleveland firm, although he maintained good relations with his former partners, and began his new job in Elyria as president of the Anderson Manufacturing Company, a mail order business he created that became well known for a roof preservative called “Roof-Fix.”

As in Cleveland, all went well for some time. The company was profitable. Anderson had a good reputation with many Elyrians, although some felt there was something different about him. He began to live a double life the longer he lived there: business by day; art by night. His first forays into writing began when he entered the advertising business in the early 1900s. In addition to his regular ad copy, Anderson wrote essays for advertising publications on a variety of topics, ultimately linking them to the advertising trade. Sometimes he created fictional characters in these essays to illustrate a message. Typical topics included salesmanship, the virtue of hard work, and the importance of square dealing.

Anderson began writing serious fiction in earnest around 1909. The deeper he explored his talent, the more the pressures of his company presidency and the chicanery of American business culture wore him down. Both his own deceptions and those of others to turn a profit increasingly sickened him. Early on in his business career he knew that cheating and falsehood were part of the game. Even as a paperboy he had found ways to persuade a man to buy an extra paper. He could play the game, but deep down Anderson recoiled at the ugly aspects of business, and a kind of idealism permeated his business endeavors. During his time in Elyria, Anderson became interested in socialism and developed a kind of profit sharing plan called “Commercial Democracy.” Nothing much came of it, but Anderson envisioned himself as a benevolent capitalist whose workers would share in his prosperity.

There is such a sharp contrast between these years and his later life. It is hard to reconcile the author of Winesburg, Ohio with the factory president and man about town in Elyria. The idea of Anderson dictating to secretaries, shooting pool at the Elks with other professional men, playing golf at the country club, sorting through invoices and overseeing payroll—-this is the same man staring out of Steiglitz’s portraits with his penetrating eyes? This is the same man who wrote Winesburg, Ohio?

Yet as Anderson biographer Walter Rideout wrote, “everyone, he was convinced, was a mixture of selves, was one or more persons to the world while inwardly living constantly shifting ‘lives’ in response to the mood of the moment and the restless activity of imagination.” The problem for Anderson in Elyria was that a deeply buried part of the self needed to emerge from circumstances impeding its development. The growth eventually occurred, but it came at a high cost to Anderson and his wife and family.

I first began writing about Anderson’s time in Elyria in 2018 after a visit to the city. and the more I have worked with this material and reflected on it, the more I am struck by this “mixture of selves” evident in his time there. I am also amazed at how deeply troubled and conflicted he must have felt in Elyria. The “Business” section of Anderson’s Memoirs is a portrait of the incredible self-loathing Anderson felt the longer he worked in business.

In this section Anderson writes of himself as “one of the slick ones.” He writes, “I was on the road to prosperity and, if I held on, to riches, but already I was sick.” Anderson’s dream of success was coming true, but it would be some time before he could no longer stand it, stating “although I had developed into this plausible thing, this slick one who could by words sell people what were often inferior goods, I wasn’t yet onto myself.”

For nearly a decade now I have been seriously studying Anderson’s works and life. I believe I have a decent sense of both the best and worst of the man, and I find the complexity of his mixture of selves fascinating. The different sides of his personality were visible during his time in Elyria. Anderson appears to be have been well liked by many. He was seen as a good-looking, affable fellow, a gentleman with an attractive wife and three children. A hard worker. A fair boss with a pleasant nature and a sense of humor. A number of local businessmen had faith in him. “We thought we had a world beater,” recalled one.

Others found Anderson strange, eccentric, moody. One man described Anderson as “an eccentric, a dreamer, an agnostic…He didn’t seem to live in the same world with us.” Another said that “there was a feeling that Anderson was very erratic. He was very modernistic in his views of life.” Anderson biographer William Sutton wrote, “His banker remembered him as pleasant, aloof, moody, self-contained, and rather strange over-all.”

Anderson left Elyria more than a century ago to pursue a literary career, but many remnants of the world he knew remain in this lovely town southwest of Cleveland. In July of 2018 I visited Elyria to learn more about his time there. Elyria began as a small Midwestern town, but it boomed in the years after the Civil War. By the time the Andersons arrived in 1907, it had a large number of factories producing a variety of products. Two of the most notable were the Garford Manufacturing Company, which first produced bicycles and a popular bicycle seat before becoming one of the country’s first automobile manufacturers, and the Worthington Ball Company, which produced golf balls and other golf-related goods.

These were the vibrant early years of the American Century, and it was a time of hope and optimism for many. Theodore Roosevelt was President when Anderson and his family moved to Elyria in 1907. During this year Oklahoma was admitted to the union as the forty-sixth state. U.S. Marines were dispatched to Honduras to protect U.S. interests in that country, part of a pattern of imperialist intervention that began around the turn of the century and continued for decades to come. Mark Twain was still alive and published a work entitled Christian Science.

The famed ship Lusitania, attacked and sunk by a German U-Boat eight years later, arrived in New York from Liverpool on its maiden voyage. The World Series of 1907 was a matchup of Midwestern teams: the Chicago Cubs and the Detroit Tigers. The Cubs won that year and the next, but 1908 would be the last time until 2016.

It was a nation where the clopping sound of horse hooves on cobblestone streets was more common than the chugging motors of early automobiles. It’s a time that lends itself to nostalgia: barbershop quartets, old-fashioned soda fountains, and Gibson girls are popular shorthand images in public memory. There was much that was charming about this time, but grim realities lurk behind sentimental images of early 20th century America. Homes near factories were often covered in layers of soot. There was virtually no government “safety net”—churches and private charities were the mainstay of help for the poor and dispossessed. In many rural areas, the poor were placed in county poorhouses. There was little in the way of health and safety regulation and protection in American industries. Each year thousands of workers were injured or killed on the job.

Laboring men and women often worked ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week. Child labor in mills, mines, and factories was common. Jim Crow was alive and well in the south, and lynch law was a fearsome reality for black men. Housewives labored long hours each day on domestic tasks. The wealthier among them could afford maids and servants to help with the work, making domestic labor one of the top job categories for women. Since the late 1800s large numbers of European immigrants had come into the U.S., and crowded tenements and city neighborhoods with deplorable living conditions were a challenge for municipal leaders. An impulse to reform was in the air.

This was America in 1907 when Anderson arrived in Elyria. He was responsible for a family and opportunity was there for the taking. He had known poverty and the economic insecurity that troubled so many at this time. This was his chance.

ANDERSON IN ELYRIA: CONFLICTED MAN

So, what was Anderson’s life in Elyria like before his breakdown? It has much in common today with a liberal-minded businessman interested in art, culture, and ideas who is married to an intelligent, cultured wife. Sherwood and Cornelia were considered “progressive” in the town where they lived, and their associations and activities reflect this reputation. He was also a family man during his time there. When the couple moved to town, they already had one child: Robert Lane Anderson, born in Cleveland on August 16, 1907. Two more children followed: John Sherwood, born at the Maternity Hospital in Cleveland on December 31, 1908, and Marion, known to her family as Mimi, born at the Elyria Memorial Hospital on October 29, 1911.

Anderson and his family enjoyed several years in town before his desire to be an artist conflicted with his earlier dream of business success. Everything wasn’t all business and commerce. In Elyria, he and Cornelia enjoyed a robust social life that included meetings with other young people interested in the arts and literature, a membership in the local country club, and a comfortable home.

That home still stands. It is located at 229 East Seventh Street, not far from the Elyria High School. It is a now a rental property. Anderson purchased his home in 1908 after a short stay with his family in a nearby apartment building called The Gray, still extant in the late twentieth century but since demolished. His Elyria house is one of a number of homes connected to Anderson still standing. Aside from Ripshin, the home he built in Virginia in the mid 1920s, two houses remain in Clyde where Anderson and his family lived and his birthplace home remains in Camden, Ohio.

 

His home was my first destination the night I arrived in Elyria in July of 2018. I drove past several times that night, taking fast glances at the property and quickly snapping a couple of photos during the letup in a heavy summer shower. The weather was fine the following day it, so I got out and walked some on the street.

This house has its own claim to literary history. We can date the start of Anderson’s writing career to his time in Chicago when he contributed articles to advertising trade publications. But it was here–in the upstairs room of this home– that Anderson began writing seriously late at night after the workday ended. Anderson claimed this space for himself not long after they moved in. He felt he needed a room where he could write in solitude and meditate. Here began the long apprenticeship that resulted in a successful literary career.

His former home and others on the street looked in good shape when I visited. Anderson lived next door to a man named Angelo Delia, an Italian immigrant stonecutter who cultivated a large garden. In the Memoirs, Anderson made him a successful restaurateur instead of a stonecutter. Delia enjoyed gardening. Across the street lived a man named Frank Wilford and his wife. Wilford was a successful Elyria attorney. The Wilfords participated in some of the same social organizations as the Andersons.

Anderson and Cornelia were part of the city’s young elite, although not among the wealthy. There was sophistication and a level of tolerance in the more educated and prosperous of Elyria’s population. Sherwood and  Cornelia both participated in a range of civic and social activities. Cornelia was involved in the Political Study Club, a group originally focused on women’s suffrage, but which widened its interests to topics such as child welfare and penal reform. The years the Andersons lived in Elyria were a heady time in American politics. Interest in reform was strong, particularly regarding the excesses of capitalism. The group wasn’t squeamish about controversial issues. At one point they discussed the problem of venereal disease and whether some kind of venereal disease prevention should be taught in the local schools.

Their closeness to Cleveland and places like Oberlin College allowed for access to broader cultural life. Cornelia and other residents went to see the renowned Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra perform at Oberlin under the direction of the renowned British conductor Leopold Stokowski.

Cornelia had interests beyond politics. Women interested in clubs devoted to art, music, or literature could find them in Elyria, and she was elected to the Fortnightly Club which, according to a source cited by Walter Rideout, was “ ‘the oldest women’s club in Ohio and the first purely literary club in the state.’ ”

Members of the Fortnightly Club read authors such as Ibsen and Tolstoy. Cornelia was well educated and well read, and she composed a paper for the Fortnightly Club entitled “Social Conditions In Russia” as well as one for the Political Study Club titled “Why English Women Are Militant.” Cornelia was an advocate for women’s rights, an interest Sherwood appears to have supported. He took a day off from work to accompany Cornelia to a state meeting of the Ohio Equal Suffrage Association on June 27, 1911 at the amusement park Cedar Point near Sandusky, Ohio. Cedar Point is still a popular destination for vacationers.

Anderson also gave a speech to the Teachers’ Club of Elyria in early January 2011. He encouraged practical education for young women and spoke on the role of women in business life. Sherwood and Cornelia were both members of a group of young people called the Round Table Club, which Rideout described as “a discussion group for young to middle aged people, mostly married couples.” Townspeople also turned out in 1911 to hear the anarchist Emma Goldman, and during the same year the local branch of the Socialist Party hosted a speaker series featuring five Socialist lecturers. Emma Goldman would later be deported to the Soviet Union during the Red Scare of 1919.

During his Elyria years, Anderson began to display overt signs of the impulses to growth and creativity stirring within him, along with instances of frustration and rebellion. Anderson was formulating his own ideas about art, life, and society. Members of the Round Table Club noted that Sherwood greatly admired the groundbreaking Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen. Some found Anderson obnoxious, which he may have been at times, but some opposition likely stemmed from conservative club members put off by challenging modern ideas. The Wilfords in particular objected to the “modernistic” cast to Anderson’s thinking. Mrs. Wilford thought Anderson believed in “free love” and supported socialism. Nellie Lewis, a teacher of German at the Elyria High School, joined Mrs. Wilford in her objections. She thought Anderson conceited, although Rideout maintains that others did not share this opinion. Anderson speaking more openly about sex also offended Lewis.

We have no way of knowing specifically what Anderson said on these occasions. It’s possible his opinions might be considered radical or controversial even today. He might have violated some boundaries or provided “too much information” as current parlance would have it, but it’s also possible that any open questioning of social structures or broaching taboo subjects alarmed some of his more conservative townspeople. What I find interesting here, given Anderson’s long concern with people living honest, authentic lives, is that he seemed to be testing out some of his ideas in these discussion groups.

On the other hand, Anderson was probably annoying and erratic in some of these discussions. He appeared  insecure about his lack of education, and he could brush aside his wife’s opinions during discussion. Mrs. Wilford even characterized his behavior as “oafish.” On another occasion, when Anderson asked his wife about the definition of a word and she didn’t know it, he seemed pleased that she was stumped.

Insecurity and fear also seem to have colored his relationship with next-door neighbor Angelo Delia. As Walter Rideout noted, Anderson regarded his next-door neighbor as a peasant. A woman named Alma Galli, who was Delia’s niece by marriage, told Walter Rideout in 1961 that her uncle believed Anderson “looked down on him as a peasant.” She added that townspeople seemed to like her uncle, but he was excluded from the kind of company Anderson kept.

Anderson was progressive in many respects, especially for the early twentieth century, but any detailed study of his life reveals that, like others of his time, including prominent artists and intellectuals, Anderson had prejudices that our culture rejects. In particular, he had some sexist views towards women and also displayed a paternalistic racism towards black people that he never abandoned, although race relations in America troubled him.

However, Anderson was a complex man. If he displayed prejudices all too typical for his time, he also possessed a deep empathy, practiced a relentless self-questioning, and maintained a powerful abiding concern with attitudes and beliefs that keep people from living fulfilling and creative lives. Anderson showed a great sensitivity to people overlooked and marginalized. He was concerned about fractured relations between men and women. His observations about the warped emotional lives of men, particularly those damaged by the rat race of capitalism, look ahead to later social criticism and current concerns about the emotional and spiritual emptiness in men and boys today.

He spoke out against anti-Semitism, was sickened by the lynching of black men, and supported the work of Jean Toomer, a black novelist and poet. In his last days he made a trip to South America with his fourth and last wife Eleanor Copenhaver to study and write about life in South America. It was during this trip that he died in the Panama Canal Zone in March 1941 of peritonitis.

I believe that one unfortunate consequence of Anderson’s early death is that he didn’t get to witness America’s incredible mobilization during WWII. I believe he would have been traveling the country, amazed at the incredible  changes in American life. The suffering would have appalled him, but he would have relished witnessing America rising to the challenge and enjoyed speaking with Americans across the country.

Anyone who reads Anderson’s letters or his Memoirs encounters the reflection and self-evaluation that Anderson pursued throughout his life–which brings us back to the matter of Angelo Delia. He is significant in Anderson’s Elyria days because Anderson later wrote about him at some length in his Memoirs. The Delia passages in his Memoirs testify to Anderson’s pursuit of social mobility and the desire to fit in with the ruling WASP class in Elyria.  For the Anderson writing in the early 1940s, his earlier attitudes and behavior are a source of regret. This is an Anderson older and wiser, one who had spent months living abroad and had traveled more extensively around the United States, who knew the vagaries of fame, had been hailed as a bold new voice in American letters and then dismissed as a has-been and a failure.

Delia during the Elyria days may have rattled him in part because he reminded Anderson of his own past. Delia was a skilled craftsman like Irwin Anderson. Sherwood Anderson also believed that his maternal grandmother, a moody and mysterious figure who rarely visited the family when he was growing up, was Italian, although she actually was German. “I would remember a certain Italian grandmother of my own, Italian peasant with big hips. I dare say she couldn’t even read or write,” Anderson declares in the Memoirs.

In contrast to the driven and anxious Anderson, Delia seemed content in his world, running his stonecutting business and spending time with his family. He was a man who worked with his hands and enjoyed gardening. Anderson wrote in his Memoirs that “I had got a great curiosity and although the man and I never became friends (I was still too stuffy to go toward him as I should have done)…” There is a palpable regret on Anderson’s part about his attitude towards Angelo Delia that emanates from this section of the Memoirs.

Anderson describes seeing Delia with his wife and children working in his garden one morning. Anderson is sitting near the window of his attic rom following one of his depressing debauches with other businessmen. Contrasted with his description of the stonecutter and his family is Anderson’s account of his empty revelry. One day earlier Anderson and other businessmen drank and consorted with prostitutes in an apartment. Anderson writes of his revulsion at his own behavior.

Anderson danced with one of the women and impulsively bit her shoulder. She then slapped him on the face. Anderson said that the two are now even and that “We have expressed what we feel for each other,” then added “she laughed a little and we were a bit closer to each other after that.” He also describes a conversation with a friend at the party. The man said that a new factory is coming to Elyria from Pittsburgh, “a big concern that makes iron pipe.” Labor is feeling its oats in Pittsburgh, the man says, and can be “handled” in Elyria.

He has a piece of land and tells Anderson that, “We are going to stick up a lot of little working men’s dwellings, cheap affairs. They should make easily fifteen or twenty percent.” Anderson goes on to say that the reader can imagine what took shape as a result of this plan, and how it is part of a common American ugliness reflected in mill town housing, tenant farm shacks, inner city tenements, and frame houses in rundown mining towns.

Anderson indicts both his personal and professional life in these pages. As he watches Delia, Anderson writes, “I thought I saw this slow rot going on. We were together fingering and fiddling about a golf course, going about in automobiles, taking the damn little cheating and robbing we were all doing so seriously, going off on such parties as the one I had been on during the very night before all of these things came to me, insulting womanhood at such parties, the women there insulting us. ‘It’s all a sort of universal whoredom,’ I said to myself, sitting there in that window on that early morning in the early spring and through a window watching an Italian man and his family in their garden.”

The deeper he plunged into his writing, the more the rot of his business life wore on him. Although it seems Anderson stayed fairly quiet about his writing, word eventually got around about his literary ambitions. Harry Crandall, a financial backer of Anderson’s company, said that “Anderson was a dreamer and did a lot of writing. He wrote volumes of stuff instead of tending to business. There was usually a sheet of manuscript on his desk.”

The tension between his public role as businessman and private ambition as author seem reflected in a strange public moment less than two years before his Elyria breakdown.

As noted earlier, Anderson spoke to the Teachers Club of Elyria on January 20, 1911 on the topic “Women In Business.” Anderson felt women should be prepared for dealing with life’s practical realities. Women profited from working in business settings and made better candidates for marriage and motherhood. Anderson didn’t seem to be stumping for women having any possible job option. It seems his focus was more on positions such as secretaries, typists, shop workers, and so on.

But Anderson made an interesting statement during this speech: he criticized girls and women for spending long hours reading romances and daydreaming. There is a sexist element to this statement—boys and men can be equally guilty of reading escapist literature and daydreaming. But it’s one of those odd moments, like Anderson playing golf with the country club men, that stands in sharp contrast to his own personal history and his empathy for overlooked people possessed of imagination and sensitivity. The daydreaming reader tag could certainly have applied to Anderson himself not only in his earlier years, but during his private life in Elyria.

I think his comment provides a glimpse into his own struggle regarding his roles, his multiplicity of selves and conflicted sense of mission. At first blush Anderson sounds like one of the early apostles of success in America: Jobby grown up and speaking on behalf of the Protestant work ethic. Anderson was surely well aware of his audience’s needs and expectations—he was speaking to an assemblage of local teachers—and his own role as successful man of business. Anderson comes across as the pragmatist concerned with everyday realities, and if women are going to be in the workforce, they should put their shoulders to the wheel.

It is also possible that hiding behind the businessman persona there is a glimpse of Anderson the writer here, the man who applauded Ibsen, Dreiser, and Turgenev. The literary marketplace of 1912 was crowded with volumes of treacly sentimental fiction geared towards a female audience, and Anderson had little use for the popular romances of his time or short story writers like O. Henry known for trick endings. Furthermore, Anderson may have had in mind Cornelia, who continually studied serious literature, among other subjects, and who became a high school English teacher later on, and his own sister Stella, a gifted young woman and excellent student who also became a teacher. In addition, Anderson in his business role also had some notions about what constituted “good reading” that date back to his days writing articles for advertising trade publications.

On the other hand, Anderson’s creative vocation at this time was still more a shadow of his public persona as businessman and prosperous citizen, although some people, including fellow businessmen, were becoming aware of this emerging interest in writing. It’s quite likely that some didn’t approve or at the least thought Anderson flakey. At this time Anderson was deep into his own writing, logging long hours in his upstairs room exploring his imagination. One of Anderson’s favorite writers was English novelist George Borrow, famous for his two romances about Romani-British gypsy life: Lavengro and Romany Rye.

The devotee of Borrow is also the same man who, as a boy, spent long hours daydreaming, who drifted into fugue-like states of disassociation, and who was now increasingly critical of American industrial society. Before moving his books and papers into his attic room, Anderson performed a kind of purification ritual to prepare the space for creation: he removed his clothes before scrubbing down the room. Talk about a romantic gesture! The dreamer, fiction reader, and budding writer would soon overwhelm the Ohio businessman.

ANDERSON–THE COUNTRY CLUB AND THE ELKS:

The image of Anderson in Elyria I find the most jarring is the Class B golfer at the Elyria Country Club. The country club is an institution strongly associated with caste, wealth, and exclusion. Memberships are usually expensive, and restrictions on who could join were common in the past. For decades many were off limits to Jews, Catholics, and blacks. Not long ago in my own town there was a feature in a local publication on a private golf club in the community. In the next issue there was a short but strongly worded letter to the editor noting that Jews were denied membership there for years—an unpleasant reality absent from the article.

The country club as an embodiment of WASP social caste and affluence in American life has left its mark on our popular culture. Novelists such as Sinclair Lewis, John O’Hara and F. Scott Fitzgerald made use of country club life in their stories. O’Hara’s Appointment In Samarra begins with an act of petulant violence by a man named Julian English at his country club that sets in motion his social downfall. Sherwood Anderson, the poor boy from Clyde, experienced country club life firsthand in Elyria, Ohio.

Anderson was one of a number of Elyria men “elected to family memberships” in the Elyria County Club in the spring of 1908, a testament to his rising social status. The Elyria County Club, founded in 1905, still exists, and I made it a point to drive out there during my short time in Elyria. My views of the place were limited—I stopped by shortly before leaving Elyria for Clyde and my views were limited to what I could see in the parking lot—but it struck me as a handsome place, and online views of the course and building interiors are impressive. According to Walter Rideout in his first volume of his Anderson biography, “The club, situated on the southern outskirts of the city along a branch of the Black River, provided a golf course, tennis courts, canoeing, and dining facilities, and was a focus of social life for the more well-to-do Elyrians.”  Anderson played golf there often, finding it a relief from the demands of business, and won the Class B tournament cup in July of 1909. Anderson later served on the Greens Committee and became a club director.

The Country Club was also the site of a special occasion for Cornelia. She entertained the ladies of the Fortnightly Club there. This was another example of the secure social status Cornelia enjoyed. In contrast to the varied perceptions of her husband, which ranged from strange and aloof to considerate and good-natured, Cornelia’s social reputation seemed consistently positive. She was even chosen to pour tea at a lawn party given by a local women’s charity in June of 1911 at the house of one of Elyria’s first families. This was a social triumph for a woman with an upper middle class background like Cornelia.

I have often wondered what Anderson thought of these country club members. He came from humble circumstances and now found himself in the upper middle class. It must have been strange for him to socialize with moneyed people at play after an upbringing spent in the company of farmers, tradesmen, and manual laborers. One time Anderson’s frustration with the emptiness of his life and those around him bubbled to the surface. He described this incident in his Memoirs.

Anderson was playing golf in a foursome with some other men. He hit the ball and it landed in a nearby cornfield. One of his fellow players told him to ignore it, but Anderson climbed a barbed wire fence to get the ball, mumbling to himself, “You go to hell, you bastard” and even said it under his breath as one of the players who followed him over the fence walked towards him. The man didn’t hear him, but Anderson said he had a headache, began walking towards the clubhouse, which broke up the foursome, then later sneaked back into the field to retrieve the ball. Discontent was brewing inside him.

Anderson also belonged to the Elks Club in Elyria, which I viewed from the street when I visited Elyria in July of 2018. The Elks, more properly known as The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, were formed in 1868 by a group of actors to support fellow thespians in financial straits. The Elks were one of a number of male fraternal organizations that emerged in the mid to late 1800s that combined fellowship with charitable activity. Other such examples are the Moose, the Odd Fellows, the Eagles and more business-centered organizations like Rotary and the Lions Club.

The lodge was built in 1911. Anderson spent time shooting pool there and visiting with his fellow Elks. Anderson would have known the building well. An upstairs ballroom was later made into a bowling alley and front porch space was added on either side of the door, but the building looks much the same as it did when constructed. The Elks lodge in Elyria is still active. The national leadership of the Elks opened membership to women during the 1990s and some lodges in the United States have experienced dramatic membership growth in recent years, with the local Elks lodge being a place where people from all walks of life can enjoy fellowship and community service.

Despite the phoniness that leached into his business and social activities, Anderson also had some positive, nurturing relationships in Elyria. Sherwood’s best friend was a man named Perry S. Williams, a liberal Republican who managed two of the city’s papers, one weekly and one daily, and was heavily involved in Republican Party politics.

He was a Toledo native and a bachelor. Anderson biographer Walter Rideout described him as “rather a rake.” Williams worked as a manager of the Republican Printing Company and founded the Elyria Evening Telegram in 1907. Both his publishing career and involvement in Republican politics began around 1900. Perry Williams also wrote an entertaining early history of Elyria.

A graduate of Elyria High School, Williams was a well-connected man about town. He was a couple of years younger than Anderson. He belonged to a plethora of civic organizations—the Masons, Moose, Elks, Eagles–in addition to the Country Club and the Chamber of Commerce. Williams was Secretary of the Republican County Executive Committee and was elected city treasurer in May of 1902 and served in that role until January 1, 1910, when President William Howard Taft commissioned Williams as census supervisor for the Thirteenth Ohio District. Perry later represented the Fourteenth Ohio District at the National Progressive Convention in Chicago on August 5, 1912, which nominated Teddy Roosevelt as its Presidential candidate.

Anderson and Perry liked to discuss literature and ideas. Cornelia recalled that Sherwood liked to quote him. Perry and Anderson joined another man on a canoe trip on the Black River’s western branch that ended past Oberlin. Williams recalled that Anderson liked to get going early. Anderson, Perry recalled, “at 4 a.m. thought it was about time to get under sail again and incidentally commenced to tell us some adventures he had down in Clyde when he was a boy.” Anderson’s storytelling nature is evident here, and there is also an echo of his father Irwin, a raconteur who enjoyed entertaining other men in bars and taverns with his tales. According to Walter Rideout, there was “a tradition” in Elyria that Williams once directly asked Anderson why he didn’t get out of business and just write.

Perry is mentioned directly at one point in the Memoirs, but there is another man in this work named “Luther Pawsey” who is likely a stand-in for Williams. Pawsey is a reflective man and a printer who tells Anderson he has a way with words. Anderson’s works of autobiography and memoir are a tricky matter. The edition of Anderson’s Memoirs as edited by Ray Lewis White is, broadly speaking, the closest thing we have to any straightforward book length account of Anderson’s life by himself. A Story-Teller’s Story is an earlier autobiography, and Tar is a fictionalized account of his upbringing, but there is much of a factual nature in a work like Tar and there is fiction in A Story-Teller’s Story. 

 

Anderson is given to changing aspects of a story or a person’s life while still conveying much of the truth of persons or situations as he saw them. In Tar, for instance, which closely matches much of the reality of Anderson’s early life, the charming and smooth-talking father is made into a southerner, although Irwin Anderson was originally born and raised in Adams County, Ohio, located eastward of Cincinnati and part of Ohio’s southeastern, Appalachian-flavored corner that eventually bumps up against West Virginia. But key aspects of Irwin—the good natured old soldier, the easy-come-easy-go father, the storyteller—are present in the characterization.

This approach is evident in the Pawsey material in the Memoirs. Luther Pawsey is much like Perry Williams. He is an intelligent and reflective print shop owner who has a way with the ladies, but seems more of a loner than Williams. However, the friendship and understanding the two men feel for one another seems much like that of Anderson and Williams, and the support for Anderson’s writing is of a piece with Anderson’s actual friend. Anderson relates that Pawsey said something similar to Gertrude Stein’s comment to Anderson years later that “You sometimes write what is the most important thing of all to be able to write, passionate and innocent sentences.”

Pawsey helps Anderson to see his gift and the true value of it and the emptiness behind the language of his advertising circulars. Anderson adds that Pawsey helped him to realize that “I had been using the words of our human speech, really, to deceive men.”

The Pawsey material clearly demonstrates how valuable this friendship was to Anderson and the importance it played in his development. Given this influence, there might have been another factor at work in Anderson’s likely conversion of Williams to Pawsey. The memoir genre, which has exploded in recent years, is fraught with potential problems for those who write them and those written about. Writers of memoir provide their own interpretations of real past events, which can be remembered differently by others, and controversy often attends the publication of memoirs. Anderson, who left Elyria under a cloud and was considered a smutty writer by some librarians and critics back in the 1920s, might have wanted to protect his old friend from association with him in print, especially given Williams’s political career and position as publisher in Elyria.

Another companion of Anderson’s in Elyria when she visited was Trillena White, a schoolteacher ten years older than Sherwood who had lived in The Oaks when he attended Wittenberg Academy. Trillena White seems to have understood Anderson and seen the potential in him. She may also have been in love with him. Anderson would later write, “She was a great woman to me, and the one who first introduced me to fine literature.” Trillena White visited the Andersons in Elyria and may have resided there for a while with the family. She would later recall having coffee with Sherwood in the morning after Sherwood had been up for several hours writing. She wrote Anderson years later that, “Those were the days of the travail of your soul, but none of us knew it.”

Anderson’s brother Earl also lived with Sherwood and his family for a while in Elyria and clerked at Sherwood’s factory. Earl lived with the family in The Gray and followed them to the house on Seventh Street, residing there until early 1911. He left Elyria for New Orleans to visit their brother Irwin, an employee of the American Can Company. Earl eventually left New Orleans and embarked on a long period of drifting that included a stint in the U.S. Naval Reserve in World War I and merchant marine service afterwards. It wasn’t until 1926, when Earl Anderson became seriously ill in New York City, that Sherwood and his siblings reconnected with Earl.

The story of Sherwood and Earl is a poignant chapter in Anderson’s family history. Sherwood had four brothers and one sister. Earl was the youngest surviving child, born in 1888. A daughter named Fern was born after Earl, but she died shortly before the age of two. Fern and Earl were the only two Anderson children born in Clyde.

For some reason Earl believed he was unwanted, but Sherwood felt Earl had much to offer the world and valued his company. Although Earl felt his mother didn’t want him, they are joined together in death: Earl was buried alongside his mother in the MacPherson Cemetery in Clyde, Ohio. Kim Townsend gives an excellent description of the connection between the men in his book Sherwood Anderson: A Biography:

“There were so few men with whom he had anything in common. Earl was a companion on his walks. Earl opened up, talked about the beauties of the countryside, about a desire for women so passionate that he feared he might assault them in an effort to get some of their beauty for himself, about his ambition to be a painter like their older brother Karl, and about his knowledge that he was doomed to fail. To Anderson his brother always symbolized the sensitive, lonely, vulnerable people of America, the kind of people who stood in stark contrast to any ‘business type’ he knew or could imagine, the kind of person he could write about.

Specifically, Earl’s presence comes through Anderson’s portrait of Enoch Robinson in “Loneliness” and makes that one of the most moving of the Winesburg, Ohio tales. In time Earl left to be with their brother Irve, who had become a manufacturer in New Orleans, and then in 1913 he disappeared altogether, until he was found thirteen years later on a street in New York City, having suffered a paralytic stroke.”

Anderson later wrote that Earl “had a great deal to do with my becoming a writer and understanding a little the impulses and purposes of the artist man.” Rideout wrote, “Karl too was convinced that the association with Earl had helped stimulate Sherwood to write, especially to undertake his first novel.”

Encouragement to write also came from Cornelia. She accepted his writing and, according to to Florence Terry, a friend of both Sherwood and Cornelia, helped him with matters such as “diction and rhetoric” and the “manner” in which he expressed ideas, and she never disapproved of any of Sherwood’s subject matter. Mrs. Wilford also noted Cornelia’s support of Anderson’s writing career. These observations are noteworthy as Anderson himself led people in later years to believe that his wife was opposed to his writing.

This attitude seems related to the competitiveness and jealousy Anderson felt towards Cornelia. Earlier I noted an occasion in which Anderson identified a word he knew but she did not. Mrs. Robert Lane, Cornelia’s sister-in-law, witnessed this event and said that Anderson was as “delighted as a child” to have stumped his wife and that Cornelia regarded him in the moment with tolerance and as though he were “a child with a new toy.” Mrs. Lane clearly spotted this rivalry Anderson felt towards Cornelia.

Rideout wrote, “Drawn to her in part precisely because of her education, her intellectual acumen, and her enthusiasm for ideas, which was as intense as his own, he wanted the education that he had missed and felt sharply the lack of, and resented her having so much. This sense of competitiveness could manifest itself in apparently trivial but revealing ways.” Anderson may have felt jealous for other reasons. In addition to her intellectual gifts, Cornelia seems like a centered person who skillfully navigated the upper middle class world of Elyria. She was broadminded and likely could appreciate the social rituals of this society but not take them too seriously. She didn’t seem oppressed by any exterior or interior force, unlike Sherwood, who eventually became a trial for her.

As Walter Rideout highlights in his biography, Anderson’s portrayal of Cornelia resisting his literary ambitions might have been a way to further emphasize “the impediments that the American artist must overcome,” and his “several accounts probably reveal less about Cornelia than about his subsequent desire to justify himself as artist and ex-husband.” Perhaps it was not so much Cornelia herself but that she embodied a situation to him that he found increasingly untenable–that of being a middle class businessman with a wife and family to provide for as he navigated the torrent of creative and emotional forces unleashed in him. Anderson never became a captain of industry, but he created a myth of himself as a different sort of “self-made man.” Cornelia was an impediment to this transformation.

It was a kind of reinvention. In this myth, Anderson overcame resistance from his cultivated but incompatible wife, threw off the shackles of conventional living and boldly walked away from commerce one autumn morning in 1912 and became an artist, eventually contributing to the Modernist revolution in literature and other arts in both the United States and Europe. Like any story, it has its core element of conflict. Anderson is the hero pitted against the forces that would stifle him, these being wife and family and the business culture of northeastern Ohio in the early twentieth century. It’s easier to cover the guilt you feel about your behavior when you can cast yourself as someone fighting off forces of personal oppression. I can imagine him looking at her and feeling like somehow she had tricked him into a life that was unacceptable to him now, but it was one for which he was ultimately responsible.

It’s clear that Anderson felt deeply insecure. Brought up in small town Ohio in poverty with limited education and a feckless, alcoholic father, Anderson still rose high on the economic ladder, but the elevated circumstances in which he found himself seemed to reinforce a feeling of inferiority. Skilled at the smooth patter of the salesman and advertising man, he could move at ease among fellow businessmen and join in their empty pleasures that reflected the double standards of the time, but he was revolted by his own behavior. Both personal ambition and firsthand experience of poverty and deprivation pushed him to rise in society and better himself, but at a high cost to his spirit.

He fell in love with an impressive young woman, married her, and they created a family. Sherwood Anderson likely felt he was doing what he wanted to do and was expected to do. And as time went by, the other facets of his being—the deep fascination with human nature, the fierce urge to create, the powerful interest in modernistic thinking—disrupted the conventional existence he had created for himself. His unrelenting creative drive roiled Anderson, and his old pattern of life, which he had worked so hard to create, was disrupted. This caused immense pain for both himself and his family.

Anderson likely felt an odd duck in the world he created and lived in. We should consider his personal history and emotional life. Anderson in many ways raised himself on the streets of Clyde and Chicago, grabbing at whatever morsels of culture he could find. He was fortunate to experience the rich oral storytelling culture of his environment—and his father was more of an influence than he might have realized at this time—but never experienced learning from or knowing practicing writers of fiction or poetry during his youth and early manhood.

He lacked the steady male influence that a reliable father could provide, and he came to despise his father. Anderson was fortunate to have some positive male role models in his life, such as a school superintendent, a local amateur artist, and Herman Hurd’s father, but solid, consistent male role modeling was missing. His beloved and overworked mother died when he was a young man, and he also suffered the loss of his little sister Fern, a deeply painful experience for his entire family. Anderson’s father left the children after his wife died, and Anderson’s problem with the man was so intense that he never saw or heard from him again or apparently made any effort to contact him.

Some aspects of his experiences are not unlike those of Jack London, who was also born in 1876. Both men learned what they could from books and the world around them and worked a variety of jobs before becoming writers. Both experienced poverty and returned to school during early manhood for a brief period of higher education. Both were self taught as writers. Their lives were very different, but both of them beat the odds in overcoming their backgrounds and earning a permanent place in American literature. Anderson and London are both two of the classic long shot stories in American letters.

In writing about Sherwood Anderson in Elyria, I am reminded of how vastly different our world is from the time of his upbringing and later years in northeastern Ohio. The society Anderson knew as a child was one in which self-reliance was no platitude, but an everyday necessity. There was little in the way of a “social safety net” outside of local churches and private charities. Today a woman like Emma Anderson could draw on food stamps and other forms of assistance from the Sandusky County Job and Family Services. She could work with child welfare advocates and the court system to pressure Irwin Anderson to provide more for his children.

School counselors and psychologists and therapists from outside agencies could be of assistance to such a family. All of the Anderson children today would be expected to finish high school and encouraged to pursue some other education, whether college or vocational training, or else begin working or join the military. In our world, a young National Guardsman like Anderson can get college or vocational training on the GI Bill. Vocational training can also be obtained in high school.

Anderson was a self-taught writer who lived long before the professionalization of “creative writing” in the United States. He lived long enough to see it begin in colleges and universities in the 1930s, but nothing like it existed for most of his lifetime. A young person growing up today can pursue creative writing as a major in college and earn a Masters of Fine Arts or even a doctorate in the subject, with some kind of completed creative work–novel or poetry or short story collection—serving as dissertation. There are magazines devoted to the business of writing and publishing. The reference shelves of chain stores like Barnes and Noble carry numerous books on creative writing and establishing a writing career.

Moreover, in the years since Anderson died in 1941, we have learned much about issues such as disassociation, alcoholism and drug addiction, abandonment, child and adolescent development, and the entire constellation of issues associated with family dysfunction and trauma. We have developed many effective treatments to help people with their emotional and mental health. Anderson had no recourse to any such options. He did the best he could, and out of the probing of his own mind and experience, he learned much about human nature. But it is unfortunate that he lacked the help we have available today to help him understand his breakdown episodes in Cleveland and Elyria.

Aside from the myth he created, there is credence to the idea that Anderson was very much a self-made man. There is something heroic in his accomplishment, especially given his background. It took tremendous courage to say no to the industrial career he was pursuing and follow his heart. I would venture also that Anderson probably struggled with traditional conditioning he likely experienced growing up in small town Ohio that said artistic careers were strange and foreign and far from the practical everyday world he and his people were steeped in.

One of the sadder dimensions, aside from Anderson’s suffering, is what his decisions cost his family. Seeing the traces of Anderson’s Elyria during my time there underscored the cost to those closest to him.

For me, the Anderson house in Elyria represents the divided nature of Anderson during those years. In the attic room was the sanctuary, the place where Anderson’s literary ventures began in earnest. But his attic retreat was one part of a place shared with Cornelia, Robert, John, Mimi, Earl, and the various friends and relatives who stayed with the Andersons for varying lengths of time. Here Anderson tried to be a husband and father.

The marriage had begun with optimism. For a while all went well. But this house became the setting for tense moments between Sherwood and Cornelia. Anderson later wrote, “She had always considered me a little twisted in the head and who can blame her?”

He also wrote the following:

“It was her fate to live with me in my terrible time and to know nothing of what went on in my soul and I could not understand what went on in her either. In the house we looked at each other with unseeing eyes. Now and then tenderness swept over us and we sat in the darkness late at night and wept.”

As with so many marriages that fall apart, the lack of communication was a problem. Anderson doesn’t seem to have spoken much with Cornelia about what he was going through, and she seems to have held back from communicating as well.

For Anderson, things sometimes took on a particularly dark and ugly aspect:

“Just because I was married to her when I did not want to be I imagined terrible things about her. It did not seem to me possible to escape out of marriage into life. I pictured her as my jailer and terrible hate woke in me. At night I even dreamed of killing her.”

One time Anderson came back from one of his long walks at night to see Cornelia out in the backyard early in the morning, pacing back and forth and wringing her hands and talking to herself. Anderson positioned himself behind the hedge around the backyard and watched her. Bitterness welled up inside him as he watched her. It was a moment when she appeared to embody all that he felt was strangling him. “No you don’t, goddamn you,” he said to himself. “You don’t get me in that way.” He then opted to go into town for breakfast and then on to his office.

Cornelia’s situation must have been incredibly frustrating. She likely felt shut out from his life when he sealed himself off in his upstairs room. He must have seemed at times like a man possessed. She probably felt also that she was raising the children by herself. Soon enough she would be.

Anderson did love his kids and spent time with them. Rideout mentioned in his magisterial biography of Anderson that Mrs. Wilford could recall the sound of Anderson playing with his children. Anderson was the one who put the children to bed each night. Rideout writes that “the Wilfords across the street were aware that early evening was a raucous time over at the Anderson house, the noises seeming like circus animals to Mrs. Wilford, who was less tolerant of such bedtime antics than her husband.”

Anderson, during these bedtime rituals and at other moments when he took them on his lap and told them stories, felt it was important to “teach imagination” to them. However, the main burden of raising them fell on Cornelia, and Anderson himself told Cornelia’s sister-in-law that this arrangement, in Rideout’s words, “gave him a chance to get ahead of his wife and reading and learning.” One can only imagine what Cornelia would have made of such a statement.

Anderson was very much a product of his times, seeing his fatherly role as mainly that of a breadwinner. He enjoyed playing with them when they were small, brought them gifts from his work travels, and loved them as much as he was able. Like many men of his time, he seems to have seen his wife as the one responsible for the day to day rearing of the children. There are certainly fathers like him today–men who work long hours while their wives stay at home with the kids, who occasionally play with the kids and help put them to bed at night, but are still largely absent from their lives.

I find Anderson’s treatment of Cornelia and his children the most bothersome aspects of the man, although it is important to acknowledge that Anderson later recognized and regretted what his development cost them. He made a serious effort to help each of his children in later years. In retrospect we could argue that such a man should not have married or had children when he was so young and unformed, but such was not the case.

The long shadow of Irwin Anderson hangs over his son’s life. Anderson bitterly resented his father for the burdens he put on his wife and the poverty and insecurity that hung over the children as they grew up. He walked out on the family after Emma Anderson died. It is remarkable to me that Anderson had no contact at all with his father after he left Clyde, nor did he attend his father’s funeral. Anderson would wrestle with his father’s legacy his entire life.

Despite these issues, Anderson was much like his father, probably more than he cared to admit. The tale-telling Irwin had his own parallel in his story-writing son, and just as Irwin’s stories often concerned his own exploits, his son would be one of the most autobiographical of American writers. Irwin Anderson’s proficiency at oral storytelling is echoed in style of Anderson’s fiction, which is strongly influenced by the oral storytelling culture nineteenth century America.

Anderson saw in both himself and his father an element of “slickness” that he deeply distrusted. He later sensed this own trait in his son Bob when Bob was a young man and shared his concern with him. He was particularly troubled when Bob expressed an interest in going into politics when both he and Bob lived in Marion, Virginia.

Anderson developed stronger relationships with his children when they were older, but he drifted away from them and only saw them periodically in the years immediately after leaving Elyria. When Anderson moved back to Chicago after his breakdown and resumed advertising work, he moved into a rented room and Cornelia and the children moved into a cottage at Little Sable Point, Michigan owned by Sherwood’s sister Stella. Anderson continued to provide financial support for his children from his copywriting work, but he was drifting further away from his family. He began to spend time in company of other Chicago area bohemians and artists. Cornelia joined him in some of these gatherings. She seems to have been liked and respected by Anderson’s friends, but he was clearly moving in a different world. During this time he met the woman who became his second wife–a sculptor named Tennessee Claflin Mitchell.

He and Cornelia tried to make a go of their marriage, even going on a special retreat in the Ozark mountains in Missouri in 1913-1914, but it was not to be. They divorced on July 27, 1916, and Cornelia agreed to take custody of the children. The two of them appeared to have worked out the divorce plan together. Cornelia entered a Bill of Complaint for desertion, noting that payments had been irregular and that Cornelia “had been obliged to teach school for her own support and to help support the children.” She requested she “be awarded such sums of money for the support or (her) and her children.” Anderson did not respond to the chancery summons (which might have been part of their plan) and the judge ruled for testimony in open court. The court declared awarded custody to Cornelia until each child turned fourteen as Sherwood was found to be “an unsuitable person to have the care, custody and maintenance of the children.”

However, the judge ruled that Cornelia was “not to be entitled to, or receive” from Anderson “any alimony, maintenance or support.” It seems that Cornelia somehow found a way to make the judge go easy on Anderson. As Rideout noted, “One can only guess that in her testimony in open court Cornelia had, characteristically, been more generous towards Sherwood’s irregularities than the necessary legalisms of the Complaint had implied.”

Cornelia Lane Anderson later wrote the following to scholar William Sutton, author of The Road To Winesburg:

“The step he took in giving up his family was not an easy one, but I still think he did the right thing. He wouldn’t have been free to develop otherwise. You are worldly-wise enough to know that some marriages don’t last forever. Then a separation is the best thing. It is a question whether living in a strained atmosphere would be any better for the children. I am a much better person for having known him so well.

I don’t know whether you would agree. I read once that what a genius needs is a mother and not a wife. I do.”

Sherwood and Cornelia maintained a cordial relationship through the years, and Cornelia always spoke well of him. She had begun working as an elementary school teacher not long before their divorce. She eventually became a high school English teacher. As the children moved into their teenage years, Anderson began to spend more time with all of them. He helped Bob get into the newspaper business in Marion. He also spent time with his son John and encouraged his interest in painting. He became close with his daughter Marion, called “Mimi” by the family, and later Sherwood and his third wife Elizabeth Prall took Mimi and John along with them on a visit of several months to Paris in 1926.

AFTERWORD:

We might also say that Anderson was successful in integrating various aspects of his personality later in his life. While Anderson was a small town boy different in notable ways from his peers, he also felt deeply connected to small communities. He loved the talk around the stores, the changing weathers in the countryside, the rituals of village life. In 1926, Anderson moved to Troutdale, Virginia, a small town not far from the border with eastern Kentucky.

With the money from his one really best selling novel, Dark Laughter, he built a lovely home called Ripshin in Troutdale, but the writing life had always been financially precarious, so to provide steady income, he purchased two newspapers in the town of Marion, one Republican and the other Democrat. He hired a man from each party to write the political editorials for his respective paper.

For a while Anderson ran these papers, overseeing their daily operations and delighting in covering town and country life while also printing famous short stories by authors such as Chekhov. He also wrote an entertaining series of commentaries employing a rural alter ego named “Buck Fever.” Anderson later sold the papers to his son Robert, but for a while he was a man of business more in line with his natural instincts. He had become a small town editor. This suited him better than advertising and factory management.

Sherwood Anderson returned to Elyria twice after his fugue episode and hospitalization. One visit was unintended–his train made a brief stop at the Elyria station in the late 1910s. Anderson was close to his old factory when that train stopped that evening. It must have seemed like a whole other life to him at this point.

His next visit was more considered. In 1934, he and Eleanor took a trip through Ohio where Anderson showed her the towns he had spent time in. By this time he had published seventeen other books in addition to Winesburg, Ohio. He had traveled widely through the United States and lived in various American cities. He had made two extensive trips to Europe and knew or had met many of the prominent artistic and intellectual figures of his times, Twenty-seven years had passed since he and Cornelia had arrived in Elyria.

He and Eleanor drove around town. Eleanor later wrote that “he showed me the factory he walked out of and the street he thought he lived in, but only reluctantly. Says he doesn’t want to think of that awful period.”

But so much of what came later stemmed from his time in Elyria. Here he began to learn his craft and spent the long hours at his desk creating the first of the works that made his name. And in the end he had to tear himself apart from the life he had created to live the one in which his most authentic self was present.

He chose to move beyond fear and create what he felt in his heart. He pursued his vision.

The price was high. And he paid it.

It that isn’t a success story, I don’t know what is.

 

Patrick Kerin

 

Sources:

Sherwood Anderson: A Writer In America—Volumes 1 and 2 by Walter Rideout. 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, Boston, 1987.

Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs: A Critical Edition. Sherwood Anderson, edited by Ray Lewis White. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1942, 1969.

Sherwood Anderson: Selected Letters. Edited by Charles E. Modlin. The University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1984.

Sherwood Anderson: An American Career by John E. Bassett. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press. Associated University Presses, Cranberry, New Jersey, 2007.

Sherwood Anderson by Brom Weber. University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. 43. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1964,

Return to Winesburg: Selections from Four Years of Writing for a Country Newspaper by Sherwood Anderson. Edited with an Introduction by Ray Lewis White. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1967.