The Undeveloped Man: Sherwood Anderson in Elyria, Ohio–Part One of a Series

Thanksgiving Day—November 28, 1912. In St. Louis, Missouri, Holy Cross and St. Louis University square off on the football field, while elsewhere in the city 4,000 pounds of turkey are provided to the city’s poor. Back east in New York City, Governor John Dix pardons Albert Patrick, one of the two men who in 1900 murdered millionaire William Marsh Rice, whose fortune created Rice University in Texas.

In Washington, D.C., President William Howard Taft, recently defeated in the election by Woodrow Wilson, joins other Republican politicians in a service at St. Patrick’s. After church the Ohio-born Taft enjoys Thanksgiving dinner, featuring a prize-winning turkey from Rhode Island and mince pie baked by one of his aunts in Massachusetts.

In Elyria, Ohio, most working people are at their jobs, as is the case for much of the country. Sherwood Anderson, president of the American Merchants Company of Elyria, goes to his office. Anderson has been a fixture in the Elyria business and social scene since his arrival in town five years earlier. Back home his wife Cornelia is preparing the Thanksgiving meal. Her parents have traveled from Toledo for the holiday. Anderson is in his office with his secretary and trusted friend Frances Shute. Anderson opens some mail, leafs through it, and walks over to a gas heater. Frances Shute will later note that on this day he was “acting queerly.”

He turns and says to her, “I feel as though my feet were wet, and they keep getting wetter.” He writes a note for Shute to give to Cornelia, and then leaves his office, walking out into the clear, cold day. His note to Cornelia reads “Cornelia: There is a bridge over a river with cross ties before it. When I come to that I’ll be all right. I’ll write all day in the sun and the wind will blow through my hair. Sherwood.”

He walks past his factory next to the Black River and continues eastward along the railroad tracks. The crossties, rails, and gravel make rough walking for a man in dress shoes. Three days later a Cleveland pharmacist sees a man enter his drugstore. Hair unkempt, his face covered with four days’ growth of beard, his shoes battered, his trousers covered with mud up to the knees, Sherwood Anderson tells the druggist he has no idea where he is or how he arrived there. He doesn’t even know his own name. For nearly four days this neatly dressed, handsome man in his suit has been walking along railroad tracks, sleeping in fields and nibbling on the detritus of the recent harvest: hard corn kernels and cast off apples he has scavenged from fields and orchards. He produces a pocket notebook and gives it to the pharmacist, who calls one of Anderson’s friends in the Cleveland area. He takes Anderson to Cleveland’s Huron Road Hospital for treatment, where he remains for several days and recovers from his ordeal.

Local papers report the incident, where it is generally described as a case of “nervous exhaustion” brought on by anxiety and excessive work. Today what happened to Anderson would likely be described as a kind of disassociative disorder resulting in a fugue state and flight from an overpowering situation. In this condition a person is cut off from an understanding of personal identity and surroundings. Amnesia is often associated with this condition. Towards the end of his journey Anderson apparently entered a state of amnesia. He may have suffered it intermittently during his journey.

This incident was pivotal in Anderson’s life, a turning point marking the end of his efforts to become a prosperous businessman and to instead fulfill his calling as a writer. The one-time northern Ohio captain of industry would leave a powerful mark on American letters. His short story collection, Winesburg, Ohio (1919), is a canonical work still read and taught today. In addition to Winesburg, Anderson published novels, other short story collections, memoirs, essays, and journalism. In the 1930s he turned more of his attention to nonfiction work. He died in March 1941 of peritonitis while on a voyage to South America. He had particular influence on Faulkner and Hemingway. Faulkner later wrote, “Sherwood Anderson was the father of all my works—and those of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, etc. We were influenced by him. He showed us the way.”

There are a number of significant places in Anderson’s life, with several of the most important located in the Midwest. One is Clyde, Ohio, where he grew up after living in several other small Ohio towns. Much of the geography and townscape of Winesburg, Ohio is based on Clyde. Chicago is another, where he made valuable connections, honed his craft and composed Winesburg, Ohio (1919). A third is Marion, Virginia, where he made his home from the mid 1920s until his death in 1941 and where he is buried. Eleanor Copenhaver, Anderson’s fourth and last wife, was a Marion native.

And then there is Elyria, which is located about thirty miles from Cleveland, Ohio. In the geography of Anderson’s life, Elyria is the crossroads. He arrived in this town determined to be a dynamic and successful businessman. He left under a cloud, a disappointment to the business community and the social circles in which he and his wife moved. For Anderson it was ultimately a fortunate escape.

Anderson’s literary vocation took shape in Elyria, making it as important in its own way as Clyde, Ohio. If Clyde provided the guiding image of the mid-American small town and the buried lives of its people, it was in Elyria that he began articulating his vision of life shaped in large part by small American communities and the people who lived in them. Here in this small Ohio city he came into conflict with the life he had chosen. Out of this confusion the writer emerged.

In Elyria he lived a prolonged dark night of the soul. His memories of the place were traumatic enough that he returned only twice. Only one visit was planned. He first saw it again in 1916, four years after his breakdown experience, when his train, bound for New York, stopped briefly at the Elyria depot by the rails he walked that November day. Anderson was only yards from his old factory site. Towards the end of his life he visited once more with his wife Eleanor Copenhaver as they traveled by car through Ohio visiting towns where he had lived. All those years later the memories were still sharp and stinging. Anderson and his family paid a high price for his emancipation.

There were essentially two Sherwood Andersons during his time in Elyria. One was the man grasping for the brass ring. He had staked it all on this dream of fortune. A man of limited education with an impoverished upbringing, he had come far by the time he arrived in Elyria. To understand the severity of Anderson’s break with Elyria and the business world, and why these visits were so painful, it is necessary to understand how completely Anderson had devoted himself to the idea of the successful self made man and what it cost him and his family to abandon this dream. Others had invested in his business and expected things from him. These associates felt betrayed by his abandonment and were suspicious of his breakdown and his interest in writing. He was the sole support of a wife and three children.

The other Anderson, who had always been there, who surfaced often in his long bouts of reading, of dreaming in the Ohio fields, of feeling merged in the lives of people around him, who wondered about the interior lives of others, was the real Anderson, the writer: the deeper, truer, more authentic self. This more authentic self began taking on more solid shape and substance in Elyria. Like all births it was painful. In this case the birth was protracted, something that would continue after he left the town and was better able to integrate his artistic identity within his full personality.  Anderson tried to be like other men, but he was losing himself in the process. He had become disgusted with the business world and the hypocrisies and sharp dealing he had seen—and been a part of. A break was inevitable. The presence of his wife and children and his obligations to them made his burden that much more severe.

This post is the first in a series in which I will closely examine Anderson’s time in Elyria and the places there associated with him. I will also give some idea of what happened there and why these places and events are important elements in his literary history. My longstanding interest in Anderson motivated me to make a trip to Elyria, part of a series of excursions around the state that have been or will be featured here on Buckeyemuse. This first essay focuses on Anderson’s domestic life in Elyria and the writing he did while in town. It is centered on his house, which still stands at 229 Seventh Street. Urges to self-expression and creative achievement dimly hinted at earlier in life emerged in this small Ohio city. The title of an essay Anderson wrote for an advertising publication–“The Undeveloped Man”–seems appropriate to me for Anderson’s time in Elyria. Our national literature has been greatly enriched by the fact his development as an artist occurred, and Elyria was key to that growth.

Much of the Elyria Anderson knew remains. Many churches, old buildings, the Elyria town hall, the town square with its Civil War statue —all would be familiar to him. His Elks lodge and his country club are still there. Devoted readers of Anderson may be startled to learn of his country club membership, but during his time in Elyria he was part of the city’s business elite, and Anderson and family were offered a membership at the club. What I find remarkable, besides the existence of his home, is that a factory still stands on the site where his own was located. The BASF factory building is of recent vintage: it was built in 2012, one hundred years after his fugue-walk to Cleveland.

The prosperous young businessman walking towards his factory in the morning would likely have impressed Clyde residents who knew Anderson as a boy or youth. Anderson could easily have remained submerged in working class and rural America given his birth and impoverished upbringing. His story began in southwestern Ohio. He was born in Camden, Ohio, which is about an hour’s drive north of Cincinnati, on September 13, 1876. His parents were Ohioans. His mother, Emma Smith, was born in Oxford, Ohio, also north of Cincinnati and a short distance south of Camden. His father was from Adams County, further east of the Queen City in the rolling Appalachian foothills. The family moved to Caledonia, Ohio near Columbus when Sherwood was about a year old, lived there for two years, then had a brief residence in Mansfield before moving to Clyde, where Anderson spent his childhood and youth. Clyde is located in northwestern Ohio not far from Lake Erie, about sixty miles west of Elyria.

Anderson was one of six children. His father, Irwin Anderson, was a harness maker and Union veteran of the Civil War. Irwin Anderson was a devoted workman for a while, but his love of drink and storytelling interfered with his business. He gave up harness making and worked infrequently as a house painter, leaving much of the breadwinning burden to Emma, who took in washing and accepted other domestic jobs to keep the family afloat. Sherwood Anderson himself became an enterprising worker as a young boy, earning the nickname “Jobby” for his willingness to take on odd jobs to help his mother and family. The townspeople of Clyde admired the boy’s ambition, and Anderson nurtured dreams of prosperity and respectability. He was too familiar with poverty.

Anderson’s education was erratic, although he was a voracious reader. He had an education of a different kind on the Clyde streets and in the neighboring farm fields, becoming familiar with rural and small town people firsthand. He left Clyde after his mother’s death in 1895 to work in a Chicago warehouse, then he returned to Clyde to join his Ohio National Guard unit for service in the Spanish-American War. His unit saw no combat, but the men were garrisoned in various locations in the south and assigned to occupation duty in Cuba, exposing Anderson and his small town comrades to a wider world.

Anderson worked again briefly in Clyde after his discharge, than enrolled in Wittenberg Academy in Springfield, Ohio to complete the equivalent of a high school education. This time at Wittenberg was pivotal. There he made contacts that led to a copywriting job in Chicago. Anderson gave a speech at graduation that impressed a Chicago advertising man in the audience, who approached Anderson afterwards and offered him a position. Anderson became first an advertising solicitor and later a copywriter for the Longfield-Crutch company in Chicago. Anderson eventually left advertising and took a position as president of United Factories in Cleveland.

The title was essentially honorific as Anderson’s main responsibilities were centered on advertising solicitation and copywriting for the firm, which was a kind of distribution company for various agricultural and household goods sold through a catalog. Anderson embarked on a vigorous promotion campaign in which he repeatedly pledged to make good on any products that were inferior or damaged. He was forced to back up his promise when hundreds of chicken incubators sold through United Factories turned out to be faulty. Anderson spent months dealing with angry and frustrated customers. The incident left Anderson frazzled and exhausted, and in a preview of his fugue episode in Elyria, he vanished at one point and was found wandering disoriented in the woods.

Anderson parted ways with United Factories and took a job in Elyria. Anderson became president of the Anderson Manufacturing Company, later called the American Merchants Company. In the beginning the company was a mail order firm specializing in a heavy preservative roofing paint called “Roof-Fix,” which led to Anderson being dubbed “The Roof-Fix Man of Elyria.” The company also sold a locally made knife sharpener. Later the firm acquired a Lorain paint company and began manufacturing more of its products in Elyria at the Black River site now occupied by BASF. In the post following this one I will examine Anderson’s business career in-depth.

Elyria was an up and coming Ohio city when Anderson arrived. Some manufacturing developed in Elyria in the years after the Civil War, including the Topliff and Ely plant that Anderson’s company would later occupy. But for the most part it was a quiet town with tree-shaded streets and a public square recalling its New England origins. This changed towards the turn of the twentieth century. U.S. Steel established factories in nearby Lorain, and Elyria soon had its own boom. Local companies such as the Worthington Manufacturing Company emerged, which produced golf balls, and the Garfield Manufacturing Company, which made bicycle seats and was soon producing more than a million of them each year. The town’s infrastructure expanded as well, as electricity, gas, paved roads, steam heat and water and sewer systems became aspects of everyday life. Along with this growth was a kind of hope and optimism about the future that Elyrians shared with their fellow citizens throughout the nation, a kind of faith that most of us would find hard to fathom in our own times.

Sherwood Anderson came to Elyria with his wife Cornelia and his youngest brother Earl in the late summer of 1907. He was thirty years old and the father of a son named Robert Lane Anderson, who was born at the Cleveland Maternity Hospital on August 16, 1907.  Another son and a daughter were born to the couple during their time in town. His second son, John Sherwood Anderson, was born in the Cleveland Maternity Hospital on December 31, 1908, and their daughter Marion, nicknamed “Mimi,” was born at the Elyria Memorial Hospital on October 29, 1911.  Anderson and his family resided in Elyria from 1907 until the early months of 1913.

Sherwood, Cornelia, and Earl, who lived with them in Elyria until 1911, first resided in an apartment building called The Gray, which was torn down during the early 2000’s. They moved to their house on Seventh Street in 1908. Earl and Sherwood were close, and Sherwood gave Earl a job at the factory. After his breakdown in 1912, Anderson divested himself of his business interests and returned to Chicago to work as a copywriter. He and Cornelia divorced in 1916.

Today Elyria is a small city of nearly 54,000 people. Like many older small cities in the United States it has an historical section. Retail, commercial and suburban development radiate outward from the old town core, although some industries remain in the old section of Elyria, including the BASF plant on Anderson’s factory site. The property section that includes BASF has been industrial since the 1870s.

In the days leading up to this trip I read about and reflected on Anderson’s psychic breakdown. The incident both fascinated and troubled me. This episode has been presented too often as a colorful legendary event in American literary history—the man of business saying the hell with it all and walking out to pursue a life of art. Anderson played up this version himself, possibly because the incident revealed his vulnerability and possibly because of traditional masculine notions of strength and weakness. It sounds better to be the man who threw it all to the wind and consciously stomped off to become an artist rather than someone wandering dazed along the railroad and sleeping on frost-covered ground, his pockets full of hard corn kernels and half eaten apples. The cover story makes for a good tale and adds a patina of legend to Anderson’s life, but the reality of the episode is disturbing.

The actual facts of the matter, the note Anderson sent to his wife before  wandering, and the fragmented notes he jotted down and then mailed to her two days after vanishing from Elyria all testify to a troubling incident. This was a man going to pieces under the pressure of business, a marriage he could no longer endure, the social expectations of men in this culture, and a desire to create that was incompatible with the world around him. The realm of the unconscious, the psychic dimension of life, can be as eerie and disconcerting a realm as the paranormal, and for this reason I found Anderson’s episode bothersome the more I delved into it.

I drove to Elyria from Cincinnati on July 26, 2018, excited to see this place where he lived, began writing seriously, and experienced his breakdown. During the drive up I continued to reflect on Anderson’s fugue journey. I had never read much about this event until I prepared for this trip, but reading the best biographical sources on Anderson gave me a better understanding of what seems to have actually occurred. Prior to this journey I also spoke with writer and Anderson scholar Will Schuck. In 2002, Will retraced Anderson’s journey by foot along the railroad from Elyria to Cleveland, and talking with him impressed more clearly on my mind what a strange odyssey Anderson’s journey had been.

Will told me that the landscape along the railroad probably hadn’t changed much in the intervening ninety years, which had the effect of making the past feel even closer at hand. I could easily picture Anderson walking along the tracks, observing the people he encountered, and taking shelter when he felt threatened. A window into Anderson’s troubled personality can be found in the fragments scrawled in his notebook during this journey, which are the records of an unbalanced mind. In a subsequent post in this series I will examine this breakdown episode in detail and explore its repercussions.

Whether it’s a powerful imagination, a heightened sensitivity or some combination of both, I can easily find myself “falling backward in time” when history gets hold of me, which happens quite often! Thoughts of this painful episode in Anderson’s life followed me into Elyria and lent a strange color to the evening. The weather was clear and sunny heading up I-71 from Cincinnati, but when I merged onto the Ohio Turnpike ominous charcoal-black clouds billowed on the horizon. Rain fell in blowing torrents just before I exited the Turnpike into Elyria.

I had booked a room at a Best Western on the town’s outskirts. Enormous electrical towers loomed in the gray distance. The hotel’s vast parking lot was nearly empty. Nearby restaurants and stores were open for business, but few cars were parked outside. The entire area felt deserted. The roads were dark with rain and the air was cool. An image hovered in my mind of an anxious man stumbling along the railroad tracks bound northeastward from Elyria.

I walked into the Best Western lobby, feeling like I had come to a hotel at the end of the world– and I was the first person to check in there in years. The clerk’s counter area was brightly lit, but the lobby space opposite was small, high ceilinged, and shrouded in darkness, as was the dining area beyond the lobby. The past felt close by, and the darkness in the lobby seemed crowded with ghosts. Outside a light rain fell and thunder rumbled in the distance. Occasionally I heard the sound of a car’s tires sluicing through puddles or a rumble of thunder. The desk clerk was a pleasant, pretty young woman who answered my questions about Elyria and whose cheerful manner offset the gloom and helped me return from the year 1912. A drive around the Elyria of today, a cup of coffee at McDonald’s and time spent watching the last third of Goodfellas that night helped keep me anchored in the present. I have to watch myself!

A framed photograph in the hallway outside my room fascinated me, and I repeatedly stopped to look at it when entering or leaving the building. It is a picture of two old bridge supports still standing in water, although the railroad or highway they once supported is gone. I have no idea where these ruins are located, although I suspect they are local, probably somewhere in Cleveland. I found this picture oddly significant: a remnant of some vital past still lingering on, still faithful, still holding its place. I was reminded of the old industrial might of Ohio, a world Anderson knew well. It also seemed a fitting symbol for the adventure of locating the visible remnants of Anderson’s past in Elyria that I was about to begin.

I took a quick drive into Elyria’s older section and found Anderson’s house, the BASF plant, and the Elks lodge. Torrents of rain alternated with periods of calm. Anderson’s house is located on one of those old streets you find in small towns and cities across America that have seen better days, where a lot of the houses are likely to be rental properties. I was concerned about the weather, but the rain moved out overnight and the following day was sunny and pleasant.

That morning I began my journey of Anderson’s Elyria by visiting the Lorain County Historical Society. This elegant old building was once the home of a prosperous Elyria merchant named Horace C. Starr. Morning sunshine spilled through tall windows, casting a warm light on museum displays and elegant old furniture. I had a pleasant conversation with the librarian there and looked at a map of Elyria from the 1970s, then drove to Elyria’s Cascade Park, where Anderson liked to take walks. The park’s main entrance was closed along with the rest of the property for renovation work, but visitors could still enjoy the River Walk that takes them to the roaring falls of the Black River’s East Branch.

The falls are loud, substantial, and impressive. I looked across the water from the observation deck at an apartment building and wondered what it’s like to live next to the falls. The tumbling water, the bright sunlight, and the rainbow formed in the spray made me feel closer to Anderson and his time. This vista has changed very little, and nature’s unceasing forces are something we share with those who have gone before. Buildings, houses and other structures can be torn down, but the river keeps on moving, strong and steady in its course.

After visiting the falls, I saw a billboard on the side of a building promoting the town’s historical district. Along the bottom it read, “Broad Street, 1910.” This photo captures the Elyria of Anderson’s time. In the photo, which can be seen below, remnants of an older way of life are juxtaposed with elements of modernity: a wagon is loaded in the foreground, while towards the rear of the scene is an early automobile. A man and a woman cross the street in opposite directions alongside of a horse-driven wagon. Another woman waits on the corner to cross. Both women have long dresses, hats, and carry umbrellas to protect against the sun. High atop the side of one building is an ad for Bull Durham tobacco.

Elyria has an impressive assortment of historic buildings, which I found made it easier to imagine the Elyria of Anderson’s time. While walking along Broad Street, I pictured his town of the early 1900s. Wagons loaded with produce and other goods clatter along streets, sharing the road with an interurban trolley line and the occasional automobile. Horse manure lies in piles in the middle of streets and along curbs. Smoke from coal and wood fires drifts through the air, mingling with the smoke from nearby factories. In pool halls, taverns, and restaurants the fragrant aroma of tobacco from pipes, cigars, and cigarettes hangs heavy. At different times of day trolley bells, factory whistles, and train horns sound across Elyria.

Looking back on that long ago time, with its women in elegant hats and dresses and the men with their celluloid collars and straw boaters, it is easy to cast a sentimental glow on those days. But aside from the charm of old Vitagraph movies and couples dancing to the music from the newfangled Victrola, life was brutal for many, including women and children.

Take the year 1908 as one example—the first full year the Andersons lived in Elyria. Workers labored for long hours in factories and businesses, sometimes as long as ten or even twelve hours a day. The working class of America included some two million children, working in dangerous conditions in mines, mills, and factories. Occupational accidents and illnesses claimed tens of thousands of lives each year. Anderson had worked in warehouses, factories, and farm fields. He was keenly aware of what the working man’s life was like.

There was no worker’s compensation—a man who lost a limb or was too injured to work was left to his own resources. The rail cars that roared across the American landscape transporting freights and passengers, that served as symbol of American resources and industrial might, were also the illicit transport system for thousands of hobos and wandering workers, the flotsam and jetsam of a ruthless capitalist society.

Gangsters extorted shop owners and burned buildings in New York’s Little Italy. In President Lincoln’s town of Springfield, Illinois, a race riot lead to the destruction of black-owned homes and businesses and the lynching of two black men. This event becomes a catalyst for the development of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) the following year.

Anderson, his friends, family and coworkers were certainly aware of a horrible event occurring in Cleveland in 1908—the Collinwood Fire. This fire killed 175 people, 172 of them children, when a school building burned. The fire’s origins are still unknown.

The tensions and promises of this world are part of Anderson’s writing and experience. These were the years of the Progressive Era, when American society enacted significant reforms after the Gilded Age period of the late nineteenth century. Anderson had a longstanding interest in social issues and witnessed firsthand America’s transition from an agrarian to industrial society: this is an important element in a number of his works, especially his novel Poor White (1920). Anderson was also interested in personal freedom and liberation. In Elyria he experienced the struggle to live an authentic life in a world of social pressures and rigidly defined roles.

After some time on the River Walk, I decided to take another look at Anderson’s house on foot and walked the length of Seventh Street. The majority of homes are well maintained. I sensed that most are rental properties. While I wouldn’t describe the neighborhood as run-down, it has a timeworn quality. There’s a difference between an older neighborhood with the cachet of a preservation ethic and a pride of ownership, and a neighborhood that simply has older properties. Seventh Street is in the latter category.

According to the real estate records, the house was built in 1900. Two families occupy the home: one upstairs and one downstairs. A satellite dish was mounted on the outside of the second floor. A Confederate flag towel covered one window. I knew from speaking with Will Schuck that the house has been a rental property for some time, and although the property is unmarked, the county historical society and town government are aware of the house’s historical nature.

Not surprisingly, the house’s appearance has been altered since Anderson’s time. Anderson added a back porch where he wrote late into the night during warm weather. From what I could tell from the street, that was no longer there. There is a large front porch on the house that is now enclosed.  When Anderson and his family occupied the house, there was a prominent bay window on the second floor. There is an addition to the second floor with a window that juts out slightly from the roof. I have never seen any photos of it from Anderson’s time there, and it is possible that none exist.

I pictured Anderson and his family in their home and Anderson playing with his kids. One of Anderson’s neighbors could recall hearing the sounds of him playing with the children. “Many a time we’d hear him through open windows romping with his children,” said Frank Wilford, a neighbor of Anderson’s. “He would be acting out imaginative scenes with them. Imagination ran riot. He and the kids had many a set-up with imaginary persons. There was quite a little action over there. And the children followed right along.”

From here Anderson would walk to his factory, probably at times with Earl. As I looked at the backyard area of the home, I thought of an incident one morning when Anderson returned after a restless night walking Elyria’s streets to peer over the hedge surrounding their home and see Cornelia pacing back and forth in the yard, upset with her husband and their marriage. He quietly retreated without being seen and had breakfast in town. These are the kinds of stories that fascinate me about places such as this. I feel houses and places have their own kinds of vibes or spirits, and that the life of the people who lived there somehow becomes a part of the place. Knowing some about what happened there–including these moments of honest, everyday life–make the past more tangible to me.

Homes that are American literary sites often tend to be of two different kinds—places where writers were raised, or those they occupied during the times when they were well known. This site is different—this is a house where a writer lived while trying to forge his career, where he lived before success, where he struggled in obscurity while attending to daily business. It was in this house’s attic that Anderson’s vocation as writer took more solid shape. I believe that this house is quite significant as a literary site. A career of great importance began here, and that writer would in turn leave his mark not only on the nation’s literature, but exert direct influence on several of America’s most prominent twentieth century writers, especially William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.

The house is interesting and important to me for three reasons. First, within its walls Anderson began to write seriously, forging the early drafts of his first two novels, Windy McPherson’s Son (1916) and Marching Men (1917), and beginning a significant career in American letters. For me his lonely struggle to write has a heroic and inspirational quality, the kind of dogged and unrelenting effort that any hardworking aspiring writer can relate to. As I looked at the upper floor of the house, I pictured Anderson in his attic room scribbling away the hours, scrawling on pads of paper and sharpening pencils with a jackknife, cigarette smoke curling in the air and a cup of cold coffee on the desk.

Second, like any older home I find it interesting simply for the life that occurred here long ago, different from our own time and yet similar in many ways—the daily rituals, the family gatherings, the ordinary moments of routine that took place then just as they do now. I can see Anderson up early in the morning, running a straight razor across a leather strop before he shaves, Cornelia softly singing one of the children back to sleep, Earl helping Sherwood set up a Christmas tree. It is not clear to me if Anderson owned or rented this house, but until he built his home called Ripshin in Virginia, this was the only house Anderson occupied longer term that is still standing. The two homes he and Cornelia occupied in Cleveland are gone. Here he lived when he was just another Ohio businessman trying to make a go of it in the early twentieth century.

The third and final reason is its importance as the center of his domestic life and the conflict warring in Anderson’s heart that emerged in Elyria and brought him face to face with his emerging vocation, which played havoc with his marriage and business. This conflict was experienced by Anderson elsewhere in Elyria, which I will detail in other posts, but it must have been felt most acutely within those walls as Anderson interacted with his wife, children, brother, and other friends and relatives—and felt the distance between the life he was living and the one he felt called to live. A woman named Trillena White, a friend of Anderson’s who encouraged his reading and writing, spent some time with the family there in Elyria. Many years later she could recall having coffee with him one morning after he completed a writing session before work. She wrote, “Those were the days of the travail of your soul, but none of us knew of it.” A particularly painful chapter in this house’s history is the beginning of the disintegration of Sherwood and Cornelia’s marriage.

There is a perennial aspect to Anderson’s story in Elyria, which is the struggle to write while earning a living. Excepting those who have some kind of wealth or private income, any writer faces this challenge. It is no different today. Anderson’s writing income was irregular throughout his life—he was constantly writing to bring in money. His sole bestseller was the often maligned  Dark Laughter (1925), which financed a land purchase and the construction of his home Ripshin in Marion, Virginia. He purchased two newspapers in Marion not only as a new creative venture but also as a source of steady income. Building Ripshin depleted much of Dark Laughter’s profits, so Anderson had to borrow money to purchase the newspapers.

It is a rare author who makes a good, steady living from writing what we now call “literary fiction.” Even successful literary novelists whose books sell well often teach or have some other profession. Writing is usually done on the margins of everyday demands—early in the morning or late at night or on the weekends; in between work or childrearing or washing the dishes. Anderson was no different. He logged long hours writing late at night, composing in the attic room or back porch of his house sometimes into the early morning hours. Anderson pushed himself especially hard before his breakdown, which had occasioned a warning from his doctor, according to one newspaper story about Anderson’s fugue journey to Cleveland. What makes Anderson’s struggle to write is that he wasn’t just some man working for the firm. He was the chief, the boss, the head man all kinds of people were looking to for direction. Anderson is the only major American writer I know of who once ran a factory. The pressure was unremitting, and Anderson was temperamentally unsuited to the job.

The upper floor of this house was the scene of intense intrapersonal drama in Anderson’s life. Early on he claimed a room towards the rear of the house on the topmost floor as his own—“a room of one’s own,” so to speak—where he retreated to write. The door to this area was locked and Anderson had the only key. The room was furnished in a spartan manner—there was only a cot, two chairs, a desk, and some books.

Anderson used the attic as a retreat, a place where he could write and think. Here was protected from the everyday banalities of the business world and the shallow heartiness of his male comrades, as well as the strains of domestic life. Anderson’s time and behavior in the attic reveals the tensions building in his life, culminating in his Thanksgiving Day breakdown. One time Anderson borrowed mops, towels and rags from the family’s maid, went into the room, removed his clothes and scrubbed down the walls and floors, as if he sought to purify himself and the space and “come clean” about his desire to live life as an artist.

On other occasions, Anderson lined up toy soldiers he had bought for his boys and marched up and down in front of the small toy figures, calling out commands, instructing them in soldiery and playing the role of “leader of men.” This behavior is interesting on several levels. On one hand, Anderson seems to have been mocking his notion of himself as a “leader of men” and contrasting the everyday reality of being a business executive with the grandiose dreams he had once held of becoming a “great man.” Anderson was clearly unsuited for this role, and once described his behavior as a boss as “nastily executive,” although many associates and employees spoke well of him as an employer. Trying to be someone he wasn’t was causing serious damage to his psyche.

But is also noteworthy as a window into Anderson’s interest in somehow organizing humanity in some meaningful fashion for purposeful action. Anderson’s second novel was called Marching Men. This was one of the books he worked on in his attic room, and although it was second in order of publication it was apparently first in order of composition.

In this book he tells the story of a man raised in poverty named Beaut McGregor who yearns to become a leader. He eventually creates a kind of proto-fascist movement of “Marching Men” who don’t do much more than march purposefully, but in their organized displays of marching they find some kind of elevation that lifts them above the futility of their own lives. They find a higher purpose they share with others. Anderson is known for his concern and empathy for the individual, but he was also interested in humanity in the aggregate, the social organization of communities and how people interact with one another.

This interest in group behavior and the relation of the individual to the mass also seems to look ahead to some of John Steinbeck’s work. At any rate, Anderson had his own group of “marching men” he could control in the attic. There may also have been some aspect of creative play here—Anderson able to prime his own creative pump with this kind of role-playing activity—and possibly some recapturing of lost childhood time. Anderson was reared in poverty, likely had few toys and worked long hours from an early age.

But in this upstairs space he also wrote, filling page after page with prose. Early drafts of his novels Marching Men and Windy McPherson’s Son were composed there, along with other writing. As Kim Townsend notes in his biography of Anderson, “He wrote versions of two novels, perhaps drafts of two others, and incalculable amounts—pages, reflections, dialogues, descriptions, notes—that cannot be categorized or retrieved.”

In addition to his struggle to write and run his business, Anderson, who later wrote that he “did not domesticate well,” was trying to fulfill his expectations as husband and father. An important person in Anderson’s story is his first wife Cornelia. Cornelia played a large part in this drama of a man who was finally discovering, after locking himself into a certain way of life, who he really was and wanted to do, and how the life he was living deeply conflicted with his true self. The more I read of Cornelia, the more I am impressed with her and how she conducted herself in relation to Anderson and his difficult ways. She deeply loved Anderson and demonstrated a generous, tolerant, and forgiving spirit towards him. She always spoke well of him in the years after her divorce, and didn’t turn their children in any way against their father. Those who love Anderson’s work are actually in her debt. Her sacrifice helped make it possible for him to move into a different way of life and create his works.

Cornelia Platt Lane was born to a wealthy family in Toledo, Ohio on May 16, 1877, making her slightly younger than Sherwood. She was well educated, something that Anderson found both admirable and powerfully galling given his limited formal education and deep insecurity. She had earned a degree from the College for Women at Western Reserve University in 1900, then she took a grand tour of Europe from June of 1901 to February of 1902. This excursion abroad included a period of study at the Sorbonne. She was especially interested in literature. She published a paper in her college literary journal entitled “The Development of the Mask in English Literature Until the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century.” Years later she would become a high school English and Latin teacher.

Anderson met Cornelia through a neighbor from his hometown of Clyde living in Toledo. They were married in her parents’ home on May 16, 1904, Cornelia’s twenty-seventh birthday, then moved to Chicago, where Anderson worked as a copywriter. They lived on a street called Rosalie Court. The couple enjoyed their early years together, especially time spent quietly reading in their apartment. In later years, long after her divorce from Anderson, Cornelia fondly recalled reading by “the good fireplace of Rosalie Court.”

Cornelia was cultivated, well read, and interested in literature and ideas. She was a suffragist. On June 27, 1911, Anderson accompanied his wife to an Equal Suffrage Association Rally at Cedar Point near Toledo. She was also interested in Maria Montessori’s ideas on education. She did not object to Anderson writing. She later wrote, “The whole idea of his writing was satisfactory. I am not practical. I guess I never have been practical. The spirit of adventure was strong in both of us.”

The marriage suffered strain early on. It is difficult and perhaps even presumptuous to assess the marriage of two long dead people from more than a century ago, but the facts strongly indicate that Anderson was a man wholly unprepared for the demands of marriage. His own family background is revealing in this regard. The long shadow of Irwin Anderson hangs over the legacy of Sherwood Anderson as husband and father. Anderson’s father was an improvident, heavy-drinking man who was no role model of stability and responsibility. His mother, a sensitive and loving woman, was overworked and probably unable to give her children all the attention they needed. She was forced into the position of family breadwinner. Anderson and his siblings grew up on the streets of Clyde and in its surrounding fields and forests. In some sense they raised themselves.

Anderson wrote the following of himself and his siblings: “We weren’t a very tender lot. A restless ambition seemed to drive us all on. The result was that those who got brushed aside by life had a tendency to justify themselves by thinking their own fate perilously hard and sad.”

Anderson attended school as a child and young man, but from an early age his world was an earthy one centered on the local racetrack, business district and railroad depot. In these places he spent considerable time among laborers, farmers, mechanics, stable grooms, salesmen, and other rough men. He worked long hours selling newspapers, and in his hours of working and wandering around town he saw glimpses of what was hidden from the daylight world, particularly in the realm of sex. Later he was a soldier in the Spanish-American War and saw how men can behave brutally towards one another.

Anderson had gone with prostitutes before meeting Cornelia, and once his marriage became routine after a few years he indulged in this behavior again, often alongside his fellow businessmen. Not long before his fugue episode, Anderson had joined several other businessmen in Elyria in taking out a hotel room where they brought women. This behavior created in him a sense of guilt, hypocrisy and self-loathing.  He also risked contracting and transmitting venereal disease to Cornelia. Sometimes he drank heavily.

It’s important to remember, for the sake of understanding the times in which these people lived, how economically insecure women’s lives were. Married women, of whatever social class, were heavily dependent on their husbands. Working class women in particular lived lives of drudgery. Unmarried working class women usually had jobs, often as domestics or factory workers, and some worked in office and secretarial positions. Upper class women like Cornelia often had maids and other household help, but the working class or rural housewife labored long hours in the kitchen and home. Cornelia and her children were deeply dependent on Anderson and his business, a fact of which he was all too aware.

In retrospect, it’s not hard to see that Anderson was headed for a crisis. He had gone from being a copywriter to an executive, and he was poorly suited to the job. Anderson’s inward and sensitive nature collided with the extraverted and backslapping business culture. He developed a self-loathing as a result of his own sharp business practices, but also recognized a bitter truth about human nature—people could easily be taken advantage of, a knowledge made even more bitter by how he exploited this credulity. He knew he was capable of deceit and manipulation, whether in business or in marriage. In the midst of this initial surge to become a prosperous man of business, his writing vocation was becoming clear. He found it hard to reconcile the world of commerce and art, of business striving and creative expression. Anderson was an intensely divided man. Add to this a marriage to a well-educated upper class woman he soon saw as an obstacle and you have the makings of a crisis.

Strain developed. Anderson later wrote, “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 of the house late at night and wept.”

As in any marriage, there are two sides to this issue, and within those sides can be a host of issues and problems. I often have to wonder in reading about this union how much Sherwood and Cornelia spoke with each other about what was going on. The quote from Anderson above seems to indicate that each kept things buried. But what seems clear is that Anderson felt trapped, that his more authentic personality and vocation was emerging, and this was creating chaos. But he also displaced frustration and anger onto his wife.

While Cornelia doesn’t seem to have pressured him to become more successful in business—in fact, she actually encouraged Anderson’s creative writing, and helped him polish and correct his advertising and business writing–the record established in reliable biographies indicates that Anderson internalized a lot of social pressure to succeed in business and developed a deep resentment towards Cornelia, somehow seeing her as a source of his problems and projecting his frustration onto her. In his eyes, she was the one keeping him chained to the grindstone of the plant on the Black River. She came to represent the demands of marriage and job responsibility that frustrated his dreams, a force blocking his emerging creative self.

This was a distortion and an evasion on his part and is unfair to his wife. Within time his resentment became so strong his sleep was disturbed with dreams of murdering her. When he mailed Cornelia his letter from his fugue journey, he addressed it to “Cornelia Anderson, American Striving Company.”

Years later, Anderson wrote the following:

“I shall never forget a quite childish thing in the life of (Cornelia) and myself. 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 worked in me. At night I even dreamed of killing her. And all the time I suppose I was a quite normal, quite-appearing fellow. I used to walk out of the house into the street at night and say to myself: ‘Great God, she don’t know.’ And of course, dear patient woman, she did not know. No one can know what they have not themselves felt. Only by feeling do we come into knowledge and I suspect that it is only by feeling deeply, deeply that we shall come to culture.”

Anderson also wrote this:

“In the first place, my first wife, the mother of my children, had been unable to believe in me as an artist and I could not blame her. She was a woman who, having married one sort of man, had awakened to find she had another. She married a bright young business man, one who might, had he remained as he seemed to be when she had married him, have been a good father, a good provider, one who would see to it that her children were brought up in the classic American style—that is to say the classic style for the well-to-do—who would have provided them with automobiles, sent them to the best colleges, etc. However, I was determined (I) would not be turned aside, and there had been a long silent struggle, ending in divorce.”

Once again, the whole notion that “it takes two to tango” certainly applies here. Only the two people involved can really say what happened. Anderson was determined to write, and he felt that his wife didn’t understand that at some level, or didn’t really understand where he was going—but Anderson didn’t either. Cornelia would later describe his development as a writer as random rather than planned. Anderson later wrote, “It seemed to me impossible to explain to others what was going on within me. It was all too unformed in my own mind. I had very little schooling. After all I thought of writers as educated men and I had no education. It is perhaps that I had been acquiring education very rapidly during the last two or three years in that place but it did not seem to me the kind of education I could explain to others.”

Anderson had heavy baggage. He was insecure about Cornelia’s level of education and his own lack of it, and it is also possible that she, perhaps unintentionally, made him feel awkward about this deficit. At one point she tried to give Anderson and one of his business associates Sunday morning lessons in French, but soon gave it up. Cornelia had a different background from her husband. She was at ease in the world of wealth and privilege. Contemporary accounts describe her as pleasant, friendly, and considerate. But she may have been prim and officious at times, and it is quite possible that she communicated condescension towards Anderson’s writing. He would soon be seen as a vital new force in American letters, but some of the people who heard him read aloud from his work during his time in Elyria were puzzled and turned off by it. At one point Cornelia mentioned a book she was reading and said it “was nothing like those things Sherwood is writing.”

On the other hand, Anderson often behaved in an adolescent fashion. Cornelia’s sister-in-law recounted an incident in which Anderson became fixated on finding a word that Cornelia didn’t know. He tossed out a succession of words that she knew, then finally found one he knew but she didn’t, then glowed with pride when he finally stumped her. Cornelia is described as looking at him with the kind of tolerant amusement one might show a child or youth trying to outwit an adult. There’s no doubt she put up with a lot from him. The irony here is that Anderson had a wife who appreciated and was interested in literature and intellectual life. They both belonged to conversation groups that discussed books, literature and ideas. While there were elements that made the marriage ultimately unsuccessful, Cornelia was certainly not a woman hostile to the arts and literary life. Anderson later wrote , “You see the woman I had married had been to college and had a degree. She had travelled in Europe while I, to tell the truth, I could at that time just spell the simplest words.” Anderson also stated that “She had always considered me a little twisted in the head and who can blame her?”

William Sutton, author of The Road to Winesburg: A Mosaic of the Imaginative Life of Sherwood Anderson, makes the case that Cornelia had her own legitimate concerns:

“As her husband’s ambition to write became stronger, as he devoted more and more time to writing, completing at least two novels before 1913, and as his business affairs became more and more tangled, events must have indeed been trying for her. She accepted passively his ambition to write; she had been educated to understand literary men. There is no evidence to show that she was enthusiastic about what he had written. But at the same time that she had her husband’s ambitions to consider, she had also herself and three children to consider. She has said of her situation, ‘I think he felt it was his duty to be in business and support a family and that it was his inclination to write.’ It is not at all clear that she knew, or that he did, why he had the inclination.”

Anderson loved his kids, and enjoyed playing games of the imagination with them, but as biographer Walter Rideout notes, “the major part of the responsibility for them fell on Cornelia.” Anderson even told Cornelia’s sister-in-law with a straight face that it was better that Cornelia did more of the child-rearing so he could, according to Rideout, get “a chance to get ahead of his wife in his reading and learning. Although he loved and within limits was even interested in his children, he appears to have felt at this point that they were hostages to fortune who hampered him in the assertion of his personality that his consuming desire to write had become.”

He was unprepared for being a husband and father. He lacked maturity, but he was also caught in a vortex of change that upended everything about his life. His situation reminds me of gay men who have tried to live a straight life, married and had children, tried to be “one of the boys” and then realized they can no longer live in this fashion. He had gotten the wife, the kids, the house, the great job, then found he was someone else, and this shattered everything. He was drowning in the life he had created.

This is not to excuse Anderson’s conduct. Other men and women have found themselves married with families, or in a position to support others and have chosen to put aside certain dreams in recognition of their obligations, or have found ways to balance competing demands.

Anderson carried a burden of guilt throughout his life about his behavior towards his wife and children. Many years later he told his daughter that he hoped some of his literary work was “good and lasting” for the sake of what others had endured for him to find his way, that “It is the only justification I shall ever be able to find for the inconvenience and suffering I have brought on others as well as myself.”

Anderson and his family left Elyria in 1913, with Anderson going to Chicago and Cornelia living with the children for a while in Little Point Sable, Michigan. The couple were essentially separated and living apart, although Anderson was with them periodically. The couple had not intended to divorce as neither one intended to remarry, but Anderson eventually fell in love with the sculptor Tennessee Mitchell, who was also a friend of Cornelia’s. She decided to go through with the divorce, which was granted on July 27, 1916.

While she radiated outward composure, one of her friends could tell that she took the end of the marriage hard and wondered if the premature graying of her hair resulted from the emotional anguish of the situation. Cornelia was always a dignified, self-respecting woman, and it is to her credit that she maintained cordial relationships with Anderson and Tennessee, and also got on well with his future wives Elizabeth Prall and Eleanor Copenhaver.

Anderson sent payments to Cornelia on an irregular basis once he relocated to Chicago, but Cornelia opted to become a schoolteacher after she filed for divorce. She was determined to follow her own path and was in a better position to raise the children. She also seems to have felt rather generous towards Anderson and apparently opted not to push for alimony from him. The judge awarded sole custody to Cornelia but required no alimony from Anderson. She taught first grade for two years and later became a high school Latin and English teacher at Elston High School in Michigan City, Indiana, retiring in 1943. She lived a long time, dying at age 89 in 1967.

Cornelia would later write to the author Burton Rascoe, “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. It don’t know whether you would agree. I read once that what a genius needs is a mother and not a wife. I do.”

Anderson seems to have been the kind of parent who was a better one when his kids were older. His oldest son Bob would eventually join his father in Marion, Virginia and take over the newspapers his father purchased and ran for a while. William Sutton, in a chapter of his book The Road To Winesburg, devotes a chapter to Anderson and his children and writes that “throughout his irregular life, for a part of which he willingly absented himself from his family circle, Anderson maintained contact with, interest in, love for, and provided partial, if erratic, support for his children.” He also notes that Anderson “remained conscious of his responsibility to his children, even if he did not allow the thought to constrict his own activities materially.”

Anderson was fortunate to have Cornelia in his life. She moved on after their divorce and was a devoted mother. She spoke kindly of Anderson and maintained her dignity. She could have chosen a path of revenge and recrimination, but she chose not to.

Perhaps William Sutton said it best when he wrote the following:

“One of her fellow teachers at Michigan City recalled that Cornelia encouraged contact between the children and their father. There were casual contacts with him, as when he took Mimi to Europe, helped John with his art studies, or established Robert with the newspapers. She had respect for talent in anyone. Perhaps still loving him, she displayed no bitterness towards him, showing only an occasional amusement when he encountered other marital problems.”

“As one considers all the other ways that Cornelia could have acted and that perhaps the wife is traditionally expected to act under such circumstances, it becomes very clear that Sherwood Anderson had in his first wife a truly remarkable woman, one perhaps ideally suited for the trials in which his ordeal subjected her. It must be recognized that his artistic success owes something to her capability of disciplining herself in a cooperative, understanding role rather than an understandably destructive or vindictive one.”

Cornelia spoke with William Sutton in 1946 and said that reliving the Elyria time, although painful, “has done me good. Perhaps after this psychiatric catharsis I shall be cleansed and happier.”

The house in Elyria was occupied before the Andersons lived there, and many others have lived there since it was built at the start of the twentieth century. Their lives are part of the panoply of human life that occurred within these walls, but theirs is a special chapter in this everyday house that occupies a place in literary history, even though it is little known. I hope that this post can help change that.

In the next installment of this series, I will take a look at “a salesman who got hold of a factory”–Anderson’s short-lived career in business as “The Roof-Fix Man of Elyria.”

Patrick Kerin

 

 

Resources:

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

Sherwood Anderson: A Writer In America, Volumes 1 and 2 by Walter Rideout. Introduction by Charles Modlin. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 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.

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

Ray Lewis White’s Introduction to the University of Illinois Press reprint of Windy McPherson’s Son. University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1993. Prairie State publication series. Windy McPherson’s Son originally published in 1916.