Sherwood Anderson and Paul Gauguin: A Forgotten Review

SHERWOOD ANDERSON AND PAUL GAUGUIN: A FORGOTTEN REVIEW Stephen Enniss University of Georgia Sherwood Anderson had a visual imagination and, for most of his life, he felt a strong affinity with visual artists. His older brother, Karl, was a painter, a fact that may have prompted Anderson to list his own occupation as "painter" when he joined the Ohio National Guard in 1895.? Later, in 1913, Anderson joined a loosely defined art colony in Chicago, a group that was made up of painters, sculptors, and other young artists. In the early twenties Anderson experimented with painting. At the time he was living in a small house on a beach just outside of Fairhope, Alabama, and, according to his biographer, it was here that he acted out his own version of Paul Gauguin's South Seas adventure.2 Anderson 's experiments with painting were more than a momentary fancy. In fact, he was serious enough about his painting to hold two showings of his work in bookstores in Chicago and New York. Taken together, these episodes in Anderson's life testify to his long-standing attraction to the visual arts. This interest, however, was in part an attraction to the life of the artist. For Anderson, no one better captured that life than Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. In these two lives Anderson saw played out the artist's perpetual struggle against convention and the great cost of such a struggle. Anderson's own thoughts about these two formative influences on his life are expressed in depth in a previously forgotten book review that Anderson wrote of Beril Becker's biography Paul Gauguin: The Calm Madman.3 The circumstances that led to Anderson's writing this review are important. In March of 1931, Anderson was traveling from Marion, Virginia, to New Orleans when he stopped in Macon, Georgia, for a week. The previous year he had made friends with the editor of the Macon Telegraph , Mark Ethridge, along with the literary editor, Aaron Bernd, and a number of other reporters and local townspeople.4 One evening during this visit Anderson got a ride to the Hotel Lanier with Aaron Bernd. On the seat of the car was a copy of the biography. When Anderson asked if he could borrow it, Bernd told him that he had to write a review of the book.5 Anderson assured him that he would return it promptly, and Bernd let him take it with the understanding that the book would either be returned soon or Anderson would do the review.6 Anderson left Macon without having returned the biography. After some time had passed, Bernd wrote to Anderson to request the return of Studies in American Fiction119 the book. Anderson responded with a review, published in the Macon Telegraph on April 15, 1931: The Paul Gauguin book by Beril Becker, which I swiped out of your car one night when I was bound South, going down to the piney woods, has disappeared. I let a gal ride with me one day. I think she got it. I read most of it sitting in my car in the piney woods east of Mobile. There were Negroes gathering turpentine sap somewhere off in the distance, and they sang. The song would, as you know, carry a long ways and sound rich and fine under the trees in the clean pine woods. This story of Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh, their relationship , Gauguin's struggle, Vincent's struggle, their misunderstanding, is one of the great modern stories. You should read Van Gogh's letters7 and Gauguin's Noa-Noa.8 It is good to get this book about Gauguin. It wipes out all the Moon and Sixpence cheapness.9 The man wanted everything. He and Vincent Van Gogh will always be linked together. As 1 sit writing to you of this book I stole from you, there are on the walls of the room facing my typewriter, colored prints of Van Gogh's sunflowers and a big thing of Gauguin's. There are three women and two men sitting on a bench. They are in a wood on a savage island. The sea is seen through...