Sherwood Anderson Remembered (review)

Sherwood Anderson Remembered is in effect a bibliography of narrative accounts about the notoriously indefinable author of the title. Welford Dunaway Taylor has compiled almost fifty excerpts, several from the same sources, of first-hand accounts about Anderson as written or told by former wives, copy-writing colleagues, university professors, Virginia mountain-folk, publishers, and members of the American literati. These diverse accounts are meant to supplement existing biographies of Anderson as well as the subject's own characteristically ambiguous autobiographical works.

Taylor has divided the excerpts according to how he defines the various stages of Anderson's life, beginning with a brief chapter pertaining to his childhood and ending with "reminiscences" by mostly those who interacted with the author around the time of his peculiar death. What makes this work different from other Anderson scholarship, according to Taylor, is that "a direct connection to the subject conveys an immediacy and an empirical authority that traditional biographers lacking a personal knowledge can never replicate" (3). It is strange, then, that Taylor chooses to conclude with someone who does not seem as intimate with Anderson as others in the collection.

Described briefly by Taylor as "one of the last living Marion [Virginia] residents who knew Anderson well," Virginia Greear was acquainted with Anderson through her husband David, whom the author had befriended while staying at the Greear homestead during a self-imposed exile from the New Orleans literary scene. In a comment concerning the nervousness she felt at speaking at the "Sherwood Anderson after Fifty Years" Conference, Greear admits that "if Sherwood was here I could be a little more relaxed. Because I was able to be myself when I was with them" (272). As the last statement of the collection, Taylor was undoubtedly trying to leave readers, with whom he laid the onus of discovering the "real" Anderson for themselves, with a particular sense of Anderson as a comforting figure, one who was gracious and embracing of all. Of course, as we learn from several of the narratives, Anderson was less kind to his spouses or other women with whom he was romantically linked.

According to Taylor, a sense of Anderson is to be fashioned "from the reader's proactive role in engaging, weighing, analyzing, comparing, and ultimately reconciling the varied assertions of the testifiers ... the likenesses produced by Sherwood Anderson Remembered will be reader-wrought, deriving from an investment in the process of epistemological exploration" (4). But the fact that Greear wasn't talking specifically about Anderson but about the Anderson couple lessens any impact her statement may have had. It is at such a moment that the reader wishes Taylor had interjected a bit of scholarly expertise or his own perspective concerning Anderson rather than leave us to grapple with the insecurities of a woman with whom Anderson may have had a connection, but with whom the reader has none—unlike, say, Caroline Greear, Virginia's mother-in-law. The elder Mrs. Greear is given room for one of the lengthier excerpts at almost twenty pages, thus allowing the reader not only a greater insight into Anderson's character, but also an attachment to this particular narrator. It is indeed one of the more satisfying entries, and because of the helpful bibliographic material Taylor provides, one can search for it easily.

In addition to providing the bibliographic material, Taylor provides brief, one might say minimal, contextual information concerning the individuals behind the narrative accounts, though without explaining why he included the excerpts he did. He does state in the introduction his criteria for choosing the excerpts: "Achieving variety in both views and viewpoints"; "unique or ... revealing information"; "Objectivity and truthfulness" (5). The notion of "objectivity," however, in a collection of first-hand accounts by those who knew Anderson seems to undermine Taylor's agenda. Otherwise, why compile a text that illuminates the connections between Anderson and those who knew him rather than offer a more typical biography?

Taylor does correct misinformation presented by the narrators by inserting the corrections in brackets, and...