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1. Stories of Harm, Stories of Hazard: Childhood Stress and Professional Traumas in the Careers of Journalist-Literary Figures
- University of Illinois Press
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1 Stories of Harm, Stories of Hazard Childhood Stress and Professional Trauma in the Careers of Journalist-Literary Figures “No man knows he is young while he is young.” —G. K. Chesterton Many people would call it a nervous breakdown when Sherwood Anderson, a thirty-six-year-old owner of a mail order paint company and editor of a series of business publications, walked out of his office in Elyria, Ohio, one day in 1912. He was later found wandering the streets of Cleveland, haggard, disoriented, and muttering confusedly of his grievances against the world. Anderson, however, came to see the incident as a matter of artistic escape—as the moment when he turned his back on the life of a Rotarian and business journalist to set off to fulfill his dreams of becoming a great artist and writer.1 The fact that Anderson—raised by an economically harried harness maker and house painter father in small town Ohio and filled with emotional turmoil rooted in unresolved childhood psychological conflicts—fulfilled his ambitions to become a celebrated novelist and short-story writer is perhaps less notable than it might seem. He is only one of a procession of journalistic writers who have overcome childhood hardships, early life family distress, and stressful experiences in journalism to succeed as novelists and literary journalists. The external and internal turbulence that helped to shape their literary vision can be seen in Anderson’s capacity to turn the negatives of his “mid-life crisis” into an artistic virtue. In Anderson’s case, his break from his small-town businessman’s and editor’s existence toward a Gauguin-like reach for the artistic life rose to legendary proportions, at least among Anderson scholars and in his own cultivation of his triumphal life story. However, in interpreting the “pervasive psychological motifs” found in a letter mailed to his wife by Anderson during his disoriented wanderings, Irving Howe, one of Anderson’s biographers, interprets Anderson’s inner issues (violent aggression against his role as an adult male, a regression to early levels of childhood, a resentment at too sharp withdrawal of maternal attentions, and a general confusion as to sex role and paranoia at imagined feminine assaults) as representing something more profound than anything in Anderson’s autobiographical writings ever revealed.2 At the time of his crisis, Anderson had been dabbling in business journalism , and he was motivated to exit his small-town life, in part, by his frustration at having to express himself within the cant and the boosterism of the business world. As much as it made Anderson feel ashamed after his rise to literary success, his provincial business and journalistic experience proved instrumental in helping him to probe and transmit the mentality of smalltown Americans in his early writings, as did his earlier work in the advertising industry, which helped to shape his view of the psychology of the American consumer and citizen. In fact, Anderson’s manifestation of psychoanalytical themes—both in his personal life and in his literary works—puts him at the forefront of the many modern writers who have shifted the territory of artistic exploration into the Freudian recesses of their characters’ psyches and made the examination of abnormal mindsets, traumatic experiences, and dysfunctional behaviors a feature of their literature. Anderson was an advertising executive in the days when Freudian concepts were becoming widely accepted throughout society, and he had come to recognize that people ’s repressed fantasies, sexual longings, and complicated inner lives could be exploited to sell them products no matter where they lived. In his own case, he came to think of himself as “before” and “after” personalities—the before person a Chicago advertising copywriter who became a small-town business owner and editor; the after personality a seeker of artistic freedom who divorced his first wife, moved from one big city to another, and searched out the company of journalists, artists, and bohemian types, often without having a residence more permanent than a hotel room.3 Anderson’s masterpiece, Winesburg, Ohio, is widely recognized for its portrayal of small-town people as anything but the stock and shallow characters of much bucolic fiction. The rustics, urban exiles, and village characters in the novel are far from being narrow, conforming, or self-satisfied, on the one hand, or wholesome people to be sentimentalized and treated nostalgically. Instead, Anderson’s small-town “grotesques,” as he called them, are a parade of eccentrics and the emotionally undone who harbor...