Moonshine

FOUND TEXT SERIES: SHERWOOD ANDERSON Sherwood Anderson's contributions to American fiction were matters not merely of theme and technique but of moral authority as well. His rejection of his business career for a life of writing has become a minor legend; and he was among the first of our writers to insist upon the crippling effects of sexual repression in American life and to try to develop a form that would let him trace this theme in the lives of the characters in his fiction. His early short stories were admired for their originality and condemned for their themes—usually by different readers, of course. They were published first in such avant-garde journals as The Little Review and The Seven Arts, bringing him significant recognition but little money; and when publisher Ben Huebsch took the chance of bringing out the group collected as Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Anderson's reputation grew but the book did not sell particularly well, nor did his subsequent works under Huebsch. Anderson became quite conscious of his pioneering role, however, and later tried to describe his conception of the writer's task in a loosely autobiographical work, A Story Teller's Story (1924). The writer's obligation, he said, was simply to tell the truth. This obliged him, however, not to a simple literalism, but rather to an imaginatively apprehended truth—truth of essence, he said, not of fact. From this commitment followed a search for form. "It grew," he wrote, "out of the materials of the tale and the teller's reaction to them." Anderson's great problem was with the reigning "plot story" of magazine fiction—a formula which, he saw clearly, cut a writer off from huge areas of nuance in human experience and fictional invention. To trace these nuances through the buried dramas of ordinary life, finding the "essential" truth they revealed, would achieve an appropriate form, however unplotted; whereas to commit one's energies to the exigencies of the plotted magazine story would be to lose one's access to truth: Anderson ends A Story Teller's Story with a cautionary tale about a writer of magazine fiction who longed to write the truth but found that he could not. Anderson's distinction between "stories of plof and "stories of form" became something of a landmark in the history of the short story, marking, with his own examples and those of Joyce and Chekhov, a great watershed between the modern short story and the traditional form as it had ossified in magazine fiction. Thus there was the drama not only of the tale but of its telling. At times, in ways that we would now call reflexive or meta-fictional, Anderson experimented with the storyteller's role in crafting his form, nowhere more expressively than in his account of his father's narrative skills in A Story Teller's Story. There Anderson dramatically places his father in front of a farm-parlor audience, recounting his Civil War experiences—a shameless poseur and a consummate liar, adjusting and expanding his tale by inspired improvisation according to the shifting responses of his rapt listeners. The literal truth does not matter; what matters is the craft of the narrator as he pursues the essential truth of heroism. And then Anderson reveals himself to be truly the son of his father—admitting that he also has crafted a fiction, a tale about his father that he cannot vouch for as literal truth but which contains the "essential" truth of his father's character and of the storyteller's art. Much of Anderson's fiction retains this sense of the teller of tales musing before his audience. The meandering and circling, the recurring to significant details, the formulaic phrasing, the self-conscious fumbling— all a part of a disarming apparent naivete—become understandable when we consider Anderson as a writer grounded in a native oral tradition who came with considerable diffidence actually to write the stories that filled his head: Having listened to the tales told by my father, I wanted to begin inventing tales of my own. At that time and for long years afterwards, there was no notion of writing. Did I...