Sherwood Anderson Biography

Sherwood Anderson visited Paris twice during his life; once in 1921 and once in 1926-1927. Each trip lasted only a few months and, of the two, the first was by far the more important. Indeed, the second trip--which began in late December 1926 and ended in early March 1927--was more of a nightmare than a pleasure excursion. Writing to literary critic Paul Rosenfeld in January 1927, Anderson complained of his own ill health, ill-temperedness in other Americans, and a general lack of creative vitality in his work. The only thing that somewhat redeemed his second Paris visit was the opportunity to see a few old friends, the foremost of whom was Gertrude Stein. Other than that it was a trip best forgotten.

The situation was quite different--personally and professionally--in 1921 when Anderson and his wife Tennessee visited Paris in the company of Paul Rosenfeld, who paid for the trip. If he was not a popular success in the best-seller sense, Anderson's literary reputation was nonetheless solid, and his work had earned him substantial respect in Europe as well as in America. With the winning of the Dial award for his contribution to American literature, which he accepted in October 1921 shortly after his return from Paris, there came an added measure of public acclaim. During the time of the 1921 Paris sojourn--from May through July--it is fair to say that Anderson was lionized; and for a man as self-conscious about his identity as an artist as Anderson, this kind of recognition was especially sweet.

It is also important to remember that Anderson was forty-five years old at the time of his first Paris trip. If his response to the city was at times emotional--he wept at his first sight of the Louvre--it was in keeping with his character. (His response to New Orleans, where he lived from time to time beginning in 1922, was hardly less enthusiastic.) Though Anderson's career as a writer was certainly not over in 1921, he had already published his two greatest fictional works--Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and Poor White (1920). Thus Sherwood Anderson did not encounter Paris as a young or unknown writer, as did Ernest Hemingway. And perhaps more importantly, he did not consider himself an expatriate in any sense of the word.

Venturing out from his base at the Hotel Jacob where he and his wife stayed, Anderson encountered most of Paris's literati. In his letters and notebook entries, Anderson mentions meetings or conversations with Andre Gide, James Joyce, Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein, Leon Bazalgette, and others. Of these, Gertrude Stein was by far the most important personal and professional contact. After he had returned to America, Anderson occasionally called on Stein to receive or assist an artist, or sometimes simply a friend, who was on his way to Paris. The most notable of these cases was that of Ernest Hemingway, whom Anderson introduced in his letter of 3 December 1921 as "an American writer instinctively in touch with everything worthwhile going on here [in America]."

Some caution must be exercised in assessing the influence of the 1921 Paris trip on Anderson's professional life. The Paris experience does not represent a significant watershed in Anderson's career; and though he later acknowledged the stylistic influence of Joyce in the writing of Dark Laughter (1925), the influence stems from a literary source, not necessarily from personal contact. Further, the entries in Anderson's 1921 Paris notebook reveal a strengthening, rather than a modification or shifting, of previously held views. He expresses mistrust of literary groups and movements, of writers who talk rather than write, and for Anderson the wholesome attitude of the French people toward work--which he compares to that of the American Negro--underscores the drudgery and sterility of the white American work ethic.

The two most important by-products of the Paris interlude were the writing of A Story Teller's Story (1924) and, of course, the beginning of his lifelong friendship with Gertrude Stein. Just how much of an inspiration and source the Paris trip may have been for A Story Teller's Story is debatable; it is nonetheless true that several of Anderson's experiences in Paris figure in the autobiographical narrative, some of them prominently. The early influence of Stein on his own work is acknowledged, and his reaction to the cathedral at Chartres is one of the chief climactic episodes in the book. Michael Fanning has argued that the Paris influence on A Story Teller's Story is even more pervasive than the material Anderson took from his 1921 Paris notebook. Anderson seized on "the confrontation between fancy and fact" and made this confrontation the central theme of his work. A Story Teller's Story was praised highly in some circles, and it was reviewed enthusiastically by Hemingway and Stein in Ex Libris in 1925.

Anderson obviously knew of Stein's work long before he made his first Paris trip, though in good Anderson fashion he gives differing accounts as to how he first encountered the work. It was the expression of his admiration for and understanding of her work that formed the basis of the friendship, which involved a mutual respect between Anderson and Stein. Shortly after Anderson left Paris, he wrote a preface for her Geography and Plays (1922). In the preface Anderson points to Tender Buttons (1914) as a work that encouraged him to experiment with his writing, and he ends by giving Stein credit for "rebuilding ... the city of words." Also in 1922 Anderson wrote in praise of Stein's work in a New Republic article entitled "Four American Impressions; Gertrude Stein, Paul Rosenfeld, Ring Lardner, Sinclair Lewis." Anderson's last article on Stein was published in 1934 in the American Spectator, and was written in response to B. F. Skinner's criticism of Stein's "automatic writing" in the January 1934 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. In all of these pieces Anderson developed the general theme that Stein's work was important, misunderstood, and underrated. For her part, Stein--after Anderson had written the preface to Geography and Plays--published an appreciation of Anderson in the Spring 1923 issue of the Little Review called "Idem the Same: A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson." This was followed by her 1925 review of A Story Teller's Story. Stein subsequently wrote of Anderson in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and Everybody's Autobiography (1938); and she reviewed Puzzled America (1935) for the 4 May 1935 issue of the Chicago Daily Tribune. Her last piece on Anderson--"Sherwood's Sweetness"--appeared after his death in a 1941 memorial issue of Story. In her published criticism of Anderson's work, Stein pictured him as the chief exponent of an American tradition in literary craftsmanship which she traced from Cooper, Howells, and Twain. In her letters to Anderson, however, her criticisms were more searching and sometimes quite perceptive. Her comments on Many Marriages (1923) pointed to Anderson's tendency in his longer works to write "a beginning an ending an ending and an ending" rather than a beginning, a middle, and an ending.

Despite his brief European visits, his long literary and personal friendship with Gertrude Stein, and his avowed respect for certain European authors, Sherwood Anderson never had any doubts about his identity as an American artist. And that may go a long way toward explaining the durability of his relationship with Stein. As he saw Stein as a wanderer rather than an expatriate, as an American writer "attempting to do something for the writers of ... English speech," and as a chef who "cares for the handmade goodies and who scorns the factory-made foods," so he consistently pictured himself.