Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/291



P to the present time Mr Sherwood Anderson has published four novels, two books of short stories, and a collection of poems. He has been termed by respective critics "the Dostoevsky of America," a great and original figure in American literature, a "phallic Chekhov," and the link that at last connects the old world with that of the new. M Faÿ, in devoting an article to him in a recent French magazine, mentions his earlier stories as "purs comme l'ivoire," and, unique among contemporary American writers, he is being rapidly translated into Russian. With the final award, Mr Anderson issued completely from those dim recesses hitherto penetrated only by enthusiastic critics and a small reading public, into the safely entrenched ranks of the so-called "best sellers."

Anxiously and hospitably one feels one's way through the pages of his novels in search for those especial qualities which have impelled his admirers to shower so unstintedly upon him their approval. Yet it is at the command of a voice that one finds oneself proceeding—a voice exhorting, suppliant, prophetic, simulating stridency, sentimentalizing, and dwindling at recurring moments to a bewildered whisper of inquiry. Never, no never, touching for more than a fleeting second that subtle art of restraint and aesthetic arrangement which we have come to associate with the most distinguished writing. Never, in spite of his continual use of the word "clean," which serves apparently all purposes, and plays over his pages like an agitated pawn vainly seeking equilibrium on a tilted chess board, giving one a sense of a technique sharp, pure, unmuddied by the stirred sediment of somewhat impuissant emotions. We move among wraiths of "purposeful" or "wistful" men, "straight," "fine" women or women misunderstood, or dulled beyond reprieve. Penetrating, imaginative passages there are, to be sure, an arresting use of a word here and there, a sense of the beauty of old weathered things, of the pitiless craft and hypocrisy of man in his most predatory moments. "How cunning they were, the men who had been successful in life. Behind the flesh that had grown so thick