Alyse Gregory

“ With the possible exception of Poor White one feels that in his Mr Anderson is subject to an ever recurring species of shell shock projects him volte face towards the prickly actualities of life, and in his efforts to regain his spiritual poise he drags one about with him in a cloud of splintering conventions and mysterious clogged desires through passages too cluttered to permit of escape into the clear light of day. ”

“ In his Winesburg, Ohio, and The Triumph of the Egg he has recorded in varying situations the obscure emotional states of people, wistful, restless, or maladjusted to the crass routines of life, people who do sudden strange things seeking release for thwarted desires, people who have clung lingeringly to old "pure" ideals as they passed over the puberty into a world too raw for their troubled timidities. ”

“ But unfortunately for American letters it must be conceded that when all has been said Sherwood Anderson taps on occasions deeper veins than almost any other of our contemporary novelists. Whether he will achieve a greater perfection in the short story, that realm of literature in which he is most at home, depends largely upon his ability to extricate himself from the debilitating influences of other writers and to think out his problems alone. ”

“ Just as a child might imprison for a moment in the cup of its hand a fledgeling fallen by the wayside and then suddenly abandon it on some grassy plot, Miss Mansfield seems to clasp in the circle of her thought a passing protest over the crudeness of life, a sense of the fugitive unacknowledged differences that lurk between the sexes, a sympathetic understanding of adolescence, and then depositing her tremulous and explicit burden hurriedly on the ground, with a toss of the head, is off down the road whistling a bar from Bohême. ”

“ Even Mr Theodore Dreiser, with whose name that of Mr Anderson's has been so often associated, achieves in his brooding candour a freedom from the dragging weight of self-consciousness. "I am a confused child in a confused world" writes Mr Anderson in his Mid-American Chants, but it is not from confused children, however engaging they may be, that one looks for art. ”

“ Even his exhilaration over the spectacular part he is to play in the great celebration is overshadowed by his eagerness to return to his family in the cramped, shabby rooms, where every morning new creditors sit angrily on the rickety rented chairs, rooms where hours of anguish and joy so strangely intermingle. ”

“ Certainly, in Miss Mansfield's earlier books, Bliss and The Garden Party, one could delight in so original and potential a talent, while reserving judgement as to certain suggested limitations. Like a cutter racing lightly over tossing waves her style carried her mobile perceptions and if one waited somewhat anxiously for the craft to turn full-blown for port one remained at least in doubt as to just what port it was to be, after all, headed toward. ”

“ Dostoevsky, like a character in one of his own novels, finally gives a crashing blow to a nearby table, breaking a glass and nearly upsetting a lighted lamp, seizes his coat, flings himself out of the door, and starts running distractedly up the road while after him follows his loyal and exasperated wife calling loudly "Fedya, Fedya, are you mad? Where are you running?" ”

“ Then why, one asks oneself, in spite of so many lapses, so much obvious awkwardness in the handling of his material, so little understanding of how the minds of certain women work under circumstances of repression, so much rhetorical self-indulgence and lack of aesthetic arrangement has Mr Anderson created for himself so large and unmistakable a following? ”

“ One has but to compare even so moving and poetically conceived a story as The New Englander to de Maupassant's Miss Harriet, of similar theme, or Senility, so like Chekhov in conception, to one of that author's delicate masterpieces, to perceive the difference between writing weakened by a groping intellect and writing that arrives radiant and ineluctable from the pens of great imaginative artists. ”

“ It is interesting to note that over and over again the author's similes revert to various metal substances almost as if she were attempting to rid herself of something hard and unyielding in her own breast, thrusting it recurrently away from her into the landscape only to have it reappear with a slight change of phrasing in each succeeding page. This is carried sometimes to a point of absurdity—"the blueness of a heaven that was angry like a stone," "trees go black with an iron slowness," "heavy metal sobs," "stiff wind like shredded iron." ”

“ 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. ”

“ At present, we feel, he somewhat resembles a man, who, having planted a fine bed of radishes, tends them rather carelessly and sells them before their time, so that when one comes at last to buy them in the open market they turn out, unfortunately, rather softer than any good radish has a right to be. To have attained their legitimate freshness and pungency they should, one strongly suspects, have been left to reach maturity in the promising and well-manured soil of Winesburg, Ohio. ”

“ IN America where there are no Rebecca Wests, May Sinclairs, or Virginia Woolfs, one is forced to make a place for so able a writer as Evelyn Scott although this astringent author lacks the depth of passion and richness of texture of Miss West, the succinct ironic detachment of Miss Sinclair, and the vigorous culture of Mrs Woolf. ”

“ We are instructed in the pangs of childbirth, endure an ensuing obstetrical operation from which no details are spared, and are finally deposited with the two haggard lovers, their baby, an unfortunate relative named Nannette, and a black servant in a spot far more remote from comforts and companionship than the last spot which we had supposed the very most remote and uncomfortable in existence. ”

“ As with Dostoevsky's novels so in reading over the present collection one's critical faculties forgo their habitual vigilance, and one is lost in speculation over the mysterious qualities of a personality so strangely limited and yet so inexplicably without boundaries. ”

“ Protruding nervously, distractedly even, is his familiar dislike of everything foreign, his apprehensive nostalgia for Russia. "A writer should not leave his country for a long time, he should live one life with her; otherwise he is lost," or "It is better for me to sit in the debtor's prison in Russia than to remain abroad."
The simplicity and mildness of his wife's portion of the book, her reiterated devotion, and pat little assurances of her obedience and loyalty might almost be termed prosaic. ”

“ Whether her work will live beyond our own generation or not is difficult to foretell, but it is perhaps not too much to say that, in those exceptional instances where her own sensitive psychology corresponded most exactly with that of the character she portrayed, she could hardly have failed to please even that great master of intricate thought whose four requisites of good literature remained, "intensity, lucidity, brevity and beauty." ”

“ For Raoul Duquette, the little Frenchman in the former story, is neither mad enough, shallow enough, nor deep enough to be convincing, and the authentic ring in his suddenly enunciated misery, which his facile articulacy negates, announces itself unmistakably as a vicarious release for the author’s own private anguish, just as in A Married Man's Story she voices again her own insistent problem when she makes the husband say "Tell me! ”