Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Read online

  The Complete Works of

  SHERWOOD ANDERSON

  (1876-1941)

  Contents

  The Novels

  Windy McPherson’s Son

  Marching Men

  Poor White

  Many Marriages

  Dark Laughter

  Tar: A Midwest Childhood

  Beyond Desire

  Kit Brandon: A Portrait

  The Short Story Collections

  Winesburg, Ohio

  The Triumph of the Egg

  Horses and Men

  Death in the Woods and Other Stories

  Uncollected Stories

  The Short Stories

  List of Short Stories in Chronological Order

  List of Short Stories in Alphabetical Order

  The Plays

  Plays, Winesburg and Others

  The Poetry Collections

  Mid-American Chants

  A New Testament

  The Poems

  List of Poems in Chronological Order

  List of Poems in Alphabetical Order

  The Non-Fiction

  Alice and the Lost Novel

  The Autobiographies

  A Story Teller’s Story

  Sherwood Anderson’s Notebook

  The Delphi Classics Catalogue

  © Delphi Classics 2019

  Version 1

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  The Complete Works of

  SHERWOOD ANDERSON

  By Delphi Classics, 2019

  COPYRIGHT

  Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by Delphi Classics.

  © Delphi Classics, 2019.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.

  ISBN: 978 1 78877 993 7

  Delphi Classics

  is an imprint of

  Delphi Publishing Ltd

  Hastings, East Sussex

  United Kingdom

  Contact: [email protected]

  www.delphiclassics.com

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  The Novels

  The railway station at Camden, Ohio, c. 1890 — Anderson was born in Camden in 1876

  A sign welcoming contemporary visitors to Camden and commemorating Anderson’s connection with the town

  Anderson as a child

  Windy McPherson’s Son

  Anderson’s first novel, published in 1916 as part of a three-book deal with the publisher John Lane, is the story of Sam McPherson’s rise in the world of business and his search for emotional enlightenment in later life. Before this, Anderson had written advertising copy and a series of articles aimed at agricultural workers, as well as a number of character sketches for a small literary magazine. Anderson left his job as a copywriter to become president of a mail-order firm, but the stress of this position led to a nervous breakdown during the summer of 1907.

  In September 1907, the Anderson family (at that time just Sherwood, his wife Cornelia and son Robert) moved from Cleveland to Elyria, Ohio, where Anderson became head of his own business, the Anderson Manufacturing Company. As part of the family’s new home, Anderson set aside an attic where he would escape the stresses of business and family life. It was here and in his office (where Frances Shute, his secretary, would sometimes stay late typing drafts of his first two novels), during a certain winter between 1907 and 1912, that Windy McPherson’s Son was composed – though there is some evidence pointing to possible edits made between those early years and the novel’s publication in 1916.

  Parallels can be drawn between Anderson’s own life and the plot of Windy McPherson’s Son. The initial section of the novel is inspired by his youth, the second “...combined the ways he had tried to make money in Chicago and Ohio...” and the marriage between Sam and Sue resembles the author’s with Cornelia. The characters of Mary Underwood and Janet Eberly were likely inspired by Trillena White, a high school teacher that befriended Anderson while he attended the Wittenberg Academy in Springfield, Ohio and who stayed for a time with the Andersons in Elyria.

  In addition to the personal connections between Windy McPherson’s Son and the author’s life, the influence of other writers can also be detected in the book. Anderson himself said of his early writing that he had, “come to novel writing by novel reading.” In particular, William Dean Howells (whose writing Anderson disliked and reacted against), Arnold Bennett, Thomas Hardy, Henry Fuller, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser and George Borrow, are all mentioned by Anderson biographer Kim Townsend as authors that Anderson would have been reading and discussing at the time he wrote Windy McPherson’s Son. In his 1951 biography of Anderson, however, Irving Howe was more critical in his assessment of the novel’s intertexts – or lack thereof – arguing that other than the “early social novels of H. G. Wells and the radical-adventure stories of Jack London... Anderson’s early novels were all too much his own, reflecting in their style the natural inclination of a poorly educated writer to strain for the literary and lapse into the colloquial.”

  The first edition

  CONTENTS

  BOOK I

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  BOOK II

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  BOOK III

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  BOOK IV

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  Title page of the first edition

  Cornelia Lane (1877-1967), whom Anderson married in 1904. Initially a happy marriage, it broke down due to Anderson’s womanising, as well as for the tensions between financial obligations to his family and an obsession with literature – tensions that led to Anderson suffering a complete nervous breakdown in 1912. Lane and Anderson formally divorced in 1916.

  TO THE LIVING MEN AND WOMEN

  OF MY OWN MIDDLE WESTERN HOME TOWN

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

  BOOK I

  CHAPTER I

  AT THE BEGINNING of the long twilight of a summer evening, Sam McPherson, a tall big-boned boy of thirteen, with brown hair, black eyes, and an amusing little habit of tilting his chin in the air as he walked, came upon the station platform of the little corn-shipping town of Caxton in Iowa. It was a board platform, and the boy walked cautiously, lifting his bare feet and putting them down with extreme deliberateness on the hot, dry, cracked planks. Under one arm he carried a bundle of newspapers. A long black cigar was in his hand.

  In front of the station he stopped; and Jerry Donlin, the baggage-man, seeing the cigar in his hand, laughed, and slowly drew the side of his face up into a laboured
wink.

  “What is the game to-night, Sam?” he asked.

  Sam stepped to the baggage-room door, handed him the cigar, and began giving directions, pointing into the baggage-room, intent and business-like in the face of the Irishman’s laughter. Then, turning, he walked across the station platform to the main street of the town, his eyes bent on the ends of his fingers on which he was making computations with his thumb. Jerry looked after him, grinning so that his red gums made a splash of colour on his bearded face. A gleam of paternal pride lit his eyes and he shook his head and muttered admiringly. Then, lighting the cigar, he went down the platform to where a wrapped bundle of newspapers lay against the building, under the window of the telegraph office, and taking it in his arm disappeared, still grinning, into the baggage-room.

  Sam McPherson walked down Main Street, past the shoe store, the bakery, and the candy store kept by Penny Hughes, toward a group lounging at the front of Geiger’s drug store. Before the door of the shoe store he paused a moment, and taking a small note-book from his pocket ran his finger down the pages, then shaking his head continued on his way, again absorbed in doing sums on his fingers.

  Suddenly, from among the men by the drug store, a roaring song broke the evening quiet of the street, and a voice, huge and guttural, brought a smile to the boy’s lips:

  “He washed the windows and he swept the floor,

  And he polished up the handle of the big front door.

  He polished that handle so carefullee,

  That now he’s the ruler of the queen’s navee.”

  The singer, a short man with grotesquely wide shoulders, wore a long flowing moustache, and a black coat, covered with dust, that reached to his knees. He held a smoking briar pipe in his hand, and with it beat time for a row of men sitting on a long stone under the store window and pounding on the sidewalk with their heels to make a chorus for the song. Sam’s smile broadened into a grin as he looked at the singer, Freedom Smith, a buyer of butter and eggs, and past him at John Telfer, the orator, the dandy, the only man in town, except Mike McCarthy, who kept his trousers creased. Among all the men of Caxton, Sam most admired John Telfer and in his admiration had struck upon the town’s high light. Telfer loved good clothes and wore them with an air, and never allowed Caxton to see him shabbily or indifferently dressed, laughingly declaring that it was his mission in life to give tone to the town.

  John Telfer had a small income left him by his father, once a banker in the town, and in his youth he had gone to New York to study art, and later to Paris; but lacking ability or industry to get on had come back to Caxton where he had married Eleanor Millis, a prosperous milliner. They were the most successful married pair in Caxton, and after years of life together they were still in love; were never indifferent to each other, and never quarrelled; Telfer treated his wife with as much consideration and respect as though she were a sweetheart, or a guest in his house, and she, unlike most of the wives in Caxton, never ventured to question his goings and comings, but left him free to live his own life in his own way while she attended to the millinery business.

  At the age of forty-five John Telfer was a tall, slender, fine looking man, with black hair and a little black pointed beard, and with something lazy and care-free in his every movement and impulse. Dressed in white flannels, with white shoes, a jaunty cap upon his head, eyeglasses hanging from a gold chain, and a cane lightly swinging from his hand, he made a figure that might have passed unnoticed on the promenade before some fashionable summer hotel, but that seemed a breach of the laws of nature when seen on the streets of a corn-shipping town in Iowa. And Telfer was aware of the extraordinary figure he cut; it was a part of his programme of life. Now as Sam approached he laid a hand on Freedom Smith’s shoulder to check the song, and, with his eyes twinkling with good-humour, began thrusting with his cane at the boy’s feet.

  “He will never be ruler of the queen’s navee,” he declared, laughing and following the dancing boy about in a wide circle. “He is a little mole that works underground intent upon worms. The trick he has of tilting up his nose is only his way of smelling out stray pennies. I have it from Banker Walker that he brings a basket of them into the bank every day. One of these days he will buy the town and put it into his vest pocket.”

  Circling about on the stone sidewalk and dancing to escape the flying cane, Sam dodged under the arm of Valmore, a huge old blacksmith with shaggy clumps of hair on the back of his hands, and sought refuge between him and Freedom Smith. The blacksmith’s hand stole out and lay upon the boy’s shoulder. Telfer, his legs spread apart and the cane hooked upon his arm, began rolling a cigarette; Geiger, a yellow skinned man with fat cheeks and with hands clasped over his round paunch, smoked a black cigar, and as he sent each puff into the air, grunted forth his satisfaction with life. He was wishing that Telfer, Freedom Smith, and Valmore, instead of moving on to their nightly nest at the back of Wildman’s grocery, would come into his place for the evening. He thought he would like to have the three of them there night after night discussing the doings of the world.

  Quiet once more settled down upon the sleepy street. Over Sam’s shoulder, Valmore and Freedom Smith talked of the coming corn crop and the growth and prosperity of the country.

  “Times are getting better about here, but the wild things are almost gone,” said Freedom, who in the winter bought hides and pelts.

  The men sitting on the stone beneath the window watched with idle interest Telfer’s labours with paper and tobacco. “Young Henry Kerns has got married,” observed one of them, striving to make talk. “He has married a girl from over Parkertown way. She gives lessons in painting — china painting — kind of an artist, you know.”

  An ejaculation of disgust broke from Telfer: his fingers trembled and the tobacco that was to have been the foundation of his evening smoke rained on the sidewalk.

  “An artist!” he exclaimed, his voice tense with excitement. “Who said artist? Who called her that?” He glared fiercely about. “Let us have an end to this blatant misuse of fine old words. To say of one that he is an artist is to touch the peak of praise.”

  Throwing his cigarette paper after the scattered tobacco he thrust one hand into his trouser pocket. With the other he held the cane, emphasising his points by ringing taps upon the pavement. Geiger, taking the cigar between his fingers, listened with open mouth to the outburst that followed. Valmore and Freedom Smith dropped their conversation and with broad smiles upon their faces gave attention, and Sam McPherson, his eyes round with wonder and admiration, felt again the thrill that always ran through him under the drum beats of Telfer’s eloquence.

  “An artist is one who hungers and thirsts after perfection, not one who dabs flowers upon plates to choke the gullets of diners,” declared Telfer, setting himself for one of the long speeches with which he loved to astonish the men of Caxton, and glaring down at those seated upon the stone. “It is the artist who, among all men, has the divine audacity. Does he not hurl himself into a battle in which is engaged against him all of the accumulative genius of the world?”

  Pausing, he looked about for an opponent upon whom he might pour the flood of his eloquence, but on all sides smiles greeted him. Undaunted, he rushed again to the charge.

  “A business man — what is he?” he demanded. “He succeeds by outwitting the little minds with which he comes in contact. A scientist is of more account — he pits his brains against the dull unresponsiveness of inanimate matter and a hundredweight of black iron he makes do the work of a hundred housewives. But an artist tests his brains against the greatest brains of all times; he stands upon the peak of life and hurls himself against the world. A girl from Parkertown who paints flowers upon dishes to be called an artist — ugh! Let me spew forth the thought! Let me cleanse my mouth! A man should have a prayer upon his lips who utters the word artist!”

  “Well, we can’t all be artists and the woman can paint flowers upon dishes for all I care,” spoke up Valmore, laughing good nature
dly. “We can’t all paint pictures and write books.”

  “We do not want to be artists — we do not dare to be,” shouted Telfer, whirling and shaking his cane at Valmore. “You have a misunderstanding of the word.”

  He straightened his shoulders and threw out his chest and the boy standing beside the blacksmith threw up his chin, unconsciously imitating the swagger of the man.

  “I do not paint pictures; I do not write books; yet am I an artist,” declared Telfer, proudly. “I am an artist practising the most difficult of all arts — the art of living. Here in this western village I stand and fling my challenge to the world. ‘On the lip of not the greatest of you,’ I cry, ‘has life been more sweet.’”

  He turned from Valmore to the men upon the stone.

  “Make a study of my life,” he commanded. “It will be a revelation to you. With a smile I greet the morning; I swagger in the noontime; and in the evening, like Socrates of old, I gather a little group of you benighted villagers about me and toss wisdom into your teeth, striving to teach you judgment in the use of great words.”

  “You talk an almighty lot about yourself, John,” grumbled Freedom Smith, taking his pipe from his mouth.

  “The subject is complex, it is varied, it is full of charm,” Telfer answered, laughing.

  Taking a fresh supply of tobacco and paper from his pocket, he rolled and lighted a cigarette. His fingers no longer trembled. Flourishing his cane he threw back his head and blew smoke into the air. He thought that in spite of the roar of laughter that had greeted Freedom Smith’s comment, he had vindicated the honour of art and the thought made him happy.