Mellowed Mystery

HOME TOWN--Sherwood Anderson--Alliance ($2.50).

Once upon a time Sherwood Anderson, manager of a paint factory in Elyria, Ohio, was dictating a letter to his secretary. Suddenly he said, "I am walking in the bed of a river," put on his hat, strode out of the paint factory, out of the town forever. He got an advertising job in Chicago, met Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, Ben Hecht, began writing stories himself. After two poor novels, Anderson brought out a remarkable sketch of small-town life, Winesburg, Ohio (1919).

In those days small-town life was a popular literary theme, with two schools of approach. One stemmed from mellow Hoosier Poet James Whitcomb Riley, was ripest in the folksy novels of Hoosier Booth Tarkington. The other stemmed from the Spoon River Anthology by an Illinois lawyer and politician, Edgar Lee Masters. The ripest work of this school is Sherwood Anderson's. His meandering, mystical tales present the U. S. small town as a dimpling surface above dark fathoms of frustrated desires. He wrote of a typical female in Winesburg, Ohio: "At night she dreamed that he had bitten into her body and that his jaws were dripping." Of a typical male: "Tricked, by Gad, that's what I was, tricked by life and made a fool of."

This week appeared Home Town, Sherwood Anderson's latter-day reflections on his favorite theme. It is a book of essays, richly illustrated by Farm Security Administration photographs. Anderson now lives in Marion, Va. (pop.: 4,156), where until recently he blithely published two newspapers, one Republican, one Democratic. Home Town muses on 1) the small town amid the moving pageant of the seasons, the varied U. S. regions--corn country, cotton country, coal country; 2) the town boy lured by the city, the city man's wistful memory of his old home; 3) the interplay of life with life among people who know each other well. Something of the old Winesburg mystery glows through his gentle prose. But now the musings are less those of a rebel paint manufacturer, fed up with it all, than those of a small-town editor, himself jest folks.

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