The Straka in Sherwood Anderson

It started as I looked into the feuds that Hemingway had with a number of other writers. He and Faulkner got into one starting around 1947.  Hemingway called John Dos Passos  a "pilot fish" in A Moveable Feast; the term was not meant to be complementary.  Hemingway and Dos Passos had a falling out after the death of Jose Robles.

Wallace Stevens intensely disliked the literati that started flocking to Key West, his long time hangout.  He got into a drunken fist fight with Hemingway;  which Stevens promptly lost (by way of a broken hand).  And Robert Frost forever earned Stevens ire by insisting that Stevens poetry "...purports to make me think." Which is an insult no matter which definition of "purports" you use.

Hemingway wrote The Torrents of Spring as a satire of Anderson's Dark Laughter.  It was Hemingway's satire that then caused his falling out with longtime friend Gertrude Stein.

But it was Sherwood Anderson that caught my eye.  His collection of loosely connected short stories in Winesburg, OH is considered his greatest work.  Published in 1919(!), the collection of 22 stories deals with the encroachment of industrialism and class on the fictional Ohio town of Winesburg.  In Ship of Theseus, Straka's novel Wineblood's Mine becomes a critique of unbridled capitalism.

In Anderson's short story Paper Pills, Dr. Reeky:

"wore also a linen duster with huge pockets into which he continually stuffed scraps of paper. After some weeks the scraps of paper became little hard round balls, and when the pockets were filled he dumped them out upon the floor. For ten years he had but one friend, another old man named John Spaniard who owned a tree nursery. Sometimes, in a playful mood, old Doctor Reeky took from his pockets a handful of the paper balls and threw them at the nursery man."

Later, it is noted that:

"On the papers were written thoughts, ends of thoughts, beginnings of thoughts."

And...

"During the winter he (Dr. Reeky) read to her all of the odds and ends of thoughts he had scribbled on the bits of paper."

Dr. Reeky marries a girl already pregnant, but she dies from illness within a year of their marriage.  Previously, her two primary suitors before her marriage were a jeweler with white hands and "a black-haired boy with large ears." (Not unlike the black haired sailor with bat wing ears on the ship?)

This caught my eye as S. finds himself in strange city with a sludge of paper with only an ornate "S" discernible.  Much later, he goes to retrieve the piece of paper only to find "...tiny, brittle wads sticking to the seam inside."

Also are the mention of apples which is evocative of the scene in which S. and his cohorts find some late season apples as they to try to escape from the brown coats.

"One nibbles at them and they are delicious.  Into a little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all its sweetness.  One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground picking the gnarled, twisted apples and filling his pockets with them  Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples."

I was also struck by Anderson's use of birds and the titles of some of his other short stories.

The Man in the Brown Coat is about a professor of history who has been able to live a very comfortable bourgeois existence.  The narrator keeps seeing visions of his wife's face floating in front of him even as he acknowledges that he knows so very little about her.

Unlit Lamps concerns a dying doctor and his daughter's attempts to connect emotionally before it is too late.

Out of Nowhere into Nothing is the story of a girl who has come home for a visit at a critical point in her life.  "Rosalind thought he looked like a gigantic bird, an aged wise old bird, "perhaps a vulture" she thought."

The Lost Novel, in which an author finally inspired to write his second novel and does so.  But when he goes back to the pages, they are blank.

Death in the Woods, although presumably about the death of an old women, it's also about the fluid nature of narratives.

I must admit that some of the original passages by Anderson that concerned birds elude me in a cursory search, but as I find them again and additional connections, I will continue to add them here.

And I welcome the thoughts and inputs of others who may see connections and affiliations I have missed.




(7/31/14, edited for grammar and tags added)