Fenton 1 Toward the Epicene: Mechanisms
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Fenton 1 Toward the Epicene: Mechanisms for Gender Dissolution in Sherwood Anderson and Floyd Dell Introduction: The Chicago Literary Renaissance Sherwood Anderson and Floyd Dell are well-recognized as two of the foremost authors from the Chicago Literary Renaissance, a period that refers to the second wave of Chicago writing spanning the years 1910-1920. The larger movement of Chicago writing spans the turn of the century through the 1940s. While the Midland realism of Hamlin Garland and Robert Herrick laid necessary foundations, the second wave – which gave rise to Sherwood Anderson, Floyd Dell, Carl Sandburg, and perpetuated Theodore Dreiser – saw a defined literary environment coalesce around Chicago. Newspapers and small magazines, such as Dell’s Friday Literary Review, proved literary testing-grounds for the city's literary surfeit. These newspapers represented an emerging Modern literary dialogue, presenting writers from Chicago as well as foreign literary influences, such as Joyce, Yeats, and Lawrence. The Chicago Literary Renaissance was possible in part due to nascent institutions such as small magazines. Similarly, Jane Addam’s Hull House Theater staged experimental plays. As a result of this literary “establishment,” H.L. Mencken proclaims Chicago as the “Literary Capital of the United States.” Furthermore, Mencken identifies in Chicago (and its attendant sensibility) an “original, genuinely national literature that made art from the principal stories and idioms of American life” (Mencken The Literary Capital of the United States). By the end of the 1920s the literary (and social) capital had shifted to New York’s Greenwich Village, the physical embodiment of Fenton 2 Bohemian sensibilities. High Modernism saw a further expatriation of literary capital. Though Chicago’s importance diminished, Dell and Anderson abide as literary figures. In moving to Greenwich Village and assuming a role as editor for The Masses, Dell again assumes a determinative role in literary taste as critic and novelist. Anderson does not identify with Greenwich Village as ostensibly as Dell. Indeed, in 1924 Anderson re-locates to New Orleans. Nonetheless, Anderson’s influence is undeniable. William Faulkner, in a June 1953 interview in The Atlantic, cites Anderson as paramount in his decision to become a novelist. Anderson’s publisher, Boni and Liverlight, was responsible for publishing the full version of Hemingway’s In Our Time in 1925. It is unsurprising then that Faulkner in the Paris Review (Spring 1956), stated that Sherwood Anderson was "the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing which our successors will carry on." Though the subsequent period of High Modernism ushered in a preference for Greenwich Village and the European, the seminal position of Floyd Dell and Sherwood Anderson guarantees their enduring vision. Floyd Dell and Sherwood Anderson’s treatment of gender confirms many Modernist tendencies toward equality and sameness. Anderson and Dell present an effective fulmination against ingrained 19th Century values and an indictment of industrialized consumerism as part of an epicene vision for society that is achieved by an affirmation of play, sex, and the imagination. The imagination's potential to destroy and reform society is also explored. The implications of Dell and Anderson’s gender neutrality and the challenges they present to conventional values, such as marriage or monogamy, continue to resonate and present an alternative society founded on “mutual respect” and “creative desires.” Nonetheless, this creative vision offers some challenges in its own right. Anderson and Dell Fenton 3 Sherwood Anderson and Floyd Dell's professional and personal association began as early as 1913 when Dell, as editor of the Friday Literary Review of Chicago's Evening Post, reviewed Windy McPherson's Son. His review of the unfinished work was positive, stating that he “had seen recently an unfinished novel by a yet unpublished writer which if finished as begun will overtop the work of any living American writer.” As editorial disputes prevented Anderson's publishing of Windy McPherson's Son, he gave Floyd Dell the manuscript. Dell brought the novel to New York in October of 1913 and sought a new publisher. After a circuitous exchange (Dell sent the novel to a reader in England who passed it to a New York office; the New York reader recalled Theodore Dreiser's praise of Anderson), the novel was finally published in 1916. As a result, Anderson claimed Dell as his “literary-father.”1 Dell's arrival in New York as assistant editor in 1913 “sharpened [the Masses'] adeptness at appealing to an audience drawn to metropolitan sophistication as well as political ideas” (Tanselle 174). In many ways, his work at the Masses continued his previous activities at Chicago's Friday Literary Review. Dell held the position of editor of the Masses and the Liberator from 1914-20 where “the journal constantly discussed issues of equality in marriage, access to divorce, free love, prostitution, and sex discrimination...making another third space where the sexes seemed to mingle and talk, easefully, in print” (Stansell 174). In his visits to New York City (and Dell), Sherwood Anderson “found confirmation of Chicago's subordination to Greenwich Village in matters of the new writing” (Stansell 175). Given Dell's influential position as managing editor of the Masses and Anderson's influence on a future generation of writers it is clear both men were involved in a similar task – imagining present and future society 1 The biographical information is assembled from Tanselle's “Realist or Dreamer: Letters of Sherwood Anderson” and Stansell's American Moderns Fenton 4 through the lens of equality, specifically gender equality. Equality is the explicit message of the Masses, the implicit message of Anderson's works, and the message of the Chicago Renaissance and Greenwich Village. Despite this similarity, though, some distinctions must be made between the two authors. In a series of letters written after the publication of Dell's Moon-Calf on 27 October 1920, Dell and Anderson discuss their literary differences. Dell characterizes himself as “a boy who because he fears reality is in love with Shadow-shapes – much more so than this novel tells. Who lives and breathes in the queer world of Poe, of Dore, of Coleridge” who “must reinforce his ardor for reality by theory—he must beware of the seductions of fantasy” (Tanselle 534). Dell professes a “religious-philosophical sternness he should refuse” and a constant insistence upon, “like Kim in the story, [saying] to himself, 'two times two is four, two times three is six, two times four.” Dell identifies strongly with the realist, despite his desire to dwell in the fantastic. Anderson responds to Dell's letter by stating that “as a personality, I am made in a different way” and that “perhaps you [Dell] and I do need two different approaches to come to the same end. You may need to punish the poet in you. I may need to give my poet breath and life.” Dell's final response is a promise to “express the part of me that believes 2 x 2 = 5 – even if I do have a footnote soberly pointing out the inaccuracy” (Tanselle 535, 536). As G. Thomas Tanselle notes, this correspondence “help[s] to clarify [Anderson's] attitudes toward the craft of fiction” and “also form an eloquent discussion of an eternal dichotomy: the realist versus the dreamer, the businessman who must 'punish the poet' in him versus the individual who rejects the multiplication table and follows his own 'strange and beautiful impulses” (537). This “eternal” dichotomy is most salient when considering the nature of Dell's and Fenton 5 Anderson's respective works. Dell's work on the socialist Masses is vested largely in material reality. Anderson's highly imagistic and symbolic writing tends toward dreams and poetry, a fault according to Dell as “[Anderson’s] tendency to be poetical or mystical was leading him away from the truth” (Tanselle 533). Though Dell writes fiction (his plays are featured in Greenwich Village), he produces considerably more non-fiction than Anderson. Looking at Life is a collection of editorials and essays published from 1914 to 1923; Were You Ever a Child (1921), imaginatively investigates childhood, education, and art (both the Child and the Artist are placed on trial as a dialogue between the narrator and conventional middle-class thinkers). Despite the creativity, including the future vision of education, “Education in 1947 A.D.,” Dell remains largely in the mode of non-fiction. Conversely, Anderson's Perhaps Women (1931) could function as a companion piece to Were You Ever a Child insofar as both examine the effects of industrialism on future generations. In contrast, though, Anderson presents his views “partly in story form, partly in broken verse, partly in opinions, thrust out at the readers” (Perhaps Women 1) Considering that “opinions thrust out at readers” are the most prosaic form of representation offered, it is unsurprising that Anderson lists it as last. According to Tanselle, the different literary styles of Anderson and Dell were even represented by their dress: “Dell no longer wore a black stock or carried a walking stick as he had in Chicago but wore instead a blue flannel shirt which was, as Dell said, 'definitely proletarian and therefore suitable to a Socialist editor.' Thereupon Anderson decided to begin using a black stock and walking stick” (533). Though Tanselle maintains that “the matter of clothes has a greater significance for the relation between the two men,” the emphasis of the Anderson and Dell correspondence should rest on their similar goals, rather than the disparate means by which both mean achieve them. Fenton 6 The Machine Song A rhetoric of non-gendered equality pervades the works of both Anderson and Dell.