A Story-Teller’s Story

A Story-Teller’s Story, by Sherwood Anderson. New York. B. W. Huebsch. 1924. 442 pages.

In a review of Ernest Hemingway’s “In Our Time” (The Three Mountains Press) Eliot has written that he promises a first distinction. He must be counted as the only American writer but one—Mr. Sherwood Anderson—who has felt the genius of Gertrude Stein’s “Three Lives” and has been evidently influenced by it. Indeed Miss Stein, Mr. Anderson and Mr. Hemingway may now be said to form a school by themselves.” Two of these writers have consented to give Ex Libris their opinion in regard to the latest book written by the third.

—The Editor

The reviewers have all compared his book with the “Education of Henry Adams” and it was not hard for them to do so, for Sherwood Anderson twice refers to the Adams book and there is plenty in the “Story Teller’s Story” about the cathedral at Chartres. Evidently the Education book made a deep impression on Sherwood for he quotes part of it. He also has a couple of other learned quotations in Latin and I can imagine him copying them on the typewriter verifying them carefully to get the spelling right. For Sherwood Anderson, unlike the English, does not quote you Latin in casual conversation.

As far as I know it is the first writer account although English reviewers may find flaws in it, and all of my friends own and speak of “The Education of Henry Adams” with such solemnity that I have been unable ever to read it. “A Story Teller’s Story” is a good book. It is such a good book that it doesn’t need to be coupled in the reviewing with Henry Adams or anybody else.

This is the Life and Times of Sherwood Anderson and a great part of it runs along in a mildly kidding way as though Sherwood were afraid people would think he took himself and his life too seriously. But there is no joking about the way he writes of horses and women and bartenders and Judge Turner and the elder Berners and the half allegorical figure of the poor devil of a magazine writer who comes in at the end of the book. And if Sherwood jokes about the base-ball player beating him up at the warehouse where he worked, you get at the same time, a very definite sharp picture of the baseball player, drunk, sullen and amazed, knocking him down as soon and as often as he got up while the two teammates watched and wondered why this fellow named Anderson had picked a fight when he couldn’t fight.

There are very beautiful places in the book, as good writing as Sherwood Anderson has done and that means considerably better than any other American writer has done. It is a great mystery and an even greater tribute to Sherwood that so many people writing today think he cannot write. They believe that he has very strange and sometimes beautiful ideas and visions and that he expresses them very clumsily and unsuccessfully. While in reality he often takes a very banal idea or thing and presents it with such craftsmanship and care and so clearly and gently that when he calls himself “a poor scribbler” don’t believe him. He is not a poor scribbler even though he calls himself that or worse, again and again. He is a very great writer and if he has, at times, in other books been unsuccessful, it has been for two reasons. His talent and his development of it has been toward the short story and tale and not toward that highly artificial form the novel. The second reason is that he has been what the French say of all honest politicians mal entouré.

In “A Story Teller’s Story,” which is highly successful as a piece of work because it is written in his own particular form, a series of short tales jointed up, sometimes and sometimes quite disconnected, he pays homage to his New York friends who have helped him. They nearly all took something from him, and tried to give him various things in return that he needed as much as a boxer needs diamond studded teeth. And because he gave them all something he is, after the manner of all great men, very grateful to them. They called him a “phallic Chekov” and other meaningless things and wished for the sparkle of his diamond studded teeth and Sherwood got a little worried and uncertain and wrote a poor book called “Many Marriages.” Then all the people who hated him because he was an American who could write and did write and had been given a prize and was starting to have some success jumped on him with loud cries that he never had written and never would be able to write and if you didn’t believe it read “Many Marriages”. Now Sherwood has written a fine book and they are all busy comparing him to Henry Adams.

Anyway you ought to read “A Story Teller’s Story.” It is a wonderful comeback after “Many Marriages”.

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This review first appeared in Ex Libris, vol. 2, no. 6 (1925, American Library in Paris).
Ernest Hemingway was an American author from Oak Park, Illinois. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.