Mystery --- Fantasy

AN Advocate editor once said to a candidate: "You have imitated the Sherwood Anderson stuff, and quite successfully, too. But we won't want that sort of thing. It's too casy to write." In substance this is what Mr. Chase has too easy to write." In substance this is what Mr. Chase has to say about Anderson. This is a critical study of a man who wrote his first novel at forty, leaving the swivel chair of presidency in an Elyria, Ohio, paint factory to build himself a new life of meaning.

Although not an avowed backer in English composition of what may be called the Wendellian Law, Mr. Chase believes that Anderson and Dreiser and all the rest will fifty years hence be as unread as the Congressional Record. Several things are wrong with Anderson, to his mind. He is to obsessed with sex, and sex perversion. "Winesburg, Ohio" was saturated with people, ranging from the philosopher who does not understand his own sexual frustration and so is writing a book to show that all the world is Christ and is suffering on the Cross, to the hotel proprietor's wife who, after a life of scrubbed floors and emptied cuspidors, is soother in the arms of death by the kisses of an understanding doctor. The book is sane and almost completely damnatory, but one is left with the thought that, after all, Sherwood Anderson is hopelessly and rather endearingly American.