A Story Teller's Story
New York: B. W. Huebsch, Inc. 1924. 12mo. viii+442 pp. $3.00.
AVOWEDLY autobiographical, A Story Teller’s Story is in the final analysis a portrait rather than a chronicle. The reader who takes up the book expecting to find a painstaking amplification of a Who’s Who entry will be disappointed; but anyone who delights in making acquaintance with a gnarled, strong-fibred, distinctive personality will tingle with pleasure as he turns these pages.
In them the external and the actual are freely bent to the elucidation of the inner reality. The author inherits his father’s love of a tall story. Though he tells it with an occasional astringent grin, the fever of invention is not checked. Yet in his very stretching of the facts he is trying to shape symbols to convey truth. The superficially disconnected, often extravagant experiences and fancies that form the substance of his book are so many facets of truth. Sherwood Anderson in the flesh may or may not have fled from his factory as Christian once fled from the City of Destruction. Nevertheless it is certain that in one way or another there did come over him the shattering conviction that for him there lay in the machinery of modern life nothing less than death; and following that conviction he renounced that life. One may not rely upon these reminiscences as evidence in a court; but one does read them with a full persuasion of the fundamental honesty of their narrator as well as a surprised enjoyment at his skill in combining and breathing life into materials so diverse.
It is not a fancy portrait that emerges from this odd story wandering through the past with Shandean irresponsibility, but rather a figure at times clumsy and groping, at times vain and strutting, at times a bit pathetic in its conventional rebelliousness; often betrayed by weakness into humiliation; always a dreamer and always a questioner. The metaphysical cast of the writer’s character is revealed unmistakably. Rich as is his delight in sensuous beauty, the veined surfaces of marble, the fragrance of trees, the hiss of rain, he is never content to dwell long with the senses. He must incessantly be probing into the dark chambers of the mind, exploring with eager curiosity the secret caverns of thought and mood. In his seemingly heavy-footed but astonishingly agile fashion he constantly searches for windows in the thick walls of custom and habit behind which lurk other souls. He wants to break down walls, because to him they are not shelters but barriers. And what he discovers he is impelled to express, though the expression costs agonizing effort. The soul that is thus presented is restless, very much alive in its inconsistencies and foibles, not starched and rationalized out of all likeness to reality.
Much might be made of the social criticism involved in the reactions of a high-strung temperament to our roaring mechanical civilization. However, the indictment of our standardization unfortunately possesses no novelty; it can be found in Ruskin, in Arnold, in William Morris, better done than here, where it seems almost futile, like shoutings in a vacuum. Here, after all, such matters are incidental.
One’s thoughts turn rather to considerations of personality, as one puts down the book: to the boy who could brood over a bit of nitroglycerine until he saw infinity; to the man who has won enviable success, yet feels himself the prisoner of his limitations as he contemplates the golden name Balzac. It is a very genuine, richly human individual that with miraculous cunning is evoked from the seeming chunks of chaos constituting this unusual and arresting autobiography.
GEORGE B. DUTTON