Sherwood Anderson

Sherwood Anderson is remembered both as a short-story writer whose plain, attentive prose the narrator admired and as a figure at the center of Gertrude Stein’s shifting literary loyalties. The contrast between Stein’s praise of Anderson as a person and her resistance to discussing his writing culminates in the anger provoked by the narrator’s parody of Dark Laughter.

Identity and Writing

When the narrator first knew Anderson through Stein’s accounts, Stein spoke warmly of him as a man: she admired his striking eyes, kindness, and charm. The narrator cared less about those qualities than about Anderson’s short stories, some of which he liked very much. He found them simply written, sometimes beautiful, and grounded in a writer’s knowledge of and deep care for the people he portrayed.

That admiration did not extend to Anderson’s novels. The narrator considered them strangely poor, a judgment he initially kept to himself because criticizing Anderson’s work would also mean criticizing one of Stein’s most loyal supporters. The account therefore distinguishes Anderson’s strengths as the narrator saw them: the humane attention and simplicity of the stories, set against novels he judged much less successful.

Stein’s Regard and Literary Conversation

The narrator recalls that during three or four years of close friendship, Stein rarely spoke well of writers who had not praised her work or helped advance her career. Anderson was an exception in a particular way: Stein spoke glowingly of him as a person, but did not want to discuss his stories. When the narrator asked about Anderson’s novels, she likewise avoided talking about the work, just as she would not discuss James Joyce.

The narrator describes this reticence through a comparison with rival generals. A general might praise an opponent only after defeating him, and then recount the victory in detail; writers whose work could not be comfortably praised or dismissed were harder to bring into conversation. Anderson’s stories, in the narrator’s view, were too good to make easy conversation. Stein’s personal affection for him thus coexisted with a silence around the writing itself, while the narrator’s own assessment of Anderson’s novels risked offending her for a different reason: Anderson was one of her loyal supporters.

Dark Laughter and the Break in Regard

Stein’s silence about Anderson did not last unchanged. After he wrote the novel Dark Laughter, which the narrator considered terribly bad, silly, and affected, the narrator could not resist criticizing it in a parody. Stein became very angry. As the narrator understood her reaction, he had attacked someone who formed part of her literary apparatus, rather than merely offered an unfavorable judgment of a book.

The timing sharpened the contradiction. For a long period Stein had avoided discussing Anderson’s work; after his standing as a writer had declined, she herself began praising him lavishly. The recollection does not explain her change of emphasis, but sets it beside the earlier pattern: Anderson’s personal virtues were safe subjects, his stories were too strong for agreeable conversation, and his later failure as a novelist made generous praise possible. His place in the episode is defined by this unstable boundary between personal loyalty and literary judgment.