Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, February 6, 1994                   TAG: 9402060176
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: C-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SHERWOOD ANDERSON'S STORIES, REDISCOVERED AND RESTORED REVIEWED BY ROBERT

While Sherwood Anderson is traditionally honored for his "Winesburg, Ohio" stories, his reputation has suffered at the hands of literary scholars who dismiss his novels and later stories as inferior.

In collecting 30 of Anderson's post-Winesburg stores, editor Charles E. Modlin gives ample evidence that Anderson wrote much of his best work after completing his Winesburg cycle.

Anderson had a regrettable habit of letting his mother-in- law, Laura Lu Copenhaver, edit story material she considered in questionable taste. As a result, readers have never before seen many of his later works as he wrote them. Modlin has done us all a service by comparing previously published stories against Anderson's typescripts and restoring the original texts. As Modlin points out, Anderson's work evolved through quite distinct middle and late periods. The stories of the middle period, written in the early 1920s, continue - but with greater technical skill - the Winesburg themes of initiation into adulthood, alienation of the artist and loss of love. Several stories of this period draw on Anderson's youthful experience as a groom or "swipe" in a livery stable. The best of these, "The Man Who Became a Woman," portrays a boy's initiation into human evil and sexuality with a poignancy few contemporary writers can match.

Anderson adapted "An Ohio Pagan," another story of the middle period, from an unfinished novel. While similar in theme and tone to "The Man Who Became a Woman," the story reaches lyrical heights Anderson never again achieved, particularly in the descriptions of rural Ohio countryside.

The title story - never published in Anderson's lifetime - relates the struggles of a writer trying to cut through his romantic imagination and get closer to real life in his work. It reflects Anderson's struggle, in his words, "to develop, to the top of my bent, my own capacity to feel, see, taste, smell, hear."

In 1926 Anderson built a house in Grayson County, Virginia, and thereafter set several stories in the Blue Ridge mountains. He fails in several of his early attempts to portray Southwest Virginia culture from the inside. But in "Virginia Justice," he succeeds brilliantly with a humorous tale about two rural justices of the peace who settle a dispute between two mountain men by stretching the law to fit the situation.

The stories of Anderson's late period, written in the late 1920s and 1930s (Anderson died in 1941), show a development toward a mellower vision, and reflect Anderson's happiness with Eleanor Copenhaver, whom he married after two previous unhappy marriages. Among the best of these later works is "Mrs. Wife," a story about a country doctor who discovers, through a blundered attempt at an affair, that he really loves his wife.

Anderson is a visceral writer with no coherent worldview. His stories are, in varying degrees, prose poems that capture spiritual and sexual epiphanies without setting them in a larger context. Anderson either couldn't see - or didn't care to express - larger philosophical, political and social implications of his stories. Yet out of his painstaking efforts to "feel, see, taste, smell, hear," he has left us a body of work that paints a powerful and realistic portrait of early 20th century America.

- Robert Rivenbark is a Blacksburg writer.