Nervous breakdown

It was then, at what seemed like the pinnacle of his business achievements, when the stresses of Anderson's professional life collided with his social responsibilities and his writing that led to the breakdown that has remained paramount in the "myth"^[61] or "legend"^[62][63] of Sherwood Anderson's life.^[64]

On Thursday, November 28, 1912, Anderson came to his office in a slightly nervous state. According to his secretary, he opened some mail, and in the course of dictating a business letter became distracted. After writing a note to his wife, he murmured something along the lines of "I feel as though my feet were wet, and they keep getting wetter."^{[note 1]} and left the office. Four days later, on Sunday December 1, a disoriented Anderson entered a drug store on East 152nd Street in Cleveland and asked the pharmacist to help figure out his identity. Unable to make out what the incoherent Anderson was saying, the pharmacist discovered a phone book on his person and called the number of Edwin Baxter, a member of the Elyria Chamber of Commerce. Baxter came, recognized Anderson, and promptly had him checked into the Huron Road Hospital in downtown Cleveland, where Anderson's wife (who he would hardly recognize) went to meet him.^[65]

Even before returning home, Anderson begun the lifelong practice of reinterpreting the story of his breakdown. Despite news reports in the Elyria Evening Telegram and the Cleveland Press following his admittance into the hospital outlining the cause of the breakdown as "overwork" and mentioning Anderson's inability to remember what happened,^[66] on December 6 the story changed. All of the sudden, the break became voluntary when the Evening Telegram reported (possibly spuriously)^[67] that "As soon as he recovers from the trance into which he placed himself, Sherwood Anderson...will write a book of the sensations he experienced while he wandered over the country as a nomad."^[68] This same sense of personal agency is alluded to thirty years later in Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs (1942) where the author wrote of his thought process before walking out, "I wanted to leave, get away from business...Again I resorted to slickness, to craftiness...The thought occurred to me that if men thought me a little insane they would forgive me if I lit out..."^[69] This idea, however, that Anderson made a conscious decision on November 28 to make a clean break from family and business is unlikely.^[62][70][71] Firstly, contrary to what Anderson later claimed, his writing was no secret. It was known to his wife, secretary, and some business associates that for several years Anderson had been working on personal writing projects both at night and occasionally in his office at the factory.^[63] Secondly, though some of the notes he wrote to himself during his journey (and mailed to his wife on Saturday, addressing the envelope "Cornelia L. Anderson, Pres., American Striving Co.") show that he had some semblance of memory, their general confusion and frequent incoherence is unlikely to be deliberate.^[72] While diagnoses for the four days of Anderson's wanderings have ranged from "amnesia" to "lost identity" to "nervous breakdown", his condition is generally characterized today as a "fugue state".^[73][74][75] Anderson himself described the episode as "escaping from his materialistic existence,"^{[ citation needed ]} and was admired for his action by many young male writers, who chose to be inspired by him. Herbert Gold wrote, "He fled in order to find himself, then prayed to flee that disease of self, to become 'beautiful and clear.'"^[76][77]

After having moved back to Chicago, Anderson formally divorced Cornelia. Later, he married his mistress, the sculptor Tennessee Claflin Mitchell (1874—1929).^[78] Mitchell got a divorce in 1924 in Reno, Nevada, and Anderson married his third wife that year. He was already involved with her.

Novelist

Anderson's first novel, Windy McPherson's Son was published in 1916 as part of a three-book deal with John Lane. This book, along with his second novel, Marching Men (1917) are usually considered his "apprentice novels" because they came before Anderson found fame with Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and are generally considered inferior in quality to works that followed.^[79]

Anderson's most notable work is his collection of interrelated short stories, Winesburg, Ohio (1919). In his memoir, he wrote that "Hands", the opening story, was the first "real" story he ever wrote.^[80]

"Instead of emphasizing plot and action, Anderson used a simple, precise, unsentimental style to reveal the frustration, loneliness, and longing in the lives of his characters. These characters are stunted by the narrowness of Midwestern small-town life and by their own limitations."^[2]

In addition, Anderson was one of the first American novelists to introduce new insights from psychology, including Freudian analysis.^[2]

Although his short stories were very successful, Anderson wanted to write novels, which he felt allowed a larger scale. In 1920, he published Poor White, which was rather successful. In 1923, Anderson published Many Marriages; in it he explored the new sexual freedom, a theme which he continued in Dark Laughter and later writing.^[76] The novel had its detractors, but the reviews were, on the whole, positive. F. Scott Fitzgerald considered Many Marriages to be Anderson's finest novel.^[81]

Beginning in 1924, Anderson and Mitchell moved to New Orleans, where they lived in the historic Pontalba Apartments (540-B St. Peter Street) adjoining Jackson Square in the heart of the French Quarter. They separated that year and divorced. For a time, he and his wife entertained William Faulkner, Carl Sandburg, Edmund Wilson and other writers, for whom Anderson was a major influence. Critics trying to define Anderson's significance have said he was more influential through this younger generation who he influenced than by his own works.^[2]

Anderson referred to meeting Faulkner in his ambiguous and moving short story, "A Meeting South." His novel Dark Laughter (1925) drew from his New Orleans experiences and continued to explore the new sexual freedom of the 1920s. Although the book is now out of print (and was satirized by Ernest Hemingway in his novel The Torrents of Spring), it was a bestseller at the time, the only book of Anderson's to reach that status during his lifetime.

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