Sacred Land

Sherwood Anderson, Midwestern, Modernisms, and the Sacramental Vision of Nature

Mark Buechsel

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781612776828
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Literaturkritik

From the 1910s through the 1930s, Midwestern writers were conspicuously prominent in American literary life. A generation of writers from the Midwest had come of age and had shared an important and motivating cultural experience: the encompassing transformation of rural and urban Midwestern life from traditional craftsmanship, manual labor, and local community to a fragmented, machine-driven, and intensely capitalistic mode of existence. A profound sense of lost possibilities pervaded the literary mood of these authors. An organic Midwestern village culture that had only just begun to take definite shape was swept away, and a fruitful and promising region was sacrificed to crass commercialism.

In Sacred Land, author Mark Buechsel shows that Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others, turned to two potential sources for grounding their region's and nation's life authentically: nature itself—particularly the super-abundant nature to be found in Midwestern states and the model provided by the traditional sacramental culture of medieval Europe. The result was a new sacramental vision of how life in the Midwest—and, by extension, life in modern America—might be lived differently. Buechsel demonstrates that each author painted his or her spiritual and cultural vision with different shades and nuances and looked to America's future with varying degrees of optimism.

Of crucial importance in each author's work are the characters' encounters with the Midwestern land, a recalcitrant objective reality that refuses to yield to the wrong kinds of dreams. Characters who are genuinely open to what their engagement with the land has to teach them generally find some personal blessing and learn how to claim a fully human place in the order of things. Characters who fail to learn the lessons nature offers become distorted and grotesque, in a way that expresses the modern condition emblematically. Sacred Land shows that in the process of critiquing American culture, Midwestern writers redefined the American pastoral myth so central to the national psyche.

1

An American Venus and Virgin

The Sacramental Dynamic of the Middle West

Had not men always used symbols to help carry them over the rough places in life? There was the Virgin with her candles. Was she not also a symbol? At some time, having decided in a moment of vanity that thought was of more importance than fancy, men had discarded the symbol. A Protestant kind of man arose who believed in a thing called “the age of reason.” There was a dreadful kind of egotism. Men could trust their own minds. As though they knew anything at all of the workings of their own minds.

—from Many Marriages by Sherwood Anderson

Among Americanists, it is a long-standing tenet that cultural critic Henry Adams provides key metaphors for the American experience when he, in Chapter XXV of The Education of Henry Adams (1907) defines the modern American age as the era of the dynamo in contrast to medieval Europe’s centeredness on the Virgin. This pair of metaphors is rich in meaning and has often proven a useful tool in cultural analysis—and it can serve as a starting point for investigating a largely undiscussed aspect of American modernism, namely, the orientation of Midwestern regionalists of the 1920s and 1930s toward Adams’s Virgin and toward a sacramental rejuvenation of American culture, a rejuvenation inspired by the fecund Midwestern land seen in contrast to the Puritan-descended, New England–derived culture imposed on that land.

The dynamo, always looming in the background of Midwestern authors’ descriptions of a brutalizing industrialism or of control-oriented forms of masculinity, is, of course, grotesquely phallic: thrusting, aggressive, and powerful, it lacks the human attributes of warmth, living organicism, feeling, passion, or spirit. It is cold, soulless, driven by electricity, by mechanical laws. It is the symbol of sheer force, of movement devoid of significance, almost movement en pure, and the scientific machine culture it represents does not return any lost teleology¹ or meaningful structure to a modern world forlorn and spiritually drained, as here stated by Adams in this third-person autobiography: “Satisfied that the sequence of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their society could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was artificial, and the sequence of thought was chaos, [Henry Adams] turned at last to the sequence of force” (363). According to Adams, the culture of the dynamo lacks significance and cannot foster art, which is inherently sacramental, i.e., dependent on meaningful form: “[St. Gaudens and Matthew Arnold] and all other artists [of their era] constantly complained that the power embodied in a railway train could never be embodied in art. All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres” (368). The dynamo’s power is frighteningly abstract; it is a force without higher reference, mere force, and therefore incapable of taking on spiritually significant concrete form. Its only significance is the anti-significance of materialism and nihilism.

Strikingly contrasted with the dynamo is the Virgin, which, paradoxically, in Adams’s mind, is synonymous with the force of sex:

[I]n America neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value as force—at most as sentiment. No American had ever been truly afraid of either.… The trait was notorious, and often humorous, but anyone brought up among Puritans knew that sex was sin. In any previous age, sex was strength.

… Everyone, even among Puritans, knew that neither Diana of the Ephesians nor any of the oriental goddesses was worshipped for her beauty. She was goddess because of her force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction—the greatest and most mysterious of all energies; all she needed was to be fecund. (364–65)

The dynamo, here, is “animated,” that is, the force has been given spirit, and there is a mystery in it, the mystery of “reproduction,” of life. Sex is the expression of this life force. In contrast to the mechanical thrusts of the dynamo, sex possesses an organic and purposeful teleology, the mysterious germination of body and spirit, of another “animated” being, i.e., of another soulful being. This mysterious, organic, and meaningful aspect of life, one capable of giving rise to significant form, to sacrament, to Chartres, to art, is, in America, mostly regarded as “sentiment.” Its full actuality is dismissed, and it is reduced to the status of a fickle, insubstantial emotive illusion programmatically evoked for pleasurable consumption.

Citing St. Gaudens and Arnold as typical representatives of Anglo-Saxon culture, Adams notes that they, while seeing the impossibility of mechanical culture inspiring art, nonetheless, were unable to turn to the Virgin for inspiration: “Neither of them felt Goddesses as power—only as reflected emotion, human expression, beauty, purity, taste, scarcely even as sympathy” (368). A longing is evident in these words, a longing to recover a sense of meaningful spiritual powers rather than to be lost in a materialistic universe. Adams yearns to return to an age where human culture is sacramental in its attempts at meaningful form, linked to significant cosmic realities, rather than merely engaged in a sentimental human exercise of clothing harsh nothingness in comforting illusions. The Puritan disdain of sex—of the bodily, the sensual—is for Adams a main culprit in modern American society’s lack of sacramentalism.² It is clear that a recovery of a more holistic culture would require a rehabilitation of the concrete, of the sensual, and a reinvestment of the concrete realm with spiritual meaning.

Adams’s thought, symptomatic of a widespread discontent with the mechanistic culture of early twentieth-century America, is shared by Midwestern modernists who portray the fecund Midwestern land as a spiritually significant, highly sexual, and sacramental realm at odds with the New England–derived, post-Puritan, anti-sacramental, and anti-sensual culture imported into the region. Not only is Adams’s thought generally shared by Midwestern modernists, but his direct influence occasionally becomes evident. While this discussion does not concern itself with tracing Adams’s influence, it is, nonetheless, significant to note that the notion of a Midwestern modernist neo-sacramentalism is at times supported by clear Adamsian references made by key Midwestern writers.

As a highly definitive figure within Midwestern modernism, Sherwood Anderson serves as the focal point of this book. His Adamsianism is explicit and his highly sexual images of sacramentalism reflect Adams’s notion of the Chartres-inspiring Virgin as a sexual force. Anderson most clearly acknowledges his debt to Adams in his 1924 autobiography A Story-Teller’s Story. After identifying Puritanism as the force in American culture that “renounce[s] life” (376) and defending his own sexually frank writings as “clean” (and life-affirming) (377), Anderson moves on to quote Adams’s chapter on the Virgin and the dynamo extensively. In the next chapter, he opens with a reference back to the Adams quotation: “‘An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist,’ he had said and it was an accusation that an American could neither love nor worship” (380). Worship and love, two relational, inherently teleological, and spiritually significant attitudes involving the whole person, emotions and intellect, body and soul—these attitudes, Anderson explains, have not been entirely squelched in the Middle West, though the squelching has been attempted continually: “At any rate I was a man of the Middle West. I was not a New Englander. For my own people, as I had known them, it was absurd to say they had neither love nor reverence.… We had simply been cheated. Our Virgins and Venuses had to be worshiped under the bush. What nights I had spent mooning about with middle-western boys, with hungry girls too. Were we but trying to refute the older men of New England who had got such a grip on our American intellectual life, the Emersons, Hawthornes, and Longfellows?” (380).

Before discussing the positive sacramental view of the Middle West implied in this passage, one might briefly address the contrastive negative view of New England. It is clear that what Anderson loosely calls “Puritanism” or the “New England tradition” is not a very carefully differentiated category; it generally stands for a large, broadly conceived counterforce to nature, to a nature-oriented neo-paganism or neo-sacramentalism, and it stands in contrast to cultures perceived as more organic, such as African American or medieval European cultures. This broad, ill-defined category includes all that is perceived as systematic thought lacking in a sacramental or “natural” openness to mystery, to the elusive, symbiotically physical and spiritual reality of life itself. Intellectualism, idealism, capitalism, materialism, mechanical culture, literalism, conventionality, any kind of abstraction, any categorically defined ideological systems, as well as actual Calvinism—all of these fall under the heading of “Puritanism” or “New England thought.” This is so because Calvinism’s highly developed theological systematicity and its strong emphasis on transcendence were seen, not just by Anderson but by many intellectuals of the time, as the origin of Western culture’s systematic and mechanistic approach to economics, intellectual matters, and all aspects of life.³

While it is hard to see a densely symbolic and in many ways antimechanistic writer such as Hawthorne as representative of a coldly categorical mindset, Anderson likely associates Hawthorne’s at times remarkable allegorical precision and stylized language with the kind of “unnatural” New England abstractionism that he considers America’s cultural bane. One can only speculate on the precise nature of his misgivings about Emerson and Longfellow, but based on the contexts in which these names are mentioned, it is safe to presume that Anderson’s misgivings revolve around these writers’ generally idealistic and Platonic vision. An instance of such matter-dissolving Platonism is Emerson’s definition of nature as merely “an appendix to the soul” and his championing, in his 1836 essay Nature, of the world of abstract spiritual forms, that is, “Ideas”: “[Intellectual science] fastens the attention upon immortal necessary uncreated natures, that is, upon Ideas; and in their presence we feel that the outward circumstance [i.e., the physical world] is a dream and a shade.… [N]o man touches these divine natures, without becoming, in some degree, himself divine.… No man fears age or misfortune or death in their serene company, for he is transported out of the district of change. Whilst we behold unveiled the nature of Justice and Truth, we learn the difference between the absolute and the conditional or relative” (29–30). What Emerson attempts in this passage is to define humans outside of their mortal and physical context, to place humans in a world of capitalized abstractions that confer their own static eternal quality upon the human beholder. In order to escape what Anderson sees as the New England romantics’ false distillation of life from the actuality of the flesh, he treats in stark and for his era even shocking detail the rough edges of life, such as sex, grotesquerie, psychic distortion, violence, drudgery, and death.⁴

As concerns the positive image of the Middle West contained in the “I was a man of the Middle West” quotation, there emerges Anderson’s view that life in the Middle West has a chance to bubble up to the surface, resisting the supposed cold grip of New England intellectualism. The divine sacramental powers of sex, life, and nature assert themselves more strongly in an extremely fertile and lush region that is at a remove from the New England cradle of Puritan-derived American civilization, a civilization founded on the imposition of systematic spiritual categories on reality. Of course, as mentioned, Anderson and his contemporaries fall prey to a reductive reading of Puritanism that turns it into a scapegoat for all that is wrong with American civilization. Thus, for instance, one might consider sexual prudery a Victorian rather than a Puritan trait, though some might argue that the seeds for Victorian culture were planted in various aspects of Protestantism and/or Puritanism. Yet, while most Midwestern writers of the early twentieth century may not qualify as good historians, they, nonetheless, evoke powerfully a sacramental approach to life that is worth investigating even at the cost of having to accommodate oneself to the historical reductiveness of the Puritan foil used to evoke that sacramentalism.

That mystery, sacrament, and experiential knowledge are always the key to insight in Anderson’s oeuvre is evident in the programmatic statement in A Story-Teller’s Story when the author is taken with the view of a disillusioned academic: “He was a man who had been a professor in colleges and knew what was conventionally called thinking and he had said that thinking meant nothing at all unless it was done with the whole body—not merely with the head” (381). In clearly Adamsian terms, Anderson defines the Middle West as a region that in its exuberant fertility and sensuous lushness is naturally close to the sacramental energy of the Virgin, but which is still struggling against the culture of the dynamo. This latter culture is deplored in A Story-Teller’s Story, and just as Adams treats the dynamo as a pseudo-religious symbol, so Anderson treats America’s machine-culture as a pseudo-religion, as, indeed, idolatry, to which the true and life-giving worship of the Virgin must be opposed:

The Virgin was dead and her son had taken as prophets such men as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Benjamin Franklin, the one with his little books in which he set down and saved his acts and impulses, striving to make them all serve definite ends as he saved his pennies and the other preaching the intellectual doctrine of self-reliance, Up and Onward. The land was filled with gods but they were new gods and their images, standing on every street of every town and city, were cast in iron and steel. The factory had become America’s church and duplicates of it stood everywhere, on almost every street of every city, belching black incense into the sky. (220)

Gods “cast in iron and steel”—the reference to idolatry is clear. And two Bostonians serve as illustrations of the New England tradition that has caused the problem. First, Anderson refers to the highly systematic rationalism exemplified by Franklin, who famously subjected his life to clear-cut disciplines and lived by the definite formulas expressed in Poor Richard’s Almanac (1733); and then he mentions Emerson, whose idealism Anderson tended to see as a form of rationalism due to its intellectual systematicity and strong sense of internal logical consistency, and due to its privileging of spirit at the expense of physical substance.⁵ These two representatives of New England illustrate the cultural background for industrialism, which, of course, is highly systematic and mechanistic and abstract in its core conception. America needs real churches, as opposed to factories; it needs a Chartres, needs meaningful, spiritual forms inspired by real life forces such as the Virgin (or Venus) represent. Then the sky, nature, will not be polluted, but rather an organic culture will arise, mirroring in artistically sublimated form the actual living reality surrounding it, a culture that points and leads toward life rather than repressing and undermining it.

Such a cultural switch from a deadening materialism to a Chartres-building sacramentalism is evoked in another passage from A Story-Teller’s Story:

While we were building all of our big ugly hurriedly thrown-together towns, creating our great industrial system, growing always more huge and prosperous, we were as much in earnest about what we thought we were up to as were the French of the thirteenth century when they built the cathedral of Chartres to the glory of God. They built the cathedral of Chartres to the glory of God and we really intended building here a land to the glory of Man, and thought we were doing it too. That was our intention and the affair only blew up in the process, or got perverted, because Man, even the brave and free Man, is somewhat a less worthy object of glorification than God. (301)

Self-reliance, a Cartesian focus on the human mind as the prime reality, intellectualism, abstractionism, systematicity, all of this amounts to a glorification of Man, but humans cannot impose themselves on the cosmos they inhabit in such a manner without losing their very souls and the soul of culture, and, thus, Anderson advocates a return to the Virgin, to a humility before mysterious cosmic life forces that are larger than human beings. And he has hopes that a new religiously inspired culture in tune with larger spiritual realities will replace the ugliness and crassness of an inhuman modern American culture.

Anderson hopes that the Midwestern land might serve as a sacramental source of spiritual guidance and inspiration, that the fecund land’s sacramental reality, resistant to easy human categorization, would facilitate a spiritual rejuvenation of Midwestern culture and eliminate the stultifying intellectualist and industrialist New England spirit. While this particular hope in the Middle West is alluded to in A Story-Teller’s Story, it is plainly discernible in Anderson’s poetry and fiction. “The New Englander,” a story published in Anderson’s first short story collection, The Triumph of the Egg (1921), functions more obviously than any other as a clear-cut allegory of the conversion from stifling New England Puritanism to a new Midwestern sacramentalism inspired by the land. In the story, the New England protagonist, Elsie Leander, changes from a sexually, relationally, and spiritually repressed Vermont spinster to a sensually liberated Iowa farm woman. As a matter of fact, the land has a rather direct agency in her conversion to, essentially, life; in a crucial scene in the story, Elsie responds sexually to an Iowa cornfield (158).

The first thing we learn about Elsie is that she is “thin” and that the Vermont farm on which she lives has “soil [that is] not very rich” (134). Land and woman lack participation in the life force, and life is severely threatened in this environment: “The fields were like cups filled with a green liquid.… The mountains, far off but apparently near at hand, were like giants ready at any moment to reach out their hands and take the cups one by one and drink off the green liquid” (135). When, after a series of misfortunes, the Leander family moves west to Iowa, the trip there begins to transform Elsie: “The trip west on the railroad train jolted Elsie out of herself. In spite of her detached attitude toward life she became excited” (137). In the night, she “stretche[s] herself” and yawn[s],’” which she has never done before (139). Her body loosens as she passes through “a new kind of land” (138). In this new environment, a striking contrast emerges between petty New England domesticity and Midwestern nature’s vastitude: whereas the fields “in this vast open place” (143) are like “the waters of a sea” (142), Elsie’s father seems, in contrast, petty as he works “with small tools, doing little things with infinite care, raising little vegetables. In the house her mother would crochet little tidies. [Elsie] herself would be small” (143). Yet a “large” feeling takes possession of her; Elsie begins to realize her place in a vast living reality that transcends the narrow confines of New England civilization (143).

The Iowa plowmen, to Elsie, become fertility gods of sorts; she is fascinated by their connection to the life force as they, in obviously sexual imagery, plow the fertile earth: “A young man who drove six horses came directly toward her. She was fascinated. The breasts of the horses as they came forward with bowed heads seemed like the breasts of giants. The soft spring air that lay over the fields was also like a sea. The horses were giants walking on the floor of the sea.… The young man who drove them was also a giant” (143). Submerged in a sea of air and earth, in the vastness of the living natural world, the gigantic hard-breasted horses and plowmen represent sexual potency, the sensual-spiritual mystery of life. In contrast to the smallness of her family’s mode of living, Elsie here finds something of larger significance, life connected with cosmic realities and yet intensely concrete and, thus, encounterable. The corn, in August, grows into a veritable corn-forest, and to Elsie, the “mysteriously beautiful” cornrows become “warm passageways running out into life” (145). Sensing a deeper life in the world of nature, a mysterious spiritual reality, Elsie runs out into the corn in order to be born again: “Elsie ran into the vastness of the cornfields filled with but one desi...