Here, Sherwood Anderson writes to Jasper Deeter, his producer and close friend, about Ernest Hemingway’s work. Anderson had given Hemingway substantial help getting his early writing published. Anderson, who had served in the Spanish-American war at the turn of the century, meditates on the widespread belief that Hemingway represented the voice of the lost generation.
15 January, Marion
Dear Jap
I wish to god and hell I had your natural toughness. I might possibly get a little work done. I’m always being floored just when I’m going good.
I guess Mims told you that I gave up the idea of sending the Dreiser letter. It wasn’t that you talked me out of it. I think I realized later that it was nonsense…the sort of thing you do naturally if you wish and that you don’t do because someone suggests it.
I have just read Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa and I am wondering. He is presumed to represent, be, more than any other, the voice of the after-the-war generation…you know, Jap, the far-famed lost generation—and I am wondering what, say, Sol, David, Bud would think of him. I wish one or all of them would write and tell me how they feel.
You know, Jap, he went in for a kind of super-realism. The imaginative world, as I understood it, was to be more or less chucked but it seems to me that in trying for this he has only got into a kind of romanticization of the so-called real…a kind of ecstasy over elephant dung, killing, death, etc., etc.
And then too he talks about writing the perfect sentence—something of that sort. Isn’t that rot? Isn’t that what you would call in the theatre “point making”? It seems to me that, with most of us, the struggle is first of all to get others out from between ourselves and the canvas…that is to say nature. Usually you have to kick some woman out from between you and it.
And then…Christ…the hardest of all…to kick yourself out.
It seems to me that the theatre for example is and…as a Civil War statesman would say…”by rights ought to be”…a thing in itself, that you can’t emphasize reality too much because the reality of the theatre is as real as what they call REALITY…etc. etc. Am I talking nonsense?
Hope you aren’t all too much fed up on the bus, the road, the work, the broken sleep, the hard work. After all, it is something, perhaps not to old birds like and and Harry, but to the others…to see so much of America…you know, having this look-see.
I’m leaving here tomorrow and will send you an address when I get to a country where the sun shines and I don’t have a lousy snotty nose most of the time.
E.’s [his wife, Eleanor] chucked—at least temporarily—her YW job and is going with me, wherever I happen to go, and we are going to be citizens of the vast unknown. That sounds pretty swell to me.
God rest your digestive organs.
S.A.
From Sherwood Anderson: Selected Letters. Anderson, Sherwood, and Charles E. Modlin. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984.