Writing in the throes of the Depression, Sherwood Anderson penned this bleak epistle to painter Charles Bockler, about days one feels oneself ” just a lost thing floating in some queer kind of emptiness.”
Marion, Ohio
Dear Charles,
It is a day when I feel very small. There are days when I am afraid of people. This is one of them. It is cold and bleak outside. I went to the P.O. hoping no one would speak to me. The sky seemed big and the buildings and all the people.
I suppose that is why we want women, days like this. We become frightened children again. Women should learn more from their lovers than they do. They should learn from their lovers what children are like.
Yesterday was cold and bleak. I went walking with a man here. It was bitter cold. We came to an old brick yard. They had taken the fire from the kiln the day before but it was still hot. We huddled against it out of the cold.
A man came along the road, chewing tobacco and spitting. The man told me about him. He is a white man and some years ago married a young white girl of sixteen. Then he went about selling her to Negroes and whites. He lived by selling her. They were both arrested.
In court, she began pointing out this man and that man. “He sold me to that one, and that one, and that one.”
All the men in the court room got scared. “She might point at me,” they thought, even though they had not been with her. They remembered things they had done.
I am going to speak on Aprill 21, 22, and 24th at Northwestern University, and then, during the following week, at Chicago University. I am not sure about the lecture at Chicago University being open to the public but at least some of them at Northwestern will be. I do not know they exact dates at Chicago University but as soon as I know will tell you. If your sister come to any of the lectures ask her to come and speak to me.
I wish I could be at the show. Try not to expect anything. I have worked and worked at my lectures. The only way I can justify doing it to myself is to put into them the best I have.
I hope you do not have queer lost days like this but I guess you do have. It is a good thing I guess that women do not get onto us. We are not brave. We are only sometimes bold.
I am sure you are like me in that you have such times when you feel yourself just a lost thing floating in some queer kind of emptiness.
S.A.
FURTHER READING
For a gratis online publication of Anderson’s seminal short story collection, Winesburg, Ohio, click here
Having begun his literary career with a violent departure from what he termed his ‘materialistic existence,’ Anderson’s creative output has always been uncomfortably intertwined with his era’s dreary economics. For an analysis pertinent to this letter, analyzing Anderson and the coming of The New Deal, click here