Books: Beyond Control

BEYOND DESIRE—Sherwood Anderson —Liveright ($2.50).

Sherwood Anderson used to call himself a storyteller, but that was long ago. It is seven years since he wrote a novel, four years since he retired to Marion. Va. to run two country newspapers. Sensitive as a weathervane to the intellectual current of the day, but dizzied beyond his normal bewilderment by conflicting winds of doctrine, he has been doing his unlevel best to understand and express what, if anything, the U. S. is driving at. Though he has always sympathized with the individual Americano aspiring to be an individual, he has been impressed by the intelligentsiae preoccupation with Communism. Beyond Desire, the muddled result of his latest feelings, is neither fish, flesh nor good red Communist herring.

Red Oliver, central figure of Beyond Desire, only son of a smalltown Southern doctor, was an ordinary young fellow with ordinary longings: to have a woman, to amount to something. Though it is impossible to piece together, from Author Anderson’s meandering and sometimes subterranean narrative, the complete career of Hero Red. he apparently went to college for a while and was a good baseball player. Then he started to work in a mill in his home town, wished he had nerve enough lo get himself a girl. His only affair, too brief and onesided to be at all satisfactory, was with an older woman, the town librarian, who was momentarily attracted by his fresh callowness. Red wandered off to other Southern mill towns.

In one of them he let a sympathetic girl mistake him for a Communist agitator.

When the militia was called out and the strikers were told to keep back. Red. in order to impress the girl, stepped forward and was shot. With this unfinal denouement the wandering tale wanders to an end.

Example of Author Anderson’s present style: “Red Oliver had to think. He thought he had to think. He wanted to think—thought he wanted to think. In youth there is a kind of hunger.”