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Making Modernism

Letter from Sherwood Anderson to Floyd Dell, 1920

Dear Floyd,
I am loving your book. Have just gone to the country where I can work. The first work I have to do is to paint and calcimine my house. I paint and then sit reading Moon Calf—when Tennessee hasn’t it.

What shall I say except that the book makes me love and understand you as I never have before. What a very sensitive fine figure you have been.

And this book—clear straight writing—keen understand—everything a fine novel should have.

I haven’t finished reading it—thank the gods but I couldn’t resist writing you now,

Sherwood Anderson

Palos Park, Ill.

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1. Letter from Floyd Dell to Sherwood Anderson, 1920 Dear Sherwood,
  
  I hoped you would like Moon Calf—I wanted you to very much—but the generosity of your appreciation put me to shame. So I’m going to try to explain in self-defense my own antagonistic attitude toward some things in your own words. All told, it would be a story as long as Moon Calf—and some day perhaps I shall write it. But here’s the scenario: a boy who because he fears reality is in love with Shadow-Shapes—much more so than this novel tells. Who lives and breathes in this queer world of Poe, of Doie, of Coleridge—who inhabits a realm “as holy and enchanted/As air beneath a waning moon was haunted/By woman waiting for her demon-lover”.
  
  Conscious his struggle to get in touch with, and to live in, the world of reality. And conscious of him, fooling himself into thinking that he does realistically love that world, and yet at the first beckoning of the white hand of fantasy, ready to surrender everything, to see his real world fall into ruin about him, while he follows that lure. A normal person can dare to love the fantastic, the super-normal, can venture safely into the core of fantasy for an evening with the goblins and the witch-girls. But not he—for he would come back, like Rip van Winkle, to find that he had spent not a night but a lifetime in the hill of dreams. He must reinforce his ardor for reality by theory—he must beware of the seductions of fantasy as the drunkard shuns the bottle—he must guard himself against the dreams that “cleave to men’s lives and waste the days thereof/With gladness and much sadness and long love.”
  
  Like Kim in the story, when the magicians begin to work their dark magic, he must say to himself, “two times two is four, two times three is six, two times four—”
  
  So you can see why he must have a severely realistic theory of fiction, why he must eschew the fantastic, why he must regard a fellow-writer who is not afraid of it (“I can take a drink or leave it alone”) as one treading the flowery way to destruction. And why, moreover, if he won’t allow himself these indulgences, he should be all the more unwilling to permit them in others! Why, with a religious-philosophical sternness he should refuse—why he must refuse—to admit that anything except what is good for him can be good for any-body else…
  
  Same day. Sherwood, when I’ve been psycho’d into complete normality, I will be able to read your works without worrying about your immortal soul, as it were—perhaps without caring whether you go to hell or not, provided you give me a good time as you go. In the meantime I can’t help being a moralist, and am grieved at the recklessness with which you have commerce with the powers of darkness. That you who tread so firmly when you wish the roads of the world should go ibexing among the crags and chasms of fantasy—it alarms me, I confess. Doubtless I am in somewhat the position of the traditional mother:
  
  “Mother may I go out to swim?”
  “Yes, my darling daughter—
  Have your clothes on
  a hickory limb
  And don’t go near
  the water!”
  
  So forgive me if even your newest book, and in many ways your finest, does not reassure me. There are some magnificent fragments of story telling in it—and the senses you transmit to me of the effect of economic change upon a whole community, is wonderful. I’d like you to think—what I believe is true—that the things I do like in your later books I like as much as anybody possibly could. I merely can’t help reacting to the other things with quite as passionate a fervor. It is all I can do, even now when I have come to apologize, to refrain from preaching…
  
  But I come to bury hatchets, not to raise them. And no matter what you may write, nor how you can never forget my devout admiration for the realism of which you are, when you choose to be, the master.
  
  Yours ever,
  Floyd
  My love to Tennessee
2. Letter from Floyd Dell to Sherwood Anderson, 1920 Dear Sherwood,
  
  I hoped you would like Moon Calf—I wanted you to very much—but the generosity of your appreciation put me to shame. So I’m going to try to explain in self-defense my own antagonistic attitude toward some things in your own words. All told, it would be a story as long as Moon Calf—and some day perhaps I shall write it. But here’s the scenario: a boy who because he fears reality is in love with Shadow-Shapes—much more so than this novel tells. Who lives and breathes in this queer world of Poe, of Doie, of Coleridge—who inhabits a realm “as holy and enchanted/As air beneath a waning moon was haunted/By woman waiting for her demon-lover”.
  
  Conscious his struggle to get in touch with, and to live in, the world of reality. And conscious of him, fooling himself into thinking that he does realistically love that world, and yet at the first beckoning of the white hand of fantasy, ready to surrender everything, to see his real world fall into ruin about him, while he follows that lure. A normal person can dare to love the fantastic, the super-normal, can venture safely into the core of fantasy for an evening with the goblins and the witch-girls. But not he—for he would come back, like Rip van Winkle, to find that he had spent not a night but a lifetime in the hill of dreams. He must reinforce his ardor for reality by theory—he must beware of the seductions of fantasy as the drunkard shuns the bottle—he must guard himself against the dreams that “cleave to men’s lives and waste the days thereof/With gladness and much sadness and long love.”
  
  Like Kim in the story, when the magicians begin to work their dark magic, he must say to himself, “two times two is four, two times three is six, two times four—”
  
  So you can see why he must have a severely realistic theory of fiction, why he must eschew the fantastic, why he must regard a fellow-writer who is not afraid of it (“I can take a drink or leave it alone”) as one treading the flowery way to destruction. And why, moreover, if he won’t allow himself these indulgences, he should be all the more unwilling to permit them in others! Why, with a religious-philosophical sternness he should refuse—why he must refuse—to admit that anything except what is good for him can be good for any-body else…
  
  Same day. Sherwood, when I’ve been psycho’d into complete normality, I will be able to read your works without worrying about your immortal soul, as it were—perhaps without caring whether you go to hell or not, provided you give me a good time as you go. In the meantime I can’t help being a moralist, and am grieved at the recklessness with which you have commerce with the powers of darkness. That you who tread so firmly when you wish the roads of the world should go ibexing among the crags and chasms of fantasy—it alarms me, I confess. Doubtless I am in somewhat the position of the traditional mother:
  
  “Mother may I go out to swim?”
  “Yes, my darling daughter—
  Have your clothes on
  a hickory limb
  And don’t go near
  the water!”
  
  So forgive me if even your newest book, and in many ways your finest, does not reassure me. There are some magnificent fragments of story telling in it—and the senses you transmit to me of the effect of economic change upon a whole community, is wonderful. I’d like you to think—what I believe is true—that the things I do like in your later books I like as much as anybody possibly could. I merely can’t help reacting to the other things with quite as passionate a fervor. It is all I can do, even now when I have come to apologize, to refrain from preaching…
  
  But I come to bury hatchets, not to raise them. And no matter what you may write, nor how you can never forget my devout admiration for the realism of which you are, when you choose to be, the master.
  
  Yours ever,
  Floyd
  My love to Tennessee
3. Letter from Floyd Dell to Sherwood Anderson, 1920 Dear Sherwood,
  
  I hoped you would like Moon Calf—I wanted you to very much—but the generosity of your appreciation put me to shame. So I’m going to try to explain in self-defense my own antagonistic attitude toward some things in your own words. All told, it would be a story as long as Moon Calf—and some day perhaps I shall write it. But here’s the scenario: a boy who because he fears reality is in love with Shadow-Shapes—much more so than this novel tells. Who lives and breathes in this queer world of Poe, of Doie, of Coleridge—who inhabits a realm “as holy and enchanted/As air beneath a waning moon was haunted/By woman waiting for her demon-lover”.
  
  Conscious his struggle to get in touch with, and to live in, the world of reality. And conscious of him, fooling himself into thinking that he does realistically love that world, and yet at the first beckoning of the white hand of fantasy, ready to surrender everything, to see his real world fall into ruin about him, while he follows that lure. A normal person can dare to love the fantastic, the super-normal, can venture safely into the core of fantasy for an evening with the goblins and the witch-girls. But not he—for he would come back, like Rip van Winkle, to find that he had spent not a night but a lifetime in the hill of dreams. He must reinforce his ardor for reality by theory—he must beware of the seductions of fantasy as the drunkard shuns the bottle—he must guard himself against the dreams that “cleave to men’s lives and waste the days thereof/With gladness and much sadness and long love.”
  
  Like Kim in the story, when the magicians begin to work their dark magic, he must say to himself, “two times two is four, two times three is six, two times four—”
  
  So you can see why he must have a severely realistic theory of fiction, why he must eschew the fantastic, why he must regard a fellow-writer who is not afraid of it (“I can take a drink or leave it alone”) as one treading the flowery way to destruction. And why, moreover, if he won’t allow himself these indulgences, he should be all the more unwilling to permit them in others! Why, with a religious-philosophical sternness he should refuse—why he must refuse—to admit that anything except what is good for him can be good for any-body else…
  
  Same day. Sherwood, when I’ve been psycho’d into complete normality, I will be able to read your works without worrying about your immortal soul, as it were—perhaps without caring whether you go to hell or not, provided you give me a good time as you go. In the meantime I can’t help being a moralist, and am grieved at the recklessness with which you have commerce with the powers of darkness. That you who tread so firmly when you wish the roads of the world should go ibexing among the crags and chasms of fantasy—it alarms me, I confess. Doubtless I am in somewhat the position of the traditional mother:
  
  “Mother may I go out to swim?”
  “Yes, my darling daughter—
  Have your clothes on
  a hickory limb
  And don’t go near
  the water!”
  
  So forgive me if even your newest book, and in many ways your finest, does not reassure me. There are some magnificent fragments of story telling in it—and the senses you transmit to me of the effect of economic change upon a whole community, is wonderful. I’d like you to think—what I believe is true—that the things I do like in your later books I like as much as anybody possibly could. I merely can’t help reacting to the other things with quite as passionate a fervor. It is all I can do, even now when I have come to apologize, to refrain from preaching…
  
  But I come to bury hatchets, not to raise them. And no matter what you may write, nor how you can never forget my devout admiration for the realism of which you are, when you choose to be, the master.
  
  Yours ever,
  Floyd
  My love to Tennessee
4. Letter from Floyd Dell to Sherwood Anderson, 1920 Dear Sherwood,
  
  I hoped you would like Moon Calf—I wanted you to very much—but the generosity of your appreciation put me to shame. So I’m going to try to explain in self-defense my own antagonistic attitude toward some things in your own words. All told, it would be a story as long as Moon Calf—and some day perhaps I shall write it. But here’s the scenario: a boy who because he fears reality is in love with Shadow-Shapes—much more so than this novel tells. Who lives and breathes in this queer world of Poe, of Doie, of Coleridge—who inhabits a realm “as holy and enchanted/As air beneath a waning moon was haunted/By woman waiting for her demon-lover”.
  
  Conscious his struggle to get in touch with, and to live in, the world of reality. And conscious of him, fooling himself into thinking that he does realistically love that world, and yet at the first beckoning of the white hand of fantasy, ready to surrender everything, to see his real world fall into ruin about him, while he follows that lure. A normal person can dare to love the fantastic, the super-normal, can venture safely into the core of fantasy for an evening with the goblins and the witch-girls. But not he—for he would come back, like Rip van Winkle, to find that he had spent not a night but a lifetime in the hill of dreams. He must reinforce his ardor for reality by theory—he must beware of the seductions of fantasy as the drunkard shuns the bottle—he must guard himself against the dreams that “cleave to men’s lives and waste the days thereof/With gladness and much sadness and long love.”
  
  Like Kim in the story, when the magicians begin to work their dark magic, he must say to himself, “two times two is four, two times three is six, two times four—”
  
  So you can see why he must have a severely realistic theory of fiction, why he must eschew the fantastic, why he must regard a fellow-writer who is not afraid of it (“I can take a drink or leave it alone”) as one treading the flowery way to destruction. And why, moreover, if he won’t allow himself these indulgences, he should be all the more unwilling to permit them in others! Why, with a religious-philosophical sternness he should refuse—why he must refuse—to admit that anything except what is good for him can be good for any-body else…
  
  Same day. Sherwood, when I’ve been psycho’d into complete normality, I will be able to read your works without worrying about your immortal soul, as it were—perhaps without caring whether you go to hell or not, provided you give me a good time as you go. In the meantime I can’t help being a moralist, and am grieved at the recklessness with which you have commerce with the powers of darkness. That you who tread so firmly when you wish the roads of the world should go ibexing among the crags and chasms of fantasy—it alarms me, I confess. Doubtless I am in somewhat the position of the traditional mother:
  
  “Mother may I go out to swim?”
  “Yes, my darling daughter—
  Have your clothes on
  a hickory limb
  And don’t go near
  the water!”
  
  So forgive me if even your newest book, and in many ways your finest, does not reassure me. There are some magnificent fragments of story telling in it—and the senses you transmit to me of the effect of economic change upon a whole community, is wonderful. I’d like you to think—what I believe is true—that the things I do like in your later books I like as much as anybody possibly could. I merely can’t help reacting to the other things with quite as passionate a fervor. It is all I can do, even now when I have come to apologize, to refrain from preaching…
  
  But I come to bury hatchets, not to raise them. And no matter what you may write, nor how you can never forget my devout admiration for the realism of which you are, when you choose to be, the master.
  
  Yours ever,
  Floyd
  My love to Tennessee
5. Letter from Floyd Dell to Sherwood Anderson, 1920 Dear Sherwood,
  
  I hoped you would like Moon Calf—I wanted you to very much—but the generosity of your appreciation put me to shame. So I’m going to try to explain in self-defense my own antagonistic attitude toward some things in your own words. All told, it would be a story as long as Moon Calf—and some day perhaps I shall write it. But here’s the scenario: a boy who because he fears reality is in love with Shadow-Shapes—much more so than this novel tells. Who lives and breathes in this queer world of Poe, of Doie, of Coleridge—who inhabits a realm “as holy and enchanted/As air beneath a waning moon was haunted/By woman waiting for her demon-lover”.
  
  Conscious his struggle to get in touch with, and to live in, the world of reality. And conscious of him, fooling himself into thinking that he does realistically love that world, and yet at the first beckoning of the white hand of fantasy, ready to surrender everything, to see his real world fall into ruin about him, while he follows that lure. A normal person can dare to love the fantastic, the super-normal, can venture safely into the core of fantasy for an evening with the goblins and the witch-girls. But not he—for he would come back, like Rip van Winkle, to find that he had spent not a night but a lifetime in the hill of dreams. He must reinforce his ardor for reality by theory—he must beware of the seductions of fantasy as the drunkard shuns the bottle—he must guard himself against the dreams that “cleave to men’s lives and waste the days thereof/With gladness and much sadness and long love.”
  
  Like Kim in the story, when the magicians begin to work their dark magic, he must say to himself, “two times two is four, two times three is six, two times four—”
  
  So you can see why he must have a severely realistic theory of fiction, why he must eschew the fantastic, why he must regard a fellow-writer who is not afraid of it (“I can take a drink or leave it alone”) as one treading the flowery way to destruction. And why, moreover, if he won’t allow himself these indulgences, he should be all the more unwilling to permit them in others! Why, with a religious-philosophical sternness he should refuse—why he must refuse—to admit that anything except what is good for him can be good for any-body else…
  
  Same day. Sherwood, when I’ve been psycho’d into complete normality, I will be able to read your works without worrying about your immortal soul, as it were—perhaps without caring whether you go to hell or not, provided you give me a good time as you go. In the meantime I can’t help being a moralist, and am grieved at the recklessness with which you have commerce with the powers of darkness. That you who tread so firmly when you wish the roads of the world should go ibexing among the crags and chasms of fantasy—it alarms me, I confess. Doubtless I am in somewhat the position of the traditional mother:
  
  “Mother may I go out to swim?”
  “Yes, my darling daughter—
  Have your clothes on
  a hickory limb
  And don’t go near
  the water!”
  
  So forgive me if even your newest book, and in many ways your finest, does not reassure me. There are some magnificent fragments of story telling in it—and the senses you transmit to me of the effect of economic change upon a whole community, is wonderful. I’d like you to think—what I believe is true—that the things I do like in your later books I like as much as anybody possibly could. I merely can’t help reacting to the other things with quite as passionate a fervor. It is all I can do, even now when I have come to apologize, to refrain from preaching…
  
  But I come to bury hatchets, not to raise them. And no matter what you may write, nor how you can never forget my devout admiration for the realism of which you are, when you choose to be, the master.
  
  Yours ever,
  Floyd
  My love to Tennessee
6. Letter from Floyd Dell to Sherwood Anderson, 1920 Dear Sherwood,
  
  I hoped you would like Moon Calf—I wanted you to very much—but the generosity of your appreciation put me to shame. So I’m going to try to explain in self-defense my own antagonistic attitude toward some things in your own words. All told, it would be a story as long as Moon Calf—and some day perhaps I shall write it. But here’s the scenario: a boy who because he fears reality is in love with Shadow-Shapes—much more so than this novel tells. Who lives and breathes in this queer world of Poe, of Doie, of Coleridge—who inhabits a realm “as holy and enchanted/As air beneath a waning moon was haunted/By woman waiting for her demon-lover”.
  
  Conscious his struggle to get in touch with, and to live in, the world of reality. And conscious of him, fooling himself into thinking that he does realistically love that world, and yet at the first beckoning of the white hand of fantasy, ready to surrender everything, to see his real world fall into ruin about him, while he follows that lure. A normal person can dare to love the fantastic, the super-normal, can venture safely into the core of fantasy for an evening with the goblins and the witch-girls. But not he—for he would come back, like Rip van Winkle, to find that he had spent not a night but a lifetime in the hill of dreams. He must reinforce his ardor for reality by theory—he must beware of the seductions of fantasy as the drunkard shuns the bottle—he must guard himself against the dreams that “cleave to men’s lives and waste the days thereof/With gladness and much sadness and long love.”
  
  Like Kim in the story, when the magicians begin to work their dark magic, he must say to himself, “two times two is four, two times three is six, two times four—”
  
  So you can see why he must have a severely realistic theory of fiction, why he must eschew the fantastic, why he must regard a fellow-writer who is not afraid of it (“I can take a drink or leave it alone”) as one treading the flowery way to destruction. And why, moreover, if he won’t allow himself these indulgences, he should be all the more unwilling to permit them in others! Why, with a religious-philosophical sternness he should refuse—why he must refuse—to admit that anything except what is good for him can be good for any-body else…
  
  Same day. Sherwood, when I’ve been psycho’d into complete normality, I will be able to read your works without worrying about your immortal soul, as it were—perhaps without caring whether you go to hell or not, provided you give me a good time as you go. In the meantime I can’t help being a moralist, and am grieved at the recklessness with which you have commerce with the powers of darkness. That you who tread so firmly when you wish the roads of the world should go ibexing among the crags and chasms of fantasy—it alarms me, I confess. Doubtless I am in somewhat the position of the traditional mother:
  
  “Mother may I go out to swim?”
  “Yes, my darling daughter—
  Have your clothes on
  a hickory limb
  And don’t go near
  the water!”
  
  So forgive me if even your newest book, and in many ways your finest, does not reassure me. There are some magnificent fragments of story telling in it—and the senses you transmit to me of the effect of economic change upon a whole community, is wonderful. I’d like you to think—what I believe is true—that the things I do like in your later books I like as much as anybody possibly could. I merely can’t help reacting to the other things with quite as passionate a fervor. It is all I can do, even now when I have come to apologize, to refrain from preaching…
  
  But I come to bury hatchets, not to raise them. And no matter what you may write, nor how you can never forget my devout admiration for the realism of which you are, when you choose to be, the master.
  
  Yours ever,
  Floyd
  My love to Tennessee
7. Letter from Floyd Dell to Sherwood Anderson, 1920 Dear Sherwood,
  
  I hoped you would like Moon Calf—I wanted you to very much—but the generosity of your appreciation put me to shame. So I’m going to try to explain in self-defense my own antagonistic attitude toward some things in your own words. All told, it would be a story as long as Moon Calf—and some day perhaps I shall write it. But here’s the scenario: a boy who because he fears reality is in love with Shadow-Shapes—much more so than this novel tells. Who lives and breathes in this queer world of Poe, of Doie, of Coleridge—who inhabits a realm “as holy and enchanted/As air beneath a waning moon was haunted/By woman waiting for her demon-lover”.
  
  Conscious his struggle to get in touch with, and to live in, the world of reality. And conscious of him, fooling himself into thinking that he does realistically love that world, and yet at the first beckoning of the white hand of fantasy, ready to surrender everything, to see his real world fall into ruin about him, while he follows that lure. A normal person can dare to love the fantastic, the super-normal, can venture safely into the core of fantasy for an evening with the goblins and the witch-girls. But not he—for he would come back, like Rip van Winkle, to find that he had spent not a night but a lifetime in the hill of dreams. He must reinforce his ardor for reality by theory—he must beware of the seductions of fantasy as the drunkard shuns the bottle—he must guard himself against the dreams that “cleave to men’s lives and waste the days thereof/With gladness and much sadness and long love.”
  
  Like Kim in the story, when the magicians begin to work their dark magic, he must say to himself, “two times two is four, two times three is six, two times four—”
  
  So you can see why he must have a severely realistic theory of fiction, why he must eschew the fantastic, why he must regard a fellow-writer who is not afraid of it (“I can take a drink or leave it alone”) as one treading the flowery way to destruction. And why, moreover, if he won’t allow himself these indulgences, he should be all the more unwilling to permit them in others! Why, with a religious-philosophical sternness he should refuse—why he must refuse—to admit that anything except what is good for him can be good for any-body else…
  
  Same day. Sherwood, when I’ve been psycho’d into complete normality, I will be able to read your works without worrying about your immortal soul, as it were—perhaps without caring whether you go to hell or not, provided you give me a good time as you go. In the meantime I can’t help being a moralist, and am grieved at the recklessness with which you have commerce with the powers of darkness. That you who tread so firmly when you wish the roads of the world should go ibexing among the crags and chasms of fantasy—it alarms me, I confess. Doubtless I am in somewhat the position of the traditional mother:
  
  “Mother may I go out to swim?”
  “Yes, my darling daughter—
  Have your clothes on
  a hickory limb
  And don’t go near
  the water!”
  
  So forgive me if even your newest book, and in many ways your finest, does not reassure me. There are some magnificent fragments of story telling in it—and the senses you transmit to me of the effect of economic change upon a whole community, is wonderful. I’d like you to think—what I believe is true—that the things I do like in your later books I like as much as anybody possibly could. I merely can’t help reacting to the other things with quite as passionate a fervor. It is all I can do, even now when I have come to apologize, to refrain from preaching…
  
  But I come to bury hatchets, not to raise them. And no matter what you may write, nor how you can never forget my devout admiration for the realism of which you are, when you choose to be, the master.
  
  Yours ever,
  Floyd
  My love to Tennessee
8. Letter from Sherwood Anderson to Floyd Dell, 1920 Dear Floyd,
  I am loving your book. Have just gone to the country where I can work. The first work I have to do is to paint and calcimine my house. I paint and then sit reading Moon Calf—when Tennessee hasn’t it.
  
  What shall I say except that the book makes me love and understand you as I never have before. What a very sensitive fine figure you have been.
  
  And this book—clear straight writing—keen understand—everything a fine novel should have.
  
  I haven’t finished reading it—thank the gods but I couldn’t resist writing you now,
  
  Sherwood Anderson
  
  Palos Park, Ill.