University of Virginia Library

Mary Cochran: Sherwood Anderson's Ten-Year Novel
by
William S. Pfeiffer

I

Though famous for his short stories—and, in particular, for his collection of interrelated short stories, Winesburg, Ohio—Sherwood Anderson often tried to write successful novels. Unfortunately, none of his eight published novels received much critical attention and only one, Dark Laughter (1925), made much money. By the thirties, the last decade of his career, he mostly abandoned novel-writing and concentrated instead on short stories and nonfiction. Throughout these final years, however, Anderson saved the unpublished manuscript of one novel, Mary Cochran, that he had worked on much earlier in his career; and in 1947, seven years after her husband's death, Mrs. Sherwood Anderson included several folders of Mary Cochran typescript in the material she contributed to the Newberry Library in Chicago. Though these folders contain a fairly complete version of the novel, an 186-page typescript, they include no evidence that reveals a composition date. Therefore, my attempt to reconstruct the history of the composition of Mary Cochran depends instead upon 1) information in Anderson's published and unpublished letters and in a 1916 newspaper interview of Anderson, and 2) parallels between Anderson's experiences during the period of composition,

on the one hand, and the characters, settings, and ideas presented in the novel, on the other. This evidence suggests that he began Mary Cochran between 1909 and 1912 in Ohio, continued work on it during the teens in Chicago, and stopped working on the novel only after he published two reworked Mary Cochran chapters in the short story collection, The Triumph of the Egg (1921).

Yet most Anderson scholars who refer to the novel conclude that it is exclusively a product of the author's apprentice writing years in Ohio, before his move to Chicago in 1913. These works often draw support for a pre-1913 dating from the earliest critical study that discusses the genesis of Mary Cochran, Harry Hansen's Midwest Portraits (New York: Harcourt, 1923, pp. 117). According to Hansen, Anderson's early period, "a period of more nearly objective story-telling than the others, began in Ohio and resulted in the writing of four books: Windy McPherson's Son, Marching Men, Talbot Whittingham, and Mary Cochran." Until recently, this account of the Ohio origin of Mary Cochran, first mentioned in Midwest Portraits and perpetuated in subsequent criticism, remained undocumented. Moreover, Anderson himself cast some doubt on the general accuracy of Hansen's book by writing to another critic in the twenties that "I detest Hansen's portrait. It is gossipy, unreliable, and I think pretty dull."[1]

In mid-1975, however, the Newberry Library acquired some correspondence between Hansen and Anderson which supports Hansen's published account. In a late 1922 letter to Anderson, Hansen remarks that, "Here and there I find the report that at one time you were working on a book called 'Mary Cochran.' What became of it? Did you work it up into short stories? I find the character, of course, in 'The Triumph,'—or have you still the manuscript on hand and expect eventually to publish it?" (Newberry incoming, 20 Dec. 1922). In his eleven-page response, Anderson writes that, "When I came back to Chicago from my manufacturing adventure in Ohio about eight years ago I had four novels—Windy McPherson—Marching Men—a novel called Talbot Whittingham and one called Mary Cochran" (Newberry outgoing, undated). Although Anderson inaccurately recalls the date of the Chicago move—for eight years prior to the date of this letter would be early 1915, not early 1913 when the move actually occurred—his statement does clearly link Mary Cochran to the Ohio period.[2]

In this letter to a prospective biographer, Harry Hansen, Anderson no doubt wished to draw the ascending curve of his career—from Mary Cochran and the other apprentice novels, to Winesburg, Ohio, and finally to the mature

work of the period in which he was writing the letter. I would like to suggest that he did not mention portions of the genesis of Mary Cochran to Hansen because his failure to produce a satisfactory revision of the novel did not fit into this curve. Indeed, some of his remarks are clearly at odds with the few facts known about the novel's composition. At one point in the letter, for example, he refers to Mary Cochran as one of the "destroyed" early books, adding that he always "threw away such early work rather than attempt to rework it." And to Hansen's inquiry about the use of the Mary Cochran character in the 1921 The Triumph of the Egg short story collection, Anderson emphasizes the difference between the original novel and the published stories and does not mention the degree to which he transferred plot, characters, and direct quotations from one to the other: "Some of them [the early works] did remain living things in the world of my imagination and every now and then one of them pops up and insists on being put into a quite different story than the one told originally—and that happens to have been Mary Cochran's experience." In this letter, then, Anderson either fails to record or obscures three parts of the history of the composition of Mary Cochran, which will be documented here: 1) his work on the novel in 1913 after moving to Chicago; 2) his effort in 1916 and again in 1919 to rework the novel for publication; and 3) his use of portions of the typescript, sometimes even word-for-word, in two stories in The Triumph of the Egg.

After Anderson brought the novel from Ohio to Chicago in early 1913, he probably continued working on it for the remainder of that year. First, some themes and settings in the novel closely parallel Anderson's life in 1913 Chicago; and second, some of Anderson's own comments in a 1916 newspaper interview give further credence to the theory of the 1913 progress on the novel. An examination of this interview, and of the autobiographical parallels in Mary Cochran, follows a brief summary of the novel.[3]

In episodic form much like that of Winesburg, Ohio, Mary Cochran tells the story of the growth from adolescence to womanhood of its heroine, Mary Cochran. In most of Chapter 1 Mary's father, while informing his daughter of his impending death, describes his courtship to her mother and the couple's subsequent marital collapse in the small New England town where he and Mary now live alone. After her father dies, ending the novel's first episode, Mary leaves town to attend a small college in southern Ohio. Although the Newberry typescript is missing some pages that deal with the Ohio episode, the extant pages make it clear that she encounters several aggressive men during these four years. In one incident which is referred to, not presented, in the typescript (though it perhaps was detailed in the missing typescript pages), Mary is surprised by a sexual advance from her professor, Jacob Hillis. In a second incident she is approached by another friend, Emil Botts, who, after sharing a ritual feast with Mary in the woods, tries to consummate

his several-year friendship with the girl. But Mary runs frantically from the deranged poet.

The next six chapters take place several years after Mary's move from the Ohio college town to Chicago. She becomes friends with Duke Yetter, her employer, and with Sylvester Hunnicutt, a man who has rejected the crass life of business while simultaneously remaining a silent partner in Yetter's firm. Though she rejects Duke's marriage proposal Mary does agree to Sylvester's bold suggestion that she accompany him on a two-week tour of Illinois and Wisconsin. She views the adventure as her chance to make up for her many failures with men and finally to generate a complete relationship, both physically and emotionally; Sylvester, however, only wants Mary as a sounding board for his rhetorical flights about the need for "new women" and new male-female relationships in the modern world. When Mary finally penetrates Sylvester's rhetoric and the couple make love in a Wisconsin hotel room, the affair amounts to an awkward and unsatisfactory one for the girl.

The final five chapters of the book begin when the two adventurers visit a Wisconsin poultry farm, the home of Sylvester's wife from whom he is separated. Sylvester has convinced himself that by confronting his wife with Mary and by explaining his need for independence, he will be able to persuade her to seek a friendly divorce. But the naive man only triggers the rage of a woman who has been praying for her husband's final return, and Sylvester and Mary flee from the farm. After this debacle Mary leaves Sylvester and decides to return to Chicago by herself, now believing that she must work out her own problems before she can expect success in her relationship with Sylvester. And with renewed zeal she earns promotions at her old firm by improving the company's quality control. Meanwhile Sylvester returns to Chicago to work on his novel describing the sort of women needed to rebuild America. And finally he and Mary, having independently found satisfaction in work, join in an unconventional marriage whereby each partner retains his or her independence and, in addition, his or her separate residence.

Certain characters, settings, and themes in Mary Cochran have close counterparts in Anderson's own life after his move from Ohio to Chicago in 1913. In February of that year he arrived in the city, only recently having severed his business connections in Elyria, Ohio. He brought from Ohio a number of manuscripts which he now hoped to prepare for publication. But to support himself in Chicago he had to begin to write copy for the Taylor-Critchfield Advertising Company. He also found time during these first months to befriend members of the now famous Fifty-Seventh Street Colony of artists who occupied studio apartments across from Jackson Park on Stony Island Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street (Sutton, Road, p. 285). This precise setting occurs in numerous Chicago scenes in Mary Cochran, and Mary herself lives in a room overlooking Jackson Park.

Floyd Dell, a journalist in 1913, reigned in the Colony along with his wife, Margery Currey, a woman very much concerned with the development

of alternate roles for women. Currey and Dell moved into separate, though adjacent, apartments on Stony Island Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street in early 1913, resembling the arrangement between Mary and Sylvester at the end of the novel. And it was Margery Currey who helped draw the Colony's attention to the new writer in Chicago, Sherwood Anderson. Also brought into the Colony later were Anderson's estranged wife, Cornelia, and Tennessee Mitchell, who would become Anderson's second wife in 1916. In these late spring and early summer days of 1913, Anderson visited the Jackson Park apartments and sometimes read his work before the others in the group. He soon became good friends with Currey and Mitchell, both of whom resemble Mary Cochran in their concern for the independent working life of women.

While writing part of the novel in mid-1913, Anderson may have been influenced by Dell's Women as World Builders, published earlier that year. In the introduction to these sketches of contemporary women activists, all previously published in the Friday Literary Review, Dell presents feminist doctrine very similar to that which is implicit, but occasionally explicit, in Mary Cochran. Like Anderson, he seems to exclude the revolution in sexual mores from the domain of feminism, considering such changes in "personal relations" a matter of "common sense" rather than a concern of feminism.[4] Dell also advocates the "setting of mothers free" with meaningful work, since the "woman who finds her work will find her love" (Dell, Women, pp. 9-10). Of the three major classes of women described by Dell—the mothers, who "find their destiny in the bearing and rearing of children"; the courtesans, who "make a career of charming, stimulating, and comforting men"; the workers, who "demand independent work like men" (Dell, Women, pp. 10-11)—only the latter are presented as a possible solution to female subjugation. Mary Cochran also demonstrates this preference for the worker-type of woman, and even includes Dell's distinction between the "worker" and the "courtesan." That is, when Mary finally decides to seek her salvation through work, she rejects once and for all the role of "courtesan" as proposed to her by Duke Yetter at the end of the novel.

Besides stressing woman's independence through labor, both Dell's and Anderson's accounts of feminism avoid what Dell calls "the spirit of Romance. I mean that attitude toward woman which accepts her sex as a miraculous justification for her existence . . . in short, woman-worship. The reverence for woman as virgin, or wife, or mother, irrespective of her capacities as friend or leader or servant" (Dell, Women, p. 17). In rejecting this romantic view of women, Mary Cochran remarks to Sylvester Hunnicutt that virginity is "not worth while. It is a thing thrust upon us. Things are badly arranged. We are made to cling to virginity and girlhood when we want to push on into womanhood." Later she gropes for a more mature sexual relationship on her trip with Sylvester, but her attempt fails; it is only after

she has achieved happiness in work that she seems to find some degree of satisfaction with Sylvester.

In a final curious correspondence, both Dell and Anderson view feminism as a "phase of the great human renaissance inaugurated by men." In addition, the movement "deserves to be considered" only because it will help to free men from the boredom of "subservient women," thus helping to make of woman man's self-sufficient complement (Dell, Women, pp. 19—21). Indeed, the heroine's liberation into labor at the end of Mary Cochran does seem of only secondary importance to the corresponding breakthrough by Sylvester Hunnicutt into the realm of the imagination, into the world of novel-writing.

Besides parallels between Mary Cochran and Anderson's own life in Chicago in 1913, two comments by Anderson himself support the theory that he worked on the novel during that year. Late in 1916 Anderson wrote his good friend, Waldo Frank, that, "I met Floyd Dell, the first man interested in writing that I had ever known, while I was at work on my third novel."[5] And in a newspaper interview published at about the same time as this letter was written, Anderson clearly refers to Mary Cochran as his third novel: "'My first novel is called Windy McPherson's Son. That'll be out Sept. 1. My second is called Marching Men, and my third Mary Cochran. Then there are some more I'll put out later.'"[6] If by "third" novel in his letter to Frank, Anderson meant to indicate Mary Cochran, as he did in the newspaper interview, and if he recalled while writing the Frank letter that he had "met Floyd Dell" in early 1913 in Chicago, then the author's own comments suggest that he worked on Mary Cochran in Chicago in 1913, after he had moved from Elyria, Ohio.

Very likely, then, Anderson drafted part of the novel during the summer and fall of 1913 after he had become involved with Dell, Currey, and Mitchell in the Colony. Yet he also might have written part of the novel when he was further distanced from his associations of the late spring and summer, perhaps working on it during his December, 1913 to March, 1914 visit to the Ozarks.[7] Although there are no precise accounts of the amount or nature of the work that Anderson completed on this winter visit (Sutton, Road, p. 235), he might have enthusiastically continued a project like Mary Cochran during this relief from his advertising routine in Chicago. And as he and Cornelia endured the final dissolution of their marriage, he might have had little difficulty writing about Gertrude Bickford, the "home-staying" though independent wife of Sylvester, and about Sylvester himself, the businessman-turned-writer

who severed his marriage with Gertrude to begin anew with Mary Cochran.

II

Anderson's work on the novel in Ohio and then in Chicago in 1913 does not complete the history of its composition. His letters indicate that he reworked parts of the novel, and predicated its eventual publication, at least twice before the end of the decade. For example, a 1916 letter to his good friend, Marietta Finley, shows him still considering some major revisions in the text. This letter also recalls the essential sexual ambiguity of Mary Cochran, the uncertainty whether Mary has achieved sexual satisfaction with Sylvester along with her marriage to him and her new-found success in the working world:

That the extant typescripts, in spite of this letter, retain Mary's marriage to Sylvester suggests four possibilities: that Anderson decided to make the revision but simply never wrote it in; that he made the revision in the novel but that any portions of text containing it were discarded or lost; that he considered, but later rejected, this change in the narrative; or that he perhaps transformed a more conventional marriage in an earlier manuscript into a less conventional one involving separate residences in the extant typescripts. In any case, the letter shows that Mary Cochran was still very much in Anderson's plans in late 1916.

No references to this novel can be found in the Newberry outgoing letters for the following year, 1917—a year in which Anderson continued his Chicago friendships, sought publication of more stories and novels, and still wrote advertising copy for a living. But early in 1918 he writes Van

Wyck Brooks that, "When I came to look at my novel Mary Cochran, written several years ago, it didn't suit me. I shall hold it back for more work" (Jones and Rideout, Letters, p. 31: ? early April, 1918). Not until over a year later, however, do Anderson's letters again record his interest in this project. To his publisher, Ben Huebsch, he reports in the late summer of 1919, "About the novel. When I got in to it I found I wanted to rewrite it almost entirely. It is a book I wrote several years ago and it seems to me it can be very greatly improved. I will keep at it and hope I will have it ready for you to look at shortly after the first of the year" (Newberry outgoing, 23 Aug. 1919). Apparently Anderson did keep at the rewriting, remarking to Huebsch in mid-November that, "One of these days I shall be able to give you the Mary Cochran book. It has tantilized me a good deal but is coming clear now. In its final form it will be like Winesburg, a group of tales woven about the life of one person but each tale will be longer and more closely related to the developement of the central caracter" (Newberry outgoing, 12 Nov. 1919). Of course, this intention to rework and finally to publish Mary Cochran conflicts with the 1922 letter to Hansen in which he states that he never returned to work on the novel after the apprentice writing period in Ohio. But in late 1919, satisfied with his recently published Winesburg, he felt that he had found his own prose form and perhaps thought that he could publish another collection of interrelated short stories on the heels of Winesburg, Ohio. There was no need, in 1919, to obscure the genesis of the novel for he did not yet consider the project a failure.

Later in the winter of 1919 he repeats his desire for an integrated noveltale collection. To Waldo Frank he writes, "Out of my necessity I am throwing the Mary Cochran book into the Winesburg form, half individual tales, half long novel form. It enables me to go at each tale seperately, perhaps when I am ready to do it at one long sitting. My life now is too broken up for the long sustained thing. Every few days I must go wade in mud, in the filth of money making" (Newberry outgoing, ca. Dec. 1919). Three additional late 1919 letters also refer to his work on the book. He says to Paul Rosen-feld, his good friend, "I have gone back into my Mary Cochran book, written a long time ago and have been trying to work on it when I can" (Newberry outgoing, ca. winter, 1919). To Frank he writes, "Also I write the Mary Cochran stories," and in another letter to Frank that, "Still I work again. I am casting Mary Cochran into real form." But in the final 1919 letter to Waldo Frank, Anderson's frustration with the revision project begins to show: "The tales that are to make the Mary Cochran book are waiting like tired people on the doorstep of the house of my mind. They are unclothed. I need to be a tailor and make warm clothes of words for them" (Newberry outgoing, all three letters to Frank ca. Dec. 1919).

Sick with influenza, dispirited by his advertising routine, and probably depressed by his standstill on Mary Cochran, Anderson left Chicago in January of 1920 for a working vacation in Mobile and then Fairhope, Alabama. Remaining there until late spring, he probably made one last effort

to put the novel together. In an undated letter from Fairhope, though one probably written just a few days before his May departure,[9] he notes that he is "having great fun with my new book Many Marriages and poor Mary C is shoved away again" (Newberry Reserved, Fairhope 1920). If Anderson had been able to work on Mary Cochran during his stay in Alabama, now he was once again postponing its completion. But some convincing evidence suggests that he probably shelved the novel before this last month of his Alabama visit, deciding instead to fashion from it several independent short stories or perhaps a collection. In fact, before Anderson even left the South, the May, 1920 issue of the Dial was coming out with his "The Door of the Trap," a short story with Mary Cochran as its protagonist.

In this story, one of Mary's college professors frightens her with an unexpected embrace while she is visiting his home for dinner. Though the names of the professor and the college town are different, the plot of the story resembles that of the missing portion of the Newberry typescript mentioned earlier in this essay, judging by scattered allusions to the incident in extant parts of the typescript. And it seems possible, therefore, that in 1920 Anderson may have removed pages from his aging typescript for use as starter copy for the story that came to be published in the Dial. Though the correspondence between "The Door of the Trap" and the Newberry typescript is speculative, that between the typescript and a second published story is less so. Over a year after the first story's appearance, Anderson published "Unlighted Lamps" in the July, 1921 issue of Smart Set, only a few months before the inclusion of both stories in the collection The Triumph of the Egg. Whereas "The Door of the Trap" may account for part of a missing chapter in the Newberry typescript, "Unlighted Lamps" closely parallels the extant first chapter of the novel typescript. A portion of this first chapter, in fact, is carried over verbatim into the published story.[10]

The probable extraction of these two stories from Mary Cochran provides substantial evidence that Anderson had given up trying to form either a novel or a Winesburg-like collection from the typescript by 1921. Perhaps his decision to insert only a few Mary Cochran stories into an otherwise unrelated collection of stories came in December of 1920, when he wrote Huebsch that, "I've an idea I would like to publish another book of short stories and I have some good ones. I'll likely come down in January and we'll talk this over" (Newberry outgoing, 14 Dec. 1920). For by March he was able to write that "the new book is ready to close" (Newberry Reserved, Mar. 1921 to Finley), and that it would be entitled The Triumph of the Egg (Newberry outgoing, 21 Mar. 1921 to Huebsch). In April, however, Anderson

seemed to favor a title change and wrote that, "The new book has gone to the publisher. I shall call it 'Unlighted Lamps'" (Newberry Reserved, April 1921 to Finley). Even at this late date he seemed reluctant to relegate Mary Cochran to death by extraction, and wanted to label an entire short story collection by one of its only two Mary Cochran stories.

Only when Anderson left for Europe in June—on another of his great escapes from the business world—did he probably bid farewell to the now ten to twelve-year-old novel. For after the publication later that summer of "Unlighted Lamps" and "The Door of the Trap" in the fifteen-story collection which came to be titled, after all, The Triumph of the Egg, no Anderson publication in the author's lifetime ever again included any portion of the Mary Cochran story. This novel, begun in the Ohio apprentice-writing years, crafted in 1913 under the influence of Dell and the Colony, reworked partially in 1916 and 1919, and then dismantled in part in the early twenties prior to the publication of Triumph, would add to the long list of Sherwood Anderson's unpublished novels. But because he never destroyed the novel, as he had claimed to in his 1922 letter to Harry Hansen, Anderson left at least partly unanswered his final disposition toward the work.

Notes