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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:
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
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
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
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.
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