Dead Letters: The Great Adventure

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent

I was at the party where Sherwood Anderson swallowed the thing that killed him, and I did not see it happen, and neither did he.

It was late February of 1941, on a ship at a New York pier, one of those bon-voyage affairs that were still permitted then, where the friends of the traveler come aboard before sailing and drink the traveler's health in the traveler's stateroom and up on the deck until the horn runs them back down the gangway. Anderson was sailing on the Santa Lucia for South America. He was sixty-four and he was going to write about labor conditions in the mills and mines down there, the wages and the hours and the men worn out by both, because that was the work that occupied him at the end, the actual arithmetic of how ordinary people were used up. He had gone gray and heavy and easy in himself. He was the man who had written Winesburg, Ohio twenty years before, the book that taught half the writers then living how to put a lonely person on a page and leave him lonely, and the young men he had taught, Hemingway and Faulkner among them, had long since passed him and turned around to mock the way he wrote, and he seemed to have made his peace with that too.

I had come aboard to get him. It was the old assignment. A few words from the master on his way to the equator, something the magazine could run. He was gracious about it, more gracious than the ones who were still hungry, and he gave me a quarter of an hour by the rail while the harbor went about its business below us, and he talked, and I listened the way you listen to a man you will have other chances to hear.

Then we went in where the drinks were.

I want to be careful here, because I have watched this evening turned into a joke many times since and I decline to tell it as one. There were drinks, and there were the small things a party like that hands around on trays, and among them were olives, each speared on a little wooden pick so a man could take one without dirtying his hand. Anderson took one from his glass, a martini olive on its pick. He was talking while he did it, the way you do at a party, holding the glass, saying goodbye to people he liked, and he ate the olive and went on talking, and somewhere in that ordinary motion the pick went with it. He did not choke. He did not gasp. Nothing in the room changed. He kept talking. I was standing near enough to have seen it if there had been anything to see, and there was nothing to see, a man had eaten the olive out of his drink, and the horn sounded, and I shook his hand and went down the gangway with the others and stood on the pier and watched the ship take him out.

The wooden pick had gone into him and it did not stop where food stops. It worked through the wall of his intestine, which is a thing you do not feel happen, and the wound it opened let out into him what the gut is meant to keep sealed, and by the time the Santa Lucia was well down the coast he had begun to feel the pain that would bring him ashore. Peritonitis is the word for what he had. It is the body poisoning itself through a hole too small to find. They put in at Colón, in Panama, and got him off the ship and into a hospital, and on the eighth of March he died there, a long way from Ohio, of a toothpick, from a party, in the middle of the work he had gone south to do.

The paper back in Elyria, where he had once run a paint factory before he threw the factory over to go and write, printed the notice of his death. I have seen it. It says, "Sherwood Anderson, Former Elyria Manufacturer, Dies." That was the man his own town had kept, across all those years and all those books, the manufacturer, the one who used to make the paint. Not a word in the headline about the sentences. They remembered the payroll.

He is buried in Virginia, on a hill, under a stone that carries words of his own. The words are, Life, Not Death, Is the Great Adventure. A last thumbed nose, I have always read it, at the thing coming for all of us, a way of refusing death the dignity of the final word. He could not have known how the sentence would read once you knew the rest.

I filed the fifteen minutes at the rail. I could not tell you now what was in it. I was there for his last words and I got them and threw them out, the way you throw out the little wooden pick after the olive is gone, because who keeps a thing like that, who could possibly know to keep it.

— F.M.

Fletcher Moody is a literary correspondent. His column, "Dead Letters," covers the stranger truths of literary history. It appears when it appears.