Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 16, 1991 TAG: 9104160248
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE/ STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: TROUTDALE LENGTH: Long
From Japan, from Germany, from Canada - even Texas - they came to backwoodsy Ripshin to see the cottage that writer Sherwood Anderson called home.
Anderson, of course, was the author of "Winesburg, Ohio" - the paint factory owner-turned-novelist who became mentor to Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe. Faulkner described Anderson as "the father of my generation of American writers."
Wolfe called him "the only man in America who ever taught me anything."
Anderson came to Virginia in the middle 1920s after living in Ohio, Chicago, and briefly in New Orleans - a writer at the peak of his fame but grown world-weary, and sick of New Orleans weather.
"Having lived through one New Orleans summer, with its oppressive heat, I wanted, if possible, to avoid another," he wrote in his memoirs.
Anderson built his house near Troutdale - a spacious log and stone cabin bordered by cool creeks and rhododendron.
He lived there, in the place he called Ripshin, off and on until his death some 15 years later.
He also bought two newspapers in nearby Marion, which he ran for two years - during which Anderson created his fictional hayseed columnist, Buck Fever.
And he established himself as a kind of Southwest Virginia legend.
Late last week, more than 40 Anderson scholars from around the world came to Southwest Virginia to talk about the writer and see the land he grew to love.
The conference was sponsored by Virginia Tech - where the Anderson scholars presented papers on Thursday, Friday morning and Saturday.
Titled "Sherwood Anderson after 50 years" - the writer died at age 64 on March 8, 1941, of an infection from a swallowed toothpick - it is the first major Anderson conference to be held at Tech, and only the second ever. A previous large conference was held in Michigan.
A third conference has not yet been planned.
Conference organizers thought Southwest Virginia was a good place for a meeting of Anderson scholars.
"Most people assume Anderson was a Midwestern writer," said Charles Modlin, one of the two Tech English professors who planned the event.
Modlin and colleague Hilbert Campbell said they hoped their conference would both highlight the tie between Anderson and Southwest Virginia and stimulate study of Anderson's life and career.
There appears to be no lack of scholars.
Among the Anderson experts to attend the conference was Jurgen Dierking, of the University of Bremen in Germany. Dierking has translated some of Anderson's works into German.
"I could immediately identify with him," said Dierking, his brown hair hanging about his shoulders. "It was a kind of closeness I never felt with any other writer."
"There is something that is similar in our sensibility with Sherwood Anderson's sensibility," said Yuichi Morioka, of the Nara Women's University in Japan.
In France, "He was very well known in the literary circles in the '20s and '30s" said Claire Bruyere, of the Universite Paris.
Even now, said Bruyere, students respond to Anderson "extremely well, at all ages."
"I teach `Winesburg, Ohio' regularly," said Gary Frame of Vancouver Community College, in Canada. "It still deeply moves students. Sometimes they don't know why."
The three-day conference, funded largely by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy, included more than 20 scholarly papers on Anderson - who never finished high school.
Among the topics: "Nietzsche and Anderson's `The Philosopher' "; "Mysticism in the Cornfields: Sherwood Anderson as poet"; "Sherwood Anderson and Raymond Carver, Poets of the Losers"; and "Sherwood Anderson's Honeymoon Diary."
In between the papers came a Friday afternoon bus trip through Anderson's Virginia, to Ripshin.
In Marion, where the writer lived in an apartment while running his newspapers, the scholars visited the Anderson archives at the Smyth-Bland Regional Library.
They gathered for an evening of reminiscences at Marion's Holiday Inn, where old-timers such as Jim Birchfield talked about the Anderson they knew.
Birchfield, who ran a Washington County newspaper with one of Anderson's sons, said the writer once attended a party at which he drank some of Birchfield's liquor.
Driving down the road later, Anderson's vision became blurred, and - believing the quality of the liquor was to blame - he began cursing Birchfield's name.
As it turned out, Birchfield said, the tipsy Anderson's glasses had just steamed up and frozen over in the cold.
The scholars also visited Anderson's grave, on a hill overlooking Marion - the small town that must have reminded him of Clyde, Ohio, where he spent his boyhood.
Clyde was Anderson's model for "Winesburg, Ohio," the best-known of his books.
Inscribed on Anderson's odd sail-shaped tombstone are the words he wanted there: "Life Not Death Is The Greatest Adventure."
Buried nearby is Eleanor Copenhaver Anderson, the Marion girl who became his fourth wife. The marriage, said the scholars, was a good one - finally. Some 20 years Anderson's junior, she died in 1985.
Ripshin, named for one of the two creeks that borders the property, was what Anderson found when he went looking for "a place where it is cool and where it doesn't cost much to live."
The words are from a letter. The answer came from Julian Harris - son of writer and "Uncle Remus" creator Joel Chandler Harris. Harris recommended Troutdale, a small lumber town in Grayson County, where his father had sometimes gone fishing.
Anderson visited Troutdale and liked it so much he bought land nearby in 1925.
It was there that Anderson built Ripshin - the pretty cottage that is now a National Historic Landmark.
Anderson was able to build Ripshin in part with the proceeds from "Dark Laughter," the most commercially successful of his books.
Ripshin is still owned by his wife's family, the Copenhavers.
Its walls are covered with photographs, many of them autographed, of the people Anderson knew: playwright Paul Green; novelist and Hollywood scriptwriter Anita Loos; Will Rogers; Carl Sandberg; Katherine Anne Porter; H. L. Mencken; Wolfe.
In addition to the cottage, Ripshin includes some 50 acres of Grayson County mountains, and the simple cabin where Anderson did his writing.
Troutdale, and Ripshin, are located just east of 5,700-foot Mount Rogers. It is about 10 cross-country miles from Marion - farther by the squiggly state highway.
When the professors arrived, about mid-afternoon, they stood around the yard. They "oohed" and "aahed" at the cottage.
Some took pictures, or home video. Those who had been there before, such as Modlin and Campbell, answered questions or gave tours. Some walked and mused, alone.
Kim Townsend, author of "Sherwood Anderson: A Biography," said when Anderson built Ripshin he had need of a peaceful place.
"I think some rough stretches preceeded it," said Townsend, who teaches at Amherst College. "It was his third marriage, and life was creating its momentum." Anderson was separated from his third wife, Elizabeth Prall, in 1929, following his move to Virginia.
Anderson tried for months to write at Ripshin - with little success - before buying his two Marion newspapers, the Marion Democrat and the Smyth County News.
"In fact, this was not a particularly productive period," said Townsend. "I think he realized the stream was running dry."
Anderson moved to a Marion hotel after purchasing the newspapers in 1927, then to an apartment at the newspaper's print shop.
For the next few years he poured much of his creative energy into "Buck Fever," a mythical reporter whose columns appeared in both newspapers.
Buck Fever's homey reports often described events in a place he called "Coon Hollow." In detailing local news, he sometimes made small attempt at traditional journalistic objectivity.
"There was a statement from the treasurer about the finances of the town," ended one of Buck's town council reports, "but when anyone begins to speak about finances we always leave."
"Though Anderson wrote the pieces hastily and always printed the first draft, they reveal a dimension of his stature hitherto unrecognized," wrote Welford Dunaway Taylor, editor of a book of Buck's collected columns published in 1971.
Taylor said Buck Fever sprang from a journalistic tradition that includes Simon Suggs, Sut Lovingood, Uncle Remus and Mark Twain.
After turning the newspapers over to his son, Bob Anderson, the writer continued to frequent Ripshin in the summer months. He often traveled in the winter, said Townsend, who spoke with a reporter on the Ripshin grounds.
Where, he was asked, does Anderson rank now among 20th century American writers?
"Not among the greats," Townsend said. "But a significant figure, for two reasons. One is what he's done. And also for his influence on the next generation."
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