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Walter Anderson As Writer

Although best known as a muralist and watercolorist, Walter Inglis Anderson (1903-1965) wrote prolifically from the early 1940s until his death, cultivating a variety of genres and devoting much thought to the relation of writing and the other arts. Anderson seldom shared his writing with others, and published almost nothing during his lifetime.

Born in New Orleans on September 29, 1903, Anderson studied at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (1922-23) and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1924-1928) before joining his family in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, where he pursued his art and survived the Depression earning a meager living as a decorator and designer for the family business, Shearwater Pottery. In 1933, Anderson married Agnes Hellmuth Grinstead (1909-1991), a Radcliffe graduate who would later chronicle their years together in a poignant memoir. In 1937, Anderson suffered an acute psychological crisis and underwent prolonged hospitalization for a condition diagnosed uncertainly as depression or schizophrenia (the diagnosis today would, perhaps, be bipolar disorder.) From 1941 to 1947, he lived at Oldfields, his wife’s family home in Gautier, Mississippi, where he thrived both as painter and as writer, producing huge linoleum block prints (exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 1949), innumerable pencil and ink drawings, large mural-like watercolors, and tempera paintings, furniture designs, and a series of ceramic figurines. In 1946 or 47, he left his wife and four children (Mary, Bill, Leif and John) and secluded himself in a cottage at Shearwater, in order to devote himself fully to art. Two masterpieces of this period include the murals in the Ocean Springs Community Center (inspired in part by the poetry of Walt Whitman) and in the “Little Room” of the Cottage, suggested by Psalm 104 (http://library.timelesstruths.org/bible/Psalms/104/). He also did thousands of drawings and watercolors depicting the flora, fauna, and landscape of Horn Island and coastal Mississippi.

(l-r) Christopher Maurer, Maria Estrella Iglesias, Mary Himel Wichmann

(Ocean Springs, Mississippi April 1999)

Among Anderson’s most vivid writings are logbooks recording his travels by bicycle to New York (1942), New Orleans (1943), Texas (1945), China (1949), Costa Rica (1951) and Florida (1960); an account of his life among the pelican colonies of North Key, in the Chandeleurs; and about 90 journals of his trips to Horn Island, off the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, in which he combines close observation of the natural world with reflection on art and nature. Another noteworthy log describes a walking tour to a colony of sand hill cranes north of Gautier, Mississippi in January 1944. Less than one fourth of Anderson’s logbooks, and only a small part of his other writings, have been published.

Between 1941 and 1947, as Anderson dreamed of finding “a common language of forms” for art and of reestablishing “the relation of art to the people,” he found different ways to relate the written word to the graphic image. He produced over 9,000 pen and ink “realizations” or “visualizations” of classical works including Alice in Wonderland, the Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, Hamlet, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, The Poems of Ossian, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Faust, The Voyage of the Beagle, Alice in Wonderland and Bulfinch’s Legends of Charlemagne. He also produced large linoleum blocks of fairy tales and myth; wrote short stories for children, some with his own linoleum block or crayon illustrations (e.g., Robinson: The Pleasant History of an Unusual Cat or “The Golden Land”); and hundreds of pages of rhymed verse, some illustrated with line drawings. A dramatic poem on Christopher Columbus and a puppet play about the rhythms of life in the “cut-over lands” (where timber companies had clear-cut the first-growth pines of the coastal forests) testify to his love of theater. A series of love letters to his fiancée and wife Agnes Grinstead, written between 1930 and 1940, are notable for their passion and their reflections on his life as a struggling artist. Redding S. Sugg, Jr., editor of the Horn Island Logs, notes that Anderson had “a Blakean turn for aphorism.” His unpublished aphorisms, maxims and essays, written mostly between 1940 and 1965, cover a variety of subjects including nature, art history, politics, the mechanism of artistic creation, myth and fable, and reflections on other writers.

Patti Carr Black points out that Anderson regarded his art not as a “product” but as a “process, a means of experiencing the world.” Writing clearly played the same role. “Why do I write this?” Anderson asks in one of the Horn Island logs. “I think writing has a cleansing effect, and altho it is easy enough to keep the body clean, the mind seems to grow clogged.” He seems to have regarded his writing, like his painting, as kindling for what he called the “third poetry.” “The first poetry is always written against the wind by sailors and farmers who sing with the wind in their teeth. The second poetry is written by scholars and students, wine drinkers who [have] learned to know a good thing. The third poetry is sometimes never written; but when it is, it is written by those who have brought nature and art together into one thing.”

Publications

Anderson’s Alice: Walter Anderson Illustrates Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. With a foreword by Mary Anderson Pickard. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1983.

The Horn Island Logs of Walter Inglis Anderson. Edited by Redding S. Sugg, Jr. Rev. ed., Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985.

The Magic Carpet and Other Tales. Retold by Ellen Douglas, illustrations by WA. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987.

Pelicans. With a preface by Mary Pickard Anderson. San Francisco: Cadmus Editions, 2003. http://www.cadmus-editions.com/

Robinson. The Pleasant History of an Unusual Cat. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1982.

Walter Anderson’s Illustrations of Epic and Voyage. Edited and with an introduction by Redding S. Sugg, Jr. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press; London and Amsterdam: Feffer & Simmons, 1980.

Walter Inglis Anderson Papers, ca. 1915-1960. Reels 4867-4872, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Bibliography

Anderson, Agnes Grinstead. Approaching the Magic Hour. Memories of Walter Anderson. Edited by Patti Carr Black. Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1989

Maurer, Christopher, Dreaming in Clay on the Coast of Mississippi: Love and Art at Shearwater. New York: Doubleday, 2000

_________. Fortune’s Favorite Child: The Uneasy Life of Walter Anderson. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003

Pinson, Ernest. “The Writings of Walter Anderson,” in Patricia Pinson, ed., The Art of Walter Anderson. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003: 233-248.

Internet Resources

Walter Anderson Museum of Art www.walterandersonmuseum.org

Publisher website: http://www.upress.state.ms.us/

Christopher Maurer, professor of Spanish literature at Boston University, is the author of Fortune’s Favorite Child: The Uneasy Life of Walter Anderson (University Press of Mississippi, 2003), winner of the 2003 Eudora Welty Prize and the nonfiction award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.