As has been already hinted, verbal automatism plays a large part in the career of Anderson’s characters. The song heard by John Webster loosens a new stream of consciousness in him. A married man with a grown-up daughter, in charge of a business concern, John Webster suddenly feels that he has missed his life. He immediately leaves everything to follow the call. In fact, he had never been happy as a married man or as an American citizen. He had never been able to express himself freely. Above all, he had lived in complete ignorance of his body. Now he has found the road to Damascus. Let him be erotically sincere. At last, let him know the “house” of his body which he has inhabited so long as a stranger, and let him visit what he calls other people’s “houses.” Thereupon his mystic lubricity is let loose. The most shocking part of the book is that in which the Wisconsin gymnosophist gives a demonstration of erotic sincerity to his daughter, she herself being hardly dressed. The pages where he tells her his misfortunes as a married man and a lover are indeed amazing. The like can only be found in Andreiev or Gorki. John Webster is insane, but he is also sincere and pure, according to the author. More than this, he atones in his person for all the inhibited inhabitants of Winesburg. This immoral book is after all pure and candid from the writer’s point of view. It was composed to keep a wager which Sherwood Anderson was careful to explain in his preface. John Webster, he tells us, may be crazy, as anybody would be who tried to act contrary to accepted standards in public. At any rate courage is also a virtue, and John is not a coward. Doubtless, a man who seeks love as directly as he does is abnormal according to present standards, but he may be more moral than many of us who refrain to follow his tracks only for fear of public opinion. Better be a De Sade than a Tartuffe. “Many Marriages” is, at the bottom, a plea in favor of individual renewal. It is the book of a moralist and of a mystic. John Webster is a saint after a fashion. He dares to uncover his most secret thoughts before others. The problem of correlations between our thoughts and our actions has always proved to be of a great interest to the author. One of the tales in “The Triumph of The Egg” showed a father who was impelled by his longing for Truth to reveal his secret life to his daughter, but he was a coward and stopped short at the last minute. As for the denudation of the body at the moment of intensive moral or religious crises, and as a symptom of conversion, it is not unknown to hagiographers. Do not the Scriptures speak of “shedding the old man?” The biography of Saint Francis of Assisi tells a similar story with a very different purpose. Nakedness in “Many Marriages” is ritual. It is equivalent to the white robe which the neophytes of the primitive church used to don.