Marching Men — A Closer Reading

Setting and Physical Detail

The excerpts foreground setting through sensory, often grimy, imagery. Coal Creek is rendered with 'black snow, sordid with the gathered grime of human endeavour.' Miners walk 'silently and with blackened faces,' carrying dinner pails. The town's Main Street is lined with stores, and the bake-shop serves as a social hub where characters like Uncle Charlie and the Reverend Minot Weeks perform for an audience.

In contrast, Chicago is evoked through the university, which McGregor sees as 'an expensive ornament worn on the soiled hand of a street urchin.' Anderson uses simile to emphasize disconnect: the university is 'not in tune with its surrounding.' The classroom scene includes a student sketching McGregor's features, another planning a dinner date, and a third who 'drummed with his fingers on the back of a book.' These details build a world of restless, observed individuals rather than a cohesive community.

Character Through Caricature and Gesture

Anderson introduces characters through exaggerated physical traits and repetitive gestures. Uncle Charlie 'stamped on the steps,' 'laughed and whistled softly,' and 'tapped with his knuckles on the showcase.' The Reverend Minot Weeks thrusts 'four fingers of each hand into the pockets of his trousers,' his thumbs bobbing on his paunch. These mannerisms define the men more than dialogue does.

McGregor himself is described as having a head 'big and red' with 'something of nobility about it like the head of a fine beast.' His outburst in class—'With an oath he arose and kicked out his foot to push his chair away'—is a physical rejection of academic talk. The yellow-haired girl draws sketches of his mouth and nose, reducing him to a caricature. Anderson's method is to show character through what bodies do, not what they say.

The Critique of Talk vs. Action

A recurring tension in the excerpts is between speech and meaningful action. McGregor is irritated by the professor's 'wordiness' and the socialist orator's talk on Coal Creek streets. He tells the class, 'We go from room to room hearing talk.' The professor himself speaks of 'unrest' and 'struggling like chicks in the shell,' but McGregor responds with a physical oath and a kick.

Anderson satirizes the university environment: a student 'was like an instrument on which the professor struck chords,' while another thinks only of dinner and cigarettes. The novel's title, Marching Men, implies organized movement, but the excerpts show only individual frustration. McGregor's desire to 'frighten' smug men 'so that they throw their cigars away' suggests a violent impulse toward order, though how this translates into the titular march remains unclear from these passages.

Readers should note that the excerpts cover only the opening and a later classroom scene, leaving the development of McGregor's movement largely unseen. Anderson's style—emphasizing physical description, satirical character sketches, and a distrust of rhetoric—is consistent throughout these passages. The catalog subjects (city life, labor leaders, coal mining) are present but filtered through a protagonist who rejects easy categorization. Approach the novel as a character study of a man who wants to remake the world through sheer physical will, not through words.

I’ve shelved Marching Men beside the other Anderson volumes for years, and its restless Beaut, so wary of speeches, still murmurs to me. There’s a quiet kinship, I think, with the household saint of The Professional Aunt — Inside the Classic—both weary of performance, both seeking order in their own stubborn, private way.