Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life
Winesburg? Such impressions have been put in more general terms in
Anderson’s only successful novel, Poor White:
All men lead their lives behind a wall of misunderstanding they have
themselves built, and most men die in silence and unnoticed behind the
walls. Now and then a man, cut off from his fellows by the
peculiarities of his nature, becomes absorbed in doing something that
is personal, useful and beautiful. Word of his activities is carried
over the walls.
These “walls” of misunderstanding are only seldom due to physical
deformities (Wing Biddlebaum in “Hands”) or oppressive social
arrangements (Kate Swift in “The Teacher.”) Misunderstanding,
loneliness, the inability to articulate, are all seen by Anderson as
virtually a root condition, something deeply set in our natures. Nor
are these people, the grotesques, simply to be pitied and dismissed; at
some point in their lives they have known desire, have dreamt of
ambition, have hoped for friendship. In all of them there was once
something sweet, “like the twisted little apples that grow in the
orchards in Winesburg.” Now, broken and adrift, they clutch at some
rigid notion or idea, a “truth” which turns out to bear the stamp of
monomania, leaving them helplessly sputtering, desperate to speak out
but unable to. Winesburg, Ohio registers the losses inescapable to
life, and it does so with a deep fraternal sadness, a sympathy casting
a mild glow over the entire book. “Words,” as the American writer Paula
Fox has said, “are nets through which all truth escapes.” Yet what do
we have but words?
They want, these Winesburg grotesques, to unpack their hearts, to
release emotions buried and festering. Wash Williams tries to explain
his eccentricity but hardly can; Louise Bentley “tried to talk but
could say nothing”; Enoch Robinson retreats to a fantasy world,
inventing “his own people to whom he could really talk and to whom he
explained the things he had been unable to explain to living people.”
In his own somber way, Anderson has here touched upon one of the great
themes of American literature, especially Midwestern literature, in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the struggle for speech
as it entails a search for the self. Perhaps the central Winesburg
story, tracing the basic movements of the book, is “Paper Pills,” in
which the old Doctor Reefy sits “in his empty office close by a window
that was covered with cobwebs,” writes down some thoughts on slips of
paper (“pyramids of truth,” he calls them) and then stuffs them into
his pockets where they “become round hard balls” soon to be discarded.
What Dr. Reefy’s “truths” may be we never know; Anderson simply
persuades us that to this lonely old man they are utterly precious and
thereby incommunicable, forming a kind of blurred moral signature.
After a time the attentive reader will notice in these stories a
recurrent pattern of theme and incident: the grotesques, gathering up a
little courage, venture out into the streets of Winesburg, often in the
dark, there to establish some initiatory relationship with George
Willard, the young reporter who hasn’t yet lived long enough to become
a grotesque. Hesitantly, fearfully, or with a sputtering incoherent
rage, they approach him, pleading that he listen to their stories in
the hope that perhaps they can find some sort of renewal in his
youthful voice. Upon this sensitive and fragile boy they pour out their
desires and frustrations. Dr. Parcival hopes that George Willard “will
write the book I may never get written,” and for Enoch Robinson, the
boy represents “the youthful sadness, young man’s sadness, the sadness
of a growing boy in a village at the year’s end [which may open] the
lips of the old man.”
What the grotesques really need is each other, but their estrangement
is so extreme they cannot establish direct ties—they can only hope for
connection through George Willard. The burden this places on the boy is
more than he can bear. He listens to them attentively, he is
sympathetic to their complaints, but finally he is too absorbed in his
own dreams. The grotesques turn to him because he seems
“different”—younger, more open, not yet hardened—but it is precisely
this “difference” that keeps him from responding as warmly as they
want. It is hardly the boy’s fault; it is simply in the nature of
things. For George Willard, the grotesques form a moment in his
education; for the grotesques, their encounters with George Willard
come to seem like a stamp of hopelessness.
The prose Anderson employs in telling these stories may seem at first
glance to be simple: short sentences, a sparse vocabulary,
uncomplicated syntax. In actuality, Anderson developed an artful style
in which, following Mark Twain and preceding Ernest Hemingway, he tried
to use American speech as the base of a tensed rhythmic prose that has
an economy and a shapeliness seldom found in ordinary speech or even
oral narration. What Anderson employs here is a stylized version of the
American language, sometimes rising to quite formal rhetorical patterns
and sometimes sinking to a self-conscious mannerism. But at its best,
Anderson’s prose style in Winesburg, Ohio is a supple instrument,
yielding that “low fine music” which he admired so much in the stories
of Turgenev.
One of the worst fates that can befall a writer is that of
self-imitation: the effort later in life, often desperate, to recapture
the tones and themes of youthful beginnings. Something of the sort
happened with Anderson’s later writings. Most critics and readers grew
impatient with the work he did after, say, 1927 or 1928; they felt he
was constantly repeating his gestures of emotional “groping”—what he
had called in Winesburg, Ohio the “indefinable hunger” that prods and
torments people. It became the critical fashion to see Anderson’s
“gropings” as a sign of delayed adolescence, a failure to develop as a
writer. Once he wrote a chilling reply to those who dismissed him in
this way: “I don’t think it matters much, all this calling a man a
muddler, a groper, etc…. The very man who throws such words as these
knows in his heart that he is also facing a wall.” This remark seems to
me both dignified and strong, yet it must be admitted that there was
some justice in the negative responses to his later work. For what
characterized it was not so much “groping” as the imitation of
“groping,” the self-caricature of a writer who feels driven back upon
an earlier self that is, alas, no longer available.
But Winesburg, Ohio remains a vital work, fresh and authentic. Most of
its stories are composed in a minor key, a tone of subdued
pathos—pathos marking both the nature and limit of Anderson’s talent.
(He spoke of himself as a “minor writer.”) In a few stories, however,
he was able to reach beyond pathos and to strike a tragic note. The
single best story in Winesburg, Ohio is, I think, “The Untold Lie,” in
which the urgency of choice becomes an outer sign of a tragic element
in the human condition. And in Anderson’s single greatest story, “The
Egg,” which appeared a few years after Winesburg, Ohio, he succeeded in
bringing together a surface of farce with an undertone of tragedy. “The
Egg” is an American masterpiece.
Anderson’s influence upon later American writers, especially those who
wrote short stories, has been enormous. Ernest Hemingway and William
Faulkner both praised him as a writer who brought a new tremor of
feeling, a new sense of introspectiveness to the American short story.
As Faulkner put it, Anderson’s “was the fumbling for exactitude, the
exact word and phrase within the limited scope of a vocabulary
controlled and even repressed by what was in him almost a fetish of
simplicity … to seek always to penetrate to thought’s uttermost end.”
And in many younger writers who may not even be aware of the Anderson
influence, you can see touches of his approach, echoes of his voice.
Writing about the Elizabethan playwright John Ford, the poet Algernon
Swinburne once said: “If he touches you once he takes you, and what he
takes he keeps hold of; his work becomes part of your thought and
parcel of your spiritual furniture forever.” So it is, for me and many
others, with Sherwood Anderson.
To the memory of my mother,
EMMA SMITH ANDERSON,
whose keen observations on the life about her first awoke in me the
hunger to see beneath the surface of lives, this book is dedicated.
THE TALES AND THE PERSONS
THE BOOK OF THE GROTESQUE
The writer, an old man with a white mustache, had some difficulty in
getting into bed. The windows of the house in which he lived were high
and he wanted to look at the trees when he awoke in the morning. A
carpenter came to fix the bed so that it would be on a level with the
window.
Quite a fuss was made about the matter. The carpenter, who had been a
soldier in the Civil War, came into the writer’s room and sat down to
talk of building a platform for the purpose of raising the bed. The
writer had cigars lying about and the carpenter smoked.
For a time the two men talked of the raising of the bed and then they
talked of other things. The soldier got on the subject of the war. The
writer, in fact, led him to that subject. The carpenter had once been a
prisoner in Andersonville prison and had lost a brother. The brother
had died of starvation, and whenever the carpenter got upon that
subject he cried. He, like the old writer, had a white mustache, and
when he cried he puckered up his lips and the mustache bobbed up and
down. The weeping old man with the cigar in his mouth was ludicrous.
The plan the writer had for the raising of his bed was forgotten and
later the carpenter did it in his own way and the writer, who was past
sixty, had to help himself with a chair when he went to bed at night.
In his bed the writer rolled over on his side and lay quite still. For
years he had been beset with notions concerning his heart. He was a
hard smoker and his heart fluttered. The idea had got into his mind
that he would some time die unexpectedly and always when he got into
bed he thought of that. It did not alarm him. The effect in fact was
quite a special thing and not easily explained. It made him more alive,
there in bed, than at any other time. Perfectly still he lay and his
body was old and not of much use any more, but something inside him was
altogether young. He was like a pregnant woman, only that the thing
inside him was not a baby but a youth. No, it wasn’t a youth, it was a
woman, young, and wearing a coat of mail like a knight. It is absurd,
you see, to try to tell what was inside the old writer as he lay on his
high bed and listened to the fluttering of his heart. The thing to get
at is what the writer, or the young thing within the writer, was
thinking about.
The old writer, like all of the people in the world, had got, during
his long life, a great many notions in his head. He had once been quite
handsome and a number of women had been in love with him. And then, of
course, he had known people, many people, known them in a peculiarly
intimate way that was different from the way in which you and I know
people. At least that is what the writer thought and the thought
pleased him. Why quarrel with an old man concerning his thoughts?
In the bed the writer had a dream that was not a dream. As he grew
somewhat sleepy but was still conscious, figures began to appear before
his eyes. He imagined the young indescribable thing within himself was
driving a long procession of figures before his eyes.
You see the interest in all this lies in the figures that went before
the eyes of the writer. They were all grotesques. All of the men and
women the writer had ever known had become grotesques.