Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life
The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some almost
beautiful, and one, a woman all drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by
her grotesqueness. When she passed he made a noise like a small dog
whimpering. Had you come into the room you might have supposed the old
man had unpleasant dreams or perhaps indigestion.
For an hour the procession of grotesques passed before the eyes of the
old man, and then, although it was a painful thing to do, he crept out
of bed and began to write. Some one of the grotesques had made a deep
impression on his mind and he wanted to describe it.
At his desk the writer worked for an hour. In the end he wrote a book
which he called “The Book of the Grotesque.” It was never published,
but I saw it once and it made an indelible impression on my mind. The
book had one central thought that is very strange and has always
remained with me. By remembering it I have been able to understand many
people and things that I was never able to understand before. The
thought was involved but a simple statement of it would be something
like this:
That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many
thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and
each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in
the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.
The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not
try to tell you of all of them. There was the truth of virginity and
the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and
of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were
the truths and they were all beautiful.
And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of
the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.
It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had
quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that
the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called
it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque
and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.
You can see for yourself how the old man, who had spent all of his life
writing and was filled with words, would write hundreds of pages
concerning this matter. The subject would become so big in his mind
that he himself would be in danger of becoming a grotesque. He didn’t,
I suppose, for the same reason that he never published the book. It was
the young thing inside him that saved the old man.
Concerning the old carpenter who fixed the bed for the writer, I only
mentioned him because he, like many of what are called very common
people, became the nearest thing to what is understandable and lovable
of all the grotesques in the writer’s book.
HANDS
Upon the half decayed veranda of a small frame house that stood near
the edge of a ravine near the town of Winesburg, Ohio, a fat little old
man walked nervously up and down. Across a long field that had been
seeded for clover but that had produced only a dense crop of yellow
mustard weeds, he could see the public highway along which went a wagon
filled with berry pickers returning from the fields. The berry pickers,
youths and maidens, laughed and shouted boisterously. A boy clad in a
blue shirt leaped from the wagon and attempted to drag after him one of
the maidens, who screamed and protested shrilly. The feet of the boy in
the road kicked up a cloud of dust that floated across the face of the
departing sun. Over the long field came a thin girlish voice. “Oh, you
Wing Biddlebaum, comb your hair, it’s falling into your eyes,”
commanded the voice to the man, who was bald and whose nervous little
hands fiddled about the bare white forehead as though arranging a mass
of tangled locks.
Wing Biddlebaum, forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of
doubts, did not think of himself as in any way a part of the life of
the town where he had lived for twenty years. Among all the people of
Winesburg but one had come close to him. With George Willard, son of
Tom Willard, the proprietor of the New Willard House, he had formed
something like a friendship. George Willard was the reporter on the
_Winesburg Eagle_ and sometimes in the evenings he walked out along the
highway to Wing Biddlebaum’s house. Now as the old man walked up and
down on the veranda, his hands moving nervously about, he was hoping
that George Willard would come and spend the evening with him. After
the wagon containing the berry pickers had passed, he went across the
field through the tall mustard weeds and climbing a rail fence peered
anxiously along the road to the town. For a moment he stood thus,
rubbing his hands together and looking up and down the road, and then,
fear overcoming him, ran back to walk again upon the porch on his own
house.
In the presence of George Willard, Wing Biddlebaum, who for twenty
years had been the town mystery, lost something of his timidity, and
his shadowy personality, submerged in a sea of doubts, came forth to
look at the world. With the young reporter at his side, he ventured in
the light of day into Main Street or strode up and down on the rickety
front porch of his own house, talking excitedly. The voice that had
been low and trembling became shrill and loud. The bent figure
straightened. With a kind of wriggle, like a fish returned to the brook
by the fisherman, Biddlebaum the silent began to talk, striving to put
into words the ideas that had been accumulated by his mind during long
years of silence.
Wing Biddlebaum talked much with his hands. The slender expressive
fingers, forever active, forever striving to conceal themselves in his
pockets or behind his back, came forth and became the piston rods of
his machinery of expression.
The story of Wing Biddlebaum is a story of hands. Their restless
activity, like unto the beating of the wings of an imprisoned bird, had
given him his name. Some obscure poet of the town had thought of it.
The hands alarmed their owner. He wanted to keep them hidden away and
looked with amazement at the quiet inexpressive hands of other men who
worked beside him in the fields, or passed, driving sleepy teams on
country roads.
When he talked to George Willard, Wing Biddlebaum closed his fists and
beat with them upon a table or on the walls of his house. The action
made him more comfortable. If the desire to talk came to him when the
two were walking in the fields, he sought out a stump or the top board
of a fence and with his hands pounding busily talked with renewed ease.
The story of Wing Biddlebaum’s hands is worth a book in itself.
Sympathetically set forth it would tap many strange, beautiful
qualities in obscure men. It is a job for a poet. In Winesburg the
hands had attracted attention merely because of their activity. With
them Wing Biddlebaum had picked as high as a hundred and forty quarts
of strawberries in a day. They became his distinguishing feature, the
source of his fame. Also they made more grotesque an already grotesque
and elusive individuality. Winesburg was proud of the hands of Wing
Biddlebaum in the same spirit in which it was proud of Banker White’s
new stone house and Wesley Moyer’s bay stallion, Tony Tip, that had won
the two-fifteen trot at the fall races in Cleveland.
As for George Willard, he had many times wanted to ask about the hands.
At times an almost overwhelming curiosity had taken hold of him. He
felt that there must be a reason for their strange activity and their
inclination to keep hidden away and only a growing respect for Wing
Biddlebaum kept him from blurting out the questions that were often in
his mind.
Once he had been on the point of asking. The two were walking in the
fields on a summer afternoon and had stopped to sit upon a grassy bank.
All afternoon Wing Biddlebaum had talked as one inspired. By a fence he
had stopped and beating like a giant woodpecker upon the top board had
shouted at George Willard, condemning his tendency to be too much
influenced by the people about him, “You are destroying yourself,” he
cried. “You have the inclination to be alone and to dream and you are
afraid of dreams. You want to be like others in town here. You hear
them talk and you try to imitate them.”
On the grassy bank Wing Biddlebaum had tried again to drive his point
home. His voice became soft and reminiscent, and with a sigh of
contentment he launched into a long rambling talk, speaking as one lost
in a dream.
Out of the dream Wing Biddlebaum made a picture for George Willard. In
the picture men lived again in a kind of pastoral golden age. Across a
green open country came clean-limbed young men, some afoot, some
mounted upon horses. In crowds the young men came to gather about the
feet of an old man who sat beneath a tree in a tiny garden and who
talked to them.
Wing Biddlebaum became wholly inspired. For once he forgot the hands.
Slowly they stole forth and lay upon George Willard’s shoulders.
Something new and bold came into the voice that talked. “You must try
to forget all you have learned,” said the old man. “You must begin to
dream. From this time on you must shut your ears to the roaring of the
voices.”
Pausing in his speech, Wing Biddlebaum looked long and earnestly at
George Willard. His eyes glowed. Again he raised the hands to caress
the boy and then a look of horror swept over his face.
With a convulsive movement of his body, Wing Biddlebaum sprang to his
feet and thrust his hands deep into his trousers pockets. Tears came to
his eyes. “I must be getting along home. I can talk no more with you,”
he said nervously.
Without looking back, the old man had hurried down the hillside and
across a meadow, leaving George Willard perplexed and frightened upon
the grassy slope. With a shiver of dread the boy arose and went along
the road toward town. “I’ll not ask him about his hands,” he thought,
touched by the memory of the terror he had seen in the man’s eyes.
“There’s something wrong, but I don’t want to know what it is. His
hands have something to do with his fear of me and of everyone.”
And George Willard was right. Let us look briefly into the story of the
hands. Perhaps our talking of them will arouse the poet who will tell
the hidden wonder story of the influence for which the hands were but
fluttering pennants of promise.
In his youth Wing Biddlebaum had been a school teacher in a town in
Pennsylvania. He was not then known as Wing Biddlebaum, but went by the
less euphonic name of Adolph Myers. As Adolph Myers he was much loved
by the boys of his school.
Adolph Myers was meant by nature to be a teacher of youth. He was one
of those rare, little-understood men who rule by a power so gentle that
it passes as a lovable weakness. In their feeling for the boys under
their charge such men are not unlike the finer sort of women in their
love of men.
And yet that is but crudely stated. It needs the poet there. With the
boys of his school, Adolph Myers had walked in the evening or had sat
talking until dusk upon the schoolhouse steps lost in a kind of dream.
Here and there went his hands, caressing the shoulders of the boys,
playing about the tousled heads. As he talked his voice became soft and
musical. There was a caress in that also. In a way the voice and the
hands, the stroking of the shoulders and the touching of the hair were
a part of the schoolmaster’s effort to carry a dream into the young
minds. By the caress that was in his fingers he expressed himself. He
was one of those men in whom the force that creates life is diffused,
not centralized. Under the caress of his hands doubt and disbelief went
out of the minds of the boys and they began also to dream.