Winesburg, Ohio
Sherwood Anderson
ISBN: 0-7607-9844-3
Contents
Introduction
The Tales and the Persons
The Book of the Grotesque
Hands—Concerning Wing Biddlebaum
Paper Pills—Concerning Doctor Reefy
Mother—Concerning Elizabeth Willard
The Philosopher—Concerning Doctor Parcival
Nobody Knows—Concerning Louise Trunnion
Godliness (Parts One and Two)—Concerning Jesse Bentley
Part I
Part II
Surrender (Part Three)—Concerning Louise Bentley
Terror (Part Four)—Concerning David Hardy
A Man of Ideas—Concerning Joe Welling
Adventure—Concerning Alice Hindman
Respectability—Concerning Wash Williams
The Thinker—Concerning Seth Richmond
Tandy—Concerning Tandy Hard
The Strength of God—Concerning the Reverend Curtis Hartman
The Teacher—Concerning Kate Swift
Loneliness—Concerning Enoch Robinson
An Awakening—Concerning Belle Carpenter
"Queer"—Concerning Elmer Cowley
The Untold Lie—Concerning Ray Pearson
Drink—Concerning Tom Foster
Death—Concerning Doctor Reefy and Elizabeth Willard
Sophistication—Concerning Helen White
Departure—Concerning George Willard
Introduction
How many readers, spotting the title Winesburg, Ohio on a library shelf, take the book down expecting to be indulged by a soft-focus, nostalgic portrait of an American small town? The name "Winesburg," after all, hints at mellowness, comfort, quaintness. Yet a glance at a single page should be enough to disabuse such readers, and point those who insist on easy reverie away from Sherwood Anderson's spiky world of anguish and frustration. Not that the book lacks poetry; only it is poetry of a bitter sort, especially when the repressed passions of the characters burst through the drab crusts of their lives—burst furiously but to no avail. For Anderson's theme is all the ways human beings misunderstand themselves and each other, failing at the interdependent tasks of self-realization and communion. In this lies the second irony of the title: if it only hints at a soothing lyricism, it clearly promises the story of a collectivity, a society. Yet Winesburg, Ohio is ultimately not about a society at all, unless a number of embittered solitudes fixed in the same place constitutes a society.
Many of the titles of Winesburg's component stories seem to promise fictional equivalents of Emerson's essays; actually they are no less ironic than the title of the whole collection. For example, the title "The Philosopher" hardly prepares us for the story of Doctor Parcival, who turns a cold shoulder to the death of a child in a street accident, and paranoically fears he will be lynched for his misanthropy. In "Godliness," the frontier-style patriarch Jesse Bentley sees himself as the equal of the ancient Israelite heroes in the eyes of God; his sense of divine mission translates into a ferocious coveting of his neighbors' lands. In "Adventure," Alice Hindman, left by her faithless lover to drag out the years in an emotional void, runs naked from her house one night in a fit of misery, thinking only of giving herself to the first man she meets. The story ends with her realization that for her there will be no real adventure, no romance; that the void has become her home. Reverend Hartman, a committed but self-doubting pastor, feels fully possessed of "The Strength of God" only once—when he smashes a stained-glass window with his fist, the better to view the naked body of a schoolteacher who has long been the object of his tormented voyeurism. The title "Loneliness" prepares us for a character who yearns for the company of other human beings; Enoch Robinson, the failed artist of the story, yearns instead for the return of the fantasy creatures who made his solitude a narcissistic paradise until a single brush with adult love broke the spell.
If readers must treat the titles warily, can they at least be confident that the book in their hands is of the type it seems to belong to—that it is simply a collection of short stories? Not at all: Winesburg actually belongs to an unnamed genre halfway between short-story collection and novel; furthermore, it exemplifies this unofficial class in a somewhat complex way.
To the extent the book is a novel, surely George Willard is the central character, since he appears in most of the stories. Yet he is less frequently an actor than an auditor, and is anything but formidable personally—a bumbler with women and an adept at misunderstanding them; an aspiring writer whose talents are nowhere demonstrated. George in fact is a bit of a blank—which is why so many of the characters want to relate their stories to him: he is the screen on which they project their pasts. Another reason is that, however paltry at this stage of his life, he does not share in the psychic deformity that makes most of the people of Winesburg problematic both to themselves and each other.
George and the other recurring characters are only one of the many devices that give unity to the book. Another is recurring symbols—the most persistent being hands, which stand for both the desire for contact with the world beyond the self and masturbatory withdrawal. More obvious is the device of the story sequence. Doctor Reefy and George's mother, for example, each have their separate stories, but the sequel of both is a single story, "Death," which appears much later in the collection. The four stories with the group title "Godliness" form a kind of scaled-down multigenerational novel related to the rest of the book mainly by theme, style, and setting; none of the recurring characters are allowed to set foot in this forbidding tale of male tyranny, female despair, and childhood trauma. The contiguous stories "The Strength of God" and "The Teacher" demonstrate an ingenious hinge device. Their respective main characters barely touch on each other's lives apart from the nonrelationship of voyeur and voyeuristic object. The passionate climaxes of both stories, however, occur only moments apart in the presence of the astounded George Willard, who forms the hinge.
Only the larger-than-life Jesse Bentley has two stories to himself; the basic pattern allots one to each character. Expert compression gives most of these stories the weight of full-length life histories, so that we have a series of novel-like stories making up the bulk of a collection that itself resembles a novel. The stories—miniature novels and luminous episodes—are joined by the devices described above and separated by structural autonomy—most of them can (and do) stand on their own in anthologies of short fiction. Similarly, the characters are joined by the shallow collective life of Winesburg and the fact of their alienation, and separated by that alienation as it works on their souls. Thus, Anderson's unusual form, which at times may seem merely quirky, turns out to be the only one exactly suited to his theme.
Just as the title Winesburg, Ohio seems to proffer a stroll through a Disney version of small-town coziness, the book's style at first glance seems suited to such an ambience—simplicity itself, democracy itself, almost chummy in its idiomatic directness. This highly accessible language is not, however, a bid for easy fellowship with the reader; it is the servant of Anderson's design of displaying as nakedly as possible situations and emotions most writers before him covered up, often in tortuous English full of vague polysyllabic words. He avoids elaborateness so as better to expose complexity; his seemingly childlike syntax and diction break complexities into their simplest parts; his best passages use the elementary to get at the elemental.
Again a pattern of unity and separation parallels the emotional predicaments of the characters. Anderson's Anglo-Saxon monosyllables make up clauses like rows of gritty particles; the clauses themselves are staccato-length, usually joined only by simple coordinate conjunctions. The brief sentences—simply patterned and us
ually with brief transitional phrases or none at all—seem isolated in the paragraphs that join them. The actual relations among clauses and sentences are left for the reader to evaluate—one way that Anderson encourages the reader to delve into his text rather than take it at face value.
In spite of surface simplicity, to get at the core of an Anderson story is often a difficult, though never a wearying task. Besides the lack of connectives to guide interpretation, the sheer density of meaning poses a challenge. Paragraphs that look like sketchy summaries turn out to be examples of extreme stylistic concision, loaded with quirky details, lurking ironies, and revelations too startling to be quickly absorbed.
The book as a whole can be said to deal with the ruins of the Whitmanian vision: Whitman celebrated the equality and harmony of body and soul, man and woman; Winesburg usually shows them in ferocious, unequal combat. This harsh, haunted view of life found its correlative in a prose of difficult but unforgettable beauty, which avoids the facile ornaments and smooth transitions that delight conventional minds. Anderson refused to coddle such minds. Instead, he chose to serve as well as he could those passions that he believed give life its only value, and that when ill-served take—as the lives of his characters demonstrate—such terrible vengeance. With a sharp, steely edge, his style cuts through the emotional barriers of the people of Winesburg to reveal their authentic, wounded selves. It cuts through the reader's barriers as well. Winesburg, Ohio embodies what Franz Kafka—who shared Anderson's penchant for Expressionist violence and conviction of the basic solitude of human beings—believed all good writing should be: "the axe for the frozen sea within us."
—Paul Montazzoli
1995
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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.
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.
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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.