by Irving Howe
I must have been no more than fifteen or sixteen years old
when I first chanced upon Winesburg, Ohio. Gripped by these
stories and sketches of Sherwood Anderson's small-town
"grotesques," I felt that he was opening for me new depths
of experience, touching upon half-buried truths which
nothing in my young life had prepared me for. A New York
City boy who never saw the crops grow or spent time in the
small towns that lay sprinkled across America, I found
myself overwhelmed by the scenes of wasted life, wasted
love--was this the "real" America?--that Anderson sketched
in Winesburg. In those days only one other book seemed to
offer so powerful a revelation, and that was Thomas Hardy's
Jude the Obscure.
Several years later, as I was about to go overseas as
a soldier, I spent my last week-end pass on a somewhat
quixotic journey to Clyde, Ohio, the town upon which
Winesburg was partly modeled. Clyde looked, I suppose, not
very different from most other American towns, and the few
of its residents I tried to engage in talk about Anderson
seemed quite uninterested. This indifference would not have
surprised him; it certainly should not surprise anyone who
reads his book.
Once freed from the army, I started to write literary
criticism, and in 1951 I published a critical biography
of Anderson. It came shortly after Lionel Trilling's
influential essay attacking Anderson, an attack from
which Anderson's reputation would never quite recover.
Trilling charged Anderson with indulging a vaporous
sentimentalism, a kind of vague emotional meandering in
stories that lacked social or spiritual solidity. There
was a certain cogency in Trilling's attack, at least
with regard to Anderson's inferior work, most of which
he wrote after Winesburg, Ohio. In my book I tried,
somewhat awkwardly, to bring together the kinds of
judgment Trilling had made with my still keen affection
for the best of Anderson's writings. By then, I had
read writers more complex, perhaps more distinguished
than Anderson, but his muted stories kept a firm place
in my memories, and the book I wrote might be seen as a
gesture of thanks for the light--a glow of darkness,
you might say--that he had brought to me.
Decades passed. I no longer read Anderson, perhaps
fearing I might have to surrender an admiration of
youth. (There are some writers one should never return
to.) But now, in the fullness of age, when asked to say
a few introductory words about Anderson and his work, I
have again fallen under the spell of Winesburg, Ohio,
again responded to the half-spoken desires, the
flickers of longing that spot its pages. Naturally, I
now have some changes of response: a few of the stories
no longer haunt me as once they did, but the long story
"Godliness," which years ago I considered a failure, I
now see as a quaintly effective account of the way
religious fanaticism and material acquisitiveness can
become intertwined in American experience.
* * *
Sherwood Anderson was born in Ohio in 1876. His
childhood and youth in Clyde, a town with perhaps three
thousand souls, were scarred by bouts of poverty, but
he also knew some of the pleasures of pre-industrial
American society. The country was then experiencing
what he would later call "a sudden and almost universal
turning of men from the old handicrafts towards our
modern life of machines." There were still people in
Clyde who remembered the frontier, and like America
itself, the town lived by a mixture of diluted
Calvinism and a strong belief in "progress," Young
Sherwood, known as "Jobby"--the boy always ready to
work--showed the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that
Clyde respected: folks expected him to become a
"go-getter," And for a time he did. Moving to Chicago
in his early twenties, he worked in an advertising
agency where he proved adept at turning out copy. "I
create nothing, I boost, I boost," he said about
himself, even as, on the side, he was trying to write
short stories.
In 1904 Anderson married and three years later moved to
Elyria, a town forty miles west of Cleveland, where he
established a firm that sold paint. "I was going to be
a rich man.... Next year a bigger house; and after
that, presumably, a country estate." Later he would say
about his years in Elyria, "I was a good deal of a
Babbitt, but never completely one." Something drove him
to write, perhaps one of those shapeless hungers--a
need for self-expression? a wish to find a more
authentic kind of experience?--that would become a
recurrent motif in his fiction.
And then, in 1912, occurred the great turning point in
Anderson's life. Plainly put, he suffered a nervous
breakdown, though in his memoirs he would elevate this
into a moment of liberation in which he abandoned the
sterility of commerce and turned to the rewards of
literature. Nor was this, I believe, merely a deception
on Anderson's part, since the breakdown painful as it
surely was, did help precipitate a basic change in his
life. At the age of 36, he left behind his business and
moved to Chicago, becoming one of the rebellious
writers and cultural bohemians in the group that has
since come to be called the "Chicago Renaissance."
Anderson soon adopted the posture of a free, liberated
spirit, and like many writers of the time, he presented
himself as a sardonic critic of American provincialism
and materialism. It was in the freedom of the city, in
its readiness to put up with deviant styles of life,
that Anderson found the strength to settle accounts
with--but also to release his affection for--the world
of small-town America. The dream of an unconditional
personal freedom, that hazy American version of utopia,
would remain central throughout Anderson's life and
work. It was an inspiration; it was a delusion.
In 1916 and 1917 Anderson published two novels mostly
written in Elyria, Windy McPherson's Son and Marching
Men, both by now largely forgotten. They show patches
of talent but also a crudity of thought and
unsteadiness of language. No one reading these novels
was likely to suppose that its author could soon
produce anything as remarkable as Winesburg, Ohio.
Occasionally there occurs in a writer's career a
sudden, almost mysterious leap of talent, beyond
explanation, perhaps beyond any need for explanation.
In 1915-16 Anderson had begun to write and in 1919 he
published the stories that comprise Winesburg, Ohio,
stories that form, in sum, a sort of loosely-strung
episodic novel. The book was an immediate critical
success, and soon Anderson was being ranked as a
significant literary figure. In 1921 the distinguished
literary magazine The Dial awarded him its first annual
literary prize of $2,000, the significance of which is
perhaps best understood if one also knows that the
second recipient was T. S. Eliot. But Anderson's moment
of glory was brief, no more than a decade, and sadly,
the remaining years until his death in 1940 were marked
by a sharp decline in his literary standing. Somehow,
except for an occasional story like the haunting "Death
in the Woods," he was unable to repeat or surpass his
early success. Still, about Winesburg, Ohio and a small
number of stories like "The Egg" and "The Man Who
Became a Woman" there has rarely been any critical
doubt.
* * *
No sooner did Winesburg, Ohio make its appearance than
a number of critical labels were fixed on it: the
revolt against the village, the espousal of sexual
freedom, the deepening of American realism. Such tags
may once have had their point, but by now they seem
dated and stale. The revolt against the village (about
which Anderson was always ambivalent) has faded into
history. The espousal of sexual freedom would soon be
exceeded in boldness by other writers. And as for the
effort to place Winesburg, Ohio in a tradition of
American realism, that now seems dubious. Only rarely
is the object of Anderson's stories social
verisimilitude, or the "photographing" of familiar
appearances, in the sense, say, that one might use to
describe a novel by Theodore Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis.
Only occasionally, and then with a very light touch,
does Anderson try to fill out the social arrangements
of his imaginary town--although the fact that his
stories are set in a mid-American place like Winesburg
does constitute an important formative condition. You
might even say, with only slight overstatement, that
what Anderson is doing in Winesburg, Ohio could be
described as "antirealistic," fictions notable less for
precise locale and social detail than for a highly
personal, even strange vision of American life. Narrow,
intense, almost claustrophobic, the result is a book
about extreme states of being, the collapse of men and
women who have lost their psychic bearings and now
hover, at best tolerated, at the edge of the little
community in which they live. It would be a gross
mistake, though not one likely to occur by now, if we
were to take Winesburg, Ohio as a social photograph of
"the typical small town" (whatever that might be.)
Anderson evokes a depressed landscape in which lost
souls wander about; they make their flitting
appearances mostly in the darkness of night, these
stumps and shades of humanity. This vision has its
truth, and at its best it is a terrible if narrow
truth--but it is itself also grotesque, with the tone
of the authorial voice and the mode of composition
forming muted signals of the book's content. Figures
like Dr. Parcival, Kate Swift, and Wash Williams are
not, nor are they meant to be, "fully-rounded"
characters such as we can expect in realistic fiction;
they are the shards of life, glimpsed for a moment, the
debris of suffering and defeat. In each story one of
them emerges, shyly or with a false assertiveness,
trying to reach out to companionship and love, driven
almost mad by the search for human connection. In the
economy of Winesburg these grotesques matter less in
their own right than as agents or symptoms of that
"indefinable hunger" for meaning which is Anderson's
preoccupation.
Brushing against one another, passing one another in
the streets or the fields, they see bodies and hear
voices, but it does not really matter--they are
disconnected, psychically lost. Is this due to the
particular circumstances of small-town America as
Anderson saw it at the turn of the century? Or does he
feel that he is sketching an inescapable human
condition which makes all of us bear the burden of
loneliness? Alice Hindman in the story "Adventure"
turns her face to the wall and tries "to force herself
to face the fact that many people must live and die
alone, even in Winesburg." Or especially in 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.