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.
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.