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 weekend 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 any-
one who reads his book.
Once freed from the army, I started to write liter-
ary criticism, and in 1951 I published a critical biog-
raphy of Anderson. It came shortly after Lionel
Trilling's influential essay attacking Anderson, an at-
tack from which Anderson's reputation would never
quite recover. Trilling charged Anderson with in-
dulging 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 Wines-
burg, Ohio. In my book I tried, somewhat awk-
wardly, 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, per-
haps fearing I might have to surrender an admira-
tion 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 per-
haps 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 sud-
den and almost universal turning of men from the
old handicrafts towards our modern life of ma-
chines." There were still people in Clyde who re-
membered 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 re-
spected: 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 Cleve-
land, 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 him-
self 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 uncondi-
tional 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 Wines-
burg, 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 dis-
tinguished 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 oc-
casional 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 Wines-
burg, Ohio in a tradition of American realism, that
now seems dubious. Only rarely is the object of An-
derson's stories social verisimilitude, or the "photo-
graphing" 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 An-
derson is doing in Winesburg, Ohio could be de-
scribed as "antirealistic," fictions notable less for
precise locale and social detail than for a highly per-
sonal, 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 land-
scape 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 composi-
tion forming muted signals of the book's content.
Figures like Dr. Parcival, Kate Swift, and Wash Wil-
liams are not, nor are they meant to be, "fully-
rounded" characters such as we can expect in realis-
tic 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 compan-
ionship 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 an-
other 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 par-
ticular circumstances of small-town America as An-
derson 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 Wines-
burg? Such impressions have been put in more gen-
eral terms in Anderson's only successful novel, Poor
White:
All men lead their lives behind a wall of misun-
derstanding 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, be-
comes absorbed in doing something that is per-
sonal, useful and beautiful. Word of his activities
is carried over the walls.
These "walls" of misunderstanding are only sel-
dom due to physical deformities (Wing Biddlebaum
in "Hands") or oppressive social arrangements (Kate
Swift in "The Teacher.") Misunderstanding, loneli-
ness, the inability to articulate, are all seen by An-
derson 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 un-
able to. Winesburg, Ohio registers the losses inescap-
able 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 es-
capes." Yet what do we have but words?
They want, these Winesburg grotesques*, to unpack
their hearts, to release emotions buried and fes-
tering. 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 ("pyr-
amids 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 inci-
dent: the grotesques, gathering up a little courage,
venture out into the streets of Winesburg, often in
the dark, there to establish some initiatory relation-
ship 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 repre-
sents "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 estab-
lish 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 "dif-
ferent"--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 sto-
ries may seem at first glance to be simple: short sen-
tences, 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 econ-
omy and a shapeliness seldom found in ordinary
speech or even oral narration. What Anderson em-
ploys here is a stylized version of the American lan-
guage, 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 hap-
pened 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 "indefin-
able hunger" that prods and torments people. It be-
came the critical fashion to see Anderson's
"gropings" as a sign of delayed adolescence, a fail-
ure 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 re-
sponses 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 mark-
ing 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 pa-
thos 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 suc-
ceeded in bringing together a surface of farce with
an undertone of tragedy. "The Egg" is an American
masterpiece.
Anderson's influence upon later American writ-
ers, 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 introspec-
tiveness 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.
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