Et in Ohio Ego: On Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio"
Sherwood Anderson, Ed. Ray Lewis White | Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio: With Variant Readings and Annotations | Ohio University Press | 1997 (Hardcover) 2019 (Paperback) | 285 Pages
Two characterizations prevail in national discourse around the Rust Belt Midwest. On the one hand, you have the Good Ol’ Boys: not quite bumpkins, but some manifestation of “no thoughts, head empty.” A mainstay in what the dust jacket of the Ohio University Press edition of Winesburg, Ohio calls “the myth of the wholesome American small town.” Ignorant of the socio-economic-religious superstructures that inform and enable indifference to The World Around Them, these cheerful chuds are always aw-shucksin’ and just want to be left to their corn, church, and sports. So the story goes. On the other hand, there is the dark underbelly lurking beneath this genteel exterior, the thick sludge underneath smooth stones; a myth no less ubiquitous. A far cry from the Good Ol’ Boys, in this latter conception the good-mannered festoon of the Midwest maliciously distracts from the true rotten, crumbling edifice. Iniquity and inequity in bed together. Dysfunction! Closed minds! Lives of quiet desperation!
Like many falsities, both visions of Rust Belt life contain a kernel of truth. Today it is the second view, the seismographic fixation on any intimation of the fabled Dark Underbelly, that reigns supreme. It is that view which Sherwood Anderson explored in his 1919 short story cycle Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life. In these stories, which Anderson called “grotesques”, one meets, among others: a conflicted horny pastor, a conflicted horny teacher, a regretful dying mother, a philosophizing doctor (whose father died in an asylum), and an embittered cuckold (in the traditional sense), who are all united only in their eccentricity.
Winesburg is a spotlight on the outcasts, of whom there are so many one may begin to wonder whether there exist any incasts. Isolation runs like a river through Winesburg. Ironically, what binds these disparate people together, aside from their physical location, is their inability to connect with each other. However, it’s no mere freak show. Anderson does not expose for exposure’s sake, nor does he adjudicate on his grotesques like an ancient fabulist.
Anderson scholar Ray Lewis White writes, “‘Grotesque’ derives from ‘grotto,’ because on the walls of grottos or caves ancient artists sometimes drew human figures that were distorted, exaggerated, or ugly.” While the characters are certainly unlikable and ugly, there is also some affection to be had for them. Anderson writes in the foreword, “I only mentioned [a carpenter] 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.” Some of the characters are like the “few gnarled apples” of the Winesburg orchard, which were rejected and not sent away into city apartments like the rest, but which the narrator of “Paper Pills” says are a pleasure nonetheless, remarking that “only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.” This is part of the task of reading Winesburg: how to hold in balance the twisted and the sweet. In The Crack Up, F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, “The test of a first rate intelligence is to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and retain the ability to function.” Fittingly enough, Anderson’s work was deeply admired by Fitzgerald.
The stories are largely centered around George Willard, young news reporter for The Winesburg Eagle. He is the fulcrum around which the story cycle spins. People feel comfortable around him and compelled to tell him their stories. In “The Philosopher”, Doctor Parcival goes to the office of the Winesburg Eagle to tell George his life story and give George some of his hard-knocks wisdom. Parcival tells George, “‘I want to fill you with hatred and contempt so that you will be a superior being,” showing that famous Midwestern docility. Parcival then tells George about his book, which when he dies he wants George to finish, the premise of which is this: “‘That everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified.’”
Insofar as George is an avatar for Anderson, that inter-universe book of Parcival’s is also the one written by Anderson—the one we are reading. After all, the grotesque characters of Winesburg all have some tragic past. Parcival had to support his mother, without any assistance from his boozing brother who went on to get killed by a train, after his father had been institutionalized. Those circumstances were the nails driven into Parcival, without which he perhaps may not have been grotesque. Or, maybe he’s just a raving old man.
The generally straightforward prose—somewhat reflecting the place and people it describes—suffers at times from a lack of style. Anderson forgets to write fiction, and tries to explain too much:
The beginning of the most materialistic age in the history of the world, when wars would be fought without patriotism, when men would forget God… and beauty would be well-nigh forgotten in the terrible headlong rush of mankind toward the acquiring of possessions…”
But there are many excellent passages too, descriptive while not overwritten; lines like “If you knew Winesburg country in the fall and how the low hills are all splashed with yellows and reds you would understand his feeling.”
There are also moments of Joycean epiphany and likely-unintentional meta-fiction. One such epiphany comes in “Adventure.” Alice Hindman falls in love with Ned Currie, who goes to find fortune in the big city. Alice gradually comes to the realization that though she’s waiting for him, he’s not coming back. It ends: “[Alice] turning her face to the wall, began trying to force herself to face bravely the fact that many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg.” That last part condenses some of the book’s key motifs: if not the inevitability then the inability to avoid suffering, as well the realization that, despite their local charms, the fact of suffering is no less, and may indeed be a good deal more real in small towns.
One can detect metafiction when Anderson writes, “The paper on which George worked had one policy. It strove to mention by name in each issue, as many as possible of the inhabitants of the village,” and then one reads a story like “Concerning Seth Richmond” which features Clarence and Virginia Richmond and Biff Carter and George Willard and Helen White and Baker Groff and Tom Willard and William McKinley and Mark Hanna and—enough full names mentioned that one may be reading the very paper George writes for. There are other such satisfying coincidences, like when George’s mother, Elizabeth, “died on a Friday afternoon at three o’clock”, which can be read as a nod back to Parcival’s conception of the communally crucified.
Elizabeth’s death really inspires the climax of the book, which is also the finale, contrary to Freytag’s famous plot triangle. There is no denouement in Winesburg. The stories, these miniatures, end abruptly. Most of them contribute to a wider arc: the maturation of George Willard. Winesburg is pointillistic and when you stand back you see that the whole is, in some respects, a künstlerroman: the process of George Willard becoming a writer.
When Elizabeth dies, George is free to leave Winesburg on a train. That scene may be Anderson’s most poignant passage:
The young man, going out of his town to meet the adventure of life, began to think but he did not think of anything big or dramatic… the serious and larger aspects of his life did not come into his mind. He thought of little things—Turk Smollet wheeling boards through the main street of his town in the morning, a tall woman, beautifully gowned, who had once stayed overnight at his father’s hotel, Butch Wheeler, the lamp lighter of Winesburg, hurrying through the streets on a summer evening and holding a torch in his hand, Helen White standing by a window in the Winesburg Post Office and putting a stamp on an envelope.
In the end, it’s not about Major Motifs and Themes. No, the true beauty of the book, of any book, is in those littler things. Instances are infinitely more important than ideas. Anderson ultimately left his small Ohio town for Chicago, just as he sends George out to the city, and yet roughly one hundred years ago, in his prescience, wrote an answer to the question mark in the Midwestern mirror that still exists today: how to balance the scales between two visions? As George rides away, one finds in his memories something of Ginsberg’s Angel in Moloch, but here it’s the justification of the grotesque Ohio small town. Anderson never shields the ugliness and yet still shows in it the sweetness of the twisted, gnarled apples. To go on would be useless—that truth is understood only in the tasting.