The Beauty of Sherwood Anderston's Winesburg, Ohio

 Winesburg, Ohio is a quirky, beautiful, strange little book.  It is a collection of short stories, each one focused on a different character living in the town of Winesburg, Ohio in the 1910s.  There is no real overarching story although the characters and tales have some overlapping, and we get a particular focus on George Willard, the boy who is becoming a man.  Sherwood Anderson began writing the short stories that would comprise Winesburg, Ohio, in 1915 and published the slim volume in 1919.

I first read the book in the mid-1990s during my graduate studies at Boston University.  I had moved from studying the British Romantics and was trying to find what part of American literature I wanted to focus on. I don’t remember who exactly pointed me to Sherwood Anderson’s book, but I’m glad it wound up in my hands.  It was one of those texts that struck my in the heart instantly, like it was an aesthetic and perspective I had been hungering for.  My Oxford World’s Classics edition is full of marginalia and underlining (both from my initial reading and from when I taught parts of the book in a composition class).

The basic thematic thread running through the stories is the pain of loneliness and isolation that we each feel by virtue of our very humanity.  We are all necessarily isolated in our own heads, experiencing the world and our thoughts and our emotions alone, trying to understand who and what we are.  Each character is looking for a way to connect with others around them, to communicate what’s inside them, to open their heart and their soul, to be seen and heard and understood.  That desire is checked by the coexisting fear that they will be rejected, railed against, laughed at, and feared.  The author shows us their humanity and what moves them.  He makes sense of the odd ways they attempt to tolerate the unbearableness of living alone among others.  And of course, we understand because we recognize the truth of this beautiful and cursed human condition.  I imagine that readers either love the book or reject it entirely.

In the first short story, The Book of the Grotesque,” an old man has a dream that he then wakes up and writes about:

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 throughts. 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 tr to tell you all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and profligacy, of carefulness 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. (9)

This provides a lens with which to view the other stories and the grotesques that populate Winesburg, Ohio, each lifting a concern or thought above all others, believing that one thing to be central to their life.  But of course that is more reductionist than the rest of the novel.  The characters sometimes threaten to become two-dimensional in their desires and pain, but the love that Anderson feels for them each, and the love we as readers are encouraged to feel for them, saves them from such a fate.

The book is important, historically, for a number of reasons.  According to the forward in my edition, written by Glen A. Love, this book marks a major change in the focus of short stories in American literature.  Before this point, short stories were often built around plot, like those of O. Henry or Edgar Allen Poe.  Anderson’s short stories look inward, built instead of the emotional situation of the lead character.  Thing happen, most certainly, in the stories, but those happenings are about the inner journey of the character, their mental and emotional landscape.  Anyone who reads contemporary short stories knows that this is still the prevailing way to structure short stories.

In addition, as you can see from the passage I quoted above, Anderson uses simple sentence structures and a plain affect as narrator.  You will not be surprised to learn that Anderson influenced Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver.  And while syntactically his writing is nothing like William Faulkner’s, he also influenced the southern author.

But for me, the historical importance of the novel is not the reason I treasure it or reread it.  It is the writing that I enjoy.  Anderson’s prose may appear businesslike, but it is laced with poetry. Looking through the book to find an example, I’m a bit stymied, because the poetry is contextual.  It’s not like grabbing any passage from Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, where every line is poetry disguised as prose.  No, here, even as Anderson has some beautiful turns of phrase, the poetry is in communicating the profound with an unassuming simplicity.  For example:

Their bodies were different as were also the color of their eyes, the length of their noses and the circumstances of their existence, but something inside them meant the same thing, wanted the same release, would have left he same impression on the memory of an onlooker. (182)

I am of course a different person than the one who first discovered the powerful beauty within these pages 30 years ago.  Revisiting the book now, I found those moments of aching beauty, but without the strength that I felt in my 20s.  I am aware of how much more complicated life is than I once thought.  I see cracks in the beauty, such as the sameness of the pain that plagues the women in the book, while the men have a greater variety.  I see something dark in the story of Wing Biddlebaum.  The work is entirely fiction, of course, and what the author says must be regarded as truth, but characterization of the “half-witted” “loose-hung lip[ped]” boy who “imagined unspeakable things and in the morning went forth to tell his dreams as facts” (15) smacks of ableism and a standard defense given to so many who have actually victimized children.  Similarly, so many of these stories dismiss the mental health of the characters, confusing neurodiversity with the same longing that someone like George Willard has.  George’s mother needs love, understanding, and connection, certainly, but I can’t help but feel that she is equally in need of pharmaceutical and professional support.  Of course I don’t expect Sherwood Anderson to write anything other than he wrote, but from my perspective now, the enjoyment of the narrative is complicated by my wider view of these things.

Even with those complications, I love this book.