Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941)

Welcome to Winesburg! Let me show you around, introduce you to a few folks. It's a small-town assortment of people with their various foibles, each defining him or herself by one trait or another but never wholly what they claim to be. Self-identity can be very self-deceiving, don't you find, especially if you believe you embody a particular trait in its purest form? Who can actually do that, I ask you! Bunch of hypocrites, the lot of them. There's something kind of grotesque about all this show more self-delusion.

Is this an earnest depiction of small town life? My personal experience has always been that a small town contains self-important myopic people who think power and control over a small populace is dream-realization in its own right. They're balanced by the calmer sort who likes the quieter setting and has no wish to live anywhere else or experience anything more. Neither of these types is much in evidence in Winesburg, which seems more like an asylum for people half off their rocker, people who still yearn to escape or else were thwarted, and people who came there to hide after failing elsewhere. Granted, Anderson was writing from personal experience, and this was more than a hundred years ago when the horizon of possible futures in that setting was narrow indeed.

Whether you recognize Winesburg or not, this collection/novel hasn't become unrelatable. Anyone stands out more strongly in a smaller environment. In a place where everyone knows everybody else's business, you can't hide your flaws for very long before they become what defines you. If you're from a large city, you'll describe its highlights in terms of particular places downtown and annual events. But if you're from a little town like this, the highlights you'll tell people about are the little old lady on the corner who was always selling flowers, the mechanic who knew everybody's first name, and the town drunk(s). All the best stories arise from the intersections between them.

If I hadn't known, to judge from its style I would guess this was written in the 1950s but in fact it's a product of 1919. It introduced a modern tone that broke new ground and influenced many, including William Faulkner. There's legitimate debate over what this work is, exactly. Is it a novel presented as interlinked episodes? A sequence of related short stories? Some of them only barely qualify as stories, reading more like scenes or character profiles. It's a rare entry that offers any insight into any other, as scarcely any characters overlap except for George Willard. I'd leave town too if everyone kept haphazardly approaching me with mad random outbursts. show less

If Winesburg, Ohio had gone on for just another 10 pages, I would have started looking for a razor blade. Oh, this work deserves its place among classics, sure, because you could read and re-read and still have plenty of "grotesque" meat left to chew on. But, good lord, who would want to? A therapist?

I had to force myself to finish the long parade of people nursing old hurts, sabotaging themselves with actions sure to shame them, and often blaming others. Granted, Anderson wrote some show more amazing, delicate moments of the human condition but I was still much relieved at the last page. I made it through. Alive!

There was one character who made me smile, Joe Welling. He's the tiny volcano of a man in "A Man of Ideas," who quietly works around town until suddenly charged by an idea, big or small, an idea he finds so fascinating he erupts with enthusiasm, accosting any hapless soul. Gee, one guy in the whole town who is undamaged by childhood, made no bad life choices, and is not steeped in brooding. Just a half-nutty, likeable guy being true to himself.

Call me well-adjusted, but I wish the town had had half a dozen more Wellings. show less

A beautiful, melancholy song to small-town loneliness and despair--to the fragile bonds that tie neighbors together and the vivid lives and heartfelt personal dramas that pulse beneath the surface of ordinary affairs. This was once a book I carried with me everywhere, a book I tried (and failed) to emulate in my own writing, and a book whose sentences I'd whisper to myself to catch something of their hypnotic cadences. It's easy to see how influential this book was on so much American show more literature: from Hemingway to Faulkner to Thomas Wolfe to Updike, they (and we) all owe Sherwood Anderson a tremendous debt for opening up the possibilities of fiction in a uniquely American landscape. show less

Hands: a single word title, conjuring work, writing, prayer, support, caresses, sharing, boxing, begging, greeting, signing, and more. It occurs 33 times in less than a handful of pages.

I had no prior knowledge of the author or story, but the cinematic opening captivated me for suggesting several stories in a single sentence:
“Upon the half decayed veranda of a small frame house that stood near the edge of a ravine near the town of Winesburg, Ohio, a fat little old man walked nervously up show more and down.”

But his silly name created immediate dissonance with his obviously tragic character:
“Wing Biddlebaum, forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts.”
His hands are always moving, or else in his pockets to hide them - from himself as much as others.
Stick with it; Anderson knows his craft.
“Their restless activity, like unto the beating of the wings of an imprisoned bird, had given him his name.”

Image: A selection of hands by Qinni (Source)

Biddlebaum’s only friend is George Willard, a reporter on the town newspaper. When they go for walks, Biddlebaum talks quickly and earnestly, though never about himself, his hands frantically moving all the time. He wants to inspire the young man to think beyond the provincial locale:
“You are afraid of dreams. You want to be like others in town here… You must begin to dream.”

Dreams and memories collide and the omniscient narrator switches to Biddlebaum’s backstory for the second half. It’s taut and almost brittle, laden with ambiguity. Reading this in 2022, my response is probably very different from what Anderson expected or intended when it was published just over a century ago.

Avoid spoilers

In his memoir, Anderson railed against plot-based stories:
“What was wanted I thought was form, not plot, an altogether more elusive and difficult thing to come at.”
Nevertheless, read the story (link below) before reading the spoilered section.


Biddlebaum’s real name is Adolph Myers. He was a much-loved teacher at a boys’ school in Pennsylvania.
“He was one of those rare, little-understood men who rule by a power so gentle that it passes as a lovable weakness. In their feeling for the boys under their charge such men are not unlike the finer sort of women in their love of men.”
But he was handsy:
“Here and there went his hands, caressing the shoulders of the boys, playing about the tousled heads. As he talked his voice became soft and musical. There was a caress in that also.”
Is that just affection and reassurance, or a euphemism for something more sinister - the sort of abuse we know happened, and still does, in many institutions such as schools and churches?

“In a way the voice and the hands, the stroking of the shoulders and the touching of the hair was a part of the schoolmaster’s effort to carry a dream into the young minds.”
The power of dreams, as he had told George Willard before his own memories flooded back.

Anderson wants us to excuse Biddlebaum: “a half-witted boy”, had a crush on the master:
“In his bed at night he imagined unspeakable things and in the morning went forth to tell his dreams as facts.”

We should always listen to victims. False accusations are very rare. But rare isn’t zero. True or not, such allegations stick and grow very quickly, but it seems there was already suspicion:
“Hidden, shadowy doubts that had been in men’s minds concerning Adolph Myers were galvanized into beliefs.”
He’s hounded out of town by a mob with lanterns, sticks, and a noose.

Praying hands or preying hands?

Even after that, Anderson excuses Biddlebaum:
“Although he did not understand what had happened he felt that the hands must be to blame. Again and again the fathers of the boys had talked of the hands. ‘Keep your hands to yourself’.”
Could a teacher really be so naive as not to understand, even after being told to keep his hands to himself, or is he self-deluded?
The final sentences, in the quotes below, liken him to a devotee at prayer. The image is beautifully described, but much as I admire the story, I wouldn’t entrust my child to Biddlebaum.

Image: “Praying Hands” by Albrecht Dürer (Source)


Quotes

• “The feet of the boy in the road kicked up a cloud of dust that floated across the face of the departing sun.”

• “A few stray white bread crumbs lay on the cleanly washed floor by the table; putting the lamp upon a low stool he began to pick up the crumbs, carrying them to his mouth one by one with unbelievable rapidity. In the dense blotch of light beneath the table, the kneeling figure looked like a priest engaged in some service of his church. The nervous expressive fingers, flashing in and out of the light, might well have been mistaken for the fingers of the devotee going swiftly through decade after decade of his rosary.”

See also

• This is a very short portrayal of a character in a fictional Ohio town. It’s one of collection of 23 such pieces in Anderson’s 1919 book, Winesburg, Ohio. George Willard is a linking character.

• Gioia’s The Art of the Short Story includes excerpts of Anderson’s memoir, A Storyteller's Story, specifically about plot and form:
“The words used by the tale-teller were as the colors used by the painter. Form was another matter. It grew out of the materials of the tale and the teller’s reaction to them. It was the tale trying to take form that kicked about inside the tale-teller at night when he wanted to sleep.”

Short story club

I read this as one of the stories in The Art of the Short Story, by Dana Gioia, from which I'm aiming to read one story a week with The Short Story Club, starting 2 May 2022.

You can read this story here.

You can join the group here. show less