Even William Faulkner acknowledged his importance, calling him “the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing which our successors will carry on. He has never received his proper evaluation”. While Anderson’s prose can sometimes take on sonorous, biblical rhythms or echo the grandstanding rhetoric of county-fair oratory, his best short fiction manages to combine the folksiness of Mark Twain, the naturalist daring of Theodore Dreiser (to whom he dedicated his collection Horses and Men), and, more surprisingly, a linguistic freshness and simplicity he discovered in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and Three Lives. Above all, though, Anderson exhibits that distinctive tenderness for his characters, despite all their flaws and foibles, that we associate with Russian writers like Chekhov and Turgenev. He once called the latter’s Memoirs of a Sportsman “the sweetest thing in all literature”.
If that’s true, Winesburg, Ohio must be one of the most quietly bittersweet. In a cycle of linked vignettes, what we might now describe as a mosaic novel, the book portrays the loneliness, isolation and desperate yearning of the citizens of an 1890s town in the middle of farm country. At the end, its main recurring character, young George Willard, leaves Winesburg for a new life in the big city. Thematically, the stories might be summed up with the once-famous phrase from the film Cool Hand Luke: “what we have here is failure to communicate”.
In “Paper Pills”, for instance, a doctor scribbles his most intimate thoughts on small scraps that he screws up into little round balls that no one ever sees. In “Godliness”, a rich old man, who identifies with the Old Testament patriarchs, prepares to sacrifice a lamb and anoint his grandson with its blood – and is struck down by a stone from the frightened boy’s sling shot. Lonely Alice Hindman, in “Adventure”, runs naked into the street to offer herself to the first man she encounters. He turns out to be decrepit and half-witted, so she retreats to her room, “and 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”.
Pathos, not cynicism or satire, is Winesburg, Ohio’s dominant mood throughout. Consider its most famous story, “The Strength of God”. One Sunday morning the Reverend Curtis Harman, at work in his study high up in the bell tower of the Presbyterian church, discovers that through a pane in a stained-glass window, one depicting Christ with a little child, he can peer down into the bedroom of the schoolteacher Kate Swift. He is shocked to see her lying on her bed, smoking a cigarette and reading a book. That day he preaches a sermon which he hopes will “touch and awaken” this woman “far gone in secret sin”.
But the memory of Kate Swift’s white skin soon begins to haunt him. On another Sunday morning he takes a stone and chips a corner of the window, so that he can more easily see directly into her bed. Afterwards ashamed, Harman resists going to the bell tower for weeks, but breaks down once, twice, three times. Finally on a cold January day, when he is feeling feverish, he climbs its steps and grimly waits:
“He thought of his wife and for the moment almost hated her. ‘She has always been ashamed of passion and has cheated me’, he thought. ‘Man has a right to expect living passion and beauty in a woman. He has no right to forget that he is an animal and in me there is something that is Greek. I will throw off the woman of my bosom and seek other women. I will besiege this schoolteacher. I will fly in the face of all men and if I am a creature of carnal lusts I will live then for my lusts.’”
At the story’s climax, Harman rushes into the office of the Winesburg Eagle newspaper and lifts up a bleeding fist, which he has just driven through the stained-glass window. With “his eyes glowing and his voice ringing with fervor”, he announces that “God has appeared to me in the person of Kate Swift, kneeling naked on a bed”.
by Michael Dirda, TLS | Read more:
Photograph: Eric Schaal
h/t: 3 Quarks Daily
