The Grotesques
[In the following essay, White examines Anderson's depiction of the grotesque in the physical, psychological, and sexual propensities of his characters.]
Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio presents an interesting description and dramatization of a typical midwestern American town in the 1890s, complete with the citizens and the institutions associated with such places. It can also be read pleasurably as the description and dramatization of a youth's initiation or growing toward adult understanding in a typical midwestern American town in the 1890s. But neither of these approaches sufficiently explains the greatness of Anderson's achievement in Winesburg, Ohio—why readers since 1919 have read the book with a new sense of the power of writing. For Anderson captures in words the most elusive and the most buried of human impulses and motivations; in short, he fulfills the aim of his dedication of his book to his mother, Emma Smith Anderson, “whose keen observations on the life about her first awoke in me the hunger to see beneath the surface of lives.” It is through Anderson's understanding and expression of the buried aspects of human character that he reaches genius in Winesburg, Ohio.
In the first of the Winesburg, Ohio stories, “Hands,” Anderson brings the reader near the town but not actually into the town. Wing Biddlebaum, the central character, has lived near the town for twenty years but has not in any sense been a part of it. His decaying little house sits in a field near a ravine and away from the road to town, so Wing must look across a field that is planted to clover but that bears only mustard weeds to see even ordinary life passing him by.
Nicknamed for the continuing nervous movements of his hands (which in season can pick amazing amounts of berries), Wing has told and will tell no one his secret: that he, born Adolph Myers, was for years a public schoolteacher in Pennsylvania; that he was accused of misusing his hands; and that he was driven from the area instead of being hanged, as the townspeople had first planned. The reader must accept Anderson's statement that Wing Biddlebaum is so innocent that he has never comprehended and can never comprehend the nature of the accusation against him. His behavior as a teacher is described thus: “With the boys of his school, Adolph Myers had walked in the evening or had sat talking until dusk upon the schoolhouse steps lost in a kind of dream. 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. In a way the voice and the hands, the stroking of the shoulders and the touching of the hair were a part of the schoolmaster's effort to carry a dream into the young minds” (31).
In the Pennsylvania school, a retarded pupil had dreamed of sexual activities with the innocent schoolmaster and had recounted his completely imagined actions as if they had really happened. The teacher was expelled from his community and from his lifework. After fleeing to Ohio, Myers has lived near Winesburg as Wing Biddlebaum ever since, alone in “a ghostly band of doubts” (27), with neither friend nor companion. Recently, George Willard has become curious and has occasionally come to walk with the little man—not, certainly, as the possible source of a newspaper story but as the source of an interesting acquaintanceship.
Here in the first Winesburg story, Anderson uses a narrative technique that is also found in the best of the twenty remaining stories: a physical peculiarity hints to the reader the presence of a psychological peculiarity. The unusually active hands of Wing Biddlebaum lead the reader to awareness that one of the few intellectuals in Winesburg, Ohio has an unusual mental and psychological constitution. The hands “became his distinguishing feaure, the source of his fame. Also they made more grotesque an already grotesque and elusive individuality” (29). Wing is not physically crippled by his hand movements, nor is he intellectually crippled by what has happened to him. Yet he is emotionally crippled, eternally frozen and fearful by the inexplicable (to him) events of twenty years ago. He is endowed with the love and motivation necessary to be a great teacher, but untrue, hysterical accusations based on community misunderstanding of the erotic dreams of a retardate have victimized him.
To present-day sophisticates in matters of sexual desire and frustration, Wing's complete ignorance of the “horrors” of which he was accused those long years ago may seem implausible. But the reader must simply accept this character as a completely Platonic personality, unable to conceive of the crimes of which he was accused—which were, of course, homosexuality and pedophilia. Self-ignorance and public stupidity have destroyed the good that Wing Biddlebaum could have given to a world already starved for intellect and inspiration. His life, intended by nature for growing clover, has produced instead only dense and useless mustard weeds.
If the reader is ready to suspect that unhappiness and frustration come to Anderson's grotesque characters merely because they are cursed with living in or near Winesburg, attention should be paid to the fact that Wing's terrible trauma—his emotionally crippling event—happened twenty years ago in Pennsylvania. Not all agony and grotesquerie come from Winesburg, Ohio.
If “Hands” brings the reader close—geographically and thematically—to the town of Winesburg, “Paper Pills,” the second Winesburg story, is the most inviting introduction to the element of the grotesque in the Winesburg stories. The story concerns the sudden, brief, and enigmatic marriage of an older doctor and one of his younger patients. Anderson compares the richness and texture of their story to some of the fruit of the apple trees that grow near Winesburg:
It is delicious, like the twisted little apples that grow in the orchards of Winesburg. In the fall one walks in the orchards and the ground is hard with frost underfoot. The apples have been taken from the trees by the pickers. … On the trees are only a few gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected. They look like the knuckles of Doctor Reefy's hands. One nibbles at them and they are delicious. Into a little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all of its sweetness. One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground picking the gnarled, twisted apples and filling his pockets with them. Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.
(36)
Similarly, the sensitive and perceptive reader will understand the unexpected attraction, the sweetness, of the manifestly twisted human personalities in Winesburg, Ohio.
“Paper Pills” is the story of Doctor Reefy, the most competent and likable of Winesburg's four physicians. Anderson presents him as one who is coping adequately with what life has dealt him: his loneliness. Years ago, he had married a tall, dark girl, who is never named, but the following spring, he suddenly lost her to an unspecified disease. Ever since her death, the doctor has worn the same articles of clothing; he has sat, usually alone, in his drab and musty office; he has tried only once—and failed—to open the window of that office to the outside air and light; and he has in those years alone been unsentimentally friendly with only one person, John Spaniard, the Winesburg nurseryman.
Doctor Reefy, with his grotesquely malformed knuckles, has a peculiar habit: he writes down upon pieces of paper his “thoughts, ends of thoughts, beginnings of thoughts” (37). He stuffs these fragments of paper continually into his pockets, so that eventually the particles of thoughts become hardened into little round balls—the “paper pills” of Anderson's title: “he worked ceaselessly, building up something that he himself destroyed. Little pyramids of truth he erected and after erecting knocked them down again that he might have the truths to erect other pyramids” (35).
Doctor Reefy is the true philosopher of Winesburg, Ohio—the person who has faced the problem of evil, of life's unfairness and injustices. Despite his manifold unspecified and discarded thoughts, he has achieved no unified theory to explain the vagaries and meaninglessness of human existence. From his thoughts the doctor “formed a truth that arose gigantic in his mind. The truth clouded the world. It became terrible and then faded away and the little thoughts began again” (37). Thus, “Paper Pills” demonstrates Anderson's typical use of grotesquerie: a character, somewhat physically unusual, is hurt deeply by life, ponders over his state of anomie, and realizes that there are no gods to whom to pray but nevertheless copes with the grayness that is life for him.
The most interesting grotesque of “Paper Pills” is not Doctor Reefy but the unnamed young woman to whom he so briefly and happily was married. In telling her story, Anderson uses concepts from psychology—here, the importance of dreaming and emotional displacement. When the young woman's parents died, she inherited considerable wealth. She was courted by several young men, typified by two: “a slender young man with white hands, the son of a jeweler in Winesburg, [who] talked continually of virginity” (37), and “a black-haired boy with large ears, [who] said nothing at all but always managed to get her into the darkness, where he began to kiss her” (37). The young woman, properly fearful of the pale, virginity-obsessed youth, comes to see that “beneath his talk of virginity … there was a lust greater than in all the others” (37). In her three dreams about this youth, she imagines him holding, turning, and staring at her body; and three times “she dreamed that he had bitten into her body and that his jaws were dripping” (37).
Surely in unconscious fear of the pale and dangerous suitor, the woman lets the dark and silent suitor seduce her (and in the seduction bite her shoulder). Subconsciously threatened by one suitor and actually bitten and impregnated by the other, she comes, motherless, to Doctor Reefy for childbearing advice. First, she sees him in his office, efficiently and kindly pulling the teeth of a suffering woman. Then the miracle: in some aspect of Doctor Reefy, bearer of huge, gnarled knuckles, perhaps in his gentleness as healer of pain and wounds, this young woman, hurt and “bitten” in life, “discovered the sweetness of the twisted apples”; and “she could not get her mind fixed again upon the round perfect fruit” (38). The two characters immediately fall in love and in the autumn marry, to the amazement and confusion of the townspeople. During their few months together, the doctor “read to her all of the odds and ends of thoughts he had scribbled on the bits of paper” (38). She loses her unborn (and to the doctor, unimportant) child and dies in the spring of an unspecified disease. Since then, Doctor Reefy has continued to sit alone and to write his thoughts about life upon scraps of paper, thoughts that come—necessarily and inevitably—to nothing.
Because Elizabeth Willard is the central character in two of the Winesburg stories, “Mother” and “Death,” she is one of the more fully realized of the grotesques in Anderson's stories. The reader learns a great deal about this frustrated woman, from her unhappy youth, spent without a mother to guide her, to her happier demise, at only forty-five, and the personification of death as a handsome gentleman-caller who comes to greet and escort her.
In “Mother” (a title that makes Elizabeth Willard represent certain universal qualities of motherhood), the reader learns of a crisis in the woman's life. She must defend her son, George, from the influence of her husband, Tom, who would have the boy learn mainly to win friends and influence people on the road to social and financial success. Like Wing Biddlebaum and Doctor Reefy, Elizabeth exhibits a slight physical grotesquerie—facial smallpox scars. She is always listless and exhausted: “Although she was but forty-five, some obscure disease had taken the fire out of her figure” (39), making her a “tall ghostly figure, moving slowly through the halls” (39) of her hotel. But this woman's grotesquerie is more clearly psychological than physical—her inability to fulfill her girlhood dreams of escape or to directly commission her son George to achieve his own escape and happiness. For although the boy and the mother sympathize with each other, they cannot express their communion or sympathy verbally. She has forgotten how to communicate, and he has never learned to speak forthrightly to his silent and suffering mother.
In “Mother,” the imagery used to describe Elizabeth Willard's life involves an easy identification of her with a mistreated cat that she sees through her bedroom window. In this seeming “picture of village life” (41), the gray cat, belonging to the druggist, Sylvester West, competes with Winesburg baker Abner Groff for the bread of life. The cat streals food to survive, and the baker, in an enormous rage, tries to hit and kill the cat. So closely and personally does Elizabeth Willard identify with this cat that “once when she was alone, and after watching a prolonged and ineffectual outburst on the part of the baker, Elizabeth Willard put her head down on her long white hands and wept” (41). The scene of struggle “seemed like a rehearsal of her own life, terrible in its vividness” (41).
Imagery from the theater—the melodramatic “scene” between cat and baker, the repeated brutal “rehearsal” of the woman's life—continues, when Anderson describes the youthful and rebellious Elizabeth Willard as having been an unhappy adolescent, a frustrated actress, who wished to escape from the town of Winesburg with the troupes of traveling actors who passed through her father's hotel, thinking that away, somewhere, elsewhere, she could be happy. In her frustration and boredom, she became an easy conquest for traveling actors and other men and found it emotionally gratifying, but she wondered why completing the sex act did not affect the worldly men as romantically as it repeatedly affected her.
Theatrical imagery continues further when the ill, aging woman is called upon to dramatically defend her son from his father. She will paint her face with old theatrical makeup to render herself once more beautiful; and she will “act,” play out a histrionic scene in the lobby of the hotel. She will defend young George from Tom's vicious influence by stabbing her hated husband to death and then somehow herself dying: “As a tigress whose cub had been threatened would she appear, coming out of the shadows, stealing noiselessly along and holding the long wicked scissors in her hand” (47).
In Winesburg, Ohio, the great scenes that are planned are seldom successfully played out as scripted. And so it is that Elizabeth Willard, at the end of “Mother,” sits in her room in weakness and darkness. When her son suddenly appears to announce quietly his eventual departure from the town, something she has longed to do herself for so long, she is, as usual, unable to voice her total approval and delight and can only recast her husband's overheard advice about George being smart and successful. Although Elizabeth is now assured that George will in time leave Winesburg, he will do so not of her direct urging. Her imagined theatrical scene of murder and vengeance will never be performed, and this sad woman will remain alone with her delusions and her thwarted ambitions.
In “Mother,” Anderson uses in the word “adventure” for the first time in Winesburg, Ohio (42)—a term that he thereafter uses frequently to indicate that a character has come to the one brief moment, the one epiphany, the one telling instant, that captures and communicates the essence of that character's personality, leaving nothing more to be said or learned about him or her. When Elizabeth Willard, worried that she has not been visited by George for several days, overhears Tom's practical advice to him about getting ahead, she must then prepare for and execute her one “adventure”—her just and murderous release of both her son and herself from the hold of Winesburg, Ohio. Often in Anderson's stories the described “adventure” is the first and presumably the only time that a character realizes how frustrated he or she is and therefore tries to take strong measures—usually unsuccessfully—toward satisfaction, rebellion, or self-completion.
“Death,” written after Anderson completed most of the other Winesburg stories, adds detail and pathos to Elizabeth Willard's unhappy story, including loss of her mother when she was five. Here Anderson applies the word “adventure” five times to her lifelong quest for love. Elizabeth recalls “her girlhood with its passionate longing for adventure and she remembered the arms of men that had held her when adventure was a possible thing for her” (222-23). “In her girlhood and young womanhood,” he narrates, “Elizabeth had tried to be a real adventurer in life” (224); in her youthful affairs with various men, “she had never entered upon an adventure prompted by desire alone” (224); and “in all the babble of words that fell from the lips of the men with whom she adventured she was trying to find what would be for her the true word” (224).
Anderson also changes the operative metaphor for Elizabeth's frustration and longing, replacing the theatrical, feline imagery of “Mother” with the more traditional imagery of circumvented romantic love. Here Anderson recounts her one-time almost-lovemaking with Doctor Reefy. For her, at forty-one, the episode is the closest to happy acceptance and understanding that she will experience. Having repeatedly contemplated her approaching death as the ultimate patient wait for her beautiful male lover, she declines in health and dies on a Friday in March in the afternoon (Christlike?). She was mute for a month from paralysis, unable to tell her beloved son George of the money, hidden in the wall of her bedroom, that she has kept ever since her youth to effect her own and now, she hopes, his escape from Winesburg.
The last words spoken over the gaunt and tired corpse of Elizabeth Willard reveal Anderson's belief that even in the most unlovely and grotesque human beings the observant witness can find a bit of secret sweetness hidden in the “twisted apples.” With Elizabeth lying dead in her hotel room, her son in his grief finally understands the essence of her life and says: “The dear, the dear, oh the lovely dear” (232). He does not know that four years earlier, in a moment of understanding, Doctor Reefy had thought of the unhappy woman visiting his office and muttered, “You dear! You lovely dear! Oh you lovely dear!” (227). In turn, Doctor Reefy did not know that one of the numerous men with whom Elizabeth had adventured in her youth “in the moment of his passion had cried out to her more than a hundred times, saying the same words madly over and over: ‘You dear! You dear! You lovely dear!’” (223).
In contrast to the useful and well-coping Doctor Reefy is Anderson's next grotesque character, the misanthropic and explosive Doctor Parcival. He, too, has a measure of physical grotesquerie: “His teeth were black and irregular and there was something strange about his eyes. The lid of the left eye twitched; it fell down and snapped up” (49). This perhaps self-proclaimed physician has arrived mysteriously in Winesburg and has lived there mysteriously. He mysteriously seeks out George Willard to anoint as his disciple in misanthropy. The psychological grotesquerie of Doctor Parcival is easy to diagnose: he has suffered from an inferiority complex since childhood, having been reared by a mother who loved his less-civilized brother better and having failed to become a Presbyterian minister. He has taken no good care of himself physically, socially, or professionally in Winesburg. This masochist, in reaction to his deep inferiority complex, preaches to George Willard a doctrine of individual primacy, challenging the youth to become superior to common people.
This unhappy man has his “adventure” (55) one day in August, when George visits his office to hear more of the doctrine of superiority. When the doctor is summoned to aid a young girl who has been struck down by horses in the street, the physician refuses to go. For this man, refusing to give medical help in an emergency is a deliberate act of cruelty, and he predicts that his arrogant refusal will bring the enraged townspeople to hang him by the neck from a lamppost on Main Street. This does not in fact occur because the doctor's refusal—like his self-importance—has not been noticed by Winesburg's citizens. Frustrated for now in his “adventure,” his sought-after martyrdom, his attempt to matter to people, his expected crucifixion nonetheless will, he asserts, sometime surely come. Doctor Parcival commissions George to write a book based on his philosophy, that “everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified. That's what I want to say. Don't you forget that. Whatever happens, don't you dare let yourself forget” (57). There is, alas, no evidence that Doctor Parcival, his self-predicted martyrdom—comparing himself to the most famous martyr in history—or his quite absurd if wonderful-sounding philosophy has impressed George Willard, or anyone else in the world.
Anderson might have originally conceived the four-part story “Godliness” as a novel; it covers the most pages and the most time of all the Winesburg stories. It recounts the growth of agricultural industrialization in the Midwest and one man's religious fanaticism and its effects on his daughter and grandson. Locating “Godliness” in American history is easy, for the central turning point is the Civil War and its effects on the Bentley family, who live on a farm outside Winesburg.
Jesse Bentley's brothers died in the Civil War, and his father subsequently retreated from responsibility. Intended for a career as a Presbyterian minister, Jesse, the weakest of the Bentley sons, leaves his seminary studies to operate the family farm. Uninformed about traditional agriculture, he is willing to try new, perhaps scientific ways of producing crops in the unpromising fields. Jesse brings from the city a wife, Katherine, who is however unlikely to survive a life of hard labor on a northern Ohio farm before mechanization: “Jesse was hard with her as he was with everybody about him in those days. She tried to do such work as all the neighbor women about her did and he let her go on without interference” (67). This maltreated wife becomes the first victim of the harsh treatment and fanatic dedication of Jesse Bentley.
Wealth is not Jesse's sole object. As he becomes successful in farming, he tries to unite his fundamentalist Presbyterian religious beliefs with his robust financial drive. Believing in the Old Testament doctrine of a “covenant” or bargain between God and the righteous man, Jesse comes to see himself as God's agent in an unrighteous world. “Look upon me, O God,” he prays, “and look Thou also upon my neighbors and all the men who have gone before me here! O God, create in me another Jesse, like that one of old, to rule over men and to be the father of sons who shall be rulers!” (70). He derives his beliefs from the Old Testament, with its emphasis on the covenant, rather than from the New Testament, with its emphasis on love, and seeks the direct commission from God that the covenant implies. He desires to found a dynasty near Winesburg, Ohio: “It seemed to him that in his day as in those other and older days, kingdoms might be created and new impulses given to the lives of men by the power of God speaking through a chosen servant. He longed to be such a servant” (70). The Bentley dynasty is to begin with the birth of Jesse's first child, a son, to be named David: “Jehovah of Hosts … send to me this night out of the womb of Katherine, a son. Let Thy grace alight upon me. Send me a son to be called David who shall help me to pluck at last all of these lands out of the hands of the Philistines and turn them to Thy service and to the building of Thy kingdom on earth” (73).
But the child born to Jesse and Katherine Bentley is a girl, and Katherine dies in childbirth. The fanatic's desire to found an invincible dynasty is frustrated. He resents his undesired female offspring, and the child, Louise Bentley, finds little love or joy in her isolated farm environment. The father, prospering still and expanding his farm, sends her to board with the Hardy family in Winesburg in order to attend school. Here the unloved and resented Louise Bentley has her own “adventure” (92), the occasion that forms and fixes her behavior for the rest of her life.
Feeling cut off as if by a wall (one of Anderson's recurring images of human anomie) from all other people, including her cold, religious father, Louise is yet eager to belong among others. This rich but naïve farm girl secretly witnesses a scene of lovemaking between one of the Hardy women and a lover. Wanting desperately to be cherished by someone, Louise writes a note to John Hardy, the son: “I want someone to love me and I want to love someone” (94). He responds, and afterward, fearful that Louise has become pregnant, John Hardy and Louise Bentley marry. But the fear of pregnancy proves false. The two are nevertheless married—a situation not promising for the endurance of young love. To them is eventually born one child, a son named David, who in his turn grows up in maternal lovelessness and resentment. “It is a man child and will get what it wants,” Louise thinks. “Had it been a woman child there is nothing in the world I would not have done for it” (96). David Hardy is the victim of his mother's ill-nature and hatred, just as Louise herself is victim of Jesse's ill-nature and neglect.
In the narration of “Godliness,” Anderson commits several infelicities; perhaps, if the story began as a novel, he had to reshape it into a brief Winesburg, Ohio story but kept some of the freedom that is allowed in longer narrative but inappropriate in the short-story form. For example, in the third part of “Godliness,” called “Surrender,” he describes Louise Bentley Hardy as “from childhood a neurotic, one of the race of over-sensitive women that in later days industrialism was to bring in such great numbers into the world” (87). How much better Anderson does when he merely describes unusual behavior instead of diagnosing it with a medical term such as “neurotic.” In the four parts of this story of three generations of Bentleys and Hardys, he too often reaches for historical breadth, lecturing the reader on the nature of industrialism and its dehumanizing influence upon American people. Put simply, in “Godliness,” as in the other Winesburg tales, Anderson should show instead of tell.
Yet there are moments of satisfying narration in “Godliness,” as when young David Hardy, troubled or threatened by fears, simply turns his face and hides his eyes from the world; as when Louise Bentley, first wanting love from a human, tries to seduce but merely unnerves a farmhand; as when David runs away from home for the first time, and Louise treats him for once with proper maternal love and becomes to him literally a different (and perhaps disconcerting) woman; as when David moves permanently to the Bentley farm to live and the entire Bentley household becomes a sunny and comforting place.
When David comes to live with his grandfather, he becomes the male heir and vehicle through which Jesse will try to establish his godly dynasty in the valley of Wine Creek. Jesse finds himself with the beloved youth in a wood one day soon after. Jesse, feeling again in tune with God and confident of his rewards for the faithful, goes through a ceremony among the trees that invokes a sign from God: “Into the old man's mind had come the notion that now he could bring from God a word or a sign out of the sky, that the presence of the boy and man on their knees in some lonely spot in the forest would make the miracle he had been waiting for almost inevitable” (85). Jesse, too, now finally has a symptom of physical grotesquerie—“he had been threatened with paralysis and his left side remained somewhat weakened. As he talked his left eyelid twitched” (81)—and as he fervently prays to his God, the old man holds David and shouts to the sky: “Here I stand with the boy David. Come down to me out of the sky and make Thy presence known to me” (86). So frightened is David that he cries out against “a terrible man back there in the woods” (86); the grandfather, ignoring the degree of his grandson's terror, simply thinks that his God does not yet approve of him.
Later, when he is fifteen, David Hardy is once again frightened in his grandfather's wood, and this occurrence is the boy's “adventure” (97) as well as his final appearance in Winesburg, Ohio. Having received from his God a most bounteous harvest on his many farms, Jesse Bentley decides in the autumn that a complete biblical ceremony of thanksgiving is in order. He takes with him his grandson and a newborn lamb so that he can reenact the Old Testament ritual of sacrifice. The old man in his intensity so terrifies the boy that David runs away from the frightening fanatic and shoots a stone with his slingshot. Thinking that he has killed the evil, terrifying figure, he concludes: “I have killed the man of God and now I will myself be a man and go into the world” (102). David is never heard from again. The fanatical old Jesse, when questioned, mutters only: “It happened because I was too greedy for glory” (102). Thus the curse of the Bentleys is carried from generation unto generation. Jesse Bentley's conviction that he must become a prophet of the God of the Bible makes him one of the more easily diagnosed grotesques in Winesburg, Ohio, one of those who have seized upon a truth and, living by that single truth, have become grotesque while that truth becomes a lie.
Not all the characters in Winesburg, Ohio are grotesque. Some of the townspeople, grotesque only occasionally, are capable of functioning quite well in their careers and in the life of their community. Such a reasonably well-adjusted person is Joe Welling in “A Man of Ideas.” Son of “a grey, silent woman with a peculiarly ashy complexion” (103) and a now-deceased man of some political prominence, Joe (the usual “Joe” of the world) is briskly efficient at selling products for the Standard Oil Company and goes about daily life. Only now and then does he trouble his neighbors with fits of unstoppable talking. Because the ideas he expresses in his “logorrhea” are true but unimportant (life is burning up, oxidizing; rain has fallen recently in a neighboring county), the town's citizens are wary of this “tiny little volcano that lies silent for days and then suddenly spouts fire” (103), this occasional oracle with gold-tipped teeth (his physical grotesquerie?) who will surely marry the uncolorful Sarah King, a woman as ashy and silent as Joe's mother.
Midway through Winesburg, Ohio and immediately after the attempted light humor of “A Man of Ideas” comes “Adventure,” one of the best narrated and most completely realized stories of the grotesque. George Willard is of no importance in this story, and little external or topical matter is involved in its plot, so “Adventure” is the best single “separable” story of the cycle to illustrate of the author's subject matter and technique.
There is little physical grotesquerie in “Adventure.” Alice Hindman's one unusual feature is that her head “was large and overshadowed her body” (112); and as she aged, “her shoulders were a little stooped and her hair and eyes brown. She was very quiet but beneath a placid exterior a continual ferment went on” (112). This ordinary-seeming woman, as Anderson masterfully constructs her, exemplifies his theory that the buried life is the best subject matter for fiction. For Alice Hindman's emotional life is buried deeply beneath the placid surface that she presents to the world everyday as she clerks efficiently in Winney's Dry Goods Store, becoming pensive and brooding only on rainy days, when there are few customers to attend, and when she must turn inward for matter to contemplate.
In “Adventure,” the reader learns of the events of eleven years of Alice Hindman's life, from age sixteen until the moment of her present “adventure” at age twenty-seven, when her life becomes forever set, desperate, and hopeless. No great trauma begins this woman's secret despair; when she is sixteen, simply “betrayed by her desire to have something beautiful come into her rather narrow life” (112), Alice becomes physically intimate with Ned Currie, a predecessor of George Willard on the staff of the Winesburg Eagle. Their courtship is interesting, for Alice, at sixteen, is quite liberated for her time. She states her desire to accompany Ned, unmarried, to Cleveland so that he can advance his career as a newspaperman there while she works to help support them: “I do not want to harness you to a needless expense that will prevent your making progress. Don't marry me now. We will get along without that and we can be together. Even though we live in the same house no one will say anything. In the city we will be unknown and people will pay no attention to us” (113). Confronted with a young woman confident of her own mind in their affair and willing to love him on equal terms, Ned, in typical male fashion, immediately reverses his emotional direction. From wanting Alice to become his mistress, he now wants her to become the passive object of his love who waits patiently at home while he goes off to heroically earn enough money to support her as he desires. Ned promises to return for her when he has sufficient funds for their wedding and married life together, and he makes love to her on the evening before his departure from Winesburg: “It did not seem to them that anything that could happen in the future could blot out the wonder and beauty of the thing that had happened. ‘Now we will have to stick to each other, whatever happens we will have to do that,’ Ned Currie said as he left the girl at her father's door” (113-14). Of course, as the reader expects, Ned forgets about Alice as soon as he moves from Cleveland to distant Chicago, where his new friends make his life urbanely interesting and exciting.
“Adventure” is the story of Alice Hindman left behind, alone in Winesburg. Anderson describes three points in her loneliness to demonstrate the development of her extreme isolation. By twenty-two, six years after being left alone, Alice has lost her father to death, seen her mother become a carpet weaver, and begun to clerk at Winney's. As money was the problem six years ago, she saves the money she earns, “thinking that when she had saved two or three hundred dollars she would follow her lover to the city and try if her presence would not win back his affections” (114). She resists friendships offered by other young Winesburg adults and looks only backward upon her one quick adolescent affair. She “felt that she could never marry another man. To her the thought of giving to another what she still felt could belong only to Ned seemed monstrous” (114-15). Thus, working and saving for a “purpose” and yet surely aware of her abandonment as eternal, not temporary, Alice “began to practice the devices common to lonely people” (115). She prays at night in her upstairs bedroom, but her words are intended not for her God but for her lover. She becomes possessive about the very furniture in her room, forbidding anyone else to touch it, since she can have and hold tangible objects, as she surely cannot have and hold Ned. The money she earns at her job, she pretends, will become abundant enough to generate sufficient interest income to support her husband and herself; she remembers in particular, and surely not ironically, Ned Currie's love of travel. Continually she whispers, weeping to herself: “Oh, Ned, I am waiting” (116).
Alice, growing older and lonelier in her little Ohio town, is given, for better or worse, a gift of self-understanding not vouchsafed to most of the grotesque characters in Winesburg, Ohio. She is frequently overwhelmed by a “fear of age and ineffectuality” (116); she “realized that for her the beauty and freshness of youth had passed” (117); “she did not blame Ned Currie and did not know what to blame” (117); and “an odd sense of relief came with this, her first bold attempt to face the fear that had become a part of her everyday life” (117). When Anderson moves to Alice's life at twenty-five, he shows Alice losing her mother (who although older than Alice is fully engaged with living) to remarriage. Alice herself joins the Winesburg Methodist Church for fellowship, and in a feeble attempt at courtship, she allows Will Hurley, a drugstore clerk, to walk her home from Wednesday evening church services. But Alice is utterly unable to invite Will to stay with her or to call a new love into her barren life. The church and the man are of no help, Alice realizes; “I want to avoid being so much alone. If I am not careful I will grow unaccustomed to being with people” (118).
And then comes the “adventure” for which Alice Hindman's story is named, the event in her life that both demonstrates her grotesquerie and encapsulates the meaning of her life. One rainy night in the autumn of the year when she is twenty-seven, Alice tries to comfort herself with imaginings and dreams of happiness. She “took a pillow into her arms and held it tightly against her breasts. Getting out of bed, she arranged a blanket so that in the darkness it looked like a form lying between the sheets and, kneeling beside the bed, she caressed it, whispering words over and over, like a refrain” (118-19). The Ned Currie fantasy that she has held for the eleven years is no longer enough: “She did not want Ned Currie or any other man. She wanted to be loved, to have something answer the call that was growing louder and louder within her” (119). The call of repressed and irresistible desires lures Alice Hindman from her desperation into the “adventure” (119) of her life.
Suddenly frantically afraid of age and unloveliness, Alice runs naked out of her house, into the street and into the falling rain, feeling somehow that the rainwater will refresh and rejuvenate her. The falling rain is effective, as “not for years had she felt so full of youth and courage. She wanted to leap and run, to cry out, to find some other lonely human and embrace him” (119). One other human being, probably another very lonely one, does appear in the darkened Winesburg street. Alice, naked, calls to him, “Wait!” (119)—waiting, the act she has been performing for eleven years now. But this other person, the man the desperate Alice Hindman finds, is an old and rather deaf man, unable to answer her call, or to fulfill her desires, or perhaps even to see her in the evening's darkness. Dropping to the wet ground, humiliated by her own actions, Alice Hindman literally crawls back into her house. Safe among the furniture of her lonely bedroom, she blockades her bedroom door with a dressing table, walling herself into her own room and her most private self. She weeps uncontrollably 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” (120).
Oh, yes, indeed, responds the superficial reader; certainly the grotesque people of Winesburg, Ohio, are doomed to live and die alone. But certainly, concludes the more thoughtful reader at the conclusion of the story “Adventure,” all the world's people are doomed to live and to die alone, no matter how well they delude themselves with fantasies of closeness and intimate love. Nowhere else in Winesburg, Ohio does Anderson more movingly and fully unite his philosophy with his narrative technique than in the story of the tenderly pathetic and grotesque Alice.
“Respectability” is one of the important stories in the initiation of the youthful George Willard, but it also contains one of the most striking and extreme instances of the grotesquerie of human appearance and character.
In an unusual introduction, Anderson directly addresses the reader: “If you have lived in cities and have walked in the park on a summer afternoon”; and “had you been in the earlier years of your life a citizen of the village of Winesburg, Ohio” (121). The author then introduces Wash (for “Washington”) Williams, who is likened to “a huge, grotesque kind of monkey, a creature with ugly, sagging, hairless skin below his eyes and a bright purple underbody” (121). Always dreadfully unclean—except for his always immaculate hands—Wash Williams, the most physically grotesque character in all of the stories, has for years been the dependable telegraph operator in Winesburg. The finer citizens of the town are disgusted by his filth and his omnipresent, malevolent misanthropy, for the clearly dislikes both women and men. Living at the New Willard House, to which he staggers home drunkenly each evening, Wash Williams becomes an object of curiosity to George, and they have several times almost come to conversation. George's recent walks about town with Belle Carpenter inspire this disreputable telegraph operator to give George his most precious advice, his direst warning about life.
One night in darkness outside of town, sitting on some decaying railroad ties, Wash Williams (the name being ironic for this outwardly filthy man) tells George a story of hatred and loathing—a hatred and loathing so pure and so emotionally expressed that, to George, it seems that the voice telling the tale is that of a poet speaking life's truths. To the anxious George and to the expectant reader, the autobiography of Wash Williams is frightening and chilling.
Years ago, in the larger city of Dayton, Ohio, a youthfully clean, and physically and emotionally virginal young telegraph operator married a woman who “was tall and slender and had blue eyes and yellow hair” (123). The respectable daughter of a dentist, she joined her respectable and worshipful young husband in setting up a respectable home in the still larger city of Columbus, a home complete with the usual respectable furnishings and with a backyard especially for vegetable gardening.
In their first spring of gardening, young Wash Williams was digging with his spade and “turned up the black ground while she ran about laughing and pretending to be afraid of the worms I uncovered. Late in April came the planting. In the little paths among the seed beds she stood holding a paper bag in her hand. The bag was filled with seeds. A few at a time she handed me the seeds that I might thrust them into the warm, soft ground” (126). The imagery is that of another Adam and Eve, complete with their innocent original garden, and yet there is also the heated sexual imagery of postlapsarian human intercourse. In an even more courtly vision of innocent, youthful love, Wash Williams remembers of his garden: “There in the dusk in the spring evening I crawled along the black ground to her feet and groveled before her. I kissed her shoes and the ankles above her shoes. When the hem of her garment touched my face I trembled” (126). Perhaps such worship of a woman by a man soon became intolerable to her; perhaps she had not, as her husband had, remained virginal until marriage; or perhaps enthusiastic outdoor gardening does not equate with enthusiastic indoor lovemaking. For whatever reason, after two years of marriage, Wash Williams learns, his adored wife has taken three lovers who regularly come to her in their once-romantic honeymoon cottage. Consumed with a bitterness as intense as his virginal love had been, he quickly gives her all their money and sends her home, as rejected and damaged, to her respectable family in Dayton, Ohio.
And yet Wash Williams's embitterment is not, with this grave betrayal, complete, for one more episode completes and sets forever this man's misogyny. Wash, still in love with his unfaithful wife and summoned by his mother-in-law, probably for a reconciliation, visits her family home in Dayton. Sent to wait in the parlor—the most “respectable” room of the house—Wash hears argumentative words, and his wife is thrust naked into the room where he waits. Presumably he is to respond to her nakedness and in passion's heat reclaim her as his wife. Rightly blaming not the wife but the mother-in-law for this new and awful assault upon his ideals, Wash tries to beat the older woman to death. But like most desires in Winesburg, Ohio, this desire for just vengeance remains unfulfilled, for the mother-in-law dies of an unrelated fever a month after Wash's trauma in the parlor. Now the reader knows why Wash Williams is misanthropic and misogynistic, why he keeps his hands so immaculately clean of emotional and physical involvement and feels so cleanly righteous inwardly, yet neglects his filthy outward appearance. The reader learns, once more, that it is not only in Winesburg that traumatic events occur, events that can lead to psychological grotesquerie, for the “adventure” that ruins Wash's life takes place in Dayton, a city seemingly without the constrictions and catastrophes that supposedly occur only in such narrow, repressive towns as Winesburg.
“The Thinker” is the first of a series of four stories—the others being “Loneliness,” “‘Queer’” and “Drink”—that deal with the quiet men and boys of Winesburg. The buried lives of the unobtrusive and unaggressive citizens are brought into contact with George Willard, Anderson's recurring character, so that the author may narrate their “adventures,” their moments of epiphany.
“The Thinker” concerns the life of Seth Richmond, eighteen. Seth's father was killed in a street duel with a newspaper editor in Toledo, Ohio, after the newspaper editor had coupled the father's name flagrantly with that of a schoolteacher. Since then, Virginia Richmond reared her only child, Seth, in Winesburg. She has taught him to ignore all references to the dead father's imperfections and to think of him as having been a thoroughly good and gentle man. Perhaps it is Virginia's ignoring of the facts of life that has led her son into quietude and placidity. But his silence has brought the youth the sobriquet “the thinker,” although behind Seth's quiescence there is neither high purpose nor especial cerebral activity.
As Wing Biddlebaum in “Hands” had to overlook an agricultural field to see people and events passing him by on the road of life, the roadway to Winesburg, Seth Richmond, who lives with his mother out of town at the end of Main Street, must from his isolated, once-grand home look from his distance at the road of life—that is, to see “wagon-loads of berry pickers—boys, girls, and women—going to the fields in the morning and returning covered with dust in the evening. … He regretted that he also could not laugh boisterously, shout meaningless jokes and make of himself a figure in the endless stream of moving, giggling activity that went up and down the road” (128).
And as the townspeople think (wrongly) of Seth, as he goes among them, as deliberative, measured, and deep in this thoughts, so his mother, unable to understand her unusual child, has an “almost unhealthy respect for the youth” (130). But “the truth was that the son thought with remarkable clearness and the mother did not” (130). To contrast Seth's maturity with his mother's naïveté, Anderson has the boy at sixteen run away from Winesburg and spend some days at a fairground and horse race. Virginia Richmond writes down the reproofs with which she will sting Seth's conscience upon his return. But on his homecoming he rationally explains that it was only his pride that set him on this most unsatisfactory and uncomfortable adventure, and the mother is silent, unable to address at all her son's wayward behavior.
The youth's contact with two of his Winesburg contemporaries—George Willard and Helen White—further reveals his nature and continues the narration of his “adventure.” His relationship with George Willard, his longtime friend, is peculiar—seemingly of George's making and not Seth's, for George finds in the quiet boy a listener to hear of his dreams and plans. On the present evening in “The Thinker,” Seth has walked silently among the citizens of Winesburg in quiet disgust. They are carrying on their meaningless and yet necessary daily pleasantries and banalities. Seth finds George in his room at the New Willard House, ready to maturely smoke a pipe and brag of trying to write a love story. Perhaps, George comments, he must be in love before he can execute a proper love story. Would Seth mind telling Helen White that George is in love with her? Seth is in no mood tonight to listen to George's bragging or to play Cupid for George's literary endeavors; further, disgusted by his additional useless and misused words, Seth leaves his friend and walks through Winesburg at dusk, only to witness again the clots of friendly folk who apparently belong to and constitute the wholeness and harmony of human society, yet who are removed, as if walled off, from the life of Seth Richmond: “feeling himself an outcast in his own town,” Seth “began to pity himself, but a sense of the absurdity of his thoughts made him smile. In the end he decided that he was simply old beyond his years and not at all a subject for self-pity” (137).
But Seth Richmond's own interest in Helen White has just now been stirred by George's meretricious suggestion, so he walks to Banker White's mansion, where he finds Helen and invites her to walk with him. The two young people have been lifelong friends, and tonight Seth, after hearing so many wasted words from the people of Winesburg, somehow wants to say significant words to someone himself. On this pleasant summer evening they stroll quietly past a kissing man and woman and sit in the wooded garden that surrounds the Richmond house. In his economic description of this nighttime walk, Anderson brilliantly objectifies and dramatizes the buried life, the unconscious mind, of Seth Richmond.
As Seth and Helen walk toward his family home, he holds her hand and recalls to himself, scarcely consciously, an event of a few days before. Running an errand in the lovely country near Winesburg, he “had stopped beneath a sycamore tree and looked about him. A soft humming noise had greeted his ears. For a moment he had thought the tree must be the home of a swarm of bees” (140); then, “looking down, Seth had seen the bees everywhere all about him in the long grass. … The weeds were abloom with tiny purple blossoms and gave forth an overpowering fragrance. Upon the weeds the bees were gathered in armies, singing as they worked” (140). In the present, still holding Helen's hand, Seth remembers this wonderfully bucolic scene and imagines himself lying in the flowery grasses again, this time with Helen White at evening; then, in his imagined romantic scene, “a peculiar reluctance kept him from kissing her lips, but he felt he might have done that if he wished” (140). In the present, with the real-life Helen beside him, Seth immediately releases her hand, apparently unable to proceed, even in fancy, with kissing her. Unable to act upon his sexual impulses, he reverts to unusual behavior—braggart talking to Helen, of his having to grow up, of his having to amount to something in life, of his having to leave Winesburg immediately to get on with his new manhood.
And it seems that nature itself cooperates with Seth Richmond in his blustery talking, for great instances of thunder and lightning accompany his important words, promising heavy summer rain. “Helen White was impressed,” narrates Anderson. “This boy is not a boy at all, but a strong, purposeful man” (141). But the more Seth talks instead of acts, the less enchanted Helen becomes with him, until Seth says words of good-bye forever, and Helen in “a wave of sentiment” pulls his head down to kiss him. But “the act was one of pure affection and cutting regret that some vague adventure that had been present in the spirit of the night would now never be realized” (142). Sensing that in Seth she is dealing with an adolescent and not, after all, with “a strong, purposeful man,” Helen lets her hand fall and more or less sends Seth, as if he were a little boy, inside the house to his mother: “You go and talk with your mother. You'd better do that now” (142). Seth, “perplexed and puzzled by her action as he had been perplexed and puzzled by all of the life of the town out of which she had come” (142), ends his adventure (or, better, his lack of adventure) by walking toward his mother, who is domestically and maternally sewing by a lighted window. Seth knows that he will never leave Winesburg, but that he will never belong there, that he will forever be separate, that “when it comes to loving someone, it won't never be me. It'll be someone else—some fool—someone who talks a lot—someone like that George Willard” (142). There is no hint that Seth will ever again, in any way, seek close connection with another human being; his life will surely continue to be an absence of adventure, a presence of anomie.
“Loneliness” is one of Anderson's bleaker stories of the grotesque. For in it he allows the main character no hope of reconstructing destroyed illusions that could keep away the chill reality of solitude and desolation in Winesburg, Ohio. The culprit who unwittingly destroys the older man's possibility of warm illusion is George Willard, still athirst for the inside story of human life and here willing to dominate a weaker personality to get that story. The trauma that creates the grotesquerie in “Loneliness,” as it did with Wing Biddlebaum in “Hands,” happens to the protagonist far away from the little Ohio town, this time in the vastness of New York City.
Enoch Robinson spent his youth near Winesburg and took with him to New York, not only his dreams of becoming a painter, but the essence of his early life in Ohio. He lived with his mother outside of town on a side road off Trunion Pike, in a farmhouse the front blinds of which were always kept closed. When Enoch was young, he was a contemplative, dreaming fellow who tended to walk in the very middle of roads until he disrupted the ordinary traffic of life and was angrily shouted “out of the beaten track” (167). Solitary by nature and dangerous to himself when among adults, Enoch, narrates Anderson, “was always a child and that was a handicap to his worldly development. He never grew up and of course he couldn't understand people and he couldn't make people understand him. The child in him kept bumping against things, against actualities like money and sex and opinions” (167-68). True to his innocent nature, early in his fifteen-year stay in New York, Enoch is struck by a streetcar and lamed, giving him the almost-requisite physical difference of Anderson's grotesque characters.
This child-man, destined for failure both as an artist and in his personal relationships, has many adventures in New York. He becomes drunk enough to be taken by the police and receive a frightening lesson in sobriety; he is tempted into sexual adventure by a streetwalker but then is frightened away from her and is laughed at by her and by a passing male stranger. He goes about with other young would-be artists, but sputteringly inarticulate, he is unable to explain to them his intentions in his art; and he gradually becomes isolated in his room—a room, says Anderson, “long and narrow like a hallway. … The story of Enoch is in fact the story of a room almost more than it is the story of a man” (168).
Just what Anderson intends to communicate to the reader through the spare description of Enoch's bare New York room, his personal space, long and narrow, is not entirely clear; but this room, hall-like and yet leading nowhere, becomes the setting for an imaginary life, with which the art student can comfortably cope: “With quick imagination he began to invent 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” (170), “people of his own mind, people with whom he could really talk, people he could harangue and scold by the hour, servants, you see, to his fancy” (171).
Although he is solitary among his imagined playmates in his peculiar room, Enoch tries again to play games with real life, for he is visited by lust and loneliness and the desire “to touch actual flesh-and-bone people with his hands” (171). Thinking to satisfy his sexual urges and to play grown-up, he finds a more ordinary apartment; he marries the woman who sits conveniently near him in art class; and he begins to practice what he considers adult behavior—or, as Anderson writes, “He dismissed the essence of things and played with realities” (171). He illustrates advertisements for a living, he votes in elections, he reads a daily newspaper, he discusses possible government ownership of railroads, and he fathers two children—or at least, the author cannily suggests, his wife bears two children while she is married to Enoch.
But the childlike Enoch Robinson cannot long be happy playing at marriage and middle-class. Wishing once again to be alone with the playthings of his mind, he rerents the old, narrow apartment near Washington Square. When he fortuitously inherits money on the death of his mother back home, he gives his wife eight thousand dollars with which to divorce him and move to Connecticut and marry a real estate agent, that person most opposite to a dreamy artist. Then, safe again in his hall-like room, he repeoples his surroundings with the pliant comrades of his imagination.
But characters in Winesburg, Ohio are allowed little peaceful happiness, and events conspire, in the form of a very flesh-and-blood woman, to drive Enoch away from the city: “Something had to come into his world. Something had to drive him out of the New York room to live out his life an obscure, jerky little figure, bobbing up and down on the streets of an Ohio town at evening when the sun was going down behind the roof of Wesley Moyer's livery barn” (173).
This woman, who is simply a woman from next door and is possibly only seeking innocent relief from her own loneliness, repeatedly invades Enoch's sanctuary. By her huge and female adulthood, she comes to dominate his weak childishness, until he orders her away in uncontrolled, infantile rage. Unfortunately, he refers to his imagined playmates: “Then I began to tell her about my people, about everything that meant anything to me. I tried to keep quiet, to keep myself to myself, but I couldn't” (176). “A look” (176)—surely a look of recognition that she has been dealing with a nearly deranged person—comes into her eyes, and she leaves Enoch's now-polluted apartment: “Out she went through the door and all the life there had been in the room followed her out. She took all of my people away. They all went out through the door after her. That's the way it was” (177). Of all the sadness in Winesburg, Ohio, this is saddest: that Enoch Robinson has come back, desolate and totally alone, from New York to live out his years in Winesburg in a sparsely furnished room, that he somehow creates anew a consoling gathering of imaginary companions, and that by telling his story and his dreams to George Willard, he has once again destroyed his lonely solace. For at the end of “Loneliness” he says to himself, “I'm alone, all alone here. … It was warm and friendly in my room but now I'm all alone” (178).
That the Cowleys do not belong among the citizens of Winesburg is clear from the location of Cowley & Son's hardware store—not on the Main Street but on Maumee Street, near Voight's wagon shop and a horse-sheltering shed. The Cowleys, of “‘Queer,’” are indeed displaced persons, for a year ago, Ebenezer Cowley, the father of the family, sold his farmland and established the second (and scarcely needed) hardware business in Winesburg to follow that American dream of commercial success. His wife has died; the daughter is only mentioned and does not appear in the story; and Ebenezer himself is pathetically out of place with his long-worn but only good coat, his visible wen, his unwashed body, his storeful of useless and unneeded farm and shop supplies, and his all-purpose saying, “I'll be starched. … Well, well, I'll be washed and ironed and starched!” (193).
But it is Ebenezer's son, Elmer Cowley (both names hint at country origins), who is most unhappy in the town of Winesburg; and it is Elmer Cowley who is the grotesque character of “‘Queer.’” The quotation marks in the story title indicate that “queer” (as in “unusual” or “odd”) is an epithet applicable, Elmer realizes, to all the Cowley family members. Elmer is described as pale, almost colorless in hair and skin, with protruding teeth and white-blue eyes—that is, he is slightly physically grotesque. Anderson illustrates the grotesquerie of Elmer Cowley in three ways: he shows his youthful rebellion against his nature and circumstances, presumably for the first time in his life; he contrasts Elmer's character with that of three other Winesburg area residents (Ebenezer Cowley, Mook, a farmhand, and George Willard); and he presents George Willard as the object of Elmer Cowley's resentment, for George represents to the odd young man all those regular people who seem to fit so conveniently and comfortably into life in the Ohio town.
Elmer's rebellion comes one day when, trying awkwardly to thread his shoelaces (George Willard can be seen from the back room of the Cowley store), Elmer hears a traveling salesman foisting off unsalable items onto the gullible Ebenezer. Elmer takes a gun and orders the salesman out of the store. Elmer cannot explain to his puzzled father this erratic, sudden, and dangerous uprising, his first rebellion against “queerness.” Instead of receiving sympathy from a wise and understanding father for his outburst against oddness, Elmer receives from Ebenezer only the saying “I'll be washed and ironed and starched!” (193).
Frustrated by his inability to explain himself, Elmer madly runs out of Winesburg and into the countryside, where he had lived until a year ago and where he understood life and his place in it. As Elmer trudges along the rural road, he thinks: “I will not be queer—one to be looked at and listened to. … I'll be like other people. I'll show that George Willard. He'll find out. I'll show him!” (194). But George Willard, as the reader knows, has his own problems and concerns and has only passing interest in the strange young man whom he has occasionally seen on the streets of Winesburg.
When he arrives at the rural homeplace, Elmer finds himself almost happy as he talks to Mook, a half-witted farmhand who worked on this land when it was the Cowleys' and who has stayed on to work for the new owner. To Mook, Elmer has no trouble communicating his worries and his pleasures, for Mook is easy to talk to. Mook “believed in the intelligence of the animals that lived in the sheds with him, and when he was lonely held long conversations with the cows, the pigs, and even with the chickens that ran about the barnyard” (195). To Mook, Elmer explains at length the troubles that the Cowleys have encountered since their unwise move to town; how the money from the farmland is dwindling away in poor business practices; and most important of all, how Elmer feels rejected and alone and simply cannot fit into Winesburg: “‘In the evening, there in town, I go to the post office or to the depot to see the train come in, and no one says anything to me. Everyone stands around and laughs and they talk but they say nothing to me. Then I feel so queer that I can't talk either’” (197). Suddenly, he realizes the oddness of his present circumstances—that a “queer” one is talking seriously to a half-witted one. Elmer ends his harangue with: “I had to tell someone and you were the only one I could tell. I hunted out another queer one, you see. I ran away, that's what I did. I couldn't stand up to someone like that George Willard” (197). As Elmer runs back toward town, Mook confides in his animal friends that Elmer may hurt someone and concludes of the episode: “I'll be washed and ironed and starched” (197).
Elmer's rebellion is now concentrated even more firmly on George Willard. At eight on the same cold November evening, Elmer mysteriously summons the newspaper reporter to walk with him on the town streets. But when the time comes to talk, he cannot explain himself or his enormous rage. He orders George away, only to summon him again near midnight, when a freight train is leaving Winesburg for Cleveland. For Elmer has decided to steal some of his father's money, flee the town of his persecution, and go to a city whose vastness will both hide him and give him comfort: “He would get work in some shop and become friends with the other workmen and would be indistinguishable. Then he could talk and laugh. He would no longer be queer and would make friends. Life would begin to have warmth and meaning for him as it had for others” (199-200). But once again, when the train is ready to leave and George Willard is nearby and sleepily curious about Elmer for the second time that evening, Elmer can only thrust the stolen money onto George, beat mercilessly upon the reporter's breast, and incoherently proclaim: “I'll be washed and ironed and starched” (200). Leaving George Willard no wiser for his interrupted sleep and his pains, Elmer Cowley departs from Winesburg, crying to himself: “I guess I showed him. I ain't so queer. I guess I showed him I ain't so queer” (201). But carrying himself with himself, Elmer Cowley will forever be, wherever he may be, a social isolate, a “queer,” a grotesque from Winesburg, Ohio.
“Drink,” the fourth story about the usually quiet men and boys of Winesburg, concerns Tom Foster, a native of Cincinnati who was orphaned there and brought at sixteen to Winesburg by his quite elderly grandmother. She wants the youth to grow up in this peaceful, tiny village, which she left decades ago. The grandmother worries that the enlarged town of eighteen hundred people will not be right for Tom; but this youth, quiet and pleasant, would fit into any society, for everyone likes him, even the tough guys and prostitutes among whom he innocently lived in Cincinnati.
Tom Foster is not one of Anderson's more physically grotesque characters; small for his age and topped with unruly black hair, his head is larger than ordinary and his voice softer, but otherwise he is quite average, quite unobtrusive, and quite inoffensive. Enjoying an easy life in Winesburg, Tom survives by doing such jobs as cutting wood, mowing lawns, and picking strawberries. He most enjoys the quiet things about the town, fits into all groups of men and boys standing or sitting about to talk, and delights in such sensuous little things as the fresh-roasting coffee in Hern's grocery, the bedewed shiny stones in a handsome driveway, the sound of rain falling at night on tin roofs, and the power of a passing winter storm. But into his almost idyllic and carefree life must come some complication, and spring is the mischief that disrupts Tom's: “The trees along the residence streets of the town were all newly clothed in soft green leaves, in the gardens behind the houses men were puttering about in vegetable gardens, and in the air there was a hush, a waiting kind of silence very stirring to the blood” (216). On such a night even Tom Foster, who usually stays peacefully “in the shadow of the wall of life” (212), must have an adventure.
But all the eighteen-year-old youth really accomplishes on this sublime spring evening is to become drunk and think wondrous thoughts, perhaps for the first time in his life. Such drunkenness and such thinking do not at first seem important enough to be considered an adventure, or a revealing moment in a Winesburg, Ohio story. To understand the momentous importance to Tom Foster of this evening of drinking, the reader must recall an earlier adventure in Tom's life, an adventure that occurred when he was younger and living in a questionable district of Cincinnati.
Tom Foster's previous adventure was the occasion of his first temptation to sexual knowledge, when a prostitute in the district where he worked and lived invited the innocent boy to her room: “He never forgot the smell of the room nor the greedy look that came into the eyes of the woman. It sickened him and in a very terrible way left a scar on his soul. He had always before thought of women as quite innocent things, much like his grandmother, but after that one experience in the room he dismissed women from his mind” (215). Not only were women dismissed from Tom Foster's mind, but he seems to have banished all deep emotions and serious feelings, leaving in their absence the placid and amicable chap so well liked in Winesburg for his blandness and his unforward presence. But such emotional repression must have its eventual outlet, and Tom's drinking is the first expression of the denied emotion that he has buried so deep that he is not even aware of it.
On this fine spring evening Tom lets himself fantasize about Helen White, whom Seth Richmond and George Willard and perhaps other young men of the town have also admired. To Tom, this pretty young woman seems “a flame dancing in the air” and he himself “a little tree without leaves standing out sharply against the sky” (216). When, to his fancy, “she was a wind, a strong terrible wind,” Tom is “a boat left on the shore of the sea by a fisherman” (216). Whatever importance should be given to these images of active female force and passive male object is unclear; but after Tom has these daring thoughts, he goes out into the night-time spring countryside near Winesburg to become gloriously drunk—that is, when safely alone, to free his emotions from their traumatic repression and to feel again something powerful, something forceful, something active.
The adventure of drunkenness works for this youth, who may henceforth be less divorced from life and its tearing and joyful emotions. For, as he explains to a kindly and puzzled George Willard later the same evening, as he is coming down from his drunken heights: “I wanted to suffer, to be hurt somehow. I thought that was what I should do. I wanted to suffer, you see, because everyone suffers and does wrong. … It hurt me to do what I did and made everything strange. That's why I did it. I'm glad, too. It taught me something, that's it, that's what I wanted. Don't you understand? I wanted to learn things, you see. That's why I did it” (219).
Like “Adventure,” “The Untold Lie” is almost completely separable from the other stories of Winesburg, Ohio. It is little concerned with George Willard or the town of Winesburg and can stand alone as a short story of great worth, although it lacks “Adventure”'s dramatic impact. “The Untold Lie” is hardly based on grotesquerie at all but is rather a study in contrasts and cycles and is perhaps Anderson's most optimistic philosophical fiction.
“The Untold Lie” is set in autumn near Winesburg, taking place in a few hours in the lives of two farm workers—Hal Winters, a young man who (like Shakespeare's Prince Hal?) cannot be tamed by outside forces but who could tame himself to the bonds of ordinary social life, and Ray Pearson, an older man who, long married and burdened with “half a dozen thin-legged children” (202), has become thoroughly tamed to the demands of marriage and fatherhood. The story is one of mostly silence, as the two farmhands quietly crouch to shuck corn in a field lovely with autumn's blazing colors. Ray and Hal work at their harvesting task almost automatically, until unexpectedly the younger man mutters: “Tricked by Gad, that's what I was, tricked by life and made a fool of” (204). Thus moved to express his smoldering anger, Hal continues: “Has a fellow got to do it? … Has he got to be harnessed up and driven through life like a horse?” (205). To his astonished companion Hal continues: “I've got Nell Gunther in trouble” (205); that is, on one of their courtship meetings he has impregnated the English teacher: “Perhaps you've been in the same fix yourself. I know what everyone would say is the right thing to do, but what do you say? Shall I marry and settle down?” (205).
Ray Pearson, thus startlingly appealed to for advice, cannot answer his young companion at all and walks wordlessly away from their common work, off across the fallow fields, where he is caught up by thoughts of the younger man's abrupt question about responsibility and freedom. Strangely, just such a dilemma occurred in Ray's youth: whether he should marry the woman who had so willingly gone walking in woods with him, or whether he should escape to the West Coast, where he might live freely and excitingly. As in other Anderson stories, this present moment of questioning of circumstances of long standing is assumed to be the first such mutiny in a character's life, his first need or opportunity to assert his individuality against the expectations of routine civilization.
Ray Pearson's silent self-questioning and potential insurrection gain dramatic impact when he goes to his bleak little tenant house, isolated among the rolling Ohio hills, where his shrewish wife and his half-dozen demanding children impatiently await him. There he is pushed into making a trip into Winesburg for food. Walking across a field toward the grocery stores, Ray is overcome by “the beauty of the country about Winesburg” (207) and suddenly “forgot all about being a quiet old farm hand and throwing off the torn overcoat began to run across the field. As he ran he shouted a protest against his life, … against everything that makes life ugly” (207). He recalls that when he was courting Minnie years ago, he promised her nothing; she had wanted sexual adventure as much as he, and biology had trapped him into marriage and parenthood.
Ray decides to warn Hal against making the same mistake, against completing the same cycle in human unhappiness. He runs madly and coatlessly across the plowed field toward the younger man, determined to be his oracle of escape and freedom and individualism. Then, as he runs, “he remembered his children and in fancy felt their hands clutching at him” (208); and suddenly seeing and coming upon Hal Winters, who is now dressed for courting and peacefully smoking a pipe of tobacco, Ray is unable to speak any words of his desperate warning. In fact, he says not a word, for Hal forestalls him with: “Well, never mind telling me anything. I'm not a coward and I've already made up my mind. … She didn't ask me to marry her. I want to marry her. I want to settle down and have kids” (208).
Thus does life cyclically and mechanically generate itself, Anderson seems to be saying—biology ensnares people into reproduction and childrearing, the prerequisites of civilization and progress. The price of this cycle and the social order that depends on it is, however, enormously high, and it is usually hopeless to elude. Even though Ray Pearson fails to say to Hal Winters anything at all, positive or negative, about being ambushed by fate into marriage—realizing that “whatever I told him would have been a lie” (209)—the reader is left to ponder whether Hal, in turn, will someday be faced with a questioning young male companion and be unable to advise either entrapment or escape, the only choices available to the individual as biology works its will. Optimistic? Yes. Pessimistic? Also yes. Truth, or lie? Both.
“Adventure” and “The Untold Lie” are both easy to enjoy and study singly, disjoined from the other stories in Winesburg, Ohio. But “The Strength of God” and “The Teacher” are two of Sherwood Anderson's greatest fictions, and they must be enjoyed and studied together, for they interrelate in event, in mood, and in style to form a unit that, in its completeness, demonstrates the quintessence of what Winesburg, Ohio is all about, of what grotesqueness and the buried life signify to Sherwood Anderson.
“The Strength of God” concerns the Reverend Curtis Hartman, who for ten years has been pastor of the Presbyterian Church of Winesburg, Ohio. The citizens are proud of his quiet, brown-bearded, and scholarly demeanor, and his stout wife, Sarah, grows “afire with secret pride” (147-48) as she rides with her respected husband in their carriage, although she is “worried lest the horse become frightened and run away” (148). But Curtis Hartman, who is in no way physically grotesque, has a hidden worry—he is secretly unhappy with his performance as minister of God: “he was much in earnest and sometimes suffered prolonged periods of remorse because he could not go crying the word of God in the highways and byways of the town. He wondered if the flame of the spirit really burned in him and dreamed of a day when a strong sweet new current of power would come like a great wind into his voice and his soul and the people would tremble before the spirit of God made manifest in him” (148). Each week, Hartman also worries at length about the sermon that he must deliver that Sunday morning, and frequently he comes to the little room in the tall bell tower of his church with anxiety, to meditate and to pray for the flame of the spirit.
This tall bell tower, freighted with its suggestively phallic shape, is central to the meaning of “The Strength of God,” for here the events occur that ultimately convince Hartman that he has found “the strength of God” for which he has so fervently prayed. In the room are a table upon which rests the Bible that the minister devotedly studies and a small window made of stained glass, the design of which shows “Christ laying his hand upon the head of a child” (148). “The Strength of God” begins in summer, when the warm weather requires for comfort that the small stained-glass window be open. The minister is, one Sunday morning, shocked to look over the pages of his Bible, through the open window, and into the bedroom of the house next door to the church, where he sees a woman lying in bed while smoking and reading a book. So shocked is he by the worldliness of this woman who, on the Lord's day, would smoke, idle about her room, and avoid church, that probably for the first time in his life, “he went down into the pulpit and preached a long sermon without once thinking of his gestures or his voice. The sermon attracted unusual attention because of its power and clearness” (149). Merely from seeing a woman reading and smoking, the minister begins to find “the strength of God” for which he has been praying.
Seeing Kate Swift, the schoolteacher who lives with her mother next door to the church and who enjoys lying reading and smoking in her bed, is more important to the Reverend Curtis Hartman than anything that has ever happened to him. For the first time since his cold and passionless marriage to a very proper woman, he has been tempted to expand his horizons in regard to warm emotion and bodily attraction. Within a few days he wants to look again through his stained-glass window at the woman's body, but he knows to keep his spying secret. With a stone he “broke out a corner of the window and then locked the door and sat down at the desk before the open Bible to wait” (150). Interestingly, the portion of the stained-glass scene that he broke away is that which shows the heel of the boy being blessed by Christ. Indeed, the reader easily assumes, the Achilles' heel of the Reverend Curtis Hartman has been found and punctured by the arrow of quite ordinary lust. And again on the coming Sunday, the minister's sermon is personal, powerful, and cogent, for again with “the strength of God,” he speaks to his congregation of personal temptation and godly forgiveness.
Anderson brilliantly handles Hartman's psychology. Over several weeks in summer and autumn, this developing character goes from horror at seeing the bare throat and white shoulders of a woman lying in bed to having a warm need to look again upon her throat and shoulders, to thanking God when she does not appear before his eyes to tempt him, to praying to be strong enough to repair the hole in the stained-glass window, to making feeble attempts at sexuality with his gelid wife, to abandoning his reticence about peeping at forbidden flesh, to rebelling and resolving to have and hold this wondrous female body just next door to the church.
For the “adventure,” the telling instant in the character's life, the action moves to the darkest and most bitterly cold evening of the year. In the dark and unheated bell tower, frigid wind blows about the Reverend Hartman through the broken stained-glass window through which he has for months been peeping into the warm and lighted bedroom next door. Here the Reverend Hartman approaches both dying of physical illness (equated with the near-death of his soul) and a spiritual revelation of strength from God, for which he has earnestly been praying.
Into the prevailing imagery of coldness and warmth, Anderson introduces and interweaves images of darkness and light. The minister has come to see himself as more Hellenic than Hebraic, has had to spend long night hours in the coldness and darkness of his bell-tower room to await the entrance of the woman next door into her warm and well-lit bedroom. At the same time, he has begun to grope his way from the darkness of a cold and passionless marriage into the heated and enlightened passion of full human nature. When she appears in her bedroom, Kate Swift habitually wears a white nightgown that to Hartman should suggest angelity more than lust; and on this final night of peeping from the darkness, over his Bible, and through the stained-glass window, the vision he sees is indeed overwhelming and monumental. This night the woman does not appear in her lighted room until late, and instead of dressing in her white gown and lying quietly abed, she falls upon her bed completely naked and “lying face downward she wept and beat with her fists upon the pillow. With a final outburst of weeping she half arose and in the presence of the man who had waited to look and to think thoughts the woman of sin began to pray” (155). In the warm lamplight of her bedroom, Anderson writes, “her figure, slim and strong, looked like the figure of the boy in the presence of the Christ on the leaded window” (155).
In the bell tower the Bible dramatically falls to the floor as the minister rises from his seated position. When the light finally goes out in the unhappy woman's bedroom, the excited minister eagerly breaks the rest of the stained-glass window with his fist, thinking that his season of temptation is over and that he has found the strength of God in the body of a woman. The reader is left to wonder whether the minister is deluding himself that he has found the light of happiness or the continuing darkness of a new if godly self delusion.
The first thing to say about “The Teacher” is that Kate Swift, the object of the Reverend Hartman's desire in “The Strength of God,” in this her own story is absolutely unaware of either her accessibility or her meaning to the peeping eyes of the preacher. In “The Strength of God” the reader learns, through Curtis Hartman, some information about Kate—specifically, that “the school teacher was thirty years old and had a neat trim-looking figure”; that she “had few friends and bore a reputation of having a sharp tongue”; that “she had been to Europe and had lived for two years in New York City” (149). Otherwise, in “The Strength of God,” the woman next door to the church who is so addictive and almost liberating to the repressed preacher could have been any attractive Winesburg woman who likes occasionally to smoke and to read in bed.
In “The Teacher” Anderson does not present a great deal of new information about Kate Swift. She lives with her widowed mother, we learn, and her health is not good, as she is in some danger of losing her hearing. When seen close, Kate Swift is neither physically beautiful nor especially physically grotesque: “Her complexion was not good and her face was covered with blotches that indicated ill health” (160); yet to an observer who sees her walking purposefully on the coldest, darkest night of the year, “alone in the night in the winter streets she was lovely. Her back was straight, her shoulders square, and her features were as the features of a tiny goddess on a pedestal in a garden in the dim light of a summer evening” (160).
In “The Teacher,” Anderson does expand upon the “sharp tongue” reference to her in “The Strength of God,” for “there was something biting and forbidding in the character of Kate Swift.” Since her return from Europe or New York five years ago, she has been “silent, cold and stern, and yet in an odd way very close to her pupils” in the schoolroom (161); George Willard is a recent graduate of the school. Only occasionally does Kate break from her iciness to tell to her pupils charming but seemingly irrelevant stories about such people as Charles Lamb and Benvenuto Cellini, only to immediately return to coldness and sternness. But since Anderson is more interested in the buried life of his characters than in their outward appearance and behavior, he confides to the reader about Kate Swift that “in reality she was the most eagerly passionate soul among them, and more than once, in the five years since she had come back from her travels to settle in Winesburg and become a school teacher, had been compelled to go out of the house and walk half through the night fighting out some battle raging within” (162). In the past, her battles with her own passionate nature have usually been settled by cold walks in the street; but in the present “adventure” of Kate Swift, Kate has a new problem, one perhaps not soluble by the usual vigorous exercise: her infatuation and lust for George Willard.
In consonance with the imagery of light and darkness and of warmth and coldness in “The Strength of God,” Anderson in “The Teacher” presents Kate's hot and hidden nature, usually bound down under her icy exterior, as emerging to focus on George Willard. On this particular night, so separately important to the Reverend Curtis Hartman and to the young newspaper reporter, “Kate Swift's mind was ablaze with thoughts of George Willard” (162); “in something he had written as a school boy she thought she had recognized the spark of genius and wanted to blow on the spark” (162-63). Thus for her “adventure,” the incident that marks her epiphany, Kate Swift leaves the huge base-burner stove in her mother's warm and well-lighted house to face the bitterly cold darkness of January and to end up with her former pupil in the well-lighted and well-heated office of the Eagle. There she ostensibly lectures him about writing creatively from life after knowing about life, but in reality she is drawn toward his boyish good looks and his manhood. As she is about to leave, “in the warm little office the air became suddenly heavy and the strength went out of her body” (165). She lets herself fall into the young man's ready arms, but then in sudden reluctance or sudden passion beats upon his face and then runs away into the cold night.
Now the reader understands why the schoolteacher is so late to appear in her bedroom while Curtis Hartman waits in his freezing, dark bell tower; why she throws herself naked onto the bed and beats her pillow in her lighted, warm bedroom; and why she finally kneels on her bed—naked, slim and boylike—to pray. The reader can only speculate about the substance of her prayer; most likely, she prays, like Alice Hindman in “Adventure,” that she herself will have the strength of God not to seduce a young student, that she will have the fortitude to learn to live and die alone, even in Winesburg, Ohio.
The reader who enjoys the stories in Winesburg, Ohio and who appreciates Anderson's narrative purposes and techniques might well wish for more, but Anderson wrote no more fiction about Winesburg, Ohio, and left for his masterpiece only the twenty-one stories published in the little yellow book of 1919. Why there are no more Winesburg stories is unclear, for it is unlikely that the author tired of them; more likely, he had to move on to new material. It is certain that he did have more Winesburg stories worth the telling, for on close examination of the stories that were written, there are intriguing references to other grotesque characters in the imaginary town.
These characters include Tom Willy and his birthmarked hands in “The Philosopher” (49); the once red-haired Bentley spinster who so adoringly rears David Hardy in “Godliness,” who speaks to the sleeping boy the romantic thoughts forbidden to her, and who becomes “ecstatically happy” (79) when his hand brushes her face in his sleep; Turk Smollett, “the half dangerous old wood chopper whose peculiarities added so much of color to the life of the village” (137) and whose boisterous social acceptance in “The Thinker” offends Seth Richmond; Mook, the half-witted farmhand who in “‘Queer’” talks to the animals and shares a warm outdoor fire with the distraught Elmer Cowley (195-97); the pipe-smoking grandmother of Tom Foster in “Drink,” who in advanced age lovingly tells her young grandson, “When you get ready to die then I will die also” (214); and Hop Higgins, the town's night watchman, who, on that cold January night in “The Teacher,” peacefully dozes before the stove in the hotel office and dreams of a career raising ferrets (139).
One may regret that Sherwood Anderson did not write the stories of these and other surely interesting grotesques among the residents of Winesburg; but he did not, and the reader is encouraged to pursue later volumes of stories written by this author: The Triumph of the Egg (1921), Horses and Men (1923), and Death in the Woods (1933). In these three volumes are many stories, some about grotesques, that individually rival the best of the Winesburg, Ohio stories—stories that on their own are interesting and well enough fashioned to shock the careful reader with their beauty and worth.
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Refashioning Coleridge's Supernatural Trilogy: Sherwood Anderson's ‘A Man of Ideas’ and ‘Respectability.’
Sherwood Anderson and the Southern Highlands: A Sense of Place and the Sustenance of Women
