Winesburg, Ohio | Page 5

a mid-American place like Winesburg does constitute an important formative condition. You might even say, with only slight overstatement, that what An- derson is doing in Winesburg, Ohio could be de- scribed as "antirealistic," fictions notable less for precise locale and social detail than for a highly per- sonal, even strange vision of American life. Narrow, intense, almost claustrophobic, the result is a book about extreme states of being, the collapse of men and women who have lost their psychic bearings and now hover, at best tolerated, at the edge of the little community in which they live. It would be a gross mistake, though not one likely to occur by now, if we were to take Winesburg, Ohio as a social photograph of "the typical small town" (whatever that might be.) Anderson evokes a depressed land- scape in which lost souls wander about; they make their flitting appearances mostly in the darkness of night, these stumps and shades of humanity. This vision has its truth, and at its best it is a terrible if narrow truth--but it is itself also grotesque, with the tone of the authorial voice and the mode of composi- tion forming muted signals of the book's content. Figures like Dr. Parcival, Kate Swift, and Wash Wil- liams are not, nor are they meant to be, "fully- rounded" characters such as we can expect in realis- tic fiction; they are the shards of life, glimpsed for a moment, the debris of suffering and defeat. In each story one of them emerges, shyly or with a false assertiveness, trying to reach out to compan- ionship and love, driven almost mad by the search for human connection. In the economy of Winesburg these grotesques matter less in their own right than as agents or symptoms of that "indefinable hunger" for meaning which is Anderson's preoccupation.
Brushing against one another, passing one an- other in the streets or the fields, they see bodies and hear voices, but it does not really matter--they are disconnected, psychically lost. Is this due to the par- ticular circumstances of small-town America as An- derson saw it at the turn of the century? Or does he feel that he is sketching an inescapable human condition which makes all of us bear the burden of loneliness? Alice Hindman in the story "Adventure" turns her face to the wall and tries "to force herself to face the fact that many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg." Or especially in Wines- burg? Such impressions have been put in more gen- eral terms in Anderson's only successful novel, Poor White:
All men lead their lives behind a wall of misun-
derstanding they have themselves built, and
most men die in silence and unnoticed behind
the walls. Now and then a man, cut off from
his fellows by the peculiarities of his nature, be-
comes absorbed in doing something that is per-
sonal, useful and beautiful. Word of his activities
is carried over the walls.
These "walls" of misunderstanding are only sel- dom due to physical deformities (Wing Biddlebaum in "Hands") or oppressive social arrangements (Kate Swift in "The Teacher.") Misunderstanding, loneli- ness, the inability to articulate, are all seen by An- derson as virtually a root condition, something deeply set in our natures. Nor are these people, the grotesques, simply to be pitied and dismissed; at some point in their lives they have known desire, have dreamt of ambition, have hoped for friendship. In all of them there was once something sweet, "like the twisted little apples that grow in the orchards in Winesburg." Now, broken and adrift, they clutch at some rigid notion or idea, a "truth" which turns out to bear the stamp of monomania, leaving them helplessly sputtering, desperate to speak out but un- able to. Winesburg, Ohio registers the losses inescap- able to life, and it does so with a deep fraternal sadness, a sympathy casting a mild glow over the entire book. "Words," as the American writer Paula Fox has said, "are nets through which all truth es- capes." Yet what do we have but words?
They want, these Winesburg grotesques*, to unpack their hearts, to release emotions buried and fes- tering. Wash Williams tries to explain his eccentricity but hardly can; Louise Bentley "tried to talk but could say nothing"; Enoch Robinson retreats to a fantasy world, inventing "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."
In his own somber way, Anderson has here touched upon one of the great themes of American literature, especially Midwestern literature, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the struggle for speech as it entails a search for the self. Perhaps the central Winesburg story, tracing the basic movements of the book, is "Paper Pills," in which