Winesburg, Ohio | Page 5

history. The espousal of sexual freedom
would soon be exceeded in boldness by other writers. And as for the
effort to place Wines- burg, Ohio in a tradition of American realism,
that now seems dubious. Only rarely is the object of An- derson's
stories social verisimilitude, or the "photo- graphing" of familiar
appearances, in the sense, say, that one might use to describe a novel by
Theodore Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis. Only occasionally, and then with a
very light touch, does Anderson try to fill out the social arrangements
of his imaginary town--although the fact that his stories are set in 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-