Winesburg, Ohio | Page 6

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 the old Doctor Reefy sits "in his empty office close by a window
that was covered with cobwebs," writes down some thoughts on slips of
paper ("pyr- amids of truth," he calls them) and then stuffs them into
his pockets where they "become round hard balls" soon to be discarded.
What Dr. Reefy's "truths" may be we never know; Anderson simply
persuades us that to this lonely old man they are utterly precious and
thereby incommunicable, forming a kind of blurred moral signature.
After a time the attentive reader will notice in these stories a recurrent
pattern of theme and inci- dent: the grotesques, gathering up a little
courage, venture out into the streets of Winesburg, often in the dark,
there to establish some initiatory relation- ship with George Willard,
the young reporter who hasn't yet lived long enough to become a
grotesque. Hesitantly, fearfully, or with a sputtering incoherent rage,
they approach him, pleading that he listen to their stories in the hope
that perhaps they can find some sort of renewal in his youthful voice.
Upon this sensitive and fragile boy they pour out their desires and
frustrations. Dr. Parcival hopes that George Willard "will write the
book I may never get written," and for Enoch Robinson, the boy repre-
sents "the youthful sadness, young man's sadness, the sadness of a
growing boy in a village at the year's end [which may open] the lips of
the old man."
What the grotesques really need is each other, but their estrangement is
so extreme they cannot estab- lish direct ties--they can only hope for
connection through George Willard. The burden this places on the boy
is more than he can bear. He listens to them attentively, he is
sympathetic to their complaints, but finally he is too absorbed in his
own dreams. The grotesques turn to him because he seems "dif-
ferent"--younger, more open, not yet hardened-- but it is precisely this
"difference" that keeps him from responding as warmly as they want. It
is hardly the boy's fault; it is simply in the nature of things. For George
Willard, the grotesques form a moment in his education; for the
grotesques, their encounters with George Willard come to seem like a
stamp of hopelessness.

The prose Anderson employs in telling these sto- ries may seem at first
glance to be simple: short sen- tences, a sparse vocabulary,
uncomplicated syntax. In actuality, Anderson developed an artful style
in which, following Mark Twain and preceding Ernest Hemingway, he
tried to use American speech as the base of a tensed rhythmic prose that
has an econ- omy and a shapeliness seldom found in ordinary speech or
even oral narration. What Anderson em- ploys here is a stylized version
of the American lan- guage, sometimes rising to quite formal rhetorical
patterns and sometimes sinking to a self-conscious mannerism. But at
its best, Anderson's prose style in Winesburg, Ohio is a supple
instrument, yielding that "low fine music" which he admired so much
in the stories of Turgenev.
One of the worst fates that can befall a writer is that of self-imitation:
the effort later in life, often desperate, to recapture the tones and themes
of youthful beginnings. Something of the sort hap- pened with
Anderson's later writings. Most critics and readers grew impatient with
the work he did after, say, 1927 or 1928; they felt he was constantly
repeating his gestures of emotional "groping"-- what he had called in
Winesburg, Ohio the "indefin- able hunger" that prods and torments
people. It be- came the critical fashion to see Anderson's "gropings" as
a sign of delayed adolescence, a fail- ure to develop as a writer. Once
he wrote a chilling reply to those who dismissed him in this way: "I
don't think it matters much, all this calling a man a muddler, a groper,
etc.... The very man who throws such words as these knows in his heart
that he is also facing a wall." This remark seems to me both dignified
and strong, yet it must be admitted that there was some justice in the
negative re- sponses to his later work. For what