Winesburg, Ohio | Page 7

characterized it was not
so much "groping" as the imitation of "groping," the self-caricature of a
writer who feels driven back upon an earlier self that is, alas, no longer
available.
But Winesburg, Ohio remains a vital work, fresh and authentic. Most of
its stories are composed in a minor key, a tone of subdued
pathos--pathos mark- ing both the nature and limit of Anderson's talent.
(He spoke of himself as a "minor writer.") In a few stories, however, he
was able to reach beyond pa- thos and to strike a tragic note. The single

best story in Winesburg, Ohio is, I think, "The Untold Lie," in which
the urgency of choice becomes an outer sign of a tragic element in the
human condition. And in Anderson's single greatest story, "The Egg,"
which appeared a few years after Winesburg, Ohio, he suc- ceeded in
bringing together a surface of farce with an undertone of tragedy. "The
Egg" is an American masterpiece.
Anderson's influence upon later American writ- ers, especially those
who wrote short stories, has been enormous. Ernest Hemingway and
William Faulkner both praised him as a writer who brought a new
tremor of feeling, a new sense of introspec- tiveness to the American
short story. As Faulkner put it, Anderson's "was the fumbling for
exactitude, the exact word and phrase within the limited scope of a
vocabulary controlled and even repressed by what was in him almost a
fetish of simplicity ... to seek always to penetrate to thought's uttermost
end." And in many younger writers who may not even be aware of the
Anderson influence, you can see touches of his approach, echoes of his
voice.
Writing about the Elizabethan playwright John Ford, the poet Algernon
Swinburne once said: "If he touches you once he takes you, and what
he takes he keeps hold of; his work becomes part of your thought and
parcel of your spiritual furniture forever." So it is, for me and many
others, with Sherwood Anderson.

To the memory of my 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, this book is dedicated.

THE TALES AND THE PERSONS

THE BOOK OF THE GROTESQUE

THE WRITER, an old man with a white mustache, had some difficulty
in getting into bed. The windows of the house in which he lived were
high and he wanted to look at the trees when he awoke in the morning.
A carpenter came to fix the bed so that it would be on a level with the
window.
Quite a fuss was made about the matter. The car- penter, who had been
a soldier in the Civil War, came into the writer's room and sat down to
talk of building a platform for the purpose of raising the bed. The writer
had cigars lying about and the car- penter smoked.
For a time the two men talked of the raising of the bed and then they
talked of other things. The soldier got on the subject of the war. The
writer, in fact, led him to that subject. The carpenter had once been a
prisoner in Andersonville prison and had lost a brother. The brother had
died of starvation, and whenever the carpenter got upon that subject he
cried. He, like the old writer, had a white mustache, and when he cried
he puckered up his lips and the mustache bobbed up and down. The
weeping old man with the cigar in his mouth was ludicrous. The plan
the writer had for the raising of his bed was forgotten and later the
carpenter did it in his own way and the writer, who was past sixty, had
to help himself with a chair when he went to bed at night.
In his bed the writer rolled over on his side and lay quite still. For years
he had been beset with no- tions concerning his heart. He was a hard
smoker and his heart fluttered. The idea had got into his mind that he
would some time die unexpectedly and always when he got into bed he
thought of that. It did not alarm him. The effect in fact was quite a
special thing and not easily explained. It made him more alive, there in
bed, than at any other time. Perfectly still he lay and his body was old
and not of much use any more, but something inside him was
altogether young. He was like a pregnant woman, only that the thing
inside him was not a baby but a youth. No, it wasn't a youth, it was a
woman, young, and wearing a coat of mail like a knight. It is absurd,

you see, to try to tell what was