Winesburg, Ohio | Page 8

inside the old writer as he lay on his
high bed and listened to the fluttering of his heart. The thing to get at is
what the writer, or the young thing within the writer, was thinking
about.
The old writer, like all of the people in the world, had got, during his
long fife, a great many notions in his head. He had once been quite
handsome and a number of women had been in love with him. And
then, of course, he had known people, many people, known them in a
peculiarly intimate way that was different from the way in which you
and I know people. At least that is what the writer thought and the
thought pleased him. Why quarrel with an old man concerning his
thoughts?
In the bed the writer had a dream that was not a dream. As he grew
somewhat sleepy but was still conscious, figures began to appear before
his eyes. He imagined the young indescribable thing within himself
was driving a long procession of figures be- fore his eyes.
You see the interest in all this lies in the figures that went before the
eyes of the writer. They were all grotesques. All of the men and women
the writer had ever known had become grotesques.
The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some almost
beautiful, and one, a woman all drawn out of shape, hurt the old man
by her grotesqueness. When she passed he made a noise like a small
dog whimpering. Had you come into the room you might have
supposed the old man had unpleasant dreams or perhaps indigestion.
For an hour the procession of grotesques passed before the eyes of the
old man, and then, although it was a painful thing to do, he crept out of
bed and began to write. Some one of the grotesques had made a deep
impression on his mind and he wanted to describe it.
At his desk the writer worked for an hour. In the end he wrote a book
which he called "The Book of the Grotesque." It was never published,
but I saw it once and it made an indelible impression on my mind. The
book had one central thought that is very strange and has always

remained with me. By re- membering it I have been able to understand
many people and things that I was never able to under- stand before.
The thought was involved but a simple statement of it would be
something like this:
That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great
many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths
himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts.
All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.
The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not try
to tell you of all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the truth
of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy,
of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths
and they were all beautiful.
And then the people came along. Each as he ap- peared snatched up
one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen
of them.
It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had
quite an elaborate theory concern- ing the matter. It was his notion that
the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it
his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the
truth he embraced became a falsehood.
You can see for yourself how the old man, who had spent all of his life
writing and was filled with words, would write hundreds of pages
concerning this matter. The subject would become so big in his mind
that he himself would be in danger of becom- ing a grotesque. He didn't,
I suppose, for the same reason that he never published the book. It was
the young thing inside him that saved the old man.
Concerning the old carpenter who fixed the bed for the writer, I only
mentioned him because he,
THE BOOK OF THE GROTESQUE 7

like many of what are called very common people, became the nearest
thing to what is understandable and lovable of all the grotesques in the
writer's book.

HANDS
UPON THE HALF decayed veranda of a small frame house that stood
near the edge of a ravine near the town of Winesburg, Ohio, a fat little
old man walked nervously up and down. Across a long field that had
been seeded for clover