One hundred years ago this month, B.W. Huebsch published
a work of fiction quickly identified as strange and beautiful in form and time.
Opinions split, as they do now, on whether Winesburg, Ohio was only a set of
interrelated short stories or really a novel.
But critics also hailed it for marking a new
direction in American fiction, heralding a greater frankness in subject matter
and a style flowing from the realistic tradition but with its own unique turn:
Modernism, if you will.
These two dozen short stories by Sherwood Anderson (pictured) appeared
at a moment of jarring transition in American life, one that the author alluded to in these pieces.
While clearly occurring a couple
of decades after the Civil War, the incidents in the lives of these small-town
residents take place at an indeterminate point before the rise of
industrialization in that area of the Midwest and the start of WWI, or “the
beginning of the most materialistic age in the history of the world, when wars
would be fought without patriotism, when men would forget God and only pay
attention to moral standards, when the will to power would replace the will to
serve and beauty would be well-nigh forgotten in the terrible headlong rush of
mankind toward the acquiring of possessions.”
In fact, for 1919 readers, even 1913 might have
seemed an eternity ago, given all that had taken place in America since: a
World War in which young men from small towns found themselves in combat
overseas; the automobile increasingly replacing the horse as the principal
means of getting around; and Prohibition and women’s right to vote becoming the
law of the land through constitutional amendments.
Attentive readers noticed that Anderson had brought
an acute new tone to American letters. The poet Hart Crane, for instance,
wrote, “'America should read this book on her knees. It constitutes an
important chapter in the Bible of her consciousness."
Over the years, Anderson’s idea of using a set of
interconnected short stories as part of a larger narrative would be employed by
three American writers who would earn far more enduring fame (not to mention
Nobel Literature prizes): William Faulkner (Go Down, Moses), Ernest Hemingway (In Our Time), and John Steinbeck (The Red Pony).
Winesburg is based on Anderson’s hometown, Clyde,
Ohio—whose residents, after the book was published, tried to disassociate
themselves from what they regarded as scandalous subject matter.
In a recent retrospective in The New York Times, Bruce Falconer, senior editor of The American Scholar, depicted what must
have been especially galling to Anderson: “The town’s head librarian burned
copies of his book, and for many years, any patron of the Clyde Public Library
who requested it was met with a scowl as she fumbled for the key to a locked
closet where she stored, together with other ‘bad books,’ a single copy that had
somehow escaped the flames.
They weren’t up in arms over a too-close
identification between fictional characters and real-life originals, as the
hometowns of Thomas Wolfe and John O’Hara would be with, respectively, Look Homeward, Angel and Appointment in Samarra. Instead, they
were affronted by the aimlessness, alienation, and dysfunction that Anderson
depicted in this prototypical small town.
While never explicit, in the manner of D.H. Lawrence
or Henry Miller, Anderson illuminated characters variously gripped by sexual repression,
frustration, perversion and misunderstanding, including:
*Wing
Biddlebaum, a schoolteacher forced to flee another town and live under an
assumed name after his expressions of affection are mistaken as sexual advances
on a student (the story “Hands”);
*Rev. Curtis
Hartman, who glimpses a woman “lying white and quiet in bed,” smoking, and
wrestles unsuccessfully with his desire (“The Strength of God”);
*Alice Hindman,
a dry-goods store clerk who, possessing a “passionate restlessness” and aware
of the loss of her beauty, feels “full of youth and courage” as she impulsively
decides to run through the streets one rain-drenched night (“Adventure”);
*Kate Swift,
a 30-year-old unmarried schoolteacher who, in speaking to former student George
Willard, almost initiates an affair with him (“The Teacher”).
For all their loneliness, these characters are
unable to communicate their desires, which become twisted into obsessions that
only worsen their misery. The only solution is to move away, as George Willard
does at the end of the book.
In some respects, certain characters resemble
Anderson or members of his family.
*George Willard, a reporter in whom the
subjects of the tales confide, is often assumed to be a stand-in for the
author;
*Elizabeth Willard, George’s mother, finds herself in an unhappy
marriage and dies when her son is 18—circumstances much like Sherwood’s mother,
Emma Anderson; and,
*Enoch Robinson, who leaves Winesburg only to see his hopes for
success in a big city come to naught, is much like Sherwood’s brother Earl, who
had moved to Chicago, taken a job as a restaurant cashier, then turned up 13
years later in New York, having suffered a disabling stroke.
In 1934, Anderson worked on a play adaptation of his
story collection. But I don’t think that even he could have anticipated that
someday, it would be turned into a musical.
Yet that’s what happened in 2003, when Chicago’s
Steppenwolf Theater Company set it to music in a tight, 75-minute format. A
year later, after receiving much interest in that production, the company
expanded it into a full-blown musical featuring more songs, conceived by Jessica
Thebus and adapted with lyrics by Eric Rosen, as well as being composed and
with additional lyrics by André J. Pluess and Ben Sussman.
Subsequent productions took place at Philadelphia’s Arden
Theatre Company (where I saw it in the fall of 2005) and Kansas City (where it
opened in 2009). The music evoked the folk style that Anderson would have heard
early in the 20th century, complete with fiddle, mandolin and banjo.
The man who created this enduring work of fiction
was hardly an overnight success story. Only six years before, following a
nervous breakdown, Anderson—the owner of a paint factory in Elyria, Ohio—took
up in earnest the avocation he had pursued outside his business, short story
writing, leaving his wife and family for Chicago.
It was like an American
literary version of a novel by W. Somerset Maugham that he came to admire: The Moon and Sixpence. (See my
discussion of that title—which appeared in Britain only a month before Winesburg, Ohio—here.)
Anderson was only able to maintain his high level of
achievement for only about a decade. But his contribution to American
literature is permanent: writing with deep acuity and sympathy of the lives of
ordinary men and women.
