Sherwood Anderson and “Winesburg, Ohio”

I have but little doubt that many look at the “books and authors” section of Travalanche and walk away thinking “ya basic”. I’m a lover of classics, and this section is a sort of morgue of Dead White Males, I’m afraid. There are some women and even some women of color there but you have to scroll to find them, and that aspect I vow to improve. It’s not a conscious bias, I just like things to be sanctioned by Father Time (see, we even make the God of Time male), and naturally (or unnaturally, if you prefer) women were locked out of the citadel for most of human history. But there are a bunch of female writers I love and haven’t raved about yet so I’ll add them over the coming months.

But my conservative taste in literature also means that I pretty much cleave to what my wife calls “a tenth grade reading list” — which I’ll also cop to. It’s the other reason I suspect people will find the section basic. I have a couple of things to say in my defense with respect to that, however. One is that, this being a performing arts history blog, the books and authors I choose to write about are often selected in order to illuminate theatre, film and broadcasting arts in some way. Sometimes the works have been adapted for stage or screen. Sometimes the writers have a foot in the theatre, or have written about it or reflect it back somehow. And the other (defense? rationalization?) is that, in case you haven’t noticed, this particular elitist has fairly populist tastes and a populist philosophy. I want art to be good but I also want it to be accessed by everybody. I am in favor of promoting books that the massive non-reading American public might conceivably be induced to read and even enjoy.

Then, why write about Winesburg, Ohio, you may ask? I seem to remember my fellow 10th graders grumbling about this eminently accessible book — in Honors English, no less. Shouldn’t it be called Whinesburg, Ohio they wondered? Well, I disagreed. I love this book. I re-read it for the 3rd or 4th time not long ago. It’s not hard to do, which is why I suggest that it is accessible, of course. It’s the birthday of Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) as I write this, that man who’s name seems a confusing mash-up of those of playwrights Robert Sherwood and Robert Anderson. Anderson (Sherwood), was a substantial man in his Ohio town, a successful businessman, community leader, husband and father, who one day either had a genuine nervous breakdown (or faked one, assessments differ) and dropped out to be a writer full time. He turned out a couple of dozen books, the most popular of which in its own time was a racy novel about Jazz Age New Orleans called Dark Laughter (1925). But the laugh was ultimately on that book, for the only work of Anderson’s that remains widely read and discussed today is Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small-Town Life (1919).

Confusingly, the book is not about the actual Winesburg, Ohio, a real town, but an imagined one more based on the town of Clyde. (The name of which immediately evokes for me the anti-hero of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, which is totally irrelevant. Well somewhat irrelevant, but making the effort to connect them would be symptomatic of me losing my marbles). It is not a novel but a book of closely related short stories featuring the inhabitants of the same small rural hamlet. Some of the tales dated to about 1915. And a thread linking a lot of the book together concerns the character of a young man named George Willard, which brings it within shouting distance of a bildungsroman, but not quite.

The unique modernist structure (it’s almost Cubist, if you think about it) is one of the chief elements that commend the book. It clearly owes a debt to Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology (1915), which is a collection of free-verse poems representing the self-delivered epitaphs of the dead in a local cemetery. Here, we treat of the living, and the folks are all alive at the same time. And there is a common sad tone to their stories. They’re mostly isolated, lonely people, misfits, outcasts, sinners, or simply contrarians. Drunks, closeted homosexuals, old maids, caregivers to infirm spouses, loose women, cripples, on and on. It’s like an entire town inhabited by the accused witches of Salem. It’s melancholy and certainly unreal but it also feels sort of telling about the nature of American society or the lack thereof. Everybody’s an extreme individualist to the point of alienation and misery. The apparent critique seemed cutting edge for its time, though it’s up for grabs how much Anderson intended it as such, or whether he was simply painting true portraits that reflected the reality anyway. His relative lack of critical success apart from this book would seem to indicate that he just sort of hit the bull’s eye accidentally. But it is very well executed. And surely one can instantly think of all sorts of things that (consciously or unconsciously) owe a death to it, like Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, to Peyton Place, to the Beatles song “Eleanor Rigby”.

Anderson’s accidental early death is like something that would happen to one of his characters. So quotidian, and yet fatal nonetheless. He swallowed a toothpick while on a cruise to South America. After several days of pain, he went ashore to seek medical care. The toothpick had perforated his colon. He succumbed to peritonitis. Death: the Great Leveler.