Originally published on About.com’s Classic Literature Page
I’ve recently
come to the interesting reflection that many of my American literary peers
began their reading and writing lives as Anglophiles. If a young reader has the
inclination to pursue the music that rings throughout the realms of gold that
exist in literature, it’s often the magic rhythms of Donne or Keats or Housman
that calls them in. And who on Earth is better than Shakespeare at seducing the
ear and the mind and the heart into devotion to the word? Or, just as often,
it’s the strange and striking (but psychologically familiar) allure of the
settings and subject matter of Jane Austen or the Brontës or Charles Dickens
that draws young readers into the world of books. I remember being fascinated
as a young reader by both the word choices and the inner and outer universes in
Dickens and then being utterly astounded by the quadruple pun on “coal” in the
first few lines of Romeo and Juliet. Who knew that words and sounds and
ideas could be so endlessly polysemous and associative? Although I’d been an
addicted reader ever since I first found out that you could represent spoken
words and interior thoughts by using abstract marks on paper, this
Shakespearean riff was my true initiation into the deepest mysteries of the
word.
Strangely,
though, I still didn’t become an Anglophile the way that so many other readers
did. My formative literary world was American, mostly written in my own
contemporary American English, and it was peopled by workers and loners and
misfits rather than by aristocrats in fancy dress fretting about who was going
to marry whom (this fascination came later, especially with Proust and
Tolstoy). My formative literary world was authored by Steinbeck and Hemingway and
Harper Lee and Arthur Miller—all seemingly engendered by His Holiness Mark
Twain. Then when I was a teenager reading John Dos Passos and William Faulkner
and William Saroyan and Henry Miller, I found a recurring name springing up as
another common influence among almost all of my favorite twentieth-century writers:
Sherwood Anderson. When I finally read his seminal 1919 collection, Winesburg,
Ohio, I then followed his wellspring of influence in nearly infinite
directions—initially back forward, but then nearly endlessly outward in both
time and space, always starting the process anew when I found a particularly
potent book or author or stream of writers.
Perhaps it was the fact that
Anderson was a fellow Ohioan—born in Camden, only thirty miles from my hometown
of Dayton—that made the language and world of Winesburg, Ohio so
compelling to me. Anderson had famously abandoned his family in Ohio to become
a writer, which also appealed to the young reader/writer looking toward the
larger world of artistic dedication. Anderson had moved a lot in his early
life, growing up mostly in Clyde, Ohio, in the north of the state, and then
later moving around to nearby Cleveland and then to Elyria (a city whose name
recalls the classical Illyria, the setting of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night;
also: Anderson went to college at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, a
school named after the more famous Wittenberg University in Germany, whose most
famous fictional alumnus was Hamlet). There’s a real town in northwest Ohio
named Winesburg, but most critics agree that it was Clyde, Ohio, where Anderson
lived from around age eight until age fourteen, when he was forced to quit
school and help support his family, that was the model for his most famous
book.
A kaleidoscopic panorama of
smalltown America, Winesburg, Ohio is a collection of interrelated
stories that many critics say works as a novel. Anderson most wanted to be a
novelist, but his best work was his short fiction, and perhaps the reason why Winesburg,
Ohio works so well is because its discrete tales accrete meaning and
multiply their facets as the book progresses, melding Anderson’s penetrating
gifts as a storyteller with his larger novelistic aims. This method of building
a fictional town (Anderson actually supplies a map of Winesburg and its main
haunts at the beginning of the book) and of having different stories intersect
along its streets’ intersections directly influenced William Faulkner’s “Yoknapatawpha County” series of novels and
stories, which in Absolom! Absolom! also has a map of its fictional
layout (Anderson was Faulkner’s friend and early mentor). Another excellent
(and somewhat neglected) literary landscape to which Winesburg and
Yoknapatawpha are tributaries is the “Manawaka” series of novels and stories by
Margaret Laurence—a Canadian author whose mind had surely traveled widely in
Ohio and Mississippi and in whose works the reader can actually see the people
and relationships and houses and towns reflecting off of each other and
fashioning a world as complex and as compelling as our own.
Along
with its varied interconnections, one of the ways that Winesburg,
Ohio holds together and builds to its gemlike level of refraction is
through the growing presence in the stories of George Willard, a young reporter
who interacts with and reflects the lives of Winesburg’s inhabitants. Like all
other small towns on the planet (including those outside of Ohio),
Winesburg is both friendly and solitary, full of hope and fear, and steeped in
dreams and disillusion, and because people trust him and confide in him, George Willard is one of our
main lenses into the town’s lives.
The book is written in third person, though, and so we’re privy to the thoughts
and actions of characters whose worlds of experience and memory are far beyond
the purview of George Willard’s consciousness. Through George Willard’s
eyes, through the townspeople’s eyes, and through our own eyes, we see people
and relationships evolve constantly, with no single facet remaining the same
from viewpoint to viewpoint.
There’s
almost no chance that at this point in his life Anderson could have read
Proust, who in 1919 was still revising and expanding the later volumes of In
Search of Lost Time, but evaluating Anderson in hindsight, the dynamism of Winesburg,
Ohio’s characterizations seems to parallel the way that nothing in Proust’s
world remains static or tied to any single perspective (including its
first-person narrator’s). Although critics often associate Anderson with the
literary school of American Naturalism (see Edgar Lee Masters’ 1915 Spoon
River Anthology for a similar approach), and although the technical
influence of Anderson’s writing style is seen more clearly in conventional
writers than in avant-garde ones, it seems probable that Anderson would have
been familiar with the work of Joseph Conrad, Ford Maddox Ford, Gertrude Stein,
and James Joyce, because the levels of seeing and understanding and portrayal
in Winesburg, Ohio seem to have deep affinities with many aspects of
early Modernism. Ultimately, Anderson remained a fairly conventional writer, and
even while his profound influence spread widely through writers of varying
styles (Nabokov famously declared that there was only one school of writing
that mattered: the School of Talent; and clearly the talented writers saw
Anderson’s greatness), even some of Anderson’s most beholden descendents
disclaimed him when times and styles changed. Even the deeply indebted
Hemingway and the ungracious Faulkner wrote cruel parodies of him. But while
there was some merit to their criticisms, these were probably just cases of
pupils trying to distance themselves from an early master.
Anderson’s
artistic fortunes started to diverge not long after Winesburg, Ohio, and
perhaps Hemingway and Faulkner saw this coming before anyone else. Although it
was a huge success among writers and critics, Winesburg, Ohio didn’t
sell well, and as Anderson pursued his dream of being a novelist, his works
became more popular with the public and less popular with his fellow writers.
Perhaps his was an example of a great artist following the wrong artistic
stream, both in form (the novel) and in style (conventional works for a popular
audience). Or perhaps his was yet another example of an author with only one truly
great work in him. Either way, Winesburg, Ohio is a tremendous cataract
in humanity’s endless flow of creative fiction. It’s one of the great works of
American literature, and of world literature, and for its brief 220 pages it
makes Ohio the size of ancient Greece (I’ve often mused that Anderson should
have called the book Elyria, Ohio and had one of his characters declare,
“This is Elyria, lady”).
Finishing the book as a teenager in Ohio, though, I joined George Willard on
the train as he left his hometown (“a background on which to paint the dreams
of his manhood”) and wanted the book’s final story, “Departure,” to be just the
beginning.
—David Wiley
