Such a Rare Thing

The Art of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio

Clarence Lindsay

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781612775883
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

An important contribution to the field of American literary studies

"Groundbreaking work in Anderson scholarship in particular and, on the wider scene, in American literary studies."
—Robert Dunne, author of A New Book of the Grotesques: Contemporary Approaches to Sherwood Anderson's Early Fiction

This critical study of Sherwood Anderson's most famous and perhaps most widely taught work, Winesburg, Ohio, treats it as a thoroughly modernist novel examining the aesthetic nature of romantic identity.

Author Clarence Lindsay argues that Anderson's famous theory of the Grotesque is a theory of American identity. Each of the small town's grotesques in effect authors a romantic narrative that privileges the self. In trying to live their lives by that narrative, each enacts a romantic selfhood. Each of these romantic selfhoods is an aesthetic enterprise, complicated by all the aesthetic issues relating to artist and audience. Every crisis in the novel is an aesthetic crisis; every comedy, every tragedy is an aesthetic misstep of some sort. Lindsay proposes that all moral issues in Winesburg, Ohio are aesthetic; all aesthetic issues are moral. Winesburg's narrator's careful attention to characters' romantic narratives of self provides an ironic scrutiny of not only the astonishing varieties of American romantic identity but also a painstaking interrogation of a variety of romantic discourses. Anderson's radical formal innovation, the interrelated tale, was the perfect American form, not only allowing for the narrator's "democracy of fascination" with the grotesques' absolutely equal competing singularities but also providing for the comic juxtaposition of these claims on uniqueness, a jostling that subverts the traditional novel's emphasis on the singular individual.

This first sustained critical analysis of this American classic restores Anderson to the top rank of American artists, placing him alongside other intense scrutinizers of American romanticism: Hawthorne, Melville, and Hemingway.

CHAPTER 1

“I Belong in Little Towns”

Anderson’s Provincial Postmodernism

In my stories I simply stayed at home, among my own people, wherever I happened to be, people in my own street. I think I must, very early, have realized that this was my own milieu, that is to say, common everyday American lives. The ordinary beliefs of the people about me, that love lasted indefinitely, that success meant happiness, simply did not seem true to me. (Letter to George Freitag, Letters 403)

“The eastern men, among whom I had now come, were perhaps right in demanding something more than courage from American artists,” I began telling myself. It was apparent there were two steps necessary and it might well be that we middlewestern men had taken but one step. One had first of all to face one’s materials, accept fully the life about, quit running off in fancy to India, to England, to the South Seas. We Americans had to begin to stay, in spirit at least, at home. We had to accept our materials, face our materials. (A Story Teller’s Story 287)

Before examining the nature of Anderson’s art and its particular discoveries, which will be the focus of the succeeding chapters, I want first to look at the circumstances that may have given rise to his art and how those circumstances may have worked against Anderson’s critical reputation. I begin with Anderson’s reflections related to staying home for two reasons. First, the formal innovations in Winesburg, Ohio are connected to Anderson’s relationship to the small town. Among the most experimental and postmodernist in the modernist canon, those technical innovations formally express Anderson’s problematic psychological relationship to his small-town origins.¹ The seemingly sympathetic and non-overtly judgmental narrator, the narrator’s digressions, the textuality of all the relationships, and the related tale nature of this collection of short stories are the formal equivalents of certain aspects of the small town. Second, while his compulsive and often compelling commitment to the Midwest and to the small town is the source of Anderson’s genius, this commitment explains why we have not read him carefully.

The epigraphs beginning this chapter do not introduce any sort of celebration of small-town virtues, at least not those virtues that we normally associate with the village. The notion of staying home was connected rather closely to other Anderson ideas: the value of littleness and corresponding theories regarding bigness; the acceptance, but not affirmation, of the life about him, both aesthetic and personal; the similarity between visiting Europe and visiting the past, as opposed to staying home in the small-town American present; and even his own aesthetic relationship to the small town as opposed to the city. These notions are inseparably intertwined throughout Anderson’s autobiographies, essays, and letters. When Anderson talks about one, he metaphorically talks about the others. Anderson’s thinking about these related subjects is very nearly obsessive. In fact, his frequent and astute comments on the Midwest arguably make Anderson a major theorist regarding the way the Midwest is constructed and the way those constructions affect those who live there.²

Anderson’s many comments on the small town convey his distinctive sense of its special qualities. Just as Anderson is a major theorist regarding the Midwest, he is also one of our first intellectual thinkers regarding the complexities of the small town. His intellectualism is, however, hidden, first because he works from a very restricted vocabulary and second because he conveys that intellectual complexity artistically through parables. He comes to the subject of small towns frequently, indirectly and directly, throughout his autobiographies and letters. When Anderson first went to Chicago, acting out the familiar small-town drama of escape to the big city, his experience was typical and disillusioning. Forced to work at hard physical warehouse labor with hard physical warehouse types, Anderson used the Spanish-American War as a way of escaping the demeaning, futureless job in Chicago to return, if not triumphantly then at least with a good patriotic excuse, to the town that he had fled only a few years before. In those days, it was still customary to raise regiments and other units entirely from a particular town or area, so it was possible to go off to war with friends. The enlisted men were likely the same age and had gone to school together, and the officers were older but from the several social layers of the originating town. Anderson comments on this odd feature on several occasions, contrasting it with the more modern practices of the First World War, ostensibly but clearly sarcastically approving of the newer impersonal techniques for waging war. The following passages from A Story Teller’s Story describing the dynamics among the boys and men in his newly raised regiment reveal the contradictions and tensions of the small town from which sprang his greatest work:

And so there we were, just boys from an Ohio country town, with officers from the same town, in a wood in the South being made into soldiers, and I am much afraid not taking the whole affair too seriously. The captain of our company had been a janitor of a public building back in Ohio, the first lieutenant was a celery raiser on a small farm near our town and the second lieutenant had been a knife grinder in a cutlery factory. (206)

As for the officers, well, it was to be admitted that in military affairs they knew more than ourselves, but there the superiority ended. It would be just as well for none of them to attempt to put on too much side when we were drilling or were not on actual military duty. The war would soon be over and after a time we would all be going back home. An officer might conceivably “get away” with some sort of injustice for the moment—but a year from now, when we were all at home again. . . . Did the fool want to take the chance of four or five huskies giving him a beating some night in an alleyway? (206–7)

They discuss their officers, the position of the officer in relation to his men. “I think it’s all right,” says a doctor’s son. “Ed and Doug are all right. They have to live off by themselves and act as though they were something special, kind of grand and wise and gaudy. It’s a kind of bluff, I guess, that has to be kept up only I should think it would be kind of tough on them. I should think they might get to feeling they were something special and get themselves into a mess.” (207–8)

These passages illustrate a fair number of separate and important issues. In the first passage, Anderson identifies a familiar and often sentimentalized aspect of the small-town sensibility, a suspiciousness of grandness and overstatement, a habit of “not taking [things] too seriously.” Such a self-conscious, antiromantic posture is a shrewd Will Rogers small-town debunking of big-city/national pretentious bombast. Anderson’s subsequent statements suggest, however, something beyond this stereotypical and sentimental small-town refusal to get too revved up over puffery. It’s not, as we might have suspected, a matter of the wholesome goodness of the small-town folk who know phoniness when they see it, know falseness because they have not been corrupted, because they are “real.” Anderson carefully moves beyond such easy sentimentality. The second and third passages suggest that small-town folk have big-time desires, that they either would or might express the full weight of their selves’ imperious desires if only they could “get away” with it. But they can’t because everyone knows them, because the town is, in a very real sense, still with them. The town knows who these men really are, knows the enormous gap between what they might aspire to and what they have come from and will have to return to. James Gatz can’t be Jay Gatsby at home in North Dakota. It is not just that those aspirers would feel uncomfortable or embarrassed being caught out by the home folk when they indulge in their pretenses. It is more than that. It is dangerous. Anderson hints at a variation of the “you can’t go home again” theme. His amended version goes something like this: if you pretend to be something that you are not, “put on too much side,” you had better not go home again. Right alongside the familiar small-town comedy, the robust pastoral lads (“huskies”) justifiably taking down a peg or two someone who’s gotten a bit too big for his britches, Anderson manages to convey a real violence with words (“beating”) that do not quite fit the more acceptable and comfortable context. He also gets at a sense of the unjust and disproportionate mob punishment of the one who dared the “injustice.”³ In the second passage, Anderson cleverly insinuates a real tension between the desire for specialness and home. All the warm associations in a phrase like “back home” are jostled a bit. That enduringly effective phrase is pried loose from its normal meanings of nurturing, refuge, and pure numinous space by means of that beating, done secretly out of public view in the alleyway.

The third passage offers other complications and issues. It hints at a complicating class drama related to the notion of the self’s aspirations as they are expressed in “Doug and Ed,” the first names themselves tropes of the leveling and restraining knowledge of the small town. We’ve been told that the company’s officers are a janitor (the captain), a celery raiser (the first lieutenant), and a knife grinder in a cutlery factory (the second lieutenant). We don’t know if these were indeed the occupations of the officers or whether Anderson created these details for their significant effect. Anderson consistently confessed—actually boasted—that he manipulated or lied about details in his autobiographies in order to get at the “essential truth.”⁴ Whatever the case, these occupations strike us forcefully as being just beyond the edge of realism. The occupations are either contrived or presented so as to blunt any of the normal kinds of romanticizing that we might want to attach to them (celery raiser instead of farmer, for example). Thus, they offer the circumstances that explain the need to exaggerate one’s self-worth. The words of the doctor’s son, who might very well be especially sensitive to the reversal of class prerogatives, may convey class conflicts and the peculiar tension between what Anderson identified as the American disease, the self’s hunger for specialness and the subtle but permeating system of class as it existed in small-town midwestern America. But in the doctor’s son’s voice and point of view, something else exists, something that sets Anderson’s work apart from that of his chief rivals, Hawthorne, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, those other students of American selfhood. By selfhood, I mean the artistic enterprise of asserting an identity, the “truth” or narrative that someone has claimed as his or her own (see the introduction for a fuller discussion of the prologue tale’s fable of identity).

When I say, “sets Anderson’s work apart,” I am not arguing Anderson’s superiority, but rather a conspicuous difference in tone or attitude in response to some of the tough-minded insights that Anderson shares with these other writers. When the doctor’s son says, “Ed and Doug are all right,” he strikes a different tone than does Hawthorne’s narrator toward Young Goodman Brown’s spiritual ambitiousness. The doctor’s son assesses his townsmen from a radically different perspective from that of any of Hawthorne’s narrators or Fitzgerald’s or Hemingway’s. His manner of speaking claims a knowledge, an experience, that those other narrators do not claim. The doctor’s son knows the officers in a different way. In that “Ed and Doug are all right,” there is a wealth of information regarding the relationship of the speaker to the men. That statement could only be made with a certain kind of conclusive knowledge based on intimate experience through time. We infer this knowledge from the idiomatic import of the phrase itself; from the first names shortened to nicknames; and from the context, a man talking about people he has lived with. The doctor’s son reveals a special empathy, an imaginative entrance into the officers’ lives based not solely on his imaginative powers but also on his knowledge of their circumstances (“I should think it would be kind of tough on them”). Apparently speaking from a knowledge of his town (like the narrator, he may know the kinds of punishments likely to be meted out to small-town Icaruses) and from a real knowledge of the officers’ circumstances (at least he knows they are not especially special), he empathetically and sympathetically constructs their futures: “I should think they might get to feeling they were something special and get themselves into a mess.”

That last statement serves as a consciously understated rubric for a great number of American fiction’s most notorious figures. The doctor’s son might be talking about Young Goodman Brown, Ahab, James Gatz, Dick Diver, Frederic Henry, Quentin Compson, or Thomas Sutpen. All leave home. Sometimes it’s just a short trip into the forest, sometimes the past, but they all get to feeling they’re pretty special and get into pretty bad messes.⁵ Anderson knows, to one degree or another, what these other writers know: that their characters leave home because they feel the need for a larger canvas, because they can’t accept the impossibly limited narratives they have had the bad luck to be born into. Just as Gatsby believes that he can’t possibly belong to his very ordinary parents, all see themselves as belonging somewhere else. American fiction is, to a large extent, a fiction of exile, and the grand figures of that fiction see themselves as changelings.

In his best work, Anderson keeps his heroes at home. For him, the small town, home, is where the essential American drama of identity is most intensely felt. Home is where the sense of limitations is so at odds with the self’s it hungers for grandness. All through the autobiographies, Anderson comments on the peculiar restlessness of the American Midwest, especially of the small town. He refers to the hastiness of the building, the flimsiness of the construction, conveying the sense of impermanence:

Let us (in fancy) imagine for a moment an American lad walking alone at evening in the streets of an American town.

American towns and in particular American towns of the Middle West of twenty years ago were not built for beauty, they were not built to be lived in permanently. A dreadful desire of escape, of physical escape, must have got, like a disease, into our fathers’ brains. How they pitched the cities and towns together! What an insanity! . . .

The lad of our fancy walks in the streets of a town hurriedly thrown together, striving to dream his dreams, and must continue to walk in the midst of such ugliness. The cheap hurried ugly construction of American physical life still goes on and on. The idea of permanent residence has not taken hold on us. (A Story Teller’s Story 60)

No hint here of any heartland mythologies, no sense of sweet place. In fact, Anderson says again and again that to be an American is to have no sense of place: “No man in America quite expected to stay where he happened to be at the moment. Really it was hardly worth while making the spot express himself” (A Story Teller’s Story 291); “Often I have asked myself whether, in America, anyone lived anywhere at all. . . . Why have not Americans begun to accept their cities and towns and begun to live in them?” (A Story Teller’s Story 295). When Anderson goes to Europe, like almost every other significant American writer (and some not so significant), he notes essential differences. For the most part, however, Anderson resists the allure that attracted so many of his contemporaries and those who came before, the appeal of the rich and heavy European past (“We did not want to spend our lives living in the past, dreaming over the dead past of a Europe from which we were separated by a wide ocean” [A Story Teller’s Story 315]).

America’s relationship to Europe, especially its cultural relationship, is a subject that preoccupies him in his various autobiographies and his letters and essays. Just as these autobiographies, particularly A Story Teller’s Story, are rich, complicated meditations on the subjects of the Midwest and the dynamics of the small town, so too are they among the richest American meditations on America and its relationship to its European past. Much of the richness is more artistic than intellectual because Anderson conveys the complexity parabolically in stories that appear deceptively simple. As he does with all issues that preoccupy him, he doubles back, undermining positions he has just presented, often with a story whose implications slyly run counter to an assertion he has just made. These autobiographies need to be examined aesthetically as well as viewed as a record of Anderson’s intellectual perspectives. At times, Anderson apparently finds much to value in Europe, often sounding a bit like Lawrence celebrating the more instinctive life of the European (see A Story Teller’s Story 289). Finally, though, he does not hanker after Europe. Even where Europe would seem to have clear superiority, in its valuing of culture and the artist, Anderson warily but definitely affirms America, claiming that Europe accepts the artist because “they know how harmless he really is—or rather do not know how subtly dangerous he can really be” (A Story Teller’s Story 217). Artists in Europe are not feared because they have less to expose, whereas America promises so much. Americans aspire to so much that the artist who registers the gap between the aching desire and the truth is indeed dangerous. Anderson’s commitment to America is on several levels: aesthetically, as a craftsman he accepts his small-town American materials (see the second epigraph at the beginning of this chapter); aesthetically and morally, he believes those materials to be superior because the stakes are higher. And he also embraces the profoundly American commitment to living in the present and looking toward the future, a future that unquestionably belongs to America: “The future of the western world lay with America. Everyone knew that. In Europe they knew it better than they did in America” (A Story Teller’s Story 315).

He is, however, positively impressed that Europeans have a sense of a relationship to place. They accept their place because they do not have the American need for specialness. In an essay on Alfred Stieglitz, after Anderson notes the peculiar American anxiety, a “great uncertainty, roots trying to go down into American soil” (Writer at His Craft 37), he comments on the different relationship to place in Europe:

It was English skies in the Englishman, French skies in the Frenchman, sense of fields, horizons, of place in man. Man in a place he knows, feels related to. “Life has gone on a long time here. Our sins on our own heads.

“We are men standing here. We will not pretend to be something greater, more splendid than we are.

“I will accept myself in my own place and time.” (Writer at His Craft 38)

While Anderson values this positive European relationship to place, which depends on an acceptance of one’s own time and place and, significantly, on an acceptance of oneself, he doesn’t want to go there aesthetically. He committed himself irrevocably to staying home, not because that home represented any of the appealing small-town mythologies, nor because it represented the sense of acceptance of place he found in Europe. From the epigraph that begins this chapter, we see clearly that Anderson is not expressing an emotional co...