Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section,
Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.
“WINESBURG, OHIO” by Sherwood Anderson (first published in
1919)
A number of
times before on this blog, I have mentioned how difficult I find it to assess
fairly a well-known book, when I have already heard many opinions expressed
about it before I have actually read it.
For me, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio is the supreme example
of this problem.
Before reading Winesburg, Ohio, I already knew that
Anderson (1876-1941) was regarded as a faded early American Modernist, a small
town “life’s enormous trivialities” man, and a stylistic precursor to Ernest
Hemingway and others, who did the deadpan style better than Anderson himself
did. I knew (because at one stage I read nearly all of Hemingway’s work) that
Hemingway was at first influenced by Anderson, but then turned against him.
Indeed, I’d read young Hemingway’s piss-take The Torrents of Spring, which is a kick in the pants to the man he
once admired and a parody of Anderson’s novel Dark Laughter. Dark Laughter
(which I have not read) was the only bestseller Anderson produced in his
lifetime; but it is now out-of-print and scorned for its dated racial epithets
and naïve attitudes to sex. Further, I knew that despite its modest reputation,
Winesburg, Ohio continued and
continues to have its devotees (in Sarah Shieff’s collection of Frank Sargeson’s
letters, you will find a drafted fan letter the youthful Sargeson intended to
send to Anderson). It is often re-published and studied on college courses, and
is the only work of Anderson’s that has survived.
There now. All this I knew before
I sat down six years ago and for the first time read Winesburg, Ohio. So quite
a lot was jangling in my head as I read. And, to put it very bluntly, the book
basically confirmed all the negative things I had heard.
Published in 1919, but largely
written in 1915-16 when Anderson was about 40, Winesburg, Ohio is a short-story cycle. Its subtitle is “A Group of
Tales of Ohio Small-Town Life”. Despite its date of publication, the stories
clearly spring from Anderson’s youth and seem to be set in the 1890s. Buggies,
railways, horses and lamplighters feature in the stories – not automobiles,
electric lighting etc.
Some of the collection’s
twenty-one stories concern George Willard, a young reporter on the local
Winesburg newspaper. He is clearly Anderson’s alter ego, the equivalent of
Hemingway’s Nick Adams. An early story tells us of George Willard’s mother
Elizabeth, who had an unsettled and unhappy series of love affairs before
marrying George’s father. George is witness to the actions of a number of other
characters in the stories, and confidant to some of them. The final two stories
in the collection have him farewelling the young woman whom he thought he
loved, and heading off to the big city.
In one sense, then, the framing
idea of the collection is the young man’s growing up, and out-growing the
restricted Midwestern small town that the collection depicts. But, despite
this, the collection does not really hang together as an account of a young
man’s growth, which is what it may have been intended to be.
The chief impact is the impact of
the individual stories. They are accounts of lonely, eccentric, isolated or
emotionally-thwarted individuals trapped in small-town life. The homosexual
schoolteacher (in the story “Hands”) escaping charges of child-molestation. The
farmer who becomes a religious fanatic and sees himself as an Old Testament
patriarch (“Terror”). The Peeping Tom parson (“The Strength of God”). The
frustrated and ageing spinster who runs naked in the rain (“Adventure”); and
any number of young men disgruntled by their limited horizons and the
littleness of things.
In 1919, some of the sexual
references (though very tame now) must have seemed very frank. Whether
influenced by them or not (and I know nothing of Anderson’s working methods or
inspiration), Anderson was in line of descent with Chekhov, Joyce and Mansfield
in attempting to present psychological character studies in terms of focused
events, rather than in terms of ingenious and developed plot. And yet he lacks
the stylistic concentration that those other writers have. While on the verge
of the type of clipped understatement that Hemingway and others developed,
Anderson can’t hold back from passages of romantic dithyramb and sheer purple
prose. Worse, he has the habit of explaining things that should be implicit; of
spelling out in so many words things that we should be able to deduce from
action and dialogue. Much of the book therefore seems very clumsy.
Or am I unfairly judging this
collection because I am more used to the spare, allusive style that has become
the norm in short stories since the time Anderson was writing?
A similar problem is presented by
Anderson’s subject matter. The cold wind of loneliness now whistles through
numerous books about small town life from many parts of the globe (reading Winesburg, Ohio, I couldn’t help having
images of Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s Taranaki eccentrics). The subject matter has
become a cliché.
Again, this is an unfair
judgement. People confined and (literally) maddened by dull small towns may be
a cliché now, but wasn’t in 1919.
How would I recommend this book,
then? I would recommend it as an historical artefact – something to remind us
what was advanced writing a century ago. And if that sounds too patronising and
backhanded, I would add that it would be excellent to put into the hands of the
right sort of adolescent. There’s never anything wrong in showing them that
everyday life is worth writing about, and that extreme feelings can exist in
the most mundane setting.
As I remarked of Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae [see blog comments thereon via index at
right], I’m sorry I didn’t read this one when I was 16 or 17. At that age, Winesburg, Ohio would probably have
bowled me over.
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