Archeology: Digging Underneath Ohio Cities

Now that I've finished reading the collection of vignettes that is Winesburg, Ohio, I can better see its faint connection to Knockemstiff. And it is a connection of place.

Sherwood Anderson wrote Winesburg in 1919, and he finds his personal expression in the character George Willard, the man-child newspaper reporter in a village so small it could fit on a mantel as Christmas decorations.

Three things struck me, literary-wise, in the small volume I read that was issued in 1958 as part of the Viking Portable Library series. First, a book that offers a map of the area in which the story takes place does the reader's imagination a disservice. When the face-to-face book club read Song Yet Sung this winter, several members thought the story would have been easier to follow if the author had included a map. At the time, I thought so as well. Thinking back now, the undeveloped primitive flood plains of the Maryland shore convey as sense of fluidity and danger that echoes the flux of the society in which the characters struggle. In the case of Winesburg, the place comes across small and rigid when the characters walk the grid of the town and all townsfolk have an assigned task without duplication: one grocer, druggist, doctor, banker, minister. Winesburg is self-contained and comfortable with a daily rhythm of the train schedule and a yearly cycle wholly agarian. The map states the obvious: you can't get lost in Winesburg as long as you know where you belong in it.

Second, a bad introduction is worse than a bad review. Here someone named Malcolm Cowley writes as though he is conducting a comparative literature lecture in mid-American novels. He points out all of Anderson's flaws, from shifts in verb tenses, to personality quirks ending in the breakup of friendships and mentoring advice with several contemporary authors. (It would be like an introduction to the Wright stories emphasizing how below code the wiring and heating systems were.) He faults Anderson's writing as lacking structure and development, saying his stories are set in the moment, like "a flash of lightning that revealed a life without changing it." But then goes on to say this is exactly what works for Winesburg, redeeming itself with the incorporation of the reflective three final chapters.

Finally, Anderson himself introduced the stories with a chapter called "the Book of the Grotesque." (Little could he imagine the scary people in Knockemstiff.) Nevertheless, he protests too much. The townsfolk are not dangerous, deformed, spiteful or in trouble with the law. Their fantasies and motives, when disclosed, are the stuff of human foibles not deviant mental health or perversions. If Anderson recalls the people from his hometown (Clyde, Ohio) as specters in his dreams, they are ghostly, not fleshed out fully, and silent.

And so, Winesburg itself is a phantom, another ghost town, not caused by chronic rust-belt unemployment like Knockemstiff with its citizen-zombies zonked out of their mind with illegal drugs, but simply by the passage of time and the inevitable need of a new American generation to transplant itself when it has become root-bound. The book is nostalgic, a perfect discourse by someone who still wonders was it is upbringing that made him the way he grew up to be.