Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson

by Sherwood Anderson

  “If my name is ever mentioned again, in such a public way... in order that you... and this man here... may go on... putting other young men through what I have been in... for your ends... I’ll go out into the public streets and denounce you, or I’ll simply kill both of you.”

  Joel Hanaford was delighted that he had been able to help Kit escape. After he had told his story he became silent and as it was almost morning Kit thought they had better find a place to sleep.

  Joel had been sleeping, his slight body leaning against Kit’s, but when she stopped the car at a filling-station he awoke and as soon as they had left the filling-station took a long drink from his bottle. He seemed at once alert and awake and when Kit suggested going to a hotel he agreed. “You notice, young woman, how fresh I am, how alert, eh?” They had stopped in the street before a small hotel. “It is this does it. I keep stewed half the time.” He took another drink from his bottle and put it in his pocket. He kept smiling and his half laughing eyes awoke a kind of gladness and even gaiety in Kit. “I wish I could take him with me,” she thought. “I’d like to take care of him.”

  They went into the hotel and registered and were assigned two adjoining rooms by a sleepy clerk. The hotel was another small, half shabby one. “The clerk thinks we are lovers, eh?” Joel said as they went up the stairs. He stood at the door before his own room speaking to Kit who was at her door and the clerk went away down a flight of steps. Joel kept smiling at her. “I guess you want to make a getaway,” he said. “You don’t want some man like my dad to get a crack at you.

  “I don’t blame you,” he added, “but after you are gone... of course I know who you are... after you are gone I presume I’ll get good and drunk.

  “I’ll be lonesome. Do you know what that means?”

  He did not wait for Kit to answer but went into his room. Kit had barely got her door closed until he rapped and she reopened it. He stood there in the hallway, in the dim light, and looked at her. There was what Kit thought a kind of comical seriousness. “Look here,” he said... he was not smiling now... “you aren’t on it, are you?” he asked, and his face was so serious-looking that Kit broke into laughter in which he joined. He stood grinning at her. “I didn’t think you were,” he said, “but, you see... well, I thought I ought to offer.”

  He took off his hat and bowed and still laughing Kit stepped over to him. She took his head in her two hands and kissed him on the cheek and as he stepped away from her he scowled. “Oh, I see. It’s like that.”

  “Oh, Lord,” he said, “it’s always like that with me and women.” He was going toward his own door but stopped and again spoke to her. “I wish it wasn’t like that with you,” he said, “but you see I’m only half a man and you want a man.

  “If I was a bit more a man I’d be asking you to marry me,” he said, and again bowing, went into his room.

  Kit stood a long time at her open door that night thinking. She was exhilarated. It wasn’t, she told herself, that she was particularly attracted to the curious human being she had found and who had helped rescue her from the police. She thought it was something he stood for. There was a kind of bitter resistance to life in him that she liked. He had been defeated but he was mature. She stood at the door of her room, looking into the empty hallway. Beside Tom Halsey, that other man she had at one time admired, Tom with his childish determination to get money, to be a big shot, to set up a respectable family, beside this new man it seemed to her that night that Tom, even in his best days, before the growth of greediness in him, was no more than a child. There was an idea in Kit’s head... a kind of dawning of light. It did not get itself very definitely expressed in her. It was as though in her there was something trying to become definite.

  Kit closed the door of her room but did not undress. She stood by the door thinking and occasionally smiling. She was thinking of the odd attractive figure of Joel Hanaford.

  Then she thought of another figure, the young farmer, a worker with his young wife in the poor little house. The woman standing by her kitchen stove, cooking food for her man come from his day’s work. In fancy she saw again the man approach his wife, the rough worker’s hands on her pregnant body. Kit kept smiling. “I’ll not be here I guess when he awakes,” she thought. Her mind made a quick plan. She would presently go downstairs and leave money for him in an envelope. Then she would cut out. There was in her mind an almost definite notion of a new kind of adventure she might begin. She felt warm and alive. Young Hanaford had done that for her. She had been carried out of herself and her own problem and into the life of another puzzled human. There were people to be found. She would get into some sort of work that did not so separate her from others. There might be some one other puzzled and baffled young one with whom she could make a real partnership in living.

  The Short Story Collections

  Wittenberg University, where Anderson was educated

  Winesburg, Ohio

  A GROUP OF TALES OF OHIO SMALL TOWN LIFE

  The short-story cycle that made Anderson’s name and secured his literary reputation, Winesburg, Ohio was first published in 1919. It is structured around the life of protagonist George Willard, from his childhood to his growing independence and ultimate abandonment of Winesburg as a young man. Set in the fictional town of Winesburg, Ohio (not to be confused with the real town of that name), the collection is based loosely on the author’s childhood memories of Clyde, Ohio. Although Willard is the central figure, the work presents a comprehensive portrait of life in the town, with over a hundred named characters.

  Mostly written from late 1915 to early 1916, with a few stories completed closer to publication, they were “...conceived as complementary parts of a whole, centred in the background of a single community.” The collection consists of twenty-two stories, with the first story, “The Book of the Grotesque”, serving as an introduction. Each of the stories shares a specific character’s past and present struggle to overcome the loneliness and isolation that seems to permeate the town. Stylistically, because of its emphasis on the psychological insights of characters over plot and plain-spoken prose, Winesburg, Ohio is regarded as an early work of Modernist literature.

  The story collection was received well by critics, despite some reservations about its moral tone and unconventional storytelling. Though its reputation waned in the 1930’s, it has since rebounded and is now considered one of the most influential portraits of pre-industrial small-town life in the United States.

  In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Winesburg, Ohio 24th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century.

  The first edition

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  EMMA SMITH ANDERSON,

  THE TALES AND THE PERSONS

  THE BOOK OF THE GROTESQUE

  HANDS

  PAPER PILLS

  MOTHER

  THE PHILOSOPHER

  NOBODY KNOWS

  GODLINESS

  A MAN OF IDEAS

  ADVENTURE

  RESPECTABILITY

  THE THINKER

  TANDY

  THE STRENGTH OF GOD

  THE TEACHER

  LONELINESS

  AN AWAKENING

  QUEER

  THE UNTOLD LIE

  DRINK

  DEATH

  SOPHISTICATION

  DEPARTURE

  Title page of the first edition

  Map of the fictional town of Winesburg

  INTRODUCTION

  BY IRVING HOWE

  I must have been no more than fifteen or sixteen years old when I first chanced upon Winesburg, Ohio. Gripped by these stories and sketches of Sherwood Anderson’s small-town “grotesques,” I felt that he was opening for me new depths of experience, touching upon half-buried truths which nothing in my young life had prepared me for. A New York City boy who never saw the crops grow or spent time in the small towns that lay sprinkled across America, I found myself overwhelmed by the scenes of wasted
life, wasted love — was this the “real” America? — that Anderson sketched in Winesburg. In those days only one other book seemed to offer so powerful a revelation, and that was Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.

  Several years later, as I was about to go overseas as a soldier, I spent my last week-end pass on a somewhat quixotic journey to Clyde, Ohio, the town upon which Winesburg was partly modeled. Clyde looked, I suppose, not very different from most other American towns, and the few of its residents I tried to engage in talk about Anderson seemed quite uninterested. This indifference would not have surprised him; it certainly should not surprise anyone who reads his book.

  Once freed from the army, I started to write literary criticism, and in 1951 I published a critical biography of Anderson. It came shortly after Lionel Trilling’s influential essay attacking Anderson, an attack from which Anderson’s reputation would never quite recover. Trilling charged Anderson with indulging a vaporous sentimentalism, a kind of vague emotional meandering in stories that lacked social or spiritual solidity. There was a certain cogency in Trilling’s attack, at least with regard to Anderson’s inferior work, most of which he wrote after Winesburg, Ohio. In my book I tried, somewhat awkwardly, to bring together the kinds of judgment Trilling had made with my still keen affection for the best of Anderson’s writings. By then, I had read writers more complex, perhaps more distinguished than Anderson, but his muted stories kept a firm place in my memories, and the book I wrote might be seen as a gesture of thanks for the light — a glow of darkness, you might say — that he had brought to me.

  Decades passed. I no longer read Anderson, perhaps fearing I might have to surrender an admiration of youth. (There are some writers one should never return to.) But now, in the fullness of age, when asked to say a few introductory words about Anderson and his work, I have again fallen under the spell of Winesburg, Ohio, again responded to the half-spoken desires, the flickers of longing that spot its pages. Naturally, I now have some changes of response: a few of the stories no longer haunt me as once they did, but the long story “Godliness,” which years ago I considered a failure, I now see as a quaintly effective account of the way religious fanaticism and material acquisitiveness can become intertwined in American experience.

  * * *

  Sherwood Anderson was born in Ohio in 1876. His childhood and youth in Clyde, a town with perhaps three thousand souls, were scarred by bouts of poverty, but he also knew some of the pleasures of pre-industrial American society. The country was then experiencing what he would later call “a sudden and almost universal turning of men from the old handicrafts towards our modern life of machines.” There were still people in Clyde who remembered the frontier, and like America itself, the town lived by a mixture of diluted Calvinism and a strong belief in “progress,” Young Sherwood, known as “Jobby” — the boy always ready to work — showed the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that Clyde respected: folks expected him to become a “go-getter,” And for a time he did. Moving to Chicago in his early twenties, he worked in an advertising agency where he proved adept at turning out copy. “I create nothing, I boost, I boost,” he said about himself, even as, on the side, he was trying to write short stories.

  In 1904 Anderson married and three years later moved to Elyria, a town forty miles west of Cleveland, where he established a firm that sold paint. “I was going to be a rich man…. Next year a bigger house; and after that, presumably, a country estate.” Later he would say about his years in Elyria, “I was a good deal of a Babbitt, but never completely one.” Something drove him to write, perhaps one of those shapeless hungers — a need for self-expression? a wish to find a more authentic kind of experience? — that would become a recurrent motif in his fiction.

  And then, in 1912, occurred the great turning point in Anderson’s life. Plainly put, he suffered a nervous breakdown, though in his memoirs he would elevate this into a moment of liberation in which he abandoned the sterility of commerce and turned to the rewards of literature. Nor was this, I believe, merely a deception on Anderson’s part, since the breakdown painful as it surely was, did help precipitate a basic change in his life. At the age of 36, he left behind his business and moved to Chicago, becoming one of the rebellious writers and cultural bohemians in the group that has since come to be called the “Chicago Renaissance.” Anderson soon adopted the posture of a free, liberated spirit, and like many writers of the time, he presented himself as a sardonic critic of American provincialism and materialism. It was in the freedom of the city, in its readiness to put up with deviant styles of life, that Anderson found the strength to settle accounts with — but also to release his affection for — the world of small-town America. The dream of an unconditional personal freedom, that hazy American version of utopia, would remain central throughout Anderson’s life and work. It was an inspiration; it was a delusion.

  In 1916 and 1917 Anderson published two novels mostly written in Elyria, Windy McPherson’s Son and Marching Men, both by now largely forgotten. They show patches of talent but also a crudity of thought and unsteadiness of language. No one reading these novels was likely to suppose that its author could soon produce anything as remarkable as Winesburg, Ohio. Occasionally there occurs in a writer’s career a sudden, almost mysterious leap of talent, beyond explanation, perhaps beyond any need for explanation.

  In 1915-16 Anderson had begun to write and in 1919 he published the stories that comprise Winesburg, Ohio, stories that form, in sum, a sort of loosely-strung episodic novel. The book was an immediate critical success, and soon Anderson was being ranked as a significant literary figure. In 1921 the distinguished literary magazine The Dial awarded him its first annual literary prize of $2,000, the significance of which is perhaps best understood if one also knows that the second recipient was T. S. Eliot. But Anderson’s moment of glory was brief, no more than a decade, and sadly, the remaining years until his death in 1940 were marked by a sharp decline in his literary standing. Somehow, except for an occasional story like the haunting “Death in the Woods,” he was unable to repeat or surpass his early success. Still, about Winesburg, Ohio and a small number of stories like “The Egg” and “The Man Who Became a Woman” there has rarely been any critical doubt.

  * * *

  No sooner did Winesburg, Ohio make its appearance than a number of critical labels were fixed on it: the revolt against the village, the espousal of sexual freedom, the deepening of American realism. Such tags may once have had their point, but by now they seem dated and stale. The revolt against the village (about which Anderson was always ambivalent) has faded into history. The espousal of sexual freedom would soon be exceeded in boldness by other writers. And as for the effort to place Winesburg, Ohio in a tradition of American realism, that now seems dubious. Only rarely is the object of Anderson’s stories social verisimilitude, or the “photographing” of familiar appearances, in the sense, say, that one might use to describe a novel by Theodore Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis. Only occasionally, and then with a very light touch, does Anderson try to fill out the social arrangements of his imaginary town — although the fact that his stories are set in a mid-American place like Winesburg does constitute an important formative condition. You might even say, with only slight overstatement, that what Anderson is doing in Winesburg, Ohio could be described as “antirealistic,” fictions notable less for precise locale and social detail than for a highly personal, even strange vision of American life. Narrow, intense, almost claustrophobic, the result is a book about extreme states of being, the collapse of men and women who have lost their psychic bearings and now hover, at best tolerated, at the edge of the little community in which they live. It would be a gross mistake, though not one likely to occur by now, if we were to take Winesburg, Ohio as a social photograph of “the typical small town” (whatever that might be.) Anderson evokes a depressed landscape in which lost souls wander about; they make their flitting appearances mostly in the darkness of night, these stumps and shades of humanity. This vision has its tr
uth, and at its best it is a terrible if narrow truth — but it is itself also grotesque, with the tone of the authorial voice and the mode of composition forming muted signals of the book’s content. Figures like Dr. Parcival, Kate Swift, and Wash Williams are not, nor are they meant to be, “fully-rounded” characters such as we can expect in realistic fiction; they are the shards of life, glimpsed for a moment, the debris of suffering and defeat. In each story one of them emerges, shyly or with a false assertiveness, trying to reach out to companionship and love, driven almost mad by the search for human connection. In the economy of Winesburg these grotesques matter less in their own right than as agents or symptoms of that “indefinable hunger” for meaning which is Anderson’s preoccupation.

  Brushing against one another, passing one another in the streets or the fields, they see bodies and hear voices, but it does not really matter — they are disconnected, psychically lost. Is this due to the particular circumstances of small-town America as Anderson saw it at the turn of the century? Or does he feel that he is sketching an inescapable human condition which makes all of us bear the burden of loneliness? Alice Hindman in the story “Adventure” turns her face to the wall and tries “to force herself to face the fact that many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg.” Or especially in Winesburg? Such impressions have been put in more general terms in Anderson’s only successful novel, Poor White: