by John Updike
Elmer tried to explain. He wet his lips with his tongue and looked at the train that had begun to groan and get under way. “Well, you see,” he began, and then lost control of his tongue. “I’ll be washed and ironed. I’ll be washed and ironed and starched,” he muttered half incoherently.
[“Queer”]
Darkness began to spread over the fields as Ray Pearson ran on and on. His breath came in little sobs. When he came to the fence at the edge of the road and confronted Hal Winters, all dressed up and smoking a pipe as he walked jauntily along, he could not have told what he thought or what he wanted.
[“The Untold Lie”]
Anderson himself had taken a long time to express what was in Winesburg, Ohio. Raised in the small Ohio town of Clyde, he had worked successfully as a Chicago advertising man and an Elyria, Ohio, paint manufacturer, and had acquired a wife and three children, but remained restless and, somehow, overwrought. In late 1912, in the kind of spasmodic sleepwalking gesture of protest that overtakes several of the pent-up and unfulfilled souls of Winesburg, he walked away from his paint factory. He was found four days later in Cleveland, suffering from exhaustion and aphasia, and, more gradually than his self-dramatizing memoirs admit, he shifted his life to Chicago and to the literary movement that included Dreiser, Sandburg, Ben Hecht, and Floyd Dell. Already Anderson had produced several long novels, but, he later wrote, “They were not really mine.” The first Winesburg stories, composed in 1915 as he lived alone in a rooming house in Chicago, were a breakthrough for him, prompted by his reading, earlier that year, of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology and Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives.* Masters’s poetic inventory of a small Midwestern community, just published that year, stands in clear paternal relation to Anderson’s rendering of his memories of Clyde; but perhaps Stein’s own elevation of humble lives into a curious dignity, along with her remarkably relaxed and idiomatic style, was the more nurturing influence in releasing Anderson into material that he did feel was really his and that gave him, for the first time, as he later related, the conviction that he was “a real writer.”
Both the godparents of Winesburg, Ohio had a firmness and realism that was not part of Anderson’s genius. Masters was a practicing lawyer, and his free-verse epitaphs state each case almost in legal prose; many have the form of arraignments, and a number of criminal incidents are fleshed out as each ghost gives its crisp testimony. Stein, before her confident and impudent mind went quite slack in its verbal enjoyments, showed an enlivening appetite for the particulars of how things are said and thought, a calm lack of either condescension or squeamishness in her social view, and a superb feel for the nuances of relationships, primarily but not only among women. For Anderson, society scarcely exists in its legal and affective bonds, and dialogue is generally the painful imposition of one monologue upon another. At the climax of the unconsummated love affair between George Willard and Helen White which is one of Winesburg’s continuous threads, the two sit together in the deserted fairground grandstand and hold hands:
In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited. In the mind of each was the same thought. “I have come to this lonely place and here is this other,” was the substance of the thing felt.
They embrace, but then “mutual embarrassment” overtakes them and like children they race and tumble on the way down to town and part, having “for a moment taken hold of the thing that makes the mature life of men and women in the modern world possible.”
The vagueness of “the thing” is chronic, and only the stumbling, shrugging, willful style that Anderson made of Stein’s serene run-on syntax affords him half a purchase on his unutterable subject, the “thing” troubling the heart of his characters. Doctor Reefy, who attends and in a sense loves George Willard’s dying mother, compulsively writes thoughts on bits of paper and then crumples them into little balls—“paper pills”—and shoves them into his pocket and throws them away. “One by one the mind of Doctor Reefy had made the thoughts. Out of many of them he formed a truth that arose gigantic in his mind. The truth clouded the world. It became terrible and then faded away and the little thoughts began again.” What the gigantic thought was, we are not told. Another questing medical man, Doctor Parcival, relates long tales that at times seem to George Willard “a pack of lies” and at others to contain “the very essence of truth.” As Thornton Wilder’s Our Town reminded us, small-town people think a lot about the universe (as opposed to city people, who think only about each other). The agonizing philosophical search is inherited from religion; in the four-part story “Godliness,” the author, speaking as a print-saturated modern man, says of the world fifty years before: “Men labored too hard and were too tired to read. In them was no desire for words printed upon paper. As they worked in the fields, vague, half-formed thoughts took possession of them. They believed in God and in God’s power to control their lives.… The figure of God was big in the hearts of men.” The rural landscape of the Midwest becomes easily confused in the minds of its pious denizens with that of the Bible, where God manifested Himself with signs and spoken words. Jesse Bentley’s attempt to emulate Abraham with Isaac so terrifies his son David that the boy flees the Winesburg region forever. Anderson writes about religious obsession with distaste but also with respect, as something that truly enters into lives and twists them. To this spiritual hunger sex adds its own; the Reverend Curtis Hartman breaks a small hole in the stained-glass window of his bell-tower study in order to spy upon a woman in the house next door as she lies on her bed and smokes and reads. “He did not want to kiss the shoulders and the throat of Kate Smith and had not allowed his mind to dwell on such thoughts. He did not know what he wanted. ‘I am God’s child and he must save me from myself,’ he cried.” One evening he sees her come naked into her room and weep and then pray; with his fist he smashes the window so all of it, with its broken bit of a peephole, will have to be repaired.
There are more naked women in Winesburg than the census declares. “Adventure” shows Alice Hindman, a twenty-seven-year-old spinster jilted by a lover ten years before, so agitated by “her desire to have something beautiful come into her rather narrow life” that she runs naked into the rain one night and actually accosts a man—a befuddled old deaf man who goes on his way. In the following story, “Respectability,” a fanatic and repulsive misogynist, Wash Williams, recalls to George Willard how, many years before, his mother-in-law, hoping to reconcile him to his unfaithful young wife, presented her naked to him in her (Dayton, Ohio) parlor. George Willard, his chaste relation to Helen White aside, suffers no lack of sexual invitation in the alleys and the surrounding fields. Sherwood Anderson’s women are as full of “vague hungers and secret unnamable desires” as men. The sexual quest and the philosophical quest blend: of George Willard’s mother, the most tenderly drawn woman of all, the author says, “Always there was something she sought blindly, passionately, some hidden wonder in life.… In all the babble of words that fell from the lips of the men with whom she adventured she was trying to find what would be for her the true word.” Winesburg, Ohio is dedicated to the memory of Anderson’s own mother, “whose keen observations on the life about her first awoke in me the hunger to see beneath the surface of lives.”
The author’s hunger to see and express is entwined with the common hunger for love and reassurance and gives the book its awkward power and its limiting strangeness. The many characters of Winesburg, rather than standing forth as individuals, seem, with their repeating tics and uniform loneliness, aspects of one enveloping personality, a circumambient bundle of stalled impulses and frozen grievances. There is nowhere a citizen who, like Thomas Rhodes of Spoon River, exults in his material triumphs and impenitent rascality, nor any humbler type, like “real black, tall, well built, stupid, childlike, good looking” Rose Johnson of Stein’s fictional Bridgepoint, who is happily at home in her skin. Do the Winesburgs of America completely lack such earthly successes? D
oes the provincial orchard hold only, in Anderson’s vivid phrase, “twisted apples”? No, and yet Yes; for the uncanny truth of Anderson’s sad and surreal picture must awaken recognition within anyone who, like this reviewer, was born in a small town before highways and development filled all the fields and television imposed upon every home a degraded sophistication. The Protestant villages of America, going back to Hawthorne’s Salem, leave a spectral impression in literature: vague longing and monotonous, inbred satisfactions are their essence; there is something perilous and maddening in the accommodations such communities extend to human aspiration and appetite. As neighbors watch and murmur, lives visibly wrap themselves around a missed opportunity, a thwarted passion. The longing may be simply the longing to get out. The healthy rounded apples, Anderson tells us, are “put in barrels and shipped to the cities where they will be eaten in apartments that are filled with books, magazines, furniture, and people.” George Willard gets out in the end, and as soon as Winesburg falls away from the train windows “his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood.”
The small town is generally seen, by the adult writer arrived at his city, as the site of youthful paralysis and dreaming. Certainly Anderson, as Malcolm Cowley has pointed out, wrote in a dreaming way, scrambling the time and logic of events as he hastened toward his epiphanies of helpless awakening, when the citizens of Winesburg break their tongue-tied trance and become momentarily alive to one another. Gertrude Stein’s style, so revolutionary and liberating, has the haughtiness and humor of the fausse-naïve; there is much genuine naïveté in Anderson, which in even his masterwork flirts with absurdity and that elsewhere weakened his work decisively. Winesburg, Ohio describes the human condition only insofar as unfulfillment and restlessness—a nagging sense that real life is elsewhere—are intrinsically part of it. Yet the wide-eyed eagerness with which Anderson pursued the mystery of the meagre lives of Winesburg opened Michigan to Hemingway and Mississippi to Faulkner; a way had been shown to a new trust in the native material, a fresh passion for its elusive emanations. Though Winesburg accumulates external facts—streets, stores, town personalities—as it gropes along, its burden is a spiritual essence, a certain tart sweet taste to life as it passes in America’s lonely spaced-out homes. A nagging beauty lives amid tame desolation; Anderson’s parade of yearning wraiths constitutes in sum a democratic plea for the failed, the neglected, and the stuck. “On the trees are only a few gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected.… One nibbles at them and they are delicious. Into a round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all of its sweetness.” Describing a horse-and-buggy world bygone even in 1919, Winesburg, Ohio imparts this penetrating taste—the wine hidden in its title—as freshly today as yesterday.
The Sinister Sex
THE GARDEN OF EDEN, by Ernest Hemingway. 247 pp. Scribner’s, 1986.
The heirs of Ernest Hemingway—his widow and three sons are all listed on the copyright page—and the staff of Charles Scribner’s Sons have produced yet another text out of the morass of unfinished manuscripts which bedevilled the writer’s last fifteen years. The Garden of Eden was begun, according to the Carlos Baker biography, “in the early months of 1946,” and was “an experimental compound of past and present, filled with astonishing ineptitudes and based in part upon memories of his marriages to Hadley and Pauline, with some excursions behind the scenes of his current life with Mary.” Within a year, “more than a hundred pages of The Garden of Eden were … in typescript, with nine hundred pages still in longhand.” Baker, not generally given to harsh criticism of his subject’s work, blames this “long and emptily hedonistic novel of young lovers” for contaminating with its fatuity and narcissism the published novel Across the River and into the Trees (1950). In the early Fifties, a cut-down version of The Garden of Eden figured as the first part of Hemingway’s projected sea trilogy, under the title The Sea When Young. In 1958, while working on the Paris sketches that would become A Moveable Feast, the author revised the recalcitrant novel down to forty-eight chapters and roughly two hundred thousand words; Baker still complains, “It had none of the taut nervousness of Ernest’s best fiction, and was so repetitious that it seemed interminable.” The lamentable opus, still not publishable, is last glimpsed as Castro is wresting Cuba from Batista, in late 1958: “The situation … was a constant worry. [Hemingway, off in Idaho,] tried to forget it by rewriting parts of the Paris sketchbook and revising three chapters of The Garden of Eden.”
The propriety of publishing, as a commercial endeavor, what a dead writer declined to see into print is, of course, dubious. The previous forays into the Hemingway trove have unfortunately tended to heighten our appreciation not of his talent but of his psychopathology; even the charming and airy Moveable Feast, the first and most finished of the posthumous publications (1964), had its ugly flashes of malice and ingenuous self-serving. Islands in the Stream (1970) was a thoroughly ugly book, brutal and messy and starring a painter-sailor hero whose humanity was almost entirely dissolved in barroom jabber and Hollywood heroics. The letters (1981), too, which Hemingway had wisely tried to safeguard from the scavengers, provided insights more alarming than appealing into his bellicose, infantile, sexist, and at the end paranoid nature. Among the published letters is one addressed to an early scavenger, Charles A. Fenton, saying, “Writing that I do not wish to publish, you have no right to publish. I would no more do a thing like that to you than I would cheat a man at cards or rifle his desk or wastebasket or read his personal letters.” Well, such old-fashioned gentlemanly thunder rings pretty hollow in this hustling era of professional desk-riflers. The second-wave Hemingway biographies proliferate, whispering to us that Oak Park was not the forest primeval and that three weeks of distributing candy bars do not a warrior make; soon the old poser will have been stripped down to his Freudian bones, much like Santiago’s great dead marlin in The Old Man and the Sea.
However: Hemingway, after a semi-eclipse in the Sixties, when his fascination with violence and war seemed desperately unworthy, now stands as a classic as surely as Hawthorne, and twenty-five years after his death his bearish claims to privacy are perhaps superseded by the claims his literary personality makes upon our interest. There is every reason—its hackneyed title, Baker’s scorn, the forty years of murky fiddling that have passed since its conception—to distrust The Garden of Eden; yet the book, as finally presented, is something of a miracle, a fresh slant on the old magic, and falls just short of the satisfaction that a fully intended and achieved work gives us. The miracle, it should be added, does not seem to be Hemingway’s alone but is shared with workers unnamed in the prefatory note, which blandly admits to “some cuts in the manuscript and some routine copy-editing corrections.” Some cuts. Some Chink, as Harry Morgan says to himself of the mysterious Chinese gentleman in To Have and Have Not. When last heard of, The Garden of Eden, according to Carlos Baker, consisted of over two hundred thousand words of lacklustre dialogue and eerie trivia. It is no secret—indeed, it has been widely reported—that last July a certain Tom Jenks, a thirty-five-year-old editor newly hired by Scribner’s, was presented with over three thousand pages of Garden of Eden manuscripts—all three versions that Hemingway had struggled with, enough to fill two shopping bags—and was invited to find a publishable book in all that verbiage. He managed. In the trim published text of sixty-five thousand words, a daily repetition of actions remains (wake, write, drink, lunch, siesta, drink, eat, make love, sleep) but the dialogue never covers exactly the same ground and the plot advances by steady, subliminal increments, as situations in real life do. The basic tensions of the slender, three-cornered action are skillfully sustained. The psychological deterioration of the heroine, Catherine Bourne, the professional preoccupations of the hero, the young writer David Bourne, and the growing involvement of the other woman, Marita, are kept in the fore, interwoven with but never smothered by Hemingway’s betranced descriptions of the weather, the meals, the landsc
ape, the chronic recreations. A chastening, almost mechanically rhythmic order has been imposed, and though an edition with a scholarly conscience would have provided some clues to the mammoth amounts of manuscript that were discarded,† this remnant does give the reader a text wherein he, unlike the author in his travails long ago, never feels lost. Endearingly, many of Hemingway’s eccentricities have been defended from copyeditors—the commas omitted by ear rather than by sense (“driving the machine up the short hill feeling the lack of training in his thighs”); the commas tossed into a run of six adjectives (a “good light, dry, cheerful unknown white wine”); the stubbornly awkward word order (“the girl put the one she was reading down”); the English as spoken (“Feel it how smooth”); the idiosyncratic spellings (“god damned,” “pyjama tops,” “self conscious”); and a sentence containing no fewer than eleven “and”s.
The Garden of Eden adds to the canon not merely another volume but a new reading of Hemingway’s sensibility. Except in some of the short stories and that strange novel To Have and Have Not, he avoided describing the life that most men and women mostly lead, domestic life. The Garden of Eden confronts sexual intimacy, marriage, and human androgyny with a wary but searching tenderness that amounts, for a man so wrapped up in masculine values and public gestures, to courage. What stymied him, while he was still in his mid-forties, from completing and publishing the novel must be idly conjectured. One possibility is that the material embarrassed as well as possessed him, and another is that he knew he was in over his head. His head was not quite right; his behavior in World War II had been strange, and in his work methods he was developing (and had just barely rescued For Whom the Bell Tolls from) the Papaesque logorrhea, the fatal dependency upon free-form spillage, of which The Dangerous Summer was to be the disastrous climax—Life’s request in 1959 for ten thousand words producing a dizzying twelve times that amount. Perhaps, in The Garden of Eden, he pulled back from the snake pit of male-female interplay and sought to reconstitute the old impervious, macho Hemingway persona, whom women attend as houris attend the blessed immortals in the Islamic paradise. This is the plot solution the Scribner’s editors have used—perhaps the only one available to them in the uncontrolled manuscript—and it is a feeble one, compared with the dark soft power of the opening sections.