Шервуд Андерсон -- Американский Писатель. 1876-1941Sherwood Anderson. Winesburg, Ohio
OCR: Ирина Нестеренко
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION by Irving Howe
THE TALES AND THE PERSONS
THE BOOK OF THE GROTESQUE
HANDS, concerning Wing Biddlebaum
PAPER PILLS, concerning Doctor Reefy
MOTHER, concerning Elizabeth Willard
THE PHILOSOPHER, concerning Doctor Parcival
NOBODY KNOWS, concerning Louise Trunnion
GODLINESS, a Tale in Four Parts
I, concerning Jesse Bentley
II, also concerning Jesse Bentley
III Surrender, concerning Louise Bentley
IV Terror, concerning David Hardy
A MAN OF IDEAS, concerning Joe Welling
ADVENTURE, concerning Alice Hindman
RESPECTABILITY, concerning Wash Williams
THE THINKER, concerning Seth Richmond
TANDY, concerning Tandy Hard
THE STRENGTH OF GOD, concerning the
Reverend Curtis Hartman
THE TEACHER, concerning Kate Swift
LONELINESS, concerning Enoch Robinson
AN AWAKENING, concerning Belle Carpenter
"QUEER," concerning Elmer Cowley
THE UNTOLD LIE, concerning Ray Pearson
DRINK, concerning Tom Foster
DEATH, concerning Doctor Reefy
and Elizabeth Willard
SOPHISTICATION, concerning Helen White
DEPARTURE, concerning George Willard
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 weekend 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
looselystrung 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 truth, 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, "fullyrounded" 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:
All men lead their lives behind a wall of misun
derstanding they have themselves built, and
most men die in silence and unnoticed behind
the walls. Now and then a man, cut off from
his fellows by the peculiarities of his nature, be
comes absorbed in doing something that is per
sonal, useful and beautiful. Word of his activities
is carried over the walls.
These "walls" of misunderstanding are only seldom due to physical
deformities (Wing Biddlebaum in "Hands") or oppressive social arrangements
(Kate Swift in "The Teacher.") Misunderstanding, loneliness, the inability
to articulate, are all seen by Anderson as virtually a root condition,
something deeply set in our natures. Nor are these people, the grotesques,
simply to be pitied and dismissed; at some point in their lives they have
known desire, have dreamt of ambition, have hoped for friendship. In all of
them there was once something sweet, "like the twisted little apples that
grow in the orchards in Winesburg." Now, broken and adrift, they clutch at
some rigid notion or idea, a "truth" which turns out to bear the stamp of
monomania, leaving them helplessly sputtering, desperate to speak out but
unable to. Winesburg, Ohio registers the losses inescapable to life, and it
does so with a deep fraternal sadness, a sympathy casting a mild glow over
the entire book. "Words," as the American writer Paula Fox has said, "are
nets through which all truth escapes." Yet what do we have but words?
They want, these Winesburg grotesques*, to unpack their hearts, to
release emotions buried and festering. Wash Williams tries to explain his
eccentricity but hardly can; Louise Bentley "tried to talk but could say
nothing"; Enoch Robinson retreats to a fantasy world, inventing "his own
people to whom he could really talk and to whom he explained the things he
had been unable to explain to living people."
In his own somber way, Anderson has here touched upon one of the great
themes of American literature, especially Midwestern literature, in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the struggle for speech as it
entails a search for the self. Perhaps the central Winesburg story, tracing
the basic movements of the book, is "Paper Pills," in which the old Doctor
Reefy sits "in his empty office close by a window that was covered with
cobwebs," writes down some thoughts on slips of paper ("pyramids of truth,"
he calls them) and then stuffs them into his pockets where they "become
round hard balls" soon to be discarded. What Dr. Reefy's "truths" may be we
never know; Anderson simply persuades us that to this lonely old man they
are utterly precious and thereby incommunicable, forming a kind of blurred
moral signature.
After a time the attentive reader will notice in these stories a
recurrent pattern of theme and incident: the grotesques, gathering up a
little courage, venture out into the streets of Winesburg, often in the
dark, there to establish some initiatory relationship with George Willard,
the young reporter who hasn't yet lived long enough to become a grotesque.
Hesitantly, fearfully, or with a sputtering incoherent rage, they approach
him, pleading that he listen to their stories in the hope that perhaps they
can find some sort of renewal in his youthful voice. Upon this sensitive and
fragile boy they pour out their desires and frustrations. Dr. Parcival hopes
that George Willard "will write the book I may never get written," and for
Enoch Robinson, the boy represents "the youthful sadness, young man's
sadness, the sadness of a growing boy in a village at the year's end [which
may open] the lips of the old man."
What the grotesques really need is each other, but their estrangement
is so extreme they cannot establish direct ties--they can only hope for
connection through George Willard. The burden this places on the boy is more
than he can bear. He listens to them attentively, he is sympathetic to their
complaints, but finally he is too absorbed in his own dreams. The grotesques
turn to him because he seems "different"--younger, more open, not yet
hardened-- but it is precisely this "difference" that keeps him from
responding as warmly as they want. It is hardly the boy's fault; it is
simply in the nature of things. For George Willard, the grotesques form a
moment in his education; for the grotesques, their encounters with George
Willard come to seem like a stamp of hopelessness.
The prose Anderson employs in telling these stories may seem at first
glance to be simple: short sentences, a sparse vocabulary, uncomplicated
syntax. In actuality, Anderson developed an artful style in which, following
Mark Twain and preceding Ernest Hemingway, he tried to use American speech
as the base of a tensed rhythmic prose that has an economy and a shapeliness
seldom found in ordinary speech or even oral narration. What Anderson
employs here is a stylized version of the American language, sometimes
rising to quite formal rhetorical patterns and sometimes sinking to a
self-conscious mannerism. But at its best, Anderson's prose style in
Winesburg, Ohio is a supple instrument, yielding that "low fine music" which
he admired so much in the stories of Turgenev.
One of the worst fates that can befall a writer is that of
self-imitation: the effort later in life, often desperate, to recapture the
tones and themes of youthful beginnings. Something of the sort happened with
Anderson's later writings. Most critics and readers grew impatient with the
work he did after, say, 1927 or 1928; they felt he was constantly repeating
his gestures of emotional "groping"-- what he had called in Winesburg, Ohio
the "indefinable hunger" that prods and torments people. It became the
critical fashion to see Anderson's "gropings" as a sign of delayed
adolescence, a failure to develop as a writer. Once he wrote a chilling
reply to those who dismissed him in this way: "I don't think it matters
much, all this calling a man a muddler, a groper, etc.... The very man who
throws such words as these knows in his heart that he is also facing a
wall." This remark seems to me both dignified and strong, yet it must be
admitted that there was some justice in the negative responses to his later
work. For what characterized it was not so much "groping" as the imitation
of "groping," the self-caricature of a writer who feels driven back upon an
earlier self that is, alas, no longer available.
But Winesburg, Ohio remains a vital work, fresh and authentic. Most of
its stories are composed in a minor key, a tone of subdued pathos--pathos
marking both the nature and limit of Anderson's talent. (He spoke of himself
as a "minor writer.") In a few stories, however, he was able to reach beyond
pathos and to strike a tragic note. The single best story in Winesburg, Ohio
is, I think, "The Untold Lie," in which the urgency of choice becomes an
outer sign of a tragic element in the human condition. And in Anderson's
single greatest story, "The Egg," which appeared a few years after
Winesburg, Ohio, he succeeded in bringing together a surface of farce with
an undertone of tragedy. "The Egg" is an American masterpiece.
Anderson's influence upon later American writers, especially those who
wrote short stories, has been enormous. Ernest Hemingway and William
Faulkner both praised him as a writer who brought a new tremor of feeling, a
new sense of introspectiveness to the American short story. As Faulkner put
it, Anderson's "was the fumbling for exactitude, the exact word and phrase
within the limited scope of a vocabulary controlled and even repressed by
what was in him almost a fetish of simplicity ... to seek always to
penetrate to thought's uttermost end." And in many younger writers who may
not even be aware of the Anderson influence, you can see touches of his
approach, echoes of his voice.
Writing about the Elizabethan playwright John Ford, the poet Algernon
Swinburne once said: "If he touches you once he takes you, and what he takes
he keeps hold of; his work becomes part of your thought and parcel of your
spiritual furniture forever." So it is, for me and many others, with
Sherwood Anderson.
To the memory of my mother,
EMMA SMITH ANDERSON,
whose keen observations on the life about her first awoke in me the
hunger to see beneath the surface of lives, this book is dedicated.
THE TALES AND THE PERSONS
THE BOOK OF THE GROTESQUE
THE WRITER, an old man with a white mustache, had some difficulty in
getting into bed. The windows of the house in which he lived were high and
he wanted to look at the trees when he awoke in the morning. A carpenter
came to fix the bed so that it would be on a level with the window.
Quite a fuss was made about the matter. The carpenter, who had been a
soldier in the Civil War, came into the writer's room and sat down to talk
of building a platform for the purpose of raising the bed. The writer had
cigars lying about and the carpenter smoked.
For a time the two men talked of the raising of the bed and then they
talked of other things. The soldier got on the subject of the war. The
writer, in fact, led him to that subject. The carpenter had once been a
prisoner in Andersonville prison and had lost a brother. The brother had
died of starvation, and whenever the carpenter got upon that subject he
cried. He, like the old writer, had a white mustache, and when he cried he
puckered up his lips and the mustache bobbed up and down. The weeping old
man with the cigar in his mouth was ludicrous. The plan the writer had for
the raising of his bed was forgotten and later the carpenter did it in his
own way and the writer, who was past sixty, had to help himself with a chair
when he went to bed at night.
In his bed the writer rolled over on his side and lay quite still. For
years he had been beset with notions concerning his heart. He was a hard
smoker and his heart fluttered. The idea had got into his mind that he would
some time die unexpectedly and always when he got into bed he thought of
that. It did not alarm him. The effect in fact was quite a special thing and
not easily explained. It made him more alive, there in bed, than at any
other time. Perfectly still he lay and his body was old and not of much use
any more, but something inside him was altogether young. He was like a
pregnant woman, only that the thing inside him was not a baby but a youth.
No, it wasn't a youth, it was a woman, young, and wearing a coat of mail
like a knight. It is absurd, you see, to try to tell what was inside the old
writer as he lay on his high bed and listened to the fluttering of his
heart. The thing to get at is what the writer, or the young thing within the
writer, was thinking about.
The old writer, like all of the people in the world, had got, during
his long fife, a great many notions in his head. He had once been quite
handsome and a number of women had been in love with him. And then, of
course, he had known people, many people, known them in a peculiarly
intimate way that was different from the way in which you and I know people.
At least that is what the writer thought and the thought pleased him. Why
quarrel with an old man concerning his thoughts?
In the bed the writer had a dream that was not a dream. As he grew
somewhat sleepy but was still conscious, figures began to appear before his
eyes. He imagined the young indescribable thing within himself was driving a
long procession of figures before his eyes.
You see the interest in all this lies in the figures that went before
the eyes of the writer. They were all grotesques. All of the men and women
the writer had ever known had become grotesques.
The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some almost
beautiful, and one, a woman all drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by her
grotesqueness. When she passed he made a noise like a small dog whimpering.
Had you come into the room you might have supposed the old man had
unpleasant dreams or perhaps indigestion.
For an hour the procession of grotesques passed before the eyes of the
old man, and then, although it was a painful thing to do, he crept out of
bed and began to write. Some one of the grotesques had made a deep
impression on his mind and he wanted to describe it.
At his desk the writer worked for an hour. In the end he wrote a book
which he called "The Book of the Grotesque." It was never published, but I
saw it once and it made an indelible impression on my mind. The book had one
central thought that is very strange and has always remained with me. By
remembering it I have been able to understand many people and things that I
was never able to understand before. The thought was involved but a simple
statement of it would be something like this:
That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many
thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each
truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world
were the truths and they were all beautiful.
The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not
try to tell you of all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the
truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of
profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the
truths and they were all beautiful.
And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of
the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.
It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had
quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the
moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his
truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth
he embraced became a falsehood.
You can see for yourself how the old man, who had spent all of his life
writing and was filled with words, would write hundreds of pages concerning
this matter. The subject would become so big in his mind that he himself
would be in danger of becoming a grotesque. He didn't, I suppose, for the
same reason that he never published the book. It was the young thing inside
him that saved the old man.
Concerning the old carpenter who fixed the bed for the writer, I only
mentioned him because he,
THE BOOK OF THE GROTESQUE 7
like many of what are called very common people, became the nearest
thing to what is understandable and lovable of all the grotesques in the
writer's book.
HANDS
UPON THE HALF decayed veranda of a small frame house that stood near
the edge of a ravine near the town of Winesburg, Ohio, a fat little old man
walked nervously up and down. Across a long field that had been seeded for
clover but that had produced only a dense crop of yellow mustard weeds, he
could see the public highway along which went a wagon filled with berry
pickers returning from the fields. The berry pickers, youths and maidens,
laughed and shouted boisterously. A boy clad in a blue shirt leaped from the
wagon and attempted to drag after him one of the maidens, who screamed and
protested shrilly. The feet of the boy in the road kicked up a cloud of dust
that floated across the face of the departing sun. Over the long field came
a thin girlish voice. "Oh, you Wing Biddlebaum, comb your hair, it's falling
into your eyes," commanded the voice to the man, who was bald and whose
nervous little hands fiddled about the bare white forehead as though
arranging a mass of tangled locks.
Wing Biddlebaum, forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of
doubts, did not think of himself as in any way a part of the life of the
town where he had lived for twenty years. Among all the people of Winesburg
but one had come close to him. With George Willard, son of Tom Willard, the
proprietor of the New Willard House, he had formed something like a
friendship. George Willard was the reporter on the Winesburg Eagle and
sometimes in the evenings he walked out along the highway to Wing
Biddlebaum's house. Now as the old man walked up and down on the veranda,
his hands moving nervously about, he was hoping that George Willard would
come and spend the evening with him. After the wagon containing the berry
pickers had passed, he went across the field through the tall mustard weeds
and climbing a rail fence peered anxiously along the road to the town. For a
moment he stood thus, rubbing his hands together and looking up and down the
road, and then, fear overcoming him, ran back to walk again upon the porch
on his own house.
In the presence of George Willard, Wing Biddlebaum, who for twenty
years had been the town mystery, lost something of his timidity, and his
shadowy personality, submerged in a sea of doubts, came forth to look at the
world. With the young reporter at his side, he ventured in the light of day
into Main Street or strode up and down on the rickety front porch of his own
house, talking excitedly. The voice that had been low and trembling became
shrill and loud. The bent figure straightened. With a kind of wriggle, like
a fish returned to the brook by the fisherman, Biddlebaum the silent began
to talk, striving to put into words the ideas that had been accumulated by
his mind during long years of silence.
Wing Biddlebaum talked much with his hands. The slender expressive
fingers, forever active, forever striving to conceal themselves in his
pockets or behind his back, came forth and became the piston rods of his
machinery of expression.
The story of Wing Biddlebaum is a story of hands. Their restless
activity, like unto the beating of the wings of an imprisoned bird, had
given him his name. Some obscure poet of the town had thought of it. The
hands alarmed their owner. He wanted to keep them hidden away and looked
with amazement at the quiet inexpressive hands of other men who worked
beside him in the fields, or passed, driving sleepy teams on country roads.
When he talked to George Willard, Wing Biddlebaum closed his fists and
beat with them upon a table or on the walls of his house. The action made
him more comfortable. If the desire to talk came to him when the two were
walking in the fields, he sought out a stump or the top board of a fence and
with his hands pounding busily talked with renewed ease.
The story of Wing Biddlebaum's hands is worth a book in itself.
Sympathetically set forth it would tap many strange, beautiful qualities in
obscure men. It is a job for a poet. In Winesburg the hands had attracted
attention merely because of their activity. With them Wing Biddlebaum had
picked as high as a hundred and forty quarts of strawberries in a day. They
became his distinguishing feature, the source of his fame. Also they made
more grotesque an already grotesque and elusive individuality. Winesburg was
proud of the hands of Wing Biddlebaum in the same spirit in which it was
proud of Banker White's new stone house and Wesley Moyer's bay stallion,
Tony Tip, that had won the two-fifteen trot at the fall races in Cleveland.
As for George Willard, he had many times wanted to ask about the hands.
At times an almost overwhelming curiosity had taken hold of him. He felt
that there must be a reason for their strange activity and their inclination
to keep hidden away and only a growing respect for Wing Biddlebaum kept him
from blurting out the questions that were often in his mind.
Once he had been on the point of asking. The two were walking in the
fields on a summer afternoon and had stopped to sit upon a grassy bank. All
afternoon Wing Biddlebaum had talked as one inspired. By a fence he had
stopped and beating like a giant woodpecker upon the top board had shouted
at George Willard, condemning his tendency to be too much influenced by the
people about him, "You are destroying yourself," he cried. "You have the
inclination to be alone and to dream and you are afraid of dreams. You want
to be like others in town here. You hear them talk and you try to imitate
them."
On the grassy bank Wing Biddlebaum had tried again to drive his point
home. His voice became soft and reminiscent, and with a sigh of contentment
he launched into a long rambling talk, speaking as one lost in a dream.
Out of the dream Wing Biddlebaum made a picture for George Willard. In
the picture men lived again in a kind of pastoral golden age. Across a green
open country came clean-limbed young men, some afoot, some mounted upon
horses. In crowds the young men came to gather about the feet of an old man
who sat beneath a tree in a tiny garden and who talked to them.
Wing Biddlebaum became wholly inspired. For once he forgot the hands.
Slowly they stole forth and lay upon George Willard's shoulders. Something
new and bold came into the voice that talked. "You must try to forget all
you have learned," said the old man. "You must begin to dream. From this
time on you must shut your ears to the roaring of the voices."
Pausing in his speech, Wing Biddlebaum looked long and earnestly at
George Willard. His eyes glowed. Again he raised the hands to caress the boy
and then a look of horror swept over his face.
With a convulsive movement of his body, Wing Biddlebaum sprang to his
feet and thrust his hands deep into his trousers pockets. Tears came to his
eyes. "I must be getting along home. I can talk no more with you," he said
nervously.
Without looking back, the old man had hurried down the hillside and
across a meadow, leaving George Willard perplexed and frightened upon the
grassy slope. With a shiver of dread the boy arose and went along the road
toward town. "I'll not ask him about his hands," he thought, touched by the
memory of the terror he had seen in the man's eyes. "There's something
wrong, but I don't want to know what it is. His hands have something to do
with his fear of me and of everyone."
And George Willard was right. Let us look briefly into the story of the
hands. Perhaps our talking of them will arouse the poet who will tell the
hidden wonder story of the influence for which the hands were but fluttering
pennants of promise.
In his youth Wing Biddlebaum had been a school teacher in a town in
Pennsylvania. He was not then known as Wing Biddlebaum, but went by the less
euphonic name of Adolph Myers. As Adolph Myers he was much loved by the boys
of his school.
Adolph Myers was meant by nature to be a teacher of youth. He was one
of those rare, littleunderstood men who rule by a power so gentle that it
passes as a lovable weakness. In their feeling for the boys under their
charge such men are not unlike the finer sort of women in their love of men.
And yet that is but crudely stated. It needs the poet there. With the
boys of his school, Adolph Myers had walked in the evening or had sat
talking until dusk upon the schoolhouse steps lost in a kind of dream. Here
and there went his hands, caressing the shoulders of the boys, playing about
the tousled heads. As he talked his voice became soft and musical. There was
a caress in that also. In a way the voice and the hands, the stroking of the
shoulders and the touching of the hair were a part of the schoolmaster's
effort to carry a dream into the young minds. By the caress that was in his
fingers he expressed himself. He was one of those men in whom the force that
creates life is diffused, not centralized. Under the caress of his hands
doubt and disbelief went out of the minds of the boys and they began also to
dream.
And then the tragedy. A half-witted boy of the school became enamored
of the young master. In his bed at night he imagined unspeakable things and
in the morning went forth to tell his dreams as facts. Strange, hideous
accusations fell from his loosehung lips. Through the Pennsylvania town went
a shiver. Hidden, shadowy doubts that had been in men's minds concerning
Adolph Myers were galvanized into beliefs.
The tragedy did not linger. Trembling lads were jerked out of bed and
questioned. "He put his arms about me," said one. "His fingers were always
playing in my hair," said another.
One afternoon a man of the town, Henry Bradford, who kept a saloon,
came to the schoolhouse door. Calling Adolph Myers into the school yard he
began to beat him with his fists. As his hard knuckles beat down into the
frightened face of the schoolmaster, his wrath became more and more
terrible. Screaming with dismay, the children ran here and there like
disturbed insects. "I'll teach you to put your hands on my boy, you beast,"
roared the saloon keeper, who, tired of beating the master, had begun to
kick him about the yard.
Adolph Myers was driven from the Pennsylvania town in the night. With
lanterns in their hands a dozen men came to the door of the house where he
lived alone and commanded that he dress and come forth. It was raining and
one of the men had a rope in his hands. They had intended to hang the
schoolmaster, but something in his figure, so small, white, and pitiful,
touched their hearts and they let him escape. As he ran away into the
darkness they repented of their weakness and ran after him, swearing and
throwing sticks and great balls of soft mud at the figure that screamed and
ran faster and faster into the darkness.
For twenty years Adolph Myers had lived alone in Winesburg. He was but
forty but looked sixtyfive. The name of Biddlebaum he got from a box of
goods seen at a freight station as he hurried through an eastern Ohio town.
He had an aunt in Winesburg, a black-toothed old woman who raised chickens,
and with her he lived until she died. He had been ill for a year after the
experience in Pennsylvania, and after his recovery worked as a day laborer
in the fields, going timidly about and striving to conceal his hands.
Although he did not understand what had happened he felt that the hands must
be to blame. Again and again the fathers of the boys had talked of the
hands. "Keep your hands to yourself," the saloon keeper had roared, dancing,
with fury in the schoolhouse yard.
Upon the veranda of his house by the ravine, Wing Biddlebaum continued
to walk up and down until the sun had disappeared and the road beyond the
field was lost in the grey shadows. Going into his house he cut slices of
bread and spread honey upon them. When the rumble of the evening train that
took away the express cars loaded with the day's harvest of berries had
passed and restored the silence of the summer night, he went again to walk
upon the veranda. In the darkness he could not see the hands and they became
quiet. Although he still hungered for the presence of the boy, who was the
medium through which he expressed his love of man, the hunger became again a
part of his loneliness and his waiting. Lighting a lamp, Wing Biddlebaum
washed the few dishes soiled by his simple meal and, setting up a folding
cot by the screen door that led to the porch, prepared to undress for the
night. A few stray white bread crumbs lay on the cleanly washed floor by the
table; putting the lamp upon a low stool he began to pick up the crumbs,
carrying them to his mouth one by one with unbelievable rapidity. In the
dense blotch of light beneath the table, the kneeling figure looked like a
priest engaged in some service of his church. The nervous expressive
fingers, flashing in and out of the light, might well have been mistaken for
the fingers of the devotee going swiftly through decade after decade of his
rosary.
PAPER PILLS
HE WAS AN old man with a white beard and huge nose and hands. Long
before the time during which we will know him, he was a doctor and drove a
jaded white horse from house to house through the streets of Winesburg.
Later he married a girl who had money. She had been left a large fertile
farm when her father died. The girl was quiet, tall, and dark, and to many
people she seemed very beautiful. Everyone in Winesburg wondered why she
married the doctor. Within a year after the marriage she died.
The knuckles of the doctor's hands were extraordinarily large. When the
hands were closed they looked like clusters of unpainted wooden balls as
large as walnuts fastened together by steel rods. He smoked a cob pipe and
after his wife's death sat all day in his empty office close by a window
that was covered with cobwebs. He never opened the window. Once on a hot day
in August he tried but found it stuck fast and after that he forgot all
about it.
Winesburg had forgotten the old man, but in Doctor Reefy there were the
seeds of something very fine. Alone in his musty office in the Heffner Block
above the Paris Dry Goods Company's store, he worked ceaselessly, building
up something that he himself destroyed. Little pyramids of truth he erected
and after erecting knocked them down again that he might have the truths to
erect other pyramids.
Doctor Reefy was a tall man who had worn one suit of clothes for ten
years. It was frayed at the sleeves and little holes had appeared at the
knees and elbows. In the office he wore also a linen duster with huge
pockets into which he continually stuffed scraps of paper. After some weeks
the scraps of paper became little hard round balls, and when the pockets
were filled he dumped them out upon the floor. For ten years he had but one
friend, another old man named John Spaniard who owned a tree nursery.
Sometimes, in a playful mood, old Doctor Reefy took from his pockets a
handful of the paper balls and threw them at the nursery man. "That is to
confound you, you blathering old sentimentalist," he cried, shaking with
laughter.
The story of Doctor Reefy and his courtship of the tall dark girl who
became his wife and left her money to him is a very curious story. It is
delicious, like the twisted little apples that grow in the orchards of
Winesburg. In the fall one walks in the orchards and the ground is hard with
frost underfoot. The apples have been taken from the trees by the pickers.
They have been put in barrels and shipped to the cities where they will be
eaten in apartments that are filled with books, magazines, furniture, and
people. On the trees are only a few gnarled apples that the pickers have
rejected. They look like the knuckles of Doctor Reefy's hands. One nibbles
at them and they are delicious. Into a little round place at the side of the
apple has been gathered all of its sweetness. One runs from tree to tree
over the frosted ground picking the gnarled, twisted apples and filling his
pockets with them. Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.
The girl and Doctor Reefy began their courtship on a summer afternoon.
He was forty-five then and already he had begun the practice of filling his
pockets with the scraps of paper that became hard balls and were thrown
away. The habit had been formed as he sat in his buggy behind the jaded
white horse and went slowly along country roads. On the papers were written
thoughts, ends of thoughts, beginnings of thoughts.
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.
The tall dark girl came to see Doctor Reefy because she was in the
family way and had become frightened. She was in that condition because of a
series of circumstances also curious.
The death of her father and mother and the rich acres of land that had
come down to her had set a train of suitors on her heels. For two years she
saw suitors almost every evening. Except two they were all alike. They
talked to her of passion and there was a strained eager quality in their
voices and in their eyes when they looked at her. The two who were different
were much unlike each other. One of them, a slender young man with white
hands, the son of a jeweler in Winesburg, talked continually of virginity.
When he was with her he was never off the subject. The other, a black-haired
boy with large ears, said nothing at all but always managed to get her into
the darkness, where he began to kiss her.
For a time the tall dark girl thought she would marry the jeweler's
son. For hours she sat in silence listening as he talked to her and then she
began to be afraid of something. Beneath his talk of virginity she began to
think there was a lust greater than in all the others. At times it seemed to
her that as he talked he was holding her body in his hands. She imagined him
turning it slowly about in the white hands and staring at it. At night she
dreamed that he had bitten into her body and that his jaws were dripping.
She had the dream three times, then she became in the family way to the one
who said nothing at all but who in the moment of his passion actually did
bite her shoulder so that for days the marks of his teeth showed.
After the tall dark girl came to know Doctor Reefy it seemed to her
that she never wanted to leave him again. She went into his office one
morning and without her saying anything he seemed to know what had happened
to her.
In the office of the doctor there was a woman, the wife of the man who
kept the bookstore in Winesburg. Like all old-fashioned country
practitioners, Doctor Reefy pulled teeth, and the woman who waited held a
handkerchief to her teeth and groaned. Her husband was with her and when the
tooth was taken out they both screamed and blood ran down on the woman's
white dress. The tall dark girl did not pay any attention. When the woman
and the man had gone the doctor smiled. "I will take you driving into the
country with me," he said.
For several weeks the tall dark girl and the doctor were together
almost every day. The condition that had brought her to him passed in an
illness, but she was like one who has discovered the sweetness of the
twisted apples, she could not get her mind fixed again upon the round
perfect fruit that is eaten in the city apartments. In the fall after the
beginning of her acquaintanceship with him she married Doctor Reefy and in
the following spring she died. During the winter he read to her all of the
odds and ends of thoughts he had scribbled on the bits of paper. After he
had read them he laughed and st