Beauty and woe in Winesburg

He's not the sole survivor in the home, but he's one of few. There's a guy across the hall who's a year older, a man who grew up on a family farm in Brookings County, South Dakota, a man who would certainly remember it too; but otherwise I'm sure Dad is pretty much alone, one of only a few, in the Home, who remembers farming with horses. 

It's been wet this spring, too wet. And while some few farmers in the neighborhood took an early chance and got something in the ground in one of a few moments of recess between the rains, most farmers, I'm sure, are hard to live with right now, even though their 400 horsepower Farmalls pull 24-row planters. The immense changes the horse created in the way of life of Native people is a story with echoes out here, where the advent of the farm tractor put a blacksmith like my grandfather out of a job. 

Once, out here, the horse came and the horse went. There's got to be a story there.

In Wednesday's New York Times, Bruce Falconer, a senior editor at The American Scholar, claims the American writer Sherwood Anderson grew up at just such a time, a moment when the world was changing faster than people who lived it could imagine, the end of a moment out here in the Midwest, a time when a world whose immensity was beyond anyone's imagination was being drawn and quartered into an immense garden, a time when people were building, not leaving, small towns. 

Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Falconer says, was panned when it first came out. criticized for its darkness, its sexual tomfoolery, its unending march of "grotesques," as Anderson called them, men and women somehow gripped by behaviors they seemingly could neither control nor understand. 

In the town where he grew up, Clyde, Ohio, the local librarian burned copies of his book, Falconer says, and kept only one behind lock and key, then sent out nothing but disapproval if anyone asked to check it out. The darkness of Winesburg, Falconer suggests, rises from a sense of doom in places like Clyde.

Indeed, Winesburg — with its dirt roads, horses and gas lights, its farmers, shopkeepers and artisans — represented a rural culture soon to be swept by unprecedented social and technological ferment. When the superintendent of the United States census declared the American frontier closed in 1890, two-thirds of Americans still resided in small farm towns not unlike Winesburg. But by 1920, for the first time in the nation’s history, the majority of Americans were living in urban areas.

That's a story writ often out here. Even though some small towns refuse to close up shop and some even grow, many have shut down or inevitably will. That death march is neither pleasant nor pretty. Falconer says Anderson was one of a group of writers in Chicago whose similar boyhood small towns, in the rear-view mirror, seemed paltry and stultifying when compared to life in the big city. Their own small town silliness was easy pickins. Still are, I suppose. 

But Anderson has a formidable legacy. Winesburg remains a staple, Falconer says, of a standard high school literature curriculum (I'm doubtful), and whether or not contemporary readers like him, there is no denying his patrimony, a literary heritage that includes some big-name descendants--Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Faulkner, who each found in Anderson's Winesburg a way of people-ing their small towns of their own.

It's not hard to understand why some find Anderson's gallery of  grotesques "dark." It is. But that doesn't mean the people are without light. I've always loved a line from what amounts to the book's "forward," where Sherwood Anderson says this about those citizens whose lives he enters: 

. . .in the beginning, when the world was young, there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth. Man made the truth, and the great truth was a composite of great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths, and they were all beautiful.

Those lines stamp the work with an era all right, an era that, like all of them, eventually died or dies; but I've always thought that "they were all beautiful" is not in the least derisive, but instead redemptive--and tried to read the book in that way.