Author Look-Alikes: Vol. 16

Shave off Sherwood Anderson’s eyebrows and you’ve got Chris Cooper:

Turn Gustave Flaubert’s hair white and you’ve got Wilford “Diabeetus” Brimley:

Pump E.E. Cummings full of red blood cells and performance-enhancing drugs and you’ve got Lance Armstrong:

Give Saki a smirk and a wristwatch and you've got Bob Hope :

Give Somerset Maugham a consiglieri and a 'family' of hired goons and you've got Don Corleone:

Ghosts of the living

"There is something memorable in the experience to be had by going into a fair ground that stands at the edge of a Middle Western town on a night after the annual fair has been held. The sensation is one never to be forgotten. On all sides are ghosts, not of the dead, but of living people. Here, during the day just passed, have come the people pouring in from the  town and the country around. Farmers with their wives and children and all the people from the hundreds of little frame houses have gathered within these board walls. Young girls have laughed and men with beards have talked of the affairs of their lives. The place has been filled to overflowing with life. It has itched and squirmed with life and now it is night and the life has all gone away. The silence is almost terrifying." 

-from Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

Review: Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

I should say up front that Winesburg, Ohio  was not a book that I was just dying to read. We’ve dealt with Sherwood Anderson’s influence here and here, and it was his influence on writers I have loved, more than anything else, that prompted me to check out his most famous book.

So what kind of book is it? Not a novel, that’s for sure. Not even a short story collection in the strictest sense- though each of the stories could technically stand on their own. It’s actually a short story cycle, where a number of stories work together like a mosaic to fill in a picture larger than themselves.

The common theme tying them all together seems to be the notion that meaningful connections with other people, even in a place as small as Winesburg, are a deceptive mirage you can never quite get to. A number of the stories focus on near -connections, typically occurring on long walks about the town (there is a bar in Winesburg, but not much else in the way of entertainment), but ultimately the characters are disappointed to find themselves bereft of the friendship and understanding that they so desperately craved. If I were to sum up the plight of Anderson’s characters in one word, I would say that they yearn .

Inserting obligatory "Yearning" link here.

Now, there are  some repeating characters we get to know a little better than others, especially the character of young George Willard, who serves as a kind of sounding board for the lost souls of his town, and whose decision to leave Winesburg in the last story gives the book its ending. But no matter the length, each story is a kind of simple character sketch, or a study in backstory- almost like a writing exercise. I was impressed with the eloquent way in which he puts their inner lives on display for the reader, as in this quick but precise description:

“In the big empty office the man and the woman sat looking at each other and they were a good deal alike. Their bodies were different, as were also the color of their eyes, the length of their noses, and the circumstances of their existence, but something inside them meant the same thing, wanted the same release, would have left the same impression on the memory of an onlooker.”

Each character’s got a history, and each finds himself in a dilemma, but there aren’t many happy resolutions or neatly tied-up endings. Every story simply adds another tile to the mosaic, which I why I would say that, in the end, the main character is probably Winesburg itself.

It’s worth checking out, as a “founding document” of modern American fiction, if nothing else.

Hemingwood Anderson

In this post we mentioned Sherwood Anderson’s influence on the generation of writers that followed him and that came to dominate the 20^th century literary landscape. But it’s one thing to talk about influence, and another thing altogether to see it plain on the page. Take a look at this passage from Winesburg, Ohio , and tell me you don’t see the pared down language and short-sentence-style that is so commonly attributed to Ernest Hemingway.

"The story of Doctor Reefy and his courtship of the tall 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."

It’s amazing, isn’t it? I mean, that paragraph could be something right out of In Our Time.

The Real Winesburg, Ohio

Immediately upon opening the book, readers of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio  are greeted by a hand-drawn map of the fictional town that is the novel’s setting:

Turns out Winesburg was a thinly veiled representation of Anderson’s own hometown of Clyde, Ohio which, like its fictional counterpart, has a Main Street that crosses Buckeye Street and some railroad tracks a little further north. If you’ve read this post or this post, you know where I’m going with this. Here is what Clyde, OH looks like today:

View Larger Map

The distances in the map of Winesburg are deceptively short (a half dozen structures fill the stretch between Buckeye and the Train tracks, a span that reaches a 1000 feet in the real world) and there’s not much in terms of landmarks that would jump out and link the two maps. Not even the train station or fairgrounds remain. But you can zoom all the way in and use Google’s Street View to at least stroll along Main and see some of the older buildings that might  have stood in Anderson’s time (Not likely, since he lived there from 1884-1896, but still worth a glance.)

William Faulkner, Geneologist

INTERVIEWER

Can you say how you started as a writer?

FAULKNER

I was living in New Orleans, doing whatever kind of work was necessary to earn a little money now and then. I met Sherwood Anderson. We would walk about the city in the afternoon and talk to people. In the evenings we would meet again and sit over a bottle or two while he talked and I listened. In the forenoon I would never see him. He was secluded, working. The next day we would repeat. I decided that if that was the life of a writer, then becoming a writer was the thing for me. So I began to write my first book. At once I found that writing was fun. I even forgot that I hadn't seen Mr. Anderson for three weeks until he walked in my door, the first time he ever came to see me, and said, “What's wrong? Are you mad at me?” I told him I was writing a book. He said, “My God,” and walked out. When I finished the book—it was Soldier's Pay—I met Mrs. Anderson on the street. She asked how the book was going, and I said I'd finished it. She said, “Sherwood says that he will make a trade with you. If he doesn't have to read your manuscript he will tell his publisher to accept it.” I said, “Done,” and that's how I became a writer.

INTERVIEWER

You must feel indebted to Sherwood Anderson, but how do you regard him as a writer?

FAULKNER

He was the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing which our successors will carry on. He has never received his proper evaluation. Dreiser is his older brother and Mark Twain the father of them both.