Winesburg, Ohio is Sherwood Anderson’s masterpiece. It is a collection of short stories delving into the psyches of different people living in the small Ohio town of Winesburg, each of whom as the prologue informs us is a grotesque, destroyed by their obsessions and deep unhappiness.We have the story of a former teacher still haunted by accusations of homosexuality that destroyed his career due to his hands, there is an old doctor who sits alone in his dusty and dingy office all day writing down ideas and rolling them into paper balls after the death of his wife, there is the story of a sickly mother who ponders killing her husband who she believes is trying to prevent their son from living his dream after her poor decision to enter a loveless marriage prevented her from living her own dreams. There is a school teacher in love with one of her students. There is a priest in love with a passionate school who spies into her room from a hole in the chapel tower and after seeing her naked believes she is a message from God. There is a religious and wealthy farmer who believes it is his destiny to acquire all the land around him from his sinning neighbors and that his family’s destiny is the same as the Biblical king David. Then there are characters like newspaper editor, George Willard, who wants to escape the town to join a city newspaper and one day become a writer of fiction, who reappears in each story, as the various characters try to tell him about their miserable lives or focus their resentment of their unhappiness against him.  If you come to this book expecting well-defined plot-oriented stories you’ll be disappointed. Anderson’s work is all about the inner lives of  his character who all seems to be deeply unhappy and lonely, discontent with and constricted by small town life.

It is a story about the inner anguish people secretly feel and keep hidden from the people around them. It is a story that reminds how many people go through life unhappy and miserable, live in isolation even when they’re surrounded by people, and how many fail to achieve their dreams, merely settling for whatever they can get.

Considering it is his masterpiece, I cannot say I loved Anderson’s work. Too often the different stories don’t seem to go anywhere, even as psychological explorations. Some of the stories in Winesburg, Ohio are definitely better than others. For example, the first story with Doctor Reefy in which we learn about how he met his now dead wife and that he writes down ideas that he rolls up into balls, doesn’t really go anywhere.

While I found the overall work to be just okay, readable, but nothing really that exciting, there are parts that transcend the overall experience. For example, the short story “Queer” about the son of a shop owner who thinks the whole town secretly thinks he and his dad are weirdoes and plans to confront George Willard, the reporter, who he believes represents the whole town, is masterpiece in its own right. It has the most wonderfully ironic ending in that there is no evidence in objective reality that anyone thinks he or his father is strange, but as he attempts to overcome these delusions about what other people think of him, his actions lead people to think that he is a weirdo.

The prose style is nothing special. Sometimes, the narrative voice even seems to contradict itself, such as at the beginning prologue:

“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 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 narrative tells us he is like a pregnant woman, but actually he was like a baby, but actually, no, he was like a youth, but wait a minute he is actually like a young woman wearing a coat of mail like a knight. The first time you read a sentence like this it is jarring. It comes off as bad writing. It is loaded with mixed metaphors, but even worse than that the narrative voice is actually in the process of changing his mind, an indecisive writer in action unsure how to proceed with the story. Another episode also appear later in the novel in which the narrator contradicts himself and tells the reader to scratch that description they just told us about a character. On re-reading the passage, I notice that a more forgiving critic could defend the passage as an example of the writer trying to comes to grips with the many diverse stories of grotesques that will follow. We might the passage as capturing the writer’s mind flickering through the many image of different peoples’ lives, hence the mixed-metaphors and the constant shifting of different character types (a youth, a baby, a pregnant mother), but I am still wary that the passage is forgivable prose even if we add this psychological and structural consideration. And even when the writing isn’t bad, contradictory, or bloated with mix-metaphors, it just feels painfully plain and uninspired most of the time.

Anderson’s straight-forward prose style foreshadows Hemingway’s superior version of a similar style, while Faulker owes a debt to the work’s regionalism and the deep psychological explorations trumping plot. At the very least, Sherwood Anderson should be read as being an important influence on Hemingway and Faulkner, but also some of the stories separate from the whole actually are extremely good (such as the story “Queer”).

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