344 Making It New: 1900–1945“that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his
truth, and tried to live by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced
became a falsehood.” The different characters whose stories are told in this volume
all hunger for something, some “truth” to live by and communicate. Snatching up
“the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty,”
they take their singular truth, their partial reading of reality as the complete text of
the world. Winesburg is a town full of people who have overdeveloped one “truth-
ful” aspect of themselves until it has achieved a disproportion that amounts to
falsehood. One character called Joe Welling, who likes to talk, has become obsessive
and compulsive in his speech. Another, Jesse Bentley, a religious man, has come to
see himself as the Abraham of his time, ready not only to lead his people out of
Canaan but to sacrifice children. Still another, Alice Hindman, has become obsessed
by what she regards as the lack of fulfillment of spinsterhood. She runs naked
through the streets at night, the rain on her skin offering the nearest thing she knows
to the touch of a lover. Such people long to be and belong, to know the love that
would give them identity and communality. They long also to communicate their
longing, to George Willard in particular; to speak the needs that their “strained,
eager” voices and strange behavior can only articulate in a distorted fashion. They
are alienated, not only from others, but themselves; and it is this that distresses and
disfigures them. What they want, Anderson intimates, is all that is at odds with the
piety and provinciality of life in small-town America. No wonder, then, that when
the book first appeared Hart Crane called it an important chapter in “the Bible of
American consciousness.”
The style in which Anderson tells the stories of the people of Winesburg, or the
story of Hugh McVey, the Midwestern protagonist of his best novel, Poor White
(1920), is often described as naturalistic. It is, however, more than that. Quiet and
modest in tone, idiomatic in diction, attentive to the minute surface details of gesture
and behavior, Anderson’s style also makes a virtue of its own awkwardness. It is
hesitant, moving forward stealthily as if words were hazards; it is repetitive, circling
back and forth as if words had to be probed, gently teased to disclose their meanings;
it vacillates between the simple and the slightly odd, the clarity of the vernacular and
quaintness of something translated from another language. This amounts to saying
that style is a measure of subject here. The style is a relatively easy one to parody:
Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner both did so – in The Torrents of Spring
(1926), and Sherwood Anderson & Other Famous Creoles (1926), respectively – in
order, partly, to disengage themselves from Anderson’s influence. But at its best, as in
Winesburg, Ohio, that style enacts the problem of communication while solving it: it
dramatizes the hunger to speak of what lies beneath the surface of life, in this case to
the reader, and it describes a hunger satisfied. In short, it acknowledges both the
difficulty and the possibility of telling the truth. It is this acknowledgment, rather
than any particular stylistic traits, that was Anderson’s principal gift to writers like
Hemingway and Faulkner, who were to offer in their own work far more intense but
nevertheless related explorations of both the problems and the potential of language.
And as with style, so with narrative structure: what Anderson offered here, to theGGray_c04.indd 344ray_c 04 .indd 344 8 8/1/2011 7:53:48 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 48 AM