Every sign for Zanesville makes me think of Winesburg

While I was driving through Ohio, every sign for Zanesville (hometown of writer Zane Gray) made me think of "Winesburg, Ohio" by Sherwood Anderson. Anderson wasn't from Zanesville -- he was from Camden, on the west side of the state, and too far for me to visit. Besides, he later wound up in Marion, Va., where his legacy is celebrated.

For all the fame he had in his day -- he was a bestseller, a literary bon vivant and mentor to Faulkner and Hemingway -- Anderson doesn't get read much now. The beginning of one of his stories — "Hands" the opening to "Winesburg, Ohio" — after the jump.

Carolyn Kellogg

"Hands," the first story in Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio" -- the book is online in full at Bartleby.com.

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.

Comments

[Jenn]

You know, I've been recommended his collection three times in the last year by various writers and teachers. He's still known and respected, I think, as an innovator of the form -- the linked stories of Winesburg have paved the way for many, many writers today.

[Bryan Miltenberg]

Carolyn,

For a long time I would have agreed with you, and I was always puzzled over why Anderson was never given due credit. But after reading Malcolm Cowley's introduction to Winesburg, Ohio, which is not extremely kind, but is very objective and very fair, it begins to make sense. I think he was a writer of great influence, but not a great writer. Is that possible? Also, did you know about Hemingway's split with him? EH felt so strongly about splitting with Anderson that he put his burgenoing career on hold to write an entire book of Anderson parody (The Torrents of Spring). Vicious.

[anonymous]

Faulkner credited Anderson with being his mentor and if you read Winesburg you see the influence. Toni Morrison has cited Anderson as part of her lineage, which she traces back to Faulkner and beyond.