Winesburg, Ohio
When the book appeared in 1919, however, its champions and detractors alike spoke passionately of its frankness, roughness, and unrelenting search for the “wart on the face of humanity.” Part of its boldness lay in Anderson’s experimental plotlessness and startlingly direct prose, as he boiled down the cadences of American vernacular to simple declarative sentences. But what made Anderson truly iconoclastic to his contemporaries were his unflinching depictions of emotional torment, most commonly fueled by debilitating sexual repression.
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Anderson’s gaze into “the infinities that lie beneath the commonplace materials of American life,” as one 1919 review put it, still makes Winesburg, Ohio a captivating, disturbing read. In his 24 interrelated stories, Anderson focuses on isolated people trapped on the margins of a seeming American idyll. Wing Biddlebaum, a schoolteacher whose affectionate caressing of his male students has nearly gotten him lynched, sits “forever frightened” on his front porch, watching others laugh and joke as they pass by, convinced he’s not “in any way part of the life of the town where he had lived for twenty years.” Joe Welling–who like many adult men in the book lives with his uncommunicative mother–is silent or polite until he’s seized by a kind of mental spasm and attacks passersby with a torrent of lunatic ravings. Elizabeth Willard–mother of reporter George Willard, the book’s central figure–is a shell of a woman who lurks in the shadows of her husband’s failing hotel, ruing her wasted life. She says about her son, “If I am dead and see him becoming a meaningless drab figure like myself, I will come back.”
It’s a stirring opening, intricate in its dark shadings. And since all the initial dialogue is sung, lyricism becomes the town’s vernacular; songs don’t seem to intrude as they so often do in musicals. But then the opening tapestry disappears and George Willard appears front and center, played by Ryan Gardner, whose aw-shucks manner instantly reduces him to a type: the male ingenue of 1960s musical comedy. It’s a complex moment in the book when George, searching for something to do with his life, announces to his friend that he’s “decided to fall in love” with Helen White–a moment both humorous and disturbing, revealing a man so alienated from himself that he imagines he can switch his feelings on like an electric light. But onstage it’s merely cute.
