`A Copernican Revolution in Reverse'

“It was Sherwood Anderson who got me out of the vicious circle and `freed my writing hand.’ I shall always be grateful to him.”

The author is Amos Oz, and the book is his autobiography, A Tale of Love and Darkness (2004). He was born in an auspicious time and place – 1939, in Jerusalem. His family was bookish, worshipful of European culture:

“Books filled our home. My father could read sixteen or seventeen languages and could speak eleven (all with a Russian accent). My mother spoke four or five languages and read seven or eight.”

His parents mostly read books in German or English (“and presumably they dreamed in Yiddish”). Like all of us, they ranked national cultures: Russian and Polish; one step up, German; then French; on top, English: “As for America, there they were not so sure: after all, it was a country where people shot at Indians, held up mail trains, chased gold, and hunted girls.”

Oz discovered Winesburg, Ohio in 1959, when an Israeli publisher brought out a Hebrew translation:

“Before I read this book, I did not know that Winesburg existed and I had never heard of Ohio. Or I may have remembered it vaguely from Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Then this modest book appeared and excited me to the bone; for nearly a whole summer night until half past three in the morning I walked the paths of the kibbutz like a drunken man, talking to myself, trembling like a lovesick swain, singing and skipping, sobbing with awestruck joy and ecstasy: eureka!”

I know the feeling. A decade later, in 1970, I read my fellow Ohioan, Sherwood Anderson, for the first time, and while I recall no sobbing I was shaken and thrilled. Even while seeing the flaws in his style, the occasional sloppiness and sentimentality, I thrilled to the life in his Winesburg stories (set in real-life Clyde, Ohio, 60 miles west of where I grew up). A month later I reread Winesburg, Ohio like a convert. Few bookish experiences have left me feeling so exalted, as though I had found a home. Oz again:

“The whole of Winesburg, Ohio was a string of stories and episodes that grew out of each other and were connected to each other, particularly because they all took place in a single, poor, godforsaken provincial town. It was filled with small-time people: an old carpenter, an absent-minded young man, some hotel owner, and a servant girl. The stories were also connected to each other because the characters slipped from story to story: what had been central characters in one story reappeared as secondary background characters in another.”

When Oz discovered Anderson he was 20 and uncertain of his literary yearnings and gifts. He was stuck in a romantically stylized cul-de-sac stitched together out of Hemingway and Erich Maria Remarque. Anderson showed him a way out:

“The stories in Winesburg, Ohio all revolved around trivial, everyday happenings, based on snatches of local gossip or on unfulfilled dreams….types who until that night I had supposed had no place in literature, unless it was a background character who afforded readers at most half a minute of mockery mixed with pity…events and people that I was certain were far beneath the dignity of literature, below its acceptability threshold, occupied center stage.”

The writer Oz cites more often than any other in his autobiography, often casually, using the adjectival form of the writer’s name, is Chekhov – thus, Chekhovian. On Page 3, describing his earliest years in Jerusalem, he writes:

“Years later, when I read Chekhov (in Hebrew translation), I was convinced he was one of us: Uncle Vanya lived right upstairs from us, Doctor Samoylenko bent over me and examined me with his broad, strong hands when I had a fever and once diptheria. Laevsky with his perpetual migraine was my mother’s second cousin, and we used to go and listen to Trigorin at Saturday matinees in the Beit Ha`am Auditorium.”

And on the eve of the creation of the Israeli state, Oz writes:

“…Jewish Jerusalem was neither youthful nor fully armed and bristling, it was a Chekhovian town, confused, terrified, swept by gossip and false rumors, at its wits’ end, paralyzed by muddle and terror.”

And so again when Oz encounters Anderson:

“Winesburg, Ohio taught me what the world according to Chekhov was like even before I encountered Chekhov himself…This modest book hit me like a Copernican revolution in reverse. Whereas Copernicus showed that our world is not the center of the universe but just one planet among others in the solar system, Sherwood Anderson opened my eyes to write about what was around me. Thanks to him I suddenly realized that the written world does not depend on Milan or London but always revolves around the hand that is writing, wherever it happens to be writing: where you are is the center of the universe.”