'The Town of Winesburg Had Disappeared'

B. W. Huebsch published Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson’s collection of stories set in a mythical small town in north central Ohio, on May 8, 1919. That same month, a book dealer in Cleveland gave the painter Charles Burchfield, who was studying at the Cleveland School of Art, a copy of the book. Burchfield later wrote: “I was both fascinated and repelled by his stories – I wrote to him and received a cordial letter in return – Winesburg cleared the air for me, and I returned to human subjects again.”

Anderson and his book have “cleared the air” for many readers and writers. I read it in the summer of 1970, in the months between graduating from high school and “going away to college” – that was the phrase. I was born and raised in Cleveland. Winesburg was Anderson’s fictionalization of Clyde, Ohio, seventy miles to the west. He lived there as a boy. The book seemed to this seventeen-year-old reader a distillation of what it meant to be American, for better and worse. I reread it almost annually for years. My second newspaper job was in Bellevue, seven miles from Clyde, and Winesburg seemed more real than ever. And then it didn’t. Here are the final words of “Departure,” the book’s final story: “. . . the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood.” The character being described is George Willard, a reporter for the Winesburg Eagle.

I lost interest in Anderson’s work. I could no longer read it. Anderson’s prose had turned soft and mushy. His sentences seemed aimless and unfocused. The phrase just quoted, “to paint the dreams of his manhood,” suggests what I’m getting at. I changed, not Anderson or his book. I tried again last year to read it but nostalgia wasn’t sufficient incentive. His second-hand Freudian posturing, which might have been daring a century ago, seemed remarkably silly. Winesburg has joined the long list of books I used to love. Something comparable has happened with my relationship to Burchfield’s paintings and prose. It’s not dismissal but a serious reevaluation. His transcendentalism and nature worship are now embarrassing. His urban and industrial scenes are more interesting than his mystical landscapes.

On this date, March 14, in 1915, Burchfield notes in his journal: “On Euclid avenue [then Cleveland’s grandest street] I saw an Italian balloon man, his bright blue shirt (that they love so much) contrasting finely with his startling red orange yellow and emerald balloons. He seemed closer akin to spring birds than most people. Peddlers, hurdy gurdy men + scissors grinders to our minds mean poetry, living a poetic life.”

This is pure sentimental effluvium -- what the hell is “a poetic life”? – but I like Burchfield’s painterly eye, the way he notices things, and I wish he had devoted more attention to scissors grinders.

[See Charles Burchfield’s Journals: The Poetry of Place, State University of New York Press, 1993.]