'This Modest Book Appeared'

An old friend, one I first met forty years ago, has retired from the Whirlpool Corp.’s washing machine plant in Clyde, Ohio, the largest in the world. The plant opened in 1952, the year my friend and I were born. Clyde is in north central Ohio, about seventy-five miles west of Cleveland. Seven miles to the east along Route 20 is Bellevue, where I landed my first job as a reporter for a daily newspaper in January 1981, after years of editing a weekly. I was an urban/suburban boy living in a small town, and I loved it. Mundane rural things seemed exotic.

Sherwood Anderson was born in 1876 in Camden, Ohio, and his family moved to Clyde in 1884 and lived there until 1895. Readers will know that Anderson modeled his fictional Winesburg on Clyde. I first read Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a collection of linked stories, when I was seventeen. The book grabbed me and only let go years later when Anderson’s mushy style and reliance on refried Freud grew tired after repeated readings. I still think fondly of the book and would encourage young readers to read it at least once. Scenes in the book have blurred with my memories of Bellevue and Clyde.

Irving Howe’s second book was Sherwood Anderson (1951), a critical biography. (His first, incidentally, was a life of Walter Reuther, and his third a critical study of William Faulkner.) Like me, he first read Winesburg, Ohio as a teenager. Howe joined the Army in 1943 and was heading to his post in Alaska when he made what he calls a “pilgrimage.” He writes in the Anderson book:

“One Sunday in 1943 I was hitchhiking through Ohio; it was my last week end before sailing overseas with the army. I remember with an undiminished sense of exhilaration a journey I took along a side road that led to Clyde, Anderson’s home town and model for Winesburg. As I should have anticipated, Clyde looked much like other American small towns and the few of its people with whom I talked were not particularly interested in Sherwood Anderson. But my pilgrimage nonetheless gave me a sense of satisfaction I could hardly have explained.”

Anderson is a writer best read early, recalled fondly and seldom or never returned to, like a former girlfriend. It’s the sort of book that turns into a myth in memory. The novelist Amos Oz discovered Winesburg, Ohio in 1959, when an Israeli publisher brought out a Hebrew translation. In his autobiography, A Tale of Love and Darkness (2004), Oz writes:

“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!”