'He Thought of Little Things'

Timing is crucial in one’s reading life. Several people have advised readers to take on Proust’s masterwork only after their fortieth birthday. I first read it months before my eighteenth in the old C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation. Was much of it lost on me? Of course. I was callow and naïve, enthusiastic but ignorant. That’s part of the reason I read it again a decade later as I approached thirty. It was like reading a different novel and the experience convinced me of the obligation to reread the books that matter most to us. Now I retain in memory enough of Proust to return periodically to favorite passages. In 1999, I left a rose on his grave in Cimetière du Père Lachaise. Perhaps I’m deluding myself, but I fantasize about reading À la Recherche du Temps Perdu a third time. Proust is a rewarding obligation, like Shakespeare and Chekhov. 

Around the time I first read Proust I also discovered the work of a far less significant writer, Sherwood Anderson. He charmed me then though I can no longer read his mushy prose. He is, I suspect, a young person's writer, unlike Proust. He was a fellow Ohio native and lived for a spell in Cleveland, my hometown. I bought a beat-up copy of Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a Viking Compass Book, from the long-defunct Kay’s Books on Prospect Avenue in downtown Cleveland, where I would go to work as a clerk several years later. That city block, which I will visit next week while visiting Cleveland, is yet another space charged with memories. A stray line from John Lennon comes to mind: “All these places had their moments . . .” In them, space and time intersect. One of the blessings and curses of life is memory. I’ve just remembered waiting at a bus stop downtown after visiting Kay’s and thinking I would write a collection of short stories titled Clevelanders, in homage to Joyce’s Dubliners. Naturally, it was never written.

 

Here are the final words of “Departure,” the final story in Winesburg, Ohio: “. . . the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood.” Anderson based the fictional town of Winesburg on his childhood home, Clyde, seven miles northwest of Bellevue in north central Ohio. I moved to Bellevue in January 1981, about a week before President Reagan’s inauguration, and went to work as a reporter for The Gazette. I was twenty-eight and this was my first daily newspaper. Previously I had worked as the editor of the weekly paper in Montpelier, Ohio, about two hours to the west, near the Indiana and Michigan lines.  

 

The Gazette closed in 2016 after almost 149 years in business. Its owner, Civitas Media, switched to twice-a-week publication in 2015 but couldn’t keep the paper afloat. Its circulation was about 1,000, after peaking at 4,300 in the late nineteen-seventies, just before I got there. Civitas Media also owned and closed The Clyde Enterprise.

 

George Willard, the character leaving Winesburg on a westbound train in the passage quoted at the top, was also a newspaper reporter. Like him, I remember incidentals, small things, like meeting Pat Boone, and the smell of Aramis, the “men’s fragrance” our publisher seemed to apply with a paint brush, the city manager coming to work one winter on skis. George’s memories are folksier than mine:

 

“He thought of little things—Turk Smollet wheeling boards through the main street of his town in the morning, a tall woman, beautifully gowned, who had once stayed overnight at his father’s hotel, Butch Wheeler the lamp lighter of Winesburg hurrying through the streets on a summer evening and holding a torch in his hand, Helen White standing by a window in the Winesburg post office and putting a stamp on an envelope.”