'A Distant Dissonance, Treble-cleft'

“Night-train noises, muffled and low, / nights when the Northern Limited left.”

I first read Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) in the summer after graduating from high school, and remained under its spell long after I accepted Anderson’s limitations as a writer. More than a decade later I was hired as a reporter for the newspaper in Bellevue, a town in North Central Ohio six miles east of Clyde along Route 20. Clyde was home to Anderson as a boy and served as his model for Winesburg.

 

The dominant business in Clyde and the region was and remains the Whirlpool Corp., the largest washing machine factory in the world. In 2003, the state put up a historical marker commemorating Anderson’s gift of immortality to the town, where he lived from 1884 to 1895. During my years in Bellevue (1981-83), the only public nod to Anderson I remember was the Winesburg Inn. Bellevue was a railroad hub and after a while you stopped hearing the train whistles and the low rumble of the engines. In “Tandy,” one of the stories collected in Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson writes:

 

“It was late evening and darkness lay over the town and over the railroad than ran along the foot of a little incline before the hotel. Somewhere in the distance, off to the west, there was a prolonged blast from the whistle of a passenger engine. A dog that had been sleeping in the roadway arose and barked.”

 

A recurrent character in the stories is George Willard, a young newspaper reporter who leaves Winesburg on a westbound train. Here are the final words of “Departure,” the final story in Anderson’s collection: “. . . the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood.”

 

I remembered Anderson and his stories when reading Maryann Corbett’s “Lament for the Midnight Train.” Its opening lines are quoted at the top. Few sounds are as lonesome-sounding as a train whistle late at night. Corbett writes:

 

“Midnights, we’d hear its strange chord blow,

a distant dissonance, treble-cleft.

Languid in summer, dulled in snow,

it spoke to me calmly: Trust and rest.

The night world works on a steady clock.”