'Time So Vicious in His Reaping'

I moved to Montpelier, Ohio, a small town in the northwest corner of the state, late in the summer of 1977. My mental model for such a place was fictional, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. I was born and raised in a Cleveland suburb and a small town surrounded by corn and soybean fields seemed terribly exotic. Anderson prefaced his stories with “The Book of the Grotesque,” a brief scene-setter which today I find condescending to smalltown people. He writes:

 “It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.”

 

It’s all a little silly and saturated in semi-digested Freudian nonsense, but half a century ago I took Anderson’s grotesquerie seriously. The main financial institution in Montpelier was downtown, two blocks from where we lived, and was called the Farmer’s and Merchant’s Bank. Its president, a very old man, was our landlord, and I resented him for no good reason. The town’s weekly newspaper, where I would soon go to work, was housed in a former gas station. The grocery/liquor store on Main Street was owned and run by a crippled man with a withered arm. Across the street was a pet store owned by a man who always wore olive-green overalls, with a parrot perched on his shoulder. Down his back ran a dense white smear of bird shit.

 

I soon ran into a peculiar-looking young man, always dressed in cowboy regalia. I never saw him do anything except walk around downtown. His face was almost featureless and resembled a slice of ham. Most of one side of it had been erased. He had one eye. I soon learned that he had bungled a suicide attempt with a shotgun. Those not laughing at him adopted a protective attitude. He died a year or two later and I’ve often wondered what his life was like. What made him desperate enough to try to kill himself? Did he ever think about trying again?

 

In his biography of Edwin Arlington Robinson, Scott Donaldson devotes several interesting pages to the poet’s attitude toward death, which remained consistent through the years. When his mother died in 1896, Robinson didn’t grieve. He reasoned that her suffering was over. She was released. When the daughter of neighbors in Gardiner, Maine was drowned while the family was on vacation, Robinson wrote to a friend: “I am never sorry for the dead, but I can be damnably sorry for the living.”

 

An uncle of the same neighbors, Donaldson tells us, “suffered a disfiguring gunshot wound while rabbit hunting,” and lingered for four days. Robinson wrote to a friend that he hoped the doctors “inadvertently . . . hastened things a little.” Robinson was stoical about death, a stance that can be mistaken for insensitivity. His brother Herman became an alcoholic, was estranged from his wife and children and died of tuberculosis in 1909. His eldest brother, Dean, was a pharmacist who became a morphine addict and had taken his life in 1899 with an overdose. Death was like a neighbor in those days, intimately familiar, not something that routinely happened in a hospital.

 

Robinson wrote “For a Dead Lady” for his mother, Mary Palmer Robinson, after her death in 1896, shortly before he published his first book, The Torrent and the Night Before. Here is the final stanza:

 

“The beauty, shattered by the laws

That have creation in their keeping,

No longer trembles at applause,

Or over children that are sleeping;

And we who delve in beauty’s lore

Know all that we have known before

Of what inexorable cause

Makes Time so vicious in his reaping.”