The Normal Times

Sherwood Anderson, 1919

In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited. In the mind of each was the same thought. “I have come to this lonely place and here is this other,” was the substance of the thing felt.

My copy is a cheap Signet Classic. I’ve had it for fifteen years, and it falls apart a little more every time I read it. It may have been the first book that made me want to try writing fiction. Some books just seem like they were particularly fun to write, chain-smoking and clacking away under some yellow-toned gas lamp. A population of weirdos, all under my control, crashing together like runaway trains.

Anderson called it a composite novel. It was a set of short stories all set in one little Midwestern town, and the characters walked in and out of the background of each other’s stories until they got their own chapter to shine in. Unusual for its era and genre, the book contained a fair amount of world building, even bothering with the trouble of a hand-drawn map.

There’s a rough kind of romance in the early industrial setting. In a tiny town, new fangled gadgetry exists in a diminutive form. Gas lamps are more common. Telegrams are the way to communicate. Naturalist, Modernist, New Realism; all have been used to diagnose this book. The terms miss the odd qualities of the book. It’s a mildly unsettling read, it would be better described as Expressionist. Like those ghastly color works of Jazz Berlin, the book is a parading of small people writ large. Slightly wild, slightly tense, slightly repulsive, and very neurotic. Nearly every character is some sort of lonely and alienated. Many of them live like ghosts with nothing to haunt.

The stories bear the marks of their time, but there is something universal about the characters and their aimlessness in small town America. There have always been the slow-fading memory of the ones who got out, the ones who want to get out, and the ones who will live and die there unless they go to prison or something. Futureless villages that never die so completely as the pop-up mining towns of the Far West. I’ve said before, (LINK FLANNERY COLLECTION) no one does weird like small rural towns. The kind of stagnant existence depicted in Winesburg, Ohio is a major ingredient of that strange stew. It’s not an important book, and it doesn’t contain any grand existential truths, but it made something interesting out of a dusty nothing.

There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun.

If you’d like to visit the wild world of Winesburg, you can buy a copy here.