Written by Dr. James Evans, Retired Psychiatrist and Author*
“Many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg.”
Sherwood Anderson, the author of ‘Winesburg, Ohio,’ was born in 1876 in a tiny farming town in Ohio, the third of seven children. Originally well off, the family moved around to other small Ohio villages, burdened by his father’s drinking and job instability, sinking lower and lower, working eventually as a hired man. Anderson quit school at 14, working at various menial jobs, his talent for selling evident at an early age. An avid reader, he moved to Chicago and had his first exposure to the world of literature. After a stint in the army, he completed the equivalent of high school education and moved to Springfield Ohio. Returning to Chicago in 1900 he became involved in advertising, selling ads and writing copy. He also began writing for a literary magazine, ‘character sketches’ which would become notable in Winesburg. He married, had three children and continued his career, eventually becoming president of a mail-order firm. His first ‘nervous breakdown’ in 1907 occurred after one of the products he sold and had guaranteed proved to be faulty.
The family moved to Elyria, Ohio where he set up a roofing preservative company (at a markup of 500%) and eventually he consolidated several businesses into one. In 1912 he was involved in his business, busy social and family life and his writing, when he suffered the most famous of his ‘nervous breakdowns’. At the age of 36, after coming to his office one morning, he wrote a note to his wife complaining that his feet were wet and getting wetter and left the office. Four days later he appeared at a drug store in Cleveland, disoriented and asking the pharmacist to help him figure out his identity. After a stint in a hospital, he returned home and began the practice of reinterpreting his breakdown. While various diagnoses have been offered, the general consensus is that he suffered a ‘fugue state’. Years later in 1942, he wrote that ‘the thought occurred to me that if men thought me a little insane, they would forgive me if I let out.’ He also described the breakdown as ‘escaping from a materialistic existence,’ serving as a model for young writers; ‘he fled in order to find himself, then prayed to flee that disease of self to become beautiful and clear.’ (Herbert Gold).
Anderson gave up his business and moved to Chicago, joining a group of writers and bohemians. Anderson moved to New Orleans in 1924 where he continued writing and was considered an important influence on other writers and where he entertained Faulkner, Sandburg and Edmund Wilson. In addition to Winesburg, he published successful short stories and other novels including one ‘Many Marriages’ that F. Scott Fitzgerald praised as his finest. (He was married four times, the second time to his mistress, the third to a woman he was involved with before the divorce). He eventually moved to Troutville, Virginia where he had a summer farm. He died at the age of 64 of peritonitis while on a South America cruise. His grave marker is in Marion, Virginia.
Many years ago, the professor of American Literature at my college described in rapturous terms Sherwood Anderson getting up from his desk, walking down the railroad tracks out of town and his life as a businessman —— and into his life as a writer.
My inclination, not as a diagnostician but as a way of considering what happened to Anderson, is to think of Anderson’s ‘nervous breakdown’ as an ‘overdetermined’ dissociative state with an overlay of ‘secondary gain’ (for an explanation of the psychiatric mumbo jumbo see below).
In a dissociative state (previously known as a fugue state), the person experiences a combination of various states of amnesia and a loss of his sense of himself or herself. It is rare and has been associated with some trauma that overwhelmed the victim’s ability to process the trauma using the mental mechanisms ordinarily available to that person. It has been most often described in the victims of sexual trauma at a young age, also in victims of wartime or other disasters. Okay, overdetermined means an event that has more than one cause. And secondary gain refers to an illness or symptom serving more than one purpose (exaggerating real symptoms for monetary gain, for example).
Let’s suppose Anderson’s background of instability (poverty, multiple moves, father’s alcoholism) created, in this very bright young man, some serviceable but shaky psychic underpinnings (quits school at 14, menial jobs, a stint in the army, becomes a businessman) makes him more vulnerable than someone with a stable and supportive background and personality. He finally develops a sense of himself as a successful businessman. But there is burning in him a fire that he can’t afford to stir but neither can it be quenched. So that is the trauma; the side of himself that has been repressed and demands release. He experiments with a dissociative state in a ‘forme frust’ (an atypical or incomplete manifestation), in the midst of a business setback and eventually develops the full-blown episode. That enables him to explain his actions as being a ‘nervous breakdown’ and at the same time releases him to his dream of being a writer. So the dissociative state is both overdetermined (his psychic vulnerability and his need to emancipate himself from his previous identity) and involves secondary gain (the episode frees him from criticism that he abandoned his own family’s stability). Anderson: “The thought occurred to me that if men thought me a little insane, they would forgive me if I let out.” He is now unleashed to assume his newfound role as a bohemian writer while also looking back with an understanding and even loving eye at the ‘grotesques’ he grew up with, themselves unable to either articulate or psychically metabolize what rages in them.
Notes about Our Upcoming Classic Book Club Teleconference on April 3, 2020, at 10 am EST – Request a Call-in Code at ellisonms2@vcu.edu
Murray (Editor) has summarized James’ Discussion Questions Below
- What are your impressions of the novel?
- Is Anderson writing about a particular period of history, or does his writing extend beyond that time?
- Do you consider the names of some of the characters as being deliberate?
- What themes related to God re-occur in the novel?
- How does this book compare to Main Street by Sinclair Lewis?
- Consider how Anderson specifically addresses the reader, for example, in the “Book of the Grotesque.”
- Why has this book both been panned and endured 100 years after it was written?
- What are your favorite stories?
James discusses several of the exemplary stories of Winesburg, Ohio below:
Irwin Howe said he thought that the best story in ‘Winesburg, Ohio’ is ‘The Untold LIe’. “Many stories are evocative even for someone who did not live in that time and place, and some passages are poetic. The ones I will most likely remember (although not necessarily for the preceding reasons) are:
“The Book of the Grotesque.” This opening story is an outlining of the writer’s task, themes, and characters in Winesburg, Ohio.
“The Teacher and The Strength of God.” – Based on the plain, spinsterish Kate Swift, having projected onto her ‘the features of a tiny goddess on a pedestal in a garden in the dim light of a summer evening,’ by the author, viewed as a temptress by Curtis Hartman, an instrument of God also by Hartman, and a muse for George Willard; “You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say.” So many people in ‘Winesburg, Ohio’ struggle and fail to tell others what they urgently want to convey.
“Paper Pills.” Twisted apple love.
“A Man of Ideas.” A hypomanic style con in the service of wooing Sarah’s menfolk; one of the few light moments in the book.
“Adventure.” So many stories of unrequited love of various sorts; this one grabbed me: “Many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg.”
*Books written by James Evans*
Love, A (written under the pen name of Arthur Bannister)
September, 1987
Walsh
Chestertown
Banner House
What Am I Going To Do With You?
Where’s Judy?
They are all available on Amazon Books
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