PARTISAN REVIEW
regularities of human intercourse and sometimes of their substitute
gratifications in inanimate objects, as with the unloved Alice Hindman
who "because it was her own, could not bear to have anyone touch
the furniture of her room." In their compulsive traits these figures find
a kind of dulling peace, but as a consequence they are deprived of
one of the great blessings of human health: the capacity for a variety
of experience. That is why, in a sense, "nothing happens" in
Wines–
burg.
For most of its figures it is too late for anything to happen,
they can only muse over the traumas which have so harshly limited
their spontaneity. Stripped of their animate wholeness and twisted
into frozen postures of defense, they are indeed what Anderson has
called them: grotesques.
The world of
Winesburg,
populated largely by these back-street
grotesques, soon begins to seem like a buried ruin of a once vigorous
society, an atrophied remnant of the egalitarian moment of nine–
teenth-century America. Though many of the book's sketches are
placed in the out-of-doors, its atmosphere is as stifling as a tomb.
And the reiteration of the term "grotesque" is felicitous in a way
Anderson could hardly have been aware of; for it was first used by
Renaissance painters to describe arabesques and drawings found in
the underground ruins,
groUe,
of Nero's "Golden House."
The conception of the grotesque, as actually developed in the
stories, is not merely that it is an unwilled affliction but also that it
is a mark of a once sentient striving. In his introductory fantasy,
"The Book of the Grotesque," Anderson writes,
"It
was the truths
that made the people grotesques ... 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 a
falsehood." There is a sense, as will be seen later, in which these
sentences are at variance with the book's meaning, but they do sug–
gest the significant notion that the grotesques are those who
had
sought "the truths" that disfigured them. By contrast the banal crea–
tures who dominate the town's official life, such as Will Henderson,
publisher of the paper for which George Willard works, are not even
grotesques: they are simply clods. The grotesques are those whose
humanity has been outraged and who to survive in Winesburg have
had to suppress their wish to love. Wash Williams becomes a mis–
ogynist because his mother-in-law, hoping to reconcile him to his
