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PARTISAN REVIEW
tions with George Willard, the young reporter. At night, when they
need not fear the mockery of public detection, they hesitantly ap–
proach him, almost in supplication, to tell him of their aillictions and
perhaps find health in his voice. Instinctively, they sense his moral
freshness, finding hope in the fact that he has not yet been calloused
by knowledge and time. To some of the grotesques, such as Dr.
Reefy and Dr. Parcival, George Willard is the lost son returned,
the Daedalus whose apparent innocence and capacity for feeling
will redeem Winesburg. To others among the grotesques, such as
Tom Foster and Elmer Cowley, he is a reporter-messenger, a small–
town Hermes, bringing news of a dispensation which will allow
them to re-enter the world of men. But perhaps most fundamentally,
and subsuming these two visions of George Willard, he seems to the
grotesques a young priest who will renew the forgotten communal
rites by which they may again be bound together. To Louise Trun–
nion he will bring a love that is more than a filching of flesh; to
Dr. Parcival the promise to "write the book that I may never get
written" in which he will tell all men that "everyone in the world
is Christ and they are all crucified"; to the Reverend Curtis Hartman
the willingness to understand a vision of God as revealed in the flesh
of a naked woman; to Wash Williams the peace that will ease his
sense of violation; ,and to Enoch Robinson the "youthful sadness,
young man's sadness, the sadness of a growing boy in a village at
the year's end [which can open] the lips of the old man."
As
they approach George Willard, the grotesques seek not merely
the individual release of a sudden expressive outburst, but also a
relation with each other that may restore them to collective harmony.
They are distraught communicants in search of a ceremony, a social
value, a manner of living; a lost ritual that may, by some means,
re-establish a flow and exchange of emotion. Their estrangement is
so extreme that they cannot turn to each other, though it is each
other they really need and secretly want; they turn instead to George
, Willard, who will soon be out of the orbit of their life. The miracle
that the Reverend Curtis Hartman sees and the message over which
Kate Swift broods could bind one to the other, yet they both turn
to George Willard who, receptive as he may wish to be, cannot
understand them.
In only one story, "Death," do the grotesques seem to meet.
