THE BOOK OF THE GROTESQUE
37
Elizabeth Willard and Dr. Reefy embrace in a moment of confession,
but their approach to love is interrupted by a stray noise. Elizabeth
leaves: "The thing that had come to life in her as she talked to her
one friend died suddenly." A few months later, at her deathbed,
Dr. Reefy meets George Willard and puts out "his hand as though
to greet the young man and then awkwardly [draws] it back again."
Bloom does not find his Daedalus; the hoped-for epiphany comes at
the verge of death and, as in all the stories, is aborted; the ritual of
communal love remains unrealized.
The burden which the grotesques would impose on George
Willard is beyond his strength. He is not yet himself a grotesque
mainly because he has not yet experienced very deeply, but for the
role to which they would assign him he is too absorbed with his
own ambition and restlessness. The grotesques see in his difference
from them the possibility of saving themselves but actually it is the
barrier to an ultimate companionship. All that George Willard's
adolescent receptivity to the grotesques can give him is the momen–
tary emotional illumination described in that lovely story, "Sophisti–
cation." On the eve of his departure from Winesburg, George Willard
reaches the point "when he for the first time takes the backward
view of life.... 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. . . . Already he hears death calling. With all his
heart he wants to come close to some other human, touch someone
with all his hands.... " For George this illumination is enough,
but it is not for the grotesques. They are a moment in his education,
he a confirmation of their doom. "I have missed something. I have
missed something Kate Swift was trying to tell me," he says to him–
self one night as he falls asleep. He has missed the meaning of Kate
Swift's life: it is not his fault: her salvation, as the salvation of the
other grotesques, is beyond his capacities.
In the story "Queer" these meanings receive their most gen–
eralized expression, for its grotesque, Elmer Cowley, has no specific
deformity: he is the grotesque as such. "He was, he felt, one con–
demned to go through life without friends and he hated the thought."
Wishing to talk to George Willard, he loses courage and instead rants
