40
PARTISAN REVIEW
uniqueness. For the former of these purposes, the most important
symbol is that of the room, frequently used to suggest isolation and
confinement. Kate Swift is alone in her bedroom, Dr. Reefy in his
office, the Reverend Curtis Hartman in his church tower, Enoch
Robinson in his fantasy-crowded room. Enoch Robinson's story "is
in fact the story of a room almost more than it is the story of a man."
The tactful use of this symbol lends
Winesburg
a claustrophobic aura
appropriate to its theme.
Most of the stories are further defined by symbols related to
their particular meanings. The story of the misogynist Wash Williams
begins by rapidly thrusting before the reader an image of "a huge,
grotesque kind of monkey, a creature with ugly sagging, hairless skin,"
which dominates its subsequent action. And more valid than any ab–
stract statement of theme is the symbolic power of that moment in
"The Strength of God" when the Reverend Curtis Hartman, in order
to peek into Kate Swift's bedroom, breaks his church window at
precisely the place where the figure of a boy stands "motionless and
looking with rapt eyes into the face of Christ."
Though
Winesburg
is written in the bland accents of the Amer–
ican story-teller, it has an economy impossible to oral narration be–
cause Anderson varies the beat of its accents by occasionally whipping
them into quite formal rhetorical patterns. In the book's best stretches
there is a tension between its underlying loose oral cadences and the
stiffened super-imposed beat of a prose almost Biblical in its regularity.
Anderson's prose is neither "natural" nor primitive; it is rather a
hushed bardic chant, low-toned and elegiacally awkward, deeply
related to native speech rhythms yet very much the result of literary
cultivation.
But the final effectiveness of this prose is in its prevalent tone
of tender inclusiveness. Between writer and materials there is an ad–
mirable equity of relationship. None of the characters is violated,
none of the stories, even the failures, leaves the reader with the bitter
sense of having been tricked by cleverness or cheapness or toughness.
The ultimate unity of the book is a unity of feeling, a sureness of
warmth and a readiness to accept Winesburg's lost grotesques with
the embrace of humility. Many American writers have taken as their
theme the loss of love in the modern world but few, if any at all,
have so thoroughly realized it in the accents of love.
