By Molly Rideout
It wasn’t until I had to move from Iowa to Columbus that I finally sat down to read Sherwood Anderson. When my father’s father downsized his book collection for the move to the retirement home, he took with him thirteen copies of Winesburg, Ohio, the most famous title of this now less-than-famous author. Thirteen doesn’t count the twenty-one volume complete Anderson published in Kyoto, Japan, or the scholarly publications devoted to Anderson’s novel-in-stories. It doesn’t include the 1962 issue of Shenandoah, wherein my grandfather argues that, while Anderson’s “hard, plain, concrete diction” paints superficial impressions of Ohio, what truly interested the author was the “dark, unrevealed parts of the personality like the complex mass of roots that, below the surface of the ground, feeds the common grass above in the light.”
A few years after the close of the Second World War, my grandfather sent some typed sheets or maybe just an outline to his editor. He wanted to write a biography of Sherwood Anderson, who had only recently died and still stood in the literary limelight. The editor said yes, promised to publish it, told him to take his time. He didn’t mean fifty years or 2,400 manuscript pages. By then the editor had retired, and a new editor told Grandpa to cut two thousand pages before they would set the type. I was playing double solitaire with my grandmother when Grandpa got that news. I’d never seen the man mad, except that day. This might be a constructed memory; my father and I aren’t sure.
My grandfather opens his biography of this Ohio native son, “In his later years Sherwood Anderson enjoyed inventing fictitious fathers for himself and usually provided them with a Southern birth and indefinite parentage.” I waited even longer to read my grandfather than I did to read Anderson. I knew a real person could never stand up against the scholar I’d carved in my head. Eventually, though, I could no longer sustain myself on this imagined and indefinite literary parentage. I needed to know my lineage. I gold-panned his literary criticism for hints of the mild man I remembered, the hosta grower, the Japanophile, the man with a few stray hairs on an impossibly round head onto which he permitted my little brother to drop a purple foam ball from the upper landing in a game they called Bean-O. When the ball connected with Grandpa’s head, my brother laughed and laughed.
The Alzheimer’s had already begun to eat holes in his memory on the day Grandpa talked to his new editor. Yet he began to excise, as she had asked, to do to his manuscript what the disease was doing to him. Maybe he could focus the biography more on the man and less on his argument that Winesburg is a novel of nostalgia—set in a facsimile of Anderson’s childhood home of Clyde, Ohio, before the factories and electric streetlights of his teenaged years. But the plaque in my grandfather’s hippocampus thickened, and the project that had driven Grandpa through my father’s birth, teenaged years, and then mine had to be abandoned.
I rarely reread books, but I’ve read Winesburg three times in the past seven years. I’m trying to understand what made my grandfather devote decades of his life to its author. I don’t know why it’s Winesburg, and not any of Anderson’s two dozen other novels, memoirs, or collections that has become a sort of cypher for the polite, gentle person who died the year I entered college. Three readings, and yet, between sittings, very little of Anderson’s stories has actually stuck in the plaque of my own memories, save for a lingering sadness and a faint pallor of nineteenth-century repression. So I keep returning to go deeper, to find that complex mass of roots that, below the surface of the ground, feeds the common grass above in the light.
I moved to Ohio for a graduate degree in English, resented Columbus’s traffic and my sudden big-city-anonymity after nearly a decade in a town not much larger than Clyde. I didn’t know at the time that, some fifty years before, my department had tried to lure my grandfather out to Anderson’s home state. He almost went too, but decided to stay at the University of Wisconsin and the newly named Helen C. White Hall. My father thinks his dad leveraged a raise from all of it, but I like to pretend Grandpa stayed for the same reason people with the last name Baker are statistically more likely to knead bread: Winesburg’s George Willard is in love with a woman named Helen White.
I’ll confess it: I never got past the opening few pages of Grandpa’s Anderson biography. I’m not sure anyone in our family has.
Before he was admitted to the memory unit of his retirement facility, the University of Wisconsin Press agreed to print my grandfather’s full Anderson biography. My grandmother, I’m told, was the primary lobbyist, though she’d never been shy about her resentment toward my grandfather’s obsession, his need to visit each place Anderson had once touched. He dragged the family to a summer stay at Ripshin Farm, Virginia. In the yard of the last house Anderson called home, my grandma stood aghast at the weeds. But still she fought for him.
The UW Press released the monster of my grandfather’s biography in two volumes, rushed to get the first into his palms while his palms were still his. Anderson fixates on hands in Winesburg: “The story of Wing Biddlebaum’s hands is worth a book in itself.” When Volume 1 of Sherwood Anderson: A Writer in America at last arrived, my father placed a pen into his own father’s grip, asked for an autograph. The dying man looked lost at the stranger he did not recognize as his son and, with some urging, drew a single, shaky line devoid of language across the title page.
What is it that Anderson wrote? “By the caress that was in his fingers, he expressed himself.”
Molly Rideout is a writer, bookmaker, and public artist whose work focuses on the deep histories of small town nobodies. Past publications include River Teeth, Fourth Genre, Mississippi Review, and Tampa Review. Her grandfather was Walter B. Rideout (1917-2006). She still feels guilty about not liking Winesburg, Ohio. A native Midwesterner, Molly currently lives in North Adams, Massachusetts. She feels guilty about that too. Learn more at mollyrideout.com.
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