“Winter” from Sherwood Anderson’s “Home Town”

Winter: the quiet time. A season of stillness after the autumn and the holidays. A time for snow, for cold, for long hours indoors as we await the spring’s return. Sometimes it’s raw and rainy. At other times the earth is blanketed with silence and snowfall, and some winters are mild, sometimes mild enough that a false spring settles on the land for a few days until seasonal temperatures return. In Home Town, Sherwood Anderson’s last book published during his lifetime, there is a chapter devoted to each of the seasons in small town America, especially in the south, Midwest and New England. The entire book is entertaining, but I find his sections on the seasons especially evocative.

Sherwood Anderson, the American novelist, short story writer and journalist, published Home Town shortly before traveling to South America in March of 1941 to write a series of articles for Reader’s Digest about the peoples and countries of the continent. He was also to serve as a kind of unofficial U.S. State Department goodwill ambassador as American involvement in WWII seemed likely. Home Town appeared just months before his untimely death from peritonitis in the Panama Canal Zone on March 8, 1941. The book is a series of reflections on small town life illustrated with photographs by Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers from Franklin Roosevelt’s administration. These photographers, whose ranks included such notables as Dorothea Lange and Ben Shahn, recorded both American life during the years of the New Deal and the Roosevelt administration’s efforts to combat the problems of the Great Depression.

Home Town, in retrospect, seems like a good way for Anderson’s career to end. Anderson is best known for his classic collection of short stories Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a canonical work which captures the loneliness and alienation of small town lives, but Anderson knew the more joyous and life-affirming elements in rural and small town America as well. Anderson’s best biographer, Walter Rideout, Jr., describes Home Town as “a compound of nostalgia and wide-traveled observation put together by the townsman who in Winesburg showed the dark side of a community more than its light and now, as though balancing his masterpiece, genially shows the light side more than the dark.”

There is a mellow tone to Home Town, the feel of a man looking on these scenes with an experienced and understanding eye, a man who has been around both the city block and down the country road many times over. Affection shines through in his portrayals of small town people and folkways.

Anderson knew small town life from his earliest days. He was born in the little town of Camden, Ohio on September 13, 1876. His family moved from Camden a year later to Caledonia, Ohio and then Mansfield for a short time before settling in Clyde in the northwest corner of the state. There Anderson spent most of his childhood and youth. He worked odd jobs and served in the Spanish-American War before finding success as an advertising copywriter and factory owner, but gave up business to write. His first novel, Windy McPherson’s Son, appeared in 1916. He followed it with another novel and a book of verse before his Winesburg, Ohio appeared in 1919. This collection of interconnected short stories made Anderson’s name and has long been recognized as a classic work of American fiction.

Anderson continued to publish short story collections and novels, but during the mid 1920s he published the first of his volumes of memoir, and later in the same decade purchased two newspapers in Marion, Virginia—one Democratic and one Republican—and served for a time as a small town editor. Anderson increasingly turned more of his attention to journalism and essays. His last wife, Eleanor Copenhaver, encouraged Anderson to travel the country and see firsthand the results of the Great Depression. Anderson was especially interested in the south, so he went on the road. His collection of essays entitled Puzzled America (1935) is a fascinating look into life in the southern states at this time. The man who sat down and wrote Home Town had decades of experience with small town life in the Midwest and South to draw upon.

Like his treatment of the preceding season of autumn (to be featured in fall of 2018 on this blog), with its emphasis on harvest, crop prices and preparation for cold weather and straitened circumstances, Anderson sounds an economic note in his discussion of winter. Anderson knew poverty firsthand as a child and youth in Ohio and later as a young adult in Chicago, and his autobiographical works contain descriptions of meager food and cold rooms. Anderson notes the grim circumstances of those who live “near the tracks” in the winter section of Home Town. The poverty some have likely known for years is accentuated by the hardness of the Great Depression. Note the attention he gives to the poor woman taking in washing, scrubbing clothes in the cold winter air—this was personal for Anderson. This was how his mother Emma Anderson spent a lot of her days when Anderson was a boy and young man while his father Irwin Anderson roamed the country drinking and telling stories.

His essay on winter reminds us that some things don’t change much at all. His description of political bickering at the Thanksgiving table and the sullen feelings that linger after echoes America’s polarization and the bitter reactions to the Trump presidency in our own time.

The everydayness of life that varies little from one generation to another is present here: high school football and basketball games; the flu; Christmas lights and Thanksgiving dinner. He mentions the need to keep the roads clear and sounds a familiar note about the relentless pace of life in the U.S.: “America must keep rolling.” Plenty of smaller towns and cities still have their service clubs—Kiwanis, Elks, Rotary, Knights of Columbus– that hold monthly luncheons. Veterans gather around the tables at the American Legion or VFW hall. The book club has made a comeback too in America in the past fifteen years or so.

You can still find women’s clubs and bridge games in little towns and smaller-sized cities and suburbs. Historical societies and libraries have their guest speakers and special programs where people gather in the indoor warmth. Old men can still be seen playing checkers in some small towns on long afternoons, especially in senior centers and nursing homes, and whenever a group of men gather and someone pulls out a deck of cards, a poker game is going to be underway—this is an evergreen aspect of human nature.

On the other hand, Anderson’s piece helps us gauge how much things have changed. The radio and movies are still around, but we have television and the Internet now. Many a long winter weekend afternoon once spent at the local movie house is given to binge-watching TV shows on Netflix or multiple football and basketball games.

Another change too is the doctor making his house calls. This still happens occasionally in some parts of the country, but the sight of the country doctor making his rounds is pretty much a vanished aspect of American life. I had the fortune to meet one such doctor in the early 2000s, a retired osteopath in my mother’s hometown of Richland, Missouri who worked not only in town but in the hills surrounding Richland attending to his patients and their needs, which ranged from gunshot wounds and the delivery of babies to treatment of everyday injuries and illnesses. To the best of my knowledge he was the last of the old time traveling doctors in that area.

One item of special interest here, as well as an indicator of social change, is Anderson’s mention of the “leg show” and burlesque theater. This is one of the few allusions to sex in the book. Home Town is concerned with the everydayness of the small town world and the more humdrum aspects of existence. Anderson highlights and expands on these prosaic details, and by doing so the perennial aspects of daily life in small communities are emphasized and foregrounded.

Because of this focus on the everyday business of living, this mention of sex-related entertainment jumps out at the reader, not only by contrast with the other material, but because the topic of small town sexual life, with all of its attendant hypocrisies, contradictions and deceptions, is a recurring theme in American literature and film. Even one of our earliest canonical novels, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, is about the effect of an illicit romance within a small community. Anderson’s brief but sly mention of the leg show, in a volume devoted to the familiar aspects of life in the ol’ home town, reminds us that people have always been people while also complicating the vision some may have of yesteryear’s small communities. Sexual life is everywhere, and aspects of that life—adultery, prostitution, premarital sex, illegitimate births, incest and pornography—are found there as they are anywhere else, despite the idealized and bucolic image of small town and rural life.

This leg show reference is characteristic of Anderson. He was always committed to writing honestly about people and the relationships between them, including sexual relationships. He was deeply aware of the power of human desires, especially the sexual kind. He was too honest a writer to gloss over the presence of the leg show’s appeal to the townsmen. Here is Anderson as both the canny small town editor and the perceptive writer training a knowing but good-humored eye on the life around him.

The burlesque show referenced by Anderson likely refers to the kind of early American burlesque that developed in the late 1800s and early 1900s. These were vaudeville-style revues or variety shows with strong comic elements that emphasized titillating exposure of the female form by sensuous movement and suggestive dancing; in short, the kind of burlesque that paved the way for the classic striptease of performers such as Gypsy Rose Lee, Sally Rand and Lili St. Cyr.

The leg show he had in mind likely included comedians and comic sketches. There may have been one dancer who was the main draw although there were other numbers featuring well-built dancing girls. All of this was accompanied by a lot of innuendo, double entendre and overall satirical spirit. Some of these might have featured as a special draw a “hootchie-cootchie” dancer who performed belly dance or whose dance evoked a sensual Middle Eastern tradition. Anderson is tantalizingly vague about the touring leg shows of pre-1930s America, but we have plenty of information about the vaudeville and burlesque shows that appeared in large cities like New York, the best known likely being Florence Ziegfeld’s famous revues.

The leg show was probably something that turned up in larger sized small towns and communities whose populations put them in the class of small cities rather than entirely rural small towns and villages. Viewed from our own time, the leg show can seem like a quaint relic. Although the old time burlesque had a clearly sexual nature, there was still strong emphasis on humor, wit, artistry and satire. The twentieth century with its increasing freedoms wrought a lot of changes in American culture in connection with sex, one of which is the presence of “gentlemen’s clubs” and porn emporiums along the highways that pass through rural America. And the Internet has made staggering varieties of porn available to anyone with a computer, which in turn has bred new problems with addiction and intimacy. I think it’s fair to say that this isn’t what Anderson and others had in mind when they argued for greater freedom and connection between men and women and more honesty regarding sex. If he could witness our own time, Anderson would quickly perceive the impersonal economic forces at play behind these operations. Sherwood Anderson well understood that one god fervently worshipped in America was and is Mammon.

I love this book of Anderson’s. I admire a lot of his work, and Winesburg, Ohio is a favorite of mine, but there’s something special about this last book of his—as if all the affection he had for his countrymen and the people he had known and the life he lived came out here in this roughhewn valentine to the men and women of America’s small towns. All the people he was in his lifetime—the restless, dreaming youth; the up and coming businessman; the lover; the husband; the father; the writer; the small town editor; the National Guardsman—all are somehow present in his voice as he takes this one last look at America’s small communities on the eve of World War II. At some point down the road I will examine the entire text of Home Town, but for now here is his chapter on winter:

In the towns, winter, for all the radios and the movies, is the waiting time. It is the time between for the American small towner. In spite of the spread of factories to the towns, North and South, the American small town remains close to the life of the land. The land sleeps and waits and the towns wait.

In the far Northern states of New England and up through the Northwest the bitter cold days come early, the spring with its new beginning is far away. Weatherwise old men have been up and down the Main Streets making predictions. They say that all of the animals have put on a thick coat of fur. It will be a long hard winter. In Southern towns, on Saturday afternoons, country men, Negroes and whites, come into the town bringing loads of firewood. They come in one-mule wagons or in worn-out trucks, to stand about the town square, patiently waiting for buyers. In some of the towns public markets have been built. The country women bring in their canned goods, potatoes and cabbage. They sit in their little booths wrapped in heavy overcoats. Now the road men of the North get out the snow moving machinery. The big highways that run through the towns must be kept clear. The cars must move. America must keep rolling.

In the early winter in the towns, all over America, Christmas decorations go up along Main Street, the store windows take on a new gaiety, wreaths of evergreen are hung on the doorknobs of houses, the local weekly is full of Christmas advertisements. You go up to the high school to watch the high school football team in a game with the boys of some nearby town, stand about shivering, only, alas, too often, to see your home town boys get a licking. You get the flu. You get through Thanksgiving, eat your share of turkey, if you can afford one.

You get all of your relatives in, have a big feast, get into an argument with your brother-in-law. He is a Republican and you are a Democrat.

The argument gets hot, becomes a quarrel, and your wife tries to patch it up, to make peace. Very likely when your brother-in-law has gone angrily away, you get down-the-river from your wife.

It is small town life. You have to go on living with people day after day, week after week. You can’t just ignore your brother-in-law, forget him as you might in a city. Tomorrow you will meet him on the street. You will be meeting him in the stores and in the post office. Better make it up, start over again.

It is the old problem of living with men, finding a common ground on which you can stand with your fellows, this intensified in the towns.

Now is the time to go skating. The boys have taken up the new sport of skiing. If there is a hill near town it is time to get out the bob-sleds.

“Jake, do you remember the old days when Al Wright kept the livery stable? Do you remember how he used to keep a couple of pretty good trotters? He got them out when the sleighing was good. He and Doc Payne, who owned that big blind pacer, and Judge Crawford with his little sorrel, would be having it lickety-split up and down Main Street.”

“Yes, and the farmers with their bob-sleds coming into town, the boys flipping on, stealing a ride, parties we used to go on out to some farmer’s house or to a barn dance.”

“I’ll tell you what, Ike, I don’t know sometimes whether all these modern inventions we’ve got are a good thing or not.”

There used to be show troupes come into towns in the winters, the actors walking on the streets in the afternoons. The movies killed them off. Every winter a burlesque show came. Only the men went to that. It was called a “leg show.” Going was a nice wicked thing to do.

The Christmas tree has been brought in from the woods and set up in the parlor. Some of the more well-to-do have set up trees in the front yards. They are covered with small many-colored lights. In southern towns they shoot off firecrackers. Tourists come back to the Northern towns in the spring and tell about it. “They make a Fourth of July out of Christmas down there,” they say. The Five and Tens have done a booming business. The churches hold special Christmas services. Some of them have Christmas trees and kids who have been regular attendants at Sunday School through the year get their reward.

Over most of America the real winter comes after Christmas. It may be that the town’s women’s club gets up a lecture course. They canvas the town selling tickets. This is where we get our culture. You’ve got to buy a season ticket and go to show you’re cultured. It is the women who keep up the cultural tone for us. College boys come with their glee clubs and sing in the town hall, the court house or in one of the churches. Miss Grayson, who is unmarried but wrote a book on how to live a happy married life, comes and lectures to us, a magician comes and does his tricks.

Some of our more cultured women, our local literati, have formed a book club. The druggist’s wife who went to Smith College reviews the latest best seller. The high school boys have a basket-ball team, there is always the radio and the movies and in the back of Cal Hurd’s shoe repair shop there is a checker game going on.

Upstairs over the bank in Fred Travey’s law office on dismal winter afternoons you can get into a poker game if you are looking for sport. Better look out. Fred and Theodore Shovely, the coal and lumber dealer, will clean you out.

In every American town, as in our cities, there is a section beyond the railroad tracks where the poor live. We in the towns also have our slums. In the summer and fall the men who live down there manage to pick up a day’s work now and then but in the winter there is nothing doing. There are half a dozen children in the family and the mother tries to keep things going by doing the washing for our well-to-do families. You will see her on bitter cold days hanging out a wash. Her hands are blue with cold. In the houses the children huddle about the one stove in the kitchen, wood and coal to be bought, shoes for the children. It is a long winter for that family. The woman who is hanging out the washed clothes is a proud one. She’ll work her arms off, she says, rather than go on relief. The long depression, unemployment, has killed the spirit of more than one such woman. They have had to throw in the sponge, give it up. They couldn’t make it.

In the winter the small town doctors, East and West, North and South, are up and out day and night, through mud and snow. There are babies to be delivered, people down with the flu. Since the depression and the end of prohibition the small town lawyer finds the pickings thinner. There are too many people hard up. They can’t afford to take their quarrels into court. The small town doctors have a hard time collecting their bills.

There is the weekly meeting of the Kiwanis and the Rotary Clubs. Some of the so-called “service clubs” meet for dinner in the evening at the town hotel. It gives the men a chance to make speeches, tell the others what is the matter with the town.

“We ought to get more factories,” the speakers keep saying.

On lodge nights the women pick up a “snack” and go off to the movies. In many towns, no matter how small, there is a women’s card club. Only the more well-to-do are invited into that.

There is a dance on Saturday night, country girls coming into town with their beaus. If there is a factory in the town the factory hands go. There are revivals being held in the churches. In the very small town the church becomes the center of social life. The church women will be giving suppers to raise money to help pay the preacher. In the South a little unpainted wooden Negro church fills the winter lives of the town Negroes. There are cries and shouts, a swaying of brown bodies, a rhythmic beating of feet on cold wooden floors, something released, the pent up emotions of a race. 

Winter is, in a curious way, the test time for the people of the towns, the test of men’s and women’s ability to live together. There is that brother-in-law with whom you had a quarrel. You and he made it up. You have quarrels with other men, even sometimes with the wife. You have to forget it, start over again. It is the only way you can make life livable when you must go on with the same people day after day, during the long winter months.

Patrick Kerin

 

Resources:

Home Town by Sherwood Anderson. Photographs by Farm Security Administration photographers. Alliance Book Corporation, New York, 1940.

Sherwood Anderson: A Writer In America, Volume II by Walter Rideout, Introduction by Charles Modlin. The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wisconsin and London, England, 2007.

Sherwood Anderson by Kim Townsend. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1987.

Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture by Robert Clyde Allen. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London, 1991.

Wikipedia articles on burlesque and striptease (tough research, but somebody has to do it!)