Winesburg, Ohio
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You see the interest in all this lies in the figures
that went before the eyes of the writer. They were
all grotesques. All of the men and women the writer
had ever known had become grotesques.
The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were
amusing, some almost beautiful, and one, a woman
all drawn out of shape, hurt the old man by her
grotesqueness. When she passed he made a noise
like a small dog whimpering. Had you come into
the room you might have supposed the old man had
unpleasant dreams or perhaps indigestion.
For an hour the procession of grotesques passed
before the eyes of the old man, and then, although
it was a painful thing to do, he crept out of bed and
began to write. Some one of the grotesques had
made a deep impression on his mind and he wanted
to describe it.
At his desk the writer worked for an hour. In the
end he wrote a book which he called "The Book of
the Grotesque." It was never published, but I saw
it once and it made an indelible impression on my
mind. The book had one central thought that is very
strange and has always remained with me. By re-
membering it I have been able to understand many
people and things that I was never able to under-
stand before. The thought was involved but a simple
statement of it would be something like this:
That in the beginning when the world was young
there were a great many thoughts but no such thing
as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each
truth was a composite of a great many vague
thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and
they were all beautiful.
The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in
his book. I will not try to tell you of all of them.
There was the truth of virginity and the truth of
passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift
and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon.
Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they
were all beautiful.
And then the people came along. Each as he ap-
peared snatched up one of the truths and some who
were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.
It was the truths that made the people grotesques.
The old man had quite an elaborate theory concern-
ing the matter. It was his notion that the moment one
of the people took one of the truths to himself, called
it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became
a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a
falsehood.
You can see for yourself how the old man, who
had spent all of his life writing and was filled with
words, would write hundreds of pages concerning
this matter. The subject would become so big in his
mind that he himself would be in danger of becom-
ing a grotesque. He didn't, I suppose, for the same
reason that he never published the book. It was the
young thing inside him that saved the old man.
Concerning the old carpenter who fixed the bed
for the writer, I only mentioned him because he,
THE BOOK OF THE GROTESQUE 7
like many of what are called very common people,
became the nearest thing to what is understandable
and lovable of all the grotesques in the writer's
book.
HANDS
UPON THE HALF decayed veranda of a small frame
house that stood near the edge of a ravine near the
town of Winesburg, Ohio, a fat little old man walked
nervously up and down. Across a long field that
had been seeded for clover but that had produced
only a dense crop of yellow mustard weeds, he
could see the public highway along which went a
wagon filled with berry pickers returning from the
fields. The berry pickers, youths and maidens,
laughed and shouted boisterously. A boy clad in a
blue shirt leaped from the wagon and attempted to
drag after him one of the maidens, who screamed
and protested shrilly. The feet of the boy in the road
kicked up a cloud of dust that floated across the face
of the departing sun. Over the long field came a
thin girlish voice. "Oh, you Wing Biddlebaum, comb
your hair, it's falling into your eyes," commanded
the voice to the man, who was bald and whose ner-
vous little hands fiddled about the bare white fore-
head as though arranging a mass of tangled locks.
Wing Biddlebaum, forever frightened and beset by
a ghostly band of doubts, did not think of himself
as in any way a part of the life of the town where
he had lived for twenty years. Among all the people
of Winesburg but one had come close to him. With
George Willard, son of Tom Willard, the proprietor
of the New Willard House, he had formed some-
thing like a friendship. &nb
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