Return to Winesburg
Why am I suddenly writing so much? Because I once again: begin. Today, suddenly—’today’ is a beginning, a one. Beginning of what? A one before what? Before a long number, before millions perhaps. And one doesn’t know from which numbers the great sum came. I have never added up—but occasionally I’ll find a result at the edge of a page and turn and not transfer it onto the new leaf. What for? It is all one book.
Rainer Maria Rilke, diary entry: 3 Nov 1899
We are in the country. It is beautiful here. The pear, apple, plum, and cherry trees blossom madly. I play the phonograph, I walk, I scribble some.
The birds sing. Something inside me—like a black still pool that has not stirred for a long time—is. stirring.
Sherwood Anderson to Gertrude Stein, summer 1927
The last time Sherwood Anderson returned to Clyde, Ohio, the hometown he and I share, was July 5, 1922, after his second major departure, from wife #2 of his eventual four, and an advertising job. “A pilgrimage back into the realities of life,” he wrote at the time to Marietta Finley. He took the train from Chicago to Clyde and met up with boyhood friends, who celebrated his literary success with a “big feed,” and wine and song. “We are proud of you,” he characterized their welcome. “We don’t know what for, but we are proud of you anyway.”
On the last morning of my most recent return to Clyde, nearly a century after Anderson’s final visit, I drove around town, taking photographs of Winesburg landmarks as if I hadn’t seen them all my life—and, since my teens, seen them in double-vision, overlaid with Anderson’s fictional depictions: Waterworks Pond, the Presbyterian Church, Main Street’s single block of 19th-century storefronts, Raccoon Creek. The little alley behind the bakery, where the baker yells at a cat. The tiny triangle of land near where the depot used to be—now a nominal park whose sole feature is a plaque noting a few details of Anderson’s life, planted in front of a stretch of disused train tracks. Those tracks were the timeline Anderson and I shared, a hundred years apart: train-clatter and low whistles, the elsewhere-music I fell asleep to and dreamed within and woke up hearing for years, a soundtrack that links pilgrimage and origin story.
It’s all one book. In my twenties, I’d get two heartening letters from our town historian, Thaddeus Hurd, oldest son of one of Anderson’s dear boyhood friends, Herman—who was likely at that gathering back in 1922. Years later, I would share a meal with Anderson’s grandson, David, a gifted photographer, whose few stories of Granddad only underscored how little known we are to our families. But those connections are embraced—a beginning, a one. Part of the lineage, and elements of the permission, that it was up to me to find the words for.
At the end of Winesburg’s final story, “Departure,” George Willard sits in a train car, about to leave home for new adventures in the city. His mind, Anderson tells us, is not on grand themes or events. He leans back and drifts off to sleep, thinking about “little things”—Turk Smollet wheeling boards through the main street of his town in the morning, Helen White standing by a window in the Winesburg post office and putting a stamp on an envelope. So it is with the scraps and glimpses we unknowingly return to, what transfers to the page whether we intended to keep it or not. We don’t always know, as Rilke says, from which numbers the great sums come.
Works Cited
Anderson, Sherwood. July 6, 1922. Letters to Bab: Sherwood Anderson to Marietta D. Finley, 1916-33,ed. William A. Simon. U of Illinois Press, 1985, 184.
—. “Departure.” Winesburg, Ohio. Random House/Modern Library, 1995, 231.
Anderson, Sherwood and Gertrude Stein. Letter 55. Sherwood Anderson/Gertrude Stein: Correspondence and Personal Essays, ed. Ray Lewis White, UNC Press, 1972, 63.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Diaries of a Young Poet. Tr. Edward Snow and Michael Winkler. W.W. Norton, 1998, 90.
Debra Allbery
Debra Allbery is the author, most recently, of Fimbul-Winter (Four Way, 2011), which won the National Book Prize in Poetry from Grub Street. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Yale Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, and elsewhere. The recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press, a Hawthornden fellowship, and other awards, she joined the faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in 1995 and served as the program’s director from 2009 until her retirement in 2023.