Clyde “Winesburg” Ohio
It was pitch dark and my motel, with its faux colonial columns seemed to be surrounded by empty space when I arrived that night from Lorain, Ohio. I was somewhere near Sandusky. That night I heard the sounds of several freight trains running past, and heard the mournful sound of the whistle. I had forgotten how much I loved that sound. We used to live close enough to the train tracks in the South End of Burlington, Vermont to hear the Central Vermont freight trains that rumbled by.
The next morning I breakfasted at the continental buffet. I sampled from many of these “added bonuses” in my journey through Literary America. This one consisted of some bagels and miniature tubs of processed cream cheese, toaster waffles with flavored corn syrup, square slabs of white or wheat bread, already going stale, generally poor coffee. Since dawn had broken, I could see my surroundings, which were pretty much empty fields. I broke camp and got on the road. I wanted to be in Clyde before noon.
More evidence of trains in Clyde: separate tracks coming around a bend and converging just before Main Street, before running off into a green tunnel of trees and underbrush on the other side. I found a parking spot in the shade near a house from whose porch some president had once made a speech. I was only a few blocks from the library—a Carnegie library with a prominent gothic turret with the names of the United States’ early writers carved into the granite: Longfellow and Hawthorne, Melville, and others. The library has a pleasant addition to it. At one time, Sherwood Anderson’s books had been banned from this library. Nowadays, there is a room devoted to him. Researchers welcome.
After spending some time there I left the choicest streets behind for a while and walked down Spring Street to look for Anderson’s first home. The Anderson family had not owned the house. They merely rented. Perhaps as a consequence, the first home of Clyde’s most famous son is unmarked. It was, at the time I passed by, an upholstery shop. Close by was the former site of the spring that had given the street its name. It was covered over after a child drowned there.
My notes from the visit include the following, which I wrote about the side streets:
“The houses seem like they should be huddled close together, like commuters on a sparsely-filled platform, waiting on a train. Thin-shouldered and plain commuters, with elbow room in mind. Anderson would have seen a story in each one.”
A few blocks further on I found the Waterworks. A stream meandered through a cut in a grassy field, into the waterworks basin at one end and out the basin at the other. In the 1950’s, a writer and photographer, David Scherman and Rosemarie Redlich, traveled through the United States photographing literary sites for a book called (coincidentally) Literary America. They had come through Clyde, and photographed some boys fishing at the waterworks. There were no boys fishing there the day I came through, though the area is now a town park. In fact, the entire downtown seemed strangely deserted; plenty of cars parked but no residents on the the street except for one young man who went to get a haircut and for the county fair, whose carnies were setting up the rides near the former train depot.
The commercial blocks of Main Street still look pretty much like they did in Anderson’s time. Behind them, on both sides of the street, run the back alleys that once fascinated Anderson. They are not as fecund, nor as confining, nor as littered with refuse as they were in his day. But they still demonstrate the symbolic power the author saw in them: on the Main Street side, the buildings show their public facades, and in the alley they display something more private, less ordered.
I walked down a few more of the nicest streets, such as Main Street and Buckeye Street. Clyde is full of beautiful trees and has some impressive houses. Green backyards open onto other green backyards, In one of those backyards is the watering trough that used to be part of the county fairgrounds, now replaced by a public school. I would have loved to see it.
I can see why the residents of Clyde were upset by Anderson’s book. It has been pretty well proven that, although the names of some of the characters in Winesburg, Ohio had a strong resemblance to the names of real residents of Clyde, the lives of those (mostly unhappy) characters were not lifted from the real people. Clyde really felt like Sherwood Anderson’s town, nonetheless. Anderson had described a small town in Ohio with a great deal of accuracy. The fact that nearly all of the residents of Winesburg had unhappy inner lives was Anderson’s take on life, I think. These were the “ugly things of life” as Anderson described them in a letter to the editor he sent the stories to. I don’t believe he had meant to impugn the people of his home town. For a humorous take on this, see the Onion newspaper’s article on Wal Mart coming to Winesburg.
I wish I could recommend some restaurants in Clyde but I had to get over to Akron before the end of the day. I drove on some country road through the farmland outside of Clyde for a little while but, fearing that I would get lost, I meandered back to the main route and left the town behind.
