Grotesques

The other day I was at the library. I witnessed a woman speak harshly to a boy, unprovoked. One minute, he had been glad, speaking to his mother in babbling French, thanking her for buying him an old magazine. She smiled, another child hanging onto her leg. Then another woman, an employee of the library, spoke harshly to the boy.  It was out of the blue, her eyes narrowed furiously, her voice edged in scorn. The boy was confused, as were those who overheard them. But the woman who spoke harshly continued doing whatever task she was involved in, ignoring the effects of her comment. The boy was stunned silent. "No problem," his mother said, trying to smooth the moment over, looking pained, two spots coloring her cheeks. When they had passed, I found myself facing the woman who had talked harshly to the boy. I was chilly to her, in alliance with the boy, who had gone. She didn't care either.

I finished reading Poor White by Sherwood Anderson and American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, recently. Did you know the writers were friends? Anderson must have hated Dreiser, someone said to me. I don't know. In letters Anderson describes his first meeting with Dreiser, who arrived on the scene with a boil on his neck. But Anderson also says that Dreiser liberated American fiction. Liberated. Such a strange word for the kind of societies both writers imagined for their characters -- ones that dare escape from the grim certainty of destiny, doomed. In Poor White, the late epiphany that Hugh McVey, farm machine inventor, has that he is destroying the farm life he loves. In American Tragedy, the certain death of society climbing Clyde Griffiths. Though I admire some parts of Anderson's work, I cannot help but agree, in part, with Lionel Trilling's assessment that Anderson's legacy as a writer is part 'grotesque,' as described in his famous story, The Book of Grotesques. A grotesque: a person reduced to the caricature, beholden to and distorted by his/her narrow set of beliefs.

I don't know if Anderson hated Dreiser. I don't know why the woman spoke harshly to the boy. I suspect reducing these moments to simple explanation would be akin to a kind of grotesquerie -- as Trilling says of Anderson, inadequate realism, a falsehood.

I am working on something about these men now -- to explain why all the talk of Anderson etc. Also read: Saragamos Blindness, magazines, magazines, magazines.