In college, I was assigned to read for one class Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, a collection of linked stories about the residents of a small Ohio town--Anderson was born at Camden, Ohio, in 1876--and, for another class, two of his short stories, "The Egg" and "I Want to Know Why." Possibly Anderson was enjoying a renaissance among the professors in the English Department at one small, Midwestern college, because my sense is that his reputation has been in eclipse now for a long while. If he's mentioned in literary histories, his own work might receive about the same attention as the friendship and encouragement he bestowed on some of the leading figures of the next generation--he was a mentor of kinds to Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, others.
I remember that "I Want to Know Why" made an especially strong impression on me, though reading it again now I find its merits offset to a degree by something like melodrama, or sentimentality. It's a story about a teen-aged boy from Kentucky and horse racing. The boy, in whose voice the story is told, loves the horses, and skips town with friends to see the races at Saratoga. Though the story isn't long, and the description of the journey not emphasized, the details that are sketched in appear to be a version of Huck Finn, the trip being accomplished by jumping box cars and nights spent sleeping in hay lofts. There is also the boy narrator's vernacular, which is reminiscent of Huck's and includes some intentionally offhanded-seeming racial commentary of satiric import: for example, the good, responsible whites will always turn in runaway boys, and are thus to be avoided, whereas "niggers" will give them food and show them where to sleep. When you're young and white and breaking the rules, you find yourself suddenly among Negroes, and it's a relief.
The contradictory aspects of "the sport of kings" must be what attracted Anderson to it as a subject for this story about a boy's disillusionment. On the one hand, there are the horses themselves, unusual but majestic animals, and the exciting spectacle of the races as well as the bucolic life around the track and stables. And, on the other hand, the stain of gambling and corruption. Through the first part of the story Anderson, in the voice of the boy, develops the former idea almost into a mystical religion of horse racing. The track rituals take on the aura of religious sacraments. The boy's devotion permits him to surpass the status of a mere novitiate, and the ache he feels when contemplating the very best horses would permit him to make a lot of money if he cared to place bets. But of course he isn't interested in that. The conclusion of this theme occurs in the moments before the big race at the Saratoga track. There are two favorite horses, both from farms near the boy's home, which was partly the motivation for the trip. Before the race, the horses get saddled on a wide, open lawn, and the boy goes to have a look. One of the favorites did not appear to be "such a much standing in a paddock." But the other favorite, Sunstreak, inspires in him the achy feeling that comes over him when in the presence of a superior creature. The boy describes his own rapture, tears come to his eyes, and, significantly, he locks eyes with the horse's trainer, who also has a shine in his eye. Of course Sunstreak wins the race. The other boys are all excited but the narrator, knowing what will happen, watches calmly. After the race, he "cuts out" from his companions in order to be alone. He wants to seek out that trainer, be near him somehow, because of the attachment he feels. Both understand the same deep thing.
He sees the trainer get in a car with some other men and drive down a road that skirts the shrine of the Saratoga race track. He walks down the road a piece just because it's the road the car had gone on. He comes to a side road, by a "rummy-looking farmhouse," and sits down. Sure enough, the car comes back and turns into the side road. The men, who are drunk, get out of the car and enter the farmhouse. The boy approaches the exterior and, standing on some bushes, looks in an open window. Of course it's a brothel. He sees the object of his veneration sitting on the lap of the prettiest woman there, who nevertheless looks a little like the horse that wasn't at the paddock "such a much," "but not clean like him," and "with a hard ugly mouth." The man brags about having trained the horse that won the big race that day, and gives the woman the same shiny-eyed look the boy had observed at the paddock just before the race, when it was directed at Sunstreak. The boy never mentions this incident to his friends or, once home, his family. He resumes his normal life, which includes hanging around horses, and the story concludes:
But things are different. At the tracks the air don't taste as good or smell as good. It's because a man like Jerry Tillford, who knows what he does, could see a horse like Sunstreak run, and kiss a woman like that the same day. I can't make him out. Darn him, what did he want to do like that for? I keep thinking about it and it spoils looking at horses and smelling things and hearing niggers laugh and everything. Sometimes I'm so mad about it I want to fight someone. It gives me the fantods. What did he do it for. I want to know why.
If the story isn't over the top, it comes close enough so that I feel like I notice the effect it's going for rather than feel that effect myself. Although forty or so years ago it had on me the intended effect. I mentioned that Anderson was a kind of mentor to Hemingway, whose story "My Old Man" appears modeled on "I Want to Know Why." I think the Hemingway story is under appreciated--perhaps because he wrote so many others that are equally good and more "representative" in the respect that the author speaks in his own inimitable voice rather than that of a boy narrator. Anyway, it's interesting that the younger man, while following Anderson so closely in theme and subject matter that one may almost feel "My Old Man" is in tribute to "I Want to Know Why," nevertheless scrubs from his story, to desolating effect, anything and everything that has about it any whiff of being over cooked. Both stories can be read online. "I Want to Know Why." "My Old Man."
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