Adventure by Sherwood Anderson, 1919
The magic trick:
Expertly written section that perfectly captures how people talk, feel, commit, and doom themselves to loneliness
Back in 2020 we looked at the first seven stories from Winesburg, Ohio. It was a remarkable journey of repressed sexual energy and small-town melodrama. So now, three years later, we’re back with the next seven stories in the collection. Brace yourself.
Alice Hindman, in today’s feature, is a classic example of the repression that hangs over the collection and its fictitious townspeople. She falls in love at sixteen, and then spends most of her adult life waiting for her lover to return to town.
The details of their courtship are painfully realistic, masterfully drawn. In just a few paragraphs, we get the whole doomed relationship, mapped out with sympathy for both characters but also a feeling of frustrated judgment.
And that’s quite a trick on Anderson’s part.
The selection:
When she was a girl of sixteen and before she began to work in the store, Alice had an affair with a young man. The young man, named Ned Currie, was older than Alice. He, like George Willard, was employed on the Winesburg Eagle and for a long time he went to see Alice almost every evening. Together the two walked under the trees through the streets of the town and talked of what they would do with their lives. Alice was then a very pretty girl and Ned Currie took her into his arms and kissed her. He became excited and said things he did not intend to say and Alice, betrayed by her desire to have something beautiful come into her rather narrow life, also grew excited. She also talked. The outer crust of her life, all of her natural diffidence and reserve, was tom away and she gave herself over to the emotions of love. When, late in the fall of her sixteenth year, Ned Currie went away to Cleveland where he hoped to get a place on a city newspaper and rise in the world, she wanted to go with him. With a trembling voice she told him what was in her mind. “I will work and you can work,” she said. “I do not want to harness you to a needless expense that will prevent your making progress. Don’t marry me now. We will get along without that and we can be together. Even though we live in the same house no one will say anything. In the city we will be unknown and people will pay no attention to us.”
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