Loneliness by Sherwood Anderson, 1919
The magic trick:
Showing us a character who rejects regular society for a collection of imaginary friends
“Loneliess” takes us to New York City – away from the comfy confines of Winesburg for the first time in the story collection. It is not, I would suggest, a worthwhile venture. The story just doesn’t work for me. What I do like is Enoch’s habit of creating his own world of imaginary friends. It’s a very strange thing on the surface. But, really, all of us have imaginary conversations every day. Things we wished we’d said at work. People we wish felt differently about us than they do. It’s not that strange. Right?
And that’s quite a trick on Anderson’s part.
(We’ll leave Winesburg here for a little bit. We’ll come back in early 2024 to finish the remaining seven stories in the collection. Until then- )
The selection:
The mild, blue-eyed young Ohio boy was a complete egotist, as all children are egotists. He did not want friends for the quite simple reason that no child wants friends. He wanted most of all the people of his own mind, people with whom he could really talk, people he could harangue and scold by the hour, servants, you see, to his fancy. Among these people he was always self-confident and bold. They might talk, to be sure, and even have opinions of their own, but always he talked last and best. He was like a writer busy among the figures of his brain, a kind of tiny blue-eyed king he was, in a six-dollar room facing Washington Square in the city of New York.
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