A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [283]
True, in the kibbutz library I did discover two or three virile novelists who managed to write almost Hemingway-like stories about kibbutz life: Natan Shaham, Yigal Mossensohn, Moshe Shamir. But they belonged to the generation that had smuggled in immigrants and arms, blown up British headquarters, and repelled the Arab armies; their stories seemed to me swathed in mists of brandy and cigarettes and the smell of gunpowder. And they all lived in Tel Aviv, which was more or less connected to the real world, a city with cafés where young artists sat over a glass of liquor, a city with cabarets, scandals, theaters, and a bohemian life full of forbidden love and helpless passion. Not like Jerusalem or Hulda.
Who had ever seen brandy in Hulda? Who had ever heard of daring women or sublime love here?
If I wanted to write like those writers, I first had to get to London or Milan. But how? Simple farmers from kibbutzim did not suddenly go off to London or Milan to draw inspiration for creative writing. If I wanted to have a chance to get to Paris or Rome, I first had to be famous, I had to write a successful book like one of those writers. But before I could write the successful book, I first had to live in London or New York. A vicious circle.
It was Sherwood Anderson who got me out of the vicious circle and "freed my writing hand." I shall always be grateful to him.
In September 1959 the Popular Library of Am Oved Publishing House brought out a Hebrew translation of Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio by Aharon Amir. Before I read this book, I did not know that Winesburg existed and I had never heard of Ohio. Or I may have remembered it vaguely from Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Then this modest book appeared and excited me to the bone: for nearly a whole summer night until half past three in the morning I walked the paths of the kibbutz like a drunken man, talking to myself, trembling like a lovesick swain, singing and skipping, sobbing with awestruck joy and ecstasy: eureka!
At half past three in the morning I put on my work clothes and boots, ran to the tractor shed from which we set out for a field called Mansura to weed the cotton, snatched a hoe from the pile, and till noon I charged along the rows of cotton plants, racing ahead of the others as though I had sprouted wings, dizzy with happiness, running and hoeing and bellowing, running and hoeing and lecturing myself and the hills and the breeze, hoeing and making vows, running, excited and tearful.
The whole of Winesburg, Ohio was a string of stories and episodes that grew out of each other and were connected to each other, particularly because they all took place in a single, poor, godforsaken provincial town. It was filled with small-time people: an old carpenter, an absent-minded young man, some hotel owner, and a servant girl. The stories were also connected to each other because the characters slipped from story to story: what had been central characters in one story reappeared as secondary, background characters in another.
The stories in Winesburg, Ohio all revolved around trivial, everyday happenings, based on snatches of local gossip or on unfulfilled dreams. An old carpenter and an old writer discuss the raising of some bed, while a dreamy young man by the name of George Willard who works as a cub reporter on the local rag overhears their conversation and thinks his own thoughts. And there is an eccentric old man named Bid-dlebaum, nicknamed Wing Biddlebaum. And a tall dark-haired woman who for some reason marries a man called Doctor Reefy, but dies a year later. Then there is Abner Groff, the town baker, and Doctor Parcival, a large man with a drooping mouth covered by a yellow mustache, who always wears a dirty white vest out of the pockets of which protrudes a number of black cigars known as stogies, and other similar characters, types who until that night I had supposed had no place in literature, unless it was as background characters who afforded readers