L. Miller Minutes

Commentaries on American Short Stories 8: Paper Pills by Sherwood Anderson (1919)

To continue this series of commentaries on American Short Stories, I’ll be discussing Paper Pills by Sherwood Anderson. Paper Pills was originally published as The Philosopher in The Little Review in 1916, then published again in Anderson’s collection of short stories Winesburg, Ohio in 1919. The version I am reading is the Winesburg, Ohio version from 1919.

Paper Pills is the final Sherwood Anderson piece in this series that I’ll be adding comment to. Let’s get into this very short and perplexing story.

Background:

  • Paper Pills was originally published as The Philosopher in The Little Review in 1916, then published again in Anderson’s collection of short stories Winesburg, Ohio in 1919. The version I am reading is the Winesburg, Ohio version from 1919.

Length:

  • 2 pages, 10 minutes

Setting:

  • Winesburg, Ohio – a fictional, rural, small town in Northern Ohio.

Themes:

  • Loneliness: inability to communicate, hiding true thoughts
  • Love vs. Lust: accepting what’s inside as opposed to what’s outside, denying carnality

Crude Plot Summary:

1) Sherwood Anderson’s Paper Pills centers around the courtship of a country doctor, Doctor Reefy, and an unnamed younger tall dark girl who has come to pass away at the time of telling the story.

  • Doctor Reefy is now an older, lonely man who doesn’t have many friends and has a habit of writing his thoughts (or truths) down on tiny pieces of paper, balling them up, and shoving them into his overcoat until they harden into little balls.
  • Anderson depicts Doctor Reefy’s hands as having large knuckles like that of unpainted wooden balls as large as walnuts fastened together by steel rods.

2) Prior to meeting Doctor Reefy, who was in his forties at the time of the courtship, the young woman was being courted by two other men.

  • One of the men, a jeweler’s son, was obsessed with the idea of virginity. This notion came to frighten the girl, as she had dreamt three separate times that he had bitten her body.
  • The other man, a quiet man, would try to continually kiss her. She would end up in the family way by this man, and in a moment of passion, he actually did bite her.

3) The young woman goes to visit Doctor Reefy for her condition (assumed to be pregnancy or illness from pregnancy) and she becomes comforted by him. For several weeks they spend time together and ultimately becoming married.

  • During their marriage, the Doctor would read his thoughts to the girl that he scribbled down on pieces of paper.

4) The young woman ultimately succumbs to illness a year after meeting the Doctor. This leaves the Doctor Reefy to be alone again, writing his thoughts down on pieces of paper and shoving them into his pockets.

Thoughts:

It took me 4 reads through Paper Pills to feel somewhat confident in my own understanding of what is going on, and to gather coherent thoughts on the story. The challenge I found is not that Paper Pills is a particularly difficult or dense read; the challenge is more so me trying to lasso the steer of Sherwood Anderson’s writing as he effortlessly weaves narrative and allusion as I try to answer the question: What the heck are you saying, man?

I still may not have landed on a precise answer, which is acceptable. I think this fact, as subjective as it is to me and my own inability to land on a final answer, lends itself to the beauty of Sherwood Anderson’s writing in Paper Pills as it transcends mere story with the answer to our questions within grasp to a work of art with complex, shifting meanings depending on the perspective of the reader. My own perspective is this (which could very well be the common perspective):

We are presented the story of how lonely Doctor Reefy and his now deceased wife, an unnamed younger woman, came to be together. The plot is fairly simple: she had the unfortunate option between two other men, one obsessed with virginity and another who while quiet is fairly focused on physical lust. She choses the later (who bit her, mind you) and ends up going to the doctor once becoming pregnant. She realizes that the Doctor is actually a better person than her two options, and they end up together.

While that plot transpires, Sherwood Anderson (repeatedly) alludes to Doctor Reefy and his courtship of the younger woman to being like that of apples on an orchard, and how despite the finest looking apples get sent off to the city markets, the best tasting ones are the slightly twisted ones, apples that have overripened on the branch and have pockets of sweetness in them. Using this allusion, he sets up his story with anticipation for the reader – come on Sherwood, spill the tea.

“It [the story of the courtship] is delicious, like the twisted little apples that grow in the orchard of Winesburg. In the fall one walks in the orchards and the ground is hard with frost underfoot. The apples have been taken from trees by the pickers. They will be put in barrels and shipped to the cities where they will be eaten in apartments that are filled with books, magazines, furniture, and people. On the trees are only a few gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected. They look like the knuckles of Doctor Reefy.”

Part of the brilliance in using the allusion of the twisted apple to set up the story is that he later uses it in a different way to drive home the theme of the story, what I think centers on denying carnality and looking inside of a person. He wrote of the younger woman at the end of the story:

“The condition that brought her to him [Dr. Reefy] passed in an illness, but she was like the one who has discovered the sweetness of the twisted apples, she could not get her mind fixed again upon the round perfect fruit that is eaten in the city apartments.”

The twisted apple comes to represent Doctor Reefy, whom Anderson portrays as having grotesque hands and eccentricities around how he keeps his thoughts to himself by writing them on pieces of paper and shoving them into his pocket until forming paper pills.

The young woman and the doctor come to be married, and during this time he reads all his paper notes to her, and after reading them, he stuffed them back into his pockets. At this notion, we see that the young woman’s choice to be with the doctor also resolved his loneliness.

Ultimately, like that of the twisted apple (and in consistent Sherwood Anderson fashion), the story of the courtship between Doctor Reefy and the young woman is bittersweet as she succumbs to her illness brought on by her pregnancy. Doctor Reefy is then left alone, back to shoving his thoughts into his pocket until they form paper pills.

A favorite line from the story:

“Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apple.”

After reading and commenting on 5 different Sherwood Anderson stories at this point in the series, I’ve come to appreciate his complex, and seemingly open-ended short stories. To me, his stories are almost brutally realistic because of the ends (thematic and those relating to narrative) left open at the conclusion of his stories. Those open ends are part of his genius and lend themselves to his ability to capture an aspect to life that us as readers may want to avoid or ignore: unresolved, often self-imposed feelings.

If you’d like to read along and join the discussion, the Paper Pills is available here. You can also follow along in the same anthology of 100 short stories I am reading from (found here).

Next Up:

Series Progress:

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Cheers.

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L. Miller

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