The Reverend Curtis Hartman
The Presbyterian minister, who broke a hole in the window of his study to watch the schoolteacher next door and then spent a winter unable to stop.
To feel the power of God actually arrive in him. Kneeling in the bell tower every Sunday morning he asks for it in the same words: "Give me strength and courage for Thy work, O Lord!" He has also decided privately that it is never going to happen to him.
The book
At a glance
- Pastor of the Presbyterian church, and the subject of 'The Strength of God'
- Forty
- Ten years in Winesburg
- Married to Sarah Hartman, daughter of a Cleveland underwear manufacturer
- A study in the church bell tower, with one leaded window
- Son of a wagon maker from Muncie, Indiana; worked his way through college
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeThe Reverend Curtis Hartman is the Presbyterian minister of Winesburg and the subject of 'The Strength of God,' a story in Winesburg, Ohio, the 1919 book of linked short stories by the American writer Sherwood Anderson. He is forty, tall and brown-bearded, silent and reticent by nature, and has held the pulpit for ten years. Preaching frightens him. From Wednesday morning until Saturday evening he thinks of nothing but the two sermons due on Sunday.
He prays in a little room in the church bell tower, where the one window is made of small leaded panes showing Christ laying his hand on the head of a child. One Sunday morning in summer, looking up from his Bible, he sees through it into the upper room of the house next door, where Kate Swift, the town schoolteacher, is lying in bed smoking a cigarette and reading a book. He closes the window, appalled at the smoking and at his own eyes, and goes down and preaches the best sermon of his career.
What follows takes the rest of the year. He knocks a corner out of the leaded window with a stone so that he can see the bed, repents of it, and then forgets to mend the hole. He tells his congregation that it is a mistake to think of a minister as a man set aside by nature to lead a blameless life, and he begins for the first time to behave something like a lover toward his own wife. Three times in the autumn and winter he creeps back to the tower after dark, and afterwards walks the streets praying.
How the book draws them
- His position in townTen years in the Presbyterian pulpit, which is the largest church in Winesburg and the best paid. He arouses no keen enthusiasm and makes no enemies. The banker's wife thinks him scholarly and refined, and he keeps a carriage and drives his wife about town on summer evenings.
- What he is afraid ofPreaching. Standing in the pulpit is a hardship every week, and he suspects the flame of the spirit does not really burn in him. He calls himself a poor stick to whom it will never really happen, and then decides philosophically that he is doing well enough.
- The windowThe tower study has one long narrow window of little leaded panes showing Christ laying a hand on a child's head. He fetches a stone from Main Street and breaks a corner out of it. The missing piece takes off the bare heel of the boy standing before Christ.
- Who is in the bedKate Swift, thirty, who teaches at the town school and lives next door with her mother. She lies propped among the pillows reading, sometimes smoking, with only her bare shoulders and throat visible. She has no idea he is there.
- The sermon he preaches insteadHe tells the congregation that ministers of God's word are beset by the same temptations as everyone else, that he has been tempted and has surrendered, and that only the hand of God beneath his head raised him up again. It is one of his better Sundays.
- His marriageHis wife Sarah is the daughter of an underwear manufacturer in Cleveland who gave them five thousand dollars on the wedding day and promised twice that in his will. During the weeks when he believes he has the temptation beaten, he puts an arm round her waist in the dark on Gospel Hill and kisses her cheek after breakfast.
- The January nightHe leaves the house in such a hurry that he forgets his overshoes, and sits in the freezing tower with wet feet and no fire, gripping the edge of the desk, having decided to stop resisting and think whatever he chooses. A fever takes hold of him. He comes near to dying of that night.