Living With Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS Two Novels About Youth and Age By Jessamyn West and Eudora Welty By Granville Hicks Jessamyn West's Cress Delahanty (Harcourt Brace, $3.75) carries its heroine from the age of...
...That Miss Welty can find true comedy in a person of less than average intelligence, and do it without a suggestion of condescension, without the tiniest lapse into bad taste, is proof not only of great literary skill but also of great wisdom and great humanity...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS Two Novels About Youth and Age By Jessamyn West and Eudora Welty By Granville Hicks Jessamyn West's Cress Delahanty (Harcourt Brace, $3.75) carries its heroine from the age of 12 to the age of 16 in a series of episodes that are sometimes comic and always poignant...
...The episodes vary somewhat in tone, and there are moments when the lack of continuity is bothersome, but the development of Cress is clear and satisfying...
...But Miss Welty can work miracles with the vernacular as well as with the poetic prose for which she is famous...
...and we see her, with particular clarity in her relations with the world of adults...
...Miss Welty's achievement brings to mind many illustrious names, but especially the name of Laurence Sterne...
...whereas Mrs...
...Charlesbois and Mr...
...When, moreover, she looks at Cress from outside, it is through the eyes of her sympathetic and intelligent, if sometimes bewildered, parents...
...The central theme of the book is the barrier that lies between adolescents and adults, but Mrs...
...Uncle Daniel, of course, is a sentimentalist, and so is Edna Earle...
...The Ponder Heart (Harcourt Brace, $3.00), on the other hand, displays Eudora Welty's talents at their very finest, and especially the sureness and flexibility of her prose...
...What one has to say, however, is that Miss Welty is more successful than her great predecessor in avoiding sentimentality...
...The style is not the delicate fabric she has so often and so admirably woven, for the story is told in the first person and in the vernacular...
...Delahanty, but of other adults as well??to make contact with the mystery that is Cress...
...West is never more poignant or more convincing than when she shows the occasional crossing of the barrier from one side or the other...
...Reading between the lines of Edna Earle's breathless and seemingly incoherent narrative, one sees clearly enough the lineaments of a grim little town...
...What she does is to find, wrapped up inside the sentimentality, a true feeling that she brings forth for us to admire...
...There are moments of sinister discovery, as in her experiences with Mrs...
...The publisher's comparison with Penrod is unfortunate, for Booth Tarkington, looking at adolescence from outside, exploited its comic aspects...
...Charming and perceptive as it is, Cress Delahanty is not quite up to Mrs...
...West's earlier novel, The Witch Diggers...
...The manners of Daniel Ponder belong to the South, but not his heart...
...Wallenius, and there are the encouraging revelations of Aunt Iris and Mrs...
...In Clay, as in so many Southern towns we have met in fiction, the glory has departed, and a good many people have nothing but pride??and, as the bizarre conclusion of the story shows, none too much of that??to live on...
...If Mrs...
...but Miss Welty, though she is charitable toward their weakness, does not share it...
...Like her great contemporary, William Faulkner, Miss Welty has found in Mississippi a sufficient field for her imagination...
...and the style, which is always and wonderfully the style of Edna Earle Ponder, an old maid in a small Southern town, serves all her purposes...
...West's view of adolescence is less somber than, say, Carson McCullers's, and if Cress is somewhat closer to what we think of as a normal American girl than Mick Kelly or Frankie Adams, this is by no means a frivolous treatment of the serious business of growing up...
...Uncle Daniel, indeed, is a magnificent comic character...
...but, again like Faulkner, she has known how to soar above the limitations of regionalism...
...We see her in her own world, as she soars to the peaks of happiness and falls into the deepest sloughs of despond...
...Cornelius...
...But it is only in its minor aspects a Southern novel, and Uncle Daniel is not what he might so easily have been made: a symbol of Southern decay...
...One feels with great force the touching eagerness??especially, of course, of Mr...
...This is that rare thing in the modern world, a novel of sentiment, and Uncle Daniel is close kin to Uncle Toby...
...One amusing episode follows another, and there has never been in all literature a murder trial so hilarious as the trial of Uncle Daniel...
...The book is made up of episodes that can stand by themselves and many of which have been published as short stories...
...and Mrs...
...As any reader of "The Wide Net" and a few other stories knows, Miss Welty can be very funny when she wants to be, and in The Ponder Heart she has really let herself go...
...West, though she sometimes laughs and invites laughter, lets us see Cress as she sees herself...
Vol. 37 • January 1954 • No. 2
