Eudora Welty's Southland
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing EUDORA WELTY'S SOUTHLAND BY PEARL K. BELL There is a map at the front of Eudora Welty's new novel, Losing Battles (Random House, 438 pp., $7.95), to help the reader find his way...
...steal your life, if they knew how...
...When her youngest grandson reminds her that he was the last to leave home, all he gets in return from Granny is '"Benedict Arnold...
...All my life I've fought a hard war with ignorance...
...Writers & Writing EUDORA WELTY'S SOUTHLAND BY PEARL K. BELL There is a map at the front of Eudora Welty's new novel, Losing Battles (Random House, 438 pp., $7.95), to help the reader find his way through the tiny pocket in the hill country of northeastern Mississippi where the story takes place...
...Death hovers like an uninvited guest at the edge of the entire reunion day, and not all the ghosts are made welcome...
...He forces them aloud on the fidgety company, who had resisted Miss Julia's ambition for them, and never could make sense of her passion...
...Eudora Welty loves these people of Banner, with all the instinctive intimacy and dedication of a lifetime of knowing...
...On a parched Mississippi Sunday, Granny Vaughn's 90th birthday, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren and the great-great babies, trailing husbands and wives and cousins and dogs everywhere, flock to the old lady's house for the reunion of the Beecham-Vaughn-Renfro clan...
...The very pocket of ignorance...
...Year in, year out...
...Though Losing Battles is to some extent an elegiac celebration of vanished innocence, it is finally clear that Miss Welty, like Faulkner before her, can discern in the Southland she holds so sacredly dear the tough and tragic web of fate that grasps not only the remembered years and people but also an unhappier time to come...
...Both map and table alert us that we are about to enter a life, an atmosphere—a way of talking and seeing and knowing?unimaginably distant from the world we are familiar with...
...And her tongue is still sharp as an ax...
...By a weird mischance his car gets stuck on the edge of Banner Top, and since there is no help for him on a Sunday, the Judge not only comes to the party but spends the night, while his car, motor running, hums away on its perilous perch all through the afternoon, night, and following morning, like a wandering dog nobody remembered to send home...
...We both fought faithfully and single-mindedly, bravely, maybe even fairly...
...Maps are for strangers...
...Yet the spectral presences rising from the often horrifying stories are as much a part of the day as fried chicken and watermelon, or the hollering oration of the Baptist preacher Brother Bethune, one of a long line of God's madmen in Eudora Welty's fiction...
...The noisy swell of talk is the lifeblood of Losing Battles: "more and more voices, all telling it—bragging, lying, singing, pretending, protesting, swearing everything into being, swearing everything away—but telling it...
...Except in those cases that you can count off on your fingers, I lost every battle...
...First the Judge who sentenced Jack to jail gets lost nearby, on the way to see his old friend Miss Julia Mortimer, the schoolteacher...
...Another ending beckons, and she knows it...
...Yet, through the flinty imperatives of Miss Julia, she can judge them, too, and point with an accuracy at once delicate and unswerving to a later Southern world in which the single-minded attachment to ignorance became more than a cloud that briefly darkened a summer day?when it turned ugly, brutally intransigent, and murderous...
...and the tiny village of Banner itself, not much more than a schoolhouse, a store, and a cemetery...
...They'd take your last row of pins...
...Mostly I lost, they won...
...When the Harvard roommate of Faulkner's Quentin Compson says, "Tell me about the South, Quentin," first he answers, "You can't understand it...
...You would have to be born there," and then complies with a story...
...As the reunion is ending, she sits helplessly on the porch in the moonlight, watching her relatives cram their children and animals into battered trucks and creaking wagons to take the day away with them, and she rages: "Parcel of thieves...
...It takes a wildly improvised train of mule-drawn wagon, ancient school bus and homemade truck to haul the Judge's car...
...If that makes Losing Battles sound like a mawkish family portrait, it is far from the truth of the book...
...We come to know Miss Julia only through the distorting prism of her pupils' unfriendly memories and the unbearably sad letters she managed to write the Judge as she lay dying...
...Granny Vaughn, entering the tenth decade of her work-worn life, keeps her hat on all through the party, as if daring someone to come up with a good reason for her to stay...
...The situation is less serious than it sounds—we are sure no law can force him back there...
...And then into the midst of this splended tribal chaos comes the news of Miss Julia's death...
...Every first Sunday in August they gather together on her drought-puckered farm, to pay homage to the old and show off the new young, to tell each other again the family legends and disasters they have heard a thousand times and never tire of "hear-telling," to drink in the comfort and pleasure of their numbers and renew the holy ties of blood, land and memory...
...Her death sends a chilling reminder through the blazing Mississippi day...
...Writing becomes literature when it is not only a record of life but a judgment, however affectionate, of the world portrayed...
...some weather-beaten old farmhouses...
...Books are not life...
...As Malcolm Cowley said of Faulkner's nonstop talkers: "Everything in their world is reduced to anecdote, and every anecdote is based on character...
...She had taught in the one-room Banner schoolhouse for so many years that everyone in the clan over 20 had been her pupil...
...But this year's is a special reunion, for all the tribe is certain that today the light of Granny's life, her great-grandson Jack, hero and provider, will come home from the penitentiary (where he was sent for a trivial blow in defense of the family honor) after a homesick year and a half "twenty-one country miles from home...
...Yet despite the narrow span of miles and time (about a day and a half) Miss Welty's story covers, and the poverty-ridden rural plainness of its setting, she crowds such a richness of human variety, tragedy, triumph, failure, cruelty, disappointment, love, and wild comedy into this speck of the earth that one reaches the end of her marvelous book with that rare sense of a world bestowed which only a master can give...
...But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble...
...an old sawmill track...
...This is not to say the Banner folk are anything like Faulkner's rapacious Snopeses—the Vaughns and Renfros, in fact, have a pastoral nobility reminiscent of Lena Grove in Light in August—but the seeds of degradation are there...
...They are only tremulations on the ether...
...And how many writers of our day even care to understand, much less fulfill as brilliantly as Miss Welty does in Losing Battles, D. H. Lawrence's aggressive commandment...
...The locale is a rather unremarkable bit of 1930s southern American landscape: some creeks almost dried up by the long summer's drought...
...a steep bluff called Banner Top...
...maimed and blinded in one headlight, into town the next day...
...my children at Banner School took up the cause of the other side and held the fort against me...
...The novel," he wrote, "is the one bright book of life...
...This year, too, Granny's kin know in their unsentimental country bones, may mark her last birthday on earth...
...Facing the map is a carefully grouped list of the characters (arranged by family, and by the town where they now live...
...it is a drumroll of doom echoing back from the stifling hills that lock these people into their land, their unchanging country life...
...Jack loves his family passionately, and so little can he bear to miss the reunion that he escapes only a day before he is to be paroled...
...What makes this book a particular delight to read is its exuberant comic vitality, the uncanny perfection of Miss Welty's ear and eye for regional idiom and eccentric gesture which render each man, woman and child in the chattering swarm of guests hilariously unique...
...For a while the close-knit family tableau is unsettled by thoughts of this indomitable spinster and her courageous, hopeless battle against the ways of the Banner world?the root of it all, like the roots of a bad tooth...
...But twice the voices are interrupted by events that seriously change the familiar pattern of the reunion Sunday...
Vol. 53 • May 1970 • No. 10
