Exploitation Then and NOW
FELDMAN, GARRICK
Universal Regionalist The Optimist's Daughter By Eudora Welty Random House. 180 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Granville Hicks Author, "Literary Horizons: A Quarter Century of American Fiction"s In...
...After Fay and her family have gone, the friends of the McKelvas give vent to their shock and resentment...
...Laurel knows there are even worse charges that could be brought against her stepmother, yet she has come to understand that it isn't Fay's shortcomings she must reckon with, but her own...
...I know his whole family...
...Certainly there is a lot to be said about Losing Battles, an amazing tour de force that deals, like some of Miss Welty's short stories, with "the common people," but the author's gifts reveal themselves more clearly to the naked eye in The Optimist's Daughter...
...Brief as it is, we are shown half a dozen men and women in critical moments of their lives, and in each one's problems we see the crisis of a way of life...
...But as Miss Welty subtly shows us, her ties with Mount Salus have really been broken forever by her father's death, though she has formed no ties in Chicago since the passing of her husband...
...For Miss Welty usually writes about men and women who belong to the upper class of the South, even though they may be some distance removed from the old plantation aristocracy, and such a person is Judge McKelva, the optimist of the new book...
...But it is Fay's mother who delivers the final crushing word to Laurel: "We thought a heap of your old dad, even if he couldn't stay on earth long enough for us to get to know him...
...Laurel's great affliction for the moment is her stepmother, Fay, a woman younger than she, loud, vulgar, selfish, and, in the eyes of Mount Salus society, an individual of no breeding...
...Reviewed by Granville Hicks Author, "Literary Horizons: A Quarter Century of American Fiction"s In 1970 Eudora Welty published Losing Battles, the only long novel she has ever written...
...Miss Welty has always been a regionalist in the sense that she has deep roots in a particular section of the country and finds her natural subjects there...
...Like some other Southern writers -Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, for example-and unlike American novelists in general, she has stayed put...
...Meanings within meanings unfold in the narrative until one is awed by the novella's richness...
...Now a woman in her middle 40s, Laurel was widowed in World War II, and has since become a successful designer in Chicago...
...In many of her stories Miss Welty seems to accept the values of the small-town upper class about which she writes, but here she looks at them more discriminatingly...
...Whatever he was, we always knew he was just plain folks...
...Courtland in New Orleans rather than some eminent specialist, he explains to his second wife, "I'm in good hands, Fay...
...I suspect that Miss Welty was writing Losing Battles over a considerable period of time and that she interrupted the process to produce the magazine piece, which she returned to when the larger work was completed...
...She is with her father when he dies, having flown to New Orleans for his operation, and she remains in Mount Salus for a few days after his funeral...
...At the funeral she puts on the show of hysteria that she believes is expected of her, encouraged by her own mother and other members of her family, who have arrived just in time from Texas...
...But through the regional she has reached toward the universal, and The Optimist's Daughter is not so much about Mount Salus as about what we call, for lack of a less pretentious phrase, the human condition...
...The central figure of the novella, however, is not the Judge but Laurel, his daughter by a previous marriage...
...A year before that, The Optimist's Daughter appeared in somewhat shorter form than its present version in the New Yorker...
...A generous, unpretentious man, the big frog in the little puddle of Mount Salus, he is a close friend of the community's social leaders and, despite an education at the University of Virginia, a small-town provincial: When he has eye trouble and insists on eoina to a Dr...
...Surrounded by old friends, Laurel partly falls back into the ways of the town...
...Fay is indeed a terrible person, and her brutal insensitivity was responsible for Judge McKelva's death...
Vol. 55 • August 1972 • No. 16
