Welty's Shimmering South
KAPP, ISA
VVEIIYS ffookjssuc SHMMERNG SOUTH BY ISA KAPP w ? Ye have grown so accustomed to the sad faces of our famous writers, to their saturnine bearing and melancholy histories of drink and disarray,...
...The hero dives deep without finding Hazel, but he captures instead the secret of her trouble: "She had been filled to the brim with that elation that they all remembered...
...She has no vocation for rectitude, and one can search in vain among dozens of her springy, piquant, often irascible characters for those implications of psychological delinquency that give such dramatic tension to the stories of Henry James...
...Whitaker first, when he first appeared here in China Grove, taking 'Pose Yourself photos, and Stella-Rondo broke us up...
...Told him I was one-sided...
...Cassie (the girl you can easily imagine Eudora Welty to have been) is in her room sprinkled with paint, trying to "tie-and-dye" a multicolored scarf...
...The pear tree gave a soft rushing noise, like the wings of a bird alighting...
...But for the students, the question implied, "for Phoenix's grandson to be dead would somehow make the story better...
...share mosquitoes, thirst, fatigue, the exotic setting, and eventually relax and separate...
...Like most of Eudora Welty's stories, "No Place for You, My Love" baffles us and, at the same time, refers to a deep and primary emotion we can all share...
...A story delightfully anachronistic in the midst of current fiction, "Shower of Gold," is narrated by Mrs...
...But it is enchanting, partly because it parodies a Greek myth in which Zeus (King of the Gods and a philanderer, like King McLain) visits Danae in her subterranean cell and impregnates her with Perseus in a stream of sunlight...
...and even if, in the gray present, she has forsaken serious music to make money and Miss Eckhart has lost her pupils and become a vengeful old woman, Cassie (and the reader) holds on to the charismatic figure that made its impact on her susceptible imagination...
...Winning and emotionally accessible as this story seems to be, Miss Welty tells us in The Eye of the Story that the unrivaled favorite of questions sent her by students and teachers is, "Is Phoenix Jackson's grandson really dead...
...Larkin, the central character in "A Curtain of Green," has spent her days since the death of her husband in tattered overalls, overplanting her garden into the density of a jungle...
...No, the heat faced them—it was ahead...
...They borrow a wide net from Old Doc, the town philosopher, who joins their festival-like procession and incants: "We're walking along in the changing-time...
...When she learned she was pregnant, "It was like a shower of something had struck her, like she'd been caught out in something bright____Why did her face have the glow...
...Winter will be standing in the door— Magnolia and live oak never die...
...The time come around...
...The man speculates that the woman is in the middle of a hopeless love affair and invites her for a ride south of the city...
...The author lends her infallible ear to formidable testimony of unfair treatment and sibling rivalry, highly embellished by pungent Mississippi cadences...
...As he drove the little Ford safely to its garage," the story ends, "he remembered for the first time in years when he was young and brash, a student in New York, and the shriek and horror and unholy smother of the subway had its original meaning for him as the lilt and expectation of love...
...No Place for You, My Love," as complex a tale as can be found today, begins with two strangers who meet in a New Orleans restaurant, sense a possible ambiguous sympathy, and worry about giving in to it...
...A gathering of town people, a hero who confronts fairytale hazards and obstacles for the sake of love, high spirits in the face of dire events—all combine, in "The Wide Net," to produce a texture as recognizably Weltian as The Marriage of Figaro is Mozartian...
...This ignoble sentiment would no doubt be the chief disclosure for some other writer, but it is their sheep-ishness and hesitation that Miss Welty wants to call to our attention...
...The ineffable charm of this staunch little figure resides in her absolute attunement to the taxing physical universe and her aging unreliable body, and in her unruffled purpose...
...The only lesson for them or us to learn is that we must accede graciously...
...T he partly autobiographical "June Recital, a shimmering flashback to the poetry and wonder of life at the age of 12, creates a marvelous balance sheet of benign and thwarting experience, setting side by side family happiness and bitter isolation, the carefree next to the crabbed, the magnolia-scented sensuous warmth of the South against its small-town indifference to those who are not lucky...
...Miss Welty unnerves us with the possibility of violence in a gentle woman mainly to stir us, as her characters are often painfully stirred, to a realization of cosmic forces...
...Though they have bribed Lily Daw with a caramel cake and a fancy purse to take the train to the institution, at the last moment Amy Slocum ("she was the one who felt things") screams to the musician, "Wait...
...VVEIIYS ffookjssuc SHMMERNG SOUTH BY ISA KAPP w ? Ye have grown so accustomed to the sad faces of our famous writers, to their saturnine bearing and melancholy histories of drink and disarray, that it is hard to envision a literary figure as stable, convivial and likeable as Eu-dora Welty...
...Then Jamey, as if in the shock of realizing the rain had come, turned his full face toward her, questions and delight intensifying his smile, gathering up his aroused, stretching body...
...Remember that...
...Rainey as she is churning butter...
...Whenever she discerns a fault in someone, she leaves room for an advantage or a felicity...
...It goes to show that, at least when we are reading Eudora Welty, there is no use fortifying ourselves with the facile cynicism we have lapped up from the academic trough or the critical horse's mouth...
...the elation that comes of hopes and changes...
...Reappearing after a few years, he invites her to a midnight tryst in the woods which issues in twins, but he is gone by morning...
...1 bound to go to town, mister," she confides to the hunter...
...she simply is more interested in our efforts and longings than in our guilts and weaknesses...
...Neat in a striped dress that reaches her shoetops, apron made of bleached flour sacks and red rag around her head, Phoenix Jackson goes up through pines and down through oaks, addresses an occasional remonstrance to a thorny bush, and scolds herself for being frightened by a scarecrow...
...is of Sister's grousing, "Shower of Gold" is not in the least sentimental...
...As comic in its treatment of Snowdie's rapture as "Why I Live at the P.O...
...She falls into a ditch "like a little puff of milkweed," and has a quick dream until a young white hunter finds her "Lying on my back like a June bug waiting to be turned over...
...By the time she gets to her last volume, The Golden Apples, she is weaving rich skeins of family and town connections, drawing more sustenance for her writing as clans proliferate and neighbors meet, and making us feel very much at home whenever another Rainey or MacLain enters our field of vision...
...There is, therefore, a special dividend in opening her Collected Stories (Haicoun, Brace, Jovanovich, 622 pp., $17.95) for readers who have not yet discovered from her interviews (unmarred by the slightest ripple of affectation), her essays about Jane Austen, Chekhov and other writers (intuitive but exact), and her conversations about her own writing (plain-spoken, confident, brilliant in their sense of conscious craft) that this extraordinary storyteller is the kind of person they might wish to consult about their lives...
...at her house it was like Sunday even in the mornings of every day, in that cleaned up way"—the story is enough of a tribute to an undemanding wife to darken the brow of the mildest women's libber...
...The now reluctant Lily is pulled off the train to be married, and the ladies comfort her, "Hush, and we'll all have ice-cream cones later...
...Yet she is no less a psychologist...
...I was getting along fine with Mama, Papa-Daddy and Uncle Rondo until my sister Stella-Rondo just separated from her husband and came back home again...
...Far more terrifying human impulses than condescension are encompassed with equanimity, for in Miss Welty's view they are natural, if not normal, and might overtake any of us...
...w T ? hen we read Eudora Welty's intricate, gossipy stories, with their layers upon layers of brewing memories and opulent images, we are frequently unprepared for the fine point to which they are directed...
...Her mother, dressed to go to a party, smells of geranium perfume...
...He calls his friend Virgil and they enlist the six Doyles and their dogs, a few Malones, and two little Negro boys...
...The very popular "A Worn Path" describes an old Negro woman's long walk through the deep woods that lead to Natchez, Mississippi, to get some medicine for her grandson's sore throat...
...In "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies," three biddies of an age to wear widow's black and get hot easily are about to plump a slightly retarded young lady into an institution for the feeble-minded, presumably for her own happiness...
...The short story form in particular has lured writers and readers to hover in the vicinity of corruption, perversity, impotence—the necrotic aspects of us...
...and Cassie's younger brother, Loch, is peering through his father's telescope into the empty house next door, where he has spied Virgie, the girl who plays tunes in the movie theater, in bed with a sailor eating pickles...
...Despite an elusive quizzical note in the silence of the listener, the momentum of the monologue is so engulfing that we nearly believe that Sister's only option was to gather up her charm bracelet, watermelon-rind preserves, thermometer and Hawaiian ukelele, and leave home to live at the post office...
...the maid is puttering in the kitchen...
...At the end King MacLain returns once more, bearing gifts, but he is scared off, this time permanently, by his two sons in Halloween masks maniacally skating around him...
...And run, little quail, run, for we'll be after you too...
...Persimmons will all get fit to eat, and the nuts will be dropping like rain all through the woods here...
...With her talent, and her air of abandon, Virgie is the logical star of Cassie's reminiscence...
...When William Wallace Jamieson stays out all night because his wife Hazel fancies her pregnancy makes her too precious to touch, she leaves a note saying she has gone to drown herself...
...Full of serene images—Snowdie coming out in clean shirtwaists to water the ferns...
...For the author, the important thing was the sheer presence of the solitary woman making her way through the winter countryside on her errand of affection—her durability...
...In Pearl River they encounter alligators, catfish and the hoary-headed King of the Snakes, subdued by a hard stare from William Wallace...
...Of course I went with Mr...
...It's going to turn from hot to cold, and we can kill the hog that's ripe and have fresh meat to eat...
...To offset the impression that Miss Welty's outlook is a de-pressingly cheery one, it should be said that especially in her early A Curtain of Green (the new collection includes in chronological order all her previous short-story volumes), she is more than willing to notice the irritating effects of gregarious habits and close relations...
...Miss Welty's readers cannot be expected to know all the myths and folk tales she has been devouring since childhood, but the aura of her fascination is communicated to us...
...Still, there is no denying Eudora Welty's true predilections...
...She wanders, marveling, over the landscape of soul and senses, never allowing the smallest fluctuation in either to escape her, but she is not a moralist...
...Humorous, frankly disposed to enjoy food and company, Eudora Welty's real self percolates into a generous fiction that wastes very little time on disapproval...
...They build a fire in a sandbar, eat fish, and fall asleep...
...At that moment, it begins to rain...
...I'll get her for you...
...But while that is the course she would recommend, she takes it for granted that most of the human species is awkward indeed at coming to grips with fate...
...Beyond this concrete whimsical story, chock full of life and humor, the distant fragments of legend and harvest rituals reverberate something magical, often lost to us—a sumptuous double-decker experience...
...it may take some reeducation before we can profit from Welty's insistence on our wholeness and vitality...
...They dance in a bar, but only formally...
...Sighing, she lowers the hoe and lays it carefully among the growing plants: "In the light from the rain, different from sunlight, everything appeared to gleam...
...Old Jack Frost will be pinching things up...
...Busy with her hoe in the afternoon sunlight, she remembers once more the incredible sight of her husband driving toward their porch in his blue car on a summer day, and then being killed without warning by a crashing chinaberry tree...
...William Wallace discovers Hazel safe at home, pert and unre-morseful, but, no longer mystified, he spanks her and they feel closer than ever...
...When they find her at home packing a hope chest (so far she has collected one bar of soap and a wash rag) and preparing to get married to a traveling xylophone player, the ladies are aghast—in good part because she has outwitted their pessimism and shattered their complacency...
...Making small gestures toward one another and instantly backing away, they submerge their emotions in the speed of the ride, the intense heat that envelops them, the intoxication of the Southern landscape...
...kiss, but tentatively...
...Although the love waiting in the wings of this haunting story has been evaded (for reasons of circumstance or psychology that the author wisely leaves unspecified), it is much less a narrative of nonfulfillment and paralysis a la James' "The Beast in the Jungle," than a recognition of the urge in all human beings toward passionate life: The physical universe, vibrantly described (it resounds through Miss Welty's writing as if she were some giant cello) is constantly heaping coals upon that fire...
...Enveloped in domestic tranquility, Cassie thinks she hears the strains of "Fur Elise," and falls into an entranced recollection of the year that she took piano lessons from Miss Eckhart, a heavy German woman "tireless as a spider," whose June recitals always featured the most gifted pupil in town, the same Virgie Rainey, in her days of innocence...
...They could see it waving at them, shaken in the air above the white of the road, always at a certain distance ahead, shimmering finely as a cloth, with running edges of green and gold, fire and azure...
...Old Mr...
...Feeling rage at the unaccountability of her loss, and the powerlessness of her love to protect her husband, her eye happens to light upon the gardening boy, Jamey, daydreaming over his work, and she raises her hoe to bring it down upon his head in some wild urge to compensate, protest, exert her own power against the powers that be...
...The green of the zinnia shoots was very pure, almost burning...
...Bigger on one side than the other, which is a deliberate calculated falsehood: I'm the same," claims the postmistress Sister of "Why I Live at the P.O...
...The albino Miss Snow-die marries, to the astonishment of all, the picturesque King MacLain, who promptly deserts her...
...The solicitous narrator marvels that Snowdie bears her wandering husband no rancor...
Vol. 63 • December 1980 • No. 23
