Michael Kreyling’s excellent study of the work of Eudora Welty draws its title from a passage in Welty’s essay on Willa Cather: “A work of art is a work: something made, which in the making follows an idea that comes out of human life and leads back into human life. It is an achievement of order, passionately conceived and passionately carried out.”
Kreyling examines Welty’s four volumes of short stories, her two short novels, and her two longer ones; and he shows how her “achievement of order, passionately conceived and passionately carried out” resulted from the experience she gained through her own writing and, in part, through the perception that came from her reading of other authors.
Considering Welty’s books in their order of appearance, Kreyling frequently cites the failure of reviewers to discover more than a surface meaning or effect in works whose deeper art escaped them but was perceived by later, more observant readers. Like the work of many other writers, Welty’s is subtler and more complex than the rapid reader sees.
Several reviewers of A Curtain of Green, Welty’s first book of stories, unjustly considered her a mere writer of Southern Gothic. They were misled, Kreyling believes, by the appearance of “grotesques” in a few stories and by a few incidents—such as the desperate suicide in “Clytie”—which blinded them to other aspects of her writing.
The stories in A Curtain of Green present real, although sometimes grotesque, people; but Welty is not content to be a mere realist picturing what the eye can see. She searches for more. As Kreyling says, “Always present and striving in the technique . . . is the will to probe the enigma with language, with fiction, for the wholeness that lies at the root of human life.”
Kreyling sees in the eight stories of Welty’s second book, The Wide Net, “a powerful and subtly unifying technique that links individual stories and transforms them into something more than a collection.” Longer and more complex than the stories in A Curtain of Green, those in The Wide Net anticipate Welty’s novellas and novels to come.
The two nineteenth century stories, “First Love” and “A Still Moment,” contain actual historical characters and they occur in the geographically real Natchez Trace. Yet, they are not historical narratives. Fictionally, they take place, as Kreyling writes, “in a state of heightened imaginative possibilities.” Aaron Burr was really tried for treason, but he is presented by Welty as the heroic figure imagined and glorified in the mind of the young deaf-mute, Joel Mayes, who receives something of Burr’s dream in a handshake. Lorenzo Dow, James Murrell, and John James Audubon, the three men who meet in “A Still Moment,” belong to history; but in the story they seem to exist in a poetically imagined landscape.
Welty’s combining of realism with mythic or symbolic elements in several stories in A Curtain of Green continues in The Wide Net. Kreyling interprets “Asphodel” as a skillfully crafted and ironic version of the classic strife between Dionysian and Apollonian visions of life.” Numerous passages in “Livvie” clearly suggest the winter-spring symbolism. In “The Winds,” both Josie and the symbolically named Cornella (from corn, suggests Kreyling) are seen during the equinox, a “season of change.” Cornella, lashed by the storm winds and rain, has already begun the change from girl into woman and the onlooking Josie is poised to enter it.
In The Robber Bridegroom, her first novella, Welty blends elements of history, fairy tales, tall tales, comedy, and tragedy. Despite the title, which suggests that Jamie Lockhart is the protagonist, Kreyling sees Clement Musgrove as the real hero, “a character in a cast of cartoons,” and he links him with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Miles Coverdale, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, “a motley fraternity of dreamers [who] all face across the bay of their own puzzling circumstances a disordered world that will not obey their wills or dreams.” Musgrove’s pastoral dream is doomed by the greed and other evils of the whites who have taken over the Natchez Trace from the Indians. At the end, although his daughter Rosamond chooses the “splendid” city, Musgrove retreats. Kreyling writes, however, “he has won an integrating vision; he has learned through physical and emotional trial the continuity of time and its concentration in the moment . . . the moment of unscaled vision is the only true stability.”
When Delta Wedding, Welty’s first full-length novel, appeared in 1946, many reviewers were disappointed. They looked for a “story,” a book with social significance, a facing of the factual present. Welty had intended a very different kind of novel, Kreyling says, one “more lyrical than narrative in its attention to setting, event, plot, and language. Its thematic territory is not the world of politics or natural disasters . . . its world is the human heart and its tangled relationships with others.”
Delta Wedding had its genesis in Welty’s unpublished “The Delta Cousins,” a short story revealed through the consciousness of Laura, a nine-year-old girl. Kreyling’s close examination of the development of the novel from the story discloses Welty’s artistry in enriching and expanding the material from the single to the multiple point of view. “Sympathy, or a widened susceptibility,” according to Kreyling, “is the theme of the novel; each of the characters who furnishes a point of view undergoes a series of experiences in which sympathy is to be gained or lost. . . . [Ellen’s] sympathetic vision is the crown of Delta Wedding.”
Welty’s next book, The Golden Apples, marked a new departure: a group of seven interrelated stories. Preceding the first story, she lists a large cast of characters who variously appear or reappear in the stories over a period of forty years. Adults grow old or die. Children are born and grow through childhood to become adults themselves. Except for “Music from Spain,” laid in San Francisco, the stories all occur in or near the small Mississippi town of Morgana.
The Golden Apples is unified, as Kreyling shows, on two levels: by its fixed cast of characters and by an intricate “network of mythological and literary allusions” to both Greek and Celtic myths. Structurally, the book follows not a sequential order but, as Kreyling makes clear, a “lyrical order that repeats, rephrases, and enriches what has gone before.” Although at one point Kreyling calls The Golden Apples a novel (as have several other critics), Welty does not consider it so and she includes it in her Collected Stories.
With The Ponder Heart, her second novella, Welty returned to comedy, which had marked several of her early stories. Kreyling, though, reads the book as one in which comedy adjoins terror. Edna Earle Ponder tells the entire story to an unnamed listener who has stopped at her hotel, and in the telling she makes Uncle Daniel the richly comic figure he is for the reader. Kreyling emphasizes, however, that there are two opposed Ponder hearts: “Uncle Daniel’s . . . freely prompts him to any act of generosity and love. Like a mythic figure, he is not constrained by mortal or social contingencies. Edna Earle’s . . . however, is wrung with a thousand concerns for the orderly way of life she sees dropping into oblivion before her attentive eyes.” One grants the accuracy of Kreyling’s observation, but Uncle Daniel is so appealing and Edna Earle herself loves him so much that he remains for most readers the dominant character of the book. He is one of Welty’s most memorable creations.
The seven stories of The Bride of the Innisfallen do not, like those in The Golden Apples, have a fixed cast of characters. In fact, not only are the characters different in all of the stories but there are varied locales and times. Yet, Kreyling sees the stories as a group asserting “that there is truth in the life of the heart, and that this truth is daily obscured by a prosaic attitude to life.” Through close analysis of the separate stories, he elaborates what he calls Welty’s “rhythmic technique” which is symbolically related to the rhythm of the heart. Having cited the puzzlement of several reviewers who wondered what some of the stories “meant,” Kreyling concedes that a recognition of Welty’s technique is needed for understanding and appreciation that she has contributed “to the short story and to the collection the lesson of rhythm and pattern as ways to art.”
Welty’s next book appeared fifteen years after The Ponder Heart. Losing Battles, a full-length novel, was praised by many reviewers, and Welty’s work as a whole was recognized for its artistic individuality and for its enduring literary value. Losing Battles may be seen as a companion novel to Delta Wedding. In the earlier novel, the time is 1923 and the Shelton family is wealthy. Granny Vaughn and most of the relatives who attend the reunion to celebrate her birthday in Losing Battles are poor farmers trying to survive the economic depression of the early 1930’s.
For Kreyling, “Losing Battles elevates Welty’s ’homemade’ symbolist technique, her unique evocation of place, and her vision of human life as a constant rhythm of ’lonesomeness and hilarity,’ community and divisions.” Welty’s cast of characters is so large that, as in The Golden Apples, she lists them before the book begins, arranging them in groups to aid the reader in keeping the various families either together or apart.
Because the novel opposes the forces of ignorance and those of learning, its readers from the beginning have tended to polarize, most of them perhaps seeing Julia Mortimer and her prize pupil Gloria as the losers to the ignorant Vaughn-Beecham-Renfro clan. Yet, the scales are better balanced than this; there are losses on both sides.
Welty’s skill in picturing atmosphere, life, and character in Banner, Mississippi, may lead one to think of her writing only about a particular time and place; but her view comprehends much more. As Kreyling remarks, “In Losing Battles myth and history battle for the allegiance of men’s minds and lives, the timeless fights the temporal, the circle struggles against the line. . . . From her elevated point of view, Welty sees that these battles are always losing but never finally lost.”
The Optimist’s Daughter, Welty’s third novella, first appeared in The New Yorker in 1969 and then in 1972 as a book. Kreyling’s final chapter is largely a comparison of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and The Optimist’s Daughter, since he believes that Welty’s confessed early excitement in reading the Woolf novel presented her “with the images of her own unspoken, as yet unwritten ideas, hopes, and themes.” As Kreyling comments, both novels “return again and again to an idea of distance, whether . . . created by the passing of time or by the gulf between the self and the public role, self and society, self and loved one, and self and the truth.”
In addition to his comparison of the Woolf and Welty novels, Kreyling cites a number of differences between The New Yorker version and the book version of The Optimist’s Daughter. He concludes that these revisions helped to make it the beautiful work of art it is.
In his “Afterword: Reading Welty,” Kreyling quotes the passage (mentioned at the beginning of this review) which gave him the title for his study and he confesses that he has been “learning the process, the concerted action of intellect and imagination” in reading Welty’s fiction. “Each work,” he writes, “builds upon passion and order, heart and head, love and knowledge.” He emphasizes that a true appreciation of Welty’s art can only come from a close attention to her work. A hurried reading will not do it, nor will the reading of critical studies. Closing, he quotes what Welty said about reading the many critics of William Faulkner. Her advice was to turn to Faulkner himself: “Read that.” Kreyling adds: “A writer’s life—his work—is in the care of his readers.”