Welty: reviews and criticism.

Schmidt, Peter

Eudora Welty. A Writer's Eye: Collected Book Reviews, edited by Pearl Amelia McHaney. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Index. 280 pp. $27.50; Gail L. Mortimer. Daughter of the Swan: Love and Knowledge in Eudora Welty's Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Index and bibliography. $40.00.

WHEN THE EYE OF THE STORY WAS PUBLISHED IN 1978 featuring Eudora Welty's essays on the art of fiction, book reviews, and miscellaneous prose, it became an invaluable companion not just for lovers of Welty's fiction but for anyone who wanted to think and feel deeply about the art of fiction in this century. Thanks to Pearl Amelia McHaney's labors of many years, readers who care can now add a companion book to The Eye of the Story and to Peggy Whitman Prenshaw's collection of interviews, Conversations with Eudora Welty. Pearl McHaney's A Writer's Eye: Collected Book Reviews gathers together all sixty-seven of Welty's reviews for a total of seventy-four books, arranged chronologically from 1942 to 1984, with helpful notes and a critical introduction.

The majority of these reviews appeared in just one publication, the New York Times Book Review. Despite this, the pieces are impressive and endearing in their range and scope and independence of thought, and only sixteen of them (the ones collected in The Eye of the Story) have been easily available until now. Consider, for instance, the range of subjects Welty took on in just one year, 1945: a biography of Roger Conant, a Puritan elder in the Massachusetts Bay colony; a review of three collections of European folktales; a piece on an encyclopedia of place-names in the U.S.; and separate reviews of new work by several of her contemporaries in the art of fiction, Edita Morris, William Sansom, and Glenway Wescott.

In her judgment of others' works, Welty put into practice many of the central principles that were to be articulated in the essays collected in The Eye of the Story. A review of even the most minor work can produce gems, as when she says in an aside about a now-forgotten novel's minor characters that they do "what minor characters are always doing, showing up the other characters" (p. 82). And she is as principled in her bestowing of praise as she is of criticism. In her first review, of a novel by Marguerite Steedman about a small town in Georgia, she strikes a characteristic note, tempering her carefully worded praise for a new novelist's first effort with some advise: "this is mostly a novel about things--wanting things, getting things, stealing and selling things, and getting better things. It does not go very inquisitively into human emotions, touching only the feelings of enterprise that things and their getting can inspire. It is to the detriment of this novel that enterprise is not revealing behavior, in fact it is often the farthest thing from it" (p. 3). Welty sounds like a wise veteran here, though in 1942 of course she had yet to publish her own first novel. This comment well reveals, however, some of the goals and strategies about what not to do with a first novel that would inform Delta Wedding (1945).

With a contemporary such as Glenway Wescott who had received much more recognition than she had, Welty is fearless though sly; her praise of a 1945 novel of his is the essence Of faintness (the novel has "nothing wanting in saying an explicit thing"), while her criticism is devastating: "Mr. Wescott has insisted overmuch, in his constant use of the words 'dear,' 'little,' 'poor,' 'soft,' 'womanly' and 'manly' and other compassionate adjectives, that his characters are thereby authorized to be human. But somehow they do not let us see it for themselves" (p. 65). Anyone wondering why Wescott is little read these days?

When Welty's love of a book is heartfelt, her prose rings out. On a 1943 novel about Uruguay by Enrique Amorim, the author of The Robber Bridegroom writes: "among the scenes burned into the mind is the blind gaucho's story of the night he spent in the tree, while the flooding river ran and humped like a bucking horse below him, while the tree itself was a Noah's ark of refugees, wildcats and snakes and himself all clinging there together" (p. 13).

On V.S. Pritchett's Collected Stories (1978): "Dialogue, in constant exchange, frisks like a school of dolphins. These are social stories: Life goes on in them without flagging. The characters that fill them--erratic, unsure, unsafe, devious, stubborn, restless and desirous, absurd and passionate, all peculiar unto themselves--hold a claim on us that is not to be denied. They demand and get our rapt attention, for in their revelation of their lives, the secrets of our own lives come into view. How much the eccentric has to tell us of what is central!" (p. 225).

On Elizabeth Bowen's Collected Stories, published in 1981, a year after Welty's own volume of collected stories: "For her, terra firma implies the edge of a cliff; suspense arises from the borderlines of experience and can be traced along that nerve" (p. 234).

In reading the reviews a great writer gives to others' work we cannot help considering whether the words she applies to others may give us insight into her own writing. A Writer's Eye is also indispensable because it allows us to recover some of the authors Welty was reading most closely when particular works of her own were developing. What prose did she read and review during the crucial decade of the 1940s? Read here and find out.

For instance, this collection makes it even clearer than did The Eye of the Story how much Welty learned early on from S.J. Perelman about humor. In a newly republished review in this volume, Welty confesses that in high school she carried a book of his hidden beneath the covers of Silas Marner (p. 79)! A comparative essay of their work would be worthwhile and might be able to define interesting similarities and differences in how their humor works. They share a superb ear for sham and cliche and know about the comic timing of neologisms and odd nouns and verbs, but it may be that Welty's humorous voices are fundamentally rooted in place, while Perelman parodies the languages of various deracinated professions and class positions as they exercise the privileges they think are their due.

Welty was demonstrably also a fan of literature featuring the supernatural: in a 1944 review of two collections she discusses several authors in this genre quite knowledgeably, especially H.P. Lovecraft and one M.P. Shiel--the latter Welty calls a "kind of genius" (p. 39). Would our own appreciation of the role of the uncanny and the return of the repressed in Welty's own plots be enhanced by investigating these authors, especially Shiel? My hunch is yes.

Her early reviews also show that Welty was thoroughly versed in and skeptical of the conventions of popular women's fiction, even though she rarely alluded to such fiction in the full-length and more "serious" essays collected in The Eye of the Story: "Lan wanders in, staggers in, collapses in the road at Alicia's feet; and with him talking wild and strange the while, she nurses him to life and finds herself attempting to mold and order him toward becoming her husband and sharing 'Elmhurst' with her" (a 1943 review of Sweet Beulah Land by Bernice Kelly Harris). Could this novel be worth reading to investigate how the author of Delta Wedding and (much later) Losing Battles would improve upon it? If you are skeptical, consider the review's opening paragraph: "This novel is the story of Beulah Land, a section of river plantation country in North Carolina, over the eight years of time bounded by the arrival and departure of a stranger. The inhabitants include river gentry, sharecroppers and Negroes, and their in-betweens.... The panorama is given a treatment by Mrs. Harris at once exhaustive in detail and tender in its exactness" (p. 6).

Welty's first review of Virginia Woolf's work (cut at the last minute from Eye of the Story and not republished until now) appears to have allowed her to answer criticism that her own stories were too baroque and indirect, as both Pearl McHaney and Michael Kreyling have suggested. In this 1944 review, Welty implies that Woolf was an honorable model for her and suffered similar obtuseness in some of her readers: "[m]any people ... have found it a curious, almost haughty, decision in Virginia Woolf to seize this palpitating life, at the last moment, indirectly. Her stories nearly all come to us once removed--seen as in a mirror, actionless, happening in an excruciatingly prolonged moment of dilated perception ..." (p. 26). Welty clearly took some of the criticism of her style to heart, however, as this astute comment on similes from a 1945 review of fiction by Edita Morris reveals: "How abundant the similes are in these stories!... [A character described using many similes] is like so many things we never get a long enough or straight enough look at her to understand for ourselves anything deeper than her surface and her symbol ..." (p. 54).

Did Edita Morris's My Darling From the Lions (which focused on the friendship of two girls) or Dorothy Baker's 1948 novel about a musician, both mentioned in reviews, influence The Golden Apples (1949), if only in showing Welty what not to do? What about William Sansom, a British contemporary published by the Woolfs' Hogarth Press whom Welty repeatedly praises? His Fireman Flower (1945) has fire as a central plot device, as does Welty's story "June Recital"; Welty has this to say about it: "the story, taking place within a burning building, is the story of search. The burning building continuously changes its aspect like the edifice of a nightmare.... Castle, cathedral, goods warehouse, a simple burning house ..., a chaos, ... a familiar home with an old friend ensconced.... [The main character] finds himself in a mirror at one point, as he finds the story of his life in the fire and its spell of past and future in the rooms ..." (pp. 66-67).

These are just some of the many ideas for further reading that can come from reading Welty's reviews. Lovers of Eudora Welty's work owe Pearl McHaney and the University Press of Mississippi a great debt for bringing out such an elegantly designed volume with such reliable notes and introductory essay. McHaney gives relevant background information to help us place Welty's reviews properly in context. She also uncovers the musing story behind the name "Michael Ravenna" that Welty used once as a pseudonym in a review. For those who are curious, there are also technical notes on such matters as the revisions made in the reviews by Welty's original editors and by Welty herself when she helped select a few of them for The Eye of the Story in the 1970s. We can learn from the notes, for instance, that Welty's 1949 comments on Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust directly answer a critique of his work by Edmund Wilson, or that behind an eloquent passage about Ford Madox Ford's generosity to younger writers is a memory of Ford's fruitless attempts to help Welty find an English publisher for her own first book.

McHaney surely was a little apprehensive about having too heavy a scholarly hand in introducing and footnoting these reviews, given the acerbic comments Welty has made about the presumptuousness of some critics (see her references to Leslie Fiedler [cf. 258n64], Arthur Mizener, or Robert Langbaum, or the uncompanionable anthologists of The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature). But the critical "apparatus" that McHaney has created for this volume is not like the scaffolding that obscures what it ought to support; rather, it is like a trustworthy, tactful guide who helps us explore for ourselves.

My first reading of A Writer's Eye did find at least two errors. Note 16's reference to a "1955" show of Goya's work as relevant background for an allusion made in a 1943 review is either a typo or an anachronism. And in A Writer's Eye's version of Welty's 1958 review of The Most of S.J. Perelman the phrase "(under 'feuilletoniste')" is missing from its last paragraph (p. 125). McHaney's note on this paragraph (#106) is not enlightening, though another difference between the original review's last paragraph and the version in The Eye of the Story (p. 238) is cited; this reader, at least, remains confused as to whether the dropped phrase is a typo in A Writer's Eye or an intentional copying of what was published in the Times. It matters because its absence subtracts a layer of meaning from Welty's concluding quip about Perelman and because elsewhere in A Writer's Eye other differences involving reviews in manuscript, in their original published form, and in The Eye of the Story are scrupulously noted.

Welty's readers will rejoice to have all these reviews in print. Still, pondering the collection as a whole, I mourn for the reviews that could have been. What if instead of the many minor novelists those New York editors sent her way Welty had been encouraged to assess work by Ellen Glasgow, Caroline Gordon, Margaret Walker, Flannery O'Connor; or Peter Taylor--to pick just a few examples?

Gail Mortimer's new study Daughter of the Swan: Love and Knowledge in Eudora Welty's Fiction focuses on selected short stories, One Writer's Beginnings, and the novel The Optimist's Daughter. It considers the ambiguous and complex relation between love and knowledge in Welty's work--on love as a protection from knowledge and as a necessary ingredient that tempers it. Mortimer's fine reading of Welty's final novel at the conclusion of her book states this guiding focus very memorably, as it ponders the novel's famous lines that "memory lived not in initial possession but in the freed hands, pardoned and freed, and in the heart that can empty but fill again, in the patterns restored by dreams" (OD, p. 179). Drawing on points Welty makes about her parents' love in One Writer's Beginnings that were discussed to open her book (pp. 4-6), Mortimer here comments, "With Laurel [the heroine] we learn that love that insists On protecting its memories ends by obscuring their truth and that to the degree we do this as adults, we perpetuate the sort of benign fabrications with which love protected us when we were children--thus keeping ourselves from deeper understanding" (p. 166).

Mortimer's chapter topics reveal how thoroughly all these ideas are interwoven in her readings. The Introduction is subtitled "The Paradoxical Interplay of Love and Knowledge." Chapter 1 focuses on "Love and Separateness: A Necessary Distance," and gives lucid summaries of Nancy Chodorow's and Carol Gilligan's theories of gender differences in personality development as it looks at general patterns that contrast male and female characters in Welty's fiction. Following Chodorow and Gilligan, Mortimer compares the way that male characters in Welty's work tend to define their identity through separateness, women through connection. But Mortimer does not imply that this behavior is strictly defined by gender or that one kind of behavior is beneficial and the other debilitaring; rather, Mortimer assesses a wide-ranging spectrum of behavior with autonomy and interconnectedness as its poles, and over the course of the book she traces a wide variety of possible combinations available to both male and female characters in Welty's work. The chapter also includes brief but trenchant asides comparing Welty's characters to Faulkner's. Chapter 2 is entitled "Fireflies and Constellations: The Types of Knowledge We Seek," while Chapter 3 focuses on different examples of "circles and labyrinths" in the stories as exhibiting contrasting "characteristics of the perceiver." Chapter 4 examines "fictions, names, and masks" as examples of the "Surfaces and the Hiddenness of Truth," and the concluding chapter is entitled "Embracing Vulnerability: Letting Go of Love as Protection."

Mortimer is at her best closely examining the texture of allusion and illusion in Welty's stories, clustering a host of motifs around a set of tropes such as circles and labyrinths. The following passage on The Golden Apples is representative:

 In both stories Welty has hinted at the circuitous nature of Ran
 and Eugene's obsessive thoughts by proliferating images of twisting
 and circularity that suggests getting nowhere. The MacLain brothers
 fail to become heroes of their own stories by failing to overcome
 their self-generated confusion and despair and by missing the
 opportunity each has to see his life from a new perspective....
 References to circles abound. ... There are also references to
 locks of hair being cut, to spider webs (CS 383), and to the
 pigtails of the "little Williams girl" (CS 382), all reinforcing
 the connotations of the frequently mentioned croquet games and the
 crochet hook wielded by Jinny's mother, Lizzie Stark "Croquet" and
 "crochet" both derive from the Old French word (croc) meaning hook,
 twist, bend, or curve.

 These images are even more evident in "Music for Spain," where
 Welty treats the entire city of San Francisco as a kind of
 honeycomb of intricately connected--and dangerously
 interdependent--buildings, a physical labyrinth mirroring Eugene's
 emotional state.... (pp. 97-98)

Mortimer's book also is notable for very useful discussions of the uncollected story "A Sketching Trip" (1945) and of the relevant contents and illustrations of Our Wonder World, a children's encyclopedia that Welty has said greatly influenced her, both in specific details and in helping to inspire her love of reading (p. 50). (We can learn here what Welty learned early on from Our Wonder World about constellations, among other things.)

Mortimer's title comes from Yeats's poem "Among School Children," which she adroitly shows to be relevant throughout for Welty's work, not just in "June Recital" or the famous last lines of The Optimist's Daughter. Despite the host of commentary that Welty's allusions to Yeats's writing have inspired, Mortimer has many fresh connections to show us and clarifying rethinkings to present often in delightfully unexpected places, as when she shows how Yeats's "Leda and the Swan" and A Vision are relevant for "A Still Moment" (pp. 71ff).

The book's minor weaknesses come from its tendency to bring together too many widely various works to be discussed under a central theme in a chapter. The unities may be demonstrated, but sometimes at the price of any sense of development in Welty's work (works from widely different periods brought together too easily), or any attention to the ways in which the stories may complicate or resist the central paradigms a chapter is exploring (how do "Lily Daw" or "Clytie" test Chodorow's and Gilligan's theses about women's connections? Why ignore "The Wide Neff?). There is a fine discussion of the critical tradition lying behind Mortimer's reading of The Optimist's Daughter (footnote 12, pp. 194-195) and Mortimer eloquently refutes Carloyn Heilbrun's reading of One Writer's Beginnings (pp. 3ff), but in general her engagement with influential critical predecessors is thinner than it might have been, especially when it comes to well-known works such as "June Recital" or "Moon Lake" or "Old Mr. Marblehall" that have received widely varying commentary. Mortimer tends to allude to just a few readings in the notes for confirmation or contrast.

Mortimer seems most at home within the critical tradition of Ruth Vande Kieft (a figure whose readings should probably have been acknowledged more specifically throughout), Michael Kreyling, and Rebecca Mark--good and diverse company, to be sure. Using Mortimer's own central critical paradigm, it might be said that each chapter contains instances when her readings do not venture adventurously enough outside of the enabling circle of her predecessors'. Yet her book also contains passages that emerge as particularly vivid strands in the ever-changing Penelopean weave that is Welty criticism--Mortimer's eloquent readings of "A Still Moment," "Music from Spain," "Kin," The Optimist's Daughter, and One Writer's Beginnings, to choose just five examples.

More on Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart, and Losing Battles would have been welcome. So too would have been a more thorough reading of Welty's work in the context of earlier American women's writings. (To say this is not to imply that Mortimer's linking of Welty to Woolf and Bowen and Faulkner and Yeats and others is not well done.) Without stronger historical grounding, a discussion of separateness-and-connection paradigms tends to imply these patterns are eternal. Earlier women's fiction often, though not always, has seen these very patterns as historically constructed and thus potentially revisable--just as Chodorow in fact does--and Mortimer's nuanced handling of Welty's prose makes it tempting to wish for more readings of Welty's predecessors to be interwoven into the discussion. The issue of how to define the American women's tradition with in which and against which Welty wrote has been examined by readers as different as Peggy Prenshaw, Nina Baym, Carol Manning, Louise Westling, Susan V. Donaldson, or Rachel Blau DuPlessis, many of whom are represented in an excellent anthology of essays edited by Carol S. Manning, The Female Tradition in Southern Literature (Illinois, 1993), that has a broad historical scope and is filled with insightful references to Welty's fiction in this broader context. It makes a good volume to complement the strengths of Daughter of the Swan.

PETER SCHMIDT

Swarthmore College