When Henry Miller set off to discover America, in October, 1940, there were several outstanding natives whom he was hoping to meet: Margaret Mitchell, Zora Neale Hurston, Walt Disney, Ernest Hemingway, and a little-known writer named Eudora Welty. Despite the alarmingly forward letter of introduction that Miller had sent her some time before, Welty—unfailingly courteous—received him as an honored guest. For three days, she drove Miller around the sights and surrounds of her native Jackson, Mississippi, the city where, at thirty-one, she lived with her widowed mother in a large Tudor-style house that her father had built. Welty’s greeting was not only gracious but bold, since her mother refused to let Miller into the house—not because of his books but because of the letter, in which he’d offered to put Welty in touch with “an unfailing pornographic market” for her talents. In the extensive touring plans that Welty had devised for her exotic visitor, she arranged for at least two male chaperons to accompany her wherever they went.
The only shocking aspect of Miller’s behavior, though, turned out to be his stupendous lack of interest in Southern history: he refused to take off his hat on a picnic at the local ruined plantation, and his apathy reached the point where he wouldn’t turn his head to look out the car window. But, if Welty had reason to dismiss this wandering libertine as “the most boring businessman you can imagine,” the contrast she offered to her own writing was hardly less extreme. Although she had published only a handful of stories, Welty already flaunted a distinct and not unshocking literary manner: deadly honest, ruthlessly funny, and as subversive of complacent American normalcy as that of any jaundiced expatriate. At roughly the time she was boring Miller stiff-necked, editors of The Atlantic Monthly were worriedly censoring Welty’s inspired black-jazz improvisation, “Powerhouse,” and trying to explain to the genteel Southern-lady author why her story could not conclude with the lyrics to “Hold Tight, I Want Some Seafood, Mama” (“Fooly racky sacky want some seafood, Mama!”).
Welty knew that she was writing “something new,” and she didn’t expect success to come without a struggle. She had an uncannily keen ear, and she tended to write quickly; in bursts of energetic prose that required little or no revision. The uproariously surging “Powerhouse” was completed in a single sitting, after she came home one night from a Fats Waller concert and felt an urge to spin the music’s high-flying, improvisatory riffs out into words. Another story, called “Petrified Man”—in which the horror of a carnival freak show is easily outdone by the horror of a small-town beauty parlor (“this den of curling fluid and henna packs”)—was rejected so many times that she burned it in disgust, and then rewrote it from memory when Robert Penn Warren, the editor of The Southern Review, changed his mind and wanted it back. Its second appearance was in the “O. Henry Prize Stories” of 1939.
Welty had a notably vivid sympathy for the freak and the grotesque, for the pygmy and the pickled and the blinkingly dim, characters who served to set the wider population in her stories at a disadvantage. She knew her outsiders, and she understood what people used them for. (“He’s turning to stone,” Leota the beautician observes sagely of the Petrified Man. “How’d you like to be married to a guy like that?”) It is the uncertainly educated denizens of Welty’s ingrown, post-historic, Coca-Cola-sodden South who are more truly akin to monsters—albeit, at Welty’s dismaying best, entirely guileless and extremely funny ones. The pitch-perfect talk she puts in their mouths seems to render moral judgment weightless; it is present but invisible, rising up like gas. But then these thankless souls don’t do any real harm—there is no Faulknerian blood lust here—except in a way that Welty takes in glancingly, with a sharp little stab at the edge of her vision, as when the dramatically departing narrator of “Why I Live at the P.O.” drags all her belongings onto the family porch:
Everyone knows who the real outsiders are in this world.
Welty published her first story in 1936, when she was twenty-six. In the decades since then, the young author of wildly daring fictions has become a monument, the Pallas Athena of Jackson. She has received the Pulitzer Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom; the Municipal Library of Jackson has been renamed the Eudora Welty Library; and the Governor of Mississippi once decided that her birthday merited a statewide holiday. Welty’s collected works are now being published in two stout volumes by the Library of America, but she has already entered the national pantheon as a kind of favorite literary aunt—a living exemplar of the best that a quaint and disappearing Southern society still has to offer.
In her best-selling memoir, “One Writer’s Beginnings,” Welty attributed her gifts and her success largely to having been the child of wonderful parents—an Ohio-born insurance man and a strong-minded West Virginia schoolteacher, who moved to Jackson after their marriage, in 1904. Welty, born in 1909, grew up in a prosperous home near the state capitol; she and her two younger brothers would roller-skate straight through the rotunda, part of a perfect idyll of childhood she portrayed, all kites and ice cream. She attended whites-only schools, of course—Richard Wright went to school in a very different Jackson during many of the same years—and the rest of her world was equally enclosed: the only black people she appears to have seen were contented servants. According to her own report, quite unremarkably she questioned nothing.
And yet by sixteen she was ready to get out. She convinced her parents that she was old enough to go away to college—first to Columbus, Mississippi, and then to Madison, Wisconsin, which was far enough from home, but in the wrong direction. After graduation, she moved to New York, to attend Columbia Business School; this was 1930, and the theatre and Harlem jazz clubs and Martha Graham occupied her far more than her classes did. She returned to Jackson only when her father was dying, in 1931. Two years later she was back in New York, but financial worries and pressure from her mother brought her home again. It was then that she started to take photographs, principally in Jackson’s black neighborhoods, where she went to buy jazz records.
Her real awakening, though, came with a job as a publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration, in 1935, for which she travelled by car or bus through the depths of Mississippi and saw poverty—black and white—that she had never imagined before. Taking pictures now became her passion, and Welty published photographs before she published her first story. When the W.P.A. job was over, in 1936, she returned to New York several times, searching for a job in publishing and pounding the pavement with her photographs. All she ever got was a small exhibition in an optician’s store on Madison Avenue. Her subject was black Mississippians, in the fields or on the streets or simply looking outward, meeting impossible odds with a frank and powerful dignity.
It is telling that through the late thirties Welty tried to publish her stories and her photographs in a single volume. The impetus for what she knew to be her first genuine writing had come from the same shock of discovery—from her W.P.A. travels, when, as she put it, “my feelings were engaged by the outside world, I think for the first time.” The evidence of this experience is sometimes stark, as in “The Whistle,” a story about impoverished tomato farmers who strip off their only warm clothing to cover the delicate crops during a frost, and in “A Worn Path,” about an ancient black woman who undertakes a long journey on foot to get medicine for her grandson (and who serenely ignores the petty insults of the white people she meets along the way; she, too, receives a nickel). Despite the subjects, there is nothing didactic in these stories; Welty’s tone remains as light and precise here as in her freak-show comedies. And, like the comedies, these stories do not need to name the big subjects they touch on—race, deprivation, ignorance, morality—because the author’s quick chiselling of character includes them all.
A brilliant array of these stories appeared in Welty’s first collection, “A Curtain of Green,” which was published late in 1941, after being held up for months while Welty trembled to ask the magisterial Katherine Anne Porter to complete a promised introduction. The book contained six years of varied, jolting, intense storytelling, by an author who now gave no sign of having ever willingly stepped off her front porch. Welty had long been apologetic about not having “been in jail or trodden grapes like other young people”—as she put it in an autobiographical note to her first published story—but Porter’s introduction transformed her into a holy vestal of inexperience, with no personal history to mention and no use for the wider world, a Little Miss Muffett entirely content at home, “where she lives with her mother, among her lifelong friends and acquaintances, quite simply and amiably.” In part, this reflects Porter’s amused condescension toward the comparatively awkward young woman whose work she admired. (Her famous reply to Welty’s confession that she was still a virgin was “Yes, dear, and you always will be.”) But if the image was rather unfair—to Welty’s past and to her work and desires—it was one that Welty herself now seemed set on making real.
She had recently completed a book that accords all too well with this encroaching sense of her limits. “The Robber Bridegroom” is a novella-length fairy tale, mixing wicked stepmothers and golden heroines from the Brothers Grimm with old Mississippi legends of robbers and heroes along the Natchez Trace. Aiming at “once upon a time,” Welty willingly threw off her gifts for character and for the revelations of ordinary talk, and moved into a realm of symbolism, cutout figures, and lockjaw whimsy. (“ ‘Ho! Ho! Ho!’ said the second traveler.”) The reviews, however, were sometimes better than they had been for Welty’s stories, and one critic—presumably noting that the plot revolved around a wandering innocent roughly educated by the world—compared the book to “Candide.” As an indication of Welty’s theme, the comparison is not far off. But if she had sunk all her virtues into a parable, what was it about?
Concerning this, no one seemed to have a clue. Yet despite the book’s tone of “joyous idiocy”—as another reviewer wrote, apparently in praise—it is clear that politics, in the broadest sense, runs like a murky source beneath the overbright tale. For Welty’s “innocent” man—she uses the adjective repeatedly—is a Southern planter who accumulates great wealth without any effort or desire. A purely noble gentleman, he is pushed on by the greed of his second wife, a spiritual foreigner from Kentucky who demands that he build her a vast plantation house. The book posits a golden age of the gracious South: a time when there were individual slaves but which was somehow distinct from the later age of institutionalized slavery: No wonder Welty had to write this as a fairy tale.
At the story’s end, the wearied hero bids farewell, in a confusing speech of Yeatsian prophecy and horror, involving gold and slaves and buzzards and a planter who “makes a gesture of abundance with his riding whip.” A gesture of abundance? Welty was clearly struggling with some peculiarly knotted ideas. In 1944, she wrote an extravagantly lyric essay entitled “Some Notes on River Country,” in which she discussed the history of a lengthy section of the Mississippi: “Wonderful things have come down the current of this river. . . . Every kind of treasure, every kind of bearer of treasure has come down, and armadas and flotillas, and the most frivolous of things, too, and the most pleasure-giving of people.” In this Watteau-like panorama, there is never any unfrivolous human cargo coming down the river. Possibly these evasions and glamorizations did not seem so far-fetched to the average white resident of Jackson in the nineteen-forties. But nothing about Welty’s writing had seemed average before.
Little is known about Welty’s life beyond what she has chosen to tell us. She continues to maintain that she has no personal history to speak of, and adds that whatever evidence exists to the contrary she is going to burn. Everything that matters has been in front of us all along, in the stories, the novels, and the literary and autobiographical essays. This fall, however, the Library of America edition of Welty’s works may be read alongside the first biography of the eighty-nine-year-old author which has ever been attempted—needless to say, without her coöperation. Ann Waldron, the persistent author of “Eudora: A Writer’s Life” (Doubleday; $25.95), details several early trips to Welty’s door, and a response as intractable as it was—what else?—gracious: rather like the response to Henry Miller’s asking her to write pornography. But it took Waldron a lot longer than it did Miller to realize that Welty was not going to produce the goods.
With Welty’s friends instructed not to talk, and with no access to private papers, Waldron depends on a lot of previously published material, frankly throws up her hands at the gaps (her opening chapter is entitled “The Teenager”), and discovers a few simple but resonating facts. It is appalling that just about everyone willing to speak of Welty in her youth volunteers that she was physically unattractive: “She was ugly to the point of being grotesque,” an unnamed source reports, in what soon amounts to a chorus. And while one would gladly do violence to a former belle who tells Waldron, “I was pretty, so our paths didn’t cross much,” her statement does make clear what kind of segregation must have been the ruling evil of Welty’s early life.
Equally important is how she overcame it. Almost every statement about Welty’s looks comes to a “but” and turns itself around: but she was so nice, she was so helpful, she was so enthusiastic that her looks entirely ceased to matter. She did not have dates, but she never minded helping other girls get dressed for theirs. This was selflessness as survival, graciousness learned by the rack and the screw. Add to it a forcefully dominating mother and a fearful but hungry spirit and what do you get? A woman who felt honor-bound to return home at twenty-two, when her mother was widowed, and then spent the next quarter century stealing as many weeks and months away as possible—she had to go to New York to get some privacy, she frets in a letter, she had to go to get some time to write—while fulfilling the obligations of an almost egregiously dutiful daughter. (In 1952, Katherine Anne Porter visited Jackson and was furious when she learned that Welty—aged forty-two—had to ask her mother if Porter could come for dinner; what’s more, her mother said no.) You also get, it seems, a woman who spent seventeen years of her life in love with a homosexual man.
“Everybody is asking about John Robinson these days,” Welty complained during an interview, in 1993. The role that Waldron gives him is indeed central—and justifiably so, in the light of his significance not only in Welty’s life but for her work. A tall and handsome man and an aspiring writer, Robinson became a friend of Welty’s in 1933, when he returned to Jackson from graduate school. Although he moved to New Orleans in 1936, their companionship flourished; after he joined the Army, in 1941, Welty rushed to meet him whenever he was on leave. In these years, Welty’s letters to the multiply married Katherine Anne Porter are a bit breathless about the quantities of camellias that he brought her but reveal little of unbotanical interest. Although Waldron concludes that the available facts do not establish “whether they were friends or lovers,” she notes that Welty’s fiction is full of signs that, sexually, something was horribly wrong.
The books and stories would be quite sexless, in fact, were it not for the rapes—which, even as rapes, are among the strangest such scenes in modern fiction. They are without violence, without emotion, even without flesh—all abstraction and tortured syntax. He “robbed her of that which he had left her the day before,” Welty writes in “The Robber Bridegroom.” (What the robber took before were her clothes.) “He violated her and still he was without care,” according to a 1942 story entitled “At the Landing,” in which the heroine eats an enormous meal immediately afterward, gratefully demonstrating her “now lost starvation.” Waldron convincingly suggests a source for this dire but bodiless sex in Welty’s deep entanglement with a man who would not touch her. But the biographer ignores the far more meaningful influence that Robinson seems to have had on Welty’s writing—an influence that was profoundly political.
The son of an old and wealthy Delta family, Robinson was part of the historic South in a way that Welty never was. His stepgrandfather was Mississippi’s infamous Governor J. K. Vardaman, the racist demagogue responsible for the Jim Crow laws passed after his election, in 1904—the very year when Welty’s parents moved to Jackson. Robinson seems to have been an impassioned dilettante of local history: an explorer of the big old houses and the little river towns (Welty’s “River Country” essay was sent to him for his approval) and a scholar of family histories. Perhaps his enthusiasm was irresistible; perhaps she wanted more than anything to please him; perhaps—particularly after her first book was done—she simply needed a new subject. But Welty’s abrupt about-face from the roads of the W.P.A. to the legendary trails of the Natchez Trace—and then on to the plantations of the Delta—would probably not have happened without him.
In 1941 and 1942, she completed eight stories about the Natchez Trace for a new collection, “The Wide Net”; the title story was dedicated to Robinson. Published in 1943, to disappointed reviews, the stories are often artificial and over-literary, the work of a gifted writer clearly struggling with the burden of being an Author. At Welty’s best, however, her artifice takes on an intensely lyric, dancing energy—animating characters as simple in outline and rich in color as commedia-dell’ arte figures—that keeps the action hovering just above reality. One story that manages to remain aloft is the iridescent “Asphodel,” in which three gossipy old maids confront the buck-naked god Pan while on a picnic at (where else?) the local ruined plantation, and run off, pursued by a pack of goats. The story seems part mock-Faulkner and—in the fleet departure of the suddenly sexually energized ladies—part Martha Graham. It suggests Welty’s ability to slip quietly into place among the best (if far more thunderously grand) American mythologists.
The inspiration for her first novel, “Delta Wedding,” was owed directly to John Robinson. In 1945, he suggested that Welty read the diaries of his great-great-grandmother, a Delta plantation mistress who recorded the events of her life from 1832 through 1870. The work that grew from this chronicle was a labor of love—in some ways literally, with Robinson reading each chapter as it was completed. Because Welty didn’t feel comfortable writing about a period she’d never known, the setting was moved to 1923—a year she chose precisely because it offered “nothing except the family” to concentrate on. Despite the appearance of an occasional automobile, however, or a reference to baying dogs at nearby Parchman prison—the lowest hell of the Jim Crow system, built by Governor Vardaman only in 1905—one could read the entire book without suspecting the transposition in time, or even realizing that the Civil War had occurred. Its characters, the Fairchild family of Shellmound, are benevolent, if temperamental, aristocrats, and their empire is maintained by largely comic and apparently contented Negroes—Bitsy, Roxie, Little Uncle, Vi’let, Man-Son—who give little sign of wanting the world any other way.
When “Delta Wedding” was published, in 1946, critical swoons over Welty’s language were mixed with horror at the book’s contents. In The Nation, Diana Trilling wrote, quite simply; “This is a value system to which I deeply oppose myself,” and Time called it all that could be expected from a member of the Junior League. Politically, the timelessness of Welty’s book was defensible only in emphasizing a point that this country—in the wake of Wright’s “Black Boy”—was just beginning to address; namely, that in the twentieth century parts of the South had effectively recreated conditions little better than those that had prevailed before the firing on Fort Sumter. Certainly this was true of the Delta: studies from the early forties found that it stood alone in its brutal restrictions on Negro life. When, in “Delta Wedding,” the field hand Man-Son raises his hat to the Fairchilds’ spirited, Scarlett O’Hara-like daughter, Dabny, what seems an act of devotion is also an act of obedience to what passed for law, not only in 1923 but in 1946. Welty claimed that she did not condone or endorse—this was not the job of the novelist—but merely described. What she describes, however, so gorgeously, is a dreamscape, a never-never land:
This might have been the greatest plantation novel of all had Welty had the courage of Margaret Mitchell’s convictions, or the courage to expose the lies and fears that lay beneath them. Instead, she spread fairy dust over the cotton fields and refused to confront, or even explore, any of her pretty characters. She couldn’t afford to. As a result, “Delta Wedding” is a tour de force of distraction—food, flowers, dotty old aunts—its focus always shifting around a nonexistent core. Perhaps this justly reflects how such a family lived with itself, but the artistic price that Welty paid for so successfully mirroring its self-deception is heavy. Her characters remain blurred, as in a faded photograph—closed off in their delusions, small and indistinct against the beauties of the land that cannot save them or this book from being, finally, empty and unfulfilled.
In the fall of 1946, Welty used her “Delta” money to follow Robinson to San Francisco, where he had moved after leaving the Army. She spent five months living alone in cheap single rooms, writing stories and nursing Robinson through colds and depressions, then returned to Jackson in the spring. It was during those months that she completed what she has called the most personally meaningful of all her stories, the complex and deeply moving “June Recital,” which became the centerpiece of her next collection, “The Golden Apples.” A story about artistic aspiration and personal failure, it tells of an old-maid piano teacher who is slowly driven insane; rumored to have murdered her mother, she is led away after trying to burn down their house.
Welty went to San Francisco again that fall, and then back to Jackson. It was New York the next year—she tried to break into writing for the theatre—and then back to Jackson. In 1949, she travelled to Europe, apparently to meet up with Robinson in Florence. And it was there that Robinson fell in love with the man he was to live with for the rest of his life. Welty told him how happy she was for him, and their friendship suffered no great break. Nor was there any apparent effect upon her work, except that when she wrote of herself in fiction again it was not as an old maid but as a widow.
Alone, permanently now, she travelled more than ever, but the effect on her writing was, conversely, a deeper drawing-in. Welty’s stories from the fifties—set in New Orleans or in Ireland or on a boat to Naples—seem thin and conventionalized, the experience never quite convincingly firsthand. Yet her treatment of the contemporary South comes to seem even less credible, not by reason of defects in her talents but by her design. This is not a new development. “The Ponder Heart,” a 1954 novella, is essentially “The Robber Bridegroom” rewritten, a heavily whimsical fable about another purely innocent Southern man—Uncle Daniel Ponder, so rich and amiably crazy that he gives all his possessions away. The major differences are that Welty’s literary model is no longer the Brothers Grimm or Yeats but something akin to the folksy humbug of Will Rogers, and that this time she had a great success.
The slender volume became an alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and fulfilled Welty’s theatrical dream by opening in a stage adaptation on Broadway in 1956. Life magazine ran a feature on the giddy new comedy in the same issue that it ran Faulkner’s “A Letter to the North,” a directive warning the country to go slow in forcing changes on the South in the increasingly volatile matter of civil rights. (“They don’t mean go slow,” Thurgood Marshall is reported to have said. “They mean don’t go.”) Eight years after President Truman proposed the integration of the military (still uncompleted by 1956), and less than two years after Brown v. Board of Education overruled “separate but equal,” Welty’s determined avoidance of social reality assumed a social significance of its own. “The Ponder Heart” turned her into Mississippi’s favorite daughter—the besieged white public was only too happy to see itself in her adorable eccentrics—which proved to be excellent timing, because she now came home for good.
She hadn’t any choice. Her mother had undergone cataract surgery in 1955, and she did not recover well, becoming frailer and ever more demanding until her death, in 1966. Both of Welty’s brothers died in the same span of time. Only many years later, in “One Writer’s Beginnings,” did Welty acknowledge the heartfelt sacrifice and wild frustration of this period, her frantic scribblings at the steering wheel as she raced between hospitals. She began a novel about a big family reunion but hadn’t the concentration to carry it through. After a lifetime of refusing to consider teaching—a profession too closely associated either with her mother or with old maids—such work became a solace. She began to lecture on writing whenever she was asked, and she was asked increasingly often. (“I’m so well behaved” is how she modestly explained her new campus popularity. “I’m always on time, and I don’t get drunk or hole up in a motel with my lover.”)
These college lectures and the needling questions Welty had begun to be asked about her lack of involvement in civil rights gave rise to her best-known essays—“Place in Fiction” (1956) and “Must the Novelist Crusade?” (1965)—defending her position as a nonpolitical writer in highly political times. There is not much to dispute in her argument for the writer’s need to be well rooted in his or her native soil (citations: Proust, Jane Austen) or in her point about the damaging results that political crusading may have on fiction (standard whipping boy: John Steinbeck). But Welty comes very close to expressing disdain for any exercise of judgment, or any expression of anger (“even to deplore, yelling is out of place”), and this demand for restraint does seem tied, unavoidably, to her very political perception that “we in the South are a hated people these days.” Better than to judge or to get angry, she claims, is to do as she does—to affirm, to write only with love. A noble dictum, but it is the opposite of what Welty actually did in the one extraordinary work that she produced in all these years—a story that turns her rationalizations upside down and shows the kind of forceful, honest writer she could still be.
On the night of June 11, 1963, Medgar Evers was shot in Jackson. Upon hearing the news, Welty went to her desk and wrote a story in a single sitting. Perhaps this was just the kind of rapid-fire response that prompted her best work—such as “Powerhouse”—or else the act of opening her eyes to the world again was what made the difference. But the story she wrote—“Where Is the Voice Coming From?”—is ablaze with the reconnection of words and purpose, as though the current of power in her early stories had never been diverted. A dramatic monologue, it takes place entirely within the mind of Evers’s killer—a fictional figure, for the real one had not yet been arrested—and is foul and vicious and pathetic and full of lacerating hate. The story begins with a couple watching television:
The story appeared in this magazine two weeks after it was written. Details had to be altered for legal reasons, because some of the author’s inventions were so close to the facts discovered in the few days after the killer was caught. But Welty had mistaken one significant detail about the killer, as she was nearly bound to have done: his class. Although the white-trash voice of the piece was brilliantly sustained and chilling, the killer was from one of the best Delta families. Yet, as Welty had to point out herself in defense of her intuition and her story’s validity, the basic psychology of a murderous bigot is the same in every class:
It was only when she explained, in later interviews, how she’d come to write this story that she referred to “that world of hate that I felt I had grown up with.” (It took three trials and thirty years to convict Evers’s actual killer.) Elsewhere, rather like Uncle Daniel Ponder, she increasingly insisted that she had been “brought up in a world of love.” Her loyalty to a past and now often despised way of life was naturally intensified by a loyalty to the family she’d lost, but also, it seems, by her need to justify her years of sacrifice to them. (Compare Faulkner on the subject of the artist’s sacrifice: “If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.”) Welty produced just two short stories in the eleven years between her mother’s surgery and her mother’s death. Then she released a small torrent of work, all on the subject of the gloriously intractable bonds of family.
“The Optimist’s Daughter” (1972) and “One Writer’s Beginnings” (1984)—an autobiographical novel and a romanticized memoir—offer dual tributes to Welty’s parents’ perfect marriage. “Between some two people,” she writes in the latter, “every word is beautiful.” Their relationship seems to have loomed ever larger in Welty’s mental life, and these books suggest wistfully overlapping images of the author: as a child standing alone and listening intently outside a closed circle of adult love, and as an old woman, even more alone, still straining after the voices in an awful silence. Welty’s family portrait does not omit the difficulties of having been her mother’s daughter, but only hints at the continual interference, the guilt, and what must have been a battering anger in the later years. Yet these two slender, plainly written books are as morally simplified as her earlier fables: the element of fantasy remains in the nearly absolute division between evil and good. Perhaps for this reason, these have been among Welty’s most popular works, and have contributed to her growing aura as a kind of Eleanor Roosevelt of literature.
Less tightly controlled, less readable, and far more interesting is Welty’s big novel, “Losing Battles”—the “family reunion” book that was brewing all those difficult years and was finally published in 1970. A sprawling, unwieldy work, it seems to have been written in a state of war between the author and her subject—or, more precisely, between the author and what she tries to feel about her subject. Welty spoke of “Losing Battles” as “a novel of admiration for the human being who can cope with any condition, even ignorance, and keep a courage, a joy of life,” but all that affirmation is hard to find in this disturbing, imbalanced book. It takes hundreds of pages of rustic farce to bring the members of a poor white hill-country clan together, and it is only then that we learn, in a few asides, their various secrets. One-handed, religion-spouting Uncle Nathan, for example, once murdered a man and “let ’em hang a sawmill nigger for it”; he cut the hand off himself: as part of his penance. The revelation is quietly stunning, and seems to matter, yet it is given no weight and immediately disappears.
Altogether, this book seems a puzzle in which the most important pieces have been hidden, even from the author. And it is these very pieces, however baffling or obscure, that possess a terrifying power. There is a three-page scene involving fruit that is more sexually bizarre than anything since Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”: the women of the clan surround an overproud young wife and knock her down, pin her flat, then ram slabs of watermelon into her face—“the red hulk shoved down into her face, as big as a man’s clayed shoe, swarming with seeds, warm with rain-thin juice”—and down her throat. “Ribbons of juice crawled on her neck and circled it, as hands robbed of sex spread her jaws open.” Their purpose—“Come on, sisters, help feed her! Let’s cram it down her little red lane!”—is to get her to admit that she shares their name, and so is just like them, one of the family:
The scene is so violent that a reader is not sure that the victim will survive. As it turns out, her dress is barely soiled, and all is forgotten.
Forgotten, too, are the lessons of Welty’s last and finest old-maid schoolteacher, the woman who loses the battles of the title and dies having tried and failed to bring enlightenment to Mississippi. The tale of her death is horrible: old and feeble, she is tied to her bed by one of the family aunts and, worse, her pencil and paper are taken away. That is when she really wants to die. For a short while she scribbles with a wet finger on her bedsheet, but then the sheet is ripped off to make her stop. Somehow she manages a final letter, which is sneaked out to one of her former students, a judge now nearly an old man himself; it contains an urgent warning about the one thing she has failed to take into account:
Buried in the core of this misshapen, determinedly bumptious comedy is an American tragedy of true distinction. But Welty was not in the business of writing tragedies, and if she spent much of her life ignoring her heroine’s warning, that life was permitted to run a far happier course.
In a public tribute to Welty in 1969, the great Faulkner champion Malcolm Cowley spoke in praise of her already famous qualities: “Gentle, unruffled, unassuming, kind, she is an unusual figure. . . . ‘Isn’t she nice!’ other writers always say of her. Her writing is nice, too . . . fastidious, scrupulous, marked by delicate discrimination.” And this is the image of Welty that has prevailed, firmly shutting out the old, indelicate discriminations, the fooly-racky-sacky deliriums, the world of hate she split wide open and exposed with expert hands. But, clearly, this change has been her choice. A born outsider in a stifling, hypocritical, yet tantalizingly charming society, Welty discovered that she could write her way into acceptance; year by year, book by book, she came to be wholly embraced. Who would not find such acceptance irresistible? Who would not be glad and grateful? In terms of her art, however, it was a hard bargain. These new volumes make it all too clear how an intrepid explorer turned into a perfect lady—a nearly Petrified Woman—with eyes averted and mouth set in a smile, who from time to time let out a bloodcurdling cry, as though she, too, could not forget what had been lost. ♦
