Customer Reviews

A Curtain Of Green: and Other Stories

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This was the first Eudora Welty book I've read. Because this is my freshman year in college, I'm wondering why it took me so long.
Like her senior, Southern cohort Faulkner, Welty concentrates her gentle touch on characters in and around Mississippi. Every story is remarkable in its own way, but there are a few standouts. "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies" is an amusing tale of a dim-witted girl who's on the brink of marriage, is snatched away, and then thrown right back when her beau comes calling. The Hitch Hikers is a brooding story of a murder in a traveling salesman's car. My favorite is The Key, in which a filched key gives doubtful, deaf newlyweds new reason for hope of love and contentment.
Miss Welty puts an incredible amount of feeling into her stories, but is not afraid to allow the charming or even picayune to provide distraction from the gravity surrounding. This collection encapsulates the famous Death of a Traveling Salesman. Lovely.

In her first book, Eudora Welty surpassed the mannered and overreaching efforts of more celebrated Southern authors. She examined the inner lives of varied characters -- male and female, black and white, funny and brutal -- and submitted them all to her quiet and curious personality. The effect is both timeless and strange.

Eudora Welty had a long and distinguished writing career. Her stories are set in the small southern towns that she knows so well, and she is known for her character portrayal. This book, which is my first experience with her work, is no exception. The stories are short and full of meaning. Some are simple and some border on the horrific. But all of them leave a lasting impression, causing me to ponder their meaning. The characters are well developed. There is no doubt that Ms. Welty is a master of her craft.

It's true that the people come alive right off the pages. Only problem is that I just didn't like any of them. Each story presents some sort of a puzzle. She packs them with great imagery and wonderful details. I found myself getting involved in reading them. And then, when the story ended, there was a lingering question. What had happened? I was always left with an uncomfortable feeling. And left wondering.

I am sure that this ambiguity was the writer's intention. And I do applaud her skill. I'm glad I had the experience of reading her work. I just don't want to read any more of it.

I am not particularly fond of short stories, in general. Most of the time I finish them with a shrug and a `so what?' I know there are some great short stories. I find it hard to define what makes one, but I know easily when I read one, or when I read a story that isn't great.

Starting Eudora Welty's collected short stories in the LoA edition, one begins with her first published story book, A Curtain of Green. The stories were all previously published in magazines during the late 1930s and early 40s. There is an introduction by Katherine Anne Porter (whom I know only by name, but she seems to have been some kind of a mentor) saying that EW wrote naturally, without being spoiled by a formal kind of training in writing, and had no problem getting published. Possibly that was what kept her from becoming a better writer in young years. I mean the lack of difficulties to find a publisher, not the lack of training. I am quite willing to believe that training in writing is not a promising activity.

She was a Mississippian with some outside experience, but she chose to return and live at home. She reached a good age and a Pulitzer and was, as I am told, the first writer to be in the LoA during lifetime. The stories are all about small town life in Mississippi. Most are 3rd person narratives, but there are also some 1st person tales.

The subjects are mostly the same as in other Southern Gothic collections: simple minds (if female, easy prey...), handicapped people (the deaf and mute couple on their honey moon missing their train to Niagara Falls...), freaks (a black clubfooted man in a show, playing an Indian woman who eats chickens alive - that kind of thing), picturesquely dysfunctional families (the woman who sleeps in her post office, to show her family that she does not need them...), decayed gentry (the mad sisters with the mad brother and the vegetable father...), mindless violence (the hitchhiker killing his travel companion because he bragged and carried a gittar around...), stupidity (ubiquitous).

But there are also better ones, like the title story, about the green curtain. A woman, struggling to live with her husband's death by accident, has a moment of hatred for fate and of attempting revenge against the world.
Or the story called Whistle, one of the best here, in my opinion: the dirt poor farmer couple who burns their furniture in a rage, for firewood. These two show that there might be much more than average `Southern Gothic' coming up, later.

In other words, all in all I expected more. The language is also not particularly original or otherwise striking.
Maybe one should stay away from collected stories and restrict one's curiosity to selected ones. Of course that runs the risk involved in trusting somebody else's selection criteria.
I am sure, somehow, that better things are down the road.