Customer Reviews

Ponder Heart

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Eudora Welty possessed a remarkable talent for crawling into the skin of her characters--and Edna Earl Ponder is one of her most astonishing creations. Like her widely anthologized short story "Why I Live at the P.O.," Welty's short novel THE PONDER HEART is written as a monologue, giving the reader the unexpected sensation of sitting across the front porch from Edna Earl herself as she determinedly relates the story of how her eccentric Uncle Daniel unexpectedly found himself on trial for murder in their tiny Mississippi town.

THE PONDER HEART is a masterpiece of American humor. The humor of the novel is not, however, so much in the story (amusing though it is) as in the way it is told. Edna Earl has a typically Southern knack for turning a colorful phrase, and throughout her narrative she takes us on a tour of the best of Southern venacular, tossing off several memorable comments and laugh-out-loud descriptions on every page--particularly when it comes to white trash Bonnie Lee Peacock, who marries the addlepated Uncle Daniel on a trial basis. And if you're not Southern enough to completely grasp the definition of "white trash," that most Southern of perjoratives, Edna Earl will leave you in no doubt as to what precisely it means.

Welty wrote considerably deeper works than THE PONDER HEART--her stunning short stories and the Pulitizer Prize winning novel THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER come quickly to mind--but for pure-dee down home humor Edna Earl, Uncle Daniel, Bonnie Lee, and the Peacock family are hard to beat. A touching, hilarious, and extremely memorable work that you'll probably return to again and again! Strongly recommended.

This is a cute little book that's very easy to read. I found myself identifying with both the narrator, Edna Earle, and Uncle Daniel. If you're looking for a book that's easy on the brain, then this is the one for you.

Endearing and funny, with a wonderfully satiric narrative style,
award-winning author Eudora Welty's exquisite, but tender and loving portraits invite us to laugh at the absurd frailties of the human animal. The slightly backward, small southern town of Clay is the setting for Edna Earle's rambling tale of her Uncle Daniel Ponder and his unique eccentricities. While perhaps not exciting (or readable) enough for the youngest teens, adult readers should enjoy this madcap window on southern life.

Uncle Daniel is a simple, gentle, kindly, guileless, and above all generous soul, who loves to give things away. Fortunately, Grandpa Ponder is "rich as Croesus", but even his resources are limited. In an effort to find someone to give more things to, Uncle Daniel becomes enamored of one Bonnie Dee Peacock, a suitably mindless twit who agrees marry him "on trial". Things are rocky enough for the happy couple, when an unexpected death
throws the whole town into turmoil. The book's conclusion may seem silly to some, but is not so very unbelievable given the context.

The only thing to be said against this precious little gem of a book is that it doesn't have much of an impact - there are no great issues being debated here, or at least the aren't presented explicitly. Reading between the lines though, some fundamental human values are being affirmed, to wit: family loyalty, kindness toward those with special needs, and good old-fashioned Christian charity. A delightful, uniquely American entertainment, even if it is rather light weight.

People love a holy fool -- Prince Myshkin, Innocent Smith, Elwood P. Dowd.

And one of the more lovable ones is Daniel Ponder, whom his niece describes as "just like your uncle, if you've got one -- only he has one weakness." Actually his weaknesses seem to be excessive friendliness and generosity -- and that's what indirectly sparks off this arch, slightly madcap little murder trial.

Edna Earle runs a hotel in a small Southern town called Clay, and helps take care of her sweet, not-too-bright Uncle Dan. Dan is generous and friendly almost to a fault, which even leads his stiff-backed father to commit him to an asylum (in a "Harveyesque" twist, the dad is accidentally committed instead).

More importantly, Uncle Dan gets married -- once to an eccentric Baptist widow, and then to an ephemerally pretty teenager from a none-too-genteel background. Considering the marriage a "trial," the self-absorbed Bonnie Dee soon leaves Dan, comes back, ejects him from his own vast house. When Edna convinces Dan to cut off all money, she asks him to return -- only to be found dead the next morning.

And after the most white-trash funeral you can imagine, Bonnie Dee's nasty family immediately charges Dan with murder. Unfortunately, Dan doesn't really recognize the danger he is in. And the murder trial soon turns into a circus, with the trashy family, lightning balls, some inconveniently-placed servants, and two completely inept lawyers in the mix.

As with all of Eudora Welty's fiction, "The Ponder Heart" drips with Southern atmosphere and gentle eccentricities. Instead of the typical cliche trappings, Welty introduces us more to the attitudes and likably odd people who populate the South, ranging from outright weirdos to the slightly odd. In few other books could you find a murder trial interrupted by a couple of boys dragging a fig tree.

And since the whole book is seen through Edna's eyes, Welty spins out a story in arch, slightly exasperated prose. It spins out slowly and with many side-stories and tangents, full of conversational moments ("Oh, but he was proud of her") and vivid little descriptions ("like one of those dandelion puff-balls"). And her throwaway lines can tell you more than most writers can with a whole paragraph, such as Edna noting that Mrs. Peacock wore tennis shoes to her daughter's funeral -- which, in an instant, tells us everything we need to know about Mrs. Peacock.

But the sense of restrained absurdity really blossoms when the trial starts -- that's when Welty really brings out the satire guns. The whole thing starts to resemble a circus, with really awful lawyers, trashy in-laws, and a blind coroner who contributes exactly nothing. The whole trial becomes more and more surreal, until Uncle Dan's eccentric, generous nature clinches it.

In fact, Uncle Dan is the heart of the entire story: a lovable child-man whose naive, generous spirit is uncorrupted by the nasty intentions of those around him. He's too sweet to be irritating, and too unworldly to be easy to live with. It's easy to see why the fiercely down-to-earth Edna loves and protects the old guy, no matter what he does.

"The Ponder Heart" is a warm little story that happily dances on the borders of Southern farce, but never gets too silly. Delicious, funny and heartwarming.

In this masterpiece of idiomatic Southern narrative, Edna Earle Ponder relates the zany adventures of her Uncle Daniel. You can almost imagine Edna Earle sitting in her rocking chair on the front porch, dryly commenting on the goings-on in Clay County and the foibles of its Dickensian population.

Edna Earle looks out for her overly generous Uncle (who "may not have a lot of brains" but is "blessed with a fond and loving heart"), looks up to her ornery Grandpa (whose fear of electricity motivated him to cover the roof "with lightning rods the way Grandma would sprinkle coconut on a cake"), and looks down at the white-trash Peacock family (the type of folk who would "wave at trains till the day they die"). When Uncle Daniel up and marries one of the Peacock daughters, the next thing you know she's dead and he's on trial for murder.

A quick read--and well worth it--"The Ponder Heart" never loses its colloquial appeal or its comic pacing. I only wish it were longer.

That's one of the many parenthetical bits of wisdom tossed off by the narrator of The Ponder Heart, Miz Edna Earle Ponder, the youngest daughter of ponderous plantation wealth destined to remain a spinster and care for her batty Uncle Daniel, himself the youngest and last male of a clan that everyone in Clay County, Mississippi reveres and envies. Uncle Daniel has a habit of giving things away out of the innocence of his Ponder Heart, perhaps not a heart of gold but at least a heart of divinity. In case you're city-bred, you should know that divinity isn't a synonym here for Godhood but rather a confection of egg white and corn syrup. You'll find a recipe for it in Joy of Cooking but not in Julia Child.

Honestly, I never liked divinity much as a kid. It's sweet and sticky and full of air, like coagulated cotton candy. And it's a perfect metaphor for this novella, written in the early 1950s when Jim Crow still held court and when the enduring verities of Southern backwardness and isolation were regarded as quaint to the edge of endearing. The skin pigment melanin was equated with sloth and foolishness in Welty's Clay County, while strangers - a euphemism for yankees - were utterly clueless and presumably up to no good. The Ponder Heart is essentially a 150-page shaggy dog story, an elaborate joke that takes its time reaching the punch line. One could choose to read it more seriously, as a depiction of the death throes of the chivalrous 'old order' of Southern society... if one were a literary poobah on the faculty of a state university somewhere... or one could just read it for the laughs. I'd recommend the latter choice.

I must have read something more profound by Eudora Welty way back in my youth, since I've harbored the notion that she was one of the major stars in the firmament of Southern literature. I wish I could remember what. This novella is "no great shakes" even as humor. It's sentimental and affected, and the joke runs thin before it's half told. It seems to me now that Welty is no more than a slick local-colorist, the equivalent in prose of a Norman Rockwell magazine cover. This book at least belongs on the shelf of regional genre writing, alongside Bret Harte, Hamlin Garland, and Garrison Keillor. Even in that category, it isn't a stand-out.

But then, as I said, I'm not partial to sticky sweetness.

If you like southern writers, if you like Eudora Welty, if you like eccentric characters, if you like a little slapstick in your novels, don't miss this one.
Uncle Daniel goes down in literary history as one of the most engaging and memorable of all characters as he 'just loves to give things away, loves to make people happy.' And, oh, the trouble he causes with his largesse!
Read it and laugh.

Eudora Welty's taut, comic short novel "The Ponder Heart" received the William D. Howells' Medal for fiction from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1955. A prestigous award from a scholarly organization, the Howells Medal is awarded every five years to the American novel deemed best during this period. Upon publication of The Ponder Heart in book form in 1954, Welty's editor, William Maxwell, wrote a letter to her about the work. Maxwell noted that while the early reviews praised the novel, the reviews for the most part were "excruciatingly stupid". He declined to pass them on to Welty. Maxwell wrote that he "winced his way" through the reviews and "wished somebody would have had the sense -- somebody with his head on his shoulders -- to say that The Ponder Heart is a comic masterpiece and let it go at that". Maxwell compared the book to Huckleberry Finn, finding that "the more times you have read it, the better it is." Maxwell's letter, dated January 11, 1954, is included in a recent book of the Welty-Maxwell correspondence edited by Suzanne Marrs. What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell Reading the correspondence prompted me to read Welty's novel.

Set in a small town called Clay, Mississippi in the late 1940's, the story is narrated in its entirety by Edna Earle Ponder who operates the Hotel Beulah in the decaying downtown of Clay. The Ponder family is the wealthiest family in Clay, but at the time the story begins, only three members of the Ponder line remain, Sam, the Grandfather, his youngest son Daniel, and Sam's granddaughter, Edna Earle. Edna Earle is in her 40's, unmarried, and with fears of dying an old maid. Besides the hotel, the family properties include a large old house three miles outside of Clay, known as Ponder Hill. The Grandfather dies early in the story, making Uncle Daniel and Edna Earle the chief protagonists as well as the heirs to his fortune.

Edna Earle's tale centers upon her Uncle Daniel who is approximately her own age. Uncle Daniel appears to be a simple soul, kind and generous. He gives property away unstintingly to friends and strangers alike and eventually takes to passing out the family cash. Daniel's father said that the boy must have been waiting in the other room when brains were passed out. With the prompting of his family, Daniel makes a short marriage to a widow named Teacake which ends after two months. Daniel is institutionalized. Upon his release, he meets a young addle-brained girl, Bonnie Dee Peacock, 17, trash from a small neighboring town called Polk. Bonnie Dee agrees to marry Uncle Daniel "for trial", and she leaves him after five years. When she returns, she orders Uncle Daniel to leave the house on Ponder Hill. Shortly thereafter, Edna Mae and Daniel return to the house at Bonnie Dee's invitation during a severe lightening storm. When Bonnie Dee is found dead, Daniel is charged with murder and tried.

Maxwell's comparison of Welty's book to Huckleberry Finn is apt because in both books more is going on that might appear on a first casual reading. It seems to me Maxwell is correct in concluding that it is useless to over-intellectualize the book beyond recognizing it as a "comic masterpiece". The doings and the characters are ruined by paraphrase.

The book is full of sharp, detailed observations of places external and internal -- the Mississippi of Welty's day and the ambiguities of character -- the hearts of the Ponders and others. Uncle Daniel and his sweet improvidence is the center of Edna Earle's concern. Roughly the first half of the book describes the Ponder family and the towns of Clay and Polk while the second part describes Uncle Daniel's murder trial through Edna Earle's voice with portrayals of the old state judge, the bumbling attorneys, and a strange concantation of witnesses and testimony. A brief but critical denouemnent follows the result of the trial.

As the book progresses, the focus of the story shifts from Uncle Daniel and the town to the garrulous Edna Earle herself. Welty captures her voice, mannerisms and character in speech and behavior that is entirely Edna Earle's own. She is both precise and mysterious. The reader learns to see events through Edna Earle's eyes befor learning to see through Edna Earle and understanding her for herself. She is the prototypical unreliable narrator.

The story has an undoubtedly light, flippant character; but as so often, surfaces and ease can be deceptive. The book bears careful reading and some digging. The Ponder Heart merited William Maxwell's praise and the National Academy's Howells Medal.

Robin Friedman

I thought that this book really portrayed the goodness of life living with townspeople. Edna Earle expained descriptively her life and background to a complete stranger, and learns things about life of others in the meantime. I thought this book was very poweful and meaningful, and i would recommend it to anybody who enjoys these types of stories.

It made me laugh out loud to see a writer of Eudora Welty's stature with two stars. One of our greatest living treasures, being heckled. This is a work of genius, as are all her books.