Customer Reviews

Selected Stories of Eudora Welty: A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (Modern Library)

5 star:		(2)
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At the time of her death, Eudora Welty was considered the single greatest living American author, a writer who (although she actually won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER) made her reputation with that most difficult of all literary forms, the short story. One of America's most frequently anthologized writers, Welty's distinctly Southern tone and the fineness of her over-all work makes her the only regional author whose reputation consistently challenges that of William Faulkner.

This particular collection of Welty's short stories includes all works previously collected under the titles A CURTAIN OF GREEN and THE WIDE NET, which were her first and second published short story volumes, written in the 1930s and 1940s. The stories from the former are widely known, and include such favorites as "The Petrified Man," "Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden," "Why I Live at the P.O.," and "The Worn Path." Although less well known, stories from the latter are equally fine, and include such titles as "First Love," "The Wide Net," and "Livvy."

Welty was blessed with a talent for writing from the inside of the character, and in reading her work one consistently feels that one is not so much reading Welty as the writings of the characters she presents--writings rendered with superlative, memorable imagery. But although Welty's work generally consists of character portrait rather than plot-driven material and maintains a stylistically consistent tone, it is remarkably varied, ranging from the outrageously comic to the deeply touching to the profoundly disquieting.

Of particular interest to modern readers is the way in which Welty, who wrote primarily during the era of segregation, addresses race in her work. In one sense, she does not address it at all, for her work is not issue-oriented; at the same time, however, certain aspects of her work (such as characters who occasionally use the 'n' word, which even in the South of this era carried certain implications about the mentality and social class of the person who used it) indicate her awareness of the slow-boil hidden beneath the surface of Southern society. Although it is not included in this particular collection, those interested in Welty's work would do well to read her 1960s story "Where Is The Voice Coming From?," a fearsome portrait of violent racism in action, for Welty's ultimate position on the matter.

There are some five-plus star stories in this selection from Eudora Welty's two volumes -- A Curtain of Green & The Wide Net -- and there are some three-minus stories also. My own five-star rating is intended to recognize the best of Welty's work, which is very good indeed. But I'm not going to identify my favorites; you, dear reader, might well take issue with my choices, and with good reasons. It does Welty's work no service to read these 25 stories sequentially and without interruption. Unlike the story sets of writers like Turgenev or Alice Munro, Welty's stories don't interpenetrate and magnify each other. Each is an artifact in itself, and too many artifacts on display at once always diminishes the impact of each one separately. These were primarily magazine stories, published at intervals in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Harper's Bazaar, New Directions, and other toney journals with urban, chiefly Northern, readerships. The best way to read them, I find, is once in a while and not necessarily in the indexed order. Put the book by your reading chair or on your night table; pick it up when the mood is right, like a dose of intellectual Viagra.

Those Northern urban readers of the 20th C seem to have had an appetite for "Southern Gothic" -- for depiction of grotesque, wayward, aberrant manners and lifestyles among the colorful and colored bumpkins of the post-Civil War South. Perhaps such portrayals served to confirm their own cultural superiority. But the best-known of the self-consciously Southern writers - William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Harper Lee - had something more than burlesque in mind. They were all issue-driven. For O'Connor, the issue was always her obsessive heretical religiosity. For Lee and especially Faulkner, it was Mythos, the grand invincible delusion of Southern particularity, the Myth of the Lost Cause, the finely-tuned hierarchy of racial destinies that only a true Southerner could feel in her/his blood, the tragedy of survival. What separated Welty from the others, and what has made her work unpalatable to many Southern readers, was her inattention to "issues". Oh, the issues are there -- chiefly race and isolation -- but that's all they are: there! Welty, it seems to me, wasn't writing about exotics or Gothic abnormalities. She was imitating the only life she knew well, a local girl capturing local scenes of reality in carefully framed snapshots. She was, by the way, a photographer as actively as a writer. By picturing ordinary quotidian life in the rural South without an aura of magnolia grandeur, without myth, Welty distanced herself from Faulkner and from the pernicious self-congratulation of Southern "better folk" like the heroes of Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird."

If you, dear urban reader of the 21st Century, find the characters in a story like Welty's "Petrified Man" to be stupid, vulgar, and enjoyably grotesque... if you think they are comic exaggerations, you simply haven't had them for neighbors. I have. I spent some years of my late childhood in trailer camps in the South. I've heard those women gossiping, those men bull-sessioning. If I had Welty's camera-like memory for dialogue, I too could write a story like "Why I Live at the P.O." What I'm saying is that Welty was above all a realist rather than a moralist. Her gift was the ability to focus her word-camera, to crop and re-touch, and to print an image that contained nothing extraneous yet everything necessary.

This pertains to her stories. Her novels were another matter entirely ...