[In the following review, Bailey discusses Welty's Losing Battles and states that "The prevailing tone is one of glorious ordinariness, but one that never sinks into the terminally cute…."]

The belated publication in Britain of this exceptionally beautiful novel, which first came out in the United States in 1970, is both welcome and timely, coming as it does so soon after the appearance here of its author's Collected Stories. These two books alone are evidence enough that Eudora Welty is a writer of considerable distinction.

"What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart, and skin of a human being who is not myself", is how she accounts for her method of working. "Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, old or young, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself." That "jump" is achieved with a seeming lack of effort in Losing Battles as the various members of Granny Vaughn's copious family gather to celebrate the nimble old lady's ninetieth birthday. No sooner have they arrived at the farm in Banner, Mississippi, than they start talking, and in a manner that is immediately compelling. The majority of Granny's descendants and their spouses are natural raconteurs, in the best tradition of the Old South, and the great originality of Losing Battles derives from its being composed of the tales told by these people as they while away a long, hot Sunday in early August sometime in the 1930s—the work of fiction thus produced is at once a novel and a collection of short stories.

The dialogue invented by Eudora Welty in this long and delicate book is often cunningly arbitrary. Conversational culs-de-sac are explored and then deserted. The Beechams and the Renfros repeat themselves constantly, but each repetition brings with it a variation or two, almost imperceptible. Such talk—varied, spontaneous, recognizably absurd—is a pleasure to read because it is always revealing of character. It is funny, too, but not in a wanton or gratuitous way. In the following example a cyclone is being discussed:

'It picked the Methodist Church up all in one piece and carried it through the air and set it down right next to the Baptist Church! Thank the Lord nobody was worshipping in either one,' said Aunt Beck.

'I never heard of such a thing,' said Mrs Moody.

'Now you have. And those Methodists had to tear their own church down stick by stick so they could carry it back and put it together again on the side of the road where it belonged,' said Miss Beulah. 'A good many Baptists helped 'em.'

'I'll tell you something as contrary as people are. Cyclones,' said Mr Renfro.

'It's a wonder we all wasn't carried off, killed with the horses and cows, and skinned alive like the chickens,' said Uncle Curtis. 'Just got up and found each other, glad we was all still in the land of the living.'

At the heart of Losing Battles is the story, recounted by sundry characters, of Miss Julia Mortimer, the dedicated school teacher who has fought a losing battle against ignorance and illiteracy. Julia never actually appears in the narrative because she dies shortly before the family reunion for Granny, but hers is perhaps the most vivid presence in the entire novel. Welty displays remarkable skill as she resurrects this difficult woman through the voices of Julia's former students, only one of whom—Judge Moody—remembers her without resentment. Yet the more Granny's kin abuse the dead teacher, the more respect and admiration the reader feels for the object of their scorn. This is the triumph of an art that determinedly refuses to cast its own judgment, that registers—with an honourable disinterest—the judgments of the human beings it celebrates. Condemnation, it suggests, is practised by men and women, but not by novelists.

For Eudora Welty's art is, essentially, in accord with the complicated business of living. Like her beloved Chekhov, she eschews the big scenes—they are subjects for discussion; they happen off-stage. Even when her characters' tongues are venomous, her concerned detachment is informing the reader that there is more to the speakers than their temporary state of viciousness would indicate. The principal events of Losing Battles are of a trivial kind that is rare in the literature that has come out of the American South—there is no rape, and only a hint of possible, distant incest. The prevailing tone is one of glorious ordinariness, but one that never sinks into the terminally cute—pace Our Town, and the jottings of Brautigan, Saroyan and Vonnegut. The humanity that is everywhere demonstrated in Losing Battles does not cuddle itself, does not invite approbation. It simply and necessarily informs what is probably the quietest masterpiece to be written in America since the death of Willa Cather.