When a novelist can articulate what he knows by feel, he calls criticism down out of its self-generated clouds. This is the welcome service rendered by Eudora Welty's selection of essays and reviews, The Eye of the Story. It could as justly have been called The Eye of the Storyteller. In criticism as in fiction, Miss Welty's observations are blessed with a dazzling accuracy; her sight penetrates to the point of insight….

Miss Welty's appreciations [essays on her favorite writers] prove that a sympathy with the subject need not blur the critic's discernment, and may in fact focus it on what is central to the achievement under study….

The book reviews are in many cases as keenly perceptive as the longer essays, and in all cases but one they are as positive in their judgments. The exception is Arthur Mizener's biography of Ford Madox Ford, which Miss Welty finds hard to forgive. Characteristically, she identifies the biographer's chief problem as a settled incompatibility with his subject, a bias as damaging to the book as its "coarsegrained prose." (p. 765)

I must admit that I found myself perversely wishing, especially in the book review section, that Miss Welty had allowed herself such astringency more often. It would have provided this part of the collection with a not unwelcome variety of tone and texture. But I gather that her usual policy has been to let bad books sink of their own weight—a practice bespeaking good sense as much as forbearance.

If her essays on writers are celebrations of craftsmanship, of what admired predecessors have done, her essays on writing celebrate craft itself. These theoretical pieces have more than sufficient interest for the general reader; but for the apprentice writer they should be assigned reading. Allowing for some lacunae, they comprise in less than 80 pages a sort of basic writer's manual, everywhere lucid and concise, nowhere oversimplified. Perhaps the most valuable piece is "Place in Fiction," already well-known since its separate appearance. It is impossible after reading it to think any longer in clichés about "regional literature." That this discussion should come from Eudora Welty, whom many now think of as our greatest living regional writer, seems a pleasant irony. In this and in the surrounding essays her theorizing grounds itself in concrete examples sensitively chosen. (pp. 765-66)

If there is any defect to be found in Miss Welty's critical pieces, it would be that, for all their brilliance, they labor in places under a tone of unleavened solemnity. One occasionally notices just enough constraint or wariness of manner to be reminded that for this author such writing is the work of the left hand.

This is a minor objection, and it does not apply in any way to the concluding section of personal memoirs and sketches. Here Miss Welty comes nearest to her own fictive art, in which comedy and deep feeling are so effectively interwoven. The memories of childhood in Jackson, Miss. or of a "pageant of birds" witnessed in a black church in the 1940s, are touching, funny and sad all at once….

In the last piece in the volume, which appeared as preface to a collection of snapshots she took while working for the WPA in Mississippi in the depression, Miss Welty writes of how her camera began to teach her "a storywriter's truth: the thing to wait on, to reach there in time for, is the moment in which people reveal themselves." This led her to determine early on that her aim in art "would be not to point the finger in judgment but to part a curtain, that invisible shadow that falls between people, the veil of indifference to each other's presence, each other's wonder, each other's human plight." I closed this book thinking that in it, as in her fiction, the job had been well done, the moments of revelation, after the patient, necessary waiting, captured in order to be generously shared. (p. 766)