[In the following essay, Burgess attempts to find instances of Welty's artistic self-consciousness in the stories of A Curtain of Green.]

“This could never have been a popular view,” admits Eudora Welty, referring to Willa Cather's lifelong opinion that “[a]rtists … are perhaps greater, and more deserving to be made way for, than other human beings” (Eye 59). While she attempts to understand and to explain why Cather sets apart the artist in value, Welty herself strikes a humbler pose. Whereas Cather's novels introduce numerous semiautobiographical artists, characters of commanding stature, Welty's corpus contains very few portraits of the artist. She does not vaunt her role, even from behind the veil of fiction.

Despite such personal modesty, Welty generously praises the accomplishments and extols the special gifts of other authors—Jane Austen, Henry Green, Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, and Willa Cather, to name but a few. Moreover, Welty's essays on writing prove her to be an artist highly conscious of her craft, respectful of its demands. These critical statements on art and artists lead to fresh readings of Welty's own stories, helping us recognize artistic impulses in characters not explicitly identified as artists. Such insights deepen our understanding of the characters while at the same time suggesting how Welty, as artist, perceives herself. If she is too self-effacing to paint overtly autobiographical portraits of herself as artist, Welty is nevertheless too fascinated by the process of artistic creation to resist treating the subject altogether.

Reading Welty's earliest collection, A Curtain of Green, with eyes alert for references to storytellers reveals numerous characters who do literally tell stories. Leota, the hairdresser in “Petrified Man,” Steve, in “Keela, The Outcast Indian Maiden,” and Sister in “Why I Live at the P.O.,” tell stories at some length. But these unsophisticated characters are not artists in disguise. To find Welty exploring the nature of her role, we must turn to the tantalizing passages that invite consideration as metaphors for the art of storytelling. For example, the girl in “A Memory,” looking at the world through the small frames made by her fingers, suggests the compositional techniques of focus and framing. Mrs. Larkin, in the title story, “cutting, separating, thinning and tying back … the clumps of flowers and bushes and vines” (CS [The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty] 108), parallels in her gardening the task of a writer: editing, organizing, deleting, and controlling her words and sentences and paragraphs. Perhaps most impressively, the jazz improvisations that Powerhouse composes on the piano both accompany and suggest themselves as musical equivalents to the performance of creating a story.

These metaphors for storytelling might fruitfully be used to elucidate the creation of stories. One might discuss such considerations as framing one's story, pruning away irrelevances, improvising a plot line, reiterating an idea, creating variations on a theme, and controlling rhythm and cadence of language. I propose, however, a slight change of focus, shifting emphasis from the craft of writing to the character of the writer. If Welty plants metaphors of story writing in her fiction, doesn't that in some sense cast the corresponding characters in the role of author or artist?¹ The girl in “A Memory” and Mrs. Larkin in “A Curtain of Green” are not artists as Welty is an artist. Yet something suggests that we consider them as such.

I would like to show that excerpts from Welty's essays support the intuition that framing and gardening may be read as metaphors for story writing or artistic creation; that studying characters who do these things as authors or artists offers valuable insights into the stories; and that in seeing where these characters fall short as artists—where the metaphors break down—we can better understand Welty's conception of the artist. Finally, I shall discuss Powerhouse, both as he is in contrast to the girl in “A Memory” and Mrs. Larkin of “A Curtain of Green” and as the single fully realized artist in this collection of stories.²

Welty's essays represent a mature crystalization of the ideas about art that she explored through metaphor in her early fiction and are a good place to seek explication of those metaphors. In “Place in Fiction,” Welty elaborates on her notion of frame: “Place, to the writer at work, is seen in a frame. Not an empty frame, a brimming one. … [The writer] is always seeing double, two pictures at once in his frame, his and the world's, a fact that he constantly comprehends; and he works best in a state of constant and subtle and unfooled reference between the two” (Eye 124-25). The concept of two pictures, the author's and the world's, reappears in subsequent essays; Welty believes in the notion of a duality of perception and of the artist's power to fuse the two impressions into a story which is both reality and illusion: a picture of the author's reality under the “pleasing illusion that it is the world's” (Eye 125).

The girl on the beach, squaring her vision with her hands, looking out at everything through the small frames made by her fingers, shares the artist's impulse to see double, to act as both “observer and dreamer” (CS 76). While she dreams of the moment when her hand brushed against the wrist of her secret love, she watches the outward world: “children running on the sand, the upthrust oak trees growing over the clean pointed roof of the white pavilion, and the slowly changing attitudes of the grown-up people” (CS 151). As long as the outside world does conform to her private reveries, the girl can bask in this mood of artistic absorption, where people cluster in “attitudes” (CS 77), and the picture is tinged with the rosy wash of her ineffable passion. A dirty stain blotches the girl's composition, however, when an ugly family of bathers plant themselves disarmingly near her, and the man “includes” (CS 78) her in his smile. She wishes they were all dead.

We've seen artistic traits in the girl, but when the grotesque bathers lumber into her framed field of vision, the girl's power of fusion fails utterly. She cannot integrate the family into her framed composition. An observation by Welty on failed fiction may tell us why:

The bad novel of today is unhappily like the tale told to the analyst. It is not communication, it is confession. … It is self-absorbed, self-indulgent, too often self-pitying. And it's dull.

Surely what is indicated is for us not to confess ourselves, but to commit ourselves. Only when the best writer on earth is ready and willing … to commit himself to his subject can he truly know it—that is, absorb it, embrace it in his mind, take it to his heart, speak it in plain words.³

Nina Carmichael, in “Moon Lake,” shows precisely this kind of willing commitment when she thinks, “It's only interesting, only worthy, to try for the fiercest secrets. To slip into them all—to change. To change for a moment into Gertrude, into Mrs. Gruenwald, into Twosie—into a boy. To have been an orphan” (CS 361). The girl on the beach, however, is too self-absorbed and self-indulgent to take the bathers to heart; consequently, she perceives only externals and relates only vulgarities like “Fat hung upon [the woman's] upper arms like an arrested earthslide on a hill” (CS 78). Until she commits herself to others, learns to accept the imaginative challenge of scenes incompatible with her dream of the touch, the girl will be able to paint only a single picture, write that one dull novel, see the world through the unsympathetic eyes of a child.

In both “A Memory” and “Moon Lake,” Welty may be tracing her own development as an artist to a childhood passion for observing life. The girls of both stories possess the artistic gift of perception—“a capacity for receiving [life's] impressions” (Eye 128); they share the desire to find secret meanings in ordinary gestures, to wait breathlessly for the moment when people reveal themselves; and they both by nature transform sight into insight, view into vision. Nina, however, is further along in terms of artistic growth than the unnamed girl: she no longer “form[s] a judgment upon every person and every event which came under [her] eye” (CS 75) but yearns instead for her “heart to twist” (CS 346), striving to imagine herself into other's lives. Likewise, the adult narrator of “A Memory” has apparently outgrown the childhood need for absolute conformity to her ideas, as it requires an effort of memory to imagine herself back to those days of terrified withdrawal. In these stories, Welty suggests that artistic sight is not merely given but learned and that it involves an “open mind and … receptive heart” (CS 130), a willingness to include the ugly, the threatening, the painful, the foreign into one's field of vision and into one's heart.

In “A Memory” and “Moon Lake,” Welty's young protagonists experiment with modes of perception; they are not yet impelled to create art, to communicate their visions in concrete form. “A Curtain of Green” concerns composition, not perception. In one sense, Mrs. Larkin can be said to author her own garden. She controls its shape; she determines whether it will sprawl in profuse growth or, as her neighbors would prefer, adhere to the bounds of properiety for an effect of restfulness. In her garden, Mrs. Larkin cuts, separates and ties back her plants, and yet, the narrator tells us,

To a certain extent, she seemed not to seek for order, but to allow an overflowering, as if she consciously ventured forever a little farther, a little deeper, into her life in the garden.

She planted every kind of flower that she could find or order from a catalogue—planted thickly and hastily, without stopping to think.

(CS 108)

The overflowering ground of Mrs. Larkin's garden metaphorically echoes Welty's statement about a story: “The story is a vision; while it's being written, all choices must be its choices, and as these multiply upon one another, their field is growing too. The choices remain inevitable, in fact, through moving in a growing maze of possibilities that the writer, far from being dismayed at his presence on unknown ground … has learned to be grateful for, and excited by” (“How I Write” 245).

The words field, growing, and ground in this essay about story writing underscore Welty's tendency to think of stories as analogous to gardens. In contrast to the writer stirred by possibilities, Mrs. Larkin is neither grateful nor excited. Although she submerges herself daily in a labyrinth of potential choices, she seems to make none. Perhaps she has not decided where she will direct her story. Welty writes that the “multitude and clamor and threat and lure of possibility …” guide the author's story “most delicately” (“How I Write” 245). Mrs. Larkin seems deliberately to allow possibility, in the form of lush vegetation, to multiply and compound; but she does not stop to think or pause to plot. Her garden, then, rather than representing a completed story or even a story in progress, seems to be a metaphor for a story's unconscious origin. Indeed, Welty's account of the workings of a mind on the verge of producing a story closely resembles Mrs. Larkin's garden:

The dark changes of the mind and heart, where all in the world is constantly becoming something … are not mapped and plotted yet … and their being so would make no change in their processes, … or schedule or pigeonhole or allot or substitute or predict the mysteries rushing unsubmissively through them by the minute. … The artist at work functions … without … the least power of prevention or prophecy or even cure.

(“How I Write” 242)

The view of Mrs. Larkin as a writer groping for a story is a helpful one for understanding her plight. An author is one who has the power to manipulate fate: if the author wants a sunny day, she can create one; if she wants a happily-ever-after ending, she can write one. Mrs. Larkin once tried to exercise this power of authorship in real life when she watched the chinaberry tree crash down and kill her husband. She spoke softly, “You can't be hurt” (CS 214). But her husband was killed. Again, she conjured the protective words “You can't be hurt” in an attempt to change the event, rewrite the ending, but without effect. When we see Mrs. Larkin in the garden, tearing away at the foliage with her hoe, it is in furious rage at her powerlessness: it seems that there is no story she can write. The crisis, when she holds the hoe poised high, ready to strike Jamey, seems to be a moment in which she can grab the pen and gain a measure of control over what has been inexorable fate. If she could not author her husband's life, at least she can author Jamey's death.

But, according to Welty, something is drastically wrong with Mrs. Larkin's conception of authorship. Where Mrs. Larkin would create a story to “compensate,” to “punish,” to “protest” (CS 111), the novelist, Welty maintains, “does not argue; he hopes to show, to disclose. … [He] works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive” (Eye 149, 152). An author's mission, Welty seems to say, is not to control but to record, not to exercise power in the interest of changing the world, but for the sole purpose of making “feeling felt” (Eye 105). “Life is strange,” she writes. “Stories hardly make it more so” (Eye 128). And this is so: chinaberry trees do kill husbands. Mrs. Larkin fails as an artist when she wants to reenact “the workings of accident, of life and death” (CS 110). The chinaberry tree's fall would be reenacted; with her hoe, she would fell Jamey: she would act rather than observe. Welty, in contrast, succeeds as an artist because she makes us feel Mrs. Larkin in action, makes us feel “her life in the garden” (CS 108).

Both the girl in “A Memory” and Mrs. Larkin in “A Curtain of Green” can be discussed as artists by virtue of the fact that their gestures—the girl's framing and Mrs. Larkin's gardening—may be interpreted as metaphors for aspects of the creation of art. A twofold advantage accrues from such a reading: recognizing an artistic impulse in the characters provides a context in which to understand their actions, while seeing why they nevertheless fail to be artists—where their actions deviate from the terms set in Welty's essays—deepens our understanding and provides an index by which we can measure and appreciate the real artist. Treading this indirect pathway, that is, via metaphor, to gain access to the nature of the artist seems justified in the case of Welty; for as noted, her characters are mostly ordinary, unsophisticated, inarticulate people, who, although they may tell stories, have little or no interest in art. Powerhouse, a jazz improvisationalist in the story bearing his name, is conspicuously different and therefore attracts and merits our attention. No metaphor need be adduced to identify him as an artist; the whole story joyously proclaims his power.

What inspired Welty to overcome her usual reticence in this singular celebration of an artist? She recalls that she launched this daring experiment in fiction—completely outside her usual orbit—in a single burst of energy after having heard Fats Waller play at a dance in Jackson (Conversations 297). Welty told interviewer Linda Kuehl that in “Powerhouse,” “I tried to write my idea of the life of the traveling artist and performer—not Fats Waller himself, but any artist—in the alien world” (Conversations 94). In this portrait of Powerhouse, a black, male, jazz musician on one level, “any artist” on another, Welty presents in highly animated, nonanalytical measures some ideas about storytelling and storytellers that her later essays state formally.

I have spoken earlier of Welty's vision of an artist as one who fuses two perceptions, his own and that of the rest of the world. She reasserts this belief in another delightful passage, which may help to describe the uncanny force of Powerhouse's narrative:

Some of us grew up with the china night-light, the little lamp whose lighting showed its secret and with that spread enchantment. The outside is painted with a scene, which is one thing; then, when the lamp is lighted, through the porcelain sides a new picture comes out through the old, and they are seen as one. … The lamp alight is the combination of internal and external, glowing at the imagination as one; and so is the good novel.

(Eye 119-20)

And so is the good jazz improvisation, one might add, where soul resonates with rhythm to cast a musical spell. Powerhouse's story projects its blazing internal light—what Welty elsewhere describes as “that initial, spontaneous, overwhelming, driving charge of personal inner feeling” (Eye 125)—through its external narrative shape.

His impromptu story seems to emanate out of the mood created by the sad strains of the “Pagan Love Song.” “You know what happened to me?” Powerhouse asks. When the bass fiddler Valentine hums a response, Powerhouse produces the theme that he and his band members will collaboratively develop as the night lingers on: “I got a telegram my wife is dead” (CS 133). Powerhouse varies the music in order to accentuate the words of his story, playing 4:4 time to the four words of the telegram, “You wife is dead,” and triplets to reinforce his triple, “Tell me, tell me, tell me” (CS 133-34). Soon Scoot, the drummer, and Little Brother, the clarinetist, join Valentine and Powerhouse in propelling the story into existence. Scoot demands to know the name of the person who sent the telegram and thus inspires Powerhouse to invent Uranus Knockwood, assigning a name and eventually a definite shape to the vague sense of fear that eats away inside him when he is away from home. Little Brother insists that Gypsy wouldn't do a thing like jump out the window and kill herself. Paradoxically, Little Brother's skepticism makes at least part of the story more real: by questioning Gypsy's actions, he attests to her identity.

Although they stop playing the waltz to break for intermission, the band continues to play with the story, resurrecting it in the Negrotown World Café. Powerhouse answers Little Brother's solicitous doubts by heaping up more and more external details, as if the more completely a scene can be visualized, the more convincing it will be. A story, of course, need not be literally true; but in order for it to be true emotionally, its imagined world must become the reader's illusion. The circle of black onlookers willingly suspend disbelief, moan with pleasure as Powerhouse's story takes shape. He imagines Gypsy's feelings of loneliness and fear, the footsteps outside her room in the night, her jump—“… Ssssst! Plooey!”—and Uranus Knockwood watching her fall, stepping in the mess, and carrying her away.

Uranus Knockwood, that “no-good pussyfooted crooning creeper” (CS 138-39), may have begun as a projection of Powerhouse's private fears; but finally, as Welty notes of great works in general, he “transcends the personal” (Eye 132). A collective chorus of black voices give him his final shape: “He take our wives when we gone!” / “He come in when we goes out!” … / “You know him.” / “Middle-size man.” / “Wears a hat.” / “That's him” (CS 138). When all are in a wonderful humor, Powerhouse ends the story by exorcising this haunting character, sending an imaginary telegram back to him: “What in the hell you talking about? Don't make any difference: I gotcha” (CS 140).

The crowded dance hall and crammed café of “Powerhouse” contrast with the sparsely peopled beach of “A Memory” and the secluded garden of “A Curtain of Green.” Neither the girl on the beach nor Mrs. Larkin share their predicaments with another soul. The artistic issues that Welty explored in those stories did not include a writer's relationship to readers. In “Powerhouse,” however, she remains acutely aware of the rapport between performer and audience, or, by extension, between writer and reader. Unlike the animated black onlookers in the World Café, the white audience in the dance hall receives Powerhouse's story with mute impassivity, no murmur, no titter, just as earlier in the evening “nobody dances” (CS 258) to his music; only his band members participate in the story's germination. In the face of such unresponsiveness, the story soon fizzles and the band disbands for intermission.

But Powerhouse is unable just to relinquish his story—the teller must tell his tale. The blacks in the café, pressing in “gently and bright-eyed” around him, attend to Powerhouse's story with stirs of delight, “Ya! Ha![s],” sighs, halloos of laughter, moans of pleasure, and other contributions of their own. In that charged atmosphere, Powerhouse's story burgeons into truly gory proportions. Although a writer cannot interact with his readers in the same way that a performer can play off of his audience, the writer, according to Welty, still “assumes at the start an enlightenment in his reader equal to his own, for they are hopefully on the point of taking off together from that base into the rather different world of the imagination” (Eye 152). Writing, like jazz, is a collaborative performance.

As his story demonstrates, Powerhouse has been able to overcome some of the artistic problems that blocked both the girl in “A Memory” and Mrs. Larkin in “A Curtain of Green.” The girl could not find a way to cope with the threatening presence of the beach family. In an artistically fatal reaction she tightly closes her eyes. While the girl strives not to see that which threatens her, Powerhouse makes his fears visible for all to see, even gives them a name. Whereas Mrs. Larkin loses herself in her overflowering garden and seems unable to face its bewildering maze of possibility, Powerhouse manifests the artistic excitement that Welty describes, eager to advance his story by trying first one choice then doubling back to discard, alter, embellish, only to plunge onward in new directions. Furthermore, Mrs. Larkin would use art to strike out against a strange life, while Powerhouse glories in and exploits the very strangeness of it. As Welty affirms, the novelist “believes the insoluble is part of his material too” (Eye 152).

Finally, the real artist can be identified from the metaphoric one by motive. Welty explains that the story writer does “everything out of the energy of some form of love or desire to please” (“Reading and Writing” 54). Even though Powerhouse performs in an “alien world,” he “gives everything,” even for an audience of one (CS 133). In contrast, Mrs. Larkin never gives away a single one of her flowers, nor does she share her thoughts with Jamey; the girl on the beach also hoards her vision of the touch in the most private recesses of her mind. Ultimately, what distinguishes Powerhouse from the girl and Mrs. Larkin is his overbrimming love and his benevolent desire to send everybody—whites as well as blacks—into rapturous “oblivion” (CS 132). Not every writer or artist is necessarily motivated by love for others and a desire to please, but apparently these motives are basic for Welty. Her conviction is best expressed in her own words: “And so finally I think we need to write with love. Not in self-defense, not in hate, not in the mood of instruction, not in rebuttal, in any kind of militance, or in apology, but with love” (Eye 156).

Notes

1. I shall use the terms author and artist interchangeably. Although Welty's medium is writing, I believe her insights apply to other art forms as well.

2. Both Porter (xi-xxiii) and Carson recognize an autobiographical element in “A Memory” and discuss the girl as an artist. Carson makes passing mention of Mrs. Larkin as kin to “Hawthorne's and Poe's dark romancers” (421) and interprets Powerhouse as “the prototype for the artist-visionaries throughout Welty's fiction,” reconciling “the dialectic of the primitive and the civilized in man” (427). Carson bases his analysis on a Coleridgean concept of the artist, whereas I find correspondences between Welty's fiction and her own essays on writing.

3. Welty deleted this passage, published in “Place in Fiction” in the January 1956 South Atlantic Quarterly, when she prepared the essay for republication in The Eye of the Story. She may have felt that it had become dated; perhaps she regretted its tone of censure.