[In the following essay, Hoffman explains Welty's use of location in her writing.]

In terms of career, Eudora Welty belongs to the middle generation of modern Southern writers. Her first publication was a short story of amazing effectiveness, “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” which appeared in a Detroit little magazine, Manuscript, for June, 1936.¹ From 1936 through 1955 there was a burst of activity, with seven books, four novels, and three collections of stories published. Since 1955, with the exception of fiction and nonfiction pieces in magazines, she has slowed down considerably.

Since Miss Welty has spent much of her creative talent on places in Mississippi, the subject of place has been very important to her. Not that she is a regionalist, or a local-colorist, but that the qualities of setting are pre-eminently influential on her work. In an essay of 1956 she testifies to its role.² The novel from the start, she says

has been bound up in the local, the “real,” the present, the ordinary day-to-day of human experience. Where the imagination comes in is in directing the use of all this … Fiction is properly at work on the here and now, or the past made here and now; for in novels we have to be there. Fiction provides the ideal texture through which the feeling and meaning that permeate our own personal, present lives will best show through.”

(p. 58)

A few pages later she offers an arresting image, to facilitate our sense of place.³ Some of her family grew up with a 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 all 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. Seeing that these inner and outer surfaces do lie so close together and so implicit in each other, the wonder is that human life so often separates them, or appears to, and it takes a good novel to put them back together.

(p. 60)

The number of insights afforded here and elsewhere in her critical writing gives one a real sense of Miss Welty's sensitivity to her craft and of her conviction regarding its role as a means of “rescuing” and ordering life. The relation of appearance to actuality is indispensable: “Yet somehow, the world of appearance has got to seem actuality.” Place (scenes, people in scenes, habits, décor, atmosphere) “being brought to life in the round before the reader's eye is the readiest and gentlest and most honest and natural way this can be brought about, I think; every instinct advises it.” (p. 61) Elsewhere, she comes up with a definition of place in fiction as “the named, identified, concrete, exact and exacting, and therefore credible, gathering-spot of all that has been felt, is about to be experienced, in the novel's progress.” (p. 62)⁴ When it comes down to it, it is the explicit things that come through on the pages of a novel, that is, the physical texture. (p. 67)

These observations, brilliant as they are, set off a train of queries: does Miss Welty communicate “physical texture?” Doesn't she prefer the grotesquely fanciful to the actual? Diana Trilling, reviewing The Wide Net, and Other Stories (1943) compared the writing to the surrealistic art of Salvador Dali, with no intention of flattering either.⁵ It is true that Miss Welty often chooses the fantastic elements of her scene, but they are no less real for having been thus chosen. Speaking about an old Southern community, she once said:

Indians, Mike Fink, the flatboatmen, Burr, and Blennerhassett, John James Audubon, the bandits of the Trace, planters and preachers—the horse fairs, the great fires—the battles of war, the arrivals of foreign ships, and the coming of floods: could not all these things still more with their stature enter into the mind here, and their beauty still work upon the heart? Perhaps it is the sense of place that gives us the belief that passionate things, in some essence, endure. Whatever is significant and whatever is tragic live as long as the place does, though they are unseen, and the new life will be built upon these things—regardless of commerce and the way of rivers and roads, and other vagaries.”⁶

Her belief in the viability and continuity of place, of both objects and persons, gives her a philosophical sense of place. Certain places are known for being inhabited by “celebrities,” who have left their marks upon them; the imagination, stirred by their extraordinary qualities, brings them back out of the past and reinstates them, thus repeating their lines, freshening them, and even in a sense bestowing immortality upon them. These observations apply to one of her novels, The Robber Bridegroom (1942), and to a few of her stories. But generally the places and people are quite commonplace. Griffith has described the geographical scope of them:

For the most part, Miss Welty is content to confine herself to that special part of the South she has known so intimately in her own life: a section that includes not only the Jackson area, where her house has always been, but also the rich Yazoo Delta cotton country to the northwest and north (Delta Wedding), the red clay farms and hill country in the northeast and east (“A Piece of News” and “The Hitch-Hikers”), the pinelands and truck farms in the southeast (“The Whistle”), the New Orleans area to the south (“The Purple Hat,” and “No Place for You, My Love”), and the Mississippi River bottoms to the west (“At the Landing”).⁷

In short, the range of place is fairly limited. The principal cities are Jackson, Natchez, and Vicksburg, Mississippi; there are others: in the volume called The Bride of Innisfallen (1955), Miss Welty moves out into the “wide world” (Ireland, Naples, even into classical mythology, in “Circe”), not especially to her advantage. The stories are not necessarily improved for the fact of their expansion of setting. Similarly, one part of The Golden Apples (1949) is set in San Francisco, but the fact of San Francisco is the least of its virtues. She is best, I suspect I am saying, when she works with a setting and an atmosphere with which she is most intimately acquainted. Robert Daniel has pinpointed that area for us:

by far the greater and the more distinguished part of [her fiction] has found its settings in the state of Mississippi. Sometimes it treats of the middle-class world of beauty-parlors and card-parties that presumably is Jackson; sometimes of villages in the Delta, with their storekeepers and salesmen and ill-to-do farmers, white and black; sometimes of decayed mansions in Natchez, and Vicksburg. And beyond all these, in her stories, lies the encompassing countryside of fields and woods and rivers, or even the primeval wilderness, when she writes of the region as it was a century and more ago.⁸

The actualities are there; Miss Welty has a clear idea of what she wants to do with them, of what she wants them to do for us. “Like a good many writers,” she says in still another essay, “I am myself touched off by place. The place where I am and the place I know, and other places that familiarity with and love for my own make strange and lovely and enlightening to look into, are what set me to writing my stories.”⁹ Much more can be made of what amounts to both a critical theory and a theory of place and imagination, but perhaps the best way of testing what she says about her work is in the results of it. That work is only incidentally “grotesque”; it is grotesque only in the sense in which her subject is. She has an accommodating and a marvelously open imagination, so that both persons and things come through it endowed and charmed and identified as almost no other persons have ever been. To call these people weird, or unreal, or vague, is to testify to several misreadings of them.

It is true, as Robert Penn Warren says, that “almost all of the stories deal with people who, in one way or another, are cut off, alienated, isolated from the world.”¹⁰ It is also true that to concentrate upon this fact leads to a great distortion; and to say, with Diana Trilling, that her style has exceeded the legitimate uses to which it might be put,¹¹ is to go beyond the point of giving Miss Welty a chance. There are many eccentricities in her people, many oddities and vulgarities, which are given the fullest benefit of her style and talent. The peculiarities of character grow as a means of her style, which acts upon them in a manner that both clarifies the atmosphere about them and highlights those characteristics that need to be emphasized for full value. She is committed to her characters, and has promised them loving care, and sometimes sympathy, but no sentimentality. There is also much humor and much irony here, but they are not superimposed upon her people. Her people possess these qualities, or deserve to have them.

Perhaps the most obvious example is “Why I Live at the P.O.,” a famous comic story from A Curtain of Green.¹² Here the narrator is neurotic as characters frequently are in Miss Welty's stories, but she sees to it that the character is taken at face value, and not for some museum specimen. The narrator explains why she has left home. Her sister, Stella-Rondo, was set against her; she'd run off with “This photographer with the popeyes she said she trusted.” (Curtain [A Curtain of Green], p. 90) A fierce competition results between the two sisters for the affection and approval of the family; we are, of course, permitted only the narrator's view of things, but that will serve. Stella-Rondo succeeds in setting the rest of the family against her; so, “at 6:30 a. m. the next morning,” Uncle Rondo “threw a whole five-cent package of some unsold one-inch firecrackers from the store as hard as he could into my bedroom and they every one went off. Not one bad one in the string. Anybody else, there'd be one that wouldn't go off.” (Curtain, p. 98) Right then, she decided “I'd go straight down to the P. O.” (p. 99) So, here she is, at the P. O. in China Grove. Of course there's not much mail, because “My family are naturally the main people in China Grove, and if they prefer to vanish from the face of the earth, for all the mail they get or the mail they write, why I'm not going to open my mouth.” (Curtain, p. 104)

“Petrified Man” is another classic of folk humor and vulgarity. It is a collection of conversational gems gleaned from a group of women in a beauty parlor. The talk skirts around banalities and near-insults, and it finally settles upon the figure of the petrified man from the carnival, the “freak show.” The three women chiefly involved in the discussion have long since gone past the point of loving their husbands, so the petrified man is an object of more than ordinary interest to the reader:

“they got this man, this petrified man, that ever'thing ever since he was nine years old, when it goes through his digestion, see, somehow Mrs. Pike says it goes to his joints and has been turning to stone.”

(Curtain [A Curtain of Green], pp. 40-41)

Subsequently, Mrs. Pike identifies the man as a man from the town, wanted for a number of rapes in California. She could have collected a $500 reward and finally is successful in getting it; but the “beautician,” Leota, is furious to discover that she's used one of her magazines (she, Leota, should have had the reward, etc.) The humor and the horror are neatly blended; we are never really horrified by these people, yet they are ghastly and unpleasant and beyond hope.

By contrast, Clytie Farr of “Clytie” is almost entirely pathetic.¹³ Clytie is from “The old big house,” in the town of Farr's Gin, and she appears to be quickly losing her wits. The house is itself a ruin, in a state of semi-repose. As Clytie enters the hall, she finds that “it was very dark and bare.”

The only light was falling on the white sheet which covered the solitary piece of furniture, an organ. The red curtains over the parlor door, held back by ivory hands, were still as tree trunks in the airless house.

In ironic contrast is the diamond cornucopia which with her “wrinkled, unresting fingers” she holds; she always wears it “in the bosom of the long black dress.” (Curtain, p. 157)

Clytie is obviously slowly dying (or going mad) from a lack of human love. She reacts sensitively to human faces, and looks at them searchingly, and with longing, hoping some day to find the face which will reconcile her to the world. But as for her family, it was not necessary to see their faces: their faces come between her face and another; “they prevented her search from being successful.” It is the family that is killing her, driving her mad.

It was their faces which had come pushing in between, long ago, to hide some face that had looked back at her. And now it was hard to remember the way it looked, or the time she had seen it first.

(Curtain, p. 163)

She makes hesitant, tender, halting gestures toward human love. When Mr. Bobo, the barber who has come to shave her father, arrives, she reaches out to touch his face:

… she put out her hand and with breath-taking gentleness touched the side of his face.

For an instant afterward, she stood looking at him inquiringly, and he stood like a statue, like the statue of Hermes.

Then both of them uttered a despairing cry. Mr. Bobo turned and fled, waving his razor around in a circle, down the stairs and out the front door; and Clytie, pale as a ghost, stumbled against the railing.

(Curtain, pp. 169-70)

She is ultimately going to go the whole way toward madness. Her narcissism is of a special variety, the result not of love of self, but of fear of others. She sees her own face in the water of the rain barrel, “a wavering, inscrutable face.”

Clytie did the only thing she could think of to do. She bent her angular body further, and thrust her head into the barrel, under the water, through its glittering surface into the kind, featureless depth, and held it there.

When the old Negro servant finds her, “she had fallen forward into the barrel, with her poor ladylike black-stockinged legs up-ended and hung apart like a pair of tongs.” (Curtain, p. 171)

These three stories are a fair demonstration of what Miss Welty was able to do in this amazing first volume. Perhaps one final look should give us—in a limited way, yet impressively—the very first story she published. The atmosphere of “Death of a Traveling Salesman”¹⁴ comes close to being that of a fantasy, a dream-vision at the moment of death. As Mark Schorer has said, it is doubtful that the described action—except for the death itself—has actually taken place.¹⁵ The salesman, R. J. Bowman, just recovered (or perhaps not?) from influenza, loses his way and wanders off into a “cowpath” and into the unknown. He has known hundreds of hotel rooms, but is now suddenly translated into an entirely different world. The car itself sinks into “a tangle of immense grapevines as thick as his arm, which caught it and held it, rocked it like a grotesque child in a dark cradle, and then, as he watched, concerned somehow that he was not still inside it, released it gently to the ground.” (Curtain, p. 234)

Where am I? he asks himself. Everything has suddenly become passing strange, and his personality seems also to have changed; he wants, somehow to accept, to rest, just to be. At the door of the only house in sight, he finds a woman who is obviously with child. Inside the house, the darkness “touched him like a professional hand, the doctor's.” (Curtain, p. 237) Images of expectant life and expectant death combine here. Bowman is not sure which one is promised here, or if both are. “He felt he was in a mysterious, quiet, cool danger.” (pp. 237-38) But he chooses to be elated, overjoyed by a sense of life, a condition so different from the one he'd suffered most of his own life. The puzzle seems finally to be solved: he is in the presence of a fruitful marriage. Then, after much elation over his discovery, he takes his bags and leaves the cabin. He must get back to where he was before. But his heart attacks him once again; it begins “to give off tremendous explosions like a rifle, bang bang bang.” (Curtain, p. 249) The final moment of life is just embarrassing; he “covered his heart with both hands to keep anyone from hearing the noise it made. But nobody heard it.” (Curtain, p. 250)

Setting aside certain effects (the gift of fire, the Confederate coat worn by Bowman's host, the name Sonny) as just a little obviously cute and too suggestive of an “Agrarian” design, “Death” is an amazing achievement. Ruth Vande Kieft, author of the best book so far published on Miss Welty, describes the story a bit too simply, though the materials for a simple interpretation do certainly exist.¹⁶ The words “rooted” and “rootless” are almost of the essence, as we reflect upon Bowman's past life on the road, and in cheap hotels and restaurants. Certainly the story's fourth paragraph testifies to the need for simple contrasts: “He had gradually put up at better hotels, in the bigger towns, but weren't they all, eternally, stuffy in summer and drafty in winter? Women? He could only remember little rooms within little rooms, like a nest of Chinese paper boxes, and if he thought of one woman he saw the worn loneliness that the furniture of that room seemed built of.” (Curtain, p. 232) …

The Golden Apples is a different kind of book.¹⁷ Its setting is scarcely larger, but it is more varied; and there are more, and more widely varied, people. The scene is the town of Morgana, Mississippi. In fact, most critics refuse to call The Golden Apples a novel, and it is a collection of stories in a sense; but the stories are vitally interrelated. If anything, Miss Welty's skill and compassion unite here more successfully than anywhere else in her work. To say that this is her best work is not a popular judgment, but I should want to place The Golden Apples very high indeed.¹⁸ There has been much to do about Miss Welty's use of mythological figures, and it is true that she has always been interested in classical overtures; but the life in Morgana can stand by itself, without the assistance of parallels.¹⁹

Miss Vande Kieft has cited Yeats's poem, “The Song of the Wandering Aengus,” as the primary source; its last line contains Miss Welty's title:

And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.(20)

To take these parallels too seriously (and Miss Vande Kieft does not) is to put aside Miss Welty's genuine concern for place and persons. King MacLain, who comes close to being one of two or three leading characters, is nevertheless treated shrewdly and with appropriate ironies. Generally, the disposition toward Morgana persons is about what they deserve; they do not transcend themselves, though occasionally they are victimized by ironic misfortunes. Of the group, perhaps Miss Eckhart, spinster music teacher, is the most accursed. Forced to care for an ailing mother and deprived of romance by the drowning of her one gentleman friend, she cannot answer to any ambitions or romantic impulses; so she relies upon the one pupil she has who shows a real talent, Virgie Rainey. She's the pride and joy, and the sustaining life. Miss Welty's description of the “June Recital” is most affecting as well as devastating: “The night of the recital was always clear and hot: everyone came. The prospective audience turned out in full oppression.” (Apples [The Golden Apples], p. 62)

Eventually, Virgie goes into a movie palace to play the piano and loses all her talent and all her interest in serious music. A series of disasters finds Miss Eckhart in the county poor farm, from which point she essays revenge upon the house, upon the metronome (symbol and sign of her students' mediocrity), and upon her life generally. She sets fire to the old house, in the hope that it will be destroyed, but it is rescued by King MacLain and two other townspeople.

Old man Moody and Mr. Bowles brought the old woman between them out on the porch of the vacant house. She was quiet now, with the scorched black cloth covering her head; she herself held it on with both hands

(Apples [The Golden Apples], p. 76)

The Golden Apples turns to another young hero, Loch Morrison, who in “Moon Lake” (pp. 99-138) performs a rescue at a summer camp. The episode is masterfully told; Loch is obliged to plunge into a muddy and sticky lake bottom. All of his instincts turn him away from girls, whom he scorns, but here he must seriously attend to at least one of them. Two subsequent episodes concern the twin sons of King and Snowdie MacLain, Randall and Eugene. “Music from Spain” has its setting in San Francisco.²¹ It is a strange story, of Eugene's admiration for a Spanish guitarist and of his encounter with him the day after his recital. He rescues the Spaniard from a near encounter with an automobile, and the two spend the day together, though neither speaks the other's language. Apparently Eugene returns to Morgana, and dies shortly thereafter. The last episode, “The Wanderers” (pp. 203-44), serves as a form of epilogue, summing up the lives of several Morgana people, commenting upon life in general. The key event is, appropriately, a funeral, in which Virgie Rainey's mother is buried. In death, she is decked out in the black satin dress, “the dress in which diminished, pea-sized moth-balls had shone and rolled like crystals all Virgie's life, in waiting, taken out twice, and now spread out in full triangle. Her head was in the center of the bolster, the widow's place in which she herself laid it. Miss Snowdie had rouged her cheeks.” (Apples, p. 213)

Mrs. Katie Rainey, suitably the person who looks on, and listens, as distinguished from the active King MacLain and Loch Morrison,²² dies and thus provides Morgana with the only interesting social affair she has been able to give it. The funeral is a lively affair, and is enjoyed by all. It is, in effect, a reunion of the clan, from King MacLain (old now, and a tribal leader) to the smallest. Persons came, as they will come, from distant places as from near. Virgie “walked and ran looking about her in a kind of glory, by the back way.”

Virgie never saw it differently, never doubted that all the opposites on earth were close together, love close to hate, living to dying; but of them all, hope and despair were the closest blood—unrecognizable one from the other sometimes, making moments double upon themselves, and in the doubling double again, amending but never taking back.

(Apples, p. 234)

Notes

1. Manuscript, 3 (June, 1936), 21-29. It was collected in A Curtain of Green (New York: Doubleday Doran, 1941), pp. 231-50.

2. “Place in Fiction,” Southern Atlantic Quarterly, 55 (January, 1956), 57-72. It was subsequently published as a pamphlet by Harcourt Brace, 1957, in 300 copies.

3. The image is also used in Delta Wedding (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1946), p. 46.

4. See above, chap. 1, my discussion of place and the modern Southern novel.

5. “Fiction in Review,” Nation, 157 (October 2, 1943), 386-87. Cited by Albert J. Griffith, in Eudora Welty's Fiction, an unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas, 1959, pp. 109-10.

6. “Some Notes on River Country,” Harper's Bazaar, 2786 (February, 1944), 156. Quoted by Griffith in op. cit., p. 33.

7. Ibid., p. 18. The Natchez Trace, featured in The Robber Bridegroom, appears also in several of the stories.

8. Robert Daniel, “The World of Eudora Welty,” in Southern Renascence: The Literature of the Modern South, edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr. and Robert J. Jacobs (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953), p. 306. Originally published in the Hopkins Review, 6 (Winter, 1953) 49-58.

9. “How I Write,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 31 (Spring, 1955), 242. See also Short Stories (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949).

10. “The Love and Separateness in Eudora Welty,” in Selected Essays (New York: Random House, 1958), p. 160. This essay originally appeared in the Kenyon Review 6 (Spring, 1944), 246-69. It concerns the two early collections of short stories, A Curtain of Green and The Wide Net, and Other Stories.

11. See Warren, loc. cit.

12. First published in the Atlantic Monthly, 167 (April, 1941), 443-50.

13. “Clytie,” in A Curtain of Green, pp. 155-71. Originally in Southern Review, 7 (Summer, 1941), 52-64.

14. In A Curtain of Green, pp. 231-69; originally published in Manuscript, 3 (June, 1936), 21-29.

15. See The Story: A Critical Anthology (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1950), p. 355.

16. Ruth Vande Kieft, Eudora Welty (New York: Twayne, 1962), pp. 38-39.

17. The Golden Apples (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949).

18. Miss Vande Kieft calls it “the most complex and encompassing of Miss Welty's works …” op. cit., p. 111. Her study of Apples (pp. 111-48) is the best so far published.

19. For the most elaborate discussions of Miss Welty's use of parallels, see H. C. Morris, “Zeus and the Golden Apples: Eudora Welty,” Perspective, 5 (Autumn, 1952), 190-99; and “Eudora Welty's Use of Mythology,” Shenandoah, 6 (Spring, 1955), 34-40.

20. See Ruth Vande Kieft, op. cit., pp. 111-12.

21. It was separately printed by Miss Welty: Greenville, Mississippi, The Levee Press, 1948.

22. See Ruth Vande Kieft, op. cit. pp. 122 ff., concerning the “two sets of characters” in Apples, the “wanderers” and those who “serve as their foils.”