[In the following essay, Vande Kieft analyzes Welty's representation of human inner life in fiction.]

I

One cannot undertake to write about the stories of Eudora Welty without feelings of trepidation and of hope because she has provided her readers and critics both with ominous warnings and with delightful allurements. It is as if the welcome mat were clearly out before her door while the sign on the gate post read “Keep Out,” or as if she had given us a map to reach her but had not promised it wouldn't turn out to be the sketch of a labyrinth in which we would get hopelessly lost. The allurements are chiefly in the stories themselves. The warnings have been posted (quite unofficially) in a small volume on Short Stories (1950)¹ and in the essay called “How I Write” (1955). Following are some of the warnings:

I have been baffled by analysis and criticism of some of my stories. When I see these analyses—most usually, “reduced to elements”—sometimes I think, “This is none of me”. … Not that I am too proud to like being reduced, especially—but that I could not remember starting with those elements—with anything that I could so label.

Beauty may be missed or forgotten sometimes by the analyzers because it is not a means, not a way of getting the story along, or furthering a thing in the world.

It's hard for me to think that a writer's stories are a unified whole in any respect except perhaps their lyrical quality.

The analyst, should the story come under his eye, may miss this gentle shock and this pleasure too, for he's picked up the story at once by its heels (as if it had swallowed a button) and is examining the writing as his own process in reverse, as though a story (or any system of feeling) could be more accessible to understanding for being upside down. “Sweet Analytics, 'tis thou hast ravish'd me!”

It's a mistake to think you can stalk back a story by analysis's footprints and even dream that's the original coming through the woods. Besides the difference in the direction of the two, there's the difference in speeds, when one has fury; but the main difference is in world-surround. One surround is a vision and the other is a pattern for good visions (which—who knows!—fashion may have tweaked a little) or the nicest, carefullest black-and-white tracing that a breath of life would do for.²

We have to admit some pertinence to these complaints and warnings when we read some of the criticism of Miss Welty's fiction. But from another point of view, we can see in her warnings the traditional complaints of the artist against the critic: the artist's denial of coherent or logical “patterns” in his work, the wariness of attempts at “placing” him (which inevitably look like pigeon-holing), and the fear that analysis will not often produce understanding and may destroy delight. While the critic admits, however, that he may be doing some injustice to the uniqueness of any single story in the process of showing the relationships among several, he recognizes that the relationships are unmistakably there, that one story does often illuminate another, that patterns emerge in the work of any good writer. The critic can also protest finally, and joyfully, that no amount of analysis can destroy the irreducible meaning and beauty of any real work of art, and (because of his faith that knowledge and understanding increase delight) that his analysis won't have “killed” the story for any reader.

Miss Welty, doubtless like any other artist, writes “in the ultimate hope of communication.” This is the promise, the hope, the allurement. “Always in the back of our heads and in our hearts,” she says in Short Stories, “are such hopes, and attendant fears that we may fail—we do everything out of the energy of some form of love or desire to please.” But the peculiar, apparently perverse habit of the best artists, she says, is to be obstructionists, and in this they give the illusion of “hold[ing] back their own best interests.” This is because “beauty is not a blatant or promiscuous or obvious quality—indeed at her finest she is somehow associated with obstruction—with reticence of a number of kinds.”

Miss Welty knows she is mysterious and “obstructionist,” but she is so because there is no other way for her to communicate what she must. She asks for a reader of “willing imagination” who will not insist on “a perfect Christmas tree of symmetry, branch, and ornament, with a star at the top for neatness,” but will find “the branchings not what he's expecting, … not at all to the letter of the promise—rather to a degree (and to a degree of pleasure) mysterious.” In explaining one of her own stories in “How I Write,” she says, “Above all I had no wish to sound mystical, but I did expect to sound mysterious now and then, if I could: this was a circumstantial, realistic story in which the reality was mystery.”

Miss Welty's stories are largely concerned with the mysteries of the inner life. She explains that to her the interior world is “endlessly new, mysterious, and alluring”; and “relationship is a pervading and changing mystery; it is not words that make it so in life, but words have to make it so in a story. Brutal or lovely, the mystery waits for people wherever they go, whatever extreme they run to.” The term “mystery” has here to do with the enigma of man's being—his relation to the universe; what is secret, concealed, inviolable in any human being, resulting in distance or separation between human beings; the puzzles and difficulties we have about our own feelings, our meaning and our identity. Miss Welty's audacity is to probe these mysteries in the imaginative forms of her fiction. The critic's task is to try to follow her bold pursuit analytically and discursively, to state what the mysteries are, and to show how she tries to communicate them.

II

We begin with the story called “A Memory,” which might be recognized as more or less autobiographical even if Katherine Anne Porter (in her sympathetic introduction to A Curtain of Green) had not suggested it first, because here in seminal form are some of the central mysteries which have occupied Eudora Welty as a mature writer. It is the nature of the child lying on the beach which suggests what is to come, her preoccupation and her discoveries. An incipient artist, the child has a passion for form, order, control, and a burning need to identify, categorize, and make judgments on whatever comes within her vision. She does this by making small frames with her fingers, which is her way of imposing or projecting order on a reality which she has already guessed but not admitted to be a terrifying chaos. She is convinced that reality is hidden and that to discover it requires perpetual vigilance, a patient and tireless scrutiny of the elusive gesture which will communicate a secret that may never be completely revealed.

Paralleled with this “intensity” is another equal intensity: that of her love for a small blond boy, a schoolmate about whom she knows nothing, to whom she has expressed nothing, but whom she holds fiercely within the protective focus of her love—a protection of him and of herself and her expectations which is enforced by the dreary regularity of school routine. But one day the boy suddenly has a nosebleed, a shock “unforeseen, but at the same time dreaded,” and “recognized.” It is the moment when she receives her first clear revelation of mortality, when she perceives the chaos that threatens all her carefully ordered universe, and the vulnerability of her loved one; she recognizes the sudden violence, the horror of reality, against which she is helpless. This event makes her even more fiercely anxious about the boy, for she “felt a mystery deeper than danger which hung about him.”

This event is also a foreboding of the experience the girl has on the beach when a family-group of vulgar bathers comes crashing into the world of her dream. Here is wildness, chaos, abandonment of every description, a total loss of dignity, privateness, and identity. There is destruction of form in the way the bathers protrude from their costumes, in the “leglike confusion” of their sprawled postures, in their pudgy, flabby figures; there is terrifying violence in their abuse of each other, their pinches and kicks and “idiotic sounds,” their hurdling leaps, the “thud and the fat impact of all their ugly bodies upon one another.” There is a hint of a final threat to human existence itself when the man begins to pile sand on the woman's legs, which “lay prone one on the other like shadowed bulwarks, uneven and deserted,” until there is a “teasing threat of oblivion.” The girl finally feels “a peak of horror” when the woman turns out her bathing suit “so that the lumps of mashed and folded sand came emptying out … as though her breasts themselves had turned to sand, as though they were of no importance at all and she did not care.” The girl has a premonition that without form—the kind she has been imposing on reality by her device of framing things like a picture—there is for human beings no dignity nor identity, that beyond the chaos of matter lies oblivion, total meaninglessness. This is the vision of reality which must be squared to the dream; and so the girl must now watch the boy, still vulnerable, “solitary and unprotected,” with the hour on the beach accompanying her recovered dream and added to her love.

This is one of the sorrowful or “brutal” mysteries which Miss Welty presents in her stories. The “joyful” mystery is, of course, the careful, tender, ravishing love, the exquisite joy, and the dream. Chaotic reality does not displace the dream; though reality proves to be as terrifying as the child might have guessed, the dream cannot be totally destroyed.

The same mystery is explored in “A Curtain of Green,” for the brooding, fearful, scarcely conscious anticipation of the girl in “A Memory” is the anguished knowledge of the bereaved young widow, Mrs. Larkin. In this story we have a similar careful, protective, absolute love, to which comes the violent affront of the most freakish and arbitrary kind of accident: a chinaberry tree simply falls on and kills Mrs. Larkin's husband. When she sees the accident, she assumes instinctively that the power of her love can save him: she orders softly, “You can't be hurt,” as though, like God, she can bring order out of chaos. “She had waited there on the porch for a time afterward, not moving at all—in a sort of recollection-as if to reach under and bring out from obliteration her protective words and to try them once again … so as to change the whole happening. It was accident that was incredible, when her love for her husband was keeping him safe.” Human love is finally powerless against chaos.

Now the young widow must penetrate deeply the meaning of this reality, which is simply to ask the question raised by any devastating accident: why did it happen? She plunges herself into the wild greenness out of which death fell: nature unpruned, uncultivated, formless in its fecundity. In the process of plunging, she hopes to discover the essential meaning of nature; the knowledge itself will give her a kind of power over it, even though paradoxically she must abandon herself to it, become a part of it, lose her identity in it, as she does with her hair streaming and tangled, her uncertain wanderings, her submersion in the “thick, irregular, sloping beds of plants.” She must look to see what is concealed behind that curtain of green.

Into the focus of her attention comes Jamey, the Negro gardener, and once again she tries to seize control of destiny and effect her will, to give some meaning to the confusion and disorder of reality. If her love cannot preserve life, at least her fury and vengeance can bring death. Jamey's mindless serenity, his elusive self-possession, his quiet, inaccessible apartness (which signifies his calm acceptance of life) goad her into wonder and fury. For a moment she experiences a terrible lust for destruction. “Such a head she could strike off, intentionally, so deeply did she know, from the effect of a man's danger and death, its cause in oblivion; and so helpless was she, too helpless to defy the working of accident, of life and death, of unaccountability. … Life and death, she thought, gripping the heavy hoe, life and death, which now meant nothing to her but which she was compelled continually to wield with both her hands, ceaselessly asking, Was it not possible to compensate? to punish? to protest?” Out of oblivion—without malice or motive—she can cause a death, as her husband's death has come, motiveless, out of oblivion; yet her destructive action would also be meaningless because it is not compensation for her husband's death: it is even too pointless to be a protest; what would the protest be against? Life and death are arbitrarily given and taken, pointlessly interchangeable—how then can her action, or any human action, have meaning? And yet, how can a human being not protest?

No rational answer comes to Mrs. Larkin. There is only release, touched off by the sudden fall of a retarded rain: thus it is a chance of nature which saves her from committing a meaningless murder, just as it is a chance of nature which kills her husband. The rain seems to bring out the quiet and lovely essences, the inner shapes of things in all the profusion of that green place, for “everything appeared to gleam unreflecting from within itself in its quiet arcade of identity.” Mrs. Larkin feels the rush of love (“tenderness tore and spun through her sagging body”); she thinks senselessly, “it has come” (the rain and the release). She drops the hoe, and sinks down among the plants in a half-sleep, half-faint, which is resignation; a blissful surrender to the mystery of nature, to the inevitable, because “against that which is inexhaustible, there was no defense.” But her sleep has the look of death: there is the suggestion that only by sinking herself into final oblivion will she ever be released from her burning compulsion to wrest meanings from nature, to impose order on chaos, to recover her loved one.

These dark mysteries are further explored in a story called “Flowers for Marjorie.” The story takes place during the Depression, and Howard and Marjorie, a poor young Mississippi couple, have gone to New York City to find work. Marjorie is pregnant, and Howard has been engaged in a humiliating and fruitless search for a job. He has now reached a point of despair in which he imagines that nothing can ever happen to break the inevitability of the pattern of being without work, without food, without hope. In his view there is no slight possibility of change or chance, a stroke of good luck; time, like their cheap alarm clock, ticks on with a bland, maddening pointlessness, because for Howard time has stopped.

But Marjorie, a warm feminine girl with soft cut hair, quietly and literally embodies an assumption of the significance of time, change, and progression. She has the matter-of-fact, yet deeply mystical knowledge that her rounding body holds a new life. She looks forward to a birth, and to Howard she seems in a “world of sureness and fruitfulness and comfort, grown forever apart, safe and hopeful in pregnancy”—the one flagrant exception to the fixed pattern of hopeless and pointless repetition. As if to tease Howard with the knowledge of her enviable exemption from despair, she has by chance found a bright yellow pansy which she places in the buttonhole of her old sky-blue coat and looks at proudly—“as though she had displayed some power of the spirit.” In her human hope and submission, her gentle and loving reproaches against Howard's anxiety, she seems to him almost “faithless and strange, allied to the other forces.” He finally shouts at her, out of his deep love turned into terrible despair, “just because you can't go around forever with a baby inside your belly, and it will really happen that the baby is born—that doesn't mean everything else is going to happen and change! … You may not know it, but you're the only thing left in the world that hasn't stopped!”

Then in a moment of wild objection to the affront of time and change in her whole being, of her content, security, and easiness, he seizes a butcher knife and stabs her quickly and without violence—so quickly that the girl stays poised in a perfect balance in her seat at the window, one arm propped on the sill and hair blowing forward in the wind; the relative stillness and composure of her life now become the absolute, ironic stillness of death. Howard watches her lap like a bowl slowly filling with blood. Then he hears the clock ticking loudly, and throws it out the window. By his action he has taken a destructive hold of time and change, correcting the only apparent flaw in his desperate logic of futility.

The events which follow can only be described as monstrous. Howard, half-numb and hysterical, flings himself on the town, only to be confronted with a series of crazily ironic pieces of good luck. It is as though chance had seized him by the throat and said, “You suppose nothing can happen to change the pattern, and you try to seize control. Oh, the universe is full of surprises—only see what can happen!”—and then throttled him and taken a gleeful revenge by playing a series of ingenious tricks on him. What a surprise when the small bright world of the glass-ball paperweight is deluged in a fury of snow, and when a man unaccountably drops a dime in his hand! What a surprise when the slot machine at the bar responds to his last nickel by disgorging itself so profusely that one of the men says, “Fella, you ought not to let all hell loose that way” (for the crazy logic of hell has been let loose since Howard has committed the murder)! And what a finally horrifying surprise when he walks through a turnstile to an arcade and becomes “the ten millionth person to enter Radio City,” covered with all of the honor and glory of arbitrarily conferred distinction and publicity (“What is your occupation?” “Are you married?”—as photo-lights flash) and given a huge key to the city and an armful of bright red roses!

He flees in terror back to the flat. There in the little fourthstory room, full of the deep waves of fragrance from the roses, he “knew for a fact that everything had stopped. It was just as he had feared, just as he had dreamed. He had had a dream to come true.” Here he is with his gift of flowers for his lovely flower-loving wife (whose round and fruitful lap should be filled with roses instead of a pool of blood)—his good luck, his “break,” his “dream come true.” And here he is also with his nightmare come true. He now faces the impossibility of any personally significant kind of chance or change or hope, the absolute and unalterable fact of death.

If love and happiness seem to be permanently insured (as in Mrs. Larkin's case), chance may annihilate them at a stroke; if misery and destruction seem unalterable, so that from despair people act in accordance with what they suppose to be their tragic inevitability (as in Howard's case), chance may surprise them, belatedly and irrelevantly, with a shower of gifts. Human beings cannot predict, they cannot control, they cannot protest against, they cannot even begin to understand the inscrutable workings of the universe.

III

These are the darkest mysteries that Miss Welty ever explores, for in no other stories does she confront her characters with all the terrors of chance and oblivion. However inarticulate, plaintive, lonely, or frustrating she shows love becoming in the experience of a human being, she never again reveals it in its final and stark impotence against the implacable inhumanity of the universe. The stories tell us something about her philosophical vision, which might be identified (at the risk of giving her work the “tweak of fashion” she deplores) as pessimistic and existential.

Through the experience of her characters she seems to be saying that there is no final meaning to life beyond the human meanings; there is no divine “surround,” no final shape to total reality, no love within or beyond the universe (for all its ravishing beauties), however much of it there may be burning in individual, isolated human hearts. Through an inevitable act of mind and heart (which is like a blessed reflex, because love comes willy-nilly, or a compulsion, because the mind must impose its order), the individual makes whatever meaning is to come out of chaotic reality, and this is the existential act. There are only fragments of shape and meaning, here, there, and everywhere: those created by all the world's lovers and artists (the terms often become interchangeable in her vocabulary). And in Miss Welty's catholic and charitable vision, the lovers and artists would probably include most people at least some of the time. Thus her deepest faith is couched securely in her deepest scepticism.

One other story in which she plunges into metaphysical questions is “A Still Moment.” In this story three men try to wrest final meanings out of human life from three different points of view. Each of these men—Lorenzo Dow, the evangelist; Murrell, the outlaw; and Audubon, the naturalist—is consumed with a desire to know, or do, or communicate something of burning urgency; and each is essentially frustrated in his mission. Lorenzo, consumed by divine love, has the passion to save souls, but his efforts are mocked not only by lack of response—his inability to light up all the souls on earth—but by far more threatening internal struggles. These come from his awareness that nature mocks him in its simplicity, peace, and unconscious effectiveness; that he is more susceptible to nature than to divine beauty; and that in his frequent encounters with death he manages to survive less because of his sense of divine guidance and protection than because some strange savage strength and cunning overtake him in the moment of danger. He is saved by an instinct which he identifies as the word of the devil, not an angel, because “God would have protected him in His own way, less hurried, more divine.” Because of his precarious and costly faith and the doubts and frustrations and waste places of his own heart, he flies across the wilderness floor from one camp meeting to the next, filled with the terrible urgency of his message: “Inhabitants of time! The wilderness is your souls on earth. … These wild places and these trails of awesome loneliness lie nowhere, nowhere but in your heart.”

Murrell, the outlaw killer, who believes himself to be possessed of the devil, falls in beside Lorenzo and settles on him for his next victim. His method is strangely ceremonial, for he rides beside the victim telling long tales, in which a “silent man would have done a piece of evil … in a place of long ago, and it was all made for the revelation in the end that the silent man was Murrell himself, and the long story had happened yesterday, and the place here.” Lorenzo's passion is to save the inhabitants of time before Eternity; Murrell's is to “Destroy the present! … the living moment and the man that lives in it must die before you can go on.” In the moment of hideous confrontation with the victim just before the murder, Murrell tries to lay hold on the mystery of being. He murders for the same reason that Mrs. Larkin almost murders Jamey: “It was as if other men, all but himself, would lighten their hold on the secret, upon assault, and let it fly free at death. In his violence he was only treating of enigma.” Approaching the point of climax which is to be the still moment, he and Lorenzo are like brothers seeking light; for Lorenzo's divine passion is darkened by his sense of the tempter within him, and Murrell is less guilty than his crimes would make him appear because he has no other motive for killing than pure quest for the elusive mystery of being. Evangelist and murderer, soul-saver and destroyer, seem to become as one.

Audubon's light step on the wilderness floor, his serene and loving gaze at the earth, and the birds and animals around him, suggest at first a sharp contrast with the desperate urgency of the two men. He is a man who seems in harmony with nature, “very sure and tender, as if the touch of all the earth rubbed upon him”; a man who needs no speech because it is useless in communicating with birds and animals. But Audubon is presently seen to have his own urgency. The sweet excess of love gives him a compulsive and insatiable need to remember, to record in his journal, and to convey all the varieties of nature about him. His vigilant probing of nature is a quest for origins and ends; he does not know whether the radiance he sees is only “closed into an interval between two darks,” or whether it can illuminate the two darks which a human being cannot penetrate, and “discover at last, though it cannot be spoken, what was thought hidden and lost.” His endless examination of the outside world may disclose to him the mystery of his own identity. “When a man at last brought himself to face some mirror surface he still saw the world looking back at him, and if he continued to look, to look closer and closer, what then? The gaze that looks outward must be trained without rest, to be indomitable.”

Here gathered in the wilderness, then, are three fiery souls, each absolute in its consuming desire, for “what each of them had wanted was simply all. To save all souls, to destroy all men, to see and to record all life that filled this world—all, all. …”

Into the still moment comes the beautiful, slow, spiral flight of the snowy heron; with its unconscious freedom, it lays quiet over them, unburdens them, says to them, “Take my flight.” To each comes a revelation, and these revelations are inevitably disparate and subjective. With swift joy Lorenzo sees the bird as a visible manifestation of God's love. Murrell has a sudden mounting desire for confession, and a response of pity; he wishes for a keen look from the bird which could fill and gratify his heart: as though the bird had some divine power, and its sign of recognition could accuse and forgive simultaneously. Audubon gazes at the bird intensely as if to memorize it; and then, because he knows he cannot paint accurately enough from memory, he raises his gun to shoot it. As he does so, he sees in Lorenzo's eyes horror so pure and final as to make him think he has never seen horror before.

Audubon shoots the bird and puts it in his bag. The three men disperse; and for each of them it is as though his destiny has been sealed, the basic issue of his life clarified. Murrell lies in wait for the next victim: “his faith was in innocence and his knowledge was of ruin; and had these things been shaken? Now, what could possibly be outside his grasp?” He is filled with his glorious satanic dreams of conquest and darkness.

Audubon knows that he will paint a likeness of the bird which will sometimes seem to him beautifully faithful to its original; but this knowledge comes with the tragic awareness that even though he alone as artist has really seen the bird, he cannot possess or even reproduce the vision because his painting will be a dead thing, “never the essence, only a sum of parts.” The moment of beauty can never be communicated, “never be one with the beauty in any other man's head in the world. As he had seen the bird most purely at its moment of death, in some fatal way, in his care for looking outward, he saw his long labor most revealingly at the point where it met its limit.” The final frustration of the artist is that he can never capture the final mystery of life, nor convey it to others; no matter how faithfully and sensitively reproduced, nature remains inviolable and unknown.

Riding slowly away, Lorenzo has a terrifying vision, for it suddenly seems to him that “God Himself, just now, thought of the Idea of Separateness.” He sees no apparent order or scheme in the divine management of things, because God is outside Time, and He does not appear to know or care how much human beings who live inside Time need order and coherence which alone can bring the lover to a final union with the loved object. God created the yearnings, but He did not provide a way of meeting the need. He seems to Lorenzo finally indifferent:

He could understand God's giving Separateness first and then giving Love to follow and heal in its wonder; but God had reversed this, and given Love first and then Separateness, as though it did not matter to Him which came first. Perhaps it was that God never counted the moments of Time; Lorenzo did that, among his tasks of love. Time did not occur to God. Therefore—did He even know of it? How to explain Time and Separateness back to God, Who had never thought of them, Who could let the whole world come to grief in a scattering moment?

In terms of the incident Lorenzo is saying: “Why did you let me see the bird, which was inevitably to love it, and see in it your love become visible, and share that love with the other watchers, only to let it be suddenly and pointlessly destroyed, so that I am now separated both from the beloved object, and from all who saw it or who might have seen and loved it?” Which is like saying, “Why do you allow death to happen?”—the question which also tortures the young wife in “A Curtain of Green.”

Yet the “beautiful little vision” of the feeding bird stays with Lorenzo, a beauty “greater than he could account for,” which makes him shout “Tempter!” as he whirls forward with the sweat of rapture pouring down his face. This is because he has again felt in his heart how overwhelmingly sensitive he is to the beauty of nature, and also how pointless and baffling is any attempt to relate it to divine love or meaning or plan or purpose; how pointless, then, is his mission to save souls. But he rushes on through the gathering darkness to deliver his message on the text “in that day when all hearts shall be disclosed.” His final desperate gesture of faith is that when Time is over, meanings will be revealed; then the breach between Love and Separateness, the source of human tragedy, will be eternally closed. It is a faith that Miss Welty herself nowhere affirms: she only shows us, in the richly varied characters and situations of her stories, the intensity of the Love, and the tragic fact of the Separateness in the only life we know, which is our present life in Time. Miss Welty is asking metaphysical questions, but she is attempting no answers. The only solution to a mystery is yet another mystery; cosmic reality is a nest of Chinese boxes.

IV

With a sensitivity as detached as it is tender, so that we may not even notice the sympathy because of the sure, cool objectivity of her art (like Audubon, she is a careful and relentless observer), Miss Welty brings to life a number of characters each engaged in the private quest for the identity of the self, and the self in relation to the other. She is concerned about what she calls “the mystery of relationship” in all stages of awareness. The questions asked are “Who am I and who are you?” These are related to the questions “How can I get my love out into the world, into reality”—that is, communicated and understood—and “How can I see and know what is going on in your heart,” which is sometimes to say, “How can I see my love returned and shared?”

In “The Hitch-Hikers” and “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” two salesmen have a flash of insight into their own identity, which is pathetically and paradoxically that they have no identity because they have no place and no focus of love to define them. Tom Harris, the thirty-year-old salesman of “The Hitch-Hikers,” appears to have been born with a premonition of his coming isolation, for as a child he had often had the sense of “standing still, with nothing to touch him, feeling tall and having the world come all at once into its round shape underfoot and rush and turn through space and make his stand very precarious and lonely.” He lives in a world of hitch-hikers, and the title suggests that Harris himself is one of the transients despite the relative economic security provided by his job.

Tom Harris is a wise, tolerant, generous sort; people naturally confide in him and women are attracted to him, but he will not be held back by anyone. He is beyond surprise or shock because of his wide experience. With a peculiarly detached kind of suspense he views the events surrounding a murder committed in his car by one of the hitch-hikers, and this is because any strong emotion or violence in his life has always been something encountered, personally removed. There had been “other fights, not quite so pointless, but fights in his car; fights, unheralded confessions, sudden love-making—none of any of this his, not his to keep, but belonging to the people of these towns as he passed through, coming out of their rooted pasts and their mock rambles, coming out of their time. He himself had no time. He was free; helpless.” Without an ounce of exhilaration in the knowledge of his freedom, and embracing with apparent resignation his knowledge of helplessness, he is found in the last scene poised for yet another flight, a puzzling, touching American phenomenon, exceptional only in the degree of his self-awareness.

The salesman of “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” R. J. Bowman, comes to this awareness belatedly, by perceiving with the acute eye of a stranger the essence of the simple, rooted life of the couple whose crude hospitality he briefly enjoys. The painful contrast with his own loveless, rootless ways kills him as much as does the protest of his troublesome heart. By the end of the story he is beautifully ready for love, but he cannot live to enjoy it. The best comment on the two salesman stories is Miss Welty's own in quite another context—her essay on the importance of place in fiction: “Being on the move is no substitute for feeling. Nothing is. And no love or insight can be at work in a shifting and never-defined position, where eye, mind, and heart have never willingly focused on a steadying point.” Just seeing this truth is enough to kill a man, although his salvation may lie in having seen it.

The salesmen barely got started in their quest for love and identity; but Clytie, in the story by that name, though less self-aware, has made some small progress. She is ready to emerge, to reach out toward others: she is full of the wonder and mystery of humanity, and there is a kind of breathless, religious awe in the way she scans the faces of the townspeople, seeing the absolute and inscrutable uniqueness of each one. “The most profound, the most moving sight in the whole world must be a face. Was it possible to comprehend the eyes and the mouths of other people, which concealed she knew not what, and secretly asked for still another unknown thing? … It was purely for a resemblance to a vision that she examined the secret, mysterious, unrepeated faces she met in the street of Farr's Gin.” To the people of Farr's Gin, Clytie is ready to give that most generous of all gifts—contemplation: the desire to know without using, the respect for “otherness,” the awe of what is inviolable. But she is suffocated and nauseated, living in a house of disease and death with her vampire-like sister, her alcoholic brother, her apoplectic father, and the dead brother with a bullet hole in his head. These faces come pushing between her and the face she is looking for, which is a face that had long ago looked back at her once when she was young, in a sort of arbor: “hadn't she laughed, leaned forward … and that vision of a face—which was a little like all the other faces … and yet different … this face had been very close to hers, almost familiar, almost accessible.”

After a horrible experience in which, with “breath-taking gentleness,” she touches the face of a barber who comes to shave her father, only to find it hideously scratchy, with “dense, popping green eyes,” she dashes out to the old rain barrel, which seems to her now like a friend, and full of a wonderful dark fragrance. As she looks in, she sees a face—the face she has been looking for—but horribly changed, ugly, contracted, full of the signs of waiting and suffering. There is a moment of sick recognition, “as though the poor, half-remembered vision had finally betrayed her.” That knowledge compels her to do the only thing she can think of to do: she bends her head down over and into the barrel, under the water, “through its glittering surface into the kind, featureless depth, and held it there.”

What does her action mean? First of all, that she sees the ghastly disparity between what she once was and ought to have been (the loving, laughing creature of her youth) and what she has become (ugly, warped, inverted). Also, perhaps, she realizes that the only love in that house, if not in that town, was the love she made: there was no one then to embrace, no nature to plunge into but her own, no love possible but narcissistic love, no reality but her own reality, no knowledge possible but the knowledge of death, which is the immersion into oblivion. It is another pointless joke in a pointless universe. The final image of her as fallen forward into the barrel, “with her poor ladylike black-stockinged legs up-ended and hung apart like a pair of tongs,” is one of the most grim jokes Miss Welty has ever perpetrated: it is only our memory of the wild misfiring of Clytie's love which makes us hear the narrator say, “See her coldly as grotesque, but see her also tenderly as pathetic.”

The situations in all these stories seem fundamentally tragic or pathetic. It is when the loving heart is awakened in finding an object that joy speaks out in the stories, almost inaudibly in “First Love,” somewhat more clearly in “At the Landing,” and loudly and triumphantly in “A Worn Path.” Joel Mayes, the solitary little deaf-mute of “First Love,” is dazzled into love by a single gesture of Aaron Burr's, a gesture which brings a revelation:

One of the two men lifted his right arm—a tense, yet gentle and easy motion—and made the dark wet cloak fall back. To Joel it was like the first movement he had ever seen, as if the world had been up to that night inanimate. It was like a signal to open some heavy gate or paddock, and it did open to his complete astonishment upon a panorama in his own head, about which he knew first of all that he would never be able to speak—it was nothing but brightness. …

A single beautiful movement of human strength and careless grace has crystallized a love which is fated to be as inarticulate as it is sweetly wondering and intense. Quietly, night after night, the little boy sits watching his beloved, adoring his nobility, his mystery, his urgency. The boy's presence is accepted by the conspirators, but ignored. Joel has no way of expressing his love, except by trotting like a little dog around his master, sniffing out the dangers that lie in his path, for Joel constantly senses the imminence of disaster, and the dread of coming separation. “Why would the heart break so at absence? Joel knew it was because nothing had been told.” And yet even if the moment of revelation did come, when love might speak out, he knows there are no words for what it might say. Gazing deeply into the face of the sleeping Burr, he has a terrible wish to speak out loud; “but he would have to find names for the places of the heart and the times for its shadowy and tragic events, and they seemed of great magnitude, heroic and terrible and splendid, like the legends of the mind. But for lack of a way to tell how much was known, the boundaries would lie between him and the others, all the others, until he died.” The most he can do for Burr is to quiet his nightfears by gently taking his hand, stopping his nightmare ravings from the ears of potential eavesdroppers. When Burr leaves town Joel feels he will “never know now the true course, or the outcome of any dream.” His love never gets in the world, but it is less pathetic than Clytie's because at least it has found an object, it has flowered.

“In the world” is a key phrase in the story of Jenny Lockhart called “At the Landing.” It is the hearts of her family that are locked: she is caught in the house of pride, tradition, “culture,” and death, folded in the womb of that house by her grandfather. Through the painful birth process of discovery and experience she comes to the landing, the taking-off place, and so out into the world. The world, the forces of life, are symbolized by the river and the flood, which inundate Jenny's house and the graveyard where her relatives are buried. Billy Floyd, a wild creature of mysterious origins who fishes on the river, rides along on the flood and is master of it, is the one who brings her into the world: not only by his sexual violation of her, but more quietly and surely through her adoring response to his wild beauty, through the revelations which come to her about herself and him, and about love, which are the chief concern of the story.

Jenny learns almost as much about love, about its mysteries and changes, and the mystery of human identity, as it is possible to learn. These revelations come to her by seeing, feeling, and guessing—by intuitive perception. For example, simply in watching Billy's innocence as he drinks deeply and then throws himself on the grass to sleep, she knows her innocence has left her: this is because a knowledge of innocence presupposes some knowledge of experience, of what might not be innocent, out of which contrast springs the recognition of innocence. Or she learns how love “would have a different story in the world if it could lose the moral knowledge of a mystery that is in the other heart”: that is, if people who love were less aware of how both vulnerable and inviolable their lovers were, they could speak their minds more fully, ride over each other more freely with their aggressions, or attack each other more analytically; but they could not, of course, learn much more about each other, or achieve more satisfaction by doing so (even though, human nature being what it is, they inevitably will do so). Watching Billy ride the red horse becomes for her a kind of anticipation of the sexual act, through which she learns that “the vaunting [male] and prostration [female] of love told her nothing”: that is, sexual experience in itself cannot disclose the mystery of human identity nor bring people together.

When she sees Billy Floyd in the village store, he seems changed: there is “something close, gathering-close, and used and worldly about him, … something handled, … strong as an odor, the odor of the old playing cards that the old men of The Landing shuffled every day over their table in the street.” If she presses him now, corners him in that small place, she will discover his identity, and that will be something small, mean, and faintly dirty—for he is thought by the literal-minded to be “really the bastard of one of the old checker-players, that had been let grow up away in the woods till he got big enough to come back and make trouble.” But he conquers her with his defiant look, and she wisely lets him escape, knowing that this is not his true and final definition: his origins are more wild and wonderful (is the Natchez Indian in his blood?—is he one of the people of the lost Atlantis?); his nature cannot be defined by the context of the village store and the odors of old playing cards.

She learns too the value of her love (“what my heart holds this minute is better than what you offer the least bit less”), and how enormously precious is her whole nature, which must be learned slowly, patiently, tenderly (“She looked outward with the sense of rightful space and time within her, which must be traversed before she could be known at all”). She knows also that “what she would reveal in the end was not herself, but the way of the traveler”: that is, she has no final revelations to give to any lover; she is only herself, like every other human being, on a perplexing journey through life, engaged in the perpetual and difficult process of finding herself, her meaning, her destination. The most two people can do is to travel together for a while. Billy Floyd has his own search, and she has hers. These are only a few of the amazing discoveries Jenny makes in her birth process, the process of coming into the world; and each discovery is, of course, only the revelation of yet another human mystery. At the end of the story she is only starting her wait for Billy Floyd. She has “arrived,” she has been born (and with what violence in that series of rapes at the hands of the river men); but she hasn't yet really begun the journey; she is “at the landing.”

Jenny's love barely manages to get articulated; its actions in the world are fumbling and largely ineffectual; and at the end of the story she is left, like Joel, separated from her loved one. But the love of Old Phoenix in “A Worn Path” is most triumphantly realized “in the world.” It has a clear object—her grandson; it is actualized, put out into reality, not only by her care of him, but in the periodic ceremonial act of her trip along the worn path into town to fetch the “soothing medicine.” There are no significant barriers to the expressive love of old Phoenix, and this is reflected also in her sense of familiarity with nature—the ease with which she talks to the birds and animals—and in her ability to live as readily, interchangeably, and effectively in the realm of the fanciful and supernatural as she does in the realm of practicalities. She is, like Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury, a completely and beautifully harmonious person—something one does not often find in the fiction of either Miss Welty or Faulkner.

V

What happens when love finds fulfillment in the most natural and happy way possible, physically and emotionally, when it is both communicated and returned and is solidly “in the world” socially and legally through marriage? Is there then an end to the mysteries of the self and the other? In several of her stories Miss Welty shows there is not; she indicates, in fact, that the one thing any married person cannot do is to assume knowledge of the other, or try to force it in any way, or make a predictable pattern of a relationship, or block the independence, or impede the search of the other. A relationship of love can be kept joyful, active, free, only if each partner steps back now and then to see the other with a fresh sense of his inviolable otherness, his mystery, his absolutely sacred and always changing identity. Out of some deep need to establish the new perspective, to insist on freedom and apartness, one partner may simply run away from the other, withdraw, or go into temporary “retreat.” This is a basic situation in “A Piece of News,” “The Key,” “The Wide Net,” The Robber Bridegroom, Delta Wedding, “Music from Spain,” “The Whole World Knows,” and “The Bride of the Innisfallen.” The quarrels and separations presented in these stories are not the ordinary distressing marital quarrels which spring from hate, aggression, and conventional domestic discord, for none of these lovers has ceased to love or want the other. Each of them is simply demanding in his own way: “See me new. Understand the changes in me, and see how I am apart from you, unknowable and not to be possessed: only when you see me new can you possess me fully again.”

The theme is given a semi-comic treatment in “A Piece of News.” Ruby Fischer, a primitive, isolated and apparently unfaithful young backwoods wife, chances on a newspaper story in which a girl with the same name is shot in the leg by her husband. Though Ruby knows such an action on her husband Clyde's part to be quite improbable—even though he knows of her infidelities—she is immediately struck with the imaginative possibilities of such a situation, and is marvelously impressed and flattered. Images of herself dying beautifully in a brand-new nightgown, with a remorseful Clyde hovering over her, play delightfully in her mind. The romantic view of herself extends to her whole body; and while preparing dinner after Clyde returns, she moves in a “mysteriously sweet … delicate and vulnerable manner, as though her breasts gave her pain.” When she discloses to Clyde the secret of the newspaper story, there is a moment, before common sense triumphs, when the two of them face each other “as though with a double shame and a double pleasure.” The deed might have been done: “Rare and wavering, some possibility stood timidly like a stranger between them and made them hang their heads.” For an instant they have had a vision of each other in alien fantasy roles—an experience which is pleasing, exciting, and rather frightening.

The theme is again treated with tender humor in “The Key.” Ellie and Albert Morgan are dramatically shut off from the outside world by being deaf-mutes. When the story opens, we find them sitting tautly in a railroad station, waiting for the departure of their train to Niagara Falls. Ellie, a large woman with a face “as pink and crowded as an old-fashioned rose,” is by far the stronger of the two. Little Albert, “too shy for this world,” seems to be Ellie's own “homemade” product, as though she had “self-consciously knitted or somehow contrived a husband when she sat alone at night.” But he is neither defeated nor submissive: there is an occasional sly look in his eye which tells of a secret hope and anticipation, a waiting for some nameless surprise indefinitely withheld.

It comes at last in the form of a key accidentally dropped by a young man, a curious red-haired stranger who bears some kinship to Harris of “The Hitch-Hikers” and to George Fairchild of Delta Wedding. He is marvelously fiery, young and strong, compassionate, sensitive, with a lovingly humorous detachment. But the observer-narrator senses that he will “never express whatever might be the desire of his life … in making an intuitive present or sacrifice, or in any way of action at all—not because there was too much in the world demanding his strength, but because he was too deeply aware.” His life is both full of giving and empty of permanent commitment; he has Harris' freely floating love and weariness.

The key, which drops apparently out of the sky at Albert's feet, immediately becomes the thing he has been waiting for, richly portentous—he sits there glowing with “almost incandescent delight.” The young man senses this and doesn't reclaim the key; he stands apart watching the fingers go as Albert and Ellie talk in their own private language. What does it mean? Maybe now they'll really fall in love at Niagara Falls; maybe they didn't have to marry just because they were afflicted and lonely; maybe they can love, be happy, like other people. They wait importantly and expectantly.

But they miss their train—they can't, of course, hear it coming and going so quickly. Shock! At once Ellie resumes her old mode of domination and organizes her “counter-plot” against the outside world, which is obviously hostile to their hopes and plans. But Albert refuses to be crushed now—he has the key; he is delightedly, securely inward. Ellie is baffled: she can't get through to him. Because the strange, funny, and pitiful little irony of their relationship is that Ellie “talks” too much. When they are on the farm together and she feels some unhappiness between them, she has to break off from her churning to assure Albert of her love and protection, “talking with the spotted sour milk dripping from her fingers.” All her talk just makes the fluid, simple, natural farm life “turn sour.” Security runs away in the face of Ellie's panic.

Ellie sits there, heavy with disappointment as she thinks about Niagara Falls, and her conviction that they would even hear it in their bodies through the vibrations. She is going to brood over the whole incident and the terrible disappointment, as she does over all their discussions, misunderstandings, agreements—“even about the secret and proper separation that lies between a man and a woman, the thing that makes them what they are in themselves, their secret life, their memory of the past, their childhood, their dreams. This to Ellie was unhappiness.” She is afraid of Albert's private life, of all his secrets that cannot be hers. Loneliness and isolation compel her to claim all—to work herself into every corner of his pitifully limited experience. But Albert really isn't tamed despite his obedience—he stubbornly preserves his quiet, intensely personal identity, and he has the key to it in his pocket. Maybe the key wasn't, as he first thought, the symbol of a coming happiness through the Niagara Falls expedition; maybe it was “something which he could have alone, for only himself, in peace, something strange and unlooked for which would come to him.” Poor Ellie.

But the red-haired stranger with his god-like compassion and omniscience (how much of all this does he guess?—the narrator seems to have infinite faith in his awareness), has a key for Ellie too. She is not to be left, literally or figuratively, out in the cold. The key he places in her hand bears the legend, “Star Hotel, Room 2.” What could be neater or lovelier? The designated use to its owner of Albert's key is never disclosed. The imagination can soar on that one; it is appropriate as the symbol of Albert's secret hope, his own unique humanity, a thing shared with, endowed by the mysterious, god-like young man. Ellie's key to the young man's hotel room is appropriately practical—she is the one who “manages”; and yet it has its exciting edge. Why do honeymooners travel to Niagara Falls, after all, except to repair to hotel rooms? This room is in the Star, and that's what Ellie has been wishing on. Perhaps she will yet see her wish fulfilled for a “changing and mixing of their lives together.”

But the story ends with the young man's faintly dismal, realistic vision, not of the possibilities, but of the probabilities. As he departs, lighting a cigarette, we can see his eyes by the light of the match, and in them, “all at once wild and searching, there was certainly, besides the simple compassion in his regard, a look both restless and weary, very much used to the comic. You could see that he despised and saw the uselessness of the thing he had done.” He may have god-like prescience and compassion, but he hasn't the omnipotence—he can't change things.

Ellie and Albert are extraordinary, but their problem is not. People do not have to be deaf-mutes to be driven together by the felt hostility of the outside world, and the inevitable pattern then is one of a too insistent closeness. Ellie has to learn that Albert has a right to his secret—he'll keep that key in his pocket as long as he lives.

A version of this theme which bears some resemblance to the Cupid and Psyche myth appears in Miss Welty's romping fantasy, The Robber Bridegroom. Rosamond, the lovely heroine, has been kidnapped by a bold bandit of the forest; but she finds the arrangement much to her liking. The one prohibition—the forbidden fruit in her Eden—is any attempt to discover her bridegroom's identity, which is disguised by wild berry stain. Rosamond's idyllic state continues until the satanic stepmother tempts her to break the prohibition and provides her with a recipe for a brew to remove the berry stain. In the night when her bandit lover is sleeping, Rosamond wipes the stains off his face. He awakens, and she is distressed to find that he is only Jamie Lockhart, the well-scrubbed, dull, respectable young man who had come at the request of her father, Clement, to search for and capture the robber bridegroom. Jamie, in turn, now recognizes Rosamond as “Clement Musgrove's silly daughter,” and both of them are thoroughly disenchanted with each other. The truth, as old Clement has seen even with his upside-down version of his daughter's predicament, is that “all things are double, and this should keep us from taking liberties with the outside world, and acting too quickly to finish things off.” Once human mystery and complexity are ignored or dissipated by a pressing for simple definitions, the residue is bound to be disappointing.

A “lovers' quarrel” is the cause of the falling out between William Wallace and his newly pregnant, young wife Hazel in “The Wide Net.” Hazel is filled with her great experience of coming motherhood: she is elated, solemn, fearful, mysterious, “touchy.” William Wallace hasn't taken sufficient account of this: in fact, to make matters worse, he has been out on a drinking spree with one of the boys. Hazel retaliates by writing a letter in which she threatens to drown herself. And so her husband must now go in quest of her, and find, swimming in the depths of the Pearl River, what is the “old trouble”:

So far down and all alone, had he found Hazel? Had he suspected down there, like some secret, the real, the true trouble that Hazel had fallen into, about which words in a letter could not speak … how (who knew?) she had been filled to the brim with that elation that they all remembered, like their own secret, the elation that comes of great hopes and changes, sometimes simply of the harvest time, that comes with a little course of its own like a tune to run in the head, and there was nothing she could do about it—they knew—and so it had turned into this? It could be nothing but the old trouble that William Wallace was finding out, reaching and turning in the gloom of such depths.

Though “The Bride of the Innisfallen” has been widely misunderstood, the real subject of that story is related to that of “The Wide Net.” The point of view of most of “The Bride of the Innisfallen” is that of an observing narrator who obviously enjoys the human comedy in the train compartment full of richly varied “types” heading for Ireland, but it is a perspective subtly shared with that of one character singled out for special attention: a young American wife who is running away from her husband. Only at the end of the story does the narrator concentrate explicitly on the mind and experience of the young wife, but then we realize how what she has seen on the trip, and on her perambulations through glorious, fresh, wildly funny, dazzlingly lovely Cork (so it registers for her), explain both to us and to her what her “trouble” has been with her husband.

The “trouble” is her excess of hope, joy, and wonder at the mystery and glory of human life, all of which is symbolized to her in the lovely young bride who appears mysteriously on board the “Innisfallen” just as it prepares to land at Cork. This joy the American girl's husband apparently cannot see or share (as William Wallace cannot at first perceive Hazel's strange elation). “You hope for too much,” her husband has said to her: that was “always her trouble.” How can she preserve this quality which is so much and simply her definition that without it she loses her identity? The question answers itself, because joy and hope constantly bound up in her. “Love with the joy being drawn out of it like anything else that aches—that was loneliness; not this. I was nearly destroyed, she thought, and again was threatened with a light head, a rush of laughter. …” Her real problem is not how to preserve her joy, but how to communicate it to her husband, or to anybody:

If she could never tell her husband her secret, perhaps she would never tell it at all. You must never betray pure joy—the kind you were born and began with—either by hiding it or by parading it in front of people's eyes; they didn't want to be shown it. And still you must tell it. Is there no way? she thought—for here I am, this far. I see Cork's streets take off from the waterside and rise lifting their houses and towers like note above note on a page of music, with arpeggios running over it of green and galleries and belvederes, and the bright sun raining at the top. Out of the joy I hide for fear it is promiscuous, I may walk forever at the fall of evening by the river, and find this river street by the red rock, this first, last house, that's perhaps a boarding house now, standing full-face to the tide, and look up to that window—that upper window, from which the mystery will never go. The curtains dyed so many times over are still pulled back and the window looks out open to the evening, the river, the hills, and the sea.

There is no “reconciliation scene” in this story as there is in “The Wide Net.” The girl leaves the story wandering off happily into a bar. From it she hears a cry flung out “fresh … like the signal for a song,” and she walks into “the lovely room full of strangers”—people in whom she can delight without fear of exposure (“So strangeness gently steels us,” Miss Welty has quoted a poem of Richard Wilbur). We do not know whether her husband will see her “new” when she returns to him, though we rather hope he may; for how can she possibly be resisted, this heavy-hearted little saint spinning so giddily toward heaven?

In a story called “Circe” (also from the volume titled The Bride of the Innisfallen), Miss Welty celebrates the human mystery by adopting the perspective of a superhuman being. The effort is a tour de force, because in her attempts to fathom the nature of Odysseus after she seduces him, Circe begins to look very much like one of Miss Welty's human lovers, more than one of whom gaze at the beloved when he is asleep, hoping at that unguarded moment to catch the elusive mystery of his identity. But as a sorceress and magician, though preserved from human frailty and tragedy, and all the uncertainties of time and circumstance (because she can predict the future), Circe envies the human condition. She first contrasts the way of her father with that of the earthly hero. Nature, here personified and deified, is seen to be enviably constant and serene, sure and effective, exempt from human pain, “suffering … no heroic fear of corruption through his constant shedding of light, needing no story, no retinue to vouch for where he has been.” But in Circe's vision human beings have an equal, though different, glory. She thinks enviously,

I know they keep something from me, asleep and awake. There exists a mortal mystery, that, if I knew where it was, I could crush like an island grape. Only frailty, it seems, can divine it—and I was not endowed with that property. They live by frailty! By the moment! I tell myself that it is only a mystery, and mystery is only uncertainty. (There is no mystery in magic! Men are swine: let it be said, and no sooner said than done.) Yet mortals alone can divine where it lies in each other, can find it and prick it in all its peril, with an instrument made of air. I swear that only to possess that one, trifling secret, I would willingly turn myself into a harmless dove for the rest of eternity!

For what is the “instrument of air”—a metaphor? Possibly imagination, intuition, sensitivity, contemplation, wonder, love (whatever, one might guess, is the opposite of cold, rational, loveless, destructive analysis—the metaphor for which would be a blunt mechanical instrument). These delicate “instruments” are the means by which human beings can probe the human mystery, the means by which any lover may meet or be united with any object in the world.

VI

It is also with these “instruments of air” that Miss Welty approaches the persons and places and themes of her fiction; it is what makes for the distinctively lyrical quality of her style. “Relationship is a pervading and changing mystery,” she says in “How I Write”; “it is not words that make it so in life, but words have to make it so in a story.” Her problem as an artist has been to find the words to convey the mysteries, the elusive and subtle inner states of mind and feeling for which most people (and certainly the people of her fiction) have no words at all: she must be articulate about what cannot be articulated. She is out on a fringe, lonely place—as lonely as the wilderness in “A Still Moment”; there, like Lorenzo, Murrell, and Audubon, she must press for definitions: the meanings, the names of some of the most complex, elusive, and important of all human experiences. And it is inevitable that she should have her failures as well as her successes. Her language is not always adequate to the difficulty of what must be conveyed, which is perhaps the reason why she has often been accused of being coy, arch, perversely subtle, too nuanceful or precious.

The wonder is, after all, the large measure of her success. The reason for this we may trace as far back as to the habit of the child in “A Memory,” the habit of close observation, of recording, identifying, “placing” things; or we may see it as recently expounded as in the small volume mentioned earlier, Place in Fiction. “Place in fiction,” Miss Welty says, “is 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.” As she defines it, place is not only the region or setting of a story; it stands for everything in a story that fixes it to the known, recognizable, present, and “real” world of everyday human experience. It is like the solid flesh that both encloses (pins down) and discloses (reveals) the more elusive human thoughts and feelings. “In real life,” she says, “we have to express the things plainest and closest to our minds by the clumsy word and the half-finished gesture. … It is our describable outside that defines us, willy-nilly, to others, that may save us, or destroy us, in the world; it may be our shield against chaos, or mask against exposure; but whatever it is, the move we make in the place we live has to signify our intent and feelings.” In fiction this illusion of reality is created if the author has seen to “believability”: “The world of experience must be at every step, through every moment, within reach as the world of appearance.” The inner world and the outer surface of life must be interrelated and fused; the imaginative vision must glow through the carefully, objectively painted exterior world.

In her best stories Miss Welty has seen to “believability” by her use of the familiar local Mississippi settings; her close descriptions of the appearance, manner, gestures of her characters; her infallible ear for their speech rhythms and idioms; her use of plausible and logical plot structures; her concern with physical texture and psychological validity; her use of proper names which are always solidly realistic, local, devastatingly accurate, and at the same time, often richly allusive in their symbolism. The destination of the salesman in “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” for example, is a town called Beulah. Surprisingly enough, there is such a place: population 342, Boliver County, N.W. Mississippi, according to the Columbia Gazetteer; but the higher validity of its use as a place name is that the salesman is on his way to the “Beulah Land” of the Southern Baptist gospel hymns.

Or her concern with “believability” may be shown again in the way “A Still Moment”—as formally patterned a story and as close to allegory as any she has written—is most solidly wedded to history in place and time. For the wilderness is not only the isolated, mythical desert setting appropriate to mystical revelations, but it is the old familiar Natchez Trace many years back in history; the characters are not simply abstract or apocryphal types of missionary prophet (the good man), criminal (the evil man), and naturalist (the artistic, detached, contemplative man), but they are three historical persons about whom Miss Welty has undoubtedly done her piece of “research.”

Most of all, the style itself is the best illustration of her concern with “believability.” The fusion of the elusive, insubstantial, mysterious, with what is solidly “real,” can be seen in almost any passage selected at random from Miss Welty's fiction. The one chosen is a short and relatively simple description from “The Death of a Traveling Salesman.” In this episode Sonny, the husband, has returned from a neighbor's with a burning stick in tongs; Bowman, the salesman, watches the wife lighting the fire and beginning preparations for supper:

“We'll make a fire now,” the woman said, taking the brand.

When that was done she lit the lamp. It showed its dark and light. The whole room turned golden-yellow like some sort of flower, and the walls smelled of it and seemed to tremble with the quiet rush of the fire and the waving of the burning lamp-wick in its funnel of light.

The woman moved among the iron pots. With the tongs she dropped hot coals on top of the iron lids. They made a set of soft vibrations, like the sound of a bell far away.

She looked up and over at Bowman, but he could not answer. He was trembling. …

In this passage the simple actions, sights and sounds, are conveyed to us sharply and precisely and yet mysteriously and evocatively, through the mind of a man who experiences an unconscious heightening of awareness, a clarity of vision, because in these closing hours of his life he is approaching his moment of revelation. He is feeling more deeply than ever before, and hence everything he sees he also feels intensely. We know that throughout the story he is in a semi-delirious state, and thus in realistic terms, we are prepared for all the adumbrations and overtones, the exaggerations, blurs, and distortions of his perception. But strange and elusive meanings are coming to him through all he sees: each act and gesture becomes almost ceremonial; each sight and sound richly allusive, portentous, beautiful, and deeply disturbing. The lamp-light registers to him as both dark and light, suggesting the states of dream and reality, his feeling of the warmth, welcome and shelter of this home and his fear of being left out, as well as the chills and fever of his illness. His sense impressions are blended as the golden light seems to him like a flower with an odor that pervades the walls; the trembling, rushing, and waving of the light are also extended to include the walls, suggesting the instability and delirium of his impressions. The woman does not simply “walk” or “step”: she “moves among” the iron pots, like some priestess engaged in a mysterious ritual, moving among the sacred objects; the sound of the hot coals dropped on the iron lids is muted, softly vibrating; the comparison to the sound of a bell again suggests the ceremonial resonance these simple actions have for the salesman. It is no wonder that at the end of the passage we find him trembling and speechless. Through the evocation of the language we have felt into his complex emotional state of wonder, fear, longing, sickness, pain, love: we have seen it all through his eyes and experience. This is characteristically the way Miss Welty blends the inner world and outer surfaces of life—the way she sees to “believability.”

In observing and recording the mysteries, Miss Welty creates a response of wonder, terror, pity, or delight. Her stories teach us nothing directly except, through her vision, how to observe, and wonder, and love, and see the mysteries; for brutal or lovely, they wait for us wherever we go.

Notes

1. Short Stories was originally an address on “The Reading and Writing of Short Stories” delivered by Miss Welty at the University of Washington in 1947. A shorter version was published in the Atlantic Monthly, CLXXXIII (February and March, 1949), 54-58, 46-49, and the full text by Harcourt, Brace in 1950.

2. The first two quotations cited are from Short Stories, the last three from “How I Write.”