Copyright

Copyright © 1965 by Eudora Welty

Copyright © 1951, 1949, 1942, 1939, 1938, 1937 by Eudora Welty

Copyright renewed 1993, 1979, 1977, 1970, 1969, 1967, 1966, 1965 by Eudora Welty

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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“The Bride of the Innisfallen,” originally appeared in the New Yorker.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 65-14703

ISBN 0-15-689969-8 (Harvest: pbk.)

eISBN 978-0-547-54572-1
v3.0920

Introduction

This volume contains a selection of representative and enduring stories written by Eudora Welty over a period of some twenty-five years.

Miss Welty’s training in her craft was the sort described by Robert Frost as taking place “cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books.” Her father, originally from Ohio, was president of a Southern insurance company, and her mother was a West Virginian of Virginia stock; they were kindly and understanding parents. A sensitive and imaginative girl, she grew up in a free and easy way in Jackson, Mississippi, attending the public schools, reading omnivorously, fancying for a number of years that she wanted to be a painter. Following her graduation from Central High School in Jackson, she spent two years at Mississippi State College for Women, in Columbus, and another two at the University of Wisconsin, where as an English major she began a more concentrated study of literature. After having received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1929, she enrolled in the School of Business at Columbia University in order to study advertising. But the Depression had begun; she was unable to find suitable employment, and soon returned to Mississippi. For the next nine years she worked at various jobs in advertising and publicity, as well as at her own writing. Her first full-time job was with the Works Progress Administration; as a publicity assistant, she traveled all over Mississippi, writing newspaper copy, taking photographs, observing, talking to all sorts of people, and so acquiring material for many of her stories.

She offered to various New York publishers a group of unposed photographs of Negro life, “thinking or hoping,” she later said, “if they liked my pictures (which I thought were fine) they might be inclined to take my stories (which I felt very dubious about, but I wondered about them—they being what I cared about), but they weren’t decoyed. Once a year for three or four years I carried around the two bundles under my arm on my two weeks’ trip to New York, and carried them home again—not much downcast, perhaps because all the time I simply loved writing, and was going to do it anyway.”

She had already been successful, however, in getting her work into magazines. Her first story appeared in a “little magazine” named Manuscript in 1936, and within three years Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, editors of the influential Southern Review, published six other stories, including three in the present collection: “Old Mr. Marblehall,” “Petrified Man,” and “The Hitch-Hikers.” Soon “A Worn Path,” “Why I Live at the P.O.,” and “Powerhouse” appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. Her first collection of stories, A Curtain of Green, was published in 1941, with a preface by Katherine Anne Porter; a short novel, The Robber Bridegroom, followed in 1942, and her second collection of stories, The Wide Net, in 1943. Delta Wedding, a full-length novel, appeared in 1946; The Golden Apples, a book of connected stories, in 1949; The Bride of the Innisfallen, a miscellaneous collection, in 1955; and The Ponder Heart, another short novel, in 1954.

In 1942 and in 1943, Miss Welty received first prize O. Henry Memorial awards for “The Wide Net” and “Livvie”; she held two Guggenheim Fellowships, and The Ponder Heart won her the William Dean Howells medal awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for “the most distinguished work of American fiction during the period from 1950–1955.” She was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1952, and has been an Honorary Consultant of the Library of Congress. Although she makes public appearances, both lecturing and reading her stories, and now and again contributes her perceptive criticism to various magazines and reviews, she is generally out of the public eye, warmly admired by her friends, quietly dedicated to the practice of her art.

The dominant characteristics of Miss Welty’s fiction are the lyrical impulse that provides its inciting force and unity, the emphasis on place that gives it focus, and the scope and experimentation that lend it variety.

In an essay called “How I Write,” she has supplied her own answer to the question, “Where do the stories come from?” The source is the lyrical impulse—“the impulse to praise, to love, to call up, to prophesy.” It is “the outside signal that has startled or moved the creative mind to complicity and brought the story to active being: the irresistible, the magnetic, the alarming (pleasurable or disturbing), the overwhelming person, place, or thing.” Her stories may be viewed, then, as celebrations of so many pieces of life with “the mysteries rushing unsubmissively through them by the minute”: life not so much analyzed and interpreted as rendered and wondered at, perhaps because what is shown is extraordinary, perhaps because it is simply ordinary.

There is no end, she seems to show us—now hilariously and now gravely—to the surprises and horrors in life. Children, like those in “Moon Lake,” are always stumbling on them: it is because Miss Welty has retained something of the child’s fresh and ingenuous view that impressions of beauty and pain are made so indelibly through her stories. Among these stories the reader will find some of her extraordinary, monolithic characters: Powerhouse, master of fantasy conveyed through music; Phoenix, with her eternally young and faithful old Heart; Lorenzo Dow, Murrell, and Audubon, each driven by his own vision, each with his burning mission. And then there are the ordinary ones: Mr. Marblehall, quietly making war with public indifference by conjuring up his own shocking double life; Livvie, too young to remain queen in Solomon’s palace, tending the old man’s wintry retirement; William Wallace, who must recover his wife by encountering the mysteries of life and birth in the depths of the Pearl River; and that whole collection of perfectly ordinary women who turn into Medusas before our eyes in Leota’s beauty parlor. The universe is dazzling and fearful, and people are remarkable. The next hitchhiker you pick up may murder his fellow in your car; the “outcast Indian Maiden,” whose savagery you exposed to a credulous public, may turn out to be an innocent and uncomprehending little clubfooted Negro, and leave you with an unhealed heart and a heavy burden of guilt; and the wonderful man from Connemara is bound to pop up like a Jack-in-the-box with his explosive “Oh my God!” about some small thing or other.

All these are human concerns for celebration by a lyricist in prose. So also is each sensuous detail of the natural world, the breath and texture of atmosphere, the color and perfume of flowers and foliage, the brightness or dimness of weather, the slow changes of the seasons and years and times of life, and the folk rituals that mark those changes. The crises produced by the unpredictable event, the outrageous act, the accident, the chance meeting, the sudden tragedy are counterpointed in Miss Welty’s fiction by the larger, steadying rhythms of nature and human feeling. We may gasp in terror or delight, but then we go on breathing just the same.

Feeling, the lyrical impulse, is the presiding angel who, according to Miss Welty, “carries the crown” for the writer of fiction; place, or setting, however, she calls one of fiction’s most important “lesser angels.” It is clearly a guardian of her own art. In an essay called “Place in Fiction,” she has argued convincingly for its significance. She demonstrates how place provides not only a region or setting for a story, but also a means of fixing it to what is known, recognizable, concrete in the everyday world. Feelings and associations attach themselves to places, which have a more lasting identity than individual human beings. “Place in fiction,” she 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. . . .” It serves to focus the vision of the writer, to assist him in convincing the reader that the fictional lie is the world’s reality, to aid him in capturing and disclosing the more subtle and elusive of human thoughts and feelings that need pinning down. Place is like the “steadily visible” surface, the carefully painted scene on the outside of the old china night light, which alight becomes excitingly “the combination of internal and external, glowing at the imagination as one.” Such a use of place for Miss Welty does not result in merely “regional” fiction, for the regional, though everywhere present, is to be transcended: the whole concept of local color would have been alien to Cervantes, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Turgenev, or the writers of the Old Testament, who simply wrote of what they knew. “It seems plain,” she concludes, “that the art that speaks most clearly, explicitly, directly, and passionately from its place of origin will remain the longest understood. It is through place that we put out roots, wherever birth, chance, fate, or our traveling selves set us down; but where those roots reach toward . . . is the deep and running vein, eternal and consistent and everywhere purely itself—that feeds and is fed by the human understanding.”

Miss Welty’s own place is, of course, Mississippi—its towns and countryside, its red clay farms and hills, its pine forests, lakes, rivers, and Delta bottoms. Pre-eminently, in the stories of this collection, it is the Natchez Trace, a path originally carved out of the wilderness by animals, later followed by Indians, and then literally deepened into the forest bed as it was traveled by river-men making their way home after coming down the Mississippi, by traders, pioneers, settlers, mail carriers, cutting northeast upward from Natchez toward Nashville, Tennessee. It is on this ancient Trace, in pioneer times, that we find evangelist Lorenzo Dow riding his horse at top speed to encounter two other actual historical characters, the outlaw James Murrell and the naturalist John James Audubon, the three converging on the wilderness floor for their “still moment” of private revelation—Miss Welty’s purely imaginary addition to an actuality already mysterious and legendary. It is away up on the old abandoned Trace that Solomon carries Livvie to his “nice house” in the country; it is the Trace that William Wallace and his entourage follow, on their way to the Pearl River, in “The Wide Net”; it is from back off the Trace that Phoenix makes her “worn path,” and her destination is Natchez, the “little party-giving town” where Old Mr. Marblehall is leading his fantastic double life.

Whether or not they are fictional, Miss Welty’s place names always sound right: that is, both probable and improbable, according to the vagaries of history and humanity. And this is symptomatic of the larger and more important Tightness that derives from the happy fusion of imaginative vision and actuality of place in her fiction. Place has given the social accuracy, including its comic vitality, to those of her stories that present Southern towns and clans, such as “Lily Daw and the Three Ladies” and “The Wide Net.” She has described certain of her stories, such as “Petrified Man” and “Why I Live at the P.O.,” as having been written “by ear.” That acutely tuned ear has caught the speech of a way of life, of a set of shared and yet subtly various social traditions, prejudices, interests, problems, human reactions, as well as private foibles and idiosyncrasies, flashes of sheer oddness, perversity, or humor, which continually surprise us by their freshness and convince us by their fidelity. The dialogue in many of the stories begs to be read aloud. The rhythms and idioms, and a rhetoric at once plain and fancy, economical and elaborate, bend the most recalcitrant accents and intonations to a gossipy Southern loquaciousness that is at the same time dreadful, funny, and touching.

The last story in this collection, which is set in Ireland, demonstrates again the importance of place to Miss Welty’s fiction. It does so in that a specific locality (one among others in which her “traveling self” set her down) helps to define the thoughts and reactions of a young American wife who is temporarily running away from her husband in London, because of a strange and elusive “trouble” with him. Everything that she sees and experiences on her trip to Ireland and on her ramblings through glorious, fresh, wildly funny, dazzlingly lovely Cork (so it registers for her) explains both to us and to her what her “trouble” has been with her husband: something like an excess of hope, joy, and wonder at the glory and mystery of human life, epitomized in her vision of the young bride. Subtle emotions are still conveyed to a large extent by a place and the people belonging to it, though the place happens to be Ireland, not Mississippi.

A remarkable fact about these stories is that in their subjects, themes, tone, form, and technique, they do not easily lend themselves to generalizations. Speaking of stories by other writers, Miss Welty says that a reader should regard each one as an entity, a “little world in space, just as we can isolate one star in the sky by a concentrated vision.” Readers of her own stories will differ about which stars are of greater and which of lesser magnitude, but they are bound to find the range wide, from a vigorous levity to the terror of hallucination or the sweet pain of the heart’s secrets. Each reader will find some constellations of his own. He may notice, for one thing, that though the stories as a whole include various sorts of comedy, tragedy, satire, and fantasy, most characteristically these elements are blended within individual stories. No reader, one hopes, will allow his pleasure in the delicious comedy of “Lily Daw and the Three Ladies” and “Why I Live at the P.O.” to be diminished by somber reflections on feeble-mindedness and paranoia. But “Petrified Man,” though grotesquely funny in its scenes, characterizations, and dialogue, is actually a caustic satire on woman’s inhumanity to man and the vulgarity and perversity of a certain kind of city life. “Moon Lake,” “The Hitch-Hikers,” “The Wide Net,” “The Worn Path,” “Powerhouse” have their elements of pathos, and threaten, at various stages, to turn into tragedy. Yet the interplay of light and shadow is continuous; the weather shifts; the tone modulates, slowly or swiftly; and nothing is exactly as we expected it to be, except that in our bones we feel that it is very much like life—full of the fluctuations we are born to in an odd, painful, and exciting universe, in which dreams are always colliding with reality or embroidering it; the grotesque lies close to the lovely; and comedy always borders on tragedy or pathos. Powerhouse instinctively knows this when he picks something awful out of the air (“I got a telegram my wife is dead”), teases and plays with it (“Truth is something worse, I ain’t said what yet. It’s something hasn’t come to me, but I ain’t saying it won’t. And when it does, then want me to tell you?”), masters it, puts it in the world, in his fantastic art. And so does his creator.

Miss Welty’s central and universal concern is the mystery of the inner life. “Relationship is a pervading and changing mystery,” she has said; “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.” “Mystery” here suggests the enigma of man’s being, and his relation to the universe; it suggests also what is concealed, secret, inviolable in human beings, putting up the barriers, making our meaning and identity puzzling to ourselves. This particular theme is explored beautifully and poignantly in the story “A Still Moment,” in which evangelist, murderer, and naturalist share a common and yet disparate revelation of nature, looking at a snowy heron. Lorenzo’s shattering illumination, that “God had . . . given Love first and then Separateness, as though it did not matter to Him which came first,” sums up the yearning love of human beings, their desire for response and understanding, and the fundamental solitude experienced by many of the characters in these stories. They are poised alone; no other creature can fathom their hidden selves. Tom Harris of “The Hitch-Hikers” is one of these puzzled and lonely men, a generous sort, but rootless. His life is full of giving yet empty of permanent commitment; his love is freely floating yet weary, desolate. Moral loneliness, the burden of an inexpiable guilt that no one will recognize, afflicts Steve in “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden.” Mr. Marblehall’s is the loneliness of being ignored, and Livvie’s the loneliness of physical and emotional isolation from the world in which she naturally belongs. Livvie returns to life (the original title of that story was “Livvie Is Back”), and Old Phoenix is never for a moment really lost, even though her senses are dimmed with age and memory betrays her briefly when she reaches the end of her worn path. But not everyone is so harmonious as Phoenix, so lucky as Livvie.

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