“Miz Welty,” the Southern boy writers all called her. They would have removed hats in her presence, had any of them been wearing one. Eudora Welty commanded the shy respect that a literary grand lady ought, although in person she was modest, retiring, self-deprecating—as if she might wish to disappear rather than stand on a platform. Perhaps she knew that her own disappearance was the surest way into the bodies of her fictional characters, into the landscape of their lives, and therefore into the hearts of their stories. Perhaps hers was a personality better suited to living a written rather than a public existence.
She died in July of 2001, a couple of months before the world underwent the most profound of its most recent transformations. Although she wrote many books and received the Pulitzer Prize, she is probably best known for the story in her oeuvre that least represents her: the ubiquitous “Why I Live at the P.O.,” an over-anthologized, oft-imitated light piece that showcases little of her writerly virtuosity and only ingeminates a regrettable regional pigeonholing. The story is a funny bit of unreliable narration, and a pleasure to hear Welty read on audiotape (“Burdyburdyburdyburdy!” she sings; “There I was over the hot stove, trying to stretch two chickens over five people and a completely unexpected child into the bargain, without one moment’s notice,” she complains). But because of its postmistress speaker’s relentless, nattering voice, the reader is robbed of Welty’s usual narrative presence, which is both more arresting and more bizarre. If not “Why I Live at the P.O.,” often an anthology will include “A Worn Path,” which comes closer to capturing Welty’s larger talents but still holds tight to the prescribed regionalism that many want to assign to its author.
Welty is more mysterious, universal, and downright scarily weird than either of these stories, even in combination, can properly display. She must frighten some anthologizers. Russell Banks helpfully championed her thoroughly eclectic—and, for undergraduates anyway, largely impenetrable—“No Place for You, My Love” in the anthology You’ve Got to Read This; while that story adequately conveys Welty’s bent toward the elliptical, it may overcompensate for everything “Why I Live at the P.O.” omits. The Best American Short Stories of the Century presents “The Hitchhikers,” a wonderfully haunting story of transience and transgression, ghosts and ghostliness, that nevertheless lacks the lighthearted whimsy of many of Welty’s best characters.
Welty’s magnificence at capturing place is well known; it is her trademark and is probably responsible for her notorious Southern identity. But she is also brilliant at capturing a place less fixed: the psychological terrain of her characters. She names the external world in all of its sensual pleasures, and then she turns her attention inward, to the state of mind and body of the person occupying that physical landscape. It is this internal scrutiny (a task never fully finished, one guesses, given the frequency with which she returns to it) that most impresses and mystifies the reader of Eudora Welty. Her characters ache to identify the unnamable and hold the intangible. They suffer the insufferable, and she, wordsmith, acts as medium between them and the reader, chronicling their restless torment.
The most disturbing of her stories present characters in occasional moments of frightened and frightening cognizance of despair and isolation. Consider Nina, the child character whose on-again, off-again sensibility oversees “Moon Lake”:
Again she thought of a pear—not the everyday gritty kind that hung on the tree in the backyard, but the fine kind sold on trains and at high prices, each pear with a paper cone wrapping it alone—beautiful, symmetrical, clean pears with thin skins, with snow-white flesh so juicy and tender that to eat one baptized the whole face, and so delicate that while you urgently ate the first half, the second was already beginning to turn brown. To all fruits, and especially to those fine pears, something happened—the process was so swift, you were never in time for them. It’s not the flowers that are fleeting, Nina thought, it’s the fruits—it’s the time when things are ready that they don’t stay.
The story offers no particular solace for Nina’s mute understanding, which I hesitate to even name understanding. Perhaps a better word would be observation—an observation of the highest, most oblique order. But “Moon Lake” is both too long and too diffuse to anthologize regularly; and Russell Banks notes that readers under the age of forty won’t fully appreciate “No Place for You, My Love.”
The happy compromise—the story that does not underrepresent Welty’s sly admiration for regional humor and dialect, yet also does not oversimplify the characters who occupy that region and whose majesty is often inarticulate; the story that honors human nature above its intellect without becoming sentimental; the story that makes clear Welty’s abiding respect for mystery without forsaking traditional narrative in favor of it; the story that spans the long continuum between the silly and sublime, neither privileging nor sacrificing either, but instead accommodating each in such a way that the reader can see their necessary proximity to one another in order to fully and accurately describe life, to give it adequate shape and luster—is “The Wide Net,” title story of Welty’s 1943 collection. If there must be only one story to stand for her as a writer—and the ever-expanding, depressingly representative fiction anthologies indicate that it is so—this is the one I would choose.
“The Wide Net” emphasizes the seemingly contradictory strengths of Welty’s best abilities. This story conjoins the peculiar varieties of her writing styles with such deftness that its effect on the reader feels spiritual. Given that the story’s subject is a marriage, with all of the supernal attributes therewith associated (the private, the unspoken, the inimitable), it is nothing short of a miracle that this artist has managed to pin the piece to the page. And yet she has.
The plot of “The Wide Net” is both ludicrous and mythic. In the ludicrous version, it goes like this: a man, after having been out drinking all night, “sitting on [his] neck in a ditch singing,” returns home at daybreak to find that his wife, Hazel, three months pregnant, has left him a note. Without even reading her words, he decides that she has drowned herself in the river, his logic running thus: “She jumped in the river because she was scared to death of the water and that was to make it worse.” Following similar logic, he retrieves his drunken friend from the night before, along with an entourage of other yokels and dimwits, to help him drag an enormous net through the water in hopes of fishing Hazel out. The day proceeds with the man (William Wallace) and his motley crew dredging up alligators, drubbing a dwarf, eating some fish, catching sight of a snake the size of a dragon, enduring a feud and a rainstorm (complete with flaming trees), and orchestrating a parade. It results, remarkably, in William Wallace’s successful return home, complete with newly acquired insight and adulthood.
To account for the transformation of character, you have to realize the mythic terms of the hero’s day. He has embarked on a journey, a quest for his wife that involves consulting his friend Virgil, under the supervision of a helpful elder, Doc, and that eventually entails his diving into both the river and the dark realms of self-discovery, “about which words . . . could not speak . . . the elation that comes of great hopes and changes.” His heroic quest involves trials of various sorts, each of which enables him to come back a man rather than the boy he departed as. William Wallace returns home from his adventure, at dusk, to find his wife in their house, apparently never having left it, “not changed one bit.” He wasn’t able to see her earlier despite her being so close he “could have put out [his] hand and touched” her. He was, in that moment, both figuratively and literally blind to her. She had “vanished.” She warns him, gently, that he oughtn’t to stay out overnight again, that “next time will be different.”
Despite the story’s laughable premise, William Wallace himself is not laughable (although there are plenty of very funny exchanges in the story). He is foolish without being a fool, not unlike a child, whose knowledge of the world, though largely inarticulate, is vast and no less sophisticated. “The Wide Net” is completely allegorical and yet thoroughly literal. The distance between those extremes is negotiated because of Welty’s ability to move with alacrity between them, because of the natural way she insists that the two co-exist harmoniously. In a lesser writer’s hands, William Wallace would be insignificant as a character, useful only as a symbol. Or in a different, yet also lesser, writer’s hands, William Wallace’s importance as a mythic figure would be neglected in deference to local color. But William Wallace, like all of Welty’s creations, is precisely who he is: in this case a boy inducted into manhood over the course of a day’s quest that he accidentally, intuitively, sets himself upon. His grail is his wife, under the new terms of their relationship, which is shifting by virtue of biology. He must give up his youth in order to become a man, a father. His heroic quest would do Joseph Campbell proud, complete as it is with a sage, a vision, a conquest, a return.
Welty inhabits her hillbillies with the identical serious tenderness that she does her suave urbanites. This patient respect raises all of her characters without altering them. With William Wallace, for instance, Welty neither patronizes nor romanticizes him with the vivid, impressionistic landscape of his journey. He is both as profoundly lost as Nina in “Moon Lake” and as ridiculously funny as the postmistress in “Why I Live at the P.O.”
There are many reasons Welty is to be admired and emulated. Primary among them is this thorough investment that she makes in the lives of her characters. She was a small, self-effacing woman, vessel of a thousand voices. In effacing self, she created others. Her work does more than observe the human condition; it possesses it: dreamily, comically, mythically, mysteriously. And it is into a trancelike state that she invites us all. I envy the reader who has yet to fully delve into the fiction of Eudora Welty.
Photo: Marion Ettlinger
Not an Ecotone subscriber? Read Eudora Welty’s classic story “The Wide Net” in issue number 8.
