April 14, 1946
By CHARLES POORE
DELTA WEDDING By Eudora Welty. |
hen Eudora Welty's short stories about the South began to appear--was it as long as eight or nine years ago?--they seemed to be pretty close to perfection in their contemporary field. They had a wry, precise shine to them that was like nothing anyone else was writing, or, for that matter, has written since. What you might call the O-O-group of annual anthologies named for Mr. O'Brien and Mr. O. Henry--soon began to laurel them, and there were amiable arguments between critics as to just who had discovered Miss Welty, overlooking the fairly obvious fact that Miss Welty had discovered herself, emerging as a skillful and sensitive writer without the assiduous, if not always relevant, help of critical counsel.
What was apparent was that here was a new talent, sparkling and deep, combining the sensibility of Virginia Woolf's moody brilliance with an uncommon sense of the American realistic tradition. Miss Welty's stories go deep into the motives and moods and compulsions that move her characters--but you never doubt that they live and have their being not far from the streets of Jackson and the bayous and cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta country or Natchez country.
It is not William Faulkner's Gothic South she writes about any more than it is the South of Caroline Gordon or Erskine Caldwell or Ellen Glasgow or the ancestor-haunted writers who come and go with the wind. It is her own South, true and recognizable--yet a South no one else could write about as she does, because no one else can see it through her distinctly individual perception. She gives its commonplaces of life and death the point and savor of her unmistakable style. To go further and say that the same point and savor would appear if she were writing about people in the Puget Sound country or Barsetshire would be an oversimplification, ignoring the heritage and environment that go into the making of a writer's style.
In discussions of Miss Welty's stories there have always, of course, been lurking comparisons to the technique of Katherine Mansfield and the method of Katherine Anne Porter or any other talented short-story writer who happened also to he a woman--though when it was clear that her ballad-like tales were not designed to solve the more durable problems of her place and time there was, as well, an opportunity to compare her with Henry James.
It generally seemed unreasonable, however, to ask Miss Welty to write even better than she was already writing about the South she knew. Instead, then, people began to ask her to write novels. This is a venerable literary custom which, if transferred to painting, would harass good easel- artists with demands that they go in for wall-wide murals; if transferred to sports, would urge champion hundred-yard runners to concentrate on the mile or the marathon.
But it sometimes produces fine results. It certainly has in Miss Welty's case. Her full-length novel, "Delta Wedding," has all the excellencies of her short stories with all the advantages of a wider pattern. It gives her a chance to tell us more about her people and their ways of life; it gives us the pleasure of seeing a full drama rather than a one-act play. And, beyond that, it is true to human life as you will find it at a considerable distance from the Mississippi Delta.
Nothing could be simpler than the outline of the story Miss Welty tells in "Delta Wedding"; nothing could be more complex than the novel's pattern of relationships and reactions. Yet the complexities of individual lives are never blurred in the cheery bedlam of life among the Fairchilds at Shellmound--the rustically feudal cotton barony they all move through with so much personal feeling and general exuberance.
The Fairchild clan has gathered for the wedding of Dabney, the second daughter of the family--in her particular generation--and Troy Flavin, who is the overseer, a man as ruddy-haired as a miller out of Chaucer and as unsuitable in the eyes of various members of the family. But they seldom say so, out loud. They express it through their attitudes, through apparent irrelevancies, through the way they live and treat each other.
For the light comes obliquely in Miss Welty's writing, but it comes from every direction, so that in the end everything has been illuminated and you know the Fairchild's world inside and out. Miss Welty does not tell you, she takes you and shows you; she does not lecture you, she lets her characters do all the talking, all the doing. The chance remark of one of the children (there are children of all ages in "Delta Wedding," each sharply defined); the soliloquy of one of the older relatives, people living in a twilight between Shiloh and Calvin Coolidge's America; the serene and affectionate (yet really lethal) maneuvers for place and power forever going on, mean more than pages of exposition.
The time is 1923, in the late summer when the semi-tropical heat hung over river and bayou and field and played its own part in affecting characters and tempers. We see the scene sometimes through the eyes of a girl of 9 whose mother has died and who has come to Shellmound on a kind of trial visit that will decide whether she is to become a permanent member of the family or be sent back to her non-Fairchild father in Jackson; sometimes through the eyes of one of the older members of the family; sometimes through the pages of the eldest daughter's diary; sometimes through the eyes of outsiders or relatives-by-marriage who, however close they may approach the gaieties and mysteries
of the impulsively warm-hearted clan, know there will for them always be ultimate barriers.
The interplay of family life, with a dozen different people saying and doing a dozen different things all at the same time, is wonderfully handled by Miss Welty so that no detail is lost, every detail had its place in the pattern of the whole. The transitions are so smoothly made that you seem to be all over the place at once, knowing the living members of three generations and all the skeletons and ghosts.
And gradually you see that this is not so much a late-blooming family feudalism as it is a perpetual matriarchy, that, though the men may think they rule, it is the women who really rule: holding on to the land, holding the family together, while the men go to seed or ruin or to die in Civil War battles or the Argonne.
In a single episode Miss Welty illuminates the whole world of the Fairchilds. The episode was a near tragedy. One of the older Fairchilds, the admired and bedeviled George, had of his own free will stayed on a railway trestle, with a dimwitted young relative whose foot was caught between the ties. They had no business there in the first place. Fortunately, the oncoming train stopped in time. (Perhaps no train would presume to run over a Fairchild.) But it was the gesture that mattered. To the Fairchilds who told the story--over and over again--it was an amusing episode; to outsiders it was a piece of reckless quixotry typical of the Fairchilds, the essence of Fairchildism. And Fairchildism, with all its admirable qualities and all its faults, is not, perhaps, confined to the people who represent it in the pages of "Delta Wedding."
