November 16, 1941

A Curtain of Green

By MARIANNE HAUSER

A CURTAIN OF GREEN By Eudora Welty. With an introduction by Katherine Anne Porter.

ew contemporary books have ever impressed me quite as deeply as this book of stories by Eudora Welty. It seems to me almost impossible to discuss her work detachedly. Reading it twice has not given me any critical distance, but has only drawn me closer into its rich and magic world. To explain just why these stories impress one so appears as difficult as to define why an ordinary face, encountered by chance in the street, might suddenly reveal miraculous beauty, through a smile perhaps, or through an unexpected expression of sadness.

Many of the stories are dark, weird and often unspeakably sad in mood, yet there is no trace of personal frustration in them, neither harshness nor sentimental resignation; but an alert, constant awareness of life as a whole, and that profound, intuitive understanding of life which enables the artist to accept it.

It is this simple, natural acceptance of everything, of beauty and ugliness, insanity, cruelty and gentle faith which helps the author create her characters with such clear sureness. Lily Daw, the feeble-minded girl who wanted to marry a xylophone player, the little clubfooted Negro, the two hitch-hikers or the traveling salesman are only a few of the many characters which the reader will not easily forget.

On each page one senses the author's fanatic love of people. With a few lines she draws the gesture of a deaf-mute, the windblown skirts of a Negro woman in the fields, the bewilderment of a child in the sickroom of an old people's asylum--and she has told more than many an author might tell in a novel of six hundred pages.

How does she achieve this? Through the colorful flexibility of her style, the choice of her plot, the clever handling of her climax? Partly, but not essentially. Miss Welty's writing is not intellectual primarily, and what makes it so unique cannot be learned in short-story courses. As Katherine Anne Porter tells in her fine introduction, Miss Welty has never studied the writing craft at any college, or belonged to any literary group. She was born a writer, and could do nothing else but write. Her art is spontaneous, and of that poetic quality which values the necessity of form by instinct. Her stories escape any technical analysis. To point out that they are right in form seems to me quite as superfluous as to state that a tree is right in form.

Her descriptions of people and things never remain mere observations, but become, as it were, part of a deeper law and meaning, not through conscious symbolism or abstraction, but merely, because they are so completely seen and felt. There is in some of her stories an almost surrealistic note, an intimate fusion of dream and reality, reminiscent at times of Kafka.

The background of most of the stories is a small town in Mississippi, the author's native State. However, there is nothing particularly regional about them. They could in a way happen anywhere, though certainly not to any one. For the mood and atmosphere of each story form a close unity with its specific characters.

There are no wars going on behind the scenes, no revolutions or headline-disasters. The tragedies which Miss Welty invokes occur in the backyards of life. She needs no outside stimulus to recreate the depths of human suffering.

If Miss Welty's writing is detached from immediate controversial subjects, it has nothing to do with "escapism." I would not think it necessary to make this point if the word had not become a standard expression for any type of literature that does not report or lecture. Escapism is not so bad a word, though if applied thoughtfully one might find that many a war story or newspaper report might come under its heading. But Miss Welty's stories never escape from anything except from the danger of literary falsehood. She rather explores, follows up and remains within her story to the last to bear the responsibility of her deeper knowledge.

I feel certain that her stories will live for a long time. Her talent is of that rare kind which holds, even at its strongest moments, a hidden wealth of still greater strength, unexpressed as yet. This is why I believe that we can expect much from her in the future, and even more.

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