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.īut it sometimes produces fine results. This is a venerable literary custom which, if transferred Instead, then, people began to ask her to write novels. It generally seemed unreasonable, however, to ask Miss Welty to write even better than she was already writing about the South she knew. 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. 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 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 She gives its commonplaces of life and death the point and savor of her unmistakable style. It is her own South, true and recognizable-yetĪ South no one else could write about as she does, because no one else can see it through her distinctly individual perception. 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. 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. Miss Welty's stories go deep into the motives and 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. 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 asĪ skillful and sensitive writer without the assiduous, if not always relevant, help of critical counsel.
What you might call the O-O-group of annual anthologies named for Mr. They had a wry, precise shine to them that was like nothing anyone else was writing, or, for that matter, has written since. To perfection in their contemporary field. 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
ApA Fine Novel of the Deep South By CHARLES POORE
0 kommentar(er)
