On Writing

by Eudora Welty

  And so, plainly, we must distinguish plots not by their skeletons but by their full bodies; for they are embodiments, little worlds. Here is another: let us try to distinguish it as if it were literally a little world, and spinning closely now into our vision.

  Now, the first thing we notice about this story is that we can’t really see its solid outlines—it seems bathed in something of its own. It is wrapped in an atmosphere. This is what makes it shine, perhaps, as well as what obscures, at first glance, its plain real shape.

  We are bearing in mind that the atmosphere in a story may be not the least of its glories, and also the fact that it may give a first impression that will prove contrary to what lies under it. Some action stories fling off the brightest clouds of obscuring and dazzling light, like ours here. Penetrate that atmosphere and the object may show quite dark within, for all its clouds of speed, those primary colors of red and yellow and blue. It looks like one of Ernest Hemingway’s stories, and it is.

  A story behaves, it goes through motions—that’s part of it. Some stories leave a train of light behind them, meteorlike, so that much later than they strike our eyes we may see their meaning like an aftereffect. And Faulkner’s seem not meteors but comets; they have a course of their own that brings them around more than once; they reappear in their own time in the sense that they reiterate their meaning and show a whole further story over and beyond their single significance.

  If we have thought of Hemingway’s stories as being bare and solid as billiard balls, so scrupulously cleaned of adjectives, of every unneeded word, as they are, of being plain throughout as a verb is plain, we may come to think twice about it, from our stargazer distance. The atmosphere that cloaks D. H. Lawrence’s stories is of sensation, which is pure but thick cover, a cloak of self-illuminating air, but the atmosphere that surrounds Hemingway’s is just as thick and to some readers less illuminating. Action can indeed be inscrutable, more so than sensation can. It can be just as voluptuous, too, just as vaporous, and, as I am able to see it, much more desperately concealing.

  In one of Hemingway’s early stories, “Indian Camp,” Nick goes with his father, a doctor, to see a sick Indian woman. She is suffering in labor and the doctor operates on her without an anaesthetic. In the bunk above her head, her husband lies with a sore foot. After the operation is over and the child successfuly born, the husband is found to have slit his throat because he had not been able to bear his wife’s suffering. Nick asks, “Is dying hard, Daddy?” “No, I think it’s pretty easy,” his father says.

  Is this still a red and blue world? I see it as dark as night. Not that it is obscure; rather, it’s opaque. Action can be radiant, but in this writer who has action to burn, it is not. The stories are opaque by reason of his intention, which is to moralize. We are to be taught by Hemingway, who is instructive by method, that the world is dangerous and full of fear, and that there is a way we had better be. There is nothing for it but, with bravery, to observe the ritual. And so action can step in front of reality just as surely and with more agility than even sentimentality can. Our belligerent planet Mars has an unknown and unrevealed heart.

  Nevertheless, this is not where we stop seeing. For what comes of this, his method? In a painting by Goya, who himself used light, action and morality dramatically, of course, the bullring and the great turbulent wall of spectators are cut in diagonal halves by a great shadow of afternoon (unless you see it as the dark sliced away by the clear, golden light): half the action revealed and half hidden in dense, clotting shade. It’s like this in Hemingway’s plots. And it seems to be the halving that increases the story.

  One power of his, his famous use of dialogue, derives as well from the fact that something is broken in two; language slips, meets a barrier, a shadow is inserted between the speakers. It is an obscuring and at the same time a revealing way to write dialogue, and only great skill can manage it—and make us aware at the same time that communication of a limited kind is now going on as best it can.

  As we now see Hemingway’s story, not transparent, not radiant, but lit from outside the story, from a moral source, we see that light’s true nature: it is a spotlight. And his stories are all taking place as entirely in the present as plays we watch being acted on the stage. Pasts and futures are among the things his characters have not. Outside this light, they are nothing.

  Clearly, the fact that stories have plots in common is of no more account than that many people have blue eyes. Plots are, indeed, what the story writer sees with, and so do we as we read. The plot is the Why. Why? is asked and replied to at various depths; the fishes in the sea are bigger the deeper we go. To learn that character is a more awe-inspiring fish and (in a short story, though not, I think, in a novel) one some degrees deeper down than situation, we have only to read Chekhov. What constitutes the reality of his characters is what they reveal to us. And the possibility that they may indeed reveal everything is what makes fictional characters differ so greatly from us in real life; yet isn’t it strange that they don’t really seem to differ? This is one clue to the extraordinary magnitude of character in fiction. Characters in the plot connect us with the vastness of our secret life, which is endlessly explorable. This is their role. What happens to them is what they have been put here to show.

  In his story “The Darling,” the darling’s first husband, the theatre manager, dies suddenly because of the darling’s sweet passivity; this is the causality of fiction. In everyday or real life he might have held on to his health for years. But under Chekhov’s hand he is living and dying in dependence on, and in revelation of, Olenka’s character. He can only last a page and a half. Only by force of the story’s circumstance is he here at all; Olenka took him up to begin with because he lived next door.

  Olenka listened to Kukin with silent gravity, and sometimes tears came into her eyes. In the end his misfortunes touched her; she grew to love him. He was a small thin man, with a yellow face; as he talked his mouth worked on one side, and there was always an expression of despair on his face; yet he aroused a deep and genuine affection in her. She was always fond of someone, and could not exist without loving. In earlier days she had loved her papa, who now sat in a darkened room, breathing with difficulty; she had loved her aunt, who used to come every other year from Bryansk; and before that, when she was at school, she had loved her French master. She was a gentle, soft-hearted, compassionate girl, with mild, tender eyes and very good health. At the sight of her full rosy cheeks, her soft white neck with a little dark mole on it, and the kind, naïve smile, which came into her face when she listened to anything pleasant, men thought, “Yes, not half bad,” and smiled too, while lady-visitors could not refrain from seizing her hand in the middle of a conversation, exclaiming in a gush of delight, “You darling!”

  Kukin proposes and they are married.

  And when he had a closer view of her neck and her plump, fine shoulders, he threw up his hand and said “You darling!” … And what Kukin said about the theatre and the actors she repeated. Like him she despised the public for their ignorance and indifference to art; she took part in the rehearsals, she corrected the actors, she kept an eye on the behavior of the musicians, and when there was an unfavorable notice in the local paper, she shed tears, and then went to the editor’s office to set things right …

  And when Kukin dies, Olenka’s cry of heartbreak is this: “Vanitchka, my precious, my darling! Why did I ever meet you! Why did I know you and love you! Your poor brokenhearted Olenka is all alone without you!”

  With variations the pattern is repeated, and we are made to feel it as plot, aware of its clear open stress, the variations all springing from Chekhov’s boundless and minute perception of character. The timber-merchant, another neighbor, is the one who walks home from the funeral with Olenka. The outcome follows tenderly, is only natural. After three days, he calls. “He did not stay long, only about ten minutes, and he did not say much, but when he left, Olenka loved him—loved him so much that she lay a
wake all night in a perfect fever.”

  Olenka and Pustovalov get along very well together when they are married.

  “Timber gets dearer every year; the price rises twenty per cent,” she would say to her customers and friends … “And the freight!” she would add, covering her cheeks with her hands in horror, “the freight!” … It seemed to her that she had been in the timber trade for ages and ages; and that the most important and necessary thing in life was timber; and there was something intimate and touching to her in the very sound of words such as “post,” “beam,” “pole,” “batten,” “lath,” “plank,” and the like.

  Even in her dreams Olenka is in the timber business, dreaming of “perfect mountains of planks and boards,” and cries out in her sleep, so that Pustovalov says to her tenderly, “Olenka, what’s the matter, darling? Cross yourself!” But the timber merchant inevitably goes out in the timber yard one day without his cap on; he catches cold and dies, to leave Olenka a widow once more. “I’ve nobody, now you’ve left me, my darling,” she sobs after the funeral. “How can I live without you?”

  And the timber merchant is succeeded by a veterinary surgeon—who gets transferred to Siberia. But the plot is not repetition—it is direction. The love which Olenka bears to whatever is nearest her reaches its final and, we discover, its truest mold in maternalism: for there it is most naturally innocent of anything but formless, thoughtless, blameless embracing; the true innocence is in never perceiving. Only mother love could endure in a pursuit of such blind regard, caring so little for the reality of either life involved so long as love wraps them together, Chekhov tells us—unpretentiously, as he tells everything, and with the simplest of concluding episodes. Olenka’s character is seen purely then for what it is: limpid reflection, mindless and purposeless regard, love that falls like the sun and rain on all alike, vacant when there is nothing to reflect.

  We know this because, before her final chance to love, Olenka is shown to us truly alone:

  [She] got thinner and plainer; and when people met her in the street they did not look at her as they used to, and did not smile to her; evidently her best years were over and left behind, and now a new sort of life had begun for her, which did not bear thinking about … And what was worst of all, she had no opinions of any sort. She saw the objects about her and understood what she saw, but could not form any opinions about them, and did not know what to talk about. And how awful it is not to have any opinions! She wanted a love that would absorb her whole being, her whole soul and reason—that would give her ideas and an object in life, and would warm her old blood.

  The answer is Sasha, the ten-year-old son of the veterinary surgeon, an unexpected blessing from Siberia—a schoolchild. The veterinarian has another wife now, but this no longer matters. “Olenka, with arms akimbo, walked about the yard giving directions. Her face was beaming, and she was brisk and alert, as though she had waked from a long sleep …” “An island is a piece of land entirely surrounded by water,” Sasha reads aloud. “ ‘An island is a piece of land,’ she repeated, and this was the first opinion to which she gave utterance with positive conviction, after so many years of silence and dearth of ideas.” She would follow Sasha halfway to school, until he told her to go back. She would go to bed thinking blissfully of Sasha, “who lay sound asleep in the next room, sometimes crying out in his sleep, ‘I’ll give it to you! Get away! Shut up!’ ”

  The darling herself is the story; all else is sacrificed to her; deaths and departures are perfunctory and to be expected. The last words of the story are the child’s and a protest, but they are delivered in sleep, as indeed protest to the darlings of this world will always be—out of inward and silent rebellion alone, as this master makes plain.

  It is when the plot, whatever it is, is nearest to becoming the same thing on the outside as it is deep inside, that it is purest. When it is identifiable in every motion and progression of its own with the motions and progressions of the story’s feeling and its intensity, then this is plot put to its highest use.

  This brings us to another story.

  One evening, March was standing with her back to the sunset, her gun under her arm, her hair pushed up under her cap. She was half watching, half musing. It was her constant state. Her eyes were keen and observant, but her inner mind took no notice of what she saw. She was always lapsing into this odd, rapt state, her mouth rather screwed up. It was a question whether she was there, actually, consciously present, or not … What was she thinking about? Heaven knows. Her consciousness was, as it were, held back.

  She lowered her eyes and suddenly saw the fox. He was looking up at her. His chin was pressed down, and his eyes were looking up. They met her eyes. And he knew her. She was spellbound—she knew he knew her. So he looked into her eyes, and her soul failed her. He knew her, he was not daunted.

  She struggled, confusedly she came to herself, and saw him making off, with slow leaps over some fallen boughs, slow, impudent jumps. Then he glanced over his shoulder, and ran smoothly away. She saw his brush held smooth like a feather, she saw his white buttocks twinkle. And he was gone, softly, soft as the wind.

  In this long story by D. H. Lawrence, “The Fox,” March and Banford, two girls, run a chicken farm by themselves in the country. As we see, it has its fox. They struggle against his encroachments, also against poverty and the elements, until a young soldier on leave, Henry, appears in the door one night. He has a vague story about his grandfather’s once having lived here. March, the hunter and the man of the place, has not, as you know, shot the fox. But she has been, to use her word to herself, “impressed” by him. And here is Henry:

  He had a ruddy, roundish face, with fairish hair, rather long, flattened to his forehead with sweat. His eyes were blue, and very bright and sharp. On his cheeks, on the fresh ruddy skin, were fine fine hairs like a down, but sharper. It gave him a slightly glistening look … He stooped, thrusting his head forward … He stared brightly, very keenly, from girl to girl, particularly at March, who stood pale, with great dilated eyes. She still had the gun in her hand. Behind her, Banford, clinging to the sofa arm, was shrinking away, with half-averted head.

  So Henry, not on any account because of his cock-and-bull story, is taken in to spend his leave here. As expected by all, he proves himself a calculating, willful being, and proposes to marry March.

  He scarcely admitted his intention to himself. He kept it as a secret even from himself … He would have to go gently … It’s no good walking out into the forest and saying to the deer: “Please fall to my gun.” No, it is a slow, subtle battle … It is not so much what you do, when you go out hunting, as how you feel. You have to be subtle and cunning, and absolutely, fatally ready … It is a subtle, profound battle of wills, which takes place in the invisible. And it is a battle never finished till your bullet goes home … It is your own will which carries the bullet into the heart of your quarry … And it was as a young hunter that he wanted to bring down March as his quarry, to make her his wife.

  Dreams occur, the fox prowls, March and Banford suffer and argue while Henry, prowling, exerts and practices his will: the farm’s fox is disposed of by him.

  Here we are at the heart of this story: One night,

  March dreamed vividly. She dreamed she heard a singing outside, which she could not understand, singing that roamed round the house, in the fields and in the darkness. It moved her so, that she felt she must weep. She went out, and suddenly she knew it was the fox singing. He was very yellow and bright, like corn. She went nearer to him, but he ran away and ceased singing. He seemed near, and she wanted to touch him. She stretched out her hand, but suddenly he bit her wrist, and at the same instant, as she drew back, the fox, turning round to bound away, whisked his brush across her face, and it seemed his brush was on fire, for it seared and burned her mouth with a great pain. She awoke with the pain of it, and lay trembling as if she were really seared.

  Banford, the sensitive one, dies when Henry deliberately fells
a tree her way, and Henry and March marry and are to be unhappy and embattled forever after.

  And now, in Lawrence’s work, what of his extraordinary characters? Are they real, recognizable, neat men and women? Would you know them if you saw them? Not even, I think, if they began to speak on the street as they speak in his stories, in the very words—they would appear as deranged people. And for this there is the most reliable of reasons: Lawrence’s characters don’t really speak their words, and they’re not walking about on the street. They are playing like fountains or radiating like the moon or storming like the sea, or their silence is the silence of wicked rocks. It is borne home to us that Lawrence is writing of human relationships on earth in terms of his own heaven and hell, and on these terms plot and characters are alike sacrificed to something: that which Lawrence passionately believes to transcend both and which is known and found directly through the senses. It is the world of the senses that Lawrence writes in. He almost literally writes from within it. He is first wonderful at making a story world, a place, and then wonderful again when he inhabits it with six characters, the five senses and sex. And the plot is by necessity a symbolic one. We know straight from the start in “The Fox” that every point in the story is to be made subjectively. “He knew her. And she knew he knew her.” And we know she knew he knew her: this by his almost super-normal appeal to, and approach by way of, what can be seen, felt and heard. What has made this story strange is also what empowers us to understand it. It is hypnotic. Human relationships in his stories are made forces so strong that what they are (and what you and I should perhaps find indescribable) is simply, when we read him, accepted without question.