A Companion to the American Short Story
Page 61
Anne Porter . New York : Harcourt, Brace ,
— — — . “ Pale Horse, Pale Rider . ” Southern Review
1965 .
3 (Winter 1938 ): 417 – 66 .
— — — . “ The Cracked Looking - Glass . ” Scribner ’ s
— — — . Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels .
91 (May 1932 ): 271 – 6 , 313 – 20.
New York : Harcourt, Brace , 1939 .
— — — . “ A Day ’ s Work . ” Nation 110 (February
— — — . Papers. Special Collections, University of
10, 1940 ): 205 – 7 .
Maryland Libraries, College Park, Md.
— — — . “ The Downward Path to Wisdom . ”
— — — . “ Rope . ” The Second American Caravan .
Harper ’ s Bazaar 2731 (December 1939 ): 72 – 3 ,
Eds. Alfred Kreymborg , Lewis Mumford , and
140, 142, 144 – 5, 147.
Paul Rosenfeld . New York : Macaulay , 1928 .
— — — . “ The Faithful Princess . ” Everyland 2
362 – 8 .
(February 1920 ): 42 – 3 .
— — — . “ The Shattered Star . ” Everyland 2 ( January
— — — . “ The Fig Tree . ” Harper ’ s 220 (June 1960 ):
1920 ): 422 – 3 .
55 – 9 .
— — — . “ The Source . ” Accent (Spring 1941 ):
— — — . “ Flowering Judas . ” Hound & Horn 3
144 – 7 .
(April – June 1930 ): 316 – 31 .
— — — . “ That Tree . ” Virginia Quarterly Review 10
— — — . Flowering Judas . New York : Harcourt,
(July 1934 ): 351 – 61 .
Brace , 1930 .
— — — . “ Theft . ” Gyroscope (November 1929 ):
— — — . Flowering Judas and Other Stories . New
unpaged.
York : Harcourt, Brace , 1935 .
— — — . “ Two Plantation Portraits: ‘ The Last
— — — . “ The Grave . ” Virginia Quarterly Review
Leaf. ’ ” Virginia Quarterly Review 11 (January
(April 1935 ): 177 – 83 .
1935 ): 88 – 92 .
— — — . “ Hacienda . ” Virginia Quarterly Review 8
— — — .
“ Two
Plantation
Portraits:
‘ Uncle
(October 1932 ): 556 – 69 .
Jimbilly ’ ” (later published as “ The Witness ” ).
— — — . Hacienda . New York : Harrison of Paris ,
Virginia Quarterly Review 11 (January 1935 ):
1934 .
85 – 8 .
— — — . “ He . ” New Masses 3 (October 1927 ):
— — — . “ Virgin Violeta . ” Century 109 (December
13 – 15 .
1924 ): 261 – 8 .
276
Ruth M. Alvarez
— — — . “ You Are What You Read . ” Vogue 164
— — — . Katherine Anne Porter: The Life of an Artist .
(October 1974 ): 248 .
Jackson : University Press of Mississippi , 2005 .
Stout , Janis . Katherine Anne Porter: A Sense of — — — . Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter ’ s
the Times . Charlottesville : University Press of
Fiction
.
Athens
:
University of Georgia Press
,
Virginia , 1995 .
1985 .
Unrue , Darlene Harbour , ed. Critical Essays on Walsh , Thomas F. Katherine Anne Porter and Mexico:
Katherine Anne Porter . New York : G. K. Hall ,
The Illusion of Eden . Austin : University of Texas
1997 .
Press , 1992 .
18
Eudora Welty and the Short Story:
Theory and Practice
Ruth D. Weston
Eudora Welty (1909 – 2001) was awarded many prizes for her fi ction, including her
fi rst Guggenheim in 1942 and the Pulitzer in 1973; and she received many other
honors, including the L é gion d ’ Honneur Fran ç ais in 1996. Welty ’ s work has attracted
a perceptive and appreciative cadre of scholars, beginning with the editors of the
Southern Review , who published some of her fi rst stories. One of those editors was
Robert Penn Warren, whose early essay “ The Love and Separateness in Miss Welty ”
not only identifi ed a major theme in her fi ction but also began the close reading that
is necessary for its full appreciation. He also, “ at the risk of incompleteness, or even
distortion, ” named an important theme in her fi ction, that of “ Innocence and Experi-
ence. ” In “ A Still Moment, ” the naturalist Audubon loves the snowy heron he fi nds
along Mississippi ’ s Natchez Trace; but he must kill the beautiful bird to fully know
it, to see and paint it accurately, and thus to share it. Warren sees in this situation
“ an irony of limit and contamination ” (Warren 46; Welty , Collected Stories 189 – 99).
For Audubon, it is also the artist ’ s dilemma: “ that the best he could make would be
… a dead thing and not a live thing, never the essence. ” He realizes his essential
isolation: he can never share his vision fully. Lorenzo, the evangelist who encounters
Audubon along the Trace, has a similar experience; however, he sees the heron as
God ’ s love “ come visible, ” but then taken away. He “ could understand God ’ s giving
Separateness fi rst and then giving Love to follow and heal in its wonder; but God had
given Love fi rst and then Separateness, as though it did not matter to Him which
came fi rst. Perhaps it was that God never counted the moments of Time. … Time
did not occur to God. ” Other major modernist themes voiced here are alienation,
ambiguity, and the preoccupation with time, especially differing perceptions of time.
Welty most often develops the theme of Love and Separateness in terms of human
relationships, especially the tensions between individuals and family or community,
and of the risks inherent in the bonds of love and in breaking those bonds. “ A Curtain
of Green, ” the title story of her fi rst collection, refers to the “ curtain ” of wild vegetal
growth that Mrs. Larkin grows to shield her from further hurts of the world after her
278
Ruth D. Weston
husband
’
s death; but it also suggests Welty
’
s stated objective in writing fi ction:
“
to part a curtain
…
that falls between people, the veil of indifference to each
other ’ s presence, each other ’ s wonder, each other ’ s human plight ” ( Welty , Eye of the
Story 355).
In spite of the popularity of Welty ’ s memoir - like autobiography, One Writer ’ s Begin-
nings , and the prizes awarded her novels, she thought of herself as “ more of a natural
short story writer, ” as she told Alice Walker ( Prenshaw , Conversations 132). 1 Indeed,
The Robber Bridegroom and The Ponder Heart are more nearly novellas; and both Delta
Wedding and The Optimist ’ s Daughter began as short stories. Her short story cycle The
Golden Apples has been called the very center of her canon (Pitavy - Souques, “ Blazing
Butterfl y ” 537), and it is in the tradition of the short story that Welty ’ s literary legacy
is greatest. She is, in fact, one of a select few short story writers whose essays are
&
nbsp; quoted by theorists of the genre. Susan Lohafer writes that, historically, “ the ones who
theorized about stories were the ones who wrote them: Poe, Chekhov, Henry James,
H. E. Bates, Frank O ’ Connor, Eudora Welty ” . 2 Both Welty ’ s short stories and her
theoretical essays about fi ction manifest aspects of the genre as it is described by some
of its fi nest practitioners, including its mixture of realism and lyricism, its formal
aesthetic patterning, and its focus on the nature of storytelling. These aspects, of
course, overlap and complement each other in the fi ction.
Charles E. May notes that “ despite the ‘ new realism ’ introduced by Chekhov, Joyce,
and Anderson early in the century, the short story still retained its links to its older
mythic and romantic forms ” ; Eudora Welty is among the writers he lists who combine
traits of this new realistic style of such writers as Hemingway and Babel with the
more mythic style of Faulkner and Dinesen (May 19).
Welty often pointed to the lyric basis for the short story ( Eye of the Story 108).
The vocabulary that describes the lyric/realist nature of the modern short story
comes from several sources, two of the most important of which are James Joyce and
his American counterpart, Sherwood Anderson. Joyce ’ s Dubliners illustrated his lyric
concept of the “ epiphany, ” a momentary manifestation of some truth revealed to a
character; and Anderson
’ s Winesbwrg, Ohio , like Joyce ’ s “ The Dead, ” revealed the
short form as one that “ focused more on lyric moments of realization than linear
events ” (May 59). Welty ’ s theory and practice suggest that her understanding of the
lyric/realist style derives not only from the tradition of Joyce and Anderson but in
large part from Anton Chekhov, especially in terms of their mutual use of the tech-
nique that one of Chekhov
’
s early critics called his
“
impressionistic
”
tendencies.
3
The aspects of literary impressionism that enhance Welty ’ s stories include her per-
vasive use of vivid sensory “ brush strokes ” to suggest a character ’ s fl eeting impres-
sions of reality from various perspectives and at signifi cant moments. She also creates
discontinuous narrative sequences in dreams, memory, or other altered states of con-
sciousness; these passages depict psychological realism, to be sure, but they also
suggest the fragmentary or ambiguous nature of modern life. Nor it is beside the
point that a Welty story must be seen at the remove of thoughtful consideration of
the whole before understanding can begin to coalesce, just as an Impressionist
Eudora
Welty
279
painting must be viewed from a certain distance, so that the viewer ’ s eye may com-
plete the artist ’ s work.
The short story ’ s focus on a single impression, also one of Edgar Allan Poe ’ s famous
dicta, is consistent with what Ernst Cassirer called “ mythical thinking … [in which]
the entire self is given up to a single impression, is ‘ possessed ’ by it and, on the other
hand, there is the utmost tension between the subject and its object, the outer world ”
(Cassirer 33). In her essay “ Place in Fiction, ” Welty speaks to the lyric attributes of
such mythopoeic thinking when she declares that the arts of writing and painting are
very close, asserting that “ impressionism brought not the likeness - to - life but the
mystery of place onto canvas.
”
She reinforces that concept in terms of a literary
“ canvas, ” as well as that of the lyric/realist nature of the modern short story, with her
comment that her story “ No Place For You, My Love, ” from The Bride of the Innisfallen
and Other Stories , was “ a realistic story in which the reality was mystery. ” And yet,
always sensitive to the natural world, Welty ’ s stories evince her photographer ’ s eye
for the realistic detail ( Eye of the Story 118, 114).
Lyric Realism in “ Flowers for Marjorie ”
From early on, commentaries on Welty ’ s fi ction have remarked its mixture of lyricism
and realism. In “ Flowers for Marjorie ” ( Collected Stories 98 – 106), from her fi rst collec-
tion, A Curtain of Green , lyric realism is manifest in the racing emotions and frag-
mented sense perceptions of the unemployed and desperate Howard, after he has
murdered his pregnant wife and fl ed into New York ’ s bleak streets where, ironically,
he is awarded the key to the city. The story begins in mundane, real time, with the
almost naturalistic description of the feet of men exhausted from seeking work during
the Great Depression. Welty observed and photographed such despair, both as a junior
publicity agent for the federal Works Progress Administration in Mississippi during
the 1930s, and also in New York City. 4 The opening scene in “ Flowers for Marjorie ”
is similar to that in Welty ’ s photograph Union Square, New York, 1930s , in which
people sit on a park bench between two “ bracketing clocks [that] show the time to
be 3 : 35 … [suggesting that] they have no jobs to command their awareness of time ”
(Pollack and Marrs 248). Those clocks are like the many images in “ Flowers for Mar-
jorie ” that contrast natural time with artifi cial time, as they clearly identify Welty
with other great modernist writers for whom the theme of time is crucial, and who
often use narrative distortion of time to reveal a character ’ s perception of time as
moving either faster or slower than “ clock time. ” “ The time as we know it subjec-
tively, ” Welty explains, “ is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is
the continuous thread of revelation ” ( One Writer ’ s Beginnings 69).
By the end of section one in “ Flowers for Marjorie, ” the as yet unnamed protagonist
has mostly kept his eyes shut against the world around him, as well as against the
thought of his waiting wife. When Howard runs back to their apartment, having
given up looking for a job, he must confront Marjorie, who is a comforting presence
280
Ruth D. Weston
like their Mississippi home; but at the same time she is a mocking reproach to him
in his unfruitful search. Unlike the pessimistic Howard, Marjorie is expectant in two
ways: pregnant and hopeful for the future, in spite of their current plight. He fi nds
her as composed as ever, looking perhaps as if the “ excess of life in her rounding body ”
leads her to ignore him. After the story ’ s opening in realistic prose, the reader enters
lyric space and time, in which every gesture, every detail of vocabulary and pattern
of language, is signifi cant. At the level of language, historical, literary, and cultural
meanings can well up in a single word or image, as Welty suggests by her remark,
“ We start from scratch, and words don ’ t ” ( Eye of the Story 134). At the level of plot,
the theory of narrative time includes Frank O ’ Connor ’ s idea that in the short story,
“ since a whole lifetime must be crowded into a few minutes, those minutes must be
carefully chosen indeed and lit by an unearthly glow, one that enables us to distinguish
present, past, and future as though they were all contemporaneous ” (O ’ Connor 22).
In the fi rst of three fl ower scenes in the story, Howard sees a pansy Marjorie has found
on a morning ’ s walk and placed in the buttonhole of her coat. The fl ower radiates
with just such an “ unearthly glow ” ; and in Howard ’ s imagination its “ dark red veins
and edges … [begin to] assume the … curves of a mountain on the horizon of a desert,
the veins becoming crevasses, the delicate edges the giant worn lips of a sleeping
crater. ” Peter Schmidt reads the scene, especially the “ giant worn lips ” image, as
evidence of Howard ’ s fear of women and his sense of entrapment. Indeed, Howard is
one of many Welty characters – male and female – who struggle against feelings of
entrapment. 5
When Marjorie asks if Howard has eaten, he is enraged that she, who seems so
self - assured, has the temerity to ask about “ his hunger and weakness! ” His response
is to stab her with a kitchen knife and to go again into the city, where he wanders in
an almost Joycean phantasmagoria of artifi cial gratifi cations. But New York City ’ s
mocking fa ç ade of commercial plenty is ironically contradicted in Howard ’ s imagina-
tion by the wastelandian images of a desert, a crater, and a burning fl ower. Howard
himself is “ ablaze with horror ” from his day ’ s experiences, one of which is noticing
the subway sign that threatens: “ God sees me, ” recalling the wastelandian scene from
F. Scott Fitzgerald ’ s The Great Gatsby , in which a huge eye on an optician ’ s billboard
ad looms over an ash pit. After the murder, Howard is so devoid of feeling that he
does not even notice when he is hit by a bicycle. With ironic timing, it is now that
he experiences two windfalls: fi rst, a slot machine jackpot; then red roses and the key
to the city. He runs back to Marjorie in a surreal state, thinking perhaps that he
himself is the one dead.
Howard
’
s confusion between reality and his imagination contributes to what
Dani è le Pitavy - Souques calls a Welty character ’ s “ doubling upon one ’ s self … [which
is] true not only of ‘ moments, ’ but of the short stories themselves as structures. ” In
one of the most insightful comments on Welty, Pitavy - Souques goes on to say that
the stories in The Golden Apples “ are built on this endless refl ection, which doubles