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A CURTAIN OF GREEN (1941)

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Rose Feld. New YorkHerald Tribune Books,November 16, 1941,pp. 10, 12.

In a foreword warm with critical apprecia-tion and generous encouragement, Kather-ine Anne Porter introduces a collectionof short stories by a comparatively newwriter, Eudora Welty. That Miss Portershould be attracted by the tales publishedunder the title, “A Curtain of Green,” isnot strange for they have a great kinshipto her own fine work, possessing a qualityof mood which surrounds and gives mean-ing to the incident. In large measure thisis a peculiarly feminine genre representedat its best by writers like Virginia Woolf,Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Bowen,Kay Boyle and Katherine Anne Porter. Theexcellence of several of Miss Welty’s storiesindicates that eventually she may belongwith these: the greater number of them,however, are interesting as examples of thework of an artist who is still in process ofperfecting a technique which will sustainincident as well as mood.

As far as formal or conventional plot isconcerned, the stories evade retelling. Butbeyond the incident or series of incidentsaround which Miss Welty builds her tales,lies the pressure of atmosphere which givessignificance to her characters and her facts.Most of her stories are placed in smallcommunities of her native state, Missis-sippi, and carry the intimacy and intensityof narrow-range observation.

Practically all of the tales hold a noteof bitterness and frustration. In “Lily Dawand the Three Ladies,” Miss Welty tells atwisted story of a half-wit girl. Left alone,Lily might have worked out some destinyof her own; pushed around by the well

intentioned women of Victory, she is leftin a state of dreadful confusion. “Keela,the Outcast Indian Maiden” (Miss Weltyneeds some one to edit her titles) is anothertale of harrowing bewilderment. A youthcomes to a little town in Mississippi insearch of a Negro cripple whom he hadunwittingly exploited in a circus. The taleholds horror and suppressed passion andas Miss Welty tells it, and intends it, thereader’s sympathy goes out not to the vic-tim of the frightful hoax, but to the tor-tured youth who realizes he can make noretribution. “Clytie,” “Old Mr. Marble-hill,” “A Curtain of Green,” “Why I Liveat the P. O.,” carry a mood of incipientmadness. In all of them, the characters,twisted for various reasons away from thepath of normal experience, make dreadfuladjustments to life.

Two of Miss Welty’s best stories dealwith traveling salesmen. In “The Hitch-Hikers,” she tells a tale of a fatality aris-ing out of casual kindness; in “Death ofa Traveling Salesman” the story of a shoedrummer who discovers how unbearablyempty his life is in comparison with hum-ble people he thought he despised. Againin “Flowers for Marjorie” and in “Power-house” Miss Welty devotes herself to thetheme of death as an escape from frustra-tion and confusion.

Like Katherine Mansfield, she has ayearning feeling for the world of child-hood. Two of the tales, “A Visit of Char-ity” and “A Memory” turn upon the help-lessness of a child against the assault ofthe adult world. In the first Miss Welty’sbitterness embraces the child as well asthe old women she visits in the charityward; in the second it is directed againstthe vulgarity of humanity. “The Whistle”is a tale of two defeated creatures whippedby suffering into a frenzy of destruction;“The Keys” a weird sketch of a couple ofdeaf mutes seeking a talisman of hope. In“Petrified Man,” a tale about a criminal

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who evaded the law by a dreadfulimposture, Miss Welty comes nearest toshowing a sense of humor but even here itis made caustic by her rejection of humanfrailties. Of all the stories, “A Worn Path”comes closest to holding warmth and kind-ness. In portraying the old Negro womanwho travels miles to bring a Christmas toyto her sick grandchild, Miss Welty writeswith warmth that holds no searing quality.

As a whole, “A Curtain of Green”shows too great a preoccupation withthe abnormal and grotesque. Some daysome one might explore this tendencyof Southern writers. Besides serving asan explanatory introduction to the book,Miss Porter’s foreword is excellent as anessay on the short story and its place inAmerican fiction.

Marianne Hauser. “‘ACurtain of Green’ andOther New Works ofFiction.” New York TimesBook Review, November16, 1941, p. 6.

Few contemporary books have everimpressed me quite as deeply as this bookof stories by Eudora Welty. It seems tome almost impossible to discuss her workdetachedly. Reading it twice has not givenme any critical distance, but has onlydrawn me closer into its rich and magicworld. To explain just why these storiesimpress one so appears as difficult as todefine why an ordinary face, encounteredby chance in the street, might suddentlyreveal miraculous beauty, through a smileperhaps, or through an unexpected expres-sion of sadness.

Many of the stories are dark, weird andoften unspeakably sad in mood, yet thereis no trace of personal frustration in them,neither harshness nor sentimental resigna-tion; but an alert, constant awareness oflife as a whole, and that profound, intu-itive understanding of life which enablesthe artist to accept it.

It is this simple, natural acceptance ofeverything, of beauty and ugliness, insan-ity, cruelty and gentle faith which helpsthe author create her characters with suchclear sureness. Lily Daw, the feeble-mindedgirl who wanted to marry a xylophoneplayer, the little clubfooted Negro, the twohitch-hikers or the traveling salesman areonly a few of the many characters whichthe reader will not easily forget.

On each page one senses the author’sfanatic love of people. With a few linesshe draws the gesture of a deaf-mute, thewind-blown skirts of a Negro woman inthe fields, the bewilderment of a child inthe sickroom of an old people’s asylum– and she has told more than many anauthor might tell in a novel of six hundredpages.

How does she achieve this? Throughthe colorful flexibility of her style, thechoice of her plot, the clever handling ofher climax? Partly, but not essentially. MissWelty’s writing is not intellectual primar-ily, and what makes it so unique cannot belearned in short-story courses. As Kather-ine Anne Porter tells in her fine introduc-tion, Miss Welty has never studied thewriting craft at any college, or belongedto any literary group. She was born awriter, and could do nothing else but write.Her art is spontaneous, and of that poeticquality which values the necessity of formby instinct. Her stories escape any tech-nical analysis. To point out that they areright in form seems to me quite as super-fluous as to state that a tree is right inform.

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Her descriptions of people and thingsnever remain mere observations, butbecome, as it were, part of a deeper lawand meaning, not through conscious sym-bolism or abstraction, but merely becausethey are so completely seen and felt. Thereis in some of her stories an almost surreal-istic note, an intimate fusion of dream andreality, reminiscent at times of Kafka.

The background of most of the storiesis a small town in Mississippi, the author’snative State. However, there is nothing par-ticularly regional about them. They couldin a way happen anywhere, though cer-tainly not to any one. For the mood andatmosphere of each story form a closeunity with its specific characters.

There are no wars going on behindthe scenes, no revolutions or headline-disasters. The tragedies which Miss Weltyinvokes occur in the backyards of life. Sheneeds no outside stimulus to recreate thedepths of human suffering.

If Miss Welty’s writing is detached fromimmediate controversial subjects, it hasnothing to do with “escapism.” I wouldnot think it necessary to make this pointif the word had not become a standardexpression for any type of literature thatdoes not report or lecture. Escapism is notso bad a word, though if applied thought-fully one might find that many a war storyor newspaper report might come underits heading. But Miss Welty’s stories neverescape from anything, except from thedanger of literary falsehood. She ratherexplores, follows up and remains withinher story to the last to bear the responsi-bility of her deeper knowledge.

I feel certain that her stories will livefor a long time. Her talent is of that rarekind which holds, even at its strongestmoments, a hidden wealth of still greaterstrength, unexpressed as yet. This is why Ibelieve that we can expect much from herin the future, and even more.

“New Southern WritersUnspoiled by Fads.”Kansas City Star,November 22, 1941,p. 14.

Book publishers usually are pretty chary ofoffering collections of short stories untilthe author’s position is well established.This is Miss Welty’s first book, few ofthe stories have appeared in magazines,and she has been writing only a fewyears.

It is, however, a worthy venture;Miss Welty is an innovator in style andpresentation, and her pieces are markedby few of the precious qualities that oftenare found in “little” magazine contribu-tions. In a sensible biographical and crit-ical introduction, Katherine Anne Portercharacterizes Miss Welty as a “sponta-neous” and “natural” writer who tendsto her own knitting in her Jackson, Miss.,home, paying no heed to literary fads andfancies. The stories, all of them laid in ruralor small town Mississippi, suggest thatMiss Welty has done well to stay where shebelongs.

Kay Boyle. “Full-LengthPortrait.” New Republic,November 24, 1941,p. 707.

In her introduction to Eudora Welty’s col-lection of short stories, Katherine AnnePorter has said a number of profoundly

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true and sensitive things. She has said themof Miss Welty, whom she describes as “aquiet, tranquil-looking, modest girl” whowas brought to visit her one hot mid-summer evening in Louisiana; and shesays them of Miss Welty as a writer witha writer’s responsibility and problem toconsider; and, lastly, she says them ofthe actual writing Miss Welty has done.I speak of these remarks of Miss Porter’shere because they seem to me to offer asgood a set of standards to bring to the eval-uation of writers and writing as any I haveseen.

Miss Porter tells us that Miss Weltyspends “an immense amount of time”writing, although the fact that she doeswrite is either not known or, if known,dismissed as of little importance in theMississippi town where Miss Welty hasspent the relatively few years of her life.We learn that she listens to music, culti-vates flowers and leads the “normal sociallife” which exists in any medium-sizedtown; we learn, too, that she was neverin any hurry either to be published oracclaimed, and that she possessed thathappy and “instinctive knowledge thatwriting cannot be taught, but only learned,and learned by the individual in his ownway, at his own pace, and in his own time.”To complete this gravely and brilliantlyexecuted portrait, Miss Porter adds thatMiss Welty has been spared a “militantsocial consciousness,” which Miss Porterbelieves can only serve to narrow, notto widen, the creative artist’s way. Whenthe artist “disassociates himself from thehuman world in favor of a set of politi-cal, which is to say, inhuman rules,” MissPorter writes, “he cuts himself away fromhis proper society – living men.”

Here then is Miss Welty’s equipment,and it is a singularly uncorrupt equip-ment in much the same way that EmilyDickinson’s was. Add to it what MissPorter defines as “an active and disciplined

imagination,” and we are, in “A Curtainof Green,” brought face to face with one ofthe most gifted and interesting short-storywriters of our time. The parallel betweenEmily Dickinson and Eudora Welty neednot, I feel, be dropped here. They are bothAmerican women writers of exceptionaldistinction who, each in her own centuryand in her own conditions, instinctivelymistrusted the outer paraphernalia of liter-ary contacts and activity and who, each inher own way, sought and found in silencean inner and almost mystical tongue. ThatEudora Welty has just won a prize for herstory, “A Worn Path,” in the O. HenryMemorial Collection is interesting to note,but it is of little importance. She is work-ing out something for herself which noneof us can have any part in, and whateverhonors come must be simply by the way.In the same sense, what small pieces ofcriticism one might write down are of littleimportance, for Eudora Welty has prob-ably recognized the weaknesses alreadyand is proceeding beyond them. The firstone is her tendency to carry objectivity sofar that at times her characters are seenfrom such a distance and at such an anglethat they lose all human proportions, andthe approach of the author herself dete-riorates into something as unworthy asthe spectator’s point of view. This man-ifests itself notably in the first three sto-ries in the book, and I deplore that theyshould have been placed where they are.I should like to have seen the collectionstart off with “Keela, the Outcast IndianMaiden,” “Powerhouse” and the “Hitch-Hikers,” printed with equal importanceand somehow side by side.

It is characteristic of Miss Porter’s ownactive and disciplined mind that she doesnot let matters rest here but enters boldlyand admirably into the question of thecompunction which Miss Welty or anyother short-story writer should feel aboutwriting a novel – the publisher’s trap, Miss

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Porter calls it, which he lays for everyshort-story writer of any gifts at all. “Shecan very well become a master of the shortstory,” Miss Porter writes. “It is quite pos-sible that she can never write a novel, andthere is no reason why she should.” In con-sidering this statement I have attempted toproject Miss Welty’s “case against realism”into a vehicle which would demand morecontinuity of thought and more develop-ment of act. Although I feel that her shortstories are (and here is my second criticalnote) not unlike paintings in that they areabsolutely halted as they stand, I foresee noway of failure for her written or unwrittennovel. On the contrary, I feel that EudoraWelty could “at her own pace, and in herown time” do whatever she set out to do.

Dale Mullen. “SomeNotes on the Stories ofEudora Welty.”Mississippi LiteraryReview 1 (November1941), pp. 21–24.

Eudora Welty’s A Curtain of Green hasreceived a critical attention such as hasbeen accorded to no other first book bya Mississippian in the last decade. Therewould be little point in this magazine’sadding another review. Let me insteadmake a few notes about Miss Welty, herbook, and its critical reception.

It may be said without fear of objec-tion that Katherine Anne Porter and KayBoyle are two of America’s very best writ-ers of the short story, and that Miss Boyleis one of our most sensitive critics. MissPorter has written the introduction to thisbook, and Miss Boyle has reviewed it for

The New Republic. In her introductionMiss Porter writes, “there are almost per-fect stories in this book.” Miss Boyle saysthat Miss Welty is “one of the most giftedand interesting short-story writers of ourtime.”

The only objection to the book thathas appeared in the reviews I have read isbest expressed in the words of Time: “Herworst fault is her lust for melodrama, ofthe insiduous sort which lies less in vio-lence than in tricked atmosphere.” Againstwhich may be placed the words of MissPorter: “In all of these stories . . . I findnothing false or labored.”

Eudora Welty was born into a well-to-do Jackson family. Miss Porter writes:“She had at arm’s reach the typical collec-tion of books which existed as a matter ofcourse in a certain kind of Southern family,so that she had read the ancient Greek andRoman poetry, history and fable, Shake-speare, Milton, Dante, the eighteenth-century English and nineteenth-centuryFrench novelists, with a dash of Tolstoyand Dostoievsky, before she realized whatshe was reading.” From her home MissWelty went to school at M.S.C.W., Wis-consin, and Columbia. She studied paint-ing and for a time believed she was goingto be a painter. She took up photographyand won something of a reputation as aphotographer. She was twenty-six beforeshe submitted her first story to a publisher.

Considering her background and edu-cation (which, for a Mississippian, wasa cosmopolitan one) it would not havebeen astonishing if she had taken note ofEllen Glasgow and turned her sharp eyesatirically upon the society of Jackson andNatchez. (She may yet. If she does, she willdo it beautifully.) Instead, she has chosento write principally of the poor people ofthe Mississippi countryside.

The point I wish to make is that sheis a Mississippian and has felt Mississippiall about her. It has been easy in the last few

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years to become interested in Mississippi:there is a growing body of Mississippiliterature; there have been many stud-ies made and books written about theSouth, and there have been studies madeand books written about Mississippi itself.Thus when she began to write, she wroteabout that Mississippi which has fasci-nated such diverse writers as Faulkner,Cohn, Kroll, and Evans Wall.

There is a thesis or an essay to bewritten on the idea that Mississippi writ-ers are creating not simply a number ofbooks but rather a body of literature.Books of such diverse quality as thoseof Faulkner and Evans Wall, Street’s InMy Father’s House and Cochran’s BossMan, have much in common both in sub-ject and treatment. Many forces tend toshape all Mississippi books toward onepattern, but most of them can be cov-ered by mentioning the great current inter-est in the South as The South. And thereis the tremendous influence exerted byWilliam Faulkner on nearly every Amer-ican and surely every southern writer. It isnot hard to believe that every Mississippiwriter (except Faulkner) has read nearlyall other Mississippi writers. EudoraWelty has undoubtedly been influenced byMississippi’s literature; her work has nowbecome a part of it and is influencing andwill influence more and more the work ofall the state’s writers.

But do not imagine for a momentthat Miss Welty’s work is not superior tomost Mississippi writing. In fiction onlyFaulkner has done better work.

In her review in The New RepublicKayBoyle has two pieces of criticism for MissWelty. “The first one is her tendency tocarry objectivity so far that at times hercharacters are seen from such a distanceand at such an angle that they lose allhuman proportions, and the approach ofthe author herself deteriorates into some-thing as unworthy as the spectator’s point

of view.” The second is that “her short sto-ries are . . . not unlike paintings in that theyare absolutely halted as they stand.” Nei-ther of these criticisms makes sense to me.

Her examples for the first criticism arethe first three stories in the book, “LilyDaw and the Three Ladies,” “A Piece ofNews,” and “Petrified Man.” They con-tain some of her sharpest satire, and cer-tainly she views her characters with littleeither of sentiment or sentimentality. Butif there is no sympathy for at least some ofthe characters, if there is not friendlinessfor all of them, I have read into the storiesa great deal that is not there. The char-acters are real and living people: that onecould view them with less than friendlinessis beyond my understanding.

As for her second point, I repeat thatMiss Welty’s people are real and living.One can and does imagine for them (asone could not for the people in many ofthe stories of the O’Brien anthologies) apast and a future. I feel that I know theheroine of “A Piece of News” so well thatI could write, if I could write, a full lengthnovel about her.

If she means that the stories are haltedtechnically as they stand, she makes nosense whatever. Miss Welty is an uninhib-ited reviser, and “A Piece of News” is agood example of her revising. Of this Ishall have something to say later.

Miss Porter writes of the habit publish-ers have of asking a short story writer ora poet to give them a novel that they maypublish before they publish his short sto-ries or poems. To her it is a “trap” andshe says that Miss Welty may well becomea master of the short story but may neverbe able to write a novel, that attempingto write a novel may retard her gift forshort stories. Miss Boyle considers this butforesees “no way of failure for her writtenor unwritten novel.” There is no point inmy entering this controversy; few if any inAmerica are better qualified than these two

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distinguished artists to argue the point. Itmight be pointed out, however, that MissBoyle is much better at writing short sto-ries than she is at writing novels.

However, I should very much like to seeMiss Welty write a novel. There is at leasta possibility that it would be an excellentone.

James Robert Peery, in reviewing ACurtain of Green for the CommercialAppeal, “hopes” that she will write oneabout the energetic ladies of Old Natchez.It may be that he has had a hint of herintention to do so. But Mr. Peery mayhave been hinting no such thing, and I donot wish to start a rumor on such a slimbasis.

A few paragraphs back I remarked thatit has been easy these last few years tobecome interested in Mississippi. Aproposof this, I wish to speak of a letter that TheOxford Eagle printed on its front page in1936.

“I enclose one dollar for which pleasesend me at above address The OxfordEagle for six months. At the end ofthat time I’ll try to find the other dol-lar for the rest of the year. I have beenreading your paper in our office (WPApublicity Dept.) and wish to say thatin county news I think you are with-out peer in any state – the flavor is allthere. I think it so worthy of preservingthat I have made a scrapbook of yourcounty news in my collection of Missis-sippiana. Please never discontinue yourcorrespondence. Eudora Welty.”

This letter is of interest to me partlyof course because The Eagle is my father’spaper, but I am not printing it here in orderto pat myself on the back. Miss Welty likesthe Eagle not because of any brilliance onhis part, but simply because it publishes agreat deal of “County News,” and pub-lishes it with no more editing than thelinotypist does when he changes “dau” to

“daughter.” And I might add that he doesnot refrain from editing these columns inorder to retain the “flavor” Miss Weltyspeaks of but rather because he has no timeto spend on them.

The thing that may be of interest toadmirers of Miss Welty’s stories is the factthat she kept a collection of Mississippi-ana and a scrapbook of clippings fromthe “County News” columns of a coun-try newspaper. When one remembers thatmany of her stories are about the same sortof people who write these columns or arewritten about in them, it is not difficult toimagine that she has made use of them.And her collection of Mississippiana indi-cates her interest in Mississippi and Mis-sissippians.

In the review in the Herald TribuneBooks, it was remarked (apropos of“Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden”) thatMiss Welty needs someone to edit hertitles. I can’t agree: her selections seemalmost perfect. However, I feel that a bettertitle could have been found for the book.“A Curtain of Green” hardly seems to indi-cate the tone of the book. The point couldbe argued, though.

As for the individual stories: “Lily Dawand the Three Ladies” is a beautiful piece,both tender and ruthless in its characteri-zation. “Why I Live at the P. O.” is fright-ening and uproariously funny. “A Mem-ory” is at once entrancing, painful andharsh. “The Hitchhikers” [sic] is a study inloneliness that might, in less certain hands,have become too fantastic for reality. “Pet-rified Man” could have been written byRing Lardner, if he had been a Missis-sippian (not since have I seen so clean adelineation of vulgarity). “Keela, the Out-cast Indian Maiden” reminds me, both inits subject and its treatment, of WilliamFaulkner.

Various stories in the book may reminddifferent readers of different writers, butin the end all must understand that this is

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Miss Welty’s book and hers alone. WilliamFaulkner would not have written the lasttwo paragraphs of “Keela, the OutcastIndian Maiden.” Their sudden appearancerelieves a story that had become almostunbearable. It is a flash of the genius thatis Miss Welty’s own.

The revisions Miss Welty has made insome of her stories are of peculiar interestto me. They were written by the “promis-ing young writer” who was discovered byJohn Rood ofManuscript and Albert Ersk-ine of The Southern Review. They havebeen rewritten by a mature and compe-tent craftsman. From “Death of a Travel-ing Salesman” (Manuscript, 1936) she haseliminated aspects which seem, after thetwo versions have been compared, inap-propriate and in bad taste. Aside from that,sentence after sentence has been smoothedand sharpened. A story that was alreadygood has been improved in both contentand style until it is an almost perfect one.

An easier comparison may be madewith “A Piece of News.” This is the firstparagraph from the story as it appeared in1937 in The Southern Review:

Coming back from the crossroads withthe sack of coffee, Ruby Fisher had gotcaught in the pouring-down rain. In thecabin door she shook her wet yellowhead crossly like a cat reproaching itselffor not knowing better.

In the 1941 book that paragraph hasbeen replaced by these two:

She had been out in the rain. She stoodin front of the cabin fireplace, her legswide apart, bending over, shaking herwet yellow head crossly, like a catreproaching itself for not knowing bet-ter. She was talking to herself – only asmall fluttering sound, hard to lay holdof in the sparsity of the room.

“The pouring-down rain, thepouring-down rain” – was that what

she was saying over and over, like asong? She stood turning in little quarterturns to dry herself, her head bentforward and the yellow hair hangingout streaming and tangled. She washolding her skirt primly out to drawthe warmth in.

The early paragraph was all right. Itserved quite well to start the story. The newparagraphs set the stage and very charm-ingly introduce our heroine, whom we areto know better and better as paragraph fol-lows paragraph. I liked “A Piece of News”in 1937; the 1941 story I think one of themost delightful of our time.

One may also compare “Old Mr. Mar-blehall” with the “Old Mr. Grenada” thatappeared in the same magazine in 1938.A word has been changed here, a sentencemade more rhythmic there. But over andabove that we find a clearer picture, a moremature conception of character.

Louise Bogan. “TheGothic South.” Nation,December 6, 1941, p. 572.

The definite Gothic quality which char-acterizes so much of the work of writ-ers from the American South has puzzledcritics. Is it the atmosphere of the romannoir, so skilfully transferred to America byPoe? Or is it a true and indigenous atmo-sphere of decaying feudalism? Faulknertreats the horrifying and ambiguous situa-tions thrown up by a background whichhas much in common with nineteenth-century Russia in a style darkened andconvoluted by, it would seem, the verycharacter of his material. Eudora Welty,who is a native and resident of Missis-sippi, in the stories of this volume has

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