Books: Cloud-Cuckoo Symphony

DELTA WEDDING (247 pp.)—Eudora Welty—Harcourt, Brace ($2.75).

“In the passenger car every window was propped open with a stick of kindling wood. A breeze blew through, hot and then cool, fragrant of the woods and yellow flowers and of the train. The yellow butterflies flew in at any window, out at any other, and outdoors one of them could keep up with the train, which then seemed to be racing with a butterfly. .. . . Once the [train] stopped in the open fields and Laura saw the engineer … go out and pick some specially fine goldenrod. . . . Sometimes like a fuzzy caterpillar looking in the cotton was a winding line of thick green willows and cypresses, and when the train crossed this green, running on a loud iron bridge, down its center like a golden mark on the caterpillar’s back would be a bayou.”

Readers who follow Eudora Welty’s train across the Mississippi Delta will find that its last stop is cloud-cuckoo land—which was also the setting of Author Welty’s previous books: A Curtain of Green (TIME, Nov. 24, 1941); The Wide Net (TIME, Sept. 27, 1943). In those short stories (which won her one Guggenheim Award and three O. Henry Memorial Awards, as well as distinguished critical praise), Author Welty showed that she could envision and remodel men & women in such a way that when they appeared in her pages—clothed in a fairy-taleish, often brilliant prose—they were fascinating and had a kind of queer vitality, but were not much like anything on earth. Delta Wedding, which is Author Welty’s first novel, is likely to provoke in readers the same old mixture of puzzlement over the odd people in it and respect for the sensitive, nimble hand that pulls the strings. Every page is filled with a sensitivity and workmanship that raise it far above the level of most novels; but also into an atmosphere that most readers may find too rare to breathe in.

Eccentric & Enormous. Like the works of other Southern writers (Carson McCullers, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner) Author Welty’s earlier books also had their full quota of human abnormalities (including two deaf mutes, one case of dementia praecox, one spinster drowned in a rain barrel). Delta Wedding adds only one: an amiable child who is not all there. But she is very much all there as one of the eccentric, enormous Fairchilds family—nonchalant Mississippi gentlefolk who flit in & out of the doors and windows of their ancestral mansion much as the yellow butterflies flitted in & out of the train, and whom Author Welty manages to pin down during the few days when they are in a bustle over the marriage of one of the girls.

Readers of Delta Wedding are likely to get hopelessly tangled in a welter of entering-and-exiting great-aunts, uncles, fathers, cousins, sons, daughters and defunct ancestors. But what they will get clearly, and often admirably, is Author Welty’s subtle blending and harmonizing of the moods and characteristics that make a large, well-knit family sound like an orchestra (sometimes a prison orchestra) going full blast. The aim and essence of Delta Wedding is the recording of this mass effect; it has no plot, no direct narrative, and its few dramatic incidents and occasional solos seem to be brought in merely to show how negligible and squeaky they are compared with the roar of the family as a whole.

The Author. Tall, blue-eyed Eudora Welty, a spinster of 37, has never lived in the Delta country (“It just seemed . . . a good place for the events to happen.”). Daughter of an insurance company executive, she was born, bred, and still lives in Jackson, Miss., where she quietly passes her time writing, painting and photographing. She also likes flowers and “soft music, classical music, as well as dance music—and triumphant bursts of music.” She is a member of the Junior League.