Books: Sense and Sensibility

THE WIDE NET — Eudora Welty — Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

These eight stories about the South present as perplexing and exasperating a mixture of good and bad as U.S. writing can show. In her first volume (A Curtain of Green — TIME, Nov. 24, 1941), Miss Welty used gifts for original comedy, satire and characterization which, judging by this book (her third), might as well have belonged to somebody else. At her best, 34-year-old Miss Welty runs a photofinish with the finest prose artists of her time and displays a delicateness of sensibility which borders at once on genius and indecency. Yet her finest writing is nearly always marred by such Celtic locutions as “a sure man, very sure and tender”; and the sensibility is seldom grounded in anything remotely sensible.

Chekhov was a master of the art of writing “mood” stories; but his moods were always rooted deep in the fertility of human souls. These flashing, strange stories of Miss Welty’s are about as human as a fish.

In the title story (which last year won her the O. Henry Memorial Prize) an oaf, assisted by a doctor, four children and an assortment of primitives, drags a river for his supposedly drowned wife, and is made (he occasion for creating some wonderfully suggestive images of the whole of existence. But he is never, even incidentally, a man looking for the corpse of his wife.

In First Love a deaf tavern boy is entranced by the urgent glamor of Aaron Burr, on the eve of his trial. His deafness becomes a mannered, melodramatic excuse for specialized sensations reported in beautiful prose. But he is never a living creature.

In Asphodel three old maids picnic near a shattered mansion, gabble of a deceased romance, and are scared away by a device (a naked man, a flock of goats) which belongs rather to ballet or to case histories than to literature.

Love, Enchantment, Death. Even when these stories use the emotions and desires of people, they use them in ways so remote from any warm sense of existence that to criticize the absence is almost beside the point. Miss Welty is apparently interested in the world and in people chiefly as embodiments of love, enchantment and death. Moreover, Miss Welty is not writing stories. She is using words to create works of art which lie somewhere between lyric poetry, painting, the still untouchable possibilities of color photography, and dancing. A young Negro dandy in a zoot suit becomes, in Miss Welty’s perception, an image of almost Shakespearean loveliness.

“As soon as this man caught sight of her, he began to look himself over. Starting at the bottom with his pointed shoes, he began to look up, lifting his peg-top pants the higher to see fully his bright socks. His coat long and wide and leaf-green he opened like doors to see his high-up tawny pants and his pants he smoothed downward from the points of his collar, and he wore a luminous baby-pink satin shirt. At the end, he reached gently above his wide platter-shaped round hat, the color of a plum, and one finger touched at the feather, emerald green, blowing in the spring winds.”