A Writer's Eye Part 1

A Writer's Eye.

Collected Book Reviews.

Eudora Welty.

Edited, with an introduction, by Pearl Amelia McHaney.

For NONA BALAKIAN.

who initiated me into my richly rewarding experience on the staff of the New York Times Book Review in the summer of 1944.

Acknowledgments.

I wish to thank Eudora Welty for the opportunity to prepare this edition. I also wish to thank Nash K. Burger, Noel Polk, and Dabney Hart for their personal and professional encouragement and generosity. Jane Hobson, Marjorie Patterson, and Matt Stinson of the Interlibrary Loan Department of Georgia State's Pullen Library were always helpful and inventive. I am grateful for research support from the Department of English and the Research Office of Georgia State University. The Mississippi Department of Archives and History proved as usual to be an excellent and cooperative source for Welty scholars; Hank Holmes, Anne Lips...o...b.. and Nancy Lips...o...b..were particularly helpful. I thank Lorna Stark for support beyond the call of sisterhood and Lothar Hnnighausen and LeAnne Benfield for their generous a.s.sistance. Meredith, Emily, and Gretchen Schmidt, who have learned at an early age to live with the making of a book, are thanked for their honesty, industry, and personal responsibility. I am especially thankful to Tom McHaney for his loving friends.h.i.+p, his enthusiasm for research, his honesty in criticism, and his creativity with words.

Introduction.

The best introduction this collection could have would be a six-column review by Eudora Welty. She could quickly appraise the sixty-seven reviews written over forty-two years, mostly for the New York Times Book Review. She could tell a literary anecdote about Robert Van Gelder, her mentor and friend at the Book Review, and how exciting it was to work in New York during the summer of 1944. She could pick out quotations from the reviews to show the humor, the painterly eye, the astuteness of the reader-reviewer as quickly as she could isolate the weaknesses of the merely chronological arrangement and the awkwardness of the collection's scholarly garb. She would doubtless say that some of the reviews are but mayflies, and that some are b.u.t.terflies worthy of stretching under a gla.s.s, but that, as she said of Virginia Woolf's reviews in Granite and Rainbow, ''writing them earned her the time to write her novels, and the least of them is a graceful and imperturbable monument to interruption." Best of all, a review by Eudora Welty would give us once again her delightful wit and mindful words about a subject we all adorebooks.

It is not news that Eudora Welty wrote book reviews, but it may come as news that she wrote so many. 1 Preparing the nonfiction collection The Eye of the Story (1978), Welty originally gathered eighteen reviews. Reviews of two books (A Haunted House and Other Stories by Virginia Woolf and Henry Green: Nine Novels and an Unpacked Bag, a critical study) had to be cut so everything else could be put in.2 The sixteen remaining reviews show the range of Welty's reviewing career though they focus chiefly on major writers: Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, William Faulkner, E. M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, Isak Dinesen, S. J. Perelman, and E. B. White. Among Page xiv the lesser-known subjects for the reviews reprinted in The Eye of the Story, but equally important in the world of belles lettres, are Was.h.i.+ngton Irving (journals), novelist and nonfictionist George R. Stewart, Australian n.o.bel winner Patrick White, and detective fiction author Ross Macdonald. The reviews in Eye are often quoted in Welty scholars.h.i.+p and have been the primary subject of three critical essays. 3 Together, these reviews show a range that does not surprise us, but they represent less than one-fourth of Welty's work as a reviewer, work she took seriously and enjoyed.

This edition collects all sixty-seven of Welty's reviews of seventy-four books. Seen together, the reviews reveal the delightful variety of books sent to Welty for comment: first novels, best-sellers, southern novels, translations, short story volumes, collected stories, essays, histories, criticism, biographies, memoirs, travel books, journals and letters, photography, children's books and fairy tale collections, even a book on growing healthy house plants. The subjects of the books vary also: World War II (European fronts, London air raids, Pacific maneuvers), Ireland, England, the South, ghost stories, detective mysteries, and humor. Welty says that when she was first a regular reviewer, she liked best the surprise of what would next be offered for her to read.

Having all of Welty's reviews available in one gathering fills in numerous gaps, some, of course, that we didn't even recognize until we came up to the precipice. The review of Virginia Woolf's posthumously collected stories, A Haunted House and Other Stories (1944), deleted from The Eye of the Story, her first review of a significant writer, can now be read in the context of her other comments about Woolf and writing. Two more Perelman t.i.tlesCrazy Like a Fox (1944) and Westward Hal Around the World in 80 Cliches (1948)that were not included in The Eye of the Story are reprinted. Reviews of The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (1981), and Essays of E. B. White (1977), written after The Eye of the Story was published, complement her praise and recommendation of Bowen and White.

In addition to reviewing Isak Dinesen's Last Tales, which she included in The Eye of the Story, Welty also reviewed two critical a.n.a.lyses of Dinesen's writing. It is interesting to read her a.s.sessment of other critics: Each book was moderately successful, she said, but neither showed well-enough that its author had been "stirred, delighted, touched, bored, maddened, even baffled" by Dinesen's genius. In both reviews, Welty advises the reader not to follow the critics but to read the fiction itself. "I suspect," Welty writes about Robert Langbaum, author of the study she liked better, "that his own Page xv first response to her stories was 'That's beautiful!'before it was 'That's important.' He has demonstrated that they are important, and also acclaimed them for being marvelous. 'Marvelous' is the relevant and better word, is it not?"

Welty's review of Henry Green: Nine Novels and an Unpacked Bag (1961) fills out her appraisal of one of her favorite writers in a similar fas.h.i.+on. Shortly after completing her essay "Henry Green: Novelist of the Imagination," Welty was asked to review English professor John Russell's a.n.a.lysis of Green's writings. Russell pa.s.ses Welty's litmus test, for, in her view, he "has been seized by the delight that Henry Green's extraordinary prose can give, for delight I think does open the door to this writer whose work does then become so moving." Welty was often on the frontier of recognizing genius in writing (witness her early and continued praise of Faulkner, before Cowley's Viking Portable and before the n.o.bel Prize). When Henry Green's autobiography Pack My Bag had its first American printing in the United States in June 1993, reviewers quoted Welty's early essay.

William Sansom is another writer whom Welty reviewed from the beginning of his career, though her earliest review of his work was until recently not well known. Sansom was a British contemporary of Green's, and like Green, he fought in the London Fire Fighters and used the experience in his first collection of stories, Fireman Flower (1945). Welty's review of this book was discovered by Suzanne Marrs as a typescript among the papers that Welty donated to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Published in 1944 by Hogarth Press in England, the collection was brought out in the United States by Vanguard Press the next year. Welty, perhaps at the suggestion of Diarmuid Russell, read the book for Vanguard and provided a comment that is excerpted on the book's dust jacket. The review itself was published in a small, avant-garde monthly t.i.tled Tomorrow (194151), owned and edited by New Yorker Eileen Garrett and published by Creative Age Press for whom Welty's childhood friend, Jacksonian Hubert Creekmore, had worked after World War II. Other Welty friends who reviewed for Tomorrow included New York Times Book Review people Nona Balakian and Nash Burger, the latter also a Jackson native.

Welty reviewed a later volume of Sansom's stories about Italy, South, for the Sat.u.r.day Review, and then for the New York Times Book Review, The Stories of William Sansom which she said included "an excellent appreciation by exactly the right fellow-writer, Elizabeth Bowen." "Sansom's talent," Welty wrote in her first review, "is an exciting matter for the new American Page xvi readers. . . . Along with their fantastic or dreamlike quality, the stories are extraordinarily vitalperhaps, for one thing, because they are visually concrete and startling." Then of the stories in South, she wrote, his "descriptive power is a steady fireworks." In her third review of Sansom fiction, she delights in being reminded that "the very act and mystery of writing a story is central to his work." The reviews of Sansom are interesting in another light also, for each was written for a different publication.

Welty's very first book review was published in September of 1942 in the Sat.u.r.day Review of Literature's special "Deep South" issue, edited by Mississippian David Cohn. Cohn wrote to Welty's agent, Diarmuid Russell, asking for a "short story or sketch of 2,0002,500 words." 4 Nothing of that description was readily available, so Russell sent The Robber Bridegroom, Welty's fairy tale novella of the Natchez Trace, to be excerpted. Cohn returned it and published no fiction in the issue because, as he says in his introduction, many of the Deep South writers "were so busy writing books that they could not turn aside" from their projects to send him contributions (Sat.u.r.day Review 19 September 1942: 3).

Russell's ambition for his client to be a part of the special issue nonetheless resulted in Welty's first review. She was a.s.signed But You'll Be Back, a first novel by Marguerite Steedman from Georgia. The Deep South issue (other special issues in the 1940s series focused on the Southwest and the Old or Upper South) included several essays of particular interest in the context of Welty's developing career, especially "Patterns of Regionalism in the Deep South" by Chapel Hill regional sociologist Howard W. Odum and "What Deep South Literature Needs" by Cleanth Brooks, one of the editors, with Robert Penn Warren, of the Southern Review (Odum, 57; Brooks`9, 2930).

Brooks, in fact, begins his essay remarking about a review of Welty's first book, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories. Louise Bogan, he notes, had written that the stories were representative of the "Gothic South," leading Brooks to lament that the "country's intense interest in and ignorance of the South . . . is in pan the result of the decay of our ability to read, and of our current confusions about the nature of literature" (8; Bogan, Nation 6 December 1941: 572). Welty, he a.s.serts, has given the southern subject a form that is "remarkable for the variety of styles which she has mastered" (2930). Brooks concludes that the region needs "more intelligent readers'' and "a group of critics and reviewers more sensitive and more intelligent than it presently has" (30). Welty takes up this problem in her review by noting Page xvii that the dust jacket of Steedman's novel says Steedman's characters are "'Normal Southern' people." Welty writes that this "is a jolting phrase, and one hopes does not indicate that hereafter southern people are to be subdivided from the rest of the country" (22).

In the same issue, Jennie Gardner, book review editor for the Memphis Commercial Appeal, points out that few of the South's writers review for the regional papers. "There's little market for any deep criticism in the Deep South, and consequently, as criticism, our reviews are vastly unimportant" ("Book Reviewing in the Deep South," 15). Five of the eight book reviews and two of the essays in the Deep South issue are indeed written by southern novelists. Welty's first book review thus appears alongside the work of novelists and literary critics Harry Harrison Kroll, Roark Bradford, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks. A Curtain of Green and her forthcoming novella that Cohn did not excerpt, The Robber Bridegroom, are advertised next to her review. Faulkner's Go Down, Moses and novels by six of the contributors to the issue are also advertised.

Welty's astute review of Marguerite Steedman's novel is an appropriate response to the call made in the issue for criticism of southern writing by distinctive southern writers. Her first review begins in the way that became Welty's pattern, a description of the book itself. Certainly, this is an obvious and sensible approach, called for by the very nature of book reviewing, but Welty does it with flair and her personal style. But You'll Be Back, she writes, is the story of the small Georgia town of Thessaly, "its threatened life, its death by ruin and fire, and its dramatic renascence" (22). Steedman "knows her little towns," Welty observes, but she creates only "stock sentimental characters" and ''contents herself with an old cliche" to represent emotional involvement. She does this, Welty suggests, because "the author herself has not been emotionally affected by her ethical ideas" (2223): "When the time comes, as it should, to look through the outside of this life to the inside, she backs away" (22). The plot and characters are manipulated; "there is no interplay of character, only a one-way effect of an omnipotent Aunt Cora on the others" (22). The subject of the novel is interesting, but in Welty's view the author does not allow the characters to live their own lives.

Welty's concerns in her 1942 review reflect her own practice in the making of fiction, ideas she has articulated many times over her fifty-year writing career. In an uncollected essay about her first story "Death of a Traveling Salesman" (1936), Welty said, Page xviii I faced the serious hazard of imagining myself inside characters whom I had no way of really knowing. . . . I never doubted, then or now, that imagining yourself into other people's lives is exactly what writing fiction is. . . . Imagining yourself inside the skin, body, heart, and mind of any other person is the primary feat, but also the absolute necessity. (755) 5 Characters who speak for themselves, who motivate and control the actions of the story, are essential to Welty's notion of what it takes for a story to succeed.

Ultimately, Steedman's writing lacks "pa.s.sion," a term Welty uses critically in a majority of her reviews. Steedman "has not been emotionally affected by her ethical ideas. . . . She is sure of them, often enthusiastic, sometimes sentimental, but not possessed. She is actuated by something less and something lighter than emotion, the development of a bright idea" (23). Steedman writes well enough, Welty says, but her "ease has permitted carelessness at times, and there are smudgy traces of journalism in an occasional absurdity of phrase and now and then a veil of sheerest hok.u.m falls over the page." Although Welty had not yet published a novel of her own, she unhesitatingly decides that Steedman's first novel is a failure and clearly identifies its problems. The rationale for the judgments Welty so competently and confidently articulates in this initial review does not change throughout her career of writing and reviewing.

Shortly before this first book review was published, Robert Van Gelder, editor of The New York Times Book Review, had interviewed Welty for the Book Review where he wrote of the young short story writer, "She writes easily, perfectly naturally, enjoying the job and lost in it" (Prenshaw 3).6 Soon, he invited her to review Sweet Beulab Land, a southern novel by Bernice Kelly Harris (NYTBR 7 March 1943: 9). That was the auspicious beginning to the relations.h.i.+p: between 1943 and 1984, Welty wrote fifty-nine of her sixty-seven book reviews for the New York Times Book Review, twenty-six of them in the 1940S, mostly during the editors.h.i.+p of Van Gelder.

Van Gelder's high regard for the young Mississippi writer led him, in 1944, to invite Welty to come to New York for a summer interns.h.i.+p as a copy reader for the Book Review. It was Van Gelder's idea to invite "someone who was not a professional" for their input.7 (As Welty remembers it, she thought it intriguing that the previous intern had been a psychologist.) Welty was responsible to Van Gelder, but everyone had to have an interview with Lester Markel, the tyrannical editor of the Sunday edition of the New Page xix York Times. In his gruff manner, Markel asked Welty for her qualifications, for "I hear you have applied for a job with our Sunday Book Review." She remembers replying "nakedly" with "'No, I was invited to work on it and I'm already working.' It was the truthI had no other thing to say. And he said it was very very irregular." She settled into her jobcopy editing and writing. Welty says she was also "responsible for thinking up fresh reviewers for the paper." Nash K. Burger, a University of the South-and University of Virginia-educated childhood friend from Jackson, was one of the first that she recommended. When the then unknown Burger's very first review appeared on page one, the intemperate Markel demanded to know ''who in the h.e.l.l is Nash K. Burger?" Van Gelder calmly replied, "Nash K. Burger is the author of the book review on the front page." Van Gelder won the round, and Burger reviewed more than one book a month during the following year before joining the Book Review staff for a thirty-year career starting in 1945.

Welty enjoyed New York city life, the hard work at the copy desk, and she says she learned a great deal about writing, but not necessarily about fiction. "You wouldn't write a very good review if you kept applying it to what you could learn to write fiction. You can't mix them," she says. In a 1978 interview with writer Reynolds Price, she likened writing essays and stories to going in "two different directionsupstream and downstream. I can't work on them simultaneously. I like both. I think it's more natural to me to write stories, but I like writing essays. I'm not a born critic, but I may be a born appreciator. I like to write about things I like" (Prenshaw 230). When the summer interns.h.i.+p was over, Welty returned to Jackson where she concentrated on writing fiction and an occasional book review.

The most curious commodity shared by Welty and Burger (in addition to Jackson childhoods, the same school teachers, a southern humor, and the ambition to write) is the pseudonym Michael Ravenna. While Welty was in New York in 1944, her two brothers and many close friends were in Europe fighting. Working at the Times kept her in close touch with the "real war" as well as the growing literature about or from the war. Although Book Review policy discouraged staffWelty's statusfrom writing reviews, occasionally someone had to write a quick review to meet a missed deadline, to fill s.p.a.ce, or to cover a last minute book of importance. Reviews by staff members were printed with pseudonymous bylines. Welty's first such review, of Artist at War (16 July 1944), appeared under the name Michael Ravenna. A month later "Ravenna" reviewed a war novel written by an Austrian ex- Page xx n.a.z.i, Franz Hoellering, ent.i.tled Furlough (20 August 1944: 5). A third review by "Ravenna"I Got a Country, another war novel, about allied soldiers stationed in Alaskawas published on 27 August 1944 (page 5). It has long been a.s.sumed that Welty wrote the second and third Ravenna reviews, but they are now acknowledged as the work of Nash Burger. Burger was reviewing from Mississippi, and it had already been decided to run his review of Invasion Diary by Richard Tregaskis on the 20th and of Cluny Brown, a novel by Margery Sharp, on the 27th, so when there was s.p.a.ce for other short reviews by Burger, they were printed under the pseudonym that Welty had already used for a book about the war. When asked why the staff used "her" pseudonym, Michael Ravenna, Welty quipped, "I probably couldn't think of another name."

For Burger, the enterprising Michael Ravenna took on a life of his own, and much later Burger recalled fan letters and requests for more Ravenna reviews. 8 Ravenna went underground when Burger joined the Book Review staff the next year, and Burger fas.h.i.+oned new pennames when necessary, until Ravenna surfaced to review the first novel of fellow-Mississippian Shelby Foote (25 September 1949: 30). The quixotic Ravenna made a point of mentioning recent Southern writers who had come before Foote, including Eudora Welty, as well as congratulating the excellent first novel, Tournament.

Those who have known about the Michael Ravenna reviews have speculated variously about Welty's choice of pseudonym. Was it because women weren't expected to review war novels as Burger suggested in his 1969 essay? Welty says, "Being a woman had nothing to do with it. After all, Van Gelder had hired a woman hadn't he?" (Correspondence to editor 1991). Multiple reviews by one writer in the same issue were discouraged, but Welty says this was not the case in the instances of her use of the pseudonym. Certainly, she recalls, the name alludes to Ravenna, Italy, locale of various war maneuvers, and the war was exceedingly on everyone's mind. Nash Burger, interviewed in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he still writes, claims to know what Michael Ravenna looks like. But Welty, who talks to Burger often, will say only, "Well, he ought to; he's the only one who does." Her final word on the matter is that it was, "Just a name that came to me. Why not Michael Ravenna?"

Before, during, and after her summer at the Times, Welty wrote the most concentrated number of book reviews, all for Van Gelder: six in 1943, twelve in 1944, and six in 1945. As editor of the Book Review, Van Gelder Page xxi favored issues that included a fair amount of fiction, and he was most interested in having fine writers review for him, rather than seeking out an expert in the book's subject. Welty was perfectly suited for this. When she wrote her first review for Van Gelder, she had published A Curtain of Green, The Robber Bridegroom, and all of the stories to be gathered in The Wide Net. With that considerable labor of fiction behind her, Welty recalls that the journalism that she wrote during 1943in addition to the reviews, there were two essays ("Pageant of Birds" for New Republic and "Some Notes on River Country" for Harper's Bazaar)was satisfying in its quick turnaround time. 9 By autumn, she had started "Delta Cousins," the germ of Delta Wedding (Kreyling 99105).

Writing book reviews had several advantages. Stories were more demanding and speculative, needing to be shopped to the right editor. Straight deadlines were relatively simple by comparison. Rarely was a review subject to further criticism; the work went in, editors shaped it a bit, and it appeared in print. Also, there was money to be earned, promptly paid. Burger recalls that his page-one review in 1944 earned him forty dollars. After working her way from obscure literary journals into lucrative national magazines, Welty still appreciated the extra payments for the reviews.

Though Welty has said in many ways that reviewing and writing fiction were very separate jobs, she still benefited as a writer from her literary journalism. As Michael Kreyling describes in Author and Agent, the review that Welty wrote of Virginia Woolf's A Haunted House and Other Stories significantly helped Welty to focus on her own fiction. She wrote to her agent, Diarmuid Russell, "I had to review Virginia Woolf's last book of stories and if they print my review as written (they never do) I would be interested to see if you agree" (11 April 1944, quoted in Kreyling 108). Making the aesthetic s.h.i.+ft to long fiction as she rewrote her story "Delta Cousins" as a novel, Welty could draw on the experience and confidence earned by the chance to survey recent fiction as reviewer and as copy editor of many other reviews.

The work for the Times had another plus. Welty admired Van Gelder (the integrity of Welty's reviews were, to this point, maintainededitorial changes were made mostly to shorten the reviews) and this, she said in an interview recently, made reviewing pleasant work. The months in New York put her in the middle of all that was happening in the war, in the country's largest cultural center, and gave her a nine-to-five office job for the first (and last) time in her career. She recalls that it was hard work, but satisfying.

Page xxii After she returned to Jackson, she continued to review a varied selection of books for the Sunday Times: Six Novels of the Supernatural; The Western Journals of Was.h.i.+ngton Irving, Apartment in Athens by Glenway Wescott; Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Names in the United States by novelist George R. Stewart (both page-one reviews); three fairy tale books; and Gumbo Ya-Ya, A Collection of Louisiana Folk Tales.

The smorgasbord ended when Van Gelder moved to Crown Publishers in 1946, partly frustrated by Markel's interference with his autonomy as Book Review editor. Editorial duties at the Book Review during the next three years were handled, chaotically at best, by a variety of editors working under Markel's sharp scrutiny. John K. Hutchens managed for a year or two before he was driven out by Markel, moving to the Times's rival, the New York Herald Tribune. Staff editor William DuBois and Markel's Sunday Magazine editor Herbert Lyons took frustrated turns before editor Francis Brown took over in 1950. 10 An additional deterrent from writing reviews, after Van Gelder left the Book Review, was Welty's work on the stories of The Golden Apples, her first lecture on writing, and her critical essay derived from the lecture, "The Reading and Writing of Short Stories."11 In the late summer of 1948, concurrent with the writing of the final story of The Golden Apples cycle and concerted efforts on her agent's pan to sell the completed stories, Welty wrote three reviews. Of the three books, only one was completely successful, in her judgment. Westward Ha! lacked Perelman's usual sharpness because it was artificially generated as a Holiday magazine commission. The plot of Dorothy Baker's Our Gifted Son was unnaturally controlled by the author. But, Hollis Summers, the author of the third book reviewed, City Limit, Welty wrote, had "compa.s.sion, a good eye not conditioned by anything, a good ear conditioned by some worthwhile anger, and a view of youth and innocence that is fresh, dignified, and rewarding" (NYTBR 19 September 1948: 18). These three reviews, written at the peak of Welty's short-story career, represent a significant crossroads of journalism, craft in fiction, and Welty's developing aesthetic in criticism.

After the review of City Limit in the Book Review, Welty reviewed a few volumes for three other publications before settling into a rhythm of one or two books reviewed in most years for the Book Review. She reviewed Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust for the Hudson Review in its inaugural year (1949). She did three book reviews for the New York Post. And for the Sat.u.r.day Review of Literature, where she had started reviewing, she praised a William Sansom collection of stories. From 1952 until her final review in 1984, only Page xxiii one review (of Martha Graham: Portrait of the Lady as Artist for the Sewanee Review) is not published in the Book Review. These thirty-one reviews represent the second half of Welty's reviewing "career"; and of them, thirteen are collected in The Eye of the Story.

Welty has always said that she's never written anything she did not want to write. Her reviews show her engagement. No book or review is simply thrown off, and Welty writes from the reader's point of view. For reviews, she does not take the role of fiction writer, but a.s.sumes instead the duties of the literary journalist, reading, a.s.sessing, and reporting. Her wonderful facility with words and her honesty as a reader and writer make her reviews themselves brilliant moments of reading matter. When she tells the plotand only brieflyit is with newly-created metaphors, often with allusions to painters and paintings, and the authors' best lines. Even when Welty encounters what an academic might call a subgenre, something not readily categorized in the canon of literature, or even something that is ephemeral, she reads carefully. Ghost story collections are a case in point: She asks what must happen in a story so that the reader will Sleep No More, as one book was t.i.tled (1944). One requirement is the delicious frisson of scariness. The stories in The Great Fog, and Other Weird Tales, for example, "raise only the intellectual hair, not the pulling kind" (3 September 1944: 5). Reviewing detective fiction, Welty explains just what makes Ross Macdonald's The Underground Man (1971) and its hero Lew Archer not only better than the average, but as successful and well-crafted as any mainstream fiction.

Of special interest are the reviews of books about World War II. She reviewed three books of art depicting the war at first hand: Artist at War by George Biddle (brother of Franklin Roosevelt's Attorney General, Francis Biddle), sketches made at several Mediterranean and African fronts; Men and Battle, sketches by artist David Fredenthal drawn during the attack on Arawa, New Britain, in 1943; and G. I. Sketch Book, a small pocket-sized Infantry Journal edition of Art in the Armed Forces edited by Aimee Crane. Welty comments not only on the subject matter that is brought fresh to the reader back home, but also on the artistic merit of the pictures and the arrangement of the volume. Biddle compares his effort to Goya's depiction of the Napoleonic invasions of Spain, so Welty continues the comparison saying, "Where Goya drew disaster in the actfalling bodies, the thrust of violence in its present momentGeorge Biddle draws the aftermath of disaster, the sprawling pattern in its wake" (NYTBR 16 July 1944: 3). Welty writes that Biddle is a "competent artist, but a good writer" (24). The review Page xxiv of Artist at War is lengthy enough to allow Welty room, beyond description of the book, to discuss the dignity of the soldiers being drawn, the issue of truth in art, and censors.h.i.+p. Even though the government has withdrawn the program that sent artists like Biddle to the front, she observes, Welty is encouraged that the idea itself is such a "hopeful example of a new, a human and subjective att.i.tude of a country toward war, that may be a sign in itself that we can never tolerate another one" (24).

In all her reviews, Welty is vigilant for the truths and pa.s.sions that are central to humanity, wherever they occur. The books she recommends most highly use the topical and the specific to reveal underlying connections among all people, the very threads of life that were, for example, challenged by the dissolution of democracy under Hider's rule. Welty writes with the same emphasis upon vigor and pa.s.sion from the first to the last books that she reviewed. If a pattern or a style in the writing of the reviews can be detected, it is a felicitous habit of eye and mind that works throughout the forty-year span of the reviews. "This book," she beginsand then unravels tapestries of her own words to retell the scenes that delight her most. From among her own pa.s.sions and interests, she repeatedly alludes to painters and fairy tales. In epic fas.h.i.+on, she includes in nearly every review a listplaces, scenes, or characterswith strings of gerunds and participles. If no catalogue can be extracted, she builds one from adjectives of praise. She concludes with "What this reader loves . . ." about the book under review.

Unlike many writer-reviewers, Welty never strikes the virtuoso's pose. She keeps the voice of the book's author in the foreground of the review. In fact, as her own fiction writing merited her a reputation of the highest regard, she appears to quote more and more from the books under review, so that her reviews in the 1970s and 80s are mostly ingenious weavings of the language and plots of the books. One might guess that the novice reviewer would be the one to quote extended pa.s.sages, but the reverse is true for Welty. In the forties, she confidently a.n.a.lyzed the writing and wisely chose the author's words to ill.u.s.trate her judgment. She let the books defend or condemn themselves.

Her review of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a prime example. Welty writes mat, "A reader's heart must go out to a young writer with a sense of wonder so fearless and unbridled." Such headlong pa.s.sion and emotion are exactly what Welty requires, but in the next paragraph, after several more lines of praise, Welty writes, "I am not quite sure that in writing this book she wholly accomplished" her ambition. Welty quotes Page xxv scenes that show both Dillard's unbridled exuberance and her consequent failure to go beyond enthusiastic solipsism. Yet, even in this, which is one of Welty's most devastating reviews (and there are several), Welty concludes with encouragement: "But how much better, in any case, to wonder than not to wonder, to dance with astonishment and go spinning in praise, than not to know enough to dance or praise at all. . ." (NYTBR 24 March 1974: 5).

Her first review of S. J. Perelman (Crazy Like a Fox 2 July 1944) ill.u.s.trates how she can praise the writer using her own words. She quotes Perelman's humor for more than half of the review, weaving in her own Perelmanesque tricks with words: "With his Dyak-like tread he has crept up on the movies, on Corn, on Jitterbugging, Bee-keeping . . . and with a maniacal glitter in his eye has done his deadly work" (6). Even as she is obviously enjoying her work, she stops to explain how Perelman manages "that sudden materializing of figures of speech, calculated to throw the bystander, or the reader, over the head of the sentence and press a little nerve at the back of his ear" (6).

Though they are, in her own view, a minor chapter in her life's work, Welty's reviews are as sensory-laden, as thoughtful, and as well-crafted as her stories. She says she never reviewed as a fiction writer thinking to learn something of her craft, but always with the hope to enjoy the reading of the book. When the book is successful, Welty reveals for the next reader why it is so. Is there heartfelt pa.s.sion or compa.s.sion? Is the description particular and sensory? Are the dialogue, plot, and characters believable? Is there an honesty, a truth behind the writing? If, on the other hand, the readerthat is, the reviewerstumbles, what is it in the path that slows the reading? Does the author keep the characters bound by some outside motive, refusing to let them act from their hearts? Does the author restrain her own feelings? Does the author (or publisher) have an ulterior purpose that bars the natural drive of the book?

It may well be true that Welty only reviewed the books that she thought she would like, but it is not true that she indiscriminately praised every book that she reviewed. If she sometimes spared the authoras with Dillardshe often did not spare the book. The author, however, interests her much less than the reader for whom the book is destined. In a 1939 monograph t.i.tled Reviewing, Virginia Woolf explained a distinction very much like the one that Welty practiced: "The reviewer, unlike the critic,. . . has nothing to say to the author; he is talking to the reader" (29). 12 Or, as Welty herself put it: Page xxvi At the other end of the writing is the reader. There is sure to be somewhere the reader, who is a user himself of imagination and thought, who knows, perhaps, as much about the need of communication as the writer.

Reader and writer, we wish each other well. Don't we want and don't we understand the same thing? A story of beauty and pa.s.sion, some fresh approximation of human truth? (Eye 106) This is the standard Welty set for herself, and when she reviewed, it was what she sought for the users of writing whom she dignified by supposing that the best of them would bring to reading a potential for pa.s.sion and imagination similar to her own.

Welty's book reviews are arranged chronologically in this volume. Beneath the t.i.tle and author of the book reviewed, the t.i.tle and publication information of the published review are listed. Welty did not compose or suggest these t.i.tles; at the Times, they were written, often from a phrase within the review, by a staff person to fit the layout of the page, and in other publications a similar process prevailed. Typesetting errors, dropped lines, and misspellings have been corrected and recorded in the endnotes. The endnotes also indicate, whenever possible, editorial changes made to Welty's typescripts or Welty's recorded revisions. For convenient reference, the appendixes contain a separate list of the books Welty reviewed, alphabetized by author, and a list of the sixteen reviews Welty collected in The Eye of the Story.

Notes.

1. Eudora Welty's comments in the Introduction are from an interview granted in preparation for this volume unless otherwise cited. Nash K. Burger provided the editor with invaluable information about book reviewing and the New York Times Book Review. Hunter McKelva Cole was the first to research Welty's book reviews; he listed them in "Book Reviews by Eudora Welty: A Check-List," Bulletin of Bibliography 23. 1 (1963): 240. Cole also a.s.sisted me with information regarding Welty's New York Post reviews and her interns.h.i.+p with the New York Times Book Review. Noel Polk added to and updated the list in "A Eudora Welty Checklist," Mississippi Quarterly 26.4 (Fall 1973): 66393, rpt. as "A Eudora Welty Checklist, 19361972" in Welty: A Life in Literature, ed. Albert J. Devlin (Jackson: U P Mississippi, 1987), 23865. Further book reviews were listed by W. U. McDonald, Jr. in his continuing ''Works by Welty" in theEudora Welty Newsletter and were collected by Pearl Amelia McHaney in "A Eudora Welty Checklist, 19731986," Mississippi Quarterly 39.4 Page xxvii (Fall 1986), 65197, rpt. in Devlin, 266302. In The Welty Collection: A Guide to the Eudora Welty Ma.n.u.scripts and Doc.u.ments at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (Jackson: U P Mississippi, 1989), Suzanne Marrs catalogues Welty's typescripts, published reviews, and The Eye of the Story papers. Noel Polk's Eudora Welty: A Bibliography of Her Work (Jackson: U P Mississippi, 1993) includes complete descriptions of Welty's non-fiction prose and a "Publis.h.i.+ng Log for the Career of Eudora Welty."

2. The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews (New York: Random House, 1978); hereafter cited as Eye.

3. Albert J. Griffith, "The Poetics of Prose: Eudora Welty's Literary Theory," in A Still Moment: Essays on the Art of Eudora Welty, ed. John F. Desmond, Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1978, 5162; Michael Kreyling, "Words into Criticism: Eudora Welty's Essays and Reviews," in Eudora Welty: Critical Essays, ed. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1979, 41122; Harriet Pollack, "Words Between Strangers: On Welty, Her Style, and Her Audience," in Welty: A Life in Literature, ed. Albert J. Devlin, Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1987, 5481.

4. Michael Kreyling, Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1991) 97.

5. "Looking Back at the First Story," The Georgia Review 33 (1979): 75155.

6. Reprinted in Conversations with Eudora Welty, ed. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw (Jackson: U P Mississippi, 1984); hereafter cited as Prenshaw.

7. Nona Balakian, who was hired by Van Gelder just as she graduated from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in 1943, taught Welty her job at the copy desk. In an introduction to a volume of her reviews and essays, Balakian characterizes Van Gelder as a "maverick with ideas of his own. . . . Himself literature oriented, Van Gelder saw the Book Review as an educative medium. Since the supplement is indirectly dependent on advertising, he couldn't ignore popular books of the day, but the reviews he printed of these books invariably exposed what was irrelevant or false or blatandy commercial about them. He had a knack for finding young writers with literary backgrounds . . . (Critical Encounters Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1978, 15).

8. See Burger's "Eudora Welty's Jackson," Shenandoah 20.3 (1969): 815.

9. "Pageant of Birds," New Republic 109 (25 October 1943): 56567; "Some Notes on River Country," Harper's Bazaar February 1944: 8687, 15056.

10. Burger, who stayed with the Book Review through all the changes, recommends a roman clef, The Belles Lettres Papers, by fellow editor Charles Simmons (New York: William Morrow, 1987), for a humorous version of the situation during this period. Robert Van Gelder also wrote a novel based loosely on Times's personalities, Important People (New York: Doubleday, 1948).

11. Welty said it was at Van Gelder's suggestion that she gave a lecture at the Pacific Northwest Writers' Conference at the University of Was.h.i.+ngton, 48 Au- Page xxviii gust 1947. Van Gelder was also one of the speakers. Welty is quoted in the local newspaper as saying, "Your story . . . should stir the reader's imaginationmake him think, feel and act. . . . Plausibility doesn't matter. Many times we are most enchanted by the story that is fairylike and highly implausible" (Joe Miller, "Short Story Writer Speaks," Seattle Post-Intelligencer 7 August 1947: S14). "The Reading and Writing of Short Stories," first published in Atlantic 183 (February 1949: 5458 and March 1949: 4649), is collected in revised form as "Looking at Short Stories'' in Eye 85106.

12. London: Hogarth, 1939, 1969.

Page 3 But You'll Be Back By Marguerite Steedman The Life of a Southern Town:

Sat.u.r.day Review of Literature 19 September 1942: 2223

This novel is about a little Georgia town cut off from life by the new highway's leaving it away to one side; and how Miss Cora, the maiden lady in the big house, contrives in one mounting flight of inspiration and ingenuity to get its life back by the homely way of putting every talent in the place to work. It is the account of a great burst of energy out of one character. 1 Out of Miss Cora's energy, everybody cans, preserves, weaves, carves, serves dinners, and hands out flowers to tourists. Miss Cora loves the town, but she does the good deeds also because the hero, in love with her niece, has left Thessaly in time-honored disgust saying it is no town for ambition to flower in, that place being New York. It is to bring Peter back by refuting this (in some kind of maiden-aunt logic) and bestowing him on the languis.h.i.+ng niece that Miss Cora schemes over the town and that the town is infected by her ambition and works busily under the spell and accomplishes a great list of things.

This is mostly a novel about thingswanting things, getting things, losing things, stealing and selling things, and getting better things. It does not go very inquisitively into human emotions, touching only the feelings of enterprise that things and their getting can inspire. It is to the detriment of this novel that enterprise is not revealing behavior, in fact it is often the farthest thing from it. At its most ambitious and at its best, the book sets out to be the panoramic story of a town, its threatened life, its death by ruin and fire, and its dramatic renascence. The human story, the emotional story in Page 4 this panorama, is touched in a vague hovering way, while the success story of getting houses, food, and a man for the girl, is told meticulously and with zest.

The author knows her little towns and is quite sure in her casual observations and in the lighter anecdotes of that life. She knows the South, obviously, and she has a nice habit of good humor. But when the time comes, as it should, to look through the outside of this life to me inside, she backs away.

Several deficiencies might come from its being a first novel. The plot is an account of manipulations instead of a study of human motives. There is no interplay of character, only a one-way effect of an omnipotent Aunt Cora on the others. For this reason there is little human interest in what Aunt Cora accomplishes and no suspense or doubt about the accomplishment. The other characters are just so many stops for Aunt Cora to pull out in her solo performance. She is able to cast such a strong spell over the population that even the town siren begins to cry and borrows a car in order to ride clear away from the hero. It is too bad that the story has to take its root out of a problem of young and unnourished love. This love affair, between Peter the young architect and the niece, cannot be much support when the heroine is asleep (alone) for most of the first eighty pages and the hero takes the train (onstage) to New York on page ninety-six without even telling her goodbye or appearing for one scene with her, and stays till the end of the book. He doesn't even write. One is told that they are in love, but one likes to make up his own mind. Since Marion herself is an unprotesting if pretty young being and makes few remarks, one decides that all this weaving and preserving should be done for the town, but not for Marion.

The jacket advertises the book's characters as "Normal Southern" people, which is a jolting phrase, and one hopes does not indicate that hereafter southern people are to be sub-divided after having already been divided from the rest of the country. This is not to say that Miss Steedman has not touched a relatively fresh field for she takes a whole little town indiscriminately into her story and includes everybody, many "nice people." Her trouble is not stock horror-characters, but stock sentimental characters, for whom "normal" may be the publisher's euphemism. There are the standby creatures, of North and South alikethe little crippled boy who is a genius, the mean old miser, the gamey Civil War general, the long-haired poet, and the treasure of a cook, etc. Miss Steedman is direct in her homely observations, but she does not look with such careful eyes at the things that better Page 5 require the clear penetration; she notes exactly and well "the sweetish odor of mud on which the sun s.h.i.+nes," but when she describes pity or love she contents herself with an old cliche. The description of the fire and the ruined town is good and is the most realistic thing in the book. But about emotion and character one can also be noticing and explicit. The charity and duty described are not emotions, ingenuity is not a force like pa.s.sion, and though this book deals with charity, duty, and ingenuity, and faith too of a kind, these things cannot come really alive without a more vital breath breathed through them. The author herself has not been emotionally affected by her ethical ideas, one feels. She is sure of them, often enthusiastic, sometimes sentimental, but not possessed. She is actuated by something less and something lighter than emotion, the development of a bright idea. The writing is energetic if not very distinguished, and is done with ease. Ease has permitted carelessness at times, and there are smudgy traces of journalism in an occasional absurdity of phrase and now and then a veil of sheerest hok.u.m falls over the page. Her thesis that no little town need die is laudable and full of interest, but the mind and heart and spirit of the town that would prove this thesis and rise above it are not examined. A glimpse at the town's real core of feeling and a timid hint of imagination are in the last chapter or so, but much more could have been made of the town's story and its overtones of medieval pride and joy in its work.

Page 6 Sweet Beulah Land By Bernice Kelly Harris Plantation Country:

New York Times Book Review 7 March 1943: 9

This novel is the story of Beulah Land, a section of river plantation country in North Carolina, over the eight years of time bounded by the arrival and departure of a stranger. The inhabitants include river gentry, sharecroppers and Negroes, and their in-betweens; and their lives when we meet them are intimately known and intimately related, one with all the others, according to the ways of the country. The panorama is given a treatment by Mrs. Harris at once exhaustive in detail and tender in its exactness.

Every last person in this place is shown to us, grouping by grouping, in a series of pantomimes at mid-distance that reveals each situation in its wholeness and in clear light and perspective. There could hardly be hope that all these characters and each of these pantomimes could emerge with equal vitality and strength, and they do not do so; but the average is good, and the procession is engrossing.

The story's development is the effect of the stranger Lan on the people of Beulah; he causes love in aristocratic Alicia's cool breast, he drives parvenue Archibald Hart and his henchman Trent to their worst exploits and villainies, and drives common little Sophie to her flagrancies and self-tortures. He is curse or blessing to every one he meets. Yet to this reader he never comes to life himself.

Perhaps none of the princ.i.p.als, or none of the close-ups, can compete successfully with such a rich background in constant life and stir behind them. Miss Partheny, the old lady sharecropper, is the exception, but she Page 7 was not one to hold back on any occasion, any more than a righteous wildcat. Hart seems at times a stage villain, sneering and grabbing women's waists and waving mortgages. Alicia is a rigid creature.

Lan wanders in, staggers in, collapses in the road at Alicia's feet; and with him talking wild and strange the while, she nurses him to life and finds herself attempting to mold and order him toward becoming her husband and sharing "Elmhurst" with her. And sure enough, a great change overcomes him when she makes him owner of some land. But the marriage does not happen, and Lan becomes manager of a little store on his land and remains and lovingly tends it for eight years, at the end of which he wanders away again, into the obscurity out of which he came.

The scenes where people, white or black, sit and talk leisurely, tirelessly, and anonymously, on disasters, on "ha'nts," have some quality of the ballad and a solid base in Southern ways. The conversation of every subordinate character is wonderful, real, and a joy to read, though that of some of the princ.i.p.als is stiff and at times destroys a scene's illusion. It might be that the breath of life which [is] in the minor characters has its origin in real people the author has known and listened to, but she cannot put equal authenticity into imagined persons.

But the picture of BeulahRidge Road, and Neckis given extremely well, it has authenticity, balance, rich and well-proportioned detail. Mature understanding has directed it, in addition to a clear and lively eye. Mrs. Harris is knowing of her country. She is completely at ease in every mansion, cottage, or shackexcept Lan's, and I don't really think she should have gone in there.

The book has collective life, and never preaches in any social-study manner to rob it of that life. Each little glimpse has concrete narrative, an intimate landscape with its times of planting and harvest, characters filling it by the score with precisely expressive faces, spontaneous pantomimes, colored costumes and possessions and toys in hand, all somewhat like a painting of Peter Breughel's. 2 In the midst of any and all of this, Lan is unreal; perhaps he is symbolic, and so lost among the rich every-dayness which is the life and charm of Sweet Beulah Land.3 Page 8 Between the Dark and the Daylight By Nancy Hale Women and Children:

New York Times Book Review 2 May 1943: 8

This is a book of twenty-one short stories. In such a number the quality as well as the kind is sure to vary. 4 Some of these are nostalgic stories of childhood, some trim vehicles for remarks on the war, education, the states of society and other current topics, some full-bodied stories of more inherent weight. Some are concerned in intense, intimate fas.h.i.+on with mood, such as the excellent "Six-Fifteen." This is also among the stories of childhood, which, one feels, are the real stories in the book, the fountains of the others.