The Limits of Love

By M.D.

THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER

by EUDORA WELTY 180 pages. Random House. $5.95.

Too often Eudora Welty has been thought of as a Southern lady and a spinster who wrote genteel something-or-others while her fellow Mississippian William Faulkner manfully immortalized the state. The truth is that ever since she published A Curtain of Green in 1941 she has been producing stories and novels of wonderful proportion and symmetry, written with a high sense of comedy, immense tenderness and no sentimentality at all. Their collective qualities this month won her the prestigious Gold Medal for Fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Now, two years after Losing Battles, her long, lyrical, raucous hymn to rural life, she has published a short, muted novel about dying and surviving. Though it contains the elements that have established her reputation--tart humor, the noisy, intricate chorales of Southern social life--this is a more inward, contemplative book than any she has written. Its concern is with what dies with the individual and what can be salvaged through memory and feeling. Its tone is rueful and uncompromising, especially in regard to the way people in this world treat loved ones about to enter the next. "What burdens we lay on the dying," the heroine reflects, "seeking to prove some little thing that we can keep to comfort us."

That kind of sentiment is typical of Laurel McKelva Hand, who is the Optimist's Daughter by his first long, happy marriage. Morally exacting and spiritually stern, Laurel is very much her mother's girl. The Optimist himself is gruff, generous Judge Clinton McKelva of Mount Salus, Miss.

Father and daughter have both long been widowed, but at 70 the old man is sanguine enough to marry Fay, a redneck trollop 30 years his junior, and introduce her into genteel circles. Fay is in every way Laurel's opposite--a shrewd, stupid vixen with a "little feist chin" who questions any altruistic gesture made to her, not out of skepticism but simple inability to comprehend it.

She cannot imagine a courtesy until it occurs.

The Judge dies in New Orleans while apparently recuperating from an operation. Fay and Laurel bring the body back to the old family house, where Laurel grew up and where all of Mount Salus gathers to "tell the Judge goodbye." Finally, Laurel is left for a time in a house that is now Fay's trying to sort out what really happened there in the past.

At first, her thoughts center on her parents' happiness together. Her mother, Becky, had been a spirited girl from West Virginia who named her child for the state flower and journeyed back ev ery summer of her life. But these memories are overwhelmed by images of Becky's slow, painful death and the Judge's powerlessness to comfort her.

In a way that seems obscene to Laurel, the presence of death had broken their harmony long before her mother died.

Before returning to her own home in Chicago, Laurel burns her father's letters to Becky and takes no keepsakes.

All she can travel with is the memory of her parents' love and her own love for them -- and the knowledge that even such a trinity is insufficient in the face of suffering and death. The book ends quietly. All her ex-bridesmaids reassemble to see Laurel off. Some first-graders wave goodbye from their schoolyard.

With some justification she decides that "surviving is perhaps the strangest fantasy of all."

In Eudora Welly's Jackson, Miss., home, the plates are a laurel pattern. There is a handsome clock that ticks clearly, just the way Fay hated. Upstairs there is a desk like Becky's. While the Judge and other elements of the story are imagined, Becky is in most respects Miss Welty's own mother who died in 1966. "Lately I have been haunted by my mother's life," she says quietly, and hundreds of details in the book seem to make bereavement tangible.

Many of her memories, though, are happy. The Weltys went to West Virginia every summer too, and the trip was a week-long adventure. Father drove while Mother steered him along the unmarked roads with directions from the Automobile Blue Book: "Jog past the ferry, a mile and three-tenths on . . ." Father cased each inn before the family entered, always carrying a rope and an ax in case of fire.

At 65, Miss Welty lives in the house her father built; her parents and two younger brothers are dead. She has never married, never left Jackson for any length of time.

If her life has been curiously uneventful in the ordinary sense of the word, it has not been passive. She worked briefly for the local radio station, and her hobby has long been the theater. Her novel The Ponder Heart (1954) was made into a successful

Broadway play. Now a good local theater, the New Stage, has made a play called A Season of Dreams out of several of her stories. Filmed for educational television last year, it won several national awards.

Author Welty's serious business remains writing fiction. Her favorite form is the not very fashionable long short story. "Everything I write starts that way, with the tension all in one direct line." She is working on several short stories now, but she never knows when one of them, like The Robber Bridegroom or Delta Wedding, might explode into another novel. She does not feel the problems and resentments that seem to be preoccupying many women writers now. "The big job," she says, "is to be in the mind of another person. It's a bigger job than sex."

Friends who visit Eudora Welty in Jackson include some with formidable reputations like Elizabeth Bowen. But she remains a shy and modest woman. When a recent visitor compared Fay --who steals every scene she is in--to the shrewish wife in Chekhov's The Three Sisters, Miss Welty spilled her coffee. There really are not many famous writers like that.

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