Life, with a Touch of the Comic

By Paul Gray

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF EUDORA WELTY

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 622 pages; $17.50

A collection of stories is the writer's equivalent of a retrospective exhibit, handily displayed in a portable museum without walls. Works created at disparate periods and under different circumstances are finally allowed to mingle in a single volume, where they may harmonize or squabble with each other at will. In either case, an author's career is bound to look slightly different afterward, even to devoted lifelong readers. With a length of time compressed between hard covers, memory is superseded by fresh considerations of breadth and depth.

The results are not always salubrious. Hidden flaws can appear as well as unsuspected virtues; repetitiveness may drown out variety. But Author Eudora Welty, 71, survives the ordeal of retrospection beautifully. Her Collected Stories reprints all the works from four earlier collections, plus two previously uncollected pieces written in the '60s, a total of 41 stories dating back to 1936, when a "little magazine" called Manuscript first published her. At that time, the young Mississippi writer could not have guessed that she was enlisting in a new confederacy of Southern letters, one that would rapidly push her forward as a standard bearer. She was intent on simply getting down imaginatively what she saw and heard around her. This volume is a reminder of how thoroughly her personal visions have entered the public domain.

Welty began writing after William Faulkner and before Flannery O'Connor, and her achievement has been partly eclipsed by theirs. All of them began with roughly the same material: life, odd and otherwise, in small towns of the rural South. Given this common starting point, comparisons of the three were probably inevitable, but they also were, and remain, misleading. Each looked at the South in a different way. Faulkner saw the tailings and butt ends of a long tragic myth; O'Connor perceived a gallery of grotesques testing the limits of God's mercy to man. Welty concentrated instead on ordinary people, on "the thing that makes them what they are in themselves, their secret life, their memory of the past, their childhood, their dreams." Her choice carried with it the hush of inference, "sad as the soft noises in the hen house at twilight," and also the rustle of laughter.

For Welty has always been a superb comic writer. Her well-known early story, Why I Live at the P.O., is a hilarious portrait of sheer cussedness; the narrator, postmistress at "the next to smallest P.O. in the entire state of Mississippi," makes herself so obnoxious to her bizarre kinspeople that she stalks out in a huff and sets up housekeeping at her place of business. The town is then split into those who will patronize the post office and those who refuse to use the mail at all, rather than cross the family.

Welty can wring humor from the Southern idioms without mocking them. In Petrified Man, a beautician named Leota reminisces about her recent courtship: "Honey, 'me an' Fred, we met in a rumble seat eight months ago and we was practically on what you might call the way to the altar inside of half an hour." In The Wide Net, a none-too-bright husband thinks his pregnant wife has drowned herself; an awkwardly large party is assembled to drag the Pearl River. Of course, no body is found, but Doc, who owns the net, pronounces himself pleased with the expedition: "I've never been on a better river-dragging, or seen better behavior. If it took catching catfish to move the Rock of Gibraltar, I believe this outfit could move it."

Welty occasionally wrote stories set as far afield as Ireland and Italy, but she seems most at home in Mississippi backwaters "spread out from Baptist church to schoolhouse."

She gives these places different names (Victory, Beulah, Morgana, China Grove) and residents who meet unhappy as well as amusing fates. People are murdered, crushed by falling trees; some drink too much, some go crazy. Those who think of Welty as a gentle, "safe" Southern writer may be surprised to find an early story about a geek, a consumer of live chickens for a traveling circus.

For some of Welty's most unfortunate characters, no consolation is possible.

Others, though, can seek out the land, the profusion of growth and beauty that is never farther away than the dirt road over yonder. If a boy wants to get away and think, he can do so royally: "He stood in the light of birdleg-pink leaves, yellow flower vines, and scattered white blooms each crushed under its drop of water as under a stone, the maples red as cinnamon drops and the falling, thready nets of willows . . ." Such is lated scenes may some day seem as remote as Jane Austen's country villages. If so, the work of Eudora Welty will similarly serve as a guide to how it once was.--By Paul Gray

Excerpt

"They went down again and soon the smell of the river spread over the woods, cool and secret. Every step they took among the great walls of vines and among the passion-flowers started up a little life, a little flight.

'We're walking along in the changing-time,' said Doc. 'Any day now the change will come. It's going to turn from hot to cold, and we can kill the hog that's ripe and have fresh meat to eat. Come one of these nights and we can wander down here and tree a nice possum. Old Jack Frost will be pinching things up. Old Mr. Winter will be standing in the door. Hickory tree there will be yellow. Sweetgum red, hickory yellow ...' He went along rapping the tree trunks with his knuckle. 'Magnolia and liveoak never die. Remember that,.. And run, little quail, run, for -- we'll be after you too."

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