Fiction
A Curtain of Green. Tales by Eudora Welty. (The Eodley Head 7s. 6d.) The Signpost. By E. Arcot Robertson. (Cape. 8s. 6d.) Hell On The Way. By James M. Fox. (Peter Davies. 7s. 6d.)
" My father and mother, who believed that I saw nothing in the world which was not strictly coaxed into place like a vine on our garden to be presented to my eyes, would have been badly- con- cerned if they had guessed how frequently the weak and inferior and strangely turned examples of what was to come showed them- selves to me."
That sentence is taken from one of the best short stories I have ever read—A Memory, by Eudora Welty, in the first volume of her work to reach England, and which she has named for one of its least good pieces, A Curtain of Green. " To watch everything about me I regarded grimly and possessively as a need. . . . It did not matter to me what I looked at ' • from any observation I would conclude that a secret of life had been nearly revealed to me—for I was obsessed with notions about concealment, and from the smallest gesture of a stranger I would wrest what was to me a communication or a presentiment." This also is from A Memory, in which story alone out of the seventeen in the volume do we gather any fragment of autobiography. It does not often happen that -a writer, looking back, sees with such precision the essence of what she was about in the unconscious, unformulating days: The child chose her field unusually, and now the writer works it with the calm unusualness of the greatly gifted. And the first thing to be said about Miss Welty is that she sits so easy to her work that, odd as it is and -coming from far away—the State of Mississippi—and set in a narrow regional idiom, the best of her stories absorb the reader's acceptance as smoothly as do the secrets of his own reflection and phantdsy. There is no need to talk of promise ; this writer comes with ac- complishment in her hands, and if in future work she can, with widened experience and under the menaces of success, adhere to the standard of the seven or eight best stories in this book, not slackening, as she travels, in purity, fierceness or imaginative ac- curacy, she will indeed have done as well for the American short story as America need ask.
She has great variation of mood and theme. She can handle straight pathos, as in The Worn Path, so as to lead-us from suspicion of commonplace to delight in the curious gaiety of her tenderness ; she can give health and childhood their just victory over horrible- ness—" . . she took a -big bite (tut of the apple . . as in A Visit of Charity ; she can establish a whole dotty, decaying family, as in Clyde, with the minimum of explanation. But these are easy fill-ups, on the side. Her best stories fall into two special kinds. There is the sheerly terrible, savagely funny kind, when she presents us with a concentration of small-town mindlessness, all-but-total idiocy pour- ing itself out in helpless egomania, and so in blind comment upon itself, upon society, upon the past, and in general upon a state of affairs that terrifies and makes the reader laugh out loud in mirth that he can neither excuse nor resist. Why I Live at the P.O. and Petrified Man are of this kind—merciless, expository, non-censorious, and wildly and beautifully funny. Thinking them over again, one is inclined to call them the gems of the collection ; but pathology is not an end in itself, and though I cannot strain my metaphor to say that Miss Welty anywhere tries to offer a cure or airanswer to confusion of mind, or to the half-apprehended lone- liness and sensory griefs of life which it is her passion to observe, she does succeed sometimes in catching some of these into a synthesis which may pacify the artist in us, ignoring the moralist.
The Key is such an attempt. I do not think it succeeds ; for what had to be said in that story is so difficult that it should have been simplified_ to- its barest bones instead of overweighted as it is with sad imagery and the guesses of sympathy. I think that there is failure also at the centre of the beautiful story, Flowers for Marjorie, where one feels that the author herself has not entirely understood, or answered for, the violent moment at its heart. Yet all that surrounds it, before and after, is most gravely and truly gathered and composed. But in Death of a Travelling Salesman, in The Hitch-Hikers, and in the bitter fantasy, Mr. Marblehall we see the shaping of a whole. A human condition is given its place in a person and in a setting ; the bare essentials of realism are chosen, and then expanded so that what comes to pass has. the quality of something seen through water, or in the wavering of lamplight—when all is recognisable and all uncertain ; alive, that is —flowering up sorrowfully from plain facts and objects to the symbols, dreams, regrets and vanities which must compose with them into imagined life. It is curious to find Miss Arnot Robertson at a loss. For the theme and setting of The Signpost she has taken her talents and wits to wartime Eire, to a village in Donegal. It is an Eire which I for one do not recognise, but it has the effect of toning down Miss Robertson's customary assurance of judgement to a new specula- tiveness ; it neutralises the well-known acidity and induces a warm, odd generosity. But, for all the author's wit and goodwill, her beautiful village and crazy villagers are synthetic, straight out of a clever writer's notebook. And, indeed, the two visiting strangers are synthetic also. I found the book entertaining in patches, but difficult to get through and impossible to believe in.
If you like your fiction rough, tough and as fast as a running commentary on a boxing-match, Hell Qn the Way is your book. The thing could hardly have been better done. Its fifth-column activities move so fast that it is a relief to have to halt now and then to work out such idioms as : " . . It's always been my con- sidered policy to make a few assorted mice by the way." The mice are what used to be called, long ago, molls, janes or skirts. The amount of double, indeed, double-double-crossing that roars like a racing-car through the book has the remarkable quality of
Previous page
