PrettyFakes

Via the always insightful Syntax of Things, I recently learned that some internet types are following up April’s National Poetry Month with Short Story Month in May, highlighting exceptional contributions to this oft-neglected genre.

The story whose praises I’d like to sing is “No Place for You, My Love” by Eudora Welty. And I know what you’re thinking: “Wow, Prof, it’s a good thing you’re taking this opportunity to use your public forum to bring attention to an overlooked and forgotten writer such as Eudora Welty. Hey, maybe you should point out how great Flannery O’Connor is, too?” But my suspicion is that Welty is sliding towards more-revered-than-read territory. Though most PF stalwarts are die-hard Weltyans, I’m unsure of her profile in the general lit-reading public. Most people have a favorite Welty story, but often it’s “Why I Live at the P.O.” or “A Worn Path”—two oft-anthologized gems that, despite their unimpeachable geminess, don’t quite represent the full range of Welty’s achievement. (I do see “The Wide Net” anthologized more and more lately, and I heartily approve of this trend.) These stories are useful for discussing key elements of Welty’s fiction: her use of the grotesque, her mythic borrowings, and her interest in the alleged storytelling culture of the South, for instance. But I’m always a little uncomfortable with how neatly we (and I’m indicting myself here, too) allow these familiar themes to explain Welty—explain her away, almost, until we don’t really even need to read her anymore. There is more and stranger fiction in her work—and, if we look closely, even those familiar stories are stranger than we were probably taught in our American Literature survey or our Introduction to Literature course. (Yes, “Why I Live at the P.O.” is funny. It’s also crushingly sad.) This is, after all, a writer whose penultimate novel features a group of women gang-raping another woman with a watermelon. We should keep this in mind at all times.

“No Place for You, My Love” is the first story in what I’m almost positive is Welty’s least-read collection, The Bride of the Innisfallen. Her final volume of short fiction, it includes stories written during and about her international travels in the late 1940s and 1950s, a period that saw her in Italy, Ireland, France, and other such far-flung locations. The non-southern setting of many of these stories is one reason they aren’t often read; if you’ve only got time to teach one Welty story or one Welty novel in a course, chances are you want it to have something to do with Mississippi. But these are odd and wonderful stories, shading sometimes towards obscurity, perhaps, yet rich and compelling nonetheless.

“No Place” is about traveling, too, but in this case it’s about a South that is not the South that Welty is often associated with, or that her characters in this story know anything about. The story recounts a journey undertaken by a man from Syracuse and a woman from Toledo who meet in New Orleans over lunch at Galatoire’s, both refugees from unhappy relationships. They decide to take a drive “south of South,” to Venice, Louisiana, at the southernmost tip of the state, the last point where you can clearly distinguish land from water, and even then only by squinting hard.

In addition to a few choice aphorisms—“The stranger in New Orleans always sets out to leave it as though following the clue in a maze”—this story is most interesting to me for Welty’s hallucinatory, nearly magical realist prose. The story in large part seems to be about heat, and the sort of changes that tropical heat can bring and the insights that we can glean from observing and experiencing those changes—and about the folly of trying to resist them. A while back I wrote about that topic, citing Jon Smith’s argument that “In the deep South, things grow, and things rot […] so fast that in their very alternation between one thing and another we are both reminded of our own mortality, our own biological contingency, and forced to marvel at the magic of it.”

Anyway, I set out to encourage people to read this story, not to explain it away so you wouldn’t have to, so I’ll leave it there, except to quote a few passages that I come back to time and again:

Going back, the ride was wordless, quiet except for the motor and the insects driving themselves against the car. The windshield was soon blinded. The headlights pulled in two other spinning storms, cones of flying things that, it seemed, might ignite at the last minute. [...]

He climbed back inside and drove. When he moved to slap furiously at his shirtsleeves, she shivered in the hot, licking night wind that their speed was making. Once the car lights picked out two people—a Negro couple, sitting on two facing chairs in the yard outside their lonely cabin—half undressed, each battling for self against the hot night, with long white rags in endless, scarflike motions.

In peopleless opened places there were lakes of dust, smudge fires burning at their hearts. Cows stood in untended rings around them, motionless in the heat, in the night—their horns standing up sharp against that glow.

At length, he stopped the car again, and this time he put his arm under her shoulder and kissed her—not knowing ever whether gently or harshly. It was the loss of that distinction that told him this was now. Then their faces touched unkissing, unmoving, dark, for a length of time. The heat came inside the car and wrapped them still, and the mosquitoes had begun to coat their arms and even their eyelids.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 9:01 am and is filed under Books, In Mississippi, In the South, Professor Fury. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.