The Logic of Dreams

In one of Eudora Welty’s early stories, “A Memory,” a young girl lies by a lake. She sees the scene before her as if it were a picture or a brightly lit stage. The noon sun beats down, the water shines like steel:

“I was looking at a rectangle brightly lit, actually glaring at me, with sun, sand, water, a little pavilion, a few solitary people in fixed attitudes, and around it all a border of dark rounded oak trees, like the engraved thunderclouds surrounding illustrations in the Bible.”

The theatrical focus, the solitary folk, the fringe of darkness, the threat of storm and the literary, biblical undertows--these are all elements of Welty’s art. Yet in “A Memory,” she lets her narrator’s reminiscences suggest the danger of an artist’s neat reordering of life: “Ever since I had begun taking painting lessons, I had made small frames with my fingers to look out at everything.” The child who frames the view is nursing a fantasy, an unspoken first love; she is living a dual life, as “observer and dreamer.” Suddenly, into her romantic haze spills a crowd of bathers, ferociously alive, ugly, “squirming, ill-assorted.” They are so hyper-real that reality itself seems threatened. A dislocating magic is in the air. Metaphor runs riot: on one girl, “fat hung upon her upper arms like an arrested earthslide on a hill,” while her sister, “wore a bright green bathing suit like a bottle from which she might, I felt, burst in a rage of churning smoke.”

In Welty’s stories, unexpected elements continually invade the given frames. In the brief essay “Writing and Analyzing a Story,” which the Library of America includes in “Stories, Essays & Memoir,” she says that her tales often start from a “pull on the line,” some outside signal that “has startled or moved the story-writing mind to complicity.” A figure glimpsed from afar or an overheard conversation may provoke her into imagining the life behind the moment; yet once she embarks, the subject of the story may turn out to be something entirely different. The relationships she conjures up take on their own momentum and direction: The “moral, the passionate, the poetic, hence the shaping idea, can’t be mapped and plotted.” Perhaps this is why her stories, apparently so firmly grounded in social reality, so often take on the miraculous and troubling logic of dreams. Indeed, the jolting dislocation between inner vision and outer world is at the heart of her fiction.

“Stories, Essays, & Memoir” and “Complete Novels” contain the bulk of her published work from 1941 to 1980. They are a treasure trove, a perpetual delight. One cannot but applaud the inclusion of Eudora Welty in the Library of America. Yet like all great writers, she somehow resists the institutional label. Her works leap, alive, off any library shelf. She is playfully aware of the power of print. In the story “A Piece of News,” a newspaper article about a Ruby Fisher whose husband shot her in the leg almost convinces another Ruby Fisher that the accident happened to her: As she thinks of her husband, dangerous gulfs yawn beneath known reality, like a quake triggered by a hidden fault.

Welty has her own distinctive place in that great tradition of American writers, descending from Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner, whose interlinked stories give such powerful and enduring life to a particular place or community. Reading her stories or following the intricate dance of a novel like “Delta Wedding,” we are transported to a world that is real, yet not real--just as Welty, as a child, lying sick in bed, would pore over the fairy tales and legends of the 10 volumes of “Our Wonder World.” But Welty’s enchanted realm is not that of myth, although she ventures there in “Circe,” or of fairy tale, despite her clever fusing of the Brothers Grimm with local bandit lore in “The Robber Bridegroom.” Instead, her country is her home state of Mississippi, from the delta to the hill country, and especially “the River country,” the “little chain of lost towns between Vicksburg and Natchez.” The history of the region is an insistent murmur. In “Some Notes on the River Country,” she looks back to the “solid blue clay, embalming the fossil horse and the fossil ox and the great mastodon”; to the wind-born soil of the ridges; to the animals who beat the trail of the Old Natchez Trace.

In her stories, she re-creates the people and manners of the past: the coming of Aaron Burr’s fated “flotilla” in “First Love” or the passionate, blind stubbornness of Confederate women in “The Burning.” Modern times leave their own tracks: During the Depression, Welty photographed every corner of the state for the Works Progress Administration. The camera, she felt, was an extension of her own curiosity: “A good snapshot stopped a moment from running away.” Years later, details from those pictures (collected in “One Time, One Place,” 1971) would find their way into her work, like old Solomon’s cherished bottle-tree in “Livvie,” “ready for invading youth to sail a stone into the bottles and shatter them.” But recording this example in her memoir “One Writer’s Beginnings,” she notes that the fictional eye, unlike the camera, “sees in, through, and around what is really there.”

That capacity to see “in, through, and around” is beautifully exemplified in the story “A Still Moment.” Here three men meet in the Natchez Trace: the evangelist Lorenzo Dow, the murderous outlaw James Murrell and the naturalist and painter James Audubon. With a wonderful ironic twist, their driving preoccupations converge--yet never meet--as they watch a solitary heron feed beside a marsh. Their linked yet separate visions, their ignorance of each other and their self-blinding passions illustrate Welty’s deep preoccupation with the loneliness of the inner life and the power of obsession, at once life-giving and deadly.

Welty often chooses inarticulate central characters, whose lives can be understood only by a powerful imaginative leap that delves beneath the surface first presented to the world: a crazed old woman who runs and shouts and waves her arms and curses, searching for a face she once loved; a deaf boy thrilling to the unheard tremor of a violin; a deaf-mute couple dreaming of a trip to Niagara, N.Y., where they can “feel” the rushing sound of the great falls. She gives voice to the dreams that hover beneath language, like the water snakes gliding and coiling beneath opaque or shining waters.

The image of water, transparent yet concealing, driven by hidden currents, an element both seductive and threatening, is a pointer to the glistening suggestiveness and depth of her work. With superlative skill, tenderness and compassion, she allows us to see the power and beauty of buried dreams, as well as their frightening fragility, and to comprehend how little we understand each other’s hidden selves.

At moments of intensity, Welty suggests, we may suddenly see with the blinding empathetic clarity of the poet: The simple phrase “he saw” often signals revelation. Such moments of insight are associated with extremity: with love, with loss, with death. Few writers have produced so many deathbed sce, in so many varied tones. Her first story, “Death of a Travelling Salesman,” records a dying man’s sudden insight into the poor household where he has taken refuge. Her last, and finest, novel, “The Optimist’s Daughter,” hinges on a death and a funeral invaded--like the quiet scene by the lake in “A Memory”--by a vulgar, energetic, ruthless family who act as a catalyst, making the heroine see her own life clearly and leave her home behind.

Homes and families in Welty’s fiction are objects of mingled love and dread. In “One Writer’s Beginnings,” she brilliantly evokes not only her own childhood but also her father’s Swiss immigrant home in Ohio and her mother’s family in the hills of West Virginia, where her uncles, known collectively as “the boys,” hang their banjos on the wall as casually as they hang their hats. But the tug of the clan and their reluctance to let go are perhaps most powerfully felt in “Delta Wedding,” with its welter of uncles and aunts and great-aunts whose cluster of houses rules over the shimmering cotton fields under the overarching sky. The only consolation anyone can offer Battle Fairchild (Welty is a wizard at names) as he groans at his daughter’s “unsuitable” marriage to his overseer is “at least she isn’t going out of the Delta.”

How these families hang on. How they love their feasts and festivals and funerals. And how strong their charm is. Any tight community, like the spellbound little town of Morgana (another fateful name) in the interwoven stories of “The Golden Apples,” can become a tribe, clinging to shared memories, sacred sites, old stories. Yet the tribe can repel as well as attract. Beneath “The Golden Apples” pulses W.B. Yeats’ poem “The Wandering Aengus,” the evocation of travelers who cannot explain their restlessness beyond the acceptance of compulsion itself, the artist’s never-ending quest to roam, to see, to create--as she herself acknowledges in the use of Yeats’ line: “Because a Fire was in my head.”

Welty teaches us that you do not need to travel far to find the strange and the wonderful. With all her canny, comic down-to-earth observation, she knows that the mundane is inherently poetic. The list of his mothers’ quilts that the homesick Troy places among the cut-glass and silver wedding gifts in “Delta Wedding” is as evocative as the list of ships in Homer. The list of plants that Katie Rainey runs through at her death is her way of laying claim to a world: “As though her impatient foot would stamp at each item, she counted it, corrected it, and yet she was about to forget the seasons, and the places things grew. Purple althea cuttings, true box, four colours of cannas for 15 cents, moonvine seeds by teaspoonful. . . . “

Even the listing of food can become an incantation, summoning a vanished life, as the sweets Welty remembers from her own childhood in “The Little Store”: “wineballs, all-day suckers, gumdrops, peppermints . . . Tootsie Rolls, Hershey Bars, Goo-Goo Clusters, Baby Ruths.” And fantasy and reality can meet in a mouthful, as in the party dishes with which Mrs. Morrison comforts her son Loch at the close of “June Recital”--that devastating story of fire and betrayal and lives overlooked, in all senses--a list that ends with “[a] swan made of a cream puff. He had whipped cream feathers, a pastry neck, green icing eyes.”

For all her pungent wit and sharp observation, Welty is a Romantic: She makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Her stories are lyrical ballads, rooted in place, mixing the local with the literary, the mundane with the magical. Her work deserves its place in the Library of America: She is one of the great storytellers of the world.