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Old February 12th, 2011 #11
Alex Linder
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Eudora Welty: A Good Writer,

But Not a Great One.


Jimmy Cantrell

If the information given me in about 1992 is correct, columnist Paul Greenberg was the second person to label Bill Clinton ‘Slick Willy’ in print. That alone should guarantee that anyone with basic sense in both politics and personal morals should find a good deal to admire in Greenberg’s work. Over the years, I have read hundreds of his columns and found few to disparage outright. Many of his articles are worthy of the highest praise. Like the best syndicated columnists, Greenberg is much more than a mere political pundit: he is something of the nearly extinct Renaissance man, one who works to know in depth as many areas as possible so that his insights typically rise above the obvious, the short-sighted, or the mandarin. For example, in an era of mad rushes into the trendy, he penned the best journalistic praise of the Authorized (King James) Version of Scripture that I have read. And obviously it was not due to nostalgia for his childhood Sunday School days among the type of cultural-illiterates who had faith that Scripture was written once and for all time in Protestant King James’ English.

Paul Greenberg also wrote the best piece on the passing of Eudora Welty I have read. The reason is simple: Greenberg knows that Miss Welty was not a genius, that she was, though highly skilled in characterization, particularly in using dialogue to mark character, merely a writer of interesting, often captivating, works that are great only in comparison to the bilge of virtually all highly praised American writers (and that to me is a different category from Southern, just as German writer is a different category from Austrian and English from Irish) of the past four decades. John Updike and Toni Morrison are a pair of prime examples.

In the middle of his article, Greenberg marks the time when he thinks he first began to doubt Miss Welty, although apparently before that he had never been able to finish more than a couple of stories. In a white heat, she wrote the story "Where is the Voice Coming From?" after Medgar Evers’ murder, and the New Yorker rushed it into print to both profit from the frenzy and to promote The Sacred Cause. It was that story that made Miss Welty a Southerner safe for mild feminists to defend; it is her sole work that leftists can claim as fully Morally Correct. Yet Greenberg admits he only finished that story by skimming: "the way you do when you really don’t want to look hard at something embarrassing."

Greenberg opens his case by noting that Miss Welty’s personal character, the manners that reflected her being truly a wonderful person, are central to the current high reputation. "Indeed," he writes, "all those qualities are evident even to me from her prose, which has the same – and I don’t mean to use the word pejoratively – niceness." Of course, niceness applied to a serious writer is at least a mild pejorative, for it marks a low aim. There is no niceness about Dante; niceness would have rendered his genius into pious saccharinity, leaving his work no better than a Medieval version of The Pilgrim’s Progress, leaving it insignificantly superior to the ‘Christian’ fiction sold voluminously in contemporary Bible bookstores. Edgar Allen Poe was chastised by James Russell Lowell, a mediocre writer from a New England Unitarian family still anthologized to advance the Yankee schoolmarm’s definition of culture, for not being nice to Longfellow, who was, according to the prevailing notions, to be treated nicely by literary critics simply because he was a ‘gentleman’ poet and nice in his person. It is no mistake that Lowell’s family was up to its neck in the various antebellum and postbellum Yankee WASP Reform and Self-Betterment societies whose spiritual descendants are today still haunting us in the forms of Multiculturalism, Environmentalism, growing Government for Do-Gooding, and New Age spirituality.

Greenberg continues by noting that though she won many awards, Miss Welty most cherished the acknowledgement that she received from Faulkner after the publication of her first novel: "A simple note like that from the writer whom Flannery O’Connor called the Dixie Limited is worth a dozen Pulitzers and all the medals of freedom that have been or ever will be awarded." That Miss Welty so esteemed Faulkner’s minimal praise shows her good sense; that Greenberg so understands shows that his is a comprehension and evaluative skill of literature well beyond that of the average contemporary Modern Language Association doyen.

One of my closest friends from graduate school confessed to me upon reading Miss Welty for the first time that he found her tame, perhaps vapid. The professor (a moderate lesbian) and other students in the two-thirds female seminar had suggested, after the requisite charge of sexism had been floated, that he lacked the sophistication to grasp Miss Welty’s subtleties and so found no value. He wanted to know what I thought. I made a case for Miss Welty’s work, but I had to acknowledge that I agreed with his assessment in the main, certainly when I compared her work to that of Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, and Flannery O’Connor – and even Ellen Glasgow and Caroline Gordon.

‘You fail to grasp the subtleties’ is, I have found, the great and final thrust of those who wish to laud the merits of any writer adored by a precious set, or to reject an argument out of hand, and Miss Welty’s promoters have used it well. Many are mild feminists of the Southern strain: they want to think that whatever women produce must be equal to man’s work in general, and they will alter standards and call names to claim their prize. The non-mild feminists tend to ignore or deride Miss Welty because she apparently never had a lesbian affair and because her work’s focus was not the racist, sexist, homophobic society that had to be remade to usher in the era of tolerance and peace. I submit that this is the chief reason Miss Welty has been so praised the past two decades. As virtually all white Southern men have been removed from anthologies of American literature, many native Southern teachers of Southern literature have made a Final Stand with Miss Welty. We have her left, they say, and we will not give her up. Their fighting for Miss Welty may have helped convince them her merits are greater than they are; it certainly seems to have helped ease the guilt some of them feel for not having fought harder to defend the agrarians, for example.

Paul Greenberg sums up the gist of what my friend and I decided was the problem with Miss Welty’s work: "The Southern words are there – in abundance – and the Southern names and mannerisms, but, dare I say it, not the South. Instead there is the cliché of the South, the South outsiders see and hear and gush over." We live in a superficial age, and it is no mistake that people fall for what seems right, especially when that which seems right makes no great demands on us intellectually or spiritually. Those enamored of superficies will sooner or later start screaming about the boors incapable of sensing the subtleties. Otherwise, they would reevaluate.

It is not that Miss Welty is minimally talented. Far from it, she is a master of what she does. It is that she is a lesser literary artist. In Irish terms, Miss Welty is a file while Faulkner is an ollamh; the former is a poet (more generally, creative writer) while the latter is a master-poet; the former primarily composes shorter works and usually treats lighter subjects while the latter aims at epic and saga to tackle the BIG matters, which inevitably must be terrible if not tragic. As Greenberg says of Miss Welty, "Her South was familiar and safe, and it amused here and there, but it did not stir anything within."

There is nothing safe about Faulkner’s vibrant fictive world, and what it does to us, if we are not dullard readers, is beyond stir. The same is true of Yeats, the only 20th-century writer I consider Faulkner’s full equal as an ollamh. The repeated line in ‘Easter 1916’, "A terrible beauty is born", is one that is applicable in some way to every truly great work of literature. No terrible beauties are born from Miss Welty’s works. They are not the type to drive us mad. They are, for the most part, comfortable and soft, threatening only the craziest of leftists, entertaining and amusing, diverting, but not Teaching and Scarring us.

Again, Paul Greenberg provides the perfect way of seeing Miss Welty’s limitations. He observes that her front-page obituary in the New York Times featured a long list of acclaimed writers who considered her a friend and a worthy. The key for Greenberg is the most prominent name omitted: Flannery O’Connor: "For in Flannery O’Connor’s stories the South is not nice or quaint or charming, but of a piece with its over-arching, Christ-haunted madness, always reeling from redemption to no avail." Miss Flannery was an ollamh, even if she only wrote short stories and two short novels that grew from stories, for her subject is the biggest. Miss Welty tended a garden, flowers decorating the vegetables, and bottle-raised calves for veal; Miss Flannery hunted bear and boar.

Faulkner was asked in the 1950s to rate the writers of his generation, and he listed Thomas Wolfe first, then himself, with Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos following. He explained his reason for rating Wolfe, who died prematurely and whose reputation suffers in no small part due to an incompetent posthumous editor, first because Wolfe had attempted to say the most (which can be accepted as true in one way, but on the whole is preposterous – I think Faulkner was being modest while honoring the dead and putting Hemingway in his place). To Faulkner, the greatest thing about literature is the furious striving to get at the truth, and the more the writer desires to tell, the more he is to be honored. Failing while struggling to say the most is preferable to saying considerably less in more artistically refined or pleasing works.

Because Miss Welty rarely attempted to dig feverishly at the eternal verities of the human heart in conflict with itself, she failed rarely and thus is of decidedly lesser merit than Miss Flannery or Caroline Gordon, not to mention than Walker Percy or Cormac McCarthy; by that standard, I rate Madison Jones Miss Welty’s better. Margaret Mitchell, widely dismissed as a mere popular novelist, mined at the human heart in telling us Scarlett O’Hara’s story, showing us eventually a tragic heroine whose self-realization comes too late. None of Miss Welty’s characters is close to being that terribly beautiful; none of her stories is as agonizing as that of Gone With the Wind.

Southern literature today is in terrible shape. Creative Writing programs produce cookie-cutter hacks on the Brave New World model who ape the Yankee, ahistorical, communityless, Correct-the-Wrongs-of-the-Past-At-Any-Cost stance and regurgitate the mild to militant PC tripe that snares remunerative publications and college teaching positions. Compared to them, Miss Welty looks like Cervantes reborn, for their work, at best, is essentially that of either Hemingway’s Harry (sold his soul to be a Success) or his ‘poor Julian’ (too stupid to know that his principal subject and the social fawning driving it necessarily shrivel and consume souls). That, I think, is central to the sadness for Miss Welty’s passing among those of us who love and/or respect the real South and its cultural heritage: perhaps the best, and possibly final, bulwark against the leftmost third of the Democratic Party and those too far gone to be comfortable even there. But we should not confuse Miss Welty with the real thing. Instead, we should honor the Masters and encourage aspiring writers today to strive to emulate them. Much less is a waste of time, for both writers and their readers.

http://web.archive.org/web/200202191...C20011125.html