Eudora Welty (1909–2001)

Delta Wedding is the story of the Fairchild family at the time of daughter Dabney’s wedding. The Fairchilds are a wealthy early 20th-century Mississippi Delta family; Dabney is marrying their overseer, Troy. That Dabney is 17 and Troy in his 30s, and that she is marrying beneath her station, don’t seem to bother anyone – at least not enough to do something about it. In another author’s hands this might be the central conflict of this novel, but Eudora Welty has something else in show more mind. This is primarily a portrait of a family at a certain place and time, how each person relates to one another, and how class informs their world view.

While Welty’s prose gripped me from the first page, as her characters tumbled off the page I found I had to concentrate more than usual just to keep up. Characters are given little introduction and it took quite a while for me to piece together the family relationships, and distinguish the servants from family members. Dabney is one of the least complex characters; her uncle George, on the other hand, is an enigma. He is different from the rest and held on a pedestal, for reasons that are never entirely clear. The plot – events in the days leading up to Dabney’s wedding – is secondary to the everyday interactions between people, and the composite picture this creates.

Although I can’t quite say I enjoyed Delta Wedding, it left me with a respect and appreciation for Eudora Welty and a desire to read more of her work. show less

This is a beautifully written quiet little book. The descriptions especially are very evocative, and certainly I know these people, having grown up in the South myself. I'm not sure how much I connected to the story or these characters, though--I felt, as I read, like a disinterested observer, admiring the craft but not getting emotionally involved. Perhaps it is because I feel like I have read the Southern novel so many times over that it has become too shopworn for me by now, which is show more probably more a fault of mine than of this author's. show less

Eudora Welty, a great writer, a great title, and a Pulitzer prize? Oh, this should be an excellent read! Except, well, I spent a goodly part of the novel not being an excellent reader.

Being what felt like an unwitting part of Laurel's protracted numbness was unpleasant to me. Up until the last third, I wondered exactly what is this woman feeling, much like Laurel wondered what caused her father to lay languishing from what should have been a recoverable surgery. Was Laurel cold, or as show more emotionally shallow as her uncouth counterpart Fay? Was Laurel just too darn well-bred to mourn in a recognizable way? Or was there maybe some secret in the past of "the optimist's daughter" to be unhappily revealed? That emptiness of my understanding went on almost too long for me. If it weren't for Fay's outbursts and bad manners, my reaction would have been a bored flat-line. At least Fay and her lowbrow family gave me something to feel: outrage and insult on Laurel's genteel behalf, and I confess, an occasional superior guffaw.

Of course, all this was almost certainly under the complete control of Welty's mastery. I see now there was a clear trajectory to her story; it's just when she got there I was almost in despair that it would happen at all. Now I'm chagrined at my weak-reader impatience. I look back and recall certain bread crumbs that I couldn't savor because I was too impatient, too caught up with my thoughts, "Yes, yes, that's interesting, but for pity's sake, what's going on in that head of Laurel? Why doesn't she react to all these shenanigans?"

Then at last, when alone, after the childish Fay, the ridiculous Chisom family, the well-meaning bridesmaids, the drunk Major, and all the long-time friends leave, Laurel feels. Slowly but surely. Grief begins to roll over her. Grief over the death of her mother ten years before and memories of her mother's unhappy change of personality at the end. Grief over the tragic death of her husband cutting short their new life together. Grief over her father's puzzling marriage to the feisty Fay and his too willingly death. All of it catches up with her. So much grief, so much delayed grief. Oh, Miss Welty, I see. I see why Laurel was holding back. She had heavy losses and memories to sort out and I'm half-ashamed for wishing this on her. When that piece of paper with her mother's handwriting with the two words "this morning" flew up from the fire, tears filled my eyes. And that obnoxious Fay? Turns out in the end I realized Fay, too, had a lifetime of loss but of a different kind -- the loss of never having. And the poor thing wasn't even possessed of enough sense to realize it. What she did have was the survivor's base instinct to propel her swiftly into the future, a future without a past worth remembering.

After closing the book, I was tempted to promptly go back to the beginning, this time to read with more sympathy, to let Laurel feel her slow-realized grief at her own pace as any of us should be allowed to do. To pick up those discarded morsels and to taste them fully. And to read a prize-winner with more confidence. show less

This is a collection of Welty's public writings about Faulkner, including a review of Intruder in the Dust; a deliciously wrathy letter to Edmund Wilson, who had critiqued the same novel with blinkers on, in her view ("there's such a thing as a literary frame of reference that isn't industrial New York City in 1948" she points out); a memorial tribute written for the Associated Press news service when Faulkner died; and some lectures and speeches. Lordy, I love this lady. She is right up show more there at the top of my list of people I wish I could sit down and talk to. And I'm pretty sure if she lived down the road, I could sit down and talk to her. She comes across as warm, witty, gracious, possessed of an intelligence I could learn from, totally lacking in Attitude but not about to take a lot of nonsense either. And, of course, she loves Faulkner the way I do...not academically, but like a slightly surly uncle who nevertheless tells terrific stories and sees things the rest of us would miss if not for him. She also reviewed a collection of Faulkner's Selected Letters. After pointing out that Faulkner would have hated the idea, but accepted the inevitability, of their publication, Welty dealt a bit with the content and the chronological presentation of the letters Joseph Blotner included in the chunky volume (there it sits, right on the shelf at the top of my desk). But then she wrote a paragraph that exemplifies why I do love her so. She said:
"No man ever put more of his heart and soul into the written word than did William Faulkner. If you want to know all you can about that heart and soul, the fiction where he put it is still right there. The writer offered it to us from the start, and when we didn't even want it or know how to take it and understand it; it's been there all along and is more than likely to remain. Read that."
Reviewed 2017 show less