THE PONDER HEART, light-hearted, fun-loving, and just a bit darker than you think

THE PONDER HEART
EUDORA WELTY
Mariner Books (non-affiliate Amazon link, since the publisher's website is not responding)
$11.49 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Daniel Ponder is the amiable heir to the wealthiest family in Clay County, Mississippi. To friends and strangers, he’s also the most generous, having given away heirlooms, a watch, and so far, at least one family business. His niece, Edna Earle, has a solution to save the Ponder fortune from Daniel’s mortifying philanthropy: As much as she loves Daniel, she’s decided to have him institutionalized.

Foolproof as the plan may seem, it comes with a kink—one that sets in motion a runaway scheme of mistaken identity, a hapless local widow, a reckless wedding, a dim-witted teenage bride, and a twist of dumb luck that lands this once-respectable Southern family in court to brave an embarrassing trial for murder. It’s become the talk of Clay County. And the loose-tongued Edna Earle will tell you all about it.

“The most revered figure in contemporary American letters,” said the New York Times of Eudora Welty, which also hailed The Ponder Heart—a winner of the William Dean Howells Medal which was adapted into both a 1956 Broadway play and a 2001 PBS Masterpiece series—as “Miss Welty at her comic, compassionate best.”

THIS IS MY ENTRY INTO THE 1954 CLUB...reviews of books published in 1954.

My Review: This magical moment of Southern history was first published in The New Yorker magazine, with the whimsically funny line drawings in my Kindle edition, in 1953. How I wish I had been there, that I'd seen it in that form...I was, obviously, unable to attend the 1956 Broadway performance of the play adapted from this book (being still as yet unborn) but I certainly saw the PBS Masterpiece Theater production with Peter MacNicol and JoBeth Williams as Uncle Daniel and Edna Earle Ponder. It was...fine. Not a patch on the read, but...fine. Like 2001 itself, it was no patch on 1953, or 1956.

The reason this novella marches on, I think, is that it is the perfect length and in the precise emotional register for Miss Eudora Welty's powers to come full bore on it. I am certain that its long-term popularity is down to Miss Edna Earle Ponder and her absolutely amazing narrative voice:

I used to dread he might get hold of one of these occasional travelers that wouldn’t come in unless they had to—the kind that would break in on a story with a set of questions, and wind it up with a list of what Uncle Daniel’s faults were: some Yankee.
–and–
Miss Teacake Magee lived here all her life. She sings in the choir of the Baptist Church every blessed Sunday; couldn’t get her out. And sings louder than all the rest put together, so loud it would make you lose your place.
–and–
The Peacocks are the kind of people keep the mirror outside on the front porch, and go out and pick railroad lilies to bring inside the house, and wave at trains till the day they die. The most they probably hoped for was that somebody’d come find oil in the front yard and fly in the house and tell them about it.

It's the voice that I sense in all Miss Eudora's very best writing, the voice of a certain woman whose presence in every Southern matriarchy is inevitable: The "excellent woman" of Barbara Pym's stories with a different accent and a slightly more acid tongue. In Miss Edna Earle, I do believe the type reached her apotheosis. She narrates the whole sorry saga of Grandpa Ponder's attempts to corral his son's bizarre, generous heart within the Institution of Marriage. After all, the mental institution couldn't even hold him a week. The problem is, you see, Uncle Daniel Ponder isn't crazy. Isn't, in fact, much of anything except smilingly delighted to be alive, and willing to do whatever it takes to give that same joy to others. And Miss Edna Earle, being a true-born Ponder and a lot sharper than Uncle Daniel, sees Grandpa's point...helps him as best she can...and, when the marriage "didn't hold out," she accepts Uncle Daniel's just going to need watching so he doesn't give away the whole of the Ponder fortune.

Nobody thought to worry about the dear soul finding another wife.

This time, though, as one might expect, Uncle Daniel finds the wrongest wife possible: A silly little girl of seventeen from a family of no-count nobodies. The shock of it! Why, Grandpa Ponder finally succumbs to this shock to "the Ponder heart" and now where is Miss Edna Earle going to get help dealing with Uncle Daniel? Especially now that his little child bride is all of a sudden dead....

What follows is an absolutely side-splittingly funny murder trial, a startling bunch of revelations about Uncle Daniel (not really) and a juicy trial for the gossips to chew over til Kingdom Come (that bit's true). There is, as always, The Welty Touch over every square inch of this magical little farce. There's the occasional nasty epithet, but never from Miss Edna Earle or Uncle Daniel; there's not one single sign of modernity in the story, in the structure or the tale of it. This is the way Southern women of a century ago told their stories to anyone who desired to listen.

I desired to listen.

WHAT THERE IS TO SAY WE HAVE SAID, a long, lively friendship in letters

WHAT THERE IS TO SAY WE HAVE SAID: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell
Suzanne Marrs, ed.
Mariner Books non-affiliate Amazon link
$12.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: For over fifty years, Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, two of our most admired writers, penned letters to each other. They shared their worries about work and family, literary opinions and scuttlebutt, moments of despair and hilarity. Living half a continent apart, their friendship was nourished and maintained by their correspondence.

What There Is to Say We Have Said bears witness to Welty and Maxwell’s editorial relationships—both in his capacity as New Yorker editor and in their collegial back-andforth on their work. It’s also a chronicle of the literary world of the time; read talk of James Thurber, William Shawn, Katherine Anne Porter, J. D. Salinger, Isak Dinesen, William Faulkner, John Updike, Virginia Woolf, Walker Percy, Ford Madox Ford, John Cheever, and many more. It is a treasure trove of reading recommendations.

Here, Suzanne Marrs—Welty’s biographer and friend—offers an unprecedented window into two intertwined lives. Through careful collection of more than 300 letters as well as her own insightful introductions, she has created a record of a remarkable friendship and a lyrical homage to the forgotten art of letter writing.

My Review: You already know who Eudora Welty is or you wouldn't've clicked on the review. I assume most of my readers know who William Maxwell is as well, since his fame hasn't precisely been shrinking. You'll realize, since the correspondents are monadnocks of American literature, that this book was a Must-Have-or-Expire purchase. Lucky me, I had then (2011) a lovely man in my life who knew me well and gifted the book to me.

No one who loved the mid-century American literary scene could've known the deep and abiding affection Welty, a nominally single woman, and Maxwell, a thoroughly married man, carried for each other. In that time, perhaps even more than this one, men and women were not friends unless there were benefits, in the public's mind at least. The fact that Maxwell was The New Yorker editor whose staunch championing of Welty's work would've added to the cynical public's certainty that there must've been somethin' goin' on. Nothing could've been further from the truth: Maxwell, in a letter to Welty, says he stopped reading a letter in a famous couple's correspondence because it contained an intimate endearment as a salutation!

Not the sort of man to sexually harass his woman friend.

But think of the work these two giants did, together...his editorial eye made her work much better, as she readily acknowledged; he felt her talent was matchless and merely benefited from burnishing...and in their own rights. I can insert a list of delicious works by both, a long, long list, for you to romp through, but those things are never complete even when both authors are dead. My tastes have changed, your tastes aren't necessarily much like mine. Suffice it to say, for today, you should go read my reviews of So Long, See You Tomorrow among Maxwell's ouevre, and One Writer's Beginnings among Welty's. They're not even small samples, it's true, but there are reasons to read these two revealing, personal narratives in conjunction with this collection of letters.

The course of a long friendship contains many bends and twists. Marrs doesn't comment extensively on Welty's seeming reticence about her long-time lover, married man Kenneth Millar, beyond noting it; I expect it was starchy Maxwell destroying "compromising" things if it existed at all. In honesty, I expect it was more likely the result of a natural reticence, a reserve, that these immensely and intensely creative people maintained in their ordinary lives. What isn't said can't be regretted with anything like the bitterness of blurting too much. A surprise to me was the long breaks between the mention of one or another's creative projects' progress. I was half-expecting a white-hot exchange of intensely felt writerly frustrations! Instead, it's the quotidian...what Mother did, what Brookie said...that they reserved for each other's eyes. It is far more intimate than mere sex. It is Love.

That is the shocking truth of this book. These two people loved each other. They cared deeply about each other, knew the foibles and failings each self-reproached, and supported supported supported until the shadows passed. Can there be a more perfect way to have a friend? A more fortunate discovery than this kind of friend?

I can't excerpt enough from any letter to make you feel the deep and abiding caring each carried for the other. I can tell you that the collection's title, which seems a bit overstated and awkward on first reading, is the only possible title for the work. It is verbatim from a letter, late in the writers' lives, sent by Maxwell to Welty. She has apologized for her long-delayed response to him. He says, "Dearest Eudora, what there is to say we have said, in one way or another.”

If ever in your life you have a friend to whom you can say, or write such a thing, or from whom you can expect it, you are a lucky person indeed.

Author Marrs has also written Eudora Welty: A Biography, which I possess but have not yet read...after all, I need a retirement project as much as people who work do!...and fully expect to enjoy as much as I did this delightful work.

ONE WRITER'S BEGINNINGS, an oral memoir/lecture by a major Southern literary light

ONE WRITER'S BEGINNINGS
EUDORA WELTY
Scribner (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$11.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Eudora Welty was born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi. In a "continuous thread of revelation" she sketches her autobiography and tells us how her family and her surroundings contributed to the shaping not only of her personality but of her writing. Homely and commonplace sights, sounds, and objects resonate with the emotions of recollection: the striking clocks, the Victrola, her orphaned father's coverless little book saved since boyhood, the tall mountains of the West Virginia back country that become a metaphor for her mother's sturdy independence, Eudora's earliest box camera that suspended a moment forever and taught her that every feeling awaits a gesture. She has recreated this vanished world with the same subtlety and insight that mark her fiction.

Even if Eudora Welty were not a major writer, her description of growing up in the South--of the interplay between black and white, between town and countryside, between dedicated schoolteachers and the public they taught--would he notable. That she is a splendid writer of fiction gives her own experience a family likeness to others in the generation of young Southerners that produced a literary renaissance. Until publication of this book, she had discouraged biographical investigations. It undoubtedly was not easy for this shy and reticent lady to undertake her own literary biography, to relive her own memories (painful as well as pleasant), to go through letters and photographs of her parents and grandparents. But we are in her debt, for the distillation of experience she offers us is a rare pleasure for her admirers, a treat to everyone who loves good writing and anyone who is interested in the seeds of creativity.

My Review: The unassuming, delight-filled, unsparingly un-self-indulgent prose of Miss Eudora's fiction is surpassed in this expansion and revision of her Massey Lecture in the History of American Civilization, delivered at Harvard in 1983. For anyone unacquainted with Miss Eudora's literary output, I recommend starting with short fiction ("The Bride of the Innisfallen" is a good starter, followed by "Why I Live at the P.O."), moving on to her chef d'ouevre, the novel The Ponder Heart; this memoir, all 104pp of it, should come after one knows whether one is able to appreciate the particularities and glories of Miss Eudora's work. While I think she would appeal to any able-minded reader, I know from experience that her beautiful sentences sound like preciosity to some readers: eg, "Over a stronghold of a face, the blue hat of the lady in the raincoat was settled on like an Indian bonnet, or, rather, like an old hat, which it was." (from "The Bride of the Innisfallen")

This, to me, is equaled in English by Nabokov's terse clarity, and by little else; but it has been cited to me several times as unendurably cutesy or simply overwritten. I so completely disagree that it's hard to credit the opinion-havers with a shred of taste; however, there are tastes, and there are tastes, so I move on from my digression.

One Writer's Beginnings is told in a narrative voice much like her fiction; it is constructed like the linear tale that a life is when it is reflected on at leisure; and there are so many things in her history, from 1909 and her birth until her last entry in the lecture, a trip by train to New York during the Great Depression as a WPA junior publicity agent, that clearly formed a consciousness of time and place and rightness of things that she uses to such telling effect in her stories. An anecdote early in the book of her parents' morning routine of whistling and humming back and forth up and down the stairs phrases from "The Merry Widow Waltz" illuminates for me the means by which this shy, never-married lady "got" the signals of relationship that are so necessary to the parties in happiness. Another moment, the discovery of two nickels preserved in a hidden box, teaches me that Miss Eudora never felt any unmixed emotion (I won't tell that story, it must be read to be understood) and that is why The Ponder Heart is such a landmark in Southern ficiton.

The death of Miss Eudora's beloved father in 1931 is simply too painful for her to go into; she elides the details and leaves us to infer her pain. It fits with her lifelong lack of interest in talking about herself, but it leaves the reader without an anchor in what had to be a turbulent passage in her life. I can't fault the lady for her reticence, but in this as in several other areas, it would have behooved Miss Eudora to have let others guide her in preparing these talks so as to answer more questions:

It is our inward journey that leads us through time – forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Our living experience at those meeting points is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction.

Well, and therein the rub: It was the last thing she ever wanted to do, answer questions, and it's also why she wrote such marvelous stories, to answer them all unasked:

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.

Miss Eudora Welty, thank you for all of it, and a safe journey into the future for your gifts to us who follow along behind you.

Another Beautiful Title: THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER

THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER
EUDORA WELTY
Vintage Books
$13.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The Optimist's Daughter is the story of Laurel McKelva Hand, a young woman who has left the South and returns, years later, to New Orleans, where her father is dying. After his death, she and her silly young stepmother go back still farther, to the small Mississippi town where she grew up. Alone in the old house, Laurel finally comes to an understanding of the past, herself, and her parents.

My Review: This is the novel that won Miss Eudora a Pulitzer Prize. She deserved all the awards going, but to select this one of her novels for an overdue honor...? Not that it's bad or anything, it's just...well...beautiful writing telling an ordinary woman's ordinary experience of coping with, understanding, death and aging. Evergreen themes to be sure, and again I stress the beautiful writing bit:

“Up home we loved a good storm coming, we’d fly outdoors and run up and down to meet it,” her mother used to say. “We children would run as fast as we could go along the top of that mountain when the wind was blowing, holding our arms right open. The wilder it blew the better we liked it.”

Yes. All of me knows that's true, and my inward ear rejoices in the music of it. But why it comes where it does, well, it's to make or re-make a point that's made.

Fine in shorter fiction. Gets tedious in longer fiction. This is *barely* over novella length and it coulda been shorter. Maybe even shoulda been.

But then there's, “At the sting in her eyes, she remembered for him that there must be no tears in his.” Oh. My. GOODNESS. Or this piece of gorgeousness, a tossaway line: “She was sent to sleep under a velvety cloak of words, richly patterned and stitched with gold, straight out of a fairy tale, while they went reading on into her dreams.” I could faint right now, saying it over and over, absorbing the *exactly*perfect* choice of words, savoring the rhythm, the heartbeat of it.

But the most frequent cry I hear against Miss Eudora's work is, "But NOTHING happens!" That's nonsense. Things happen, things that as we grow older we see clearer, things that don't involve fires and floods, or car, plane, boat trips to places near and far. Things that change the bone and meat of you, not the skin:

And perhaps it didn't matter to them, not always, what they read aloud; it was the breath of life flowing between them, and the words of the moment riding on it that held them in delight. Between some two people every word is beautiful, or might as well be beautiful.

And that, that right there, is my personal definition of what a marriage should be. I'd say "don't settle for less!" but there'd be more single people than there are places to house them.

So yes, things happen, yes, things and people change and grow and learn, but it takes a quiet and reserved readerly touch to see it, find it, winkle it out from the words. Action? Little. Characterization? Lots, maybe too much for some characters' ability to sustain our interest (Fay!). Discovery? Well.

At their very feet had been the river. The boat came breasting out of the mist, and in they stepped. All new things in life were meant to come like that.

In you step, now, and mind the gap.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Book-A-Day meme #9, a character you love to hate: DELTA WEDDING

DELTA WEDDING
EUDORA WELTY
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
$15.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A vivid and charming portrait of a large southern family, the Fairchilds, who live on a plantation in the Mississippi delta. The story, set in 1923, is exquisitely woven from the ordinary events of family life, centered around the visit of a young relative, Laura McRaven, and the family’s preparations for her cousin Dabney’s wedding.

My Review: The Doubleday UK meme, a book a day for July 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten reviews. Today's prompt, the ninth, is to discuss your favorite character in a novel to hate.

Dabney. Hands down, Dabney. What a self-centered nightmare of a spoiled brat! She's marryin' 'neath her, that no-count Troy is just scramblin' for a place in the Fairchilds! But Dabney, she knows:

"I will never give up anything!" Dabney thought, bending forward and laying her head against the soft neck. "Never! Never! For I am happy, and to give up nothing will prove it. I will never give up anything, never give up Troy - or to Troy!" She thought smilingly of Troy, coming slowly, this was the last day, slowly plodding and figuring....

And still, there's something deeply Southern in Dabney's greed, something that life in the lush heat of the land down by the water just puts in you, makes you part of it:

The eagerness with which she was now going to Marmion, entering her real life there with Troy, told her enough - all the cotton in the world was not worth one moment of life! It made her know that nothing could ever defy her enough to make her leave it. How sweet life was, and how well she could hold it, pluck it, eat it, lay her cheek to it - oh, no one else knew. The juice of life and the hot, delighting taste and the fragrance and warmth to the cheek, the mouth....

Dabney's complete inability to see the other person as real makes her a monster, that familiar monster, The Southern Belle. She hasn't got room for anyone but herself in the movie of her life:

Life was not ever inviolate. Dabney, poor sister and bride, shed tears this morning (though belatedly) because she had broken the Fairchild night light the aunts had given her; it seemed so unavoidable to Dabney, that was why she cried, as if she had felt it was part of her being married that this cherished little bit of other peoples' lives should be shattered now.

Things, the stuff that surrounds people like the Fairchilds from cradle to grave (and they'd take it on as grave goods if only people still did that), *those* evoke tears and memories. Not the people, not the little damn-near stranger in the Fairchild midst, little motherless Laura whose presence is unwished for but accepted because she is Family.

And in the end, that's where we end up in this novel, in the Family. Like every family, the Fairchilds have codes and shortcuts in their communication that seem designed to exclude others. That includes the reader of the novel, in fact. But it's not that the Fairchilds don't want you to understand them, or that Miss Eudora failed to give you the keys to a roman à clef. It's this very experience that's the point of the novel. Either you like that experience, or you don't, but this is the point:

Indeed the Fairchilds took you in circles, whirling delightedly about, she thought, stirring up confusions, hopefully working themselves up. But they did not really want anything they got - and nothing, really, nothing really so very much, happened!

Now that said, what makes this book fall short of four stars for me, an ardent Eudoraist? Novels aren't like short stories in that the introduction of a character or inclusion of a detail must be part of the essential nature of the book. There are about a squillion voices in this chorus, and that's just way too many. WAY too many. So there isn't a long-term investment in the current carrying us to...to...wherever it is we're going and we don't quite get to. Miss Eudora could've pruned the voices to Dabney, Uncle George, and Laura, and been able to tell the same big, noisy story. But this is a novel, and writing novels was not Miss Eudora's métier. That was the short story, a form of which she was a mistress.

In the end, as much as I loved to hate Dabney and her cut-rate Scarlett-ness, I was only slightly less appalled by the sheer feckless ridiculousness of George, Dabney's uncle and the Fairchild Golden Boy, and the cult surrounding him. His morganatic marriage to Robbie is summed up by Aunt Ellen, one of his groupies:

t seemed to Ellen at moments that George regarded them, and regarded things - just things, in the outside world - with a passion which held him so still that it resembled indifference. Perhaps it was indifference - as though they, having given him this astonishing feeling, might for a time float away and he not care. It was not love or passion itself that stirred him, necessarily, she felt - for instance, Dabney's marriage seemed not to have affected him greatly, or Robbie's anguish. But little Ranny, a flower, a horse running, a color, a terrible story listened to in the store in Fairchilds, or a common song, and yes, shock, physical danger, as Robbie had discovered, roused something in him that was immense contemplation, motionless pity, indifference...Then, he would come forward all smiles as if in greeting - come out of his intensity and give some child a spank or a present. Ellen had always felt this about George and now there was something of surprising kinship in the feeling.

That gets to the heart of my dislike and discomfort with George. He's so spoiled, so cossetted and babied, that only a severe adrenaline jolt (at someone else's expense) will do to fetch him up among the living.

It's not hard for me to appreciate this novel for what it is, but it's not at all the beau ideal of a novelist's art. I like it, I understand why others don't, but goodness me give me the lush, rich, deeply felt beauty of Welty's prose any old way it comes.