Yesterday I read a collection of short stories by Eudora Welty, A Curtain of Green. The stories are beautifully-written, slicing, and jarring expositions of pre-modern, almost primordial, life in the Deep South.  Even in the stories wearing a vestige of civilization — post offices and gardens and All-Nite diners — the underlying current is savage, bitter, and brutal.

Welty was a master of description.  I’ve never read more precise characterizations than “as she sprawled close to the fire, her hair began to slide out of its damp tangles, and hung all displayed down her back like a piece of bargain silk“  or “Ellie Morgan was a large woman with a face as pink and crowded as an old-fashioned rose” or “the darkness was thin, like some sleazy dress that has been worn and worn for many winters and always lets the cold through to the bones” or “Her late marriage has set in upon her nerves like a retriever nosing and puffing through old dead leaves out in the woods” or “Pale darkness turned for a moment through the sunlight, like a narrow leaf blown through the garden in a wind” or “he covered his heart with both hands to keep anyone from hearing the noise it made.”

When she matches her gift of description with a subtleness of story-telling, as in “Curtain of Green”, “Petrified Man”, “The Hitch-Hikers”, “Death of a Traveling Salesman”, and “The Key”, she is unsurpassable in the beauty and power of her writing.  l also like when Welty exercises her wit and her insight into Southern reasoning, gossiping, and busy-bodying, and of course her skills at description, to create parodied tales of Southern Life, as in “Lily Daw and The Three Ladies” and “Old Mr. Marblehall”.  But when she indulges her high Southern Gothic penchant for hyperbolic melodrama of suffering, as in “The Whistle”, “Clytie”,  “The Worn Path”, and “Flowers for Marjorie”, the stories left me overwhelmed but unmoved.

Reading Welty’s stories is like going back in time to a different world, back to a Deep South of stupefying heat and small towns, a time of inequality, injustice, inbreeding, and intense pathos. Welty came from that world, she sprang out of it to turn back and see it with an eviscerating eye and write about it with an incredible (if at times extreme) talent.  With her stories she drags us back to that bizarre place and makes us see its charms, its horrors, and its unique place in our American culture.