564
PARTISAN REVIEW
and fades, and behind it all arrives a vision of horror, or a spontaneous
but unresolved decision, or else people grope for each other only to
pass like ships in the night. There is the same sociological data, em–
bellished beautifully when nature, interiors, or the life of the past are
described; distilled and quaintly bottled when human motivations are
involved. It is, of course, so artfully attenuated and so skillfully softened
that it bears little resemblance to formal sociology and comes across as
a kind of arcane wit, as if she could tell all she chose if only the pulse of
life were not so feeble.
Her themes are familiar by now. A Northern lady and gentleman
take an automobile ride into the Bayou country and encounter an
isolated Negro roadhouse where things are popping. No harm comes to
them, and they leave, somehow shamed by it, and don't have an affair.
Instead they discover the insufficiency of each other, and themselves.
Character portrayal is intended, but then again Miss Welty is always
delineating the character of the empty, or the insane. In another story,
two Southern ladies, made for nothing but ante-bellum life, hang
themselves grotesquely when Sherman burns their home, but this one
is that old Faulkner tale with the hot-house atmosphere, the compulsive
but agonizingly deliberate action that is supposed to take on the sig–
nificance of eternity, and was very good the first eight times Southern
writers did
it.
The title story concerns an American girl who has left
her husband and rides the night train and boat to Ireland with an
assortment of talkative passengers whose chatter influences her personal
problems, I think by making her recognize her need for the bright life
and solace of strangers. There are others: a bunch of ebullient Italians
going to Naples, a rather jejune monologue by Circe retailing her finely
spun grief, several having to do with the somnolent luxuriousness and
wonder of Southern life.
I don't much enjoy Miss Welty's work. She keeps evoking things
as if I had experienced them and relish them. I tire of her endless de–
scriptions of clothing and furniture. I enjoy the talky dialogue only to
a point. I don't find passionate people as incomprehensible as she does,
nor do I go for the unshakeable quiet frustration her characters are
inflicted with. In short, life doesn't seem as difficult to get at as all
that.
Theodore Hoffman
