PARTISAN REVIEW
289
saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and
since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that in–
stant to enter Paradise." The interaction of Miss O'Connor's vigorous
Catholicism with the Southern situation sets her apart, but her con–
sciousness of violence, pain, endurance, and redemption places her
squarely in the center of the Southern tradition. Only Faulkner - of
whom she once said, "The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst
makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit
him–
self to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track
the Dixie Limited is roaring down" - ranks higher.
Of those writers who are still living and have made major contribu–
tions to the Southern tradition, two - Eudora Welty and Peter Tay–
lor - are workIng at the height of their artistry. Robert Penn Warren,
Katherine Anne Porter, and Erskine Caldwell have long since passed
their peaks; Miss Welty and Taylor are the last authentic practitioners
of the tradition.
The historical theme is less important in their work than place
and community. Miss Welty's latest novels,
Losing Battles
and
The
Optimist's Daughter,
and Taylor's
Collected Stories
concern themselves
largely with that most fundamental of Southern communities, the fami–
ly. In
Losing Battles,
a Mississippi hill family gathers in ritualistic cele–
bration of a grandmother's 90th birthday; in
The Optimist's Daughter,
a middle-aged woman who has left Mississippi returns to find her father
dying and the last bonds of family dissolving; in Taylor's stories, various
families of Memphis and western Tennessee strive "to keep up the family
ties," some succeeding and some failing. Similarities between Miss Welty
and Taylor should not be made too much of, but one passage from
Losing Battles
comes close to characterizing their work:
The tree looked a veteran of
all
the old blows, a survivor. Old
wounds on the main trunk had healed leaving scars as big as tubs
or wagon wheels, and where the big lower branches had thrust out,
layer under layer of living bark had split on the main trunk in a
bloom of splinters, of a red nearly animal-like.
"Too late to pull it up now," said Granny, looking from one face
to another, all around the table.
It would be difficult to find a passage that more succinctly de–
scribes the Southern themes: the tree, representing both the rootedness
of place and the dignity of survival against harsh odds; the family,
rooted like the tree, gathered nearby in community.
