Eudora Welty

The Golden Apples

One of the things that I find so striking about Eudora Welty is the unique and fresh way she turns a phrase as in:

"...like man never married at all till he flung in."

"And once they dressed Snowdie [an albino] all in white, you know she was whiter than your dreams."

"...after he went sallying out..."

"Everybody tried to stay with her as much as they could spare, not a day go by without one of us to run in and speak to her and say a word about an ordinary thing."

"...and there underfoot they were dressing up and playing ghosts and boogers."

"Just lammed the little wifey over the puss."

"'Granddaddy's almost a hundred,' said little King clearly. 'When you get to be a hundred, you pop.'"

I realize that a lot of this is old made new again by the wearing out of a phrase, the abandonment of it, the passage of time and the uncovered treasure of what was used up and put away. Still it suits me just fine.

Again, this was a different place and time, I understand it. But I can't help cringe at the disdain for black Americans as seen in passages in the story about scaring and playing tricks on them, referring to a child's toy gun as a "nigger shooter" and the like.

Welty describes Miss Jefferson Moody as "shooting-the-moon", but for the life of me I can't find any reference for the saying.

Focusing on the good of the work, it made me homesick for an era where gypsies were the most mystically intriguing creatures to be found.

Welty's characters are so rich that you come to really care about them without really being able to justify yourself, it being a book about nothing and all.

The Virgie character "caught lightning bugs and tore out their lights for jewelery." This reminds me of summers in Tennessee where twinklers were rampant, not like now. I used to smash them and paint my face with their phosphorescence which seemed to last less than a minute, fully air-exposed. "Hardly worth it," the tired adult in me complains.

This strikes me somehow: "They wished she had moved away... then they wouldn't always have to remember that a terrible thing once happened to her." It reminds me of a scene from The Beach, where the suffering of a shark-bitten friend is such a downer (when he develops sepsis) that they move him out of the camp (leaving him to die alone) so they don't have to listen to him moan. The concept of Welty's brutally honest comment also reminds me of the ease with which psychotropics are currently dispensed... and the disgust of bystanders when these fixes are not a peace panacea.

"...The rosy mole might be riding the pulse in her throat..." reminded me of The Birthmark.

Some of what Welty writes is so period that it is a little confusing, but I like the fact that there is this tangible but untouchable world that belongs only to the people in it and not wholly to outsiders.

I liked and could relate to:

"The inviolable grief she had felt for a great thing only widened her capacity to take little things hard."

"How cold to the living hour grief could make you."

The Golden Apples is an interesting glimpse of the world, of lifetimes, of nothing. Welty's landscapes are rich, multi-layered like impossible scores of Mozart. (See: "The magnolias' inflamed cones and their brown litter smoldered in the tail of the eye.") The woman was gifted congenitally. It flowed through her brain like oxygen fills myriad vili of human lungs. It is a marvel, an enchantment to observe. Welty's world is sometimes lost on me... but not, I can tell you, through any fault of hers... only my eyes read through a cataract of lost perception. Three steps to the mailbox was a book and a half of facet and dimension on every passionate level to Welty.

I would have liked to have sipped iced tea with her on some historic wraparound in the reddest heat of summer, to sweat and bother, talking about everything and nothing, but I would have been seriously, fatally beneath her. Alas she is gone, added to the passing landscape of time and having forgotten the gifts of her extrasensory perception and the world left enjoying them.

I am not a fancier of fiction. Not at all, but Welty caught me up in The Golden Apples. Good show, old girl. Good show.

Visit Welty's grave.
(Epitaph reads: "For her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love." The Optimist's Daughter)