Review: The State(room) of Welty Studies

Stephen Fuller’s study of Eudora Welty’s fiction—not the full canon, a point I’ll return to—enters a crowded field. I called up the online card catalogue of the Vanderbilt University Library (a fair example of a research library) and found fifteen pages of Welty titles, ten to twelve titles per page. To be sure, this includes works by Welty herself and a few graduate theses, but Welty studies would still fill a couple of shelves in anybody’s library. Besides two biographies (one authorized, the other not), there are numerous book-length critical studies, beginning with Ruth Vande Kieft’s Eudora Welty in 1962, and collections of critical essays. Journal articles and conference presentations add to the population. It is not easy to come across an angle of vision on Welty’s work that one’s predecessor has not already, at least tangentially, noticed.

Fuller comes closer than most. Concentrating heavily on the period in her life when, as a young woman in her thirties, Welty seemed to be on a Jackson-to-New York City shuttle, Fuller argues that exposure to surrealism—both directly in works of art and manifestoes she might or must have seen or read, and indirectly as an aficionado of the fashion scene that was deeply influenced by the outré designs of Salvador Dali—afforded the beginning (and eventually the accomplished) writer her “main path” in fiction published between 1941 and 1955 (45). This path is marked by a gallery of images, a temperament—a way to be a writer in Mississippi who communed with sensibilities in New York, London, and Paris. This is less a southern Welty than an expatriate Welty, more modernist than regionalist—like the figure in a group portrait who looks vaguely familiar but in the end is not in the picture but rather passing through it. Fuller’s opening chapter is a densely researched, persuasive evocation of the circles in which Dali, André Breton, and the rest of the surrealist nomads of the 1920s swam, looking away from the trauma that lingered after 1919. The premise of surrealism was, in its historical moment, that realism had failed and would continue to fail to prove an adequate language for the post-World War I world. How could plain language explain the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of men in a war that proved nothing? Hemingway, as is well known, dealt with the wound by refusing to accord it any metaphysical meaning. The surrealists shunned reality, too, and evaded the professional seriousness of psychoanalysis for the “free” play of dream worlds. Unexplained, unprompted association might reveal as much “truth” and “meaning” as formal therapy or realistic narrative (6). Breton was the theorist of surrealism and Dali was the practitioner.

The surrealist movement had migrated to New York in the 1930s, and Fuller is scrupulous in identifying many gallery and museum exhibitions of the movement’s visual art. Using Welty biography, he can put her in the city for many of these shows, especially the pivotal exhibition curated by Alfred Barr at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936. There is no conclusive proof that Welty attended any of these exhibitions, but a copy of the catalogue for Barr’s MOMA exhibition is among the volumes in Welty’s library in Jackson (13). On her periodic visits to the city, Welty could have visited any or all of the museum and gallery shows of surrealist art. If she did not attend in person, Fuller points out, her Jackson friend Frank Lyell, a more permanent resident of the metropolitan scene, moved in avant-garde circles and could keep her current on the scene and its gossip. Vogue was available in Jackson, and Schiaparelli couture, heavily influenced by Dali, filled its pages. Welty knew the fashion scene well enough to satirize it in her spoofs of glamour photographs.

Tracing the surrealist temper in Welty’s early short stories, however, is problematic. In many of the stories in A Curtain of Green and...