Things from Out in the World

Time goes like a dream no matter how hard you run, and all the time we heard things from out in the world that we listened to but that still didn’t mean we believed them.

—“Shower of Gold,” The Golden Apples

In the summer of 1949 I was twenty-five years old, a would-be writer working at a boring job on a newspaper copydesk in Wilmington, Delaware. My favorite writer, the one I thought I wished to emulate, was Thomas Wolfe. What I identified with was the romantic egocentricity, the “O Lost!” motif: “A Legend of Man’s Hunger in His Youth.” “He twisted his throat with a wild cry.”

In the New Yorker I read a review by Hamilton Basso of a book entitled The Golden Apples. It prompted me to read the book. The Golden Apples consisted of a set of related stories, all but one of them located in a town in Mississippi. What the various characters did and said was for the most part neither exceptional nor world-shaking. The events were such as might happen in any Southern town or small city. It ended with a funeral and then a middle-aged woman sitting under a tree and watching the rain: “October rain on Mississippi fields. The rain of fall, maybe on the whole South, for all she knew on the everywhere. She stared into its magnitude.”

There was something about the stories that made them more than just a group of stories. Lurking with the seemingly mundane surface doings, things were going on. Within the apparently commonplace happenings among unexceptional people—part of those happenings, causing those people to turn out to be not unexceptional but extraordinary—important and remarkable perceptions about what human experience was about were revealing themselves.

I could not set the book aside. I kept coming back to it. That winter, back in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins, I was prompted to write a review of it and several other books by Southern authors for The Hopkins Review. It was not a very discerning review; the best I can say for it is that it did convey the idea that there was that about The Golden Apples that lifted it out of the commonplace and made it memorable.

In Thomas Wolfe everything had seemed powerful and obvious. In Eudora Welty there was mystery in the prose. The art did not advertise itself; it was the kind of artistry that concealed art. You had to look for the secrets, the equivocations, the meanings about people. Just as you did in real life. It made me keep thinking and wondering. Why did Cassie Morrison recall that poem in her dreams? What was the poem? What kind of flower was it that the old woman left at Virgie Rainey’s house late at night after Virgie’s mother had died? Why, when Virgie had returned to Morgana after trying to live elsewhere, had there been a thunderclap? Why did Jinny Love Stark insist so desperately upon waving the towel while the Boy Scout Loch Morrison worked to resuscitate the drowned orphan girl’s life? Why, when Mr. Sissum was being buried, did the old music teacher Miss Eckhart keep nodding her head back and forth? All such things were in themselves natural; but why did they stand out so in retrospect? Why?

I could not forget those stories, and did not want to. Their artistry grew on me; they were luminous. Through them—in them—I learned how fiction worked from within. I discovered a critical vocation.