| Title | : | A Curtain of Green and Other Stories |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 324 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1941 |
A Curtain of Green and Other Stories Reviews
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One of the pleasures of reading is encountering an author who has influenced the authors we admire, and this pleasure may turn to delight when we discover this new author pleases us more than the first. My admiration for Flannery O'Connor led me to Eudora Welty, but now I find that Welty--both as a writer and a person--is someone whom I both admire and love.
Both O'Connor and Welty write a lapidary prose, inlayed with irony and humor and inscribed with the characters—many of them eccentrics--who people their Deep South. O'Connor's viewpoint is both Catholic and Olympian, her pity distant and absolute. Her characters stagger under their sins, their flaws highlighted with ironies, until something—abrupt if not literally violent--opens them up to grace.
Welty, on the other hand, is something different. I would be hard-pressed to find a specific religious denomination in her viewpoint—although I hear she lived and died a Methodist—but I sense in all her writings a sort of Christian Humanism: a sense of the dignity of humankind, an affirmation of the incarnational mystery. In Welty, a character's flaws—although explored with devastating precision--reveal our common humanity. Though her prose is restrained, her pity is palpable. And everywhere, grace abounds.
Welty's worst stories—although still good—are the ones in which she tries too hard to be symbolic, like “The Key” or “The Whistle.” Better—indeed excellent—are the stories in which the characters and their flaws, and the attendant ironies, speak for themselves, like “Petrified Man,” “Why I Live at the P.O.”, and “Clytie.” But the best—almost half the book, and each one a masterpiece—are those stories in which the plot and characters inexplicably unite to produce a powerful symbolic narrative, stories like “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden, “A Memory,” “A Curtain of Green, “A Visit of Charity,” “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” “Powerhouse,” and “A Worn Path.” Katharine Anne Porter, in her introduction, describes such stories better than I can: they are stories “where external act and the internal voiceless life of the human imagination almost meet and mingle on the mysterious threshold between dream and waking, one reality refusing to admit or confirm the existence of the other, yet both conspiring toward the same end.” -
Rating: 4.25* of five
The Publisher Says: In her now-famous introduction to this first collection by a then-unknown young writer from Mississippi named Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter wrote that "there is even in the smallest story a sense of power in reserve which makes me believe firmly that, splendid beginning that it is, it is only the beginning." Porter was of course prophetic, and the beginning was splendid. A Curtain of Green both introduced and established Eudora Welty as in instinctive genius of short fiction, and in this groundbreaking collection, which includes "Powerhouse" and "Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden," are the first great works of a great American writer.
My Review: Her first collection of stories, published *the same year* as her first story appeared in print! ("A Worn Path" in Atlantic Monthly {as it was then}, in 1941.) Diarmuid Russell, the superagent of his era, sold the collection on the strength of that...to a friend of Miss Eudora's who was working at Doubleday, Doran (as it was then). That, laddies and gentlewomen, is damn near inconceivable to today's publishing professionals. A collection by an unknown barely published writer getting published by a major house? Who's she sleepin' with?
The Muses. She was a gifted writer, and stories were her perfect métier.
It's a first book, though, and no matter how hard one tries, there is the inevitability of imperfection and probability of overexuberance. Here:Night fell. The darkness was thin, like some sleazy dress that has been worn and worn for many winters and always lets the cold through to the bones. Then the moon rose. A farm lay quite visible, like a white stone in water, among the stretches of deep woods in their colorless dead leaf. By a closer and more searching eye than the moon's, everything belonging to the Mortons might have been seen--even to the tiny tomato in their neat rows closest to the house, gray and featherlike, appalling in their exposed fragility. The moonlight crossed everything, and lay upon the darkest shape of all, the farmhouse where the lamp had just been blown out.
first paragraph, "The Whistle" in A Curtain of Green
That's a lovely word-picture, and a kind of eerie mood-setting image. It's also too long and just a widge overwritten. But the story, a chilling little piece, is plenty interesting. It's always good to have an isolated farmhouse with a married couple basking in pale moonlight when something unexplained and menacing in its unexpectedness happens. The story left me physically chilled. And it's not her best work.
I am a major partisan of "Why I Live at the P.O." as among the great stories of the American South's culture. It's a flawlessly built, amusingly written moment in a family's life, a piece of time that any Southern boy with sisters or maternal aunts can not only relate to but practically choreograph.So I hope to tell you I marched in and got that radio, and they could of all bit a nail in two, especially Stella-Rondo, that it used to belong to, and she well knew she couldn't get it back, I'd sue for it like a shot. And I very politely took the sewing-machine motor I helped pay the most on to give Mama for Christmas back in 1929, and a good big calendar, with the first-aid remedies on it. The thermometer and the Hawaiian ukulele certainly were rightfully mine, and I stood on the step-ladder and got all my watermelon-rind preserves and every fruit and vegetable I'd put up, every jar.
"Why I Live at the P.O." from A Curtain of Green
Two sisters have a spat about a man, and the family weighs in. Hijinks ensue. It's a chestnut now, it was a chestnut then, and it's damn good and hilarious.
This is my idea of a good story collection, and the writer who created this first crack out of the box is my idea of gifted, and there is not one thing I'd say to her except "well done, Miss Eudora" if she stood right here in front of me, not one little hint of a frown or trace of a doubt in my voice. Make those mistakes and make 'em big, Miss Eudora, because if this is the FIRST then the BEST is gonna knock "good" right into "superb."
And it did. -
Wonderful way with words but mostly pointless stories
By Charles van Buren on February 11, 2018
Format: Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase
Just like many of my fellow residents of the Jackson, Mississippi area, I became accustomed to occasionally seeing Miss Welty around town, particularly at the English Village Jitney Jungle grocery. Despite this and the general recognition that she is one of the great authors, I never read much of her work. Early on I developed a suspicion of anything which literature teachers and professors told me that I should read and particularly things they said that I had to read. In my later years I have gone back and read some of that material and have enjoyed some of it. I did not enjoy this collection of stories. Miss Welty definitely had a way with words but I require more from a story than the artistry of the language and the drawing of characters. The truth is, most of these stories bored me. I found them to be plotless and pointless. I simply do not understand those who say that I should ponder their meaning. I belong to the "if you have something to say, say it" school of communication. -
I read this first short story collection by Eudora Welty after I read “What There is to Say We Have Said, the Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell. I came to greatly admire her from reading the letters that went back and forth between those two.
I am very impressed with this collection of short stories, as I would imagine thousands of other people are. There are probably other reviews here that give inklings or more than inklings of the content of the 17 stories. I will say that many of the short stories were raw and daresay at least to me some were quite depressing. But she was merely writing about what life was like for a number of different people from different walks of like in Jackson Mississippi back in the late 1930s, early 1940s. I liked her writing style. Supposedly she was writing at a very early age, and writing just came naturally to her. A number of the stories resonated with me. One of them, and it happens to be one of the few humorous works in the collection, is “Why I live at the P.O.” And to think it initially got rejected by 6 well-known publications at that time! There were several I found to be over-the-top touchingly/wonderfully written but they were quite sad. So I would only advise that if you are feeling blue and want a pick-me-up save these for another day (but do read them): The Key, The Whistle, Clytie, Flowers for Marjorie, Death of a Traveling Salesman, and A Worn Path.
I was curious as to when each of the short stories were originally published, and where, which was her first short story published, etc. etc. So I did some digging and found their first publications and some other interesting ephemera.
A Curtain of Green (Eudora Welty’s first short story collection, 1941, Doubleday Doran, issued 2,476 copies @ $2.50)
Following are the stories in order of their appearance in the book:
1. Lily Daw and the Three Ladies (revision of story published in Winter edition of Prairie Schooner, 1937)
2. A Piece of News (first published in The Southern Review, Vol. 3 No. 1, Summer 1937)
3. Petrified Man (first published in The Southern Review, Vol. 4 No. 4, Spring 1939, originally rejected by this periodical in 1937, in fact in rejection letter Robert Penn Warren then managing editor called it “flawed”)
4. The Key (first published in Harper’s Bazaar, 1941)
5. Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden (first published in New Directions in Prose and Poetry 1940)
6. Why I Live at the P.O. (first published in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 167, No. 4, Apr, 1941), had been rejected by The New Yorker, Collier’s, Harper’s Bazaar, Good Housekeeping, Mademoiselle, and Harper’s Magazine
7. The Whistle (first published in Prairie Schooner, 1938)
8. The Hitch-Hikers (first published in The Southern Review, Vol. 5 No. 2, Autumn 1939)
9. A Memory (first published in The Southern Review, 1937)
10. Clytie (first published in The Southern Review, Vol. 7 No. 1, Summer 1941) interesting blurb about Clytie:
http://hansen2307.blogspot.com/2014/0...
11. Old Mr. Marblehall (first published in The Southern Review, Spring 1938, ‘As Old Mr. Granada’)
12. Flowers for Marjorie (first published in Prairie Schooner, 1937), rejected by The Southern Review when Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren were managing editors, in fact in rejection letter RPW called it “flawed”.
13. A Curtain of Green (first published in The Southern Review, Vol. 4 No. 2, Autumn 1938)
14. A Visit of Charity (first published in Decision, a small literary journal in 1941, that famously was rejected 13 times by various magazines in the early 1940s, including The Atlantic Monthly and Ladies Home Journal. It was finally published in a small literary magazine for which Welty was paid $30. See:
https://coffeespew.org/2009/04/20/eud...
15. Death of a Traveling Salesman (first published in Manuscript, 1936, first published short story of Ms. Welty)
16. Powerhouse (first published in The Southern Review, Vol. 167, No. 6, Jun, 1941, originally rejected by this periodical)
17. A Worn Path (first published in The Atlantic Monthly, 1941) -
Eudora Welty's first published collection of short stories requires some patience from the reader. Welty's prose is immaculate and colorful, but often her stories are vignettes in which an ordinary person experiences a meaningful event; the endings aren't always satisfying, and interpretation of the story is left to the reader to a large degree. Some of the stories have funny small-town dialogue but there is often a darker undercurrent the reveals itself upon closer inspection.
The stories included - along with a rating and brief blurb about each - include:
Lily Daw and the Three Ladies - 4/5 - funny, with a dark undertone, tale about a mentally challenged ("feeble-minded" in this 1937 story) young lady in a small town
A Piece of News - 3/5 - a wife's inner thoughts as she waits for her husband to arrive home
The Petrified Man - 3/5 - conversations between two women in a beauty parlor
The Key - 2/5 - a man drops a key at a train station, another man waiting with his wife picks it up
Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden - 3/5 - three men talking about a former gimp act at a traveling freak show
Why I Live at the P.O. - 4/5 - hilarious family bickering
The Whistle - 3/5 - desperately poor tenant farmers try to protect their crops
The Hitch-Hikers - 3/5 - a traveling salesman picks up two hitch-hikers
A Memory - 3/5 - a girl lying on the beach thinking about things
Clytie - 4/5 - a social misfit from a dysfunctional family fallen on hard times
Old Mr. Marblehall - 3/5 - Mr. Marblehall's unusual home lives
Flowers for Marjorie - 4/5 - an unemployed man and a woman expecting a baby
A Curtain of Green - 3/5 - gardening in the afternoon before it rains
A Visit of Charity - 4/5 - a Campfire Girl takes a plant to the Old Folks Home
Death of a Traveling Salesman - 4/5 - a salesman recovering from an illness gets lost and stops along the road
Powerhouse - 4/5 - jazz musicians at work
A Worn Path - 3/5 - an old woman walks into town at Christmas -
'Why I Live at the P.O.' is still my favorite short story of all time. (Sorry,
Shirley Jackson. You know I love you, too.) I first read it in college, and read it again in this collection. There's just something about this wacky tale of a young woman pushed SO far by her family, she leaves home to live at the post office, that tickles my fancy. Whatever that is.
Here's a wonderful collection by a consummate storyteller. Her characters are just bursting with life. They are traveling salesmen, beauticians, murderers, and outspoken postmistresses. Some of the ladies are so delicate, they cannot bring themselves to utter the word pregnant, but must spell it out instead. They are gossipy and judgmental. Many are lonely.
From 'Death of a Traveling Salesman':
But he wanted to leap up, to say to her, I have been sick and I found out then, only then, how lonely I am. Is it too late? My heart puts up a struggle inside me, and you have heard it, protesting against emptiness. . . .
But they are all very human. Welty certainly understood people. She saw their foibles, and she saw them at their best. And she knew, oh, so well, that even ladies in silk dresses let one rip every now and then. -
I expected to love Eudora Welty's writing but was disappointed. I slogged through this collection - only enjoying a couple of the more humorous stories. (Why I Live at the P.O., The Petrified Man) Most of the stories felt heavy-handed and melodramatic and the language was too florid for my taste. I will return to Welty at some point and try some of her other collections. I'm rating this a generous 3 stars as it could be just my mood. (I'm currently reading The Warmth of Other Suns and am not finding stories of quirky white Southerners appealing right now.)
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These short stories were eye-opening for me. I enjoyed a few of them for the humor, but some of them were strange and hard to figure out, with a definite Flannery O'Connor vibe. It was valuable for a Welty fan because it was her first published book, and you can see inklings of what is to come.
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Lento scorre il fiume
Eudora Welty racconta la vita tranquilla che scorreva intorno a lei a Jackson, Missouri, negli anni ’30. La provincia americana sarà stata noiosa, ma ha lasciato molto tempo per pensare e ha dato molto alla letteratura.
Siamo liberi di immaginare case di legno dipinte di bianco, giardini ombrosi e belle signore con capelli ondulati che prendono il fresco.
I suoi racconti sono deliziosi, pieni di immaginazione e acutezza d’osservazione e mi hanno fatto pensare a Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio).
[image error] -
Cada conto tem cerca de 80% de descrição de paisagens e 20% de enredo. Tenho lá pachorra para isto...
as malvas iam fechando os olhos vermelhos...
uma fonte irrompendo de um tronco oco...
a estrada descia, continuava a descer...
uma árvore esbelta e alta...
o céu azul... o pôr do sol... a lua...
os pássaros... as abelhas...
os dias... as noites...
as peras... os figos... -
Non ho parole per descrivere questa incredibile raccolta di racconti scritti tra gli anni '30 e '40 dalla finora sconosciuta, per me, Eudora Welty. Penso che potranno ricredersi e apprezzarli anche coloro che strabuzzano gli occhi di fronte alle short stories.
L'atmosfera è quella del Sud degli Stati Uniti, del Mississippi, con il suo caratteristico e variegato campionario umano che ricorda in parte gli ambienti e i personaggi già descritti da Mark Twain.
Su tutti, cito Powerhouse, in cui un narratore bianco racconta, con un linguaggio infarcito di luoghi comuni, l'esibizione di una jazz band di colore che suona in un locale per bianchi, ”Fuori, è una brutta serata. Dentro, è un ballo per bianchi e nessuno balla, salvo quattro fanatici sparpagliati e due coppie di anziani: gli altri stanno tutti attorno alla band e guardano Powerhouse. Certe volte si scambiano uno sguardo di sottecchi, come a dire: Be’ certo, si sa com’è con questi qui - i negri - questi capiorchestra - suonerebbero comunque così, dando l’anima, anche per una persona sola… E quando uno, non importa chi, dà l’anima, ci si sente sempre un po’ in imbarazzo per lui.” Powerhouse attacca con brani bianchi, come Marie, the Dawn is Breaking!, per virare poi su
Honeysuckle Rose, di Fats Waller. E dopo aver suonato su richiesta il valzer Pagan love song attacca una lunga performance oratoria con botta e risposta tra lui e i componenti della band. Il racconto è godibilissimo di per sé, ma cercando in rete i brani musicali, e i personaggi citati, ci si imbatte su una vasta messe di articoli che analizzano il racconto e il rapporto tra letteratura e musica, di cui quello di Michael Hollister, pescato nel sito American literature, rappresenta un'interessante
sintesi completa.
Che dire? Si possono assegnare anche qui sei stelle? -
I racconti di Eudora Welty assolvono tutti la stessa funzione, ossia mostrare una crepa: esiste una dissonanza tra la vita interiore dei protagonisti e il mondo esterno, e il mondo esterno a cui fare riferimento è la cultura del Sud degli Stati Uniti del Novecento, con tutto il bagaglio storico che ne consegue. Il conflitto è generato dalla contrapposizione di due forze che Eudora riconosceva anche in se stessa, come donna meridionale e come scrittrice: «desiderio d’indipendenza e senso di colpa». L’alienazione si manifesta in modo buffo, esagerato e grottesco perché non ha soluzione: la liberazione a cui tende lo spirito è contrastata dalle convenzioni sociali; la repressione degli istinti genera nuovi desideri e i desideri generano nuova colpa. A differenza dei romanzi di William Faulkner, però, in cui il conflitto si risolve con un atto di violenza, a differenza dei racconti di Flannery O’Connor, nei quali la violenza è la chiave per accedere alla grazia, le storie di Eudora Welty non si concludono in tragedia; l’obiettivo della sua scrittura non è trovare una soluzione al disagio ma dimostrare che esiste.
https://www.scratchbook.net/2018/02/e... -
This is difficult to rate. I can honestly say I liked it, something that wouldn't've been true ten years ago. So great is the literary kinship between Eudora and Flannery, that I included this on my "Flannery" shelf.
Eudora is truly a "good gift" (<— meaning of her name). Her capacity for the bizarre is enormous. While her stories are strange and very 'other', her grasp of language is exceptional. I'm intentionally reading short stories, a genre of craftsmanship of which I've read little. I would love to be able to say that I understood Southern literature, but that would be a lie.
My favorite, The Key tells an account of a deaf-mute couple in a railroad station. When they have a heated conversation with their hands, the other folks waiting become the ones who can't hear or speak.
A whoop-aloud phrase: She was ... in a bathing suit which had no relation to the shape of her body.
Caution: the n-word is used in a non-gratuitous manner two or three times. -
Racconti sorprendenti per contenuto (una quotidianità antieroica, personaggi e situazioni disturbati e disturbanti) e per stile (uno sguardo in tralice asciutto, nervi scoperti, per niente poetico).
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Chiedo scusa a tutti.
Alla grandezza della signora Eudora Welty, una delle grandi madri del racconto americano. A Una coltre di verde. Agli altri lettori che quando spiano una recensione perché magari sono indecisi se leggere un libro o meno.
Scusate, non credo di essere stata molto parziale.
Ho un problema: amo troppo Flannery O’Connor.
Della quale ho infatti in libreria due raccolte a cui ho dato 5 stelle (ma solo perché non ne ho di più).
Quindi quando mi trovo di fronte qualcosa di simile, ma non proprio identico, sto più bassa.
Le atmosfere sono quelle del profondo Sud, bianco e religioso.
Rispetto a Flannery, Eudora ha un altro modo di raccontare la violenza dei conflitti e delle disperazioni che stanno alla base di questi racconti.
È più ‘educata’, non trovo un modo migliore per descriverla.
Se dovessi fare un paragone da psicologia spiccia, penso sia una questione biografica. Welty era una donna del Sud (Mississipi), ma con un’educazione formatasi in parte al Nord (si laureò in Wisconsin) e con un passato da fotografa. In un certo senso, questa cosa si riflette nei racconti, alcuni tra l’altro nati a partire dalle foto scattate negli anni della Grande Depressione. Per cui ho avuto come questa impressione: che racconti da un passo di distanza. Non è un difetto. È solo una mia impressione.
Restano un sacco di quadri incredibili su quello che sono gli Stati Uniti.
No, non ho sbagliato il tempo verbale. Il grosso degli Stati Uniti sono e restano questa roba qui. -
Primera vez que leo a Eudora, y he de admitir, que al principio intentaba buscar una similitud con Carson y Porter, error que supe corregir a tiempo. En la narrativa de Welty podemos atisbar esa característica de una buena observadora, donde en cada cuento nos abre una cortina y nos pone en escena su Sur natal, con sus paisajes, personajes cotidianos, pinceladas góticas. En general todos sus cuentos me han gustado, pero, cuatro de ellos han sobresalido entre los otros. Me quede con ganas de más, espero poder encontrar mis cinco estrellas.
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In Annie Hall, Woody Allen explains how he thinks everyone can be divided up into the horrible and the miserable. In these stories, Welty puts a sharp focus on the horrible, but leaves some room for the merely miserable.
The writing is strong. Often, I found myself impressed with how good the writing was. At other times, I felt like she was trying too hard, and it was like slogging through a mire of similes. But usually, on a sentence by sentence level, and even paragraph by paragraph, I thought the writing was really fine.
And yet, I had a hard time engaging with these stories. They were very short on story, and were more like vignettes. In the best of them, it was like a written version of a Diane Arbus photo. But in others, I found myself wondering why Welty was creating such a nice sketch, and then doing nothing with it. It's possible that its something about Welty, but I also think that I've pretty much lost whatever taste I had for Southern gothic. -
I’ve just finished, and very much enjoyed A Curtain Of Green and Other Stories by Eudora Welty.
Welty’s great skill is to enable the reader to travel back through time and sit in a rocking chair on the porch of this small town in Mississippi in the 1930s and watch the world go by. On each page one senses the author's great love of people. Her descriptions never remain mere observations, but are something much deeper.
Many of the stories are dark, occasionally weird and often sad in mood, but with a profound and intuitive understanding of life.
Particularly standing out for me were.. The Whistle, The Hitchikers, Mr Marblehall, Death Of A Travelling Salesman, A Worn Path.
Here’s a clip...Old Mr Marblehall never did anything, never got married until he was sixty. You can see him out taking a walk. Watch and you’ll see how preciously old people come to think they are made - the way they walk, like conspirators, bent over a little, filled with protection.
He has short white bangs and a bit of snapdragon in his lapel. He walks with a big polished stick, a present. Everyone says to his face ‘So well preserved!’. Behind his back they say cheerfully, ‘One foot in the grave’. -
This book was disappointing and I felt like I was dragging through the last 150 pages just to finish it. Like Faulkner's, I don't get much out of Welty's stories other than someone yelling, "I'M FROM MISSISSIPPI!!! DEATH IS INEVITABLE!!!" There are other authors that focus upon their Southern homes to great effect (read: Flannery O'Connor), but reading Welty felt to me like listening to an 8tracks "southern gothic" "aesthetic" playlist that's full of gimmicky British "Americana" music like Hozier and Mumford & Sons that's included just because it's in a minor key and either has a banjo or mentions church and death. I have never much liked this "southern gothic" (I recall O'Connor's "school of Southern degeneracy" quip), and Welty seems to be a token of it. These stories are overloaded with similes, metaphors, and other over descriptive language that results in any meaning being obscured and every action becoming stilted, weighed down and drawn out by the mess of pretentious figurative language she must apply to it. I felt like I was reading about literary marionettes, not humans, and I got hardly any emotion out of it other than boredom and faint disgust. And that's just her portrayal of white people, because her few instances of black characters are even more one-dimensional, reliant on racist cliches, and uncomfortable to read (another similarity to Faulkner). I don't know anything about Eudora Welty's life and maybe she was actually a lovely woman, but from A Curtain of Green all I can think is that she hated humanity and her only fascination was evil. Ugh!
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A Curtain of Green and Other Stories is Eudora Welty’s first book, and this beautiful collection of short fiction, originally published in 1941, marks the beginning of a long, distinguished literary career. This is a book I’ve reread and taught several times, and each time I revisit these stories, I feel as if I’m catching up with an old friend. As is the case with outstanding fiction, I also see new elements in the stories each time I reread them. I recommend this collection for its diversity of subject matter: a former freak-show worker who was known as “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden;” a jazz musician whose wife may or may not have killed herself; an elderly grandmother who makes long, arduous walks into the nearest town to procure medicine for her grandchild. Indeed, after reading this collection, you will undoubtedly feel that Ms. Welty could write stories about almost any conceivable subject.
Humor plays important roles in several of the stories, and I want to mention a few words about two stories: “The Petrified Man” and “Why I Live at the P.O.” These stories are similar in the fact that the humor emanates from the characters. First, in “The Petrified Man,” Mrs. Fletcher is a woman extremely concerned with appearances. The entire story takes place in a beauty parlor while Mrs. Fletcher is having her hair fixed by Leota, and almost the entire story is told through dialog. Early in the story, Leota mentions Mrs. Pike, a new friend. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, Mrs. Fletcher views Mrs. Pike as a threat, and she continually reasserts her superiority to Mrs. Pike. Together, Leota and Mrs. Pike, who is seen only through Leota’s stories, attend a freak show. Mrs. Pike loves the “freaks,” and this implies, of course, that she welcomes differences. Mrs. Fletcher, however, emphatically states that she “detests freaks.” The differences in opinion between Mrs. Fletcher and Mrs. Pike are the foundations for much of the story’s humor, and Welty skillfully develops a rounded character with Mrs. Pike, even though Mrs. Pike is never seen in the story directly. While they attend the freak show, Leota and Mrs. Pike see a petrified man, a man whose food digests in his joints and turns to stone. Later, Mrs. Pike identifies the petrified man as an imposter, a man named Mr. Petrie, someone who raped four women in California. Mrs. Pike receives $500 from the police as a reward for leading to Petrie’s capture, and this infuriates Leota because the freak show where Petrie was hiding was close to her beauty parlor. “The Petrified Man” explores themes of class, gender, and appearances, and it does so in a way that’s extremely humorous. Ultimately, Leota serves as a connector between Mrs. Fletcher and Mrs. Pike’s characters.
Mrs. Pike’s ability to “see” others for who they truly are threatens Mrs. Fletcher, who is focused on outward appearances. Similarly, in the story “Why I Live at the P.O.,” the return of Stella-Ronda threatens the security of Sister. In her introduction to A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, Katherine Anne Porter describes Sister as “a terrifying case of dementia praecox.” Indeed, Sister’s actions are over-the-top and her first-person perspective is unreliable. However, I would like to make the argument that Sister verbally abuses Stella-Rondo and alienates her entire family because she feels invisible. Sister’s aggression manifests itself in a series of neurotic acts, all aimed at attracting her family’s attention. In addition, Welty uses humor to raise intriguing questions about Sister’s character: Is Sister unaware of how contentious she actually is? Is Sister intentionally trying to be funny, or is she using humor as a defense mechanism? Is she mad (angry) or Mad (insane)? Other family members show preference to Stella-Ronda because she left China Grove, Mississippi, so at the story’s conclusion, Sister also leaves home. She takes all of her “valuables:” the electric oscillating fan, the sewing-machine motor, the Hawaiian ukulele, etc. and moves into China Grove’s post office, where she works. Like Mrs. Fletcher, Sister feels the need to continually assert her superiority, and both women are performers. They desperately need audiences.
A Curtain of Green and Other Stories both entertains and disturbs. The characters in these stories are memorable, and the stories themselves are some of the most influential short fiction from the early twentieth century. -
Short stories at their finest.
She can set a scene! Here's an example:
from "A Memory"
She herself stared fixedly at his slow, undeliberate movements, and held her body perfectly still. She was unnaturally white and fatly aware, in a bathing suit that had no relation to her body. Fat hung upon her upper arms like an arrested earth slide on a hill. With the first motion that she might make, I was afraid that she would slide down upon herself into a terrifying heap. Her breasts hung heavy and widening like pears into her bathing suit. Her legs lay prone one on the other like shadowed bulwarks, uneven and deserted, upon which, from the man's hand, the sand piled higher like the teasing threat of oblivion. A slow, repetitious sound I had been hearing for a long time unconsciously, I identified as a continuous laugh which came through the openness pouched mouth of the woman.
Need I say more? -
sigh. i truly think this collection of short stories has ruined other books for me for the last three months.
where to begin? eudora is so terrific at the art of the short story. she says little of what she is really thinking, but creates tongue-in-cheek plots and characters that set your mind on fire with possibilities. i think of each of her short stories as a sort of mystery tale. in her mission to expose the american south for all its dirty beauty she is both mercilessly cruel, as well as ironic and hilarious.
between the tension of her natural humor and exuberance and fiercely enforced intellectual restraint, welty's central themes (the oppression of blacks and women, and the stupefying religiosity of the south) develop into perfectly ripened fruit. impressively, her power as a writer comes from saying more by saying less. -
Flannery has been my favorite author for years and only Eudora Welty comes close to matching her aesthetic. These stories are not about people for whom one feels sympathy- they are losers, creeps, the tragic and the misunderstood. The famous works deserve their fame but the real power lies within stories like "The Whistle" and "A Memory". Dialogue makes up the majority of the action but it is the descriptions of a slowly changing southern atmosphere that gives real weight to the collection. One of the best works of southern short fiction you can read. It's still resonant!
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The title story in this first collection of short stories (1941) by Eudora Welty, is not darkly humorous like many of her stories, but would still qualify as dark with the story focusing on a bitter widow and the young black boy helping her in her garden. Set in Mississippi, there is a current of sadness, acceptance and violence.
I listened to this story on Selected Shorts where it was featured on a segment called
Strange Places. -
I gave up after the first six stories. I call them stories, but they were so ambiguous that ‘story’ is the wrong word. In an avalanche of similes and over description, we’re introduced to a weird character, drift on to another weird character, then a third and a fourth, then the narrative stops. Tedious, pointless, and annoying.
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Gostei muito da escrita, mas os contos não me disseram muito.
Quero ler algo da autora que não contos. -
It's been more than twenty years since my Southern Fiction class in college. Re-reading these stories now, I like them even more.
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I read this for the second time as research for my novel Nevermind, which will soon be published by All Things That Matter Press.
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Welty's southern gothic is a genre that uses rootedness and place to meditate on all kinds of weirdness. When that weirdness (what we often call mental illness) is romanticized, and the ruling class (sometimes rightly) is accused of oppression for their ostracization of the weird, poor, and underprivileged, the insane becomes the master, the object of respect, honor, and literary meditation. Thus begins a decline yet to be corrected.
The stories themselves are mildly interesting, and have some entertaining and memorable characters, but I found her portrayal of male internal voice two dimensional and irrational. Her characterization of women seemed more accurate, but I can't say, as I am not a woman.
