Valerie Trueblood on Eudora Welty's Matchless Book, The Eye of The Story

In the 26th in a series of posts on 2016 books entered for The Story Prize, Valerie Trueblood, author of Criminals: Love Stories (Counterpoint), writes about a literary touchstone.

“If these short sentences have the look of simplicity, let no simplifier try to copy what they do.”

That’s Eudora Welty, writing about Henry Green in her book The Eye of the Story, in which the essay “Henry Green: Novelist of the Imagination” is a literary education in sixteen pages. May every young writer, slow to begin or tempted by despair, find this book in time, with its adages and comforts, its revelations of a mind disciplined and enchanted by story. Just as this writer’s portraits of a plausible goodness move us in her stories, in the essays her profound respect for the books of others seems to come from another critical world, slower and more emotional than the one we have now with our fast strobes of enthusiasm and scorn. “I write about what I like.” Like! It is wonder she transmits in her reviews. In me she awakened the desire to read any book that had produced this luxurious submission, allowed her to possess its secrets as she did in all humility, and confirmed her belief in wonder as the purpose of art.

In the title essay, writing about how Katherine Anne Porter does without a certain kind of scene-setting, Welty finds nothing lacking in a story offering revelation in this degree. A character’s intense inner state has expanded to fill the space, and to Welty what matters is the story’s own path to its end. For her, nothing can hold a strong story back; it must do what it will.

In “Looking at Short Stories” she examines five in detail—by Crane, Hemingway, Chekhov, Lawrence, and Faulkner—and when she finishes, we’ve gone from technical matters into style into beauty. Speaking to us as like-minded seekers (reader and writer ought to be companionable, she says) rather than as a cohort in need of what she knows, she examines what makes us think something is beautiful. She goes into all this in an everyday voice. No gushing. Beauty is not, she says, “a blatant or promiscuous or obvious quality.”

In 1941 a reviewer struck by the beauty of the stories in Welty’s own first book refused to comment on their form, saying to do so was as hopeless as “saying a tree is right in form.” This rightness exists throughout her work and steers her criticism out of its surface matter-of-factness into vision.

Henry Green: "the look of simplicity"

Before I read The Eye of the Story I had some school-learning of her stories, often presented (as with the mysteriously oft-anthologized “Why I Live at the PO”) as comedies packed with that Southern knowledge of what people would do. “She would do that, wouldn’t she.” Asked about her progress as a writer, Welty said she improved “once I got some sense.” In the South you’re raised on the word. “He’s got no sense.” “What was the sense in that?” To a child listening to the marvelous litany of what people would do, “no sense” had an endless store of effects inside it like seeds in a pepper. Some of them were just flavor, some of them burned: desperate acts, rape and incest and murder, abrupt intensities in lives called ordinary—the ground of Welty stories. “Trouble, the backbone of literature,” she wrote. She was not a comedian at heart any more than Chekhov was. Our comic writers are funnier today, lacking her boundless sympathy. Our paranormal is thin compared to her normal, and much of our criticism, lacking her wonder, just advertisement. Not just her visionary stories but her way of reading enlarged my reading and my life. I go on and on learning from The Eye of the Story.

Valerie Trueblood on the "When" of Stories

In the 17th in a series of posts on 2013 books entered for The Story Prize, Valerie Trueblood, author of Search Party (Counterpoint Press), lays out a notion central to short fiction.

“Anything can happen,” we say. The short story accepts that claim, and the truth it is after doesn’t seem to reside in character or plot. It’s a truth about experience itself, particularly what is abrupt, haphazard, or ungovernable in human life. In most cases the truth can’t be put into words other than those of the story, which is freer than the novel to be simply anything, as one day in a life—no matter how ordinary the life—can be anything, with bombs in it or kisses. The luck of the short story is to be that one day, to have a day’s suddenness in it, even if it covers years. Its task is to be one thing—a temporary plight or state of being—and not many. Thus its nature seems to me to spring out of the notion of  “when”:

When...
... he accidentally shot his brother.
... the killer appeared on the road.
... he awoke to find he was an insect.
... she followed him to Australia.
... the horse threw her.
... his superior officer kicked him.
... he hugged the leper.
... the prostitute saved the travelers.
... the teacher stayed the night with her mad student.
... the soldiers on both sides opened fire on the messenger dog.

These moments are from stories of episode or event. We could name events from the incomparable stories of Chekhov, yet Frank O’Connor can say of him that he writes “stories with the very minimum of episodic interest.” And in truth they do take place for the most part in the alert senses and sore minds of their characters. But stories more openly located in states of mind also have this core of the “when” in them.  

When...
... he heard the voices.
... the grandmother forgot the children she was minding.
... the parents tried to think of a present to take to their son in the institution.
... they walked in Kew Gardens.
... the old woman looked back on her ruined wedding day.
... he stayed at the side of his dying mother-in-law.
... she nursed the hurt jockey.

We live in a sea of information now, and the novel seems to thrive on it, but the short story, while scrupulous about detail, keeps much of the factual world out; it limits what flows into its set-apart time, its “when.” To Flannery O’Connor, the story, like the poem, was required “to do something with the least possible number of movements.” So the patience and generosity of the novel are denied it, while without hurrying, explaining, or asking for undue indulgence, it has to get somewhere quickly, often passing through an ordeal, and leave the reader in an awakened state.

We keep hearing that this oldest of forms is in the midst of a renaissance, at the same time that we hear that it is having a hard time finding its readers. But it seems to me the short story is always being reborn and will never lack for readers in love with its waywardness and its mystery.

When...
... they had hiked to the top of the cliff he asked her for a divorce, and
... he left the penitentiary no one met him, and
... it was time, the prisoners walked out to be shot.

Writers will go on writing of the moments when life is most saturated in meaning, no matter how often they’re asked if they’re ready yet to tackle a novel.