Welty is not just a southern writer, she is a true intellectual, Her essays here on authors, the writing life, book reviews, and short pieces on her life in Jackson, Mississippi show the scope of her intelligence and the ability to relay her feelings on the written page.
It's easy to see why she is so respected, She was also a photographer, an avid gardener, and a copious letter writer who corresponded with dozens of friends, What a lady! I am learning a lot from this brilliant fiction writer in this, one of her only works of non fiction.
Not only does she share her own insight about fiction writing, she reviews and critiques some of my favorite writers, like Katherine Anne Porter, E.
B. White, and William Faulkner.
So far so great!! The Eye of the Story is lush, literate, filled with almost languid richness,
I can only imagine being so well read that I could recognize all of her references to other writers and the vast literature of novels and short stories.
I envy the breadth of her engagement with the world of fiction,
Im more interested in what she has to say about writing,
“We who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination” p.
.
“Each work is new” p,. Welty is talking about novels, but this also is true, so true, of poetry, She observes that, in the fiction of her contemplation, “words have been found for which there may be no other words” p.
.
“The imagination has to be involved, and moreignited, How much brighter than the symbol can be the explicit observation that springs firsthand from deep and present feeling” p,.
“It is through the shaping of the work in the hands of the artist that you most nearly come to know what can be known, on the page, of his mind and heart, and his as apart from the others.
No other saw life in an ordering exactly like this” p,.
I find affirmation in The Eye of the Story, Welty declares that writing is an art that uses the literally infinite array of words in sequence to create a spectacular, unique exhibition of whats in the writers mind and in her heart.
“Each work is new, ” I believe that each poem is unique, Each engaged reader takes a new step on new ground each time he reads the poem,
The poet opens a new window in her mind each time she takes the quill in hand,
Read more of my book reviews and poems here:
sitelinkwww, richardsubber. com I pick it up often for inspiration, Eudora Welty one of my favorite writers, Im a big fan of Eudora Welty, I dont always love her books, but I always love her voice, And in this collection, she uses that voice to share indepth knowledge about writers and writing, Its broken down into four sections: writers, writing, book reviews and a selection of miscellaneous essays,
In the Writers section she digs deep to unearth little gems about significant authors, For example, on Chekhov, I love this: “It was his plainest intention that we never should hear him telling us what we should think or feel or believe.
He is not trying to teach us, through his characters he only asks us to understand them, ”
The Writing section, “On Writing,” is something Ive read before, but feel I could read it forever and never grasp it all.
If you give it some concentration, you come away with quite an education, Heres an idea worth spending some time on: “Making reality real is arts responsibility, It is a practical assignment, then, a selfassignment: to achieve, by a cultivated sensitivity for observing life, a capacity for receiving its impressions, a lonely, unremitting, unaided, unaidable vision, and transferring this vision without distortion to it onto the pages of a novel, where, if the reader is so persuaded, it will turn into the readers illusion.
”
Most of her reviews were about authors I dont yet know, She did, however, convince me to reread Charlottes Web, and hadnot surprisinglysome brilliant insight into Faulkner, I found his quotes she shared about why he wrote such long sentences fascinating, Basically, he believed the past wasnt past, but existed within each person, and the long sentence was an attempt to get their past and future into the present moment.
How cool is that
The essays at the end were some that dont necessarily have broad appealan address to the Mississippi Historical Society, for example.
But what came through in all of them was her sense of placethat aspect of her fiction that so many of us love.
“All the years we lived in that house where we children were born, the same people lived in the other houses on our street too.
People changed through the arithmetic of birth, marriage and death, but not by going away, So families just accrued stories, which through the fullness of time, in those times, their own lives made, And I grew up in those, ”
Those stories that Eudora Welty grew up in made her the unique writer she was, I learned so much from her, and thoroughly enjoyed spending time in this collection, College reads: I only read chapters/sections relevant to my studies, hence the dnf/Amazing, Incredible. I'm slogging my way through this, It's divided into four parts: On Writers, which is analysis of the body of works of five different writers On Writing, which is, I believe, advice to writers s, which appears to be reviews of fifteen specific works by writers and Personal and Occasional Pieces, which is eight works that are, I suppose, exactly what the section title says.
I bought this mainly for the second section, but thought I should read the first part first, I'm five pages from finishing the fourth review, but I just can't go on with this, and will skip ahead to part two tomorrow.
Welty's language is very dense, and leaves me dense, I can't tell what she's saying, The English is good, as you would expect, Sentences are grammatical, she doesn't use overly long or obscure words, but the concepts are written in such a scholarly mannerat least I assume it's scholarlythat I can't understand it.
Here's an example.
"In this landscape we are made as aware of what isn't as of
what is, There is no recent past, There is no middle distance the perspectives of time and space run unbroken, unmarked, unmeasured to the vanishing point, With nothing in between, the living foreground and that almost mythological, almost phantasmagorial background are all but made for one, as in a Chinese paintingand exactly as in one of the mirages that Willa Cather's people often meet, quite casually, in the desert:"
I'm sorry, but I have no idea what that means.
I'll slog through part, at least the beginning, and hopefully come back and write more when I have more to say.
ETA: The book got a little better as I went through it, The last several chapters of part, writing advice, were clearer than the earlier ones, All the chapters of part, literary criticism of specific works, were clear and held my interest, I read only the first two chapters in part, miscellaneous personal pieces, They read like a historical travel log of rural Mississippi, The writing was fine, but that's not what I want to read right now,
I'm putting this on my bookshelf, Perhaps I'll get to it somewhere down the line, and find it more comprehensible and valuable, Back now to my regular reading pile, .