The Golden Apples, by Eudora Welty

Staff Review by Chris Saliba

The Golden Apples is both a strange and highly original work of fiction.

Eurdora Welty (1909-2001) wrote short stories, novels and essays. She was born in Jackson, Mississippi. She would live there for the rest of her life. During the Depression she worked as a publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration which was part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal program. In this job she conducted interviews, collected stories and took photographs of the people of Mississippi. In addition to her literary work, she published books of her Mississippi photography.

It was her experiences working around the state of Mississippi during the depression that inspired her first stories. Her first collection, A Curtain of Green, was published in 1941. The following year Welty published her debut novel, The Robber Bridegroom.

The wonderfully titled The Golden Apples was first published in 1949. It’s a collection of seven interrelated stories, with many of the characters appearing in different stories at different times of life. Its format and organisation are highly original, as the book is really suspended somewhere between being a novel and a story collection. Eudora Welty was inspired by Virginia Woolf at the time, and she does bring Woolf’s shimmering, impressionistic style to The Golden Apples.

The book is set in the fictional town of Morgana, and concentrates on a set of families and their internal dynamics. The stories also examine the relationships between the family groups. There are several outsiders to these Morgana families, and there are stories that concentrate on them and their relationships to the townsfolk. Welty likes to focus on otherness and has her characters daydream about slipping into different personalities. For example, when Nina in “Moonlake” muses on what it would be like to transform herself into someone else:

"The Orphan! she thought exultantly. The other way to live. There were secret ways. She thought. Time's really short. I've been only thinking like the others. It's only interesting, only worthy, to try for the fiercest secrets. To slip into them all – to change. To change for a moment into Gertrude, into Mrs Gruenwald, into Twosie – into a boy. To have been an orphan."

The main subject matter of the book, if there is one, is the cultural and family life of the Morgana residents. Welty beautifully weaves together the manners, natural environment and idiosyncratic personalities of the town. Her writing is wonderfully rich and strange, full of atmosphere and organic texture. You feel like you can smell, feel and touch Eudora Welty’s world. 

There’s also quite a bit of sly humour in Welty’s writing. When a prim mother thinks a lifesaver has acted with impropriety, she says "You little rascal, I bet you run down and pollute the spring, don't you?"

The Golden Apples is perhaps the strangest and most unique work of fiction I’ve ever read. Welty’s stories are rich prose-poems. These are rare, exotic and frequently intoxicating stories that reward slow and repeated readings.

The Golden Apples, by Eudora Welty. Published by Penguin Modern Classics. ISBN: 9780141196848 RRP: $22.95

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Delta Wedding & The Ponder Heart, by Eudora Welty

Staff Review by Chris Saliba

Two classic novels by the great Southern writer Eudora Welty.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publish this lovely hardback edition of two classic works by American short story writer and novelist Eudora Welty. Born in Jackson, Mississippi, she would live there for the rest of her life. During the Depression, she worked as a publicity agent for the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal program. It was her experiences working around the state of Mississipi in this capacity – conducting interviews, collecting stories and taking photographs, that inspired her first stories.


Delta Wedding

Delta Wedding was Eudora Welty’s first full length novel, published in 1946. Set in 1923, the novel is centred around wedding preparations for a member of the Fairchild family. Dabney Fairchild is set to marry the farm overseer, Troy Flavin. Many tongues are wagging in the sprawling Fairchild family, which includes a large cast of cousins, aunts, uncles, as it is thought she is marrying beneath her.

Other dramas are unfolding as the wedding preparations get under way when it is revealed that Uncle George has separated from his wife Robbie. As Welty explicitly states in the text, it is the women in the Fairchild family that run the whole show, and so it is the gossipy nature of the matriarch-like aunts who shape much of the narrative.

The young observer of all of this rambling family mayhem is Laura McRaven. Her mother has recently died, and so she is emotionally at loose ends, but the Fairchild family seem to think it is preordained that they will adopt her.

In style, Delta Wedding is very much like Eudora Welty’s short story fiction. There is no real centre in the novel, and focus is constantly shifting like a kaleidoscope. The prose flits from character to character, perspective to perspective. The reader doesn’t follow a plot, but rather gets to float down a river of Welty’s dreamy, beautifully atmospheric prose. You get carried away.

The writing in Delta Wedding is more about providing lots of texture, imagery and mystery. It’s a novel that you experience. It’s not quite stream of consciousness in its style, but definitely has a hallucinatory quality. Another thing Welty provides that other such writers in this genre seem to miss out on: humour. Her ear for dialogue is so peerless and sense of comedy so attuned that Delta Wedding is often hilarious.

It’s hard not to think that Delta Wedding is superior to a lot of other Southern novels, such as works by Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor. The only mystery is why such a work of clear genius remains absent from so many bookshelves.

The Ponder Heart

Originally published in The New Yorker in 1953, with illustrations by Joe Krush, The Ponder Heart is a 100 page novella. The story is narrated by Edna Earl, and largely follows the romantic adventures (and misadventures) of her eccentric Uncle Daniel. The novella also includes a cast of characters from the fictional Clay County, Mississippi. 

More overtly comic than Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart is different from much of Welty’s other fiction by virtue of the first person voice of Edna Earl and her perspective on the world. She happily chugs along describing all kinds of calamitous events and doesn’t appear phased by much at all.

The Ponder Heart is very much a light, frothy fiction, but like all else Eudora Welty puts her hand to, its execution is perfect. This is a brilliantly entertaining read and a great introduction to the works of this great 20th century writer.

Delta Wedding & The Ponder Heart, by Eudora Welty. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN: 9780547555645  $29.95

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The Optimist's Daughter, by Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty’s 1969 novel The Optimist’s Daughter should be considered a timeless classic. It deals with the complex relationship between a middle-aged daughter and her parents, told with a remarkable artistry that is at once simple and powerful.

Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and is well known as a Southern contemporary writer. She wrote short stories, literary criticism and novels, also publishing a book of her photographs in 1971. Of the five novels she wrote during her long life, The Optimist’s Daughter was her last, published in 1969.

This reviewer is not intimately aquainted with the work of Ms Welty, having only read her rich and strange novella Moon Lake (1949). Although I found that particular work by turns bizarre, curious and generally beyond interpretation, it was compelling enough to get me to re-read immediately. Welty’s prose in Moon Lake is light, rarefied and exquisitely ornate, without being merely decorative or pretty. She writes in this way, one gets the impression, because it is a true reflection of her soul. What may appear artifice on first read, it turns out on re-reading, is a deep authenticity.

The Optimist’s Daughter comes some 30 years after Moon Lake was published, and it’s interesting to note stylistic differences and similarities. The light and delicate tone is there, as is the unerring ability to capture mood and troubled psychological interiors, but the air of strangeness is gone. This is very much Welty telling a‘straight’ story of loss and grief, in what seems a piece of autobiography. As you read this, in many ways devastating story, you get the impression that Welty is writing to heal personal wounds. This sense of honesty, tempered as it is by such controlled and dignified prose, makes The Optimist’s Daughter a literary classic. Written over40 years ago, the novel hasn’t dated. Every page positively breathes a life of its own.

The title is ironic. The optimist of the story is Judge McKelva, who must undergo surgery for his eye. Being of an advanced age, his daughter Laurel is naturally enough concerned about her father’s welfare. He tries to allay fears, insisting that’s he’s always been an optimist. But his resigned attitude to the surgery makes it seem that he’s not an optimist at all, but a fatalist who expects the worst. Judge McKelva has a second wife, the shrewish and selfish Wanda Fay. Her silly attitude and foolish opinions causes tensions with the optimist’s daughter, Laurel.

This is a short novel of 180 pages, divided into four parts. Part one deals with Judge McKelva in hospital, part two shows Laurel back at her father’s house deep in grief and battling her mother-in-law, part three describes Laurel reflecting on her past while going through the artifacts in her father’s house, including details of her relationship with her biological mother, Becky, and part four wraps things up.

In the end, it’s hard to say exactly what The Optimist’s Daughter is about. It feels like a child’s meditation on the lives of her parents, and how their influence created a thoughtful and troubled daughter. It’s about the hothouse atmosphere parents can create for their children, and how it's impossible to escape the past, as it forms our very being. Eudora Welty achieves all this in a novel that skillfullybalances intense family drama against personal introspection and reflection. The Optimist’s Daughter shows how life bruises and alienates us, and how we limp along nonetheless.

The Optimist’s Daughter, by Eudora Welty. Published by Virago. ISBN:978-0-86068-375-9