Read The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty Online
Authors: Eudora Welty
A Curtain of Green and Other Stories
KEELA, THE OUTCAST INDIAN MAIDEN
The Wide Net and Other Stories
The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories
WHERE IS THE VOICE COMING FROM?
A HARVEST BOOK
HARCOURT BRACE & COMPANY
SAN DIEGO NEW YORK LONDON
Copyright © 1980, 1966, 1963, 1955 by Eudora Welty
Copyright 1954, 1952, 1951, 1949, 1948, 1947, 1943, 1942, 1941, 1939, 1938,
1937, 1936 by Eudora Welty
Copyright renewed 1994, 1991, 1980, 1979, 1977, 1976, 1975, 1971, 1970, 1969,
1967, 1966, 1965 by Eudora Welty
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to:
Permissions Department, Harcourt Brace & Company,
6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.
Some of the stories in this collection, a few in different form, first appeared in the
following magazines:
Accent, American Prefaces, Atlantic Monthly, Decision, Harper's
Bazaar, Harper's Magazine,
the
Hudson Review, Levee Press
of Greenville, Mississippi,
Manuscript, New Directions, Prairie Schooner, Sewanee Review, Southern Review,
Tomorrow,
and
Yale Review.
"No Place for You, My Love," "The Bride of the Innisfallen,"
"Kin," "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" and "The Demonstrators" first appeared in
the
New Yorker.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Welty, Eudora, 1909â
The collected stories of Eudora Welty.
PZ3.W4696Co [PS3545.E6] 813'.52 80-7947
ISBN 0-15-618921-6 (Harvest: pbk.)
Printed in the United States of America
N P R S Q O
PrefaceTo my nieces,
Elizabeth Welty Thompson
and
Mary Alice Welty White
Without the love and belief my family gave me, I could not have become a writer to begin with. But all my stories brought together here speak with their own voice to me of a source of strength on which I leaned as well, and do lean. In the presence of the stories, taking in forty years of time, I feel the presences also of those whose support of my work made all the difference in its fate and in
my
life as a writer. For beyond their being writtenâI do know they would have been
written
âthere is what happens to the writer's stories when they are submitted to the world of strangers.
It happened for me that the strangersâthe first readers of my first storiesâincluded Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, the editors of
The Southern Review.
This distinguished quarterly, between 1937 and 1939, gave space to six stories of mine. Katherine Anne Porter, when she read some of them there, sat down and wrote me a letter of encouragement. The generosity of these writers' openness to me, their critical regard when it mattered most, not to mention the long friendships that began by letter in those days, have nourished my life.
Submitting stories to
The Southern Review
had needed its own encouragement. That had come about when John Rood published "Death of a Traveling Salesman," my first, in
Manuscript,
the "little" magazine he issued from Athens, Ohio. Following my good fortune with
The Southern Review,
other good things happened. John Woodburn, an editor with Doubleday, Doran (as it was then), who was driving through the South on a scouting trip, stopped on
The Southern Review's
suggestion to see me, and left carrying some of my manuscripts with him. As was to be expected, a book publisher was not interested in a collection of short stories by an obscure young writer. But when Diarmuid Russell was opening his literary agency of Russell and Volkening, John Woodburn offered him the names of some new young writers he'd come across who might need an agent, among them
mine. I became his client (I believe, his first), a decisive event in my writing life.
Diarmuid Russell's integrity was a clear stream proceeding undeflected and without a ripple on its own way through the fields of publishing. On his quick perception, his acute and steady judgment in regard to my work, as well as on his friendship, I relied without reservation. (When, presently, he sent back to me a story I'd written called "The Delta Cousins," saying that to him it looked like Chapter Two of a novel, I saw then where the story had come from and where it was going, and wrote my first novel,
Delta Wedding.
)
It was Diarmuid Russell's own belief in my work, and his hardheaded persistence in sending it out again and again when it was rejected, that resulted after a year's time in the acceptance of a story of mine in a magazine of general circulation. Edward Weeks took "A Worn Path" for
The Atlantic Monthly
in 1941. He had opened the door. Mary Louise Aswell, the fiction editor of
Harper's Bazaar,
who was a passionate advocate of new young writers, was able to clear the way for "The Key," the first of many of my stories she later introduced.
Diarmuid Russell was thus eventually able to interest a publisher in a first book of stories by a writer hardly known, true, but now in print. The publisher was Doubleday, Doran, and the book went straight into the shepherding of the same John Woodburn who a few years earlier had carried the manuscripts there. It was through his editorship that Katherine Anne Porter, once more to encourage me, out of her shining bounty introduced the book,
A Curtain of Green.
John Woodburn, one of the great editors in a time of great ones, was a true champion of young writers; others writing today have him to thank as I do. When he moved to Harcourt, Brace (as it was then), I moved along with him.
The present collection holds all my published stories: those in
A Curtain of Green
and the three volumes that followed; and two that appear here for the first time in book form. In general, my stories as they've come along have reflected their own present time, beginning with the Depression in which I began; they came out of my response to it. These two written in the changing sixties reflect the unease, the ambiguities, the sickness and desperation of those days in Mississippi. If they have any special virtue in this respect, it would lie in the fact that they, like the others, are stories written from within. They come from living hereâthey were
part
of living here, of my long familiarity with the thoughts and feelings of those around me, in their many shadings and variations and contradictions.
"Where Is the Voice Coming From?" is unique, however, in the way it came about.
That hot August night when Medgar Evers, the local civil rights leader, was shot down from behind in Jackson, I thought, with overwhelming directness: Whoever the murderer is, I know him: not his identity, but his coming about, in this time and place. That is, I ought to have learned by now, from here, what such a man, intent on such a deed, had going on in his mind. I wrote his storyâmy fictionâin the first person: about that character's point of view, I felt, through my shock and revolt, I could make no mistake. The story pushed its way up through a long novel I was in the middle of writing, and was finished on the same night the shooting had taken place. (It's only two pages long.) At
The New Yorker,
where it was sent and where it was taken for the immediately forthcoming issue, William Maxwell, who had already known on sight all I could have told him about this story and its reason for being, edited it over the telephone with me. By then, an arrest had been made in Jackson, and the fiction's outward details had to be changed where by chance they had resembled too closely those of actuality, for the story must not be found prejudicial to the case of a person who might be on trial for his life.
I have been told, both in approval and in accusation, that I seem to love all my characters. What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart, and skin of a human being who is not myself. Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, old or young, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set most high.
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Jackson, Mississippi
May 1980
Preface
[>]
A Curtain of Green and Other Stories
Lily Daw and the Three Ladies
[>]
A Piece of News
[>]
Petrified Man
[>]
The Key
[>]
Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden
[>]
Why I Live at the P.O.
[>]
The Whistle
[>]
The Hitch-Hikers
[>]
A Memory
[>]
Clytie
[>]
Old Mr. Marblehall
[>]
Flowers for Marjorie
[>]
A Curtain of Green
[>]
A Visit of Charity
[>]
Death of a Traveling Salesman
[>]
Powerhouse
[>]
A Worn Path
[>]
The Wide Net and Other Stories
First Love
[>]
The Wide Net
[>]
A Still Moment
[>]
Asphodel
[>]
The Winds
[>]
The Purple Hat
[>]
Livvie
[>]
At The Landing
[>]
The Golden Apples
Shower of Gold
[>]
June Recital
[>]
Sir Rabbit
[>]
Moon Lake
[>]
The Whole World Knows
[>]
Music from Spain
[>]
The Wanderers
[>]
The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories
No Place for You, My Love
[>]
The Burning
[>]
The Bride of the Innisfallen
[>]
Ladies in Spring
[>]
Circe
[>]
Kin
[>]
Going to Naples
[>]
Uncollected Stories
Where Is the Voice Coming From?
[>]
The Demonstrators
[>]
LILY DAW AND THE THREE LADIESTo Diarmuid Russell
Mrs. Watts and Mrs. Carson were both in the post office in Victory when the letter came from the Ellisville Institute for the Feeble-Minded of Mississippi. Aimee Slocum, with her hand still full of mail, ran out in front and handed it straight to Mrs. Watts, and they all three read it together. Mrs. Watts held it taut between her pink hands, and Mrs. Carson underscored each line slowly with her thimbled finger. Everybody else in the post office wondered what was up now.
"What will Lily say," beamed Mrs. Carson at last, "when we tell her we're sending her to Ellisville!"
"She'll be tickled to death," said Mrs. Watts, and added in a guttural voice to a deaf lady, "Lily Daw's getting in at Ellisville!"
"Don't you all dare go off and tell Lily without me!" called Aimee Slocum, trotting back to finish putting up the mail.
"Do you suppose they'll look after her down there?" Mrs. Carson began to carry on a conversation with a group of Baptist ladies waiting in the post office. She was the Baptist preacher's wife.
"I've always heard it was lovely down there, but crowded," said one.
"Lily lets people walk over her so," said another.
"Last night at the tent showâ"said another, and then popped her hand over her mouth.
"Don't mind me, I know there are such things in the world," said Mrs. Carson, looking down and fingering the tape measure which hung over her bosom.
"Oh, Mrs. Carson. Well, anyway, last night at the tent show, why, the man was just before making Lily buy a ticket to get in."
"A ticket!"
"Till my husband went up and explained she wasn't bright, and so did everybody else."
The ladies all clucked their tongues.