Books: Life, with a Touch of the Comic

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THE COLLECTED STORIES OF EUDORA WELTY

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 622 pages; $17.50

A collection of stories is the writer's equivalent of a retrospective exhibit, handily displayed in a portable museum without walls. Works created at disparate periods and under different circumstances are finally allowed to mingle in a single volume, where they may harmonize or squabble with each other at will. In either case, an author's career is bound to look slightly different afterward, even to devoted lifelong readers. With a length of time compressed between hard covers, memory is superseded by fresh considerations of breadth and depth.

The results are not always salubrious. Hidden flaws can appear as well as unsuspected virtues; repetitiveness may drown out variety. But Author Eudora Welty, 71, survives the ordeal of retrospection beautifully. Her Collected Stories reprints all the works from four earlier collections, plus two previously uncollected pieces written in the '60s, a total of 41 stories dating back to 1936, when a "little magazine" called Manuscript first published her. At that time, the young Mississippi writer could not have guessed that she was enlisting in a new confederacy of Southern letters, one that would rapidly push her forward as a standard bearer. She was intent on simply getting down imaginatively what she saw and heard around her. This volume is a reminder of how thoroughly her personal visions have entered the public domain.

Welty began writing after William Faulkner and before Flannery O'Connor, and her achievement has been partly eclipsed by theirs. All of them began with roughly the same material: life, odd and otherwise, in small towns of the rural South. Given this common starting point, comparisons of the three were probably inevitable, but they also were, and remain, misleading. Each looked at the South in a different way. Faulkner saw the tailings and butt ends of a long tragic myth; O'Connor perceived a gallery of grotesques testing the limits of God's mercy to man. Welty concentrated instead on ordinary people, on "the thing that makes them what they are in themselves, their secret life, their memory of the past, their childhood, their dreams." Her choice carried with it the hush of inference, "sad as the soft noises in the hen house at twilight," and also the rustle of laughter.

For Welty has always been a superb comic writer. Her well-known early story, Why I Live at the P.O., is a hilarious portrait of sheer cussedness; the narrator, postmistress at "the next to smallest P.O. in the entire state of Mississippi," makes herself so obnoxious to her bizarre kinspeople that she stalks out in a huff and sets up housekeeping at her place of business. The town is then split into those who will patronize the post office and those who refuse to use the mail at all, rather than cross the family.