According to Bachelard, ‘The oneirically definitive house … must retain its shadows’ (PS, 13), and in ‘June Recital’ the old house preserves its mystery to the end, the mystery of man’s temporal existence. Welty allows us to experience ‘the house in its reality and in its virtuality, by means of thought and dreams’ (PS, 5), and Margiad Evans performs a similar miracle in stories like ‘Into Kings’. This wondrously intense and exquisitely wrought tale is self-confessedly one that entices us, like ‘June Recital’, to step out of the world of ordinary place and time. Little five-year-old Harry, we’re told at the outset, ‘neither lived nor remembered in sequence, and life and his dreams appeared without reason. He was a busy visionary’ (OY, 44). It is courtesy of his consciousness that we are able to enter the twilit world of enchantment that is the living-room of ‘Pewit [sic] Castle’, a little cottage – whose strange misfit of a name mystifies him – occupied by elderly Mr and Mrs Lackit and their disabled daughter. And Harry’s adventuring secretly over their threshold is also an enactment of the little boy’s discovery of his own mysterious interiority: ‘he began to be aware he was a being – a private being, and that he need not tell’ (OY, 46).
The living room’s dim interior is a magical zone of restlessly metamorphosing forms, like the face of the invalid asleep in the chair, whose eyes and mouth seem to be twitching monstrously as the firelight plays over her features. The most dominant feature in this fairy-tale realm is the tall gilded mirror, in the ‘poetry’ of whose glass all the objects in the surrounding space seem to be strangely stilled, ‘compacted … into a tilted but solid peace’ (OY, 49). Indeed, in this living room the whole domestic world seems set permanently slightly askew. For the little boy Harry, epiphany comes in the form of a ‘cheap round shaving glass’ (OY, 49). Caught in its reflection, a vulgar golden wreath from the cheap, tired, old pier glass is transformed before his enraptured gaze into the golden crown he would have expected to find in a cottage otherwise so puzzlingly called a Castle. And once he discovers the crown, Harry instinctively garbs the old Lackits in the gorgeous glamour of regal regalia:
Hadn’t he always wanted to know why they lived in a castle? It was the greatest of marvels, the most delicious answer … The most real of stories seemed about to begin. He saw Mrs Lackit as queen with a great yellow ring around her brows. And driving her, in the little black tub, Mr Lackit, the king. Poor drab old Nellie the donkey disappeared, and in her place in the shafts trotted a circus pony with red harness …
He didn’t believe in the crown, any more than he believed that the excited heart he could feel was alive in the mirror. Yet, like the heart, it existed outside. Perhaps, yes, somewhere? (OY, 49)
Little Harry has, then, stumbled wonderingly on what is for Margiad Evans, like Eudora Welty, the real source of story: his entry into that shabby little living room crammed full of tasteless bric-a-brac is actually his entry into the very womb of narrative, as Evans and Welty understood it. What makes it so, is that it is the realm of what E. M. Forster, in a famous phrase, termed ‘the twilit vision’. It is a region where things and people alike both are and are not as they seem. As critics regularly point out, at the very heart of Welty’s fiction lies her consciousness of this doubleness, and the same could be claimed for Evans’s stories. She points to this in the concluding line of ‘Into Kings’. After the wonders of mirror and ‘crown’, the little boy next literally awakens in the invalid a wholly unexpected, clumsy and inarticulate tenderness, and is caught by old Mr and Mrs Lackit at the very moment this melting happens. Gruff Mrs Lackit is moved to quiet tears, leaving her husband as the only one who has not been turned by the affecting scene into something rich and strange. ‘He’, writes Margiad Evans, ‘was the only person of the four to whom nothing could possibly have been otherwise than as it was’ (OY, 50). Literalist to their ‘visionary’, he stands there, searching for his pipe, to remind us that the world is, indeed, mundane as well as magical. The true artist’s genius lies, of course, in granting equal ‘reality’ to the scene in both its transfigured and its untransfigured states, and Evans was faithful to this ‘double vision’ in every detail of her writing. ‘It was November’, we learn at the beginning of ‘Into Kings’, ‘the brown winds were visible with leaves. Yellow and tortoiseshell, grey and lacquer red, mahogany and gingerbread colour, they span and skimmed’ (OY, 44). The first sentence, that remarkably views the leaves as a visible incarnation of the wind, is counterbalanced by the second, where the simple reality of the leaves in all the variegated colours of their ordinary, rich leafiness is reasserted.
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For both Evans and Welty, it was art that frequently brought out the ‘inscrutable’ mystery, the unsuspected ‘otherness’, of people, The word ‘inscrutable’ comes from the concluding sentence of ‘Miss Potts and Music’. Rather like ‘June Recital’, it is a story that pivots on the astonishing transformation that happens when an otherwise non-descript young girl sits at a piano and begins to play. And similarly in ‘A Modest Adornment’, who could possibly have dreamt that Miss Allensmore, ostensibly a ‘fat black cauldron’ (OY, 117) of an old ‘hag’, finds secret ecstatic – and indeed erotic – fulfilment by playing the oboe with breathy, sensuous lyricism. Similarly, at the climax of the collection’s title story, ‘The Old and the Young’, the young girl Arabella stumbles on a scene where the old woman, Tilly, dances to the vigorous popular tunes being played by robust Josephine, in her gardening breeches. The scene is an idyllically communal one, embracing both the old and the young, but earlier in the same story, as little Arabella thinks wistfully of Josephine’s magical playing, she suddenly recalls how her violin could suddenly change its tune. First, to Arabella’s distress, would come the breakdown of melody into seeming cacophony – ‘her legs would straddle and stiffen and out of the violin came the screams of a parrot in the rage. To the child it was terrible – as if the deck of the lawn tilted over a big wave and the leaves reeled’ (OY, 157) – and then the instrument would settle to an entirely different key: ‘the tune would fall, would drop half a tone as if the horizon had darkened, as if the sun had been lowered like a lamp – and Arabella knew it was Beethoven’ (OY, 157). The change of key signifies, of course, the music’s explorations of complex, subtle moods and experiences unknown to childhood and thus foreshadows the conclusion of the story, when little Esther – younger even than Arabella – breaks the charm of the innocent moment by enquiring, with semi-conscious pertness, where babies come from.
As for the otherness, the secret selves and ‘virtualities’ of localities, what better language could there be for exploring such uncanny dimensions of familiar ‘reality’ than that afforded by fairy tale, legend and myth, a narrative vocabulary in which both Evans and Welty were fluent. Such tales ‘reflect upon forces and signs’, as Bachelard put it (PS, 41). The interconnected stories in Welty’s The Golden Apples make particularly powerful use of such rich psychic materials. The hints are already there in the very title of the opening story, ‘The Shower of Gold’, where the part of Zeus is taken by the elusive King MacLain, who, floating free of his family and from all the moral constraints of provincial Morgana, roams the countryside at will, mysteriously materialising on fleeting occasion like the incarnation of some amoral, sexually potent and predatory force of forest life. The very stuff of legend, MacLain is a figure ancient and distant as classical mythology yet familiar and local to Mississippi folk culture, the stories about him naturally resembling the tall tales of the southwest frontier on which Welty modelled her notable early novel The Robber Bridegroom. King MacLain is flesh and blood yet also exists as a figment of the feverish imaginations of the locals in whose circulating tales he looms so menacingly yet enticingly large. In this latter respect he is the means whereby Welty implicitly reflects on the origins and functions of tale-telling (and its close relative gossiping) in the ‘economy’ of communal existence.
His unpredictable appearances in the wood are mirrored by his unexpected appearances
in the tales themselves. He returns, for example, in ‘Sir Rabbit’, as a kind of king of the woods entitled to exercise his seigneurial rights over all those who venture into his kingdom. When Mattie Will goes hunting with her frightened husband, aptly named Junior, and his young black helper, the party is from the outset much more apprehensive about running into MacLain than it is intent on shooting a rabbit. And when MacLain does lazily appear, drifting between and behind the trees like a stalking ghost, he has only to fire a load of buckshot vaguely in Junior’s direction to scare him into a dead faint, leaving Mattie entirely at MacLain’s disposal. Zeus to her Leda, he complacently has his will, and as he saunters off, so ‘a dove feather came turning down through the light that was like golden smoke’ (GA, 108). No swan he, nor shower of gold, but nevertheless he has all the attributes of a Zeus, divinely careless of human ties and obligations.
Welty’s interest in communal tales is paralleled by Margiad Evans’s fascination with the stories she heard on the lips of local villagers. In the footnotes to her edition of The Old and the Young, Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan consistently demonstrates what an appetite Evans had for recording such materials, out of which she regularly compiled her own fictions. And, again like Welty, she was concerned to capture the actual words used by her unconscious ‘informants’, sensitive as both were to the fact that there could be no successful separation of oral story from the exact manner, as well as occasion, of its utterance. Evans and Welty were both connoisseurs of dialect, of inflection, of the very pace and rhythm, sound and texture, of narrative that actually constituted the very marrow of story; its core substance and meaning. And both writers placed storytelling at the very epicentre of their art. Welty, for example, stated that ‘Family stories are where you get your first notions of profound feelings, mysterious feelings that you might not understand till you grow into them. But you know they exist and that they have power.’9 While, reviewing a book on the Welsh border country, Evans could admire the photographs but very much regretted ‘that there is not just an inch for the scraps of story belonging to the places they illustrate’.10
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The interest of Evans and Welty in such matters seems to have been intensified by a melancholy intuition that such tales, in their experience, were the exhalations of a dying world. In ‘The Boy Who Called for a Light’, a story that is, to some extent, like some of Welty’s, so constructed as to reflect on its own character as a tale, the adult narrator finds his narrative spontaneously invoking for him the vanished circumstances of its own origins:
I’d no idea of remembering that much. It all fits in so that it is difficult to take out the pieces I need. I seem to be back there in the moon-blanched lane, standing under the tree, hearing the sounds drop out of the sky, falling clearly, with a starry stillness and shapeliness on the fields of hills. (OY, 63)
As is clear from a number of stories in The Old and the Young, the recurrent elegiac note is due, in part, to their being the anxious product of a time of war and therefore of a period of profound, and potentially cataclysmic, change. Measured in terms of its damage to the intimate relationship between young woman and fiancé in ‘The Ruin’, this wartime world of change leaves its physical mark, in ‘The Old and the Young’, on the pre-war layout that so suited slow and leisurely village life. ‘The village has changed’, notes Arabella, ‘The bridge has been widened for traffic, and ruined, the eighteenth-century sundial has been carted away and left in a corner, a tomb without a grave’ (OY, 150).
Arabella’s worried, bewildered, question – ‘Where’s everybody? And what has happened to us?’ – is one with which Welty may very well have sympathised. She was, after all, one of the nostalgic Southern generation of writers and intellectuals whose unease about the new, post-bellum South was so arrestingly voiced in the classic ‘Agrarian’ manifesto I Take My Stand (1930).11 Although never committed, like her distinguished contemporaries John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Donald Davidson, to its socially conservative agenda, Welty certainly sympathised with its concern to defend traditional, rural, communal values from the destructive encroachments of the aggressively individualist and functional ideology of the victorious, heavily industrialised Northern states of the Union. Along with her other contemporaries in what was a brilliant constellation of talents from across the diverse regions of the South – writers like William Faulkner, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, Cleanth Brooks, Katherine Anne Porter and Erskine Caldwell – Welty developed her own rhetorical strategies (instanced, for example, by her preoccupation with time, memory and the past, and by the value she placed on collective imaginative enterprises such as the tale) for addressing the crisis of her South. Indeed, the very ambivalences of her ‘double vision’ were very much in keeping with the famous and influential concern with paradox of other Southern writers and critics of her time – a concern that spawned what became known as the ‘New Criticism’.
Underlying this conspicuous privileging of creative equivocation – and the related appreciation of the pregnant indeterminacies of image and symbol (what Bachelard called ‘the coalescence of images that refuse an absolute anatomy’ [PS, 29]) – lay Southerners’ conviction that Northern culture was so single-minded and monomaniac in its pursuit of ‘progress’ that it had completely lost the capacity to appreciate the rich complexities and insoluble enigmas of human existence. Believers in the straightforwardly open road to ever-increasing prosperity, the materialistic Yankees were deemed indifferent to Welty’s dominant sense of ‘spiralling time’ and the brooding omnipresence of the past. In this context, ‘the double vision’ was very much understood by the Agrarians and others to be, in the US context, the unique gift of traditional Southern culture; a legacy of inestimable value to the arts. In Welty’s work (as, most famously, in Faulkner’s) this cultural climate is powerfully inscribed in an original style that often seems also to be evocative of the torrid body heat of the south and the miasmic quality of vision it so readily generates:
[Like the physical climate, the style creates] an evanescent medium in which things are constantly melting into one another or dividing their identity between different levels of experience. The mind absorbs the landscape and then the landscape absorbs the mind … Everything … is animate and apparently capable of numerous metamorphoses: so much so that the metaphors lacing the description hardly seem like metaphors at all, but literal accounts of a magical environment. All is shifting, all is clear and yet somehow fluid, intangible.12
And while Margiad Evans’s style is, of course, as markedly different from that of Welty as the climate of the Welsh border country is different from that of the Mississippi delta, it nevertheless – or so this essay has been suggesting – possesses in its own answering way many of the salient characteristics of the style of Welty so accurately characterised in this passage by Richard Gray.
Also like Welty, Evans is resistant to the ironing out of life to a bland ‘Yankee’ flatness. Again like Welty, she is temperamentally inclined to think of life instead as an elusive, ephemeral function of the space–time complex. The defining characteristic of ‘the space we love’, according to Bachelard, is that it ‘is unwilling to remain permanently enclosed. It deploys and appears to move elsewhere without difficulty; into other times, and on different planes of dream and memory’ (PS, 53). In ‘Solomon’, Evans uses the fantastical consciousness of a little boy, Albert (known in the family as Barrabas [sic]), to illustrate how a cavernous house, ‘filled with the green air of the trees’ but with ‘too few people in it’ (OY, 97), proves to be exactly such a space as Bachelard specifies. So large and time-scarred is the house that ‘nobody can number what’s in it or guess who dropped and hid the things they find’ (OY, 100). And just as its endless multiplicity of rooms is for Albert suggestive of its labyrinthine history, so, when he joins his sisters for an imaginary tea-party in the grounds, he informs them – ‘in a voice that seems to come through the back of his head’ – t
hat ‘“I’m listening to where all the little paths go to”’ before selecting from the ‘skein’ ‘one he thinks wants to go home’ (OY, 102). Living as he does in a world in which everything has a will and secret purpose of its own, he laughs and then ‘turns to see which way the laugh went’ (OY, 102). And when he looks up, he ‘gazes amazed at some sky which is coming round the corner of a steamy cloud’ (OY, 102). There is, therefore, no fixed centre, no commanding ‘point of view’ in his universe, which resembles a post-Einsteinian universe of relativity complete with time-warped space through which it is impossible to travel in any straight line of understanding. As an electric storm gathers overhead, little Albert makes his way out of doors to join the old gardener, Meffy, and notices that from the back the great house ‘is ponderous age. Compared with the facade it is earthenware compared with porcelain’ (OY, 104). The story he demands from Meffy is ‘part of the house’, and the old man’s ‘memory is inseparable from the place’ (OY, 104).
All That is Wales Page 10
