The Reading and Writing of Short Stories

by EUDORA WELTY

6

THE plot of a short story in many instances is quite openly a projection of character. In a highly specialized instance, but a good example, the whole series of ghostly events in The Turn of the Screw may obviously be taken as a vision — a set of hallucinations of the governess who tells us the story. The story is a manufactured evidence against the leading character, in effect.

Not always does plot project character, even primarily. William Sansom, a young English writer, might be mentioned as one new writer who pays his highest respect to pure idea. Virginia Woolf too was at least as interested in a beam of light as she was in a tantrum.

In outward semblance, many stories have plots in common — which is of no more account than that many people have blue eyes. Plots are, indeed, what we see with. What’s seen is what we’re interested in.

On some level all stories are stories of search — which isn’t surprising at all. From the intense wild penetration of the hunter in '‘The Bear" by William Faulkner to the gentle Sunday excursion of Katherine Mansfield’s “Miss Brill"; from the cruel errand of Nick’s father to the Indian camp in Ernest Hemingway’s story to the fantasy of soaring into the realm of the poetic imagination in E. M. Forster’s “Celestial Omnibus"; from the fireman seeking the seat of the fire in William Sansom’s “Fireman Flower” to the Henry James man in “The Jolly Corner” seeking, with infinite pains and wanderings, the image of himself and what he might have been, through the corridors of a haunted house— in any group of stories we might name as they occur to us, the plot is search. It is the ancient Odyssey and the thing that was ancient when first the Odyssey was sung. Joyce’s Ulysses is the titan modern work on the specific subject, but when Miss Brill sits in the park, we feel an old key try at an old lock again — she loo is looking. Our most ancient dreams help to romance us that her timid Sunday afternoon is the adventure of her life, and measure for us her defeat.

Corresponding to the search involved is always the other side of the coin. On one side of James’s coin is search, on the other side is blight. Faulkner is concerned with doom and history, Hemingway with career, ritual, and fate — and so on. Along with search go the rise and fall of life, pride and the dust. And Virginia Woolf sees errand and all alike dissolving in a surpassing mystery.

When plot, whatever it does or however it goes, becomes the outward manifestation of the very germ of the story, then it is purest — then the narrative thread is least objectionable, then it is not in the way. When it is identifiable in every motion and progression of its own with the motions and progression of simple revelation, then it is at its highest use. Plot can he made so beautifully to reveal character, reveal atmosphere and the breathing of it, reveal the secrets of hidden, inner (that is, “real”) life, that its very unfolding is a joy. It is a subtle satisfaction — that comes from where? Probably it comes from a deep-seated perception we all carry in us of the beauty of organization — of that less strictly definable thing, of form.

Where does form come from — how do you “get it”? My guess is that form is evolved. It is the residue, the thrown-off shape, of the very act of writing, as I look at it. It is the work, its manifestation in addition to the characters, the plot, the sensory impressions — it is the result these, which comes to more than their mathematical total. It is these plus something more. This something more springs from the whole. It pertains to the essence of the story. From the writer’s point of view, we might say that form is somehow connected with the process of the story’s work — that form is the work. From the reader’s point of view, we might say that form is connected with recognition; it is what makes us know, in a story, what we are looking at, what unique thing we are for a length of time intensely contemplating. It does seem that the part of the mind which form speaks to and reaches is the memory.

7

IN stories today, form, however acutely and definitely it may be fell, does not necessarily imply a formal structure. It is not accounted for by structure, rather, A story with a “pattern,”an exact kind of design, may lack a more compelling over-all quality which we call form. Edgar Allan Poe and other writers whose ultimate aim depended on pattern, on a perfect and dovetailing structure (note the relation to puzzles and to detection and mystery here), might have fell real horror at a story by D. H. Lawrence first of all because of the unmitigated shapelessness of Lawrence’s narrative. Lawrence’s world of action and conversation is as far from the frozen perfection, the marblelike situations, of Poe as we can imagine; Lawrence’s story world is a shambles—a world just let go, like a sketchy housekeeper’s un-straightened-up room. More things are important than this dust! Lawrence would say, and he would be as right as the crier of that cry always is.

And what about his characters? Are they real, recognizable, neat men and women? Would you know them if you saw them? Not even, I think, if they began to speak on the street as they speak in the stories, in the very words — they would only appear as deranged people. For the truth seems to be that Lawrence’s characters don’t really speak their words not conversationally, not to one another; they are not speaking on the street, but are playing like fountains or radiating like the moon or storming like the sea, or their silence is the silence of wicked rocks. It is borne home to us that Lawrence is writing of our human relationships on earth in terms of eternity, and these terms set Law rence’s form.

The author himself appears in authorship in phases like the moon, and sometimes blesses us and sometimes smites us while we stand there under him. But we see that his plots and his characters are alike sacrificed to something; there is something which Lawrence considers as transcending them both. Others besides him have thought that something does. But Lawrence alone, that I have knowledge of now, thinks the transcending thing is found direct through the senses. It is the world of the senses that Lawrence writes in, works in, thinks in, takes us his medium — and if that is strange to us, isn’t the loss ours? Through this world he will send his story. It is the plot too; it is his story’s reason for being, with sex the channel the senses most deeply, mysteriously, run through, cutting down through layers and centuries and country after country of hypocrisy.

Virginia Woolf presents an interesting variation of this conception; she was an intellectual. Extremely conscious of sex, she was intellectually or philosophically concerned with it. She could make a fantasy of her world, and her people could laugh. But the extreme beauty of her writing is due greatly to one fact, it seems to me: that the imprisonment of life in the word was as much a matter of the senses with her as it was a concern of the intellect. The scent, the gesture, the breath moving from the lips, the sound of the hour striking in the clock, the rippling texture of surface in running water and flowing air — all these things she sought with all her being to apprehend, for they were the palpable shadows and colored reflections of the abstract world of the spirit, the matter that mirrored the reality.

The impressionist dictum at one time that light is the most important actor in the picture can apply to the work of Virginia Woolf; here light does move frequently as a character and on business of its own, from scene to scene, and only itself remains unaffected by cruder and frailer human vision. In one story, “The Searchlight,”light is literally the main character.

But it has to be observed that in Mrs. Woolf’s stories the beam of light arises not out of the unconscious but out of the conscious being. It is manipulated, like a wand; it touches and discriminates, from here to there, with precise, rather haughty, almost ladylike purpose, to illuminate quite clearly the particular in the abstract world. So near can the sensory come to the philosophic in her stories that the words “breathing,”"breath,”and the other words which mean this, give us the feeling of a creator ever consciously breathing life into the creation.

While Virginia Woolf uses her senses intellectually, Lawrence uses his intellect sensuously. And while Chehov builds up character, Lawrence breaks down character. These opposites are perpetrated only in one interest, in getting at truth.

D. H. Lawrence is somewhat like the True Princess, who fell beneath forty mattresses that there was a pea under her. Lawrence is as sensitive to falsity as the True Princess was to the pea. And he is just as sure to proclaim the injury.

How can he be so quarrelsome with us while at the same time he is enrapturing us with his extraordinary powers to make us see and feel beauty . But my feeling toward his writing is my feeling toward greatness anywhere. Take it — take it all. It is no laughing matter. It is more pertinent to give in to that beauty of his and better to grit our teeth at his cruelty — for he is cruel — than to laugh at or be annoyed by the shambles he makes of the everyday world.

We all use the everyday world in our stories, and some of us feel inclined or even bound to give it at least a cursory glance and treatment, but Lawrence does not care. He feels no responsibility there at all. He does not care if the mechanics and props of everyday life suffer in his stories from distortion unto absurdity, if his narrative thins and frays away into silliness. Those things aren’t what he’s concerned with. His plots might remind you of some kind of tropical birds—that are awkward in structure and really impossible-looking when they’re on the ground, and then when they take wing and fly, a miracle happens. All that clumsiness and outrageousness is gone; the bird’s body becomes astonishingly functional, and iridescent in flight.

8

WILLIAM FAULKNER carries on a plot of development of a kind which I have not yet discussed. The more we read and write, the more clearly we see how many ways there are of using material. Some compile meticulously, adding and subtracting and getting a sum which is a story, and which could be graphed if required; sometimes Henry James, who uses this method, seems to be plotting, all exquisitely, graph after graph of different kinds of blights. Other writers distill material, getting clearer and purer essences as though by some boiling down process — Lawrence, for example. Faulkner seems to set upon his material and divine his stories from it.

The furious speed of Faulkner’s stories is one of the marks of a divining writer. His stories seem to race with time, race with the world. You remember — who could forget? — one sentence of 1600 words in “The Bear.”How this skyscraper could race — like a dinosaur across the early fields of time — is something to teach us mainly that in the world of our story-making, wonders never cease. But that sentence runs along with a strange timeencompassing quality of seeming all to happen at once; while we are reading we are still hearing the part behind, and the part before is being anticipated by means of its present part. It makes us realize how true it is that prose is a structure, in its every part — the imagination, by instinct or otherwise, is engineered when we write. A sentence can be in as perfect control as a bridge or a church. Not too obviously or too exquisitely perhaps, or the reader might start testing as he goes, which would be fatal to the story.

But the reason Faulkner’s unwieldy-looking sentences can race is of course their high organization — a musical organization. And Faulkner is highly organized and his evocation does seem to come out of the place where music comes from. Don’t let his turbulence ever blind us; his structure is there daring structure. To me, above all other present-day storytellers he is the one ahead of his time—the most astonishingly powered and passionate writer we have. “The Bear is an apocalyptic story of the end of the wilderness. It ends with the senseless clang on clang of a man idiotically pounding pieces of his broken gun together while, in the isolated gum tree over his head, forty or fifty squirrels are running frantically around. It signifies for one thing the arrival of the machine age and the squealing treadmill. The story encompasses past and future, all the past of the land from the Indian times on to this. It has towering heroic figures, wilderness figures, symbolic figures; and we get the knowledge in every happening of its happening again, over and over — and the marvelous whole world of the wilderness, the whole history of Mississippi.

For in “The Bear" the structure of time is constantly in danger of being ripped away, torn down by the author the whole time bulges at ihe cracks to get in to the present-time of the story. This dilation in time sense and intractability in space sense, the whole blown-up surface of the story, has of itself a kind of looming quality, a portentousness. Like the skin of a balloon, time and space are stretched to hold more, while the story remains in form and function itself.

It is this, most of all, that makes “The Bear" a great deal more than a hunting story. It is a very long story, in five parts, and in Part IV the flimsy partition that keeps the story time apart from whole time flies away entirely. The entire history of the land and a people crowds into a chapter of an expansion, in sentence and paragraph, almost outrageous to the eye alone. Duration of time and extent of space, which always took the accusative case, and were disposed of that way, are let loose now — they are evoked, and tear through the story running backwards and forwards, up and down, into Indian times and the very future, like a pack of beasts from the world’s wilderness itself. And this is the beauty of the story. Its selfdestruction, self-immolation, is the way it transcends all it might have been had it stayed intact and properly nailed together. There is its wonder.

Sherwood Anderson, it could be said, used this power of expansion in quite another sense in the Winesburg stories— whereby the uneventful and imprisoned life he saw around him became moving and tragic as though another dimension had been added when it passed through his passionate survey—like the same river flowing between deeper walls. In the case of “The Bear,”I feel that to Faulkner the escapement of wild time and place must have seemed one attribute of the thing he was describing, the lost attribute —just as to Anderson passion was the lost attribute of Winesburg — implicit in it and supplied now, in his stories.

Faulkner in letting time and place out of the box was not being reckless and exhibiting his talents—though what a spectacle they make! — but being true, faithful to his conception of the story at hand. If this alarms many readers, even the very ones most alarmed will have to be the first ones to admit the strict propriety of it.

9

A STORY’S major emphasis may fall on the things that make it up — on character, on plot, on its physical or moral world, in sensory or symbolic form. And perhaps the way this emphasis is let fall may determine the value of the story; may determine not how well it is written, but the worth of its being written.

Of course fashion and the habits of understanding stories at given periods in history may play their parts, unconsciously or willfully. But mainly, I venture to think, the way emphasis falls, the value of a story, is the thing nearest dependent upon the individual and personal factor involved, the writer behind the writing.

The fine story writers seem to be in a sense obstructionists. As if they hold back their own best interests. It’s a strange illusion. For if we look to the source of the deepest pleasure we receive from a writer, how surprising it seems that this very source is the quondam obstruction. The fact is, in seeking our source of pleasure we have entered another world again. We are speaking of beauty.

And beauty is not a blatant or promiscuous or obvious quality; indeed at her finest she is somehow associated with obstruction — with reticence of a number of kinds. The beauty of “The Bear” seems tied up intimately with the reluctance to confine the story to its proper time sequence and space measurements; Faulkner makes fantastic difficulty about time and place both, and the result is beauty. Time after time Lawrence refuses to get his story told, to let his characters talk in any natural way; the story is held up forever, and through so delaying and through such refusal on the author’s part, we enter the magical world of pure sense, of evocation — the shortest cut known through the woods.

Could it be that one who carps at difficulties in a writer (“Why didn’t he write it like this? Why didn’t he write another story?”), at infringements of the rules and lack of performance of duty, fails to take note of beauty? And fails to see straight off that beauty springs from deviation, from desire not to comply but to act inevitably, as long as truth is in sight, whatever that inevitability may mean?

Where does beauty come from, in the short story? Beauty comes from form, from development of idea, from after-effect. It often comes from carefulness, lack of confusion, elimination of waste — and yes, those are the rules. But that can be on occasion a cold kind of beauty, when there are warm kinds. And beware of tidiness. Sometimes spontaneity is the most sparkling kind of beauty

— Katherine Mansfield had it. It is a fortuitous circumstance attending the birth of some stories, like a fairy godmother that has — this time — accepted the standing invitation and come smiling in.

Beauty may be missed or forgotten sometimes by the analyzers because it is not a means, not a way of getting the story along, or furthering a thing in the world. For beauty is a result —as form is a result. It comes. We are lucky when beauty comes, for often we try, but then when the virtues of our story are counted, beauty is standing behind the door. I think it may be wrong to try for beauty; we should try for other things, and then hope.

Intensity and beauty are qualities that will come out of man’s imagination and out of his passion — which use sensitivity for their finding and focusing power. (This can’t beg the question quite so hopelessly as assigning the best stories to genius.) It seems to be true that for practical purposes, in writing a story, beauty is in greatest accord with sensitivity.

The two things that cannot be imitated, beauty and sensitivity, are or may be kin to each other. But there is only one of them we can strive for. Sensitivity in ourselves. It is our technique. In the end, our technique is sensitivity, and beauty may be our reward.

A short-story writer can try anything. He has tried anything — but presumably not everything. Variety is, has been, and no doubt will remain endless in possibilities, because the powder and stirring of the mind never rests. It is what this power will try that will most pertinently define the short story. Not rules, not aesthetics, not problems and their solution. It is not rules as long as there is imagination; not aesthetics as long as there is passion; not success as long as there is intensity behind the effort that calls forth and communicates, that will try and try again.

And at the other end of the stories is the reader. There is no use really to fear “the reader.” The surly old bugaboo who wants his money’s worth out of a magazine — yes, he is there (or I suspect it is a she, still wanting her money’s worth and having yet to be convinced she’s got it); but there is another reader too, perhaps with more at stake.

Inescapably, this reader exists — the same as ourselves; the reader who is also a user of imagination and thought. This reader picks up a story, maybe our new story, and behold, sees it fresh, and meets it with a storehouse of hope and interest.

And, reader and writer, we can wish each other well. Don’t we after all want the same thing? A story of beauty and passion and truth?