Fiction Reviews

DELTA WEDDING

The coveted lead position review this week went to the literary event of the week, the release of Eudora Welty’s first full-length novel, Delta Wedding. The review was by Charles Poore, one of the two book critics for the daily New York Times. In the book the Fairchild clan, a Mississippi cotton-raising family, gather in 1923 for the wedding of one of their own to a man they consider beneath her. The story slowly unfolds as seen through the eyes of different family members. Poore gave it a rave. Welty had already attracted attention in the literary world for her short stories. Her novel had "all the excellencies of her short stories," Poore wrote, adding that the “interplay of family life, with a dozen different people saying and doing a dozen different things all at the same time, is wonderfully handled by Miss Welty so that no detail is lost, every detail has its place in the pattern of the whole...you seem to be all over the place at once, knowing the living members of three generations and all the skeletons and ghosts.”

Poore may have loved the novel, but the critical reception elsewhere was divided. Some of the critics found her cavalcade of characters. simultaneous events and shifting points of view hard to follow. Welty had been publishing short stories in major magazines since 1936. Two collections of her stories had been published in book form, as well as a novella, The Robber Bridegroom. Critics debated whether she was a major new talent or a talented regionalist. Even some of her ardent admirers were not sure what to make of Delta Wedding. For instance, Orville Prescott, the Times other daily reviewer, found the novel “disappointing and somewhat dull,” writing that it was “pallid, over-refined, painted for admirers of a particular school of esthetics, not for the general public.”

Her greatest champions were other writers associated by birth or adoption with the South like novelist Hamilton Basso who wrote in The New Yorker that Delta Wedding was "as fine a novel as any contemporary American author had turned up in recent years,” John Crowe Ransom who praised it highly in The Kenyon Review and Robert Penn Warren, who had a major success himself later in the year with All the King’s Men. The reviewer for The Atlantic Monthly, which had serialized the novel, a common magazine practice in 1946, also gave it a thumbs up. But even some of the book’s admirers warned that the book might not be for the general reader who, according to the reviewer for Time "are likely to get hopelessly tangled in a welter of entering-and-exiting great-aunts, uncles, fathers, cousins, sons, daughters and defunct ancestors.” Despite this quibble, the magazine included Delta Wedding in its year-end list of the most significant books of 1946.

The novel’s detractors complained that Welty’s storytelling was too subtle and free of dramatic incident, her pace too languid and the atmosphere and prose style too rarefied. Some of the New York intellectuals were among her harshest critics, taking her to task for writing so warmly of the South rather than producing a politically correct diatribe on the rabid racism and corrupt political demagogues of the region. Diana Trilling, the intensely parochial, highly opinionated but not always insightful high priestess of the Upper West Side intellectual set, while conceding that Welty was a gifted writer, wrote in The Nation that “I find it difficult to determine how much of my distaste for Eudora Welty’s new book... is dislike of its literary manner and how much is resistance to the culture out of which it grows and which it describes so fondly.” Another of the New York intellectual set, Isaac Rosenfeld, touted then as a golden boy but now largely unread, claimed in the New Republic that he had been unable to finish the book. Understandably Welty took great offense at the critics who told her what book she should have written rather than review the one she had. See the Herald Tribune Book Review take on the novel here.

Despite its mixed initial reception, Delta Wedding is now considered a classic and Eudora Welty is generally hailed as one of the most significant writers of the mid-twentieth century. The novel is in print and also available as an e-book.

OTHER FICTION REVIEWS

The novels reviewed this week had little impact then or subsequently in the literary world, although a couple were popular enough to be made into movies. The only book of the week other than Delta Wedding that is still in print is Mark Harris’s Trumpet to the World, mostly because of Harris's later fame as a baseball novelist.

The novels that made it to the screen were:

I Heard Them Sing by Ferdinand Reyher: The melancholy story of a small town barber whose sheltered wife runs off with another man leaving him to raise their children alone. “His barber shop is a Hollywood prop man's reproduction with a group of dummies standing where the actors should be” according to reviewer Frank S. Nugent. Reyher was also a screenwriter and playwright and a promoter of Bertolt Brecht and his work. Reviewer Nugent was a former film critic for the Times who went to Hollywood and became a prominent screenwriter himself. Despite Nugent's thumbs down, the novel was made into the film “Wait Till the Sun Shines Nellie” in 1952. Jean Peters and David Wayne starred.

· Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton by Magdalen King-Hall: An historical romance about a female highwayman in the 17^th century. “This being Miss King-Hall's ninth book she handles all the requisite turns with a skill and finesse that can come only with practice” wrote reviewer W.V Winebaum. It had already been made into a movie, “The Wicked Lady” in England; Margaret Lockwood, James Mason and Michael Rennie starred.

Peabody's Mermaid by Guy and Constance Jones: A “sweet, sad, funny little story” about a Boston shoe manufacturer who catches a mermaid while convalescing in the Caribbean. It was reviewed by Thomas Sugrue, who was on the non-fiction bestseller list this week with Starling of the White House. The novel was made into the movie “Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid” with William Powell and Ann Blyth in 1948. Constance Jones finished her husband's novel when his wartime service interrupted its progress. He is best known for his 1941 book Two Survived, the true story of two seamen who survived 70 days in a lifeboat after their ship was torpedoed. That book is still in print.

The positively reviewed novels included:

· Brutus Was an Honorable Man by Walter Marquiss: “A solid, well-planned study of a Midwestern city through four decades,” according to reviewer Marguerite Tazelaar.

· Hawks Flight by Helen Hull : The lives and marriages of a group of affluent, Connecticut neighbors. “This is that rare novel today, a character study uncluttered by political or ideological undertones” that is “well-realized, sensitive, even distinguished,” wrote reviewer Catherine Maher. The prolific Hull taught English and Creative Writing at Columbia. The novel received a negatve reception elsewhere,

The Mayfair Squatters by Ann Marie Fielding. Four drifters settle “without invitation: into a vacant London town house during the blitz.” “Just what all of its events and relationships add up to, just why they are worthy of recording and of remembrance is not entirely clear. Yet somehow, in a minor way, the total effect is rather impressive,” wrote reviewer by Richard Sullivan.

Twelve Stories by Steen Steensen Blicher, translated by Hanna Astrup Larsen: Moralistic