One Time, One Place: A Mississippi Album

Eudora Welty writes books and short stories. Her Losing Battles is a jewel of a novel about a cracker family in the thirties in Mississippi. Her newly published photographs, One Time, One Place: A Mississippi Album is a self-indulgence on her part for which we should be grateful. Eudora Welty is not a photographer, but she has salvaged not only a glimpse of the thirties, but more important even than that, she has shown us how she can salvage her own writing.

During the Depression, when Eudora Welty worked as a publicity agent for the WPA in the state of Mississippi just after she had gotten out of Mississippi State College, she took her kodak along. She developed her photographs in the kitchen at night. And now she has chosen one hundred of them for her album, black and white photographs with five pages of introduction.

In her introduction, Eudora Welty refuses to make excuses for her amateurism. The lighting is often poor; many of the pictures are blurred; what composition there is cartoonish and static. The photographs are more than anything snapshots, where the need to record, and more, the fear of losing dominates the impulse. That they are snapshots throws the emotion behind the subjects into a peculiarly desperate emphasis, which a more professional rendition might have mitigated in favor of a better whole. The effect is heartbreaking--the lighting, the blurring, the posing--one knows one is looking backward through a great deal of time onto a period about which our guilt and our sentimentality hang about equal.

Chopping in the field. Warren County. Hog-killing time. Hinds County. WPA farm-to-market road worker. Lowndes County. Saturday off Jackson. With a dog. Madison County. With a baby. Hinds County. With a chum. Madison County. Home. Claiborne County. Home. Pearl River. Home. Jackson. A slave's apron showing souls in progress to Heaven or Hell. Yalobusha County. Ida M'Toy, retired midwife. Jackson.

Both Losing Battles and One Time. One Place portray the Depression from within, rather than from outside. "The Depression," she says in her introduction, "was not a noticeable phenomenon in the poorest state in the union." Whatever this may say about the perpetuity of depression conditions in rural Mississippi, it is more telling about how people under thirty-five felt about the thirties. There is in the eye of the photographer and in the faces and scenes she captures a desperate optimism and an unforgivable innocence. It seems that reality breaks Eudora Welty's heart, and that most of the activity in her writing is diversion from heavier judgements. The photo Saturday Off is of a beautiful young black woman leaning up against the base of a column crossing her arms before her like a springer spaniel, looking rich and sexy as any Scarlett O'Hara. "A piece of body torn off at the roots might be more to the point," is what James Agee and Walker Evans in their Let Us Now Praise Famous Men had to say about the rural south in the thirties. It is difficult to forgive the thirties, and Eudora Welty, in particular, their lack of rage.

When Eudora Welty took these pictures she knew that she was a writer. What there is in her collection of photographs that there isn't in her writing is what makes her an exquisite rather than a powerful writer. She is a writer of fairy tales and not a maker of myths. What there is about the photographs is a day of the year, an hour, a month, the weather; there is a President of the United States: there is a depression; there is money or no money, female and male, race and class and jobs or no jobs: there was a war and there would be another war. Losing Battles took place on a long, hot, August day, the day of Grannie Refro's birthday, and the family reunion. Jack was home from jail and the lovers were reunited. But it reads more like a Walt Disney script than a novel. The superbly animated, soulful characters are little dei ex machina without any sort of reality to descend into.

Her reticence in dealing with politics and money and newspapers and race and cigarettes lit up and put out, one suspects, is a function of her insecurity as a woman in dealing with a man's world. One wonders about the convolutions and distractions of woman's writing in the thirties and forties. Gertrude Stein, and even Anais Nin. In her next novel, Eudora Welty should imitate the solidity, the involvement with things that matter in One Time. One Place. And she is writing another novel.