By Eudora Welty. They are, she seems to suggest, essentially at cross-purposes.
Criticism tries to solve the mystery, by translating fiction into another language.
It offers us close analysis, like a headphone we can clamp on at the U.N. when they are speaking the Arabian tongue. The pieces in this book about the climate of the fiction writer's mind should be prescribed reading for all literary critics. Also included here are some essays of reminiscence, from her childhood on. Flesh and blood and the sense of comedy are the essence of her pieces about her hometown, Jackson, Miss., perhaps the most evocative being a sketch, written in 1942, about Ida M'Toy, eccentric black secondhand dealer and ex-midwife. A long section is given over to book reviews, and here Miss Welty, given her views on academic criticism, stands in the eye not only of the story but of the storm.