Eudora Welty's "Magic": A History of the Story
Pearl A. McHaney, Georgia State University

Eudora Welty's "Magic" is a gothic tale of a cemetery tryst between a telegram delivery boy and a stenography school student, both young city people in a community easily identified as Jackson, Mississippi. It is a well-plotted story, much of its drama recorded in the couple's slangy dialect with the same daring Welty would apply to "Petrified Man."2 "Magic" was Welty's third published story, and the second story published by the perceptive editor John Rood; this one, in the September-October 1936 issue of Manuscript, filled pages three to seven. Manuscript, a "little magazine" that sought to showcase promising new writers, was owned, edited, and published by Rood and his wife Mary Lawhead through "their own press, the Lawhead Press, in Athens, Ohio" (Welty, "Looking" 7). Welty had sent her first submissions for publication to John Rood at the suggestion of her Jackson friend and neighbor Hubert Creekmore, a published writer. Two years older than Welty, and later related to Welty by his sister's marriage to her brother Walter, Creekmore had by 1934 published in Poetry and placed fiction in Story (Bain et al. 105). In recalling her first publication, which was "Death of a Traveling Salesman," Welty revealed that she hadn't even "risked showing" her stories to Creekmore, but sent them straightaway to several journals he had suggested ("Looking" 7).

That Creekmore had published fiction in Manuscript,3 The Tanager, and Mississippi's own River: A Magazine of the Deep South (Hoffman 279, 339) seems to indicate that these are the magazines that he had suggested. None of these little magazines paid for stories, and of the three, the bimonthly Tanager had the longest life (1925-1938). Manuscript lasted for three years; River had only three issues: March, April, and June, 1937, but these included essays, fiction, and poetry by such later well-known writers as James K. Feibleman, George Marion O'Donnell, August Derleth, and Peter Taylor. Four of Welty's early stories were published in these three short-lived literary magazines: "Death of a Traveling Salesman" and "Magic" were in Manuscript; "The Doll" appeared in June 1936 in The Tanager, a college magazine of Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, edited in 1936 by Carl Niemeyer (Welty, "The Doll" 25); and "Retreat"4 was published by Dale Mullen in River: A Magazine of the Deep South (Oxford, Mississippi) in March 1937.

Three of these first four Welty stories were not included in her first short-story collection, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (1941), nor were they included by Welty in a collection titled Stories that she circulated to publishers beginning in 1939. They do not, therefore, appear in her Collected Stories (1980), either, and until its publication in this issue of the Eudora Welty Newsletter, "Magic" is the only one of the four never reprinted at all. In 1981, Palaemon Press Limited published "Retreat" and, for its A Tribute to Eudora Welty issue, The Georgia Review reprinted "The Doll" in 1999. Other stories that were either unpublished ("Acrobats in the Park") or uncollected after the first publication ("Hello and Good-Bye") have by now also been published.5

When Welty sent "Death of a Traveling Salesman" and "Magic" to John Rood at Manuscript, she received an enthusiastic acceptance of both stories by March 19, 1936 (Marrs 157). In the "Correspondence Calendar" for The Welty Collection, Suzanne Marrs quotes Rood as telling Welty that "Death of a Salesman" is "one of the best stories we have ever read," and she paraphrases Rood's intention to "forego the usual year-long wait and publish one of the stories in June or August" (157).

Welty was fortunate to appear in the Rood and Lawhead magazine, for admission to its pages was not easy. Despite its short lifespan, writes Frederick Hoffman, Manuscript "begins with the valuable and genuine aim of encouraging young and comparatively unknown writers … and it is in examples" of the short story "that the excellence of the magazine lies" (322-23). During its three-year run, Manuscript published six issues per year in a ten-by-six-inch format, each issue sixty-five to eighty-five pages long. The content included poems, stories, an occasional "sketch," and a few novelettes of twenty-five to thirty pages. James Laughlin, IV, and August Derleth contributed poems and a story; John Malcolm Brinnin published three poems; Peter de Vries, August Derleth, and Weldon Kees each contributed a story; and John Rood, the editor, had room in his magazine for three of his own stories. Alongside the statement that Welty published her first story in Manuscript, Frederick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich note in their 1946 study The Little Magazine: A History and A Bibliography that Welty is "one of the most promising writers of fiction of the thirties" (323).

Hoffman also noted that the "style of Manuscript's fiction is influenced though not dominated by the sociological and political emphases of the time; there is some proletarian fiction" (323)-a tag that does not quite fit Welty's story despite her characters' working-class backgrounds. A more overtly leftist magazine to which Welty sent stories in 1936 is Literary America, but editor S. Robert Morse returned "Flowers for Marjorie," "Petrified Man," and two other stories on November 2, 1936 (Polk 365, 366; Marrs 158). Hoffman describes Literary America as "impartial and tolerant in its editorial attitudes, generous and inclusive in its publication of materials" but "admit[s] that writing must deal with social affairs and problems if it is to fulfill itself" (321). Welty's fiction was not inappropriate for Literary America-where significant writers of the day and of the future appeared: Langston Hughes, August Derleth, William Carlos Williams, Erskine Caldwell (Hoffman 322)-but she had no luck. Like so many of the little magazines of the thirties, Literary America lasted only a few years.

This history of opportunities gained and lost establishes the lofty aspirations of the young Welty and places her among many names of others who, like her, also fulfilled their ambitions, in time. It also demonstrates that Rood's recognition of her talent was no accident because Welty was by no means his only "find." Rood had an aesthetic mind and a discriminating taste. In accepting "Death of a Traveling Salesman" and "Magic," he wrote that he and his wife "admired" them "much more than an earlier story … [that] they had rejected" (Kreyling 12). Unfortunately, as was so often the case with "little magazines," especially during the Depression, Welty's reception at Manuscript ended the same year it had begun, when the magazine folded later in 1936.

Several months before accepting Welty's stories, however, Rood had accepted "Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton," by Thomas Lanier Williams. It was published in the May-June 1936 issue, between the two issues bearing Welty's stories.6 Rood wrote to Williams that his story was "a fine piece of work … perhaps a little too strong in the sex business, but still too fine to pass up" (qtd. in Leverich 159). When the story was published, Williams wrote to his grandparents that

As with Welty, Rood apparently had rejected other submissions by Williams, for in an undated letter,7 Williams wrote to him:

Rood also rejected subsequent work that Welty submitted after he had taken "Magic," saying that one story was "both too long and too short," and suggesting revision, possibly that she expand it as a novel or novelette of the kind he published in his journal (Marrs 158). Rood's treatment of Welty and the writer who would become Tennessee Williams suggests his high critical standards and indicates that he found "Magic" as promising as the other work that he was publishing, even if he somewhat preferred "Death of a Traveling Salesman" to this story (Marrs 157).

Rood's artistic success after Manuscript also touched Welty's writing life, but in a situation where she, by then a highly successful writer, could assist his reputation. During his post-Manuscript career, working in the modernist mode of sculpture initiated by Constatin Brancusi, Rood had seventeen solo exhibitions in the United States, Italy, and Mexico; won numerous awards; and taught sculpture at the University of Minnesota. For a New York exhibition in 1958, Welty contributed an introduction to the catalogue. At the end of his career, in preparation for an exhibit at the University of Minnesota that became a Memorial Exhibition due to his unexpected death, Rood wrote an "Artist's Comment" (1974) that parallels in some ways Welty's foreword to her 1971 collection of photographs One Time, One Place, both statements outlining the integrity of the artist's life work. Rood writes:

It is interesting to recall that Welty was frequently taking her photographs during the same period that John Rood helped her launch her writing career.

An obvious question to ask, then, is why "Magic," which Rood seemed to think was not unequal to "Death of a Traveling Salesman," was not included in Welty's big first collection, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (1941). Many possible explanations come to mind. Welty apparently assembled a selection of stories to circulate in 1939 and 1940 with the hope of finding a book publisher. Around the same time, she had some of the stories and a selection of photographs gathered as Black Saturday, another book she was trying to place (Marrs 31; Kreyling 12, 20-21). Diarmuid Russell's letter proposing to represent her work as her literary agent did not come until May 28, 1940, and although Welty had earnest encouragement from Ford Maddox Ford, Ford's friend Stanley Unwin, and John Woodburn of Doubleday, Doran, she served as her own agent, a time-consuming and often hapless enterprise many beginning writers have endured.

Welty recalls some details of her early marketing efforts in "Looking Back at the First Story," an essay that first appeared in 1979 in The Georgia Review, which Welty much later permitted to reprint "The Doll." The main collection she circulated consisted of seventeen stories, probably carbon typescripts, but when the package was lost in the mail in 1940, Welty set about retyping the stories from the magazines in which they had been published. The stories published after the four early pieces that include "Magic" and before Russell became her agent had appeared in the more prestigious and longer-lived Prairie Schooner and Southern Review. I speculate that during the gathering of material for the book, Welty had confidence in her first story-"Death of a Traveling Salesman"-because it had gotten the attention of Harold Strauss of Covici-Friede (Kreyling 13), but that "The Doll," "Magic," and "Retreat" were, in some sense, forgotten.

Certainly, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories is a lengthy collection-too long, perhaps, to include the three additional stories from little magazines that no longer existed.8 And Welty says that as she retyped her stories she typically "yielded to various temptations" to make changes ("Looking" 13). Such work takes time and creative energy, and in her more experienced view four or five years after their composition, these early stories may have required too much revision. Once the first collection (introduced by Katherine Anne Porter) was published, Welty's next collection, The Wide Net, would have the organizing principle of the Natchez Trace, with which these stories had nothing to do. The highly interdependent Morgana stories of The Golden Apples likewise left no room for the three early pieces. What, after all, could be done with these early stories, now orphaned from their siblings?

Perhaps these other "first" stories were not personal favorites or tempted too easily an autobiographical interpretation. "The Doll" and "Magic" are town stories, set in a town like Jackson with young female protagonists.9 By contrast, the Curtain of Green stories that have autobiographical overtones hearken to Welty's childhood and early youth rather than to her young womanhood. And, as John Rood remarked about Tennessee Williams's "Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton," "Magic" may have been "a little too strong in the sex business" for widespread reading in Jackson.

"Magic" recalls the furtive assignations of early sexual arousal and the local cemeteries that were often, in small towns and for people without cars, the only place for private courtship. Referring to "Death of a Traveling Salesman," Welty says that it "belongs to the family of all my stories in that its origin, its generative force, comes out of real life" ("Looking" 8). The "real life" in "Magic" probably comes from the writer's close observation of the speech and behavior of people like her yearning young couple as well as her knowledge of the anticipation and disappointment that often accompany youthful love. Welty of course suggests that she often created characters, such as R. J. Bowman, that she "had no way of really knowing: all my characters were experienced in ways I was not.… [I]magining yourself into other people's lives is exactly what fiction writing is" ("Looking" 15).

"Magic" relates a disappointing tryst in a graveyard, identifiable as Jackson's Greenwood Cemetery, which was only a short distance from Welty's Congress Street birth home. The story's sexual content, coupled with its taking place in the respectable Jackson cemetery, could have provoked civic as well as maternal outrage. Had her mother read the story, Mrs. Welty might very well have had a reaction similar to that of Tennessee Williams's mother upon reading the "shocking" "Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton," which Williams was forbidden to send even to his highly supportive minister grandfather (Leverich 158).

"Modern" and "humorous" is how Tennessee Williams thought of "Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton" (qtd. in Leverich 158), and "Magic" has similar strengths. The dialogue in "Magic" represents a cultural and economic class less educated than that portrayed by Sister, Momma, and Poppa Daddy in "Why I Live at the P.O." or by the three ladies who control Lily Daw's life, and the setting is more urban than small town. The characters' speech is more extreme in representation than in any of Welty's fiction. In "Petrified Man," "Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden," "The Hitch-Hikers," and "Powerhouse," Welty uses dialectical, slang spellings of some of the following words: "naw," "nothin'," "doin'," and "gonna," but in no other story in A Curtain of Green is there dialogue with such slang as "aw," "watchu," "aright," "offa," "yonda," "ya," or the magnificent elision of "don't" to "'o'" as in "Magic." Nor are there other such dialogues in Welty's stories that depict the slang or skaz10 of teenagers or young adults, no others without guides to the speakers' identities. When Ralph asks Myrtle how they are going to arrange things, she responds,

The initial humor of the story derives from Myrtle's and Ralph's language, which alerts us to their naïveté and angst, their inarticulateness, foreshadowing their artless lovemaking. Does the slang make the story as "modern" as Williams thought his story was? Perhaps.

The characters, plot, and tone of the story suggest Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919).11 We meet the characters, two young girls/women coming from stenography class and the telegraph boy/man on the street. Then we enter Myrtle's private world as she dresses and dreams of the tryst ahead. The two young people walk out into the dark, dance to radio music emanating from an open window. We find them next lying in the cemetery, Ralph crying, Myrtle pondering the world until she is frightened by the grotesque image of a "man with a black felt hat … laughing without making a sound" as he has watched them from the other side of the cemetery wall (4). Although the encounter in "Magic" is not like that of George Willard and Louise Trunnion's evening in "Nobody Knows" from Winesburg, Ohio, and George and Louise are, of course, distinctly unlike Ralph and Myrtle, the darkness, the deception of the girl's parents, the truncated communications, the expectations, the meeting, and the longing in both stories are comparable.

Elements of the plot-the leaves on the trees swelling, Myrtle's curious hold on her boyish suitor's thumb while he vaunts himself by balancing, using only one foot, on a For Rent sign, and the reversal of sexual situations when Ralph cries about his impotence to make Myrtle respond as they lie on the grave-resonate with modernist, empty sexual liaisons. "Magic" suggests a poignant variation of the scene in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land wherein the self-assured "young man carbuncular" assaults the indifferent "typist home at tea time," who, "hardly aware of her departed lover," "smoothes her hair with automatic hand, / And puts a record on the gramophone" (44). Welty's story, compared to the work of Anderson and Eliot, is an equally daring psychological portrayal of young love with its emotional turmoil.

The motif of the grotesque is one of Anderson's triumphant accomplishments in Winesburg, Ohio, and we find the grotesque often in Welty's early fiction. Ruth Weston in her study of Welty, gothic tradition, and the grotesque notes that from this early story "Magic" to a deleted passage in the 1969 magazine publication of The Optimist's Daughter, Welty's tombstones associate sex with death (148). In "Magic" we certainly have sex and death played out for us in many grotesque images. The carnivalesque, almost Poe-like, juxtaposition of the serious and the ludicrous include the too-real incongruities of Myrtle's calm reverie on the grave after Ralph's futile assault, the boy's crying, and the bizarre distant stranger's silent laughter. These events are compounded by the silhouettes of the angel statue and the lamb gravestone and by the observation that the specter-like man in the black felt hat12is "thrusting his black hole of a mouth outward at [Myrtle] like a funnel" (4). The grotesque is also apparent in Myrtle's preparations for her meeting with Ralph, her applications of the "Magic Love Philtre" she has purchased for a dime through an advertisement in a movie magazine and has carefully withdrawn from beneath the pinafore of her carnival-prize Kewpie Doll, and her rough, moony, and moaning talk to her baby-faced, angel-winged Kewpie, whose name derives from "Cupid."13When asked about the "grim and grotesque" in her earlier stories, Welty responded:

The grotesque in "Magic" shows the reader Myrtle's loneliness and her ambivalence about sexual maturity. Myrtle fills her emotionally drab life with cheap popular objects that signify her dreams and fantasies.14 We may find Welty's story too elliptical or grotesque, but as one of Welty's earliest attempts to render the interior life of a woman, "Magic" deserves a wider audience, and the Eudora Welty Newsletter is extremely grateful to the Welty Estate for allowing us to bring it now to many new readers.

Notes

1 Jennifer Ford, Interim Head Archivist at J. D. Williams Library at the University of Mississippi, provided the transcription of this Author's Note. Shiela Winchester, librarian at the General Libraries at the University of Texas at Austin, photocopied the tables of contents for the three volumes of Manuscript. Laurel Bowen, Archivist and Rare Book Curator for the Special Collections Department at Georgia State University, assisted with various materials, including the limited edition of Retreat. We greatly appreciate all of their help. The typescript of "Magic" at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History has numerous substantive changes not included in the 1936 or this 2004 version of the story (Marrs 68). Back to text

2 "Petrified Man," written at roughly the same time as "Magic," was rejected by Literary America in 1936 (Polk 366). Back to text

3 "Pilgrimage," Manuscript May-June 1935: 72-76. Back to text

4 The male protagonist in "Retreat" is also grotesque, childlike, and cries, as does Ralph in "Magic." Back to text

5 Other pieces, such as the one-act play Bye-Bye Brevoort and essays including "Ida M'Toy," have also been printed in limited editions. Noel Polk's Eudora Welty: A Bibliography of Her Work gives full descriptions of these and other titles. "A Sketching Trip" is not in any of Welty's story collections and is reprinted only in O. Henry Memorial Prize Stories of 1946 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1946). Back to text

6 Of nine stories that Williams wrote between 1930 and 1936, only three, including Rood's choice, were published prior to 1985 (Williams 571-74). Back to text

7 The letter is unsent, perhaps, because when Williams met Rood in the summer of 1936 at a Mid-West Writers Conference in Chicago he expressed the sentiments personally (Leverich 170). Back to text

8 That Katherine Anne Porter, who introduced Welty's first story collection, had published a short story titled "Magic" in transition in 1928 may also be a factor. Back to text

9 Jan Gretlund points out that "Acrobats in the Park" (circa 1934) also suggests the "identification of the writer with her town" (34). Back to text

10 Skaz derives from the Russian word skazat, meaning "tale," and indicates "a written narrative that imitates a spontaneous oral account in its use of dialect, slang, and the peculiar idiom of that persona" ("Skaz"). J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, the American modeling of skaz, was not published until 1951. Back to text

11 John Rood was a reader and admirer of Anderson's work; Rood writes, "I never understand why this great Midwest of ours strikes many newcomers as hideously raw, gauche, ugly. They never seem to see below the surface. To me we have here a special kind of strength and poetry that spells the United States of America! Sherwood Anderson felt that strength and poetry and put them into words" (qtd. in Eldredge 9). Back to text

12 R. J. Bowman in "Death of a Traveling Salesman" also wears a "wide-brimmed black hat" (21), described a second time as a "black felt hat" (26), about which Welty later wrote "I regret that literary broad-brimmed hat" ("Looking" 12). Back to text

13 Kewpie Dolls, designed by Rose O'Neill, made their first appearance as dolls in 1912, were re-introduced post-WWI in 1925, and in 1930 "regained popularity as giveaways in carnivals" ("Kewpie"). The bisque dolls have small blue wings on their shoulders and a topknot on their heads. Myrtle thinks of the "calliope at the Fair below the hill" (2), suggesting where she may have gotten her Kewpie doll. Back to text

14 The most obvious contributions to the dream/fantasy motif are the magazine or novel Dream World that Myrtle's mother is reading and the sheet music for Girl of My Dreams on the piano rack (4). Back to text

Return to Top

Works Cited

Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. (1919) New York: Penguin, 1982.

Bain, Robert, Joseph M. Flora, and Louis D. Rubin, Jr., eds. Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1979.

Eldredge, Charles C. "John Rood: The Metamorphosis of a Sculptor." Works by John Rood: A Memorial Exhibition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1974. [9-17].

Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land. The Collected Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot, 1909-1950. 1952. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971.

Gretlund, Jan Nordby. Eudora Welty's Aesthetics of Place. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1994.

Hoffman, Frederick J., Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich. The Little Magazine: A History and A Bibliography. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1946.

"Kewpie Dolls." 10 July 2004. www.badfads.com/pages/collectibles/kewpie.html.

Kreyling, Michael. Author and Agent. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1991.

Leverich, Lyle. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York: Crown, 1995.

Marrs, Suzanne. The Eudora Welty Collection. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1989.

Polk, Noel. Eudora Welty: A Bibliography of Her Work. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994.

Rood, John. "Artist's Statement." Works by John Rood: A Memorial Exhibition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1974. [8].

"Skaz." Encyclopedia Britannica. 2004. Encyclopedia Britannica Premium Service. 2 Aug. 2004. www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=137844.

Welty, Eudora. Acrobats in the Park. Northridge, CA: Lord John Press, 1980.

---. "The Art of Fiction XLVII: Eudora Welty." Interview with Linda Kuehl. Conversations with Eudora Welty. Ed. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1984. 74-91.

---. Collected Stories. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1980.

---. "Death of a Traveling Salesman." Manuscript 3.3 (May-June 1936): 21-29. Rpt. in First Story. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999.

---. "The Doll." The Tanager (June 1936): 11-14. Rpt. in Georgia Review 53.1 (Spring 1999): 25-30.

---. "Hello and Goodbye." Atlantic Monthly 180 (July 1947): 37-40. Rpt. in Brightleaf: A Southern Review of Books (Winter 1998): 24-26, 32.

---. "Looking Back at the First Story." Georgia Review 33.4 (Winter) 1979: 751-755. Rpt. in First Story. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999. [7]-15.

---. "Magic." Manuscript 3.5 (September-October) 1936: 3-7. Rpt. in Eudora Welty Newsletter 28.2 (Summer 2004): 1-5.

---. "Retreat." River: A Magazine of the Deep South 1 (March 1937): 10-12. Rpt. Winston-Salem: Palaemon Press Limited, 1981.

---. "A Sketching Trip." Atlantic Monthly 175 (June 1945): 62-70.

Weston, Ruth. Gothic Traditions and Narrative Techniques in the Fiction of Eudora Welty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1994.

Williams, Tennessee. Collected Stories. New York: New Directions, 1985.

Williams, Thomas Lanier. "Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton." Manuscript 3.4 (July-August) 1936: 25-28. Rpt. in Tennessee Williams, Collected Stories. New York: New irections, 1985. 43-48.

Return to Top