We emerge from our summer wanderings with a discussion of one of our favorite works of fiction and really one of the most perfect summer stories: Eudora Welty’s “A Curtain of Green.” Originally published in 1941, it is the title work of her first collection. “A Curtain of Green” takes place in the fictional town of Larkin, Mississippi.
Sonja: What we are witnessing in this story is, from an outsider’s perspective, a subtle, quiet scene. It is an oppressively hot day, the usual rain hasn’t come, and Mrs. Larkin is working in the garden with a young boy. However, Welty has imbued it with such vibrancy and life, that even the light of the sun is active. It doesn’t hover lazily, it “spin[s] in a tiny groove in the polished sky.”
Jeremy: She uses at least three different metaphors for sun and light, maybe even more. When she talks about the sun “almost seeming” to spin in a groove in the sky, I thought of the little silver rails guiding the little silver ball to its drop-off point at the top of the slope in a pinball machine, which I used to play at Rod’s Capricorn Inn near the Cowan Lake spillway. Burgers and onion rings, parchment paper in plastic baskets, country music, pickup trucks in the gravel parking lot . . . But to return from a severely nostalgic digression, there’s also the light-like tweezers picking out Mrs. Larkin’s form, and the sun being clamped to the sky, before it rains. The sun is always constrained, it seems, before the rain. Just . . . just like Mrs. Larkin.
S: The descriptions always seem to extend to both her and her surroundings, particularly the garden itself, which is a symbol of her, or more precisely her life after the death of her husband. The garden is walled off with a hedge, making it mostly out-of-sight to others (“visible only from the upstairs windows of the neighbors”). Welty uses the same types of descriptive words when discussing both Mrs. Larkin and the garden (sometimes, even the same ones, in italics below), effectively linking them: tangled, untidy, slanting, clumsy, streaming, irregular, thick, over-vigorous, extreme fertility, excessive energy, over-flowering, strenuously, heedless, invisibly/visible only . . .
Many of these words, while parallel, describe Mrs. Larkin’s attempt to keep the garden in control with the same extreme of vivacity with which the garden is growing. By all description it is quite wild, despite vigorous cultivation, and one wonders what it would be like without her constant hoeing. She is battling its fertility, the “rich blackness of the soil,” with her own tirelessness. In many ways, it is as though she is battling herself and her own directionlessness since the death of her husband. The symbolism is quite clear. One thing, however, is that in the paragraph immediately following the descriptions of her “cutting, separating, thinning and tying back” the plants in her garden to keep them from “overreaching their boundaries,” Welty describes her adding, deliberately, to the chaos, “plant[ing] every kind of flower she could find or order.” This is a wonderful representation of the flawed, often counterproductive way in which we sometimes handle life’s unfair dealings.
J: How does Welty write it, the habitual action of when Mrs. Larkin daily first steps out of her house and looks at her wild backyard and doesn’t know what to do yet? It’s like she’s walking into her own purgatory. It’s full of growing, creeping forms in a disordered state. She has no plan, probably because the night before she worked herself to exhaustion so she wouldn’t have to think, and just collapsed in bed. She beats down weeds—those “juicy weeds”—wherever she sees them and sticks new transplants in their places. The garden, despite its “fine flowers” that she refuses to give out to her neighbors (like she’s supposed to do! is the implication), is ugly: “It was impossible to enjoy looking at such a place.” That’s a sin, as far as being a lady in the town of Larkin. Her neighbors, already rebuffed from visiting, don’t like her anymore, or they have lost any feeling of attachment or obligation to her since she has sequestered herself from their lives.
As a contrast, outside the garden we get a strong sense of order, rigidity: “in the trees along the street and in the rows of flower gardens in the the town, very leaf reflected the sun from a hardness like a mirror surface.”
S: Yes, the town itself proceeds, orderly and systematic, without Mr. Larkin, his death a hiccup. When Mrs. Larkin does not “appreciate” their visits in the wake of his death, they slowly leave her alone, carrying on with their lives, only noticing her in her usual spot in the garden as they “studiously” brush their hair. They wait for the daily rain, they live by schedule, but do nothing of real importance in the story—they have no sense of purpose. And while Mrs. Larkin also lives by a certain schedule, hers is one that defies the norm. For her the rain is a nuisance that interrupts her gardening, not a long-awaited daily event that brings relief. Nonetheless, it is part of her schedule as well, and when it fails to come, Welty has set the stage for the unexpected. It is as if we enter a time warp, or another dimension, the same sort of uncanny sense that she experienced when she witnessed Mr. Larkin’s death. The atmosphere Welty describes is powerful, oppressive:
Presently she became aware that hers was the only motion in the whole slackened place. There was no wind at all now. The cries of the birds had hushed. The sun seemed clamped to the side of the sky. Everything had stopped once again, the stillness had mesmerized the stems of the plants, and all the leaves went suddenly into thickness. . . .
J: I like that you use the word “uncanny.” Uncanny here in that this day in this town ought to be like the days before it, but it’s just not, not in nature’s plan, just like Mrs. Larkin’s husband continuing living turns out not to have been in that plan either. Of course, for the women surrounding Mrs. Larkin’s wild lot (they must have bigger houses than her, despite her prestige of being the daughter-in-law of the town’s founder, if they’re able to look down on her . . . moreover, despite her having multiple servants, her house is described as “small” . . . ) those days are perfectly fine. Fine summer days! But as we find out later in the story, these days are to some extent agonizing for Mrs. Larkin. The calamity of her husband getting crushed in his car by the chinaberry tree—an act of God, a brutal, smashing killing that begs for a meaning, or seems almost like retaliation—is so fresh that she thinks it’s happening again every day: “In the freedom of gaily turning her head, a motion she was now forced by memory to repeat as she hoed the ground, she could see again the tree that was going to fall.” She’s forced to constantly relive that day, because she can’t accept the stupendous coincidence of her husband’s death.
I keep going back to that opening paragraph, about the sun being in its grooved track and the plants organized along roadsides and in garden beds and how the rain cooperates with the clock. The town of Larkin is still under the illusion that nature can more or less be made to conform to a human conception of time and space. The tragedy of Mr. Larkin’s death has forced Mrs. Larkin to know nature for what it is. She’s living in what the aboriginal Australians call “dream-time,” a mode of experience wherein the past occurs concurrently with the present.
S: Yes—that’s such an apt comparison. She works every day in this trance-like state flitting between past and present, until the rain comes, forcing her to stop and rest under the pear tree. This is how she processes the death of her husband—through her work, quiet, utterly alone, despite the presence of Jamey, the boy who helps her in her garden. She gets deeper and deeper in this state until the rain breaks it, but on this particular day, because the rain is delayed, she descends farther than ever before—to the edge of the abyss, so to speak. She is hot, irritated, working erratically in the windless, scorching day, and all of a sudden, she is overcome—by her loneliness, by her own hopelessness, by the futility of her husband’s death and of life itself. As Welty writes: “She felt all at once terrified, as though her loneliness had been pointed out by some outside force, whose finger had parted the hedge.”
She uses her garden as a fortress to protect herself from both the outside and from her own acceptance of the loss of her husband, but in this moment the reality of his death is inescapable. And this realization moves her from denial to fear to rage. “An obscure fluttering” in her chest articulates this:
The bird that flies within your heart could not divide this cloudy air.
Each time I read this story I struggle with the meaning of this line. Ultimately, I think it represents the beginning of the crystallization, for her, of her absolute powerlessness in the face of her situation, and, on a greater level, the powerless of everyone, in the face of nature, chance, and our deterministic universe. To me, this line elevates the work from a simple short story to a true work of art. It is a short circuit in logic, or rather the logic we expect from storytelling, that leads, circuitously, to truth.
Of course, in this moment, this truth is still “obscure.” Over the next few paragraphs, Mrs. Larkin reacts to this overload of emotion, nearing a complete psychotic break. Mrs. Larkin is one of the most complex characters I have ever read—she is influenced by her environment, by her past, by the present, by other characters, simultaneously. One would be hard-pressed to find a fuller, more nuanced character in this few pages of fiction.
A stark contrast, at this point at least, would be the character of Jamey. A young, black male character, who is described using words like “docile.” As he daydreams, his finger “negligently stir[s]” the soil. His smile is “deprecating,” he is lax, innocent, known for his whistling—an almost perfect caricature. I think a careless reader could fault Welty for this description. However, we are deeply in Mrs. Larkin’s perspective, and from this standpoint the description of Jamey is not a caricature, but actually functions as a description of Mrs. Larkin. In other words, through seeing the way she views Jamey, we better understand her as a person, with her own, possibly flawed, perceptions of the world around her. At the end of the story, when we slip into Jamey’s perspective, Welty grants a similar complexity to him as she did to Mrs. Larkin’s character.
As Mrs. Larkin stands over Jamey, on the brink of a psychological break, a cocktail of contradictory emotions, she almost gains a sense of power. While she had no control over her husband’s death, she realizes she does have, in this moment, the possibility of wielding power over a life. She could, with a swift whack of the hoe, “strike off” Jamey’s head. Jamey has become a symbol of life, or more specifically, of the innocence of youth, and its “impossible” and “ridiculous” dreams, free of the weight of death. We enter a stream of consciousness where she contemplates the meaning of her existence as she holds the hoe over Jamey: “so helpless was she, too helpless to defy the workings of accident, of life and death, of unaccountability. . . . Life and death . . . which now meant nothing to her . . .”
But she doesn’t kill Jamey, because, in reality, she has no control—the natural world still wields the true power. Darkness comes, bringing the rain. With the first drops on her hands, she lowers the hoe. She listens to the rain: “the sound of the end of waiting.”
J: And then she collapses into the plants, flowers, and dirt, claimed and captured by her own wild garden, her head possibly oriented downward along the slope so that her bodily sense of freefall is heightened. That suspicion she’s been holding tight to, that the earth and its forces of life and death must be mastered to be lived with, or can be lived with without countenancing terror and mystery and sacrifice, has escaped from her, now that she has tempted herself with madness and murder and been thwarted. She had lost the ability to care for life, had lost familiarity with its meaning and pleasures, because her husband’s death was not supposed to happen. Then the rain/outside force beyond the hedge shoved her back into a state where rehabilitation can begin.
Then Mrs. Larkin sank in one motion down into the flowers and lay there, fainting and streaked with rain. Her face was fully upturned, down among the plants, with the hair beaten away from her forehead and her open eyes closing at once when the rain touched them. She seemed to move slightly, in the sad adjustment of a sleeper.
Her collapse and lying in the ground reminds me of something that happened to me. One spring, I came home from college deeply depressed, lost, long-haired and 140-something pounds. One cloudy, cool day, I went into the woods, and from there into the field. It was too early for the corn or beans. That year the field was still planted in a cover crop of rye. It being May in southwest Ohio, the ground was moist, almost wet. The rye was thickly planted and up to my chest. I went down into a gentle swale that was removed from everywhere, my own retreat, although unlike Mrs. Larkin’s garden, my fortress was not supplied by walls but rather by a wide open, privately owned space, filled with grain. Then I lay down, folding over the rye stalks under me like a reedy bed. I remember it was surprisingly comfortable, and soothing, warm. I just looked at the gray sky and the tips of the rye blowing in my peripheral vision. I listened to it sound in the wind. For a moment, my mind was soothed. It’s one of the most beautiful memories I have of home.
That’s not the only thing this part of “Curtain of Green” reminds me of. One of the few poems that seems stuck in my memory banks, the short Rimbaud poem, “Le Dormeur du Val” (“The Sleeper in the Valley”), has the following lines:
Un soldat jeune, bouche ouvere, tête nue,
Et la nuque baignant dans le frais cresson bleu,
Dort; il est étendu dans l’herbe, sous la nue,
Pâle dans son lit vert où la lumière pleut.
Les pieds dans les glaïeuls, il dort. Souriant comme
Sourirait un enfant malade, il fait un somme:
Nature, berce-le chaudement: il a froid.
Les parfums ne font pas frissonner sa narine;
Il dort dans le soleil, la main sur sa poitrine,
Tranquille Il a deux trous rouges au côté droit.
Which translates (roughly) to:
A young soldier, mouth open, face bare,
And neck bathing in the fresh blue cress,
Sleeps; he is lying in the grass, under the skies,
Pale in his green bed where the light rains.
Feet in the gladiolas, he sleeps. Smiling like
A sick child smiles, he takes a nap:
Nature, cradle him warmly: he is cold.
The scents do not tingle his nostril;
He sleeps in the sun, hand over his chest,
Peaceful. He has two red holes on the right side.
Experiencing the point of view shift so that we suddenly see Mrs. Larkin through the eyes of Jamey, we see what could possibly be a dead woman. Like the poem, the sleeper in the flowers, bathing not in raining sunlight but in literal rain, is located in a liminal zone, dead/not dead, except it’s reversed. In the poem, the sleeper has attributes of a napping young soldier but is, in reality, dead. In “Curtain” the sleeper has attributes of a corpse—”the unknowing face, white and rested under its bombardment;”—but is only in shock. Not dead, just unresponsive, and once Jamey has run out of the garden, the story is over.
S: It is so important that we land in Jamey’s perspective in the end. This signifies that Mrs. Larkin’s story, a detour from reality which started with the “incredible” accident of her husband’s death, is finished. It also allows us to understand that Jamey’s character is more nuanced than we might first presume. He felt Mrs. Larkin’s dark presence over him, he felt the same uncanniness that was overtaking her; he was not empty and oblivious as she had believed: “He remembered how something had filled him with stillness when he felt her standing there behind him looking down at him, and he would not have turned around at that moment for anything in the world.” (It is worth noting that, despite his fear of her, he still is sure to tend to her until he knows she is alive.) “Miss Lark’!”, he calls her, and she becomes the image of a fainted bird, recalling the earlier flutter in her heart that began this episode. The outside world, or rather, the world outside of Mrs. Larkin and her garden, is now taking precedence again. Welty describes the “crash of windows” above, reminding us of the hovering, judgmental women who peer over their fans, and as the rain begins to fall, she leaves us with the picture of Jamey, birdlike, alighting from the garden, over the hedge, back to the orderly streets of Larkin.
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