He could understand God’s giving Separateness first and then giving Love to follow and heal in its wonder; but God had reversed this, and given Love first and then Separateness, as though it did not matter to Him which came first.
— “A Still Moment.”
If we put The Wide Net, Eudora Welty’s present collection of stories, up against her first collection, A Curtain of Green, we can immediately observe a difference: the stories of The Wide Net represent a specializing, an intensifying, of one of the many strains which were present in A Curtain of Green. All of the stories in A Curtain of Green bear the impress of Miss Welty’s individual talent, but there is a great variety among them in subject matter and method and, more particularly, mood. It is almost as if the author had gone at each story as a fresh start in the business of writing fiction, as if she had had to take a new angle each time out of a joy in the pure novelty of the perspective. There is the vindictive farce of “The Petrified Man,” the nightmarish “Clytie,” the fantastic and witty “Old Mr. Marblehall,” the ironic self-revelation of “Why I Live at the P. O.,” the nearly straight realism of “The Hitch-Hikers,” the macabre comedy and pathos of “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maid.” The material of many of the stories was sad, or violent, or warped, and even the comedy and wit were not straight, but if read from one point of view, if read as a performance, the book was exhilarating, even gay, as though the author were innocently delighted not only with the variety of the world but with the variety of ways in which one could look at the world and the variety of things which stories could be and still be stories. Behind the innocent delight of the craftsman, and of the admirer of the world, there was also a seriousness, a philosophical cast of mind, which gave coherence to the book, but on the surface there was the variety, the succession of surprises. In The Wide Net we do not find the surprises. The stories are more nearly cut to one pattern.
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