What Eurdora Welty writes about - and what she ignores

Moon Lake is another one of the longer stories that Eudora Welty wrote in the late 1940s for her 3rd collection, The Golden Apples, in her "Collected Stories" - truly, though some excellent description and some fine passages in Moon Lake it's not one of her better stories - she was obviously pushing the boundaries with some of these stories, either developing material for novels or working toward a novella, but Moon Lake is a long journey with less of a payoff - much as I love the description and appreciate how well Welty could bring off some of these passages, I felt at times, why am I reading this? What's happening? The multiple points of view, with the characters not clearly delineated, do not help, either. Story about girls - some of whom we've met before in other stories in this collection - at a summer camp, some of the girls from proper Southern families, another large group of the girls are orphans, obviously tougher, deprived, needier - one, Easter, emerges as the leader, and she's the one some of the other girls try to befriend. Welty very well captures the tensions between these two groups, Easter wanting the friendship to a degree but also knowing the differences, pushing the others away, being tough. Loch, whom we'd met in the first story in this collection, is the only boy around, a loner, a Boy Scout hired to be the bugler. Though there are many intimations and hints of action and danger all through this 50 page story, the central action doesn't take place till very near the end when Easter, poked by one of the black kids who kind of hang around the camp (the boy who pokes her is the son of the camp cook I think) falls into the lake, nearly drowns, is rescued and "resurrected" by Loch. The religious symbolism is painfully obvious, right? If you didn't get it - just look at her name. At the heart of the story, though this is not made too obvious, is Nina, the character who is most evidently the young Eudora Welty, observant, creative, a bit of a loner - the one who will later resurrect all this material into art. The issue of race in Eudora Welty's fiction again is a troubling matter here - the black characters always on the margin, nobody really questioning this or troubled by it, and Welty herself can't seem to see or doesn't care to see anything but the stereotype, the convention, of the black characters, ambling around, doing nothing but fishing and slouching and getting into trouble - they have no interior life in her fiction, at least through the 40s. Obviously she re-creates the world that she sees and that she knows, but her fiction is without any political edge of social conscience. This story calls to mind the recent excellent Munro story about girls at summer camp and the cruelties inflicted. I, too, have written about camp, in a story (never published) strikingly similar in structure to Welty's - which I'd never read till this week. But it seems the events she writes about are true and likely and resonant across the genders, the decades, and the culture.