Volume 18, Number 12 · June 29, 1972
Cunning Time
By Michael Wood
The Optimist's Daughter
by Eudora Welty
Random House, 180 pp., $5.95
'But the time of cunning has come, and my time is over, for cunning is of a world I will have no part in.' Innocence enmeshed by schemers, gullibility abused, a harmless, hopeless simplicity too grand for deceitful living has been a theme in Eudora Welty's fiction since The Robber Bridegroom, 1942, from which the above quotation is taken. Uncle Daniel in The Ponder Heart, 1954, is an amalgam of Tristram Shandy's Uncle Toby and David Copperfield's Mr. Dick, perfectly naturalized in the American South—indeed he would be at home anywhere, since he is the generous, unworldly, outrageously benign uncle we all have, or dream of having. But in Miss Welty's new novel this very innocence ceases to be comic or charming and becomes lethal, a crucial failure to do business with the world, a special vulnerability, not a state of peculiar grace; not innocence at all, finally, but a form of guilt, the weakness both of individual men and a whole Southern style.
Review, 2599 words
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