In the end, they seem happy and content again. So I grew up surrounded by southern voices. He goes with them to drag the river. And I found a note to myself slipped in the pages of my old single volume edition of the collection relating Eudora Weltys initial concept of writing a fictional history of the Old Natchez Trace. His name was Patrick Duval. 182)reassures the reader that all will be well, at least for the time being. Ben and his brothers continue their voyage while developing different theories about . No wonder Eudora Welty was ready to lash out if anyone else showed the same dimwittedness as the reviewer in Time Magazine. This paper reviews the history, the goals, the organisation and the components of CSNET (the Computer Science Research Network). But even children are sensitive to the boundary between the real and the fictional, and would hate to hear their father repeat the soliloquies of Hamlet from breakfast to bedtime even if he made a living as an actor. I had suspected something like this as a boy, but now it was confirmed. William Wallace takes the lead back to Dover, and back to Hazel who has never left their house. He has recovered his memory too, and with it, we know now, a new power of self-direction, decision, and acceptance. Right before it begins in force, a holy-ghostly benediction or aeolian charma wind touched each man on the forehead (Welty, Collected Stories 182)reassures the reader that all will be well, at least for the time being. After all, where else can I look for a better source? I had no memory that Welty had tried to dramatize or imply a single overreaching southern identity, cultural, historical, or otherwise. It is more of a distraction than a signpost, unlike, I would be the first to admit, the names of Virgil and Hazel, more fixed in their roles.2 If we must look for hidden meanings, perhaps the symbolical would be a better avenue to explore than the historical. When Virgil finds a string of beads in the river, he gives them to Sam and Robbie. I grew up during segregation, but the racism was subdued, and codified down to a syllable and a glance. William Jamieson comes home one night from being out with friends and finds a note from his pregnant wife, who is threatening suicide by jumping off bridge He calls his friends and they go to the river searching for her, they also recruit bystanders to help out . The only shade was provided by a long tin shed next to the sludge bin. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. When he comes back the next morning, Hazel is gone, and he finds a letter from her telling him she has gone to drown herself in the river. Though she is changing every day, she has really not changed at all. Hickory tree there will be yellow. The Golden Apples. But the real proof of his character came at noon, when we all stopped to have lunch. Ben Forkner was a Professor of English at the University of Angers where he taught Southern and Irish literature, directed the English Department, and founded the Journal of the Short Story in English. The citation above will include either 2 or 3 dates. When the search party spies a large water snake, a local legend everyone knows as the King of Snakes, William Wallace stares him down. Then group returns to town, everyone carrying their heavy strings of fish. I like to think too, along these same lines, that the comic folklore of the first half of the story makes his solitary dive in the Pearl River, and his transformation, more unpredictable, and thus more human. 180). Print. He was a tall dignified man who dressed in a white suit and always had a Stetson hat on his head or in his hand. County judges are elected, and he never lost an election because there was never any opposition. The memory is a living thingit too is in transit. He could lift hundred-pound sacks of fertilizer with each hand. But Hazel is no rabbit as Virgil makes clear: Anybody can freeze a rabbit, that wants to he says, and promptly chases the rabbit away: Was you out catching cotton-tails, or was you out catching your wife? (Welty, Collected Stories 172). Soon after his triumphant dive, William Wallace smiles for the first time, and falls asleep, but not for long. if there are three dates, the first date is the date of the original publication in traditional print. He did not smoke the cigar, he chewed it, and as a boy it was best to stay on his windward side. in Marrs 103). 173). But the history of the South itself came to me mainly through the stories I heard in my family. The Malones are indistinguishable from each other, and so are the Doyles. I do not mean to suggest that I find anything of myself in William Wallace, nor in his search for Hazel. 172). There is, however, a simpler explanation, of the South to be sure, but leaving the story still uncomplicated by history. What interests me more as the years go on is the life story of the individual southerner. There is Virgil of course, living up to his name (but only in the mind of the reader, we need to remember) in that he is there to guide William on his quest, to keep him on the track, as he says. The Wide Net and Other Stories deliberately refuses to shy away from vice, racism, pride, self-indulgence, and violence. It is more of a distraction than a signpost, unlike, I would be the first to admit, the names of Virgil and Hazel, more fixed in their roles. But there is an even better reason not to insist too much on the historical significance of names in The Wide Net. Names are chosen for us, not the other way around, and The Wide Net insists upon individual choice as the primary measure of character. William goes out one night with two friends, gets drunk and lies all night in a ditch playing the harmonica. Even though there is no southern history in the story, surely his name is steeped in historical associations. Perhaps nature itself, the mother of all myth, is the true heart of the story. 183). They all carried their classic illustrations. In 1940 she had accepted the offer of Diarmuid Russell (son of the Irish poet George Russell) to be her agent. She could have easily searched out one of the old Backus crowd willing to share the memory of Beanies role in the funeral and the missing headstone. William Wallace takes the lead back to Dover, and back to Hazel who has never left their house. I had suspected something like this as a boy, but now it was confirmed. It will not be lost on the reader that the structure of The Wide Net roughly follows the same literary source, proceeding from hell, to purgatory, and finally to paradise. They have to go and get the wide net,. 38I do not want to leave the impression that my grandfather was in any sense a rebel or an outsider. I was fifteen years old, and was the only white in the group of workers. A reality that is, perhaps, a level or two beneath the conventional mode of realism. Recollections contains a fifty-page biographical essay by Forkner. When he comes back the next morning, Hazel is gone, and he finds a letter from her telling him she has gone to drown herself in the river. Whenever Walter Scott is mentioned in the context of the South, Mark Twains theory of the Civil War and the southern imagination immediately leaps to mind. Eudora Welty could use myth otherwise, as she does in such works as her masterpiece The Golden Apples. Rereading The Wide Net brought many of these memories back to mind, and it brought back to mind too my dismay in Chapel Hill at fitting them into a theory of myth, or even at weaving them into a common pattern of southern identity. In Life on the Mississippi, one of Eudora Weltys favorite books, Twain makes the outrageous, though irresistible, claim that Scott and his historical romances helped cause the Civil War by promoting a mythical vision of history, and by shaping the southern character: It was Sir Walter Scott that made every gentleman in the South a Major or Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations Sir Walter Scott had so large a hand in making the southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible (266). The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943), The Golden Apples (1949), and The Bride of Innisfallen and Other Stories (1955) are collections of short stories, and The Eye of the Story (1978) is a volume of essays. The Great Wide Sea (2008), a novel by M. H. Herlong, follows sixteen-year-old Ben Byron, who mourns the loss of his mother with his younger brothers, Gerry and Dylan, while spending a year at sea.As Ben processes his grief, he clashes with his father, until he mysteriously vanishes from the boat one morning. Hickory tree there will be yellow. Subscribers can purchase the slipcased edition by signing in to their accounts. I would agree, and I did try to explore its implications as I reworked my way through the story. Myth may help shape an identity, but memory is the single vital source of selfhood, and the key, I believe, to William Wallace and The Wide Net. Despite the help of the search party, the willingness of the community to lend a hand, William Wallace must forget the outside world before he plunges into the inner, and by so doing, he recovers Hazel, who as Old Doc knows, has been there all the time. Hazels name evokes the Celtic symbol of wisdom and the source of life hidden in underground water. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1781. But the history of the South itself came to me mainly through the stories I heard in my family. I grew up during segregation, but the racism was subdued, and codified down to a syllable and a glance. Backus, locally known as Beanie. Even as I write, the memories come flooding, but two or three should be enough to make my case. There doesn't seem to be a regularization effect from very high depth in residual net- works as wide networks with the same number of parameters as thin ones can learn same or better representations. Eudora Welty is comically playing on the popular refrain that such a collection of rural men and boys could be found only in the Deep South. CRM is one of the top technology investments that organizations can make. Jamieson takes a bit more twisting to unravel a historical connection. Perhaps nature itself, the mother of all myth, is the true heart of the story. She ends One Writers Beginnings with a celebration of memory that for her has now become a personal creed, and has allowed her to begin her life as a writer. The grown-up Doyles and Malones are fixed in their undefined identities forever. William goes out one night with two friends, gets drunk and lies all night in a ditch playing the harmonica. Trans. A graduate of Stetson University in Florida, he received his M.A. They were later given to the University of Florida. During the wars of Scottish independence in the thirteenth century, William Wallace was the great leader and hero, whom popular tradition in the mists of time has now elevated to mythical proportions. Sam wore them around his head, with a knot over his forehead and loops around his ears, and Robbie Bell walked behind and stared at them (Welty. Sir Walter Scott celebrated both William Wallace and Bonnie Prince Charles, the latter in the most popular series of historical novels ever written, the Waverly novels. . And finally, on the last page, memory is evoked again, this time in words to be engraved in stone: Of course the greatest confluence of all is that which makes up the human memorythe individual human memory. William Wallace has done the real catching, unless of course, it has been Hazel herself. eNotes Editorial. This was her 3rd book of fiction, another collection of stories; published in 1943 after the Robber Bridegroom. Seeing I was struggling with my bucket and shovel, he came right over and helped show me the right way to do it. County judges are elected, and he never lost an election because there was never any opposition. William Wallace Jamieson, the first words of the story, and a name I will return to, is a young man who has been married to his wife, Hazel, for a year. In one of her early letters to him she wrote about her desire to write a Mississippi book: She also asks Russell: Do you think I dare to have honest-to-God people walking around in the stories? 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