New Writer

A CURTAIN OF GREEN -- Eudora Welty--Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

These are 17 short stories by a writer whom watchers for new talent have been following in magazines for two or three years. So they arrive, with an introduction by Katherine Anne Porter, as something of a literary event.

Miss Welty, daughter of an insurance executive, has spent most of her 32 years in Jackson, Miss. Unlike most young writers, she likes her home, her neighbors and her life in general; she sets all but one of her stories in her home State. But, like many Southern writers, she has a strong taste for melodrama, and is preoccupied with the demented, the deformed, the queer, the highly spiced. Of the 17 pieces, only two report states of experience which could be called normal, only one uses the abnormal to illuminate any human mystery deeper than its own:

>The Key, an allegory involving a strange young man and two deaf mutes, makes Mississippi seem like Tsarist Russia.

> Clytie winds up with a spinster drowned in a rain barrel.

> A Memory builds a family sporting on a beach into a terrible mural of subhuman vulgarity.

> Death of a Traveling Salesman does extraordinary tricks with the sensations of fever and with the resonances upon a 20th-century man of fully primordial living.

> Why I Live at the P.O., one of the best, uses the Popeye-esque wranglings of a batty family for amazingly powerful purposes. Miss Porter calls the heroine "a terrifying case of dementia praecox"; she is also a first-rate showpiece of American humor.

Miss Welty has a clean, original prose style, which is clearly self-taught. In one page after another, she turns up sharp landscapes and atmospheres, details of costume, action and speech, with flashes of real brilliance. Her worst fault is her lust for melodrama, of the insidious sort which lies less in violence than in tricked atmosphere.

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