Shangri-la South

LOSING BATTLES by Eudora Welty. 436 pages. Random House. $7.95.

"Don't give anybody up. Or leave anybody out," a young man tells his bride who is dying to leave the party and be alone with him. "There's room for everything and time for everybody." After reading this 436-page celebration of togetherness, the reader can only say, wearily but reverently, "Amen."

Eudora Welty is an accomplished amateur photographer, and her new novel is not unlike a home movie made by a loving genius. Its action takes place in Banner, a Mississippi hill town, during two summer days in the 1930s at the 90th birthday celebration of Granny Elvira Jordan Vaughn. "Now there was family everywhere," Miss Welty writes, "front gallery and back, tracking in and out of the company room, filling the bedrooms and kitchen, breasting the passage. With chairs, beds, windowsills, steps, boxes, kegs and buckets all taken up, they overflowed into the yard."

At first the book seems to be an impenetrable wall of clamor, but the reader soon gets to know most of the throng, at least by voice. Indeed one can read the book following certain voices all the way through, the way children learn the niceties of baseball by concentrating only on the shortstop all through a game.

Surface Commotion. Welty's prose as Sinclair Lewis once noted, "is as clear as the Gettysburg Address." She is sole remaining owner of a once popular, genteel literary property, a tidy little Shangri-la South, where time is a dream and the violence of William Faulkner's Mississippi--or Emmett Till's--is unknown. In this kingdom of the nostalgic heart, rural property is heavily insulated, and for all the surface commotion, everyday lives take on a postcard serenity. In their bright, hot morning world, people dart and hover like the hummingbirds the author likes to describe. Her people are talkers, gossipers, helpers, huggers. In their very old community, archives are still oral; lives are governed not by a political system but an ethical one. What holds it all together--and what the author manages to make fresh--is familial love.

At 61, Miss Welty lives quietly in her native Jackson. She says she is "underfoot locally"--meaning that she has an active social life. Losing Battles is the sum of years of minute social observation. The surprise is that the attention she lavishes is neither frustrated nor satiric but wholehearted. Nothing much really happens at Granny Vaughn's birthday party. Her 19-year-old great-grandson Jack Renfro returns to his wife and baby after 18 months in prison. He had been convicted of robbery, though what he actually committed was an act of gallantry.

Family Reunion. The man who sentenced Jack, mean Judge Moody ("born and bred in Ludlow, never heard of a one of us"), becomes an unwilling participant in the family reunion when he racks up his beloved Buick near the Vaughn household. The judge is accorded twice the kindness he deserves, and the point is not lost on him. Finally the throng hears that old Miss Julia Mortimer, an elegant schoolmarm who taught them all, is dead.

The rest of Losing Battles is devoted to remembering and burying Miss Julia. She spent a bitter life in a Sisyphean struggle to nudge Banner out of its happy bondage of ignorance and kinship into the modern world. The symbol of her defeat is Jack Renfro's beautiful wife Gloria, a Mortimer protegee who actually won a statewide spelling bee and succeeded Miss Julia as schoolteacher. "She stands for all I gave up to marry you," says Gloria. "I'd give her up again tonight. And give up all your family too."

Gloria will lose her battle. She longs for something quite modern--the undisputed possession of husband and home. But Jack is really Eudora Welty's man: for him, life is a perpetual family reunion. "There is only one way of depriving the ones you love," he decides, "taking your living presence away from theirs. No one alive has ever deserved such punishment."

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