Last month, Kathryn and I read Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty for our podcast, Something We Read. It’s called that because we read the books together, so it’s something we read, not just something Eve read. Clever right?
Delta Wedding, centers of the Fairchild family of Fairchilds Mississippi. It’s 1923, and Dabney Fairchild, not the oldest but the prettiest daughter of the largest branch of the clan, is set to marry Troy Flavin, the overseer of the family plantation. It’s unfortunate but begrudgingly accepted. Little Laura McRaven arrives on the scene for her cousin’s wedding and as she’s swept up into the flouncy and wild domesticity of Shellmound, so too is the reader. Nothing really happens, other than the wedding eventually.
Well, at least nothing much happens in the concrete sense. It’s a very interior book, and though it’s narrated in the third person and Welty makes it fairly straightforward to ascertain who says what and who thinks what, it reminded me a lot of Virginia Woolf’s writing—particularly in To The Lighthouse and The Waves. The focus is not what happens in the outside world, but rather how those happenings are processed in the interior world of each character. The reader is exposed to their motivations and misgivings, their impulses and understandings. What may be an exciting adventure to one character is to another a practical rupture in reality. What one finds glaringly obvious might be a revelation for the other.
Much like Woolf, Welty takes connection and isolation as her central theme. To quote myself:
How do our internal selves interact with the outside world? How do our external selves do well to represent us, or do bad to break with what we truly are? Who in the world out there sees the small but urgent world in here? How can we make them? How can we stop them?
What is life if not a constant oscillation between feelings of deep connectedness and unbreachable solitude. Welty makes this dichotomy all the more apparent by taking as her subject a large and very closeknit family. Even amongst blood—and perhaps especially amongst blood for those who marry into the clan—one is faced with the unsettling truth that no one else is experiencing the world in quite the same way.
I’ve been loving a song recently that deals—at least somewhat—in the same theme. It’s called “I Can’t Shake the Stranger Out of You,” and it’s by a man named A. Savage (ha ha), though I don’t think that’s his real name. The song is actually a cover, originally released by Lavender Country on their self-titled LP, widely recognized as the first openly gay country music album, but A. Savage makes it new.
I know nothing about music (aside from when something sounds good and when something sounds bad; when something moves me and when something does not), so I don’t know if I can aptly describe in words what this song sounds like. The first minute is purely instrumental, introducing the jangly, quickly alternating keyboard refrain that repeats through the song. It’s simultaneously playful and melancholy, echoing the lyrics.
Each verse opens by describing someone out on the town, feeling…flirty. They’re in “tight blue jeans,” “prancing and preening,” “chomping at the bit.” The speaker (singer?) knows that this person is “looking for some necking,” perhaps even yearning for “a chunk of rapture with someone new.” They’re “hotter than the popcorn dancing in the pan” (!!!!), so he sings, climb on in, I’ll kiss you, we can hit the sack, but he also closes each verse with a warning. What this frisky babe is seeking cannot be achieved: “I can’t shake the stranger out of you.”
Now of course, the depth of interaction that’s being described in this song is limited. We’re talking about a one-night stand, which is broadly regarded as a fairly reliable way to end up more lonely, not less. The connecting force in this type of interaction is, in the worst case, illusory, in the best case, genuine but fleeting. The longer lasting relationships we have with friends, true lovers, kin—these will be much better at staving off feelings of isolation. These will more readily make us feel the bonds that connect us, make us feel that we are known in this world. But still, the jangling in the back of the head: I am a stranger, I am a stranger.
And it’s true. Your interior country has a population of one no matter what. My addicting little tune doesn’t offer a solution, beyond hinting in the end that it might be more fruitful to seek this type of connection—recognition of the human spirit and all—in a friend. However! Welty, with the command of many more words, I think does offer a balm.
To be a part of something larger, whether it’s a family, or like in Woolf, a close group of friends—even to be one of a pair of lovers—doesn’t shake out your stranger, but it creates some external thing that can offer real and lasting reprieve. In Delta Wedding the family is a breathing thing with a life outside and separate from each of its parts. The key, I think, is to stop thinking about yourself. Isn’t it always? The key is to realize that connection, bondage, love, familiarity, does not exist just for you. It does not serve you; you serve it—you and your stranger.