Reading Welty in the Twenty-first Century Patrick E. Horn A Tyrannous Eye: Eudora Welty’s Nonfiction and Photographs. By Pearl Amelia McHaney. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2014. 240 pp. 20 b&w photographs, bibliography, index. $55. For many years now, Pearl McHaney has established herself (along with Suzanne Marrs and a handful of other scholars) as an indispensible authority on the life and work of Eudora Welty. Prior to publishing the book under review, McHaney authored or edited A Writer’s Eye: Collected Book Reviews (1994); Eudora Welty: Writers’ Reflections upon First Reading Welty (1999); Eudora Welty: The Contemporary Reviews (2005); Occasions: Selected Writings (2009); and Eudora Welty as Photographer (2009), along with the Eudora Welty Review and a host of articles. Michael Kreyling has described two of the above works—Occasions and Eudora Welty as Photographer—as “rounding out and filling in” Welty’s oeuvre (351). With A Tyrannous Eye, the rounding out and filling in continues—and, I would add, the curating. For in addition to the new material and insights that this book brings to Welty scholarship, it also serves as an expertly guided tour through the considerable body of work that came before it. McHaney argues that Welty applied “a tyrannous eye” to her photography and nonfiction writing—in other words, to Welty’s creative work besides her famous fiction. The phrase is borrowed from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1844 essay “The Poet” and more often associated with Walt Whitman’s life and work, but McHaney adapts and defines the concept in her own terms: “A tyrannous eye is one that seeks to see beyond the frames while using the frame to give proportion, seeks to observe silently, but politely, so as to gain perspective and keep objectivity” (3). Silent but polite tyranny? This description seems to suit Welty’s art more precisely than it adheres to Emerson’s vision, but no matter. The book goes on to take up, in six genre-based chapters, Welty’s work as a journalist, a photographer, a book reviewer, a letter writer, an essayist, and an autobiographer. There are some lovely discoveries to be found here, at least for this reader. McHaney fleshes out what she calls the “missing year” in Marrs’s excellent biography, between Welty’s graduation from the University of Wisconsin in 1929 and beginning her studies at the Columbia Graduate School of [End Page 101] Business in fall 1930 (22). Welty’s abstract 1927 drawing of “H. L. Mencken Singing the Star-Spangled Banner in His Morning Tub” is a sheer delight (47). Her comment that she wrote letters “out of homesickness to see my friends” to William Maxwell (quoted from Marrs, What There Is to Say, We Have Said) is moving and illustrative of the famous author’s earnestness and warmth of personality (108). McHaney deftly analyzes how the writing of Welty’s quasi-autobiographical novel The Optimist’s Daughter informed the writing of her 1983 Harvard lectures, which grew (and shrank) into her actual memoir One Writer’s Beginnings. McHaney’s observations about the surprise visitors and comic scenes in each of the novel’s four parts and her reading of the funeral scene as a “whodunit” situation reveal the hand of not only a Welty scholar, but also a seasoned educator. And Welty’s description of Faulkner’s short stories as “not meteors but comets,” originally published in the Atlantic in 1949, provides an intriguing interpretive puzzle to consider (138). There are also some missteps. McHaney conflates seeing and hearing—discrete sensory systems and modes of cognition—as a grand but untroubled metaphor: “The confluence of the two systems of signs, augmented by the gesture and music, are prevalent and wholly characteristic in both her photographs and her writing. Seeing is hearing” (48). The interplay between what is seen and what is heard (and between the depictions of such perceptions in Welty’s work) is rich, complex, and dynamic, but surely McHaney’s conflation is too simple. Many books and scholarly careers have been devoted to connections between visual and aural stimuli, the phenomenon of synesthesia, the semiotics of photography, music, and film. But seeing is not simply hearing, as Welty...