Eudora Welty

Author(s): Granville Hicks

Source: College English, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Nov., 1952), pp. 69-76
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/371765
Accessed: 21/10/2009 18:10

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ncte.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

National Council of Teachers of English is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
College English.

http://www.jstor.org
COLLEGE E NGLISH
Volume ir NOVEMBER 1952
Eudora Welty
GRANVILLE HICKS1
SEVERAL years ago Eudora Welty
wrote to the New Yorkera witty letter,
by no means so mild as on the surfaceit
appeared to be, protesting against some
observations on Southern writers that
had beenmade by EdmundWilsonin the
course of a review of William Faulkner's
Intruder in the Dust. Like all Southern
writers, Wilson had said, Faulkner was
provincial;he was out of touch with con-
temporarycurrentsof thought. His pro-
vincialism, Wilsongranted, was in many
ways an asset, but he went on to argue
that Faulkner's remoteness from the
great cities, which are the birthplaceof
modernfiction, had "apparentlymade it
impossible for him to acquire complete
expertnessin an art that demandsof the
artists the closest attention and care."
This, Miss Welty objected, was like
criticizing Cezanne because he lived in
Aix rather than Paris. "Such critical ir-
relevance, favorable or unfavorable,"
she said, "the South has long been used
to, but now Mr. Wilsonfancies it up and
it will resounda little louder. Mr. Faulk-
ner all the while continues to be capable
of passion,of love, of wisdom,perhapsof
1 Author of The Great Tradition, Figures in
Transition, Only One Storm; literary editor of the
New Leader.
69
Number 2
prophecy,towardhis material.Isn't that
enough? Such qualities can identify
themselvesanywherein the world and in
any century without furnishing an ad-
dress or references." Mr. Wilson, she
noted, tried to explain Falllkner's de-
scriptive powers by saying that the
Southern world is differentand makes a
different impact. She asked: "Could the
simple, though superfluous,explanation
not be that the recipientof the impact,
Mr. Faulkner,is the differentcomponent
here, possessingthe brainas he does, and
that the superiority of the work done
lies in the brain?"
Although Miss Welty's Jackson is no
great distance from Mr. Faulkner'sOx-
ford, it was not mere regionalpatriotism
that inspired her protest. She was ex-
pressinga philosophyof literature,a phi-
losophy that is, of course, embodied in
her own work as well as in William
Faulkner's. Like Faulkner, and unlike
most contemporary writers, she has
spent the greater part of her life in the
regionin which she was born, and, again
like him, she has found in that regionall
that she needed to exerciseand challenge
her talents. She wouldnever condemnan
author for being urban or cosmopolitan,
but she would defend her own right, or
70 COLLEGE ENGLISH
the right of any other author, to be rial whereshe found it-i.e., not far from
neither. Provincialism,she feels, is not a home. As KatherineAnne Porter said in
sufficient explanation of a writer's mer- the Introduction she wrote for Miss
its, nor is it inevitably a source of short- Welty's first book, A Curtain of Green,
comings. A writer can be provincial in "Shegets her rightnourishmentfromthe
the geographicalsense without being in- source natural to her-her experienceso
tellectually or aesthetically provincial: far has been quite enough for her and of
one does not have to live in cities, as Mr. precisely the right kind."
Wilson seems to believe, in order to read When A Curtainof Greenappeared,in
and understand James and Proust and 1941, some reviewers quickly concluded
Joyce. that the author was one more Southern
Miss Welty was bomrn in Jackson,Mis- realist with a penchant for squalor.
sissippi, in 1909, and was educated at "Like many Southern writers," Time
MississippiState Collegefor Women,the wrote, "she has a strong taste for melo-
University of Wisconsin, and Columbia drama, and is preoccupiedwith the de-
University. After working for a time in mented, the deformed, the queer, the
New York City, she returnedto Jackson, highly spiced. Of the 17 pieces, only two
and there she has lived, except for brief report states of experiencewhich could
trips, ever since. Her first published be called normal." The statistics are
story appeared in a little magazine, probably accurate: the stories deal with
Manuscript,in 1936, and her first collec- such charactersas a feeble-mindedgirl,
tion of stories, A Curtain of Green,was a moonshiner and his faithless wife, a
publishedin 1941.She has publishedfour pair of poverty-strickensharecroppers,a
books since then: a novella, The Robber couple of hoboes, and a victim of de-
Bridegroom;another collection of short mentia praecox. One story, indeed,
stories, The Wide Net; a novel, Delta "Clytie," seems to present its once
Wedding; and a collection of related prominentfamily as a museumof South-
stories, The GoldenApples.Her workhas ern decadence: the father is paralyzed;
been frequently honored: she once won one son has committed suicide; another
second prize and twice won first prize in is alcoholic;one daughteris mad;and the
the 0. Henry MemorialAward, and her daughter who has been the mainstay of
work has also appeared in The Best the family drownsherself in a rain bar-
AmericanShortStories.She was given an rel. This might well be called Southern
award by the American Academy of Gothic.
Arts and Letters in 1944. But if one reads carefully,it is appar-
Miss Welty has been even more faith- ent that Miss Welty is not preoccupied
ful to her section of Mississippi than with violence and horror,in the way that
Faulknerhas to his: a story is set in New ErskineCaldwellso often is and not even
York City, one in New Orleans, one in to the extent that William Faulkner
San Francisco, and everything else is sometimes is. The meaning of the story
close to the Natchez Trace. She has not, is never in the violence, nor is the abnor-
however,sought to create a regionof her mality of the characterstheir important
own, as Faulkner has done with his quality. Take, for instance, "The Hitch-
YoknapatawphaCounty, and to that ex- Hikers." SalesmanTom Harrispicks up
tent she is a less self-consciousregionalist two men alongthe road,one of them with
than he. She has merely taken her mate- a guitar. He feeds them, and, when he
 EUDORA
comes to the hotel in which he intends to
spend the night, he makes arrangements
for them to sleep on the back porch. But
suddenlywordcomesthat one of the men
has hit the other, the guitar player, over
the head with a bottle. The latter is
taken to the hospital, while the formeris
locked up in the hotel, the jail being oc-
cupied by a Negro. The salesmangoes to
a party, as he had planned, but it fails to
distract him, nor does he respond when
one of the girls comes to the hotel for
him. In the morning he learns that the
guitar player is dead. After listening to
the other man's confession,Harrisgives
the guitar to a little Negro boy and goes
on about his business.
The act of violence seems perfectly
casual. "1 was jist tired of him always
uppin' and makin' a noise about ever'-
thing," the assailant says. And later:
"He was uppity, though. He bragged.
He carrieda gittar around."The murder
is so casualin appearancethat one is hor-
rified at the thought of what its real
causes must be. The deeper meaning of
the story, however,is in the effect of the
incident on the salesman. After the
party Harris tries to sleep.
But it was too like other evenings, this town
was too like other towns, for him to move out
of this lying still clothed on the bed, even into
comfort or despair. Even the rain-there was
often rain, there was often a party, and there
had been other violence not of his doing-
other fights, not quite so pointless, but fights
in his car; fights, unheralded confessions, sud-
den love-making-none of any of this his, not
to keep, but belonging to the people of these
towns he passed through, coming out of their
rooted pasts and their mock rambles, coming
out of their time. He himself had no time. He
was free, helpless.
It is interesting that Miss Welty had
used a figure comparableto Harris as a
symbol of rootlessness in her first pub-
lished story, "Death of a Traveling
JJELTY 71
Salesman."This salesman,sick and lost,
comesupon a man and woman,the latter
pregnant, living in primitive poverty. It
is the simplest,most basic kind of human
association, and the salesman is moved
by it.
He wanted to leap up, to say to her, I have
been sick and I found out, only then, how
lonely I am. Is it too late? My heart puts up a
struggle inside me, and you may have heard it,
protesting against emptiness.... It should be
full, he would rush on to tell her, thinking of
his heart now as a deep lake, it should be hold-
ing love like other hearts. It should be flooded
with love.
In this early story, which in some ways
is reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson,
Miss Welty is moreexplicit than she ever
lets herself be in her later work. It is a
tremendously effective story just the
same,and, though the announcedsubject
is death, the real theme is life.
Squalor,violence, and decadencehave
in themselves no importance for Miss
Welty. They are merely facts, and facts,
whether pleasant or unpleasant, are no
more than means to an end. What mat-
ters in her stories is never the thing that
happens but the effect of the thing on
human beings. Her concern, in other
words, is with states of mind, and her
emphasis falls upon those emotional
states that cannot be easily articulated.
In "Clytie," for instance, the horrorsare
not intended to shock us; that would be
all too easy to do; Miss Welty's task, far
moredifficult,is to showus their effecton
Clytie. As Miss Porter says, "The very
shape of madnesstakes place beforeyour
eyes in a straight account of actions and
speech, the personal appearance and
habits of dressof the main characterand
her family." In a simplerand even more
memorablestory, "A Worn Path," there
is nothing at all except the details of an
old Negrowoman'sjourneyto the city to
get medicine for her grandson, but it
72 COLLEGE
gives us a sense of human fortitude that
is almost unbearablein its sad intensity.
Miss Welty knows how, if ever an
author did, to let facts speak for them-
selves, but she does not systematically
refrain,in the Hemingwaymanner,from
the direct account of emotional states.
Although her later work is never so ex-
plicit as "Death of a Traveling Sales-
man," she does not hesitate to tell us
what is going on within the mind of a
character when it serves her purpose to
do so. With beautiful adroitness, of
which only a deliberate analyst can be
conscious, she slips from the objective to
the subjective, at just the moment to
achieve the maximumof revelation.Her
method varies to suit her themes: in "A
Worn Path" everything is done with ob-
jective description and conversation;in
"A Piece of News" there is a single, sud-
den illumination of the minds of Ruby
and Clyde; in "A Curtainof Green" we
are now outside and now inside the mind
of the bereaved,bewilderedMrs. Larkin.
So far as technique is concerned, her
characteristicquality is just this perfect
balance between the objective and the
subjective.
In another sense her work is remarka-
bly objective. As Miss Porter observes,
there is only one story in A Curtain of
Greenthat could conceivablybe regarded
as autobiographical,and in the second
collection of stories, The IVide Net, there
is not even one. Each story is an excur-
sion of her imaginationinto the minds of
others, and one finds in the two collec-
tions an extraordinaryvariety of subject
matter. It is not merely that she writes
about Negroes, poor whites, decayed
aristocrats, the middle-class women of
Southern towns, and, in The Wide Net,
about the past as well as the present;her
emotional range stretches from the
poignant to the overwhelming,and from
ENGLISH
humor to the blackest tragedy. Nor do
her stories always conform to the pat-
terns that have been discussed.There is,
for example, "Powerhouse," an enig-
matic story of a Negro orchestra leader
with a strong,wild rhythmin it, or thereis
"The Wide Net," with its fine colloquial
style and country humor. Miss Welty's
versatility bafflesthe pigeonholers.
Yet in all this variety there are, of
course,persistentthemes. The first is the
mystery of personality, which Miss
Welty perceivesin two forms-the mys-
tery of others and the mystery of self.
The failure of human beings to under-
stand one another, one of the perennial
themes of literature, she treats often as
tragedy and sometimes,as in "A Piece of
News" and "The Wide Net," as comedy,
though always with serious overtones.
The mystery of identity, central in such
a story as "Old Mr. Marblehall,"figures
in some degreein almost every one of her
tales.
Closely related to this first theme is
her second, the problem of what brings
people together and what holds them
apart. She writes about separatenessin
"Death of a TravelingSalesman,""The
Hitch-Hikers," and many others, about
love and separatenessin "The Key," "A
Worn Path," and "A Memory." In "A
Still Moment," a kind of parableinvolv-
ing Lorenzo Dow the evangelist, Mur-
rell the bandit, and Audubon the scien-
tist, Dow thinks about separateness:
"He could understandGod'sgiving Sep-
arateness first and then giving Love to
follow and heal in its wonder; but God
had reversed this, and given Love first
and then Separateness,as though it did
not matter to Him which came first." At
any rate, Miss Welty is saying, love and
separatenessare equally real; they are,
perhaps, the great realities.
Some of Miss Welty's stories have
 EUDORA WYELTY 73

been called obscure, and she would not story and of the Americantall tale. The
try to refute the charge. She has said in central action is as implausibleas any-
one of her rare excursionsinto criticism: thing in Grimm, and as plausibly nar-
The fine story writers seem to be in a sense rated. The flat, poker-faced narrative,
obstructionists. As if they hold back their however,is enrichedby a dry humorthat
own best interests. It's a strange illusion. For delights in the absurditiesthat are being
if we look to the source of the deepest pleasure
we receive from a writer, how surprising it described,
and it is interrupted by de-
seems that the very source is the quondam ob- scriptive and meditative passages of
struction. The fact is, in seeking our source of great beauty and by colorfully fantastic
pleasure we have entered another world again. episodes in which historical and legend-
We are speaking of beauty. And beauty is not ary figuressuch as Little Harp and Mike
a blatant or promiscuous quality: indeed at Fink take
her finest she is somewhat associated with ob- part.
struction-with reticence of a number of It is an engaging little story, and one
kinds. feels that Miss Welty had a good time
Miss Welty's short stories are not for writing it, but the core of seriousnessis
inattentive readers; the best of them not to be disregarded.In one of its as-
yield their meaning only to an effort of pects the novella is a parable on the
the imagination.But the effort is worth theme of the mystery of personality.
making. Speaking as a writer, Miss Jamie Lockhart, the robberbridegroom,
Welty has said, "In the end, our tech- plays two roles, and Rosamund Mus-
nique is sensitivity, and beauty may be grove, his mistress, presents two person-
our reward."This can be applied to the alities to him. Her father, Clement Mus-
readersof Miss Welty's stories:sensitivi- grove, is single-minded in his simplicity,
ty is what they must bring to them, and but it is suggested that his beautifulfirst
their rewardis beauty. wife and his ugly second wife are actually
In her Introduction to A Curtainof the same person. There are other am-
Green, Katherine Anne Porter spoke of biguities as well on which a curious mind
the pressure that publishersexert upon can meditate.
short-story writers in order to get them The Robber Bridegroom has its excel-
to produce that more marketable com- lences, but it was in Delta Wedding
modity, a novel. This pressureshe urged (1946) that Miss Welty was to show
Miss XVcltyto resist. "There is nothing what she could do with the novel. The
to hinder her from writing novels if she book is a triumph of sensitivity: the at-
wishes or believesshe can. I can only say mosphereof the Delta in September;the
that her good gift, just as it is now, alive excitement and commotion of a house-
and flourishing,should not be retarded hold preparingfor a wedding;the feeling
by a perfectly artificialdemandupon her of a crowdedhouse;the feelingof a house
to do the conventionalthing." full of children; the special quality of a
Miss Welty was to come to the novel particularand unusual family, the Fair-
in her own time and her own way, but childs. It is a technicaltriumph,too: the
first, between the publication of A Cur- constant, subtle shifting of the point of
lain of Green and the publicationof The view to render the most that can be
Wide Net, she brought forth an experi- rendered.
mental novella, The Robber Bridegroom. Outwardly little enough happens.
Located in Mississippiin the old days, it Dabney, second of the Fairchild daugh-
has elements both of the Europeanfairy ters, is getting married to Troy Flavin,
74 COLLEGE
her father's overseer,a poor boy fromup
in the hills. The relatives gather, and
there are parties, excursions,rehearsals.
Dabney's Uncle Georgearrives,with the
disconcerting news that Robbie, his
wife, has left him, but she subsequently
appears. Among the visiting relatives is
little Laura McRaven, Dabney's nine-
year-old cousin,who has recentlylost her
mother,and in the parts of the story that
are told from her point of view we not
only get a sense of the intense juvenile
life that is going on but also, because of
her responsivenessto everything that is
uniquein the Fairchildsand Shellmound,
are given fresh insight into the adult
world.
Gradually we realize that George,
rather than Dabney, is the novel's cen-
tral figures.On her arrival,Laura is told
of an act of rather pointless heroism in
which Georgehas recently engaged. This
act, as we later learn,or the pointlessness
of it, is what has alienated Robbie. The
scene of George on the railroad bridge
with his feeble-mindedniece is referredto
again and again, until we perceivethat it
is the key to George'scharacterand that
George is the quintessential Fairchild.
The outsiders, Robbie and Troy, medi-
tate on the mysteries of the Fairchild
character,and so does Laura,who is only
half a Fairchild and finds Shellmound
strange and wonderful.Even Ellen, the
mistress of Shellmound,who has moth-
ered half-a-dozen Fairchilds, is still an
outsider, though she rests more easily
with the enigma than the others. To the
born Fairchilds, of course, there is no
mystery; they accept George,as they ac-
cept themselves, without any conception
that he or they could be different from
what they are. Althoughwe look through
the eyes of many of the characters,we
are never taken inside George's mind,
and to the end he remains a mystery,
ENGLISH
though one that we constantly feel we
are on the verge of solving.
If Delta Weddingis one of the finest
novels of recent years, it is because Miss
Welty's sensibilityis equal to the burden
she has imposedupon it, the burdenof a
sustained narrative. There is nothing
higher to be said in praise of Delta Wed-
ding than that it is just as good, and good
in just the same way, as her best short
stories. It is held up from beginning to
end by unfailing insight into the subtle
and complicatedemotions of its charac-
ters and by a matchless gift for making
us feel what they feel.
In The Golden Apples (1949) Miss
Welty did not attempt that kind of sus-
tained effort. The same charactersfigure
in various episodes,and of some of them
we have a cumulative revelation, but
each episode stands by itself. It is, in
part, a book about small-town life, and
the quality of its understandingof small-
town ways remindsone of Andersonand
Faulkner. In another, more important
aspect it is concernedwith the mystery
of personality. King MacLain,who peri-
odically vanishes from Morgana, and
who affects the imaginations of its
people, is an obvious enigma, but he is
really no more mysterious than Miss
Eckhart the music teacheror Easter the
orphan or either of his sons or Virgie
Rainey or Loch Morrison.
The resourcefulnesswith which Miss
Welty exploresher mysteries is exciting
to watch. Regarded simply as short
stories, the episodes of The Golden
Apples, with a single exception, belong
with her best work. Take, for instance,
"Music from Spain," in which Eugene
MacLain is jolted out of his routine and
into a state of heightened sensibility by
an arbitraryact- slappinghis wife's face
as it happens-and spends a remarkable
day in the company of a Spanish musi-
 EUDORA tWELTY 75

cian. Or there is the final story, "The opment, so that today the individuality
Wanderers,"with its wonderfullyevoca- of her prose is as obvious as it is quietly
tive portrayalof Virgie Rainey. asserted.
The title of the book is, of course, an Although her workhas been frequent-
allusion to a Greeklegend, and so is the ly honoredand, with each volume, more
title of the first story, "Showerof Gold." and morehighly praised,she has failed to
And in almost all the stories there is win the approval of certain critics who
some suggestionof myth. "Moon Lake," are to be taken seriously, among them
for example,which is in part an amusing Diana Trilling, Isaac Rosenfeld, and
account of life in a girls' camp, has its MargaretMarshall.They agreewith her
parable of death and resurrection. admirersthat she is greatly talented, but
I do not want to suggest that Miss what she does with her talents distresses
Welty belongs to the school of authors them. They feel, to begin with, that she
who think that the retellingof an ancient exploits her technical virtuosity for its
legend makes a modem masterpiece. I own sake, but their quarrelis largerthan
am merely saying that her work has ac- that. Mrs. Trilling,reviewingDelta Wed-
quired somethingof the quality of fable. ding, said that she disliked equally the
In The RobberBridegroomand a coupleof literarymannerof the book and the "cul-
short stories she has deliberatelycreated ture out of which it grows and which it
legends of her own, but these are less im- describes so fondly," and she accused
portant than the tales in which the or- Miss Welty of a lack of moraldiscrimina-
dinary events of life in contemporary tion. Miss Marshall, after complaining
Mississippi take on the purity and-to about the "finespun writing" in The
use a recklessword-the universality of Golden Apples, summed up her indict-
legend. ment: "The book does, I suppose,convey
It is not easy to say how she has the quality of life among the main fami-
learned do this. Even if Miss Porter lies of Morgana, but this is its only ac-
to
had not told us, we would have no doubt complishment, and the quality of life
that Miss Welty has read widely. She has among the main families of Morgana
learned, we can be sure, from many is, to speak rudely, not worth 244
writers,but none of them has left a clear pages."
mark upon her work. Her admirationfor Miss Marshall'scomment, it seems to
her fellow-Mississippian,William Faulk- me, is not so much rudeas narrow.If one
ner, is great, but his way of doing things begins with the assumptionthat life in a
is not hers. Nor is Henry James'sway her small Mississippi town is not worth
way, though he is another writershe has writing about, one is likely to miss the
certainly studied with great care. Her larger implicationsof a book about such
work has often been comparedwith that a town. (Hamilton Basso, a Southerner,
of VirginiaWoolf and Katherine Mans- has testified that Morgana"canbe taken
field, but the resemblancesseem to me to representnot only all small Southern
superficial.In the beginning, I suspect, towns but the whole Deep South.") If,
she learned a good deal from Katherine moreover,one has no sympathy with the
Anne Porter, about both the shapingof a kind of life that is being portrayed, one
story and the manipulationof words,but may easily call a writer who does like
she has followed her own path of devel- that sort of life uncritical.And, finally, if
76 COLLEGE ENGLISH

a way of life is distasteful,the skill a writ-
er employs to evoke that way of life may
seem wasted.
Miss Welty is, to be sure, a Southern
writer, in the sense that the South is her
subject matter, just as it is Faulkner's.
Furthermore, again like Faulkner, she
lives in the midst of the life she writes
about. She is a writer with roots, a fact
significantly reflected in all her work.
But if she shares in the heritage of the
South, she also sharesin the literary tra-
dition of Westerncivilization,and shares
at least as fully and deeply as the most
up-to-date New York intellectual. And
not only that: she proves, as the good re-
gionalists have always proved, that the
deeperone goes into the heart of a region,
the more one transcendsits geographical
boundaries.

A Primer Study in Browning's Satire

BENNETT WEAVER1

'TissaidI brewstiffdrink.
-Epilogue to Pacchiarotto.

S OMETHINGneeds to be said about which has a special dramatic function,

Browning'ssatire. It does not need to be are the epitome of Browning's philoso-
inclusive, and it does not need to be phy is as dull and wrong as to say that
"scholarly"; but it does need to be Shakespeare'sphilosophy is summed in
exact, in order that students may see Ophelia'sverse, "Hey non nonny, nonny,
what is there and give it merited atten- hey nonny."
tion. For the tendency to read Brown- Since he is a dramaticpoet, much, al-
ing not from his page but out of tradi- though not all, of Browning's satire
tion is yet strong among us. One part comes to us in dramaticform. That this
of the tradition would deny him all form is a sufficientinstrumentfor satiric
privilege as a satirist: that which nomi- purpose Aristophanes demonstrated.
nates him the good Victorian poet who True, the medium both limits and
said, "God's in his heaven- / All's liberates what is said and how it is said.
right with the world." If this persuasion Artisticallyit affects the intent and even
were absolute in a man, he could have the spirit of the satirist, binding or
nothing about which to complain. Of enlargingthe intent, restrictingor freeing
course,in seems never to be noticed that the spirit. If Aristophanescan never do
the words lie in a lyric sung by Pippa as what Juvenal can do, he can do what
she passes the Shrub-house of Luca, Juvenal cannot. Swift can do what
where all's wrong with the world. Se- neither of these can; and so we might
bald, having slit Luca's throat, is about go on makingdistinctions.On the whole,
to crownthe painted wife of the old man the dramatist gives up direct attack-
queen, "magnificent in sin." Presently the heavy, savage, flat blow-and de-
the two are dead of self-slaughter. To pends on agility and skill. He may rightly
say that these verses from Pippa's song, be picturesque. Or to change the figure,
1 University of Michigan. he prefers to release an ass upon the