Here's a bit of sad news: Eudora Welty died. I bolded a particularly lovely quote about being a writer.
From today's NYT:
July 23, 2001
Author Eudora Welty Dies at 92
By ALBIN KREBS
Eudora Welty, whose brilliant short
stories, notable for the evocativeness of
their imagery and the sharpness of their
dialogue and wit, made her the most revered
figure in contemporary American letters,
died today. She was 92.
Miss Welty was plagued by health problems
and had been confined for some time to the
home in Jackson, Miss., that her father built,
where she lived since high school, and
where she wrote most of her stories, novels,
essays, memoirs and book reviews.
As a short-story master Miss Welty is
mentioned by critics in the same breath with
Chekhov, but she was often dismissed early
in her career as a regionalist and she did not
receive widespread critical respect until she
was no longer young. When it came, she accepted it with the ease, modesty
and grace that had become her hallmark.
Miss Welty was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for her novel, "The
Optimist's Daughter." She was the recipient of the National Book Critics
Award, the American Book Award, several O. Henry Awards and the Gold
Medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She was inducted into
the French Legion of Honor and received the Medal of Freedom in 1980,
presented, she said happily, by "one of my great Southern heroes, President
Jimmy Carter."
Late in 1998 Miss Welty was "excited and delighted" to learn that she had
become the first living writer ever to be included in the prestigious Library of
America series of collected works by the nation's literary giants. The library's
break with its long tradition of choosing only dead authors for its series of
definitive collections ushered Miss Welty into a pantheon that includes Mark
Twain, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Edgar
Allan Poe and William Faulkner.
For decades she was pigeonholed by many critics who placed her with
Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor and Carson
McCullers as a writer of the so-called Southern School. Her reputation as a
regional and apolitical writer was often cited as a reason why she failed to
receive a Nobel Prize. But her work, like that of those other Southerners,
transcended region and possessed a universal relevance and appeal.
"It is not the South we find in her stories, it is Eudora Welty's South, a region
that feeds her imagination and a place we come to trust," Maureen Howard
said when she reviewed Miss Welty's "Collected Stories' in 1980. "She is a
Southerner as Chekhov was a Russian, because place provides them with a
reality — a reality as difficult, mysterious and impermanent as life."
Eudora Welty was born April 13, 1909, in Jackson, the daughter of
Christian Webb Welty, a native of Ohio, and the former Christina Andrews,
who had been a West Virginia schoolteacher. ("I was always aware," she
has written, "that there were two sides to most questions.") The Weltys
settled in Jackson shortly after their marriage, and Mr. Welty became an
executive of the Lamar Life Insurance company. They also had two sons
younger than Eudora.
The Weltys were a book-loving family, devoted to reading and learning. In
"One Writer's Beginnings," Miss Welty's 1984 memoir based on a series of
lectures she gave at Harvard, she recalled the exhilaration she felt when she
fell under the spell of books.
"It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that storybooks had
been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of
themselves like grass," she said. "Yet regardless of where they came from, I
cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them — with the books
themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their
smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and
carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the
reading I could give them."
Miss Welty was a daily visitor to the local Andrew Carnegie Library, where
she was allowed what she later called "a sweet devouring" — a ration of two
books a day by the stern-faced librarian. Several decades later, in 1986, the
library was replaced; the new one was named the Eudora Welty Library.
Miss Welty learned to read before starting public school and began turning
out stories as a child.
"It took Latin to thrust me into a bona fide alliance with words in their true
meaning," she wrote. "Learning Latin (once I was free of Caesar) fed my
love for words upon words, words in continuation and modification, and the
beautiful, sober accretion of a sentence. I could see the achieved sentence
finally standing there, as real, intact and built to stay as the Mississippi State
Capitol at the top of my street, where I could walk through it on my way to
school and hear underfoot the echo of its marble floor and over me the bell
of its rotunda."
"Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories," Miss Welty wrote in
1984. "Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I
suppose it's an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children
know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just
waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole."
Miss Welty attended the Mississippi State College for Women, where she
helped to start a literary magazine, and then the University of Wisconsin,
where she earned a bachelor's degree in 1929. After college Miss Welty told
her parents she wanted to be a writer, but she said her father insisted that she
"learn something to fall back on" to support herself, so she took advertising
courses at the Columbia University School of Business.
Back in Jackson in the early 1930's, Miss Welty wrote for a radio station
and contributed society items to the Commercial Appeal in Memphis. During
the Depression she got a publicity job atn the Works Progress
Administration, which enabled her to travel throughout Mississippi. She was
troubled and fascinated by the people she saw and took hundreds of
snapshots with a cheap camera, developing her prints in her kitchen at night.
In 1971, Random House published a collection of these pictures, "One Time,
One Place: Mississippi in the Depression." Those stark, often grim
black-and-white photographs revealed that Miss Welty's long-admired sense
of observation was not limited to the ear, but extended to the eye as well.
"I learned quickly enough when to click the shutter," she said later, "but what
I was becoming aware of more slowly was a story-writer's truth. The thing to
wait on, to reach there in time for, is the moment when you see it. In my own
case, a fuller awareness of what I needed to find out about people and their
lives had to be sought for through another way, through writing stories. I
knew this, anyway: that my wish, indeed my continuing passion, would be
not to point the finger in judgment but to part a curtain, that invisible shadow
that falls between people, the veil of indifference to each other's presence,
each other's wonder, each other's human plight."
The Depression pictures were exhibited in
New York in 1936, the same year that Miss
Welty, who had sent dozens of unsolicited
stories to magazines, finally made her first
sale. A small literary magazine called
Manuscript accepted "Death of a Traveling
Salesman," the often anthologized recounting
of the last day in the life of a lonely, ill and
frightened shoe salesman who loses his way
in rural Mississippi. Before he dies of a heart
attack, he realizes fleetingly how little he has
understood about himself and others.
It was the first of several stories published in
small magazines. "None of these publications
paid, not really," Miss Welty recalled years
later. "Oh, I think the Southern Review was
giving $25 a story, but it took two years
before an agent could place one of my stories in a national magazine."
Miss Welty began to attract attention after The Atlantic published two of her
stories destined to become classics — "Why I Live at the P.O." and "A
Worn Path." The first, one of the most popular of the dozens that were to be
printed in the years to come, is a first-person explanation by a small-town
postmistress of why she is moving out of her eccentric family's home to live
at the post office. The second won Miss Welty her first of six O. Henry
Awards.
Early admirers of her short stories pressed Miss Welty to try her hand at a
novel but she resisted for several years. Her first hard-cover book was a
1941 short-story collection, "A Curtain of Green," with an introduction by
Katherine Anne Porter, who had encouraged her early on. "Curtain of Green
" sold only 7,000 copies in 30 years, but the 17 stories in the collection
became widely known and valued through their inclusion in many anthologies
and college textbooks.
The editor and critic James Olney said of "Curtain of Green": " The volume's
tonal variety is astonishing: from the somber `Death of a Traveling Salesman'
to the hallucinatory `Flowers for Marjorie,' from the wonderment at the
variety of human faces of `Clytie' to the foreboding near- violence of the title
piece, from the jazzy `Powerhouse' to the satiric `Petrified Man,' from the
wildly comic `Why I Live at the P.O.' to the dignified `A Worn Path' (the
`grave, persistent, meditative' sound of old Phoenix Jackson's cane tapping
the frozen earth establishes the tone at the outset)." `
"Why I Live at the P.O." combined Miss Welty's antic sense of humor with
her pleasure in language. As the narrator prepares to leave her family's home,
she says: "So I hope to tell you I marched in and got the radio. and they
could of all bit a nail in two, especially Stella-Rondo, that it used to belong
to, and she well knew she couldn't get it back, I'd sue for it like a shot. . . .
The thermometer and the Hawaiian ukulele were certainly mine, and I stood
on the step-ladder and got all my watermelon-rind preserves and every fruit
and vegetable I put up, every jar."
Many years later a widely used Internet e-mail program was named Eudora
after Miss Welty because its designer, Steven Dorner, admired `Why I Live
at the P.O."'
In "Powerhouse," Miss Welty described a musician who is "in a trance; he's
a person of joy, fanatic. He listens as much as he performs, a look of
hideous, powerful rapture on his face."
"I wrote that when I got home from a Fats Waller concert," she told a visitor,
Nicholas Dawidoff, in 1995. "I never would have tried in my right mind to
think I could describe anything like that, but I was carried away by that
concert. It was here in Jackson. It was just an outpouring."
Miss Welty followed "Curtain of Green" with "The Wide Net and Other
Stories" in 1941 and a novella in 1942, "The Robber Bridegroom," which
later became a successful musical in an adaptation by Alfred Uhry and
Robert Waldman. Her first full-length novel, "Delta Wedding," appeared in
1946.
Three years later, a group of stories set in the imaginary small town of
Morgana in the Mississippi Delta was published under the title "The Golden
Apples." All of Miss Welty's gifts for compression, metaphorical language
and poetic structure were on display. So was her genius for using the details
of daily life to illuminate the mysteries of the heart. In the story "The Whole
World Knows" she charted a doomed meeting between a young couple who
was estranged:
"There in the flower beds walked the same robins. The sprinkler dripped
now. Once again we went into the house by the back door. Our hands
touched. We had stepped on Tellie's patch of mint. The yellow cat was
waiting to go in with us, the door handle was as hot as the hand, and on the
step, getting under the feet of two people who went in together, the Mason
jars with the busy cuttings in water — `Watch out for Mama's —!'A
thousand times we had gone in like that. As a thousand bees had droned and
burrowed in the pears that lay on the ground."
During World War II, Miss Welty was briefly a staff member of The New
York Times Book Review and sometimes contributed reviews using the
pseudonym Michael Ravenna. But during the 1950's she returned to Jackson
when her mother and brothers fell seriously ill. For almost 15 years, from the
mid 50's to the late 60's, she published just a few short stories. some book
reviews and a children's book,"The Shoe Bird" (1964.) During this period
she cared for her family and worked on two novels. Some writers have
speculated that she seemed also to be undergoing some sort of ordeal of the
spirit or artistic crisis. After the deaths of her mother and brothers, she
returned in the 70's with the novels "Losing Battles" and "The Optimist's
Daughter."
In the 1980's Robert Penn Warren wrote of Miss Welty's body of work: "It
is easy to praise Eudora Welty, but it is not so easy to analyze the elements
in her work that make it so easy — and such a deep pleasure — to praise.
To say that may, indeed, be the highest praise, for it implies that the work, at
its best, is so fully created, so deeply realized, and formed with such
apparent innocence that it offers only itself, in shining unity."
Joyce Carol Oates later wrote: "What shocks us about her art is its delicate
blending of the casual and the tragic, the essential femininity of the narration
and the subject, the reality, which is narrated. Eudora Welty baffles our
expectations. Like Kafka, with whom she shares a number of traits, she
presents the distortions of life in the context of the ordinary, even chatty life;
she frightens us."
Miss Welty's stories often reflected the fruits
of her wide reading and special interests.
"The Robber Bridegroom," for example,
incorporated elements of folklore, fairy tales,
classical myths and legends of the
Mississippi River and the Natchez Trace,
the road of pioneer days that stretched from
Natchez to Nashville.
In "Delta Wedding," Miss Welty
concentrated on the frenzied activities of the
extended Fairchild family in the week before
the marriage of a daughter to the plantation's
overseer, who is considered by several of
the Fairchilds to be an intruder unworthy of
admission into the family.
That novel, as well as the short novel "The
Ponder Heart" (1954) and her longest one, "Losing Battles" (1970), are
examples of Miss Welty's preoccupation with family life. These stories focus
on weddings, reunions and funerals, all vehicles that bring together family
members to recall the past, criticize and lavish praise on one another and
settle old scores.
Jack Kroll, reviewing "Losing Battles" for Newsweek, rhapsodized, as many
critics did, over Miss Welty's use of language, particularly her metaphors:
"The air changed, as if a mile or so away a wooden door had swung open. .
.'; `It ran with a color as delicate as watermelon juice on a clean plate'; `the
graniteware coffeeepot, with its profile like her own and George
Washington's at the same time."
Miss Welty's novels and stories expose the foibles to which large clans are
prone, the tendencies of such families to resist change, squelch individuality
and ostracize outsiders. Miss Welty often shifts points of view to accomplish
this, but in "The Ponder Heart," she demonstrates her extraordinary ear for
dialect and a sense of the ridiculous as she tells the entire story as a comic
monologue by Edna Earle Ponder, a garrulous hotel manager. "Ponder
Heart" was adapted for the stage by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov
and a hit on Broadway when it opened in 1956.
"The Ponder Heart" was Miss Welty at her comic, compassionate best.
William Maxwell, wo was her editor at The New Yorker, remembered when
he heard Miss Welty read it for the first time. "In no time I was wiping my
eyes. Nothing has ever seemed so funny since. What the world must be like
for a person with so exquisite a sense of humor, I don't dare think."
Her more serious side was evident in "The Optimist's Daughter." In that
novel, published in 1972, she tells a story of "the great interrelated family of
those who never know the meaning of what happened to them." In the novel,
Laurel Hand, who has lived in Chicago for many years, returns to her
Mississippi home for her father's funeral and stays on a few days with Fay,
her selfish and stupid young stepmother, another of Miss Welty's outsiders.
During a night alone in the house she grew up in, Laurel confronts memories
of the past that lead her to new insights into the relationship between love,
death, memory and truth and learns to better understand herself and her
loving parents.
"Losing Battles," which appeared in 1970, is constructed around the reunion
of an extended, impoverished and talkative family in the red clay hills of
northern Mississippi in the early 1930's. "I needed that region, that kind of
country family, because I wanted that chorus of voices, everybody talking
and carrying on at once," she said. "These people are natural talkers and
storytellers, in a remote place where there was time for that."
Commenting on the fact that many critics noted that "Losing Battles" and her
other works always bore a strong sense of place, Miss Welty said: "I think
Southerners have such an intimate sense of place. We grew up in the fact
that we live here with people about whom we know almost everything that
can be known as a citizen of the same neighborhood or town. We learn
significant things that way. We know what the place has made of these
people, what they've made of the place through generations. We have a
sense of continuity and that, I think, comes from place."
And because she was in that place, the South, in the racially discordant
1960's, "I was one of the writers who received dead-of-night telephone
calls, when I was harangued by strangers saying, `Why are you sitting down
there writing your stories instead of out condemning your society?'
"I didn't need their pointers to know that there was injustice among human
beings or that there was trouble. I had been writing about that steadily right
along by letting my characters show this. I see as my privilege writing about
human beings as human beings with all the things that make them up,
including bigotry, misunderstanding, injustice and also love and affection and
whatever else. Whatever else makes them up interests me."
"The real crusader doesn't need to crusade; he writes about human beings in
the sense Chekhov did," Miss Welty said in 1978. "He tries to see a human
being whole with all his wrong-headedness and all his right-headedness. To
blind yourself to one thing for the sake of your prejudice is limiting. I think it
is a mistake. There's so much room in the world for crusading, but it is for
editorial writers, the speech-maker, the politician, and the man in public life
to do, not for the writer of fiction."
Miss Welty made one notable exception to her rule against preaching and
direct crusading when in 1963 Medgar Evers, the black civil-rights leader,
was shot to death in Jackson by a sniper.
"I did write a story the night it happened," she said. "I was so upset about
this, and I thought: I live down here where this happened and I believe I must
know what a person like that felt like — the murderer. There had been so
many stories about such a character in the stock manner, written by people
who didn't know the South, so I wrote about the murderer intimately — in
the first person, which was a very daring thing for me to do."
The story, "Where Is the Voice Coming From?," was rushed into print in The
New Yorker only days after an arrest was made. Taking up only two pages
in the magazine, it was a chilling probe into the mind of a bigoted psychopath
that was hailed as a disturbingly effective examination of the roots of racial
hatred, and has since been included in many anthologies.
Miss Welty was often asked how autobiographical her stories were, and she
would stress that her characters were entirely fictional. "Any character you
write about has bits and pieces of somebody, but they are really conceptions
of the imagination, which are invented to carry out what I want to do in a
story," she said. "Of course, I endow them with things I have observed,
dreamed, or understood, but no one represents a real person. I couldn't do
it. It would defeat me in my fiction."
Miss Welty, never married (marriage for her, she said, "never came up.").
Although she was a shy person, she had many friends who were writers,
among them Mr. Warren, Miss Porter, Elizabeth Bowen, V.S.Pritchett,
Cleanth Brooks, Shelby Foote, Walker Percy, Elizabeth Spencer, Ross
McDonald, and Reynolds Price. She also had an enduring friendship with
Diarmuid Russell, the agent who fiercely and devotedly represented her.
Her friends often spoke of her innate sense of courtesy, out of which she
seldom turned down requests for interviews. These usually took place at her
home and she often offered her interviewer bourbon and a home-cooked
meal. She was warm and humorously self-deprecating.
One unlikely caller was Henry Miller. Miss Welty's mother, who had heard
that he was a writer of dirty books, banned Miller from entering their house.
When Miss Welty did see him, she reported that he was "the dullest man I
ever saw in my life. He wasn't interested in anything outside himself, that was
the truth." In 1943, William Faulkner wrote an unsolicited letter to Miss
Welty after he had by chance read "The Robber Bridegroom." "You're doing
all right," he said. That letter hangs near the the wooden desk where she
wrote in an upstairs room in the Tudor-style house on Pinehurst Street that
her father had built in 1925 when she was 16..
"The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists," Eudora Welty said.
"What distinguishes it above all from the raw material. and what distinguishes
it from journalism, is that inherent is the possibility of a shared act of the
imagination between its writer and its reader. There is absolutely everything
in great fiction but a clear answer." |
