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First
posted: 7-26-01
Since being read
to and after, when I began reading to myself, there
has never been a line read that I didn't hear. As
my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying
it silently to me. It isn't my mother's voice, or
the voice of any person I can identify, certainly
not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly
that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the
story or the poem itself. The cadence, whatever it
is that asks you to believe, the feeling that resides
in the printed word, reaches me through the reader—voice.
I have supposed,
but never found out, that this is the case with all
readers—to read as listeners—and with all
writers, to write as listeners. It may be part of
the desire to write. The sound of what falls on the
page begins the process of testing it for truth, for
me. Whether I am right to trust so far I don't know.
By now I don't know whether I could do either one,
reading or writing, without the other.
My own words, when
I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in
the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When
I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears,
then I act to make my changes. I have always trusted
this voice.
—One Writer’s
Beginnings, Eudora Welty
In an age
of post-modern literary analyses, the politicizing of
symbols of Southern heritage and the extinction of individuals
who could weave a yarn to keep a room spellbound, the
life of Eudora Welty—literary legend, Southerner
born and bred, and storyteller extraordinaire—is
a refreshing blend of known fact and resolute privacy.
Her literary talents earned her a William Dean Howells
medal for fiction (for the 1954 comic novel The Ponder
Heart), a Pulitzer Prize in fiction (for her 1972
novella, The Optimist's Daughter), and a Presidential
Medal of Freedom in 1980, in addition to a long line of
indebted readers and storytellers, many of whom were exposed
to her writing as students through Intro to Southern Literature
or Women’s Lit classes.
While the public came to know the South—and Welty—through
her writing, they were not afforded many glimpses into
the personal life of this Lady of the South. An intensely
private writer, Welty opposed any number of inquiries
into her personal life, advising family and friends to
be guarded with stories of her life so that her writing
could stand on its own. And yet the facts that are known
about her, the skeletal biography gathered from anecdotes
and essays, hint at a woman with a love of life—particularly
the interior life—and an instinctive ear for storytelling.
In One Writer’s Beginnings, a collection of
Welty’s autobiographical essays, she writes:
"Long before
I wrote stories, I listened for stories. 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."
This writer,
whose legend is kin to those of other great Southern literary
figures like William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor
and Tennessee Williams, came into being on April 13, 1909,
the only daughter in a close-knit family of five. Her
life in Jackson, Mississippi, was the stuff from which
her stories found their inspiration. The music drifting
through her open window from practice piano sessions at
a small college across the street from her house found
its way into her 1949 collection of short stories, "The
Golden Apples." The family banter and small-town
intrigues provided the backdrop to her novels Losing
Battles (1970) and Delta Wedding (1946). The
hotels she stayed at during a working tour of the rural
South gave flavor to "The Hitchhiker."
And yet while the majority of Eudora Welty’s life
was lived in the South—most of it in her Mississippi
hometown—she really saw the South when she
traveled as a publicity agent and photographer for the
Works Progress Administration during the Depression. It
was in writing about these travels—particularly a
trip to Tishomingo County, Mississippi—that she "discovered"
herself as a writer. In a 1989 interview about her photography
and its impact on her writing, Welty talked about that
moment when it all came together—the visual, the
literary, the understanding of the human struggle and
the story that waited to be told.
"[J]ust when
I was working on Losing Battles, a novel set
in that part of the world, so much came back to me
of what I had absorbed. It was so remote from anything
I knew in Jackson or had seen in the Delta or on the
Coast or in the Black Prairie country, or any of the
other parts of Mississippi where I've been. It appealed
to me as a stage to put Losing Battles on because
life there had been so whittled down to the bare bones
of existence. No history but the struggle to keep
alive."
On being
asked what she, as the artist, discerned as the vision
expressed in her writing, Welty responded:
"Well, I think
it lies only in the work. It's not for me to say.
I think it's what the work shows, comprises altogether....
[A]s in everything, I want the work to exist as the
thing that answers every question about its doing.
Not me saying what's in the work. In fact, I couldn't.
Some time, if I have the time left to me I would like
to do more, but of course you could never make it
full enough. You know, of what is out there and in
here."
After a
lifetime of transforming the spirit and personality of
her Southern experiences into characters who struggled,
failed, fought, loved, laughed and cried their way through
her stories, the time left to Eudora Welty ran out on
July 23, 2001. Welty bequeathed to us, her only living
descendants, the children of a Master Storyteller, snapshots
of the South, of family life, of a time when life was
slower, people more at ease with each other, and storytellers
held us spellbound from their seats of honor in the family
parlor. She will be greatly missed, but her stories—her
glorious stories—will not be forgotten.
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