On Writing

Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, on April 13, 1909. Of her tranquil childhood she wrote: “I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.” She studied at Mississippi State College for Women, the University of Wisconsin, and Columbia University, with the intention of pursuing a career in advertising, an idea abandoned in favor of writing after her stories began to be published regularly in the mid-1930s. The appearance of her work in
The New Yorker
and
The Atlantic Monthly
established a reputation that was furthered by the publication of her first story collection,
A Curtain of Green
, in 1941. After her college days she returned to Jackson, where she would live permanently.

Further stories were collected in
The Wide Net
(1943),
The Golden Apples
(1949),
The Bride of the Innisfallen
(1955), and a book of stories for children,
The Shoe Bird
(1964). Another collection,
Moon Lake
, appeared in 1980, as did
The Collected Stories
. The novella
The Robber Bridegroom
was published in 1942 and was followed by other longer works of fiction:
Delta Wedding
(1946),
The Ponder Heart
(1954), and, after a hiatus of several years,
Losing Battles
(1970), which focused new attention on her work. Her next book,
The Optimist’s Daughter
(1972), won the Pulitzer Prize. A collection of essays,
The Eye of the Story
(1978), was followed by the memoir
One Writer’s Beginnings
, which in 1984 became an unexpected best-seller.

In addition to her work as a writer, Welty published a book of photographs,
One Time, One Place
(1971), recording her visual impressions of Mississippi in the early thirties. Two of her books,
The Ponder Heart
and
The Robber Bridegroom
, have been adapted for the stage.

Eudora Welty died on July 23, 2001, at the age of ninety-two.

One evening not so long ago, I was present at a gathering in the Episcopal Church across from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. It was late October, and there was a crispness in the air, the trees lining the avenues were all blazing with color. I was then a member of the PEN/Faulkner Board, and though the occasion was decidedly secular rather than religious, it was certainly spiritual: Miss Eudora Welty, then eighty-six years old, was going to read one of her stories.

Earlier, at the dinner which always precedes such events, she had told how a town librarian once approached her, wanting her to come speak. “What we’d like you to do,” the librarian said, “is come tell us one of your stories in your own words.” Miss Welty’s eyes sparkled, relating this story, and there was no dismissal at all in her voice, no sense of the librarian as someone at whose expense the story was told. It was as if this were a tale of the kind of sweet innocence that a child might inspire, and even that isn’t adequate as a depiction of the attitude: for Miss Welty was in fact delighted by it. One would almost say gladdened. There was something in her spirit that was always outward-aimed, and glad of human foible, and it is hard to express exactly how it shone forth: one simply knew it when one was in its presence.

At the Fellowship of Southern Writers Luncheon back in 1991, I plopped down next to her and stuck a fork into the chicken cordon-bleu that had been placed before me, and then realized that someone was saying a prayer for the gathering and that the whole audience, including people whom I knew quite well to be pagan, had heads bowed, hands folded. I couldn’t get the fork out of the chicken, and so I sat back and put my head down, and waited. When the prayer was finished, Miss Eudora leaned over to me and murmured, “I believe it’s already killed.” I still think about the look of mischievous gladness in her eyes and I smile.

And now, years later, she was going to read her story “A Wide Net” to this large gathering, a packed church, people standing all along the walls and in back, and seated on the floor in the central aisle and across the front of the elevation that led to the altar behind her. There was a small table, with a book and a microphone on it, and one glass of water. She was so frail that she had to be helped across to the chair. She took her place, and the microphone was adjusted at the angle necessary to broadcast her thin, quiet voice, with the lilt of Mississippi in it, and its kindly tremor of humor and grace, and, well, goodness. Nothing less. She got comfortable in the chair, arranged herself, looked out at the throng, smiling, nodded slightly, waiting for the applause to die down. She opened the book, adjusted her glasses, looked at the page and waited a second, then began to read. The silence, as she spoke, and went on, was profound. No one coughed or cleared his throat; no one shifted weight or moved papers or fumbled with a purse—for that might have meant missing a word or phrase. The voice was so small, scarcely more than a murmur. When there were laughs—and she knew precisely where they all were, and took pleasure in them without making a show of it—she waited, patiently, until the silence returned, and then continued, in the same soft, warm tones, the voice of an intimate friend, telling you secrets you didn’t know you knew.

Here, in the Modern Library, is this wonderful book, filled with all her best virtues as a writer and as a person. Rich with her great wisdom not only about the art she practiced so well all the years, but about life, and the intelligent living of it. Any student of literature would do well to study
On Writing
, because this book contains the words of a great practitioner of the art of fiction, spelling out the matters of her craft. But there is plenty for anyone interested in how to live, too. Here she is discussing place in fiction:

That applies to her subject, but it also contains wisdom of its own, separate from the esthetic she’s describing, or extending from it.

So this book on craft is of general interest, it seems to me. And even so, I expect that young writers of fiction will be carrying it around with them in the years to come. They ought to be, anyway.

Miss Welty uses her own work and the work of artists she admires from her wide reading to talk about the forms of fiction, and the application of these matters to the life we lead: there is an essay on the writing of stories, and another on analyzing fiction; there’s one about the uses of place in the novel, and there’s another about words themselves in the construction of a fictive world. Each essay contains windows into the mind and soul of Eudora Welty the reader, as well as the writer. Here she is discussing Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and Chekhov:

But as I have indicated, there is more than literary criticism here. Her essay “Must the Novelist Crusade?,” written at the height of the civil rights crisis of the middle sixties, is fresh and burning with truth. In that essay, she confronts the evil of her time with toughness and compassion:

But she also addresses the notion that it is the novelist’s duty to be a crusader:

The one thing most evident in all her criticism is good sense.

And that is what is so frequently lacking in the criticism of our day, the era that has been termed postmodern, and that I have elsewhere called post-sensical. It is an overly politicized era, in which the novelist is often faced with an unspoken but very clear expectation that he indeed crusade; that one must be about the business of engineering better human beings, and correcting social ills, or redressing old social grievances. Fictive art is seen in terms of its political utility, its quotient of moral outrage. Everything is politics, the professors tell us, and the writer is morally bound to expose this or that injustice. And in keeping with this mentality, writers who have gone before us are lifted or devalued by how well they can withstand the heresy-hunting party line: for instance, Joseph Conrad was an imperialist, according to this feature of the critical climate, and Faulkner was a racist.