COUNTRY CHURCHYARDS
By Eudora Welty
University Press of Mississippi, 111 pages, $35
Place has always been important to Eudora Welty–in her life, her photographs and her writings. Concluding her essay on “Place in Fiction” (1956), she says, “It is through place that we put out roots, wherever birth, chance, fate or our traveling selves set us down; but where those roots reach toward . . . is the deep and running vein, eternal and consistent and everywhere purely itself, that feeds and is fed by the human understanding.”
Birth set Welty down on April 13, 1909, in Jackson, Miss., then a town of about 10,000; “Miss Eudora” is now its most-famous and most-revered citizen. Her mother was a former teacher from the mountains of West Virginia, her father a businessman from Ohio. On their marriage in 1904, the young couple chose to make their fortune in the capital of the poor but promising state of Mississippi. There Christian Welty became a senior executive in Lamar Life Insurance Co.
In those days,most northern Mississippians went to Memphis when they wanted to visit a genuine city, while those in the southern part of the state went to New Orleans. But Christian Welty’s business took him to Chicago–always by the Illinois Central train, the Panama Limited. In her radiant autobiography, “One Writer’s Beginnings” (1984), Welty recalls “the big box of Fannie May Chocolates he brought back from Chicago (and) the sheet music to `I Want to be Happy’ from `No, No, Nanette’ that would tell us all about the show he’d so much enjoyed and wished we could have seen with him.”
Somewhat later, she–the oldest of the three children, the only girl and a lover of trains–traveled on the Panama Limited with her father to Chicago, where they not only attended a show but also stayed at the Palmer House, shopped at Marshall Field’s, visited the Art Institute and heard a performance by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Welty is virtually certain that this trip–there may have been several–was her first to a real city.
At age 16, Welty entered the Mississippi State College for Women, the first state-supported college for women in the country. Two years later, in 1927, she transferred to the University of Wisconsin at Madison and, after thinking about becoming an artist, majored in English and minored in art history. She admired her teachers and enjoyed her courses. But she disliked the cold weather and, in her words, was “too naive and inexperienced and shy” to become friends with other students, who struck her as “sticks of flint . . . in an icy world.” So she came often to Chicago, sometimes while waiting for train connections between Madison and Jackson. “It was just wonderful,” she reminisced, to see great paintings, especially the Impressionists. In Chicago she first saw Picasso’s work.
When she finished college in 1929, Welty was sure she wanted to be a writer. But her parents, chiefly her practical father, who distrusted fiction because it isn’t true, suggested that, in order to prepare for a more profitable career, she enroll in a year-long advertising course at the Columbia University School of Business. Consequently, with light course requirements, she savored New York’s concerts, movies, museums, theater and Harlem jazz clubs during the academic year of 1930-31. In fall 1931, her father, 52, died of leukemia, and Welty continued to live in Jackson, to which she had returned. Although she frequently satisfied her zest for travel in America and abroad, she always returned there. At 91, she’s now too fragile to leave the city.
During the Depression, Welty held an assortment of jobs, most notably as a junior publicity agent of the Works Progress Administration. Carrying out her duties, she traveled throughout her native state, conferring with officials, talking to ordinary people, writing news releases and reports, and, on her own initiative, taking “snapshots” (her word) of some of the people she met, including an astonishing number, when one considers the period, of black adults and children. The most acclaimed collection of her photographs, “One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression,” was published in 1971, with a silver anniversary edition appearing in 1996.
Also during the 1930s and ’40s, Welty, for whom “cemeteries had a sinister appeal somehow,” walked alone in numerous Mississippi graveyards, taking pictures of scenes and objects that caught her artistic and writerly eye. But not until her 91st year did she realize her wish to publish a book of these snapshots.
“Country Churchyards” is a handsome volume shaped in the same format as “One Time, One Place” and adorned on its dust jacket and front cover with an enlarged photo of a headstone. It contains a short article, “Eudora Among Her Photographs,” by Hunter Cole, associate director and marketing manager at the University Press of Mississippi; a longer essay, “An Abundance of Angels,” by Elizabeth Spencer, distinguished Mississippi writer and lifelong friend of Welty’s; 79 photographs; nine relevant passages from Welty’s works opposite as many photographs; and an index of the photos.
The first piece consists largely of Welty’s comments as she recently looked at her cemetery pictures. About one, she remarked, “There was a statue of a man in full business dress, and underneath was an inscription that said he was an honor to the earth on which he walked. So of course I took that picture.” In the second essay, Spencer, after pointing out that all of Welty’s art–in photographs and words–“is an effort to rescue life from oblivion,” records her own memories, similar to Welty’s, and then concludes by noting Welty’s fondness for tomb sculpture in “Country Churchyards”; her treatment of death and burying in some of her fiction; and, though she is not a traditional believer, “her sense of reverence for life’s mysteries, death being one of those.”
Discerning and complementary, the introductory essays markedly increase a reader-viewer’s comprehension of the gallery of photographs, which can be broadly distinguished by sites and subject. The locations of 23 pictures have not been identified. Of the remainder, the two largest groups, 12 each, were taken in the now virtually deserted rivertown of Rodney–lovingly described by Welty in her essay “Some Notes on River Country” (1944), included in her “The Eye of the Story” collection–and in Jackson.
Perhaps predictably, the largest number of pictures by subject–13–are of churches, with three different shots of the same building–at Church Hill, near Natchez–opening the gallery. The best known of the churches is the First Episcopal in Port Gibson, a town reputedly spared by Gen. Ulysses Grant because it “was too pretty to burn.” The church’s steeple is topped by a gold-leaf hand–originally wood, now metal–pointing upward. Near the end of the gallery, the last church picture, showing an unidentified church in the background and a man astride a horse in the foreground, is one of only three photos of people in the volume. Besides taking her pictures of Depression and churchyards Mississippi in the 1930s and ’40s and later, until 1951, Welty visited many places outside the state: New York and New Orleans often; Mexico; a Bread Loaf Writers’ conference in Middlebury, Vt.; Yaddo, the writers’colony outside Saratoga Springs, N.Y.; San Francisco; Washington, D.C.; Italy; France; England; and Ireland, where she met and became a close friend of Irish author Elizabeth Bowen’s. But apparently she never returned to Chicago, although a number of her Jackson friends had made the trip in 1933 to see the World’s Fair. Then, in autumn 1951, Bowen toured the U.S., giving many lectures and readings. She was Welty’s houseguest briefly. Afterward, the two went to Tulane University in New Orleans and subsequently to Chicago. She and Welty stayed at the Drake Hotel. In a letter a bit later, Welty glowed about the hotel and “our” restaurant in “sweet deep-carpeted Chicago.”
Five years later, in May 1956, Welty delivered her first William Vaughn Moody talk at the University of Chicago. Cited at the beginning of this article, it is her best known critical essay, which she had given previously at Cambridge University, where, as in Chicago, it elicited universal praise. That triumph would probably have been succeeded by another in February 1959 had not the death, from rheumatoid arthritis, of her brother Walter, at 43, forced Welty to cancel a trip to Chicago. The powerful Georgia writer Flannery O’Connor agreed to substitute for her. However, O’Connor’s visit was “awful,” according to Welty. O’Connor herself said later, “It was the most awful blizzard I landed in and–I got pneumonia.” In a letter to Welty, she also exclaimed, “I ought to hate you really.” Happily, she didn’t; in fact, when they met at a conference in South Carolina in 1962, they liked and admired each other. Years later, replying to a question at Vassar College about her relationship with O’Connor, Welty said, “Well, you know, Flannery talks about hell and damnation, and all I know about hell and damnation I got from Flannery O’Connor.”
Welty’s six remaining visits to the University of Chicago and the city were taxing but enjoyable. In October 1961, before an audience of 800, she presented a lecture on “Writing a Story” and read illustrative excerpts from her fiction. The next day she met informally with a large group of students in one of a series of programs called “My Life and Yours,” designed to introduce students to “leaders in a variety of fields.”
In May 1965, Welty read several of her stories before another big crowd in Mandel Hall. Her stay was short, but she remembered vividly the “lovely time, the May wine, I had” at the late afternoon party given by Perrin Lowrey and his wife, Janet. Perrin, a member of a prominent Mississippi family and also of the English department, was killed the following July in a car accident. Welty contributed to the education fund for the Lowrey children.
Welty’s 1973 visit to Chicago had been scheduled, long before, for the spring. However, the Mississippi Arts Festival for that year announced “A Eudora Welty Celebration,” and the governor declared May 2 Eudora Welty Day. Whereupon Welty wrote engaging letters inviting several Chicagoans to attend the festivities and saying that she “had dreamed” that the university had moved the date of her visit to the autumn. She added that she had been invited to present a paper in October during the international gathering sponsored by the University of Nebraska in honor of the centennial of Willa Cather’s birth, and she wondered whether she could stop off in Chicago after the conference.
Thus, four Hyde Parkers flew to Jackson for the lavish celebrations, the most important of which were the governor’s Outstanding Mississippian Award to Welty; a dramatic performance of her novel “The Ponder Heart”; and an after-theater party in the lush garden of a hospitable Jackson couple. In accordance with the revised schedule, Welty arrived in Chicago via the Burlington Zephyr on Oct. 29; read excerpts, some very funny, from her novel “Losing Battles” (1970), before a large, enthusiastic audience; and left on the 31st for New York, where she lectured at the Museum of Modern Art about her Depression photographs.
Her next visit, in 1980, her second longest, almost a week, may have been her busiest at the University of Chicago. Named the Emily Talbot lecturer, she lived in a dormitory and talked informally for three days to individual students and small groups about writing fiction. Her public performance consisted of a reading of several stories. A huge, lengthy reception followed the reading. When she left the next day, she remarked: “I’m both exhausted and exhilarated. I especially enjoyed talking to those bright students.”
Her sixth appearance in Chicago began not at the university but at the Caxton Club, consisting of book lovers. The club’s announcement of Welty’s presentation read: “Eudora Welty: A Caxton Club Coup!” And on Oct. 18, 1989, what was said to be the largest crowd in the history of the club gathered at the Midday Club to hear her read selections from her fiction. When she finished, she received a standing ovation. Afterward one member wrote, “Everyone in attendance sang her praises.”
During the evening, Welty met an associate director of the Art Institute, who, on learning that she had spent many hours there when she was young, invited Welty to be her special guest the next day. Welty accepted with immense pleasure, and after the unexpected event had occurred, she said, “The lunch was excellent, the conversation sparkling, and the Impressionists as glorious as ever.”
Welty’s final appearance, as a Moody lecturer, on May 26, 1992, was a dazzling tour de force. She had said that she would be happy to come but that she couldn’t prepare a new lecture. Therefore, the university came up with the idea of having her read relevant portions of “One Writer’s Beginnings” and then showing slides of some of her photographs and having her comment on them. The title chosen was “Making the Record: Photography & Writings.” Mandel Hall was packed, with some people standing; the crowd was estimated to be more than 1,000. When she got to the podium, everyone arose amid deafening applause. The chair introduced her, saying that “our speaker is an internationally celebrated woman who is diffident about her photographs.” He also operated the projector and asked the questions. Her ad lib answers were informative, often funny, often witty, always eloquent in describing her human subjects,who, she insisted as she always did, gave the snapshots all the merit they possessed. When she finished, the crowd rose again and the clapping was again deafening.
On leaving the university, Welty went to the Union League Club, where she was the friendly, unassuming guest of honor at a reception for Chicago-area alumni of Millsaps College in Jackson, of which Welty is a member of the board of trustees. The morning after the reception, my wife and I picked up Welty at the Union League Club, went to Berghoff’s for lunch–she remembered it from her college days–and then out to O’Hare, where she, with the aid of an attendant, boarded her plane back to Jackson. The University of Chicago’s most-often-named Moody lecturer had made her final visit at age 83.
From start to finish, from her childhood through her farewell visit in 1992, Eudora Welty’s experiences in the city and at the University of Chicago enhanced her joy of life remarkably, at the time and in retrospect. On countless occasions, she has said passionately, “I fell in love with Chicago as a child and I’ve loved it ever since.”
