Eudora Welty
By Suzanne Marrs
Harcourt, 652 pages, $28,
IN the introduction to Suzanne Marrs’ “Eudora Welty,” the late Mississippi author tells her biographer ” ‘it’s good to know something about a writer’s background, but only what pertains.’ “
But “only what pertains” is a qualification loaded with undefined implications. One is free to take the “only” as a relatively severe, exclusive directive to exercise discrimination in setting down the facts of a life out of which–in Welty’s case–the stories and novels somehow came. Or the “only” may be applied in the inclusive sense of anything and everything that happened to her; in which case, nothing is irrelevant, there is nothing that doesn’t pertain.
In her biography of more than 650 pages, Marrs clearly is committed to the inclusive approach. This is a mixed blessing, because in Welty’s later years, when she had problems writing fiction, her social life of travel, of entertaining and being entertained, constitute most of what is there to be described. (The biographer’s overused trope has “Eudora” getting together with so-and-so for “drinks and dinner.”)
Marrs is determined to counter what she sees as a misleading image of Welty, as put forward in an earlier biography by Ann Waldron and in a New Yorker profile by Claudia Roth Pierpoint. As Marrs quotes Welty’s good friend, novelist Reynolds Price, she was thought of by some in her later years as ” ‘the Benign and Beamish Maiden Aunt of American Letters,’ ” rather than the worldy and witty figure her friends knew her to be. In seeking to replace the maiden aunt cliche with a more realistic portrait of the writer, Marrs gives careful attention to Welty’s intense and extended relationships with two men: John Robinson, with whom, in the eyes of some, marriage seemed a possibility; and Kenneth Millar, who wrote detective fiction under the name Ross Macdonald. Robinson’s homosexual impulses won out; Marrs quotes him as saying he loved Welty too much to marry her. Millar, who was already married, saw Welty only a few times (when she was in her 60s) before he became a victim of Alzheimer’s disease, but their correspondence is charged with deep feeling on both sides.
Strongly evident throughout Welty’s life are her friendships with all sorts of people, from the local Mississippians with whom she grew up, to Northern literary folk like her beloved agent, Diarmuid Russell, and her New Yorker editor, William Maxwell, to fellow writers like Katherine Anne Porter (who gave her an initial boost in a preface to Welty’s first collection of stories), Elizabeth Bowen and V.S. Pritchett. Anyone who had the privilege of encountering her (I did twice when she visited Massachusetts) knew how unforgettably vivid a presence, and a vividly humorous presence, she was.
Marrs, who teaches writing and literature at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss., Welty’s hometown, met the writer in 1983 and kept in close touch with her for the remaining 18 years of her life. Three years ago she published a book about Welty’s fiction (“One Writer’s Imagination”), and her biography eschews any detailed analysis of that fiction. Instead Marrs takes us through, in greater detail than anyone has done before, Welty’s schooling at Jackson’s Central High School and her two years at the Mississippi State College for Women, then her more focused study of literature at the University of Wisconsin, where she received her bachelor of arts degree. There followed (oddly, it may seem) a year studying advertising at Columbia University’s School of Business, the most significant part of which must have been her exploration of theater and other New York cultural events.
Then came a return to Jackson, freelance writing of various sorts and, most interestingly, her travels about Mississippi during the Depression, when she worked for the Works Progress Administration and took the photographs of people and places that would eventually be gathered into the handsome book “Eudora Welty: Photographs” (1989).
The latter years of the 1930s were brilliantly productive ones, as she published her first story, “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” followed by others (many in the Southern Review) that would make up her first volume, “A Curtain of Green” (1941). These include such diverse productions as the beautiful title story, the comic grotesqueries of highly anthologized ones like “Petrified Man” and “Why I Live at the P.O.,” and the original “Powerhouse,” her homage to Fats Waller. In one of the earliest stories, “A Memory,” a young woman confesses that, “To watch everything about me I regarded grimly and possessively as a need,” an activity that can lead to terror–to “a vision of abandonment and wildness which tore my heart with a kind of sorrow.” This early declaration of the fiction writer’s vision is one Welty never renounced, and it gives, even in the stories most full of idiomatic comedy, a hint of something deeper, of life as (to quote Alexander Pope) “a long, exact, and serious comedy.”
In her introduction to “A Curtain of Green,” Porter, while full of praise for Welty as a story writer, suggested she might not be capable of writing a novel, adding that there was no reason why she should do so. Porter may have been projecting a bit, given her own years of struggle to write “Ship of Fools,” a large vessel that quickly sank; and indeed, Welty went on to publish five novels. But only the last of them, “The Optimist’s Daughter” (1972), which was also her last completed work of fiction, can be read with sustained interest and pleasure. Like Porter, and like Flannery O’Connor, she excelled in the shorter flight–although some of those flights do go on for 60 pages or more, as in Porter’s “Noon Wine” or O’Connor’s great “The Displaced Person.” In Welty’s case, her single finest achievement, in this reader’s judgment, is the 75-page “June Recital,” from “The Golden Apples” (1949), her collection of related stories focused on a mythical Mississippi town.
With its shifting narration and its blend of tragicomedy, “June Recital” is too complex and various to describe here, but in its conclusion, an old, now-deranged piano teacher, Miss Eckhart, and her once-prize pupil, Virgie Rainey, confront and do not speak to one another. It is an occasion for Cassie Morrison, watching from her bedroom window and surely a Welty surrogate, to understand that the two women “were human beings terribly at large, roaming on the face of the earth . . . like lost beasts.” As Cassie falls asleep, a line from Yeats’ early poem “The Song of Wandering Aengus” (a poem Welty loved and from which she took the golden apples of her collection’s title) surfaces in her mind: “Because a fire was in my head.” The extraordinarily moving conclusion to “June Recital” serves to distinguish Welty from the hard-nosed, sometimes cruel though very funny satire of O’Connor, in that Welty’s sentences aspire, for want of a better word, to poetry. She is always, at her best, a difficult writer, because she perpetually sought to find language extravagant enough to express her visions of abandonment and wildness.
Marrs is concerned to defend her subject from a charge by Price that in the last three or more decades of her life, Welty was “emotionally and physically . . . gravely deprived,” and that her inability to write fiction during those years was a consequence of that deprivation. By way of answer, Marrs points to Welty’s continuing, outgoing response to friends and to the natural world. There is no question that the “arduous, nomadic routine” of her “incessant trips” had much to do with keeping things in motion when sitting at the desk and writing no longer seemed to work. She never, it seems, turned down any invitation; notably, she received 39 honorary degrees from academic institutions.
In the 1970s she wrote draft after draft of what was to be, in Marrs’ words, “a long story about an interracial rape in the contemporary South.” It was never completed. One of the last two stories she did finish was “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” Written after the murder of Medgar Evers, it elicited from O’Connor, who liked Welty as a person but disliked the story, the remark (not mentioned by Marrs), “The topical is poison.”
Certainly for a writer as visionary about the poetry of human wanderings as Eudora Welty, the contemporary, the “topical,” would have been a drag and a hindrance on her more inward expressive impulses. In this she is like the young Cassie Morrison at the end of “June Recital,” who “did not see except in dreams that a face looked in; that it was the grave, unappeased, and radiant face, once more and always, the face that was in the poem.”
