Happy birthday, Miss Welty page 1, 2

In fact, Welty's experience of the world was anything but parochial. From her early 20s onward Welty made innumerable trips east, especially to New York, where she was an avid theatergoer and struck up enthusiastic friendships with writers and editors, even working at the New York Times Book Review for a spell. She also lived for a few months in San Francisco (one of the stories in "The Golden Apples" is a veritable walking tour of the city and describes her daily streetcar ride to the beach) and traveled in Europe, the inspiration for many of the stories in "The Bride of the Innisfallen."

But if travel opened Welty's mind, her true subject was always her inner landscape. Welty would not have earned her status in the American canon if she had merely invented traveling salesmen or provincial beauticians or old black grandmothers or little girls dreaming through storms. What distinguishes her fiction is the way she parts a curtain for her characters -- often observers, outsiders, travelers like herself -- allowing them fleeting glimpses of some truth they'll never be able to hold onto. In one of many eloquent soliloquies delivered by a Welty character, an adolescent camper on the cusp of adulthood in the story "Moon Lake" thinks of how pears begin to turn brown as they are eaten: "It's not the flowers that are fleeting," she thinks, "it's the fruits -- it's the time when things are ready that they don't stay."

Welty's legendary powers of observation -- undoubtedly honed during her travels, camera in hand, for the WPA -- were obvious from her first book, "A Curtain of Green and Other Stories." In this strange and affecting collection, Welty laid virtually all of her stylistic and thematic cards on the table: her knife-edged ability to render place, her fascination with journeys, her virtuosity with metaphor and description and her characteristic plot, a meandering, nonlinear story that resolves itself -- or doesn't -- in ways wholly impossible to anticipate. The effect is that of entering an elevator in which a fateful conversation is already taking place -- and your only choice is to get off at your own floor. Most of Welty's best-known stories, including "Why I Live at the P.O.," come from this book, which also displays how acutely she understood the stilted mysteries of relationships between men and women. "Women?" the then-admittedly virginal Welty wrote in "Death of a Traveling Salesman," "He could only remember little rooms within little rooms, like a nest of Chinese paper boxes, and if he thought of one woman he saw the worn loneliness that the furniture of that room seemed built of."

There is nothing of the prudish old maid, nothing innocent, about Welty's fiction. Not only does she not flinch at the most vivid of sexual situations, she exhibits an almost frightening insight into the nuances of sexual conduct and married life. In "Sir Rabbit," a young wife is raped in the woods by a Pan-like character with whose twin boys she once literally rolled in the hay. Another young wife, reuniting with her husband after a year's separation, "slid in her hand and seized hold of him right at the root." In "Music From Spain," a year after a beloved child's death a husband slaps his stunned wife across the breakfast table, "without the least idea why he did it." And in a fantastically pagan, archetypal scene in the novel "Losing Battles," a bride is forced to the ground by her assembled female relatives, who cram her mouth and smear her wedding dress with watermelon.

"The Optimist's Daughter" is the most overtly autobiographical of her books. Written in response to the recent deaths of her mother and younger brother, the book's protagonist is Laurel McKelva Hand, an artist nursing a complicated, long-buried grief. Laurel has returned to her family home to be with her father during his eye surgery, but he dies while convalescing in a New Orleans hospital, leaving Laurel to contend with his selfish, oblivious second wife, her mother's wretched death years before and her widowhood -- Laurel's young husband was killed shortly after their marriage during World War II. As the novel opens, Laurel remarks that "some things don't bear going into"; by book's end, after her father's funeral and an inescapable pull back into memory, Laurel has removed herself from the category of "those who never know the meaning of what has happened to them."

Welty seems to have used "The Optimist's Daughter" to discover for herself the meaning of what had happened in her own life. Laurel's mother, Becky McKelva, is clearly based on Chestina Welty: Like Chestina, Becky missed the West Virginia mountains where she grew up with a widowed mother and five banjo-playing, storytelling brothers. At 15, Chestina had taken her father, whose appendix had ruptured, by river raft and then train to Baltimore, where he died; Becky makes the same terrible journey. "Your mother died a crazy!" Laurel's stupid stepmother taunts, and Laurel is forced to think back on her mother's angry suffering, described in terms not dissimilar to Chestina Welty's final years, during which Eudora was completely occupied by the needs of her family. Laurel's father's optimism -- a reference to his determined desire for his wife's torments to turn out all right, an unrealistic hope that only caused her mother more frustration and that Laurel cannot easily forgive -- is clarified further in "One Writer's Beginnings," in which Welty recalls her mother labeling her father "an optimist" with a sigh. "You're a good deal of a pessimist, sweetheart," Welty's father replied.

Looking back over her parents' "blunders," Laurel is ultimately freed by disturbing the "old perfection" of the past, despite the losses and regrets that rise to the surface. And yet, knowing how closely linked the emotions, if not the fictionalized events, in this book are to Welty's own life, it's hard to ignore the autobiographical sting of its most sorrowful moment: when Laurel dreams up her dead husband, "wild with the craving for his unlived life," crying out, "I wanted it!" "I tell my innermost secrets through my fiction. It's all there," Welty stated in a late interview. How can one not imagine her, then, weeping like Laurel McKelva Hand "for what happened to life," the voice of her lost love rising with the wind in the night and becoming a roar?

Back in 1943, when what Welty wanted most was to succeed as a writer, she got a fan letter. She had just published her third book, "The Wide Net," in which many of the characters are somehow isolated, cut off from the world; most of the reviews were disheartening, calling her work "puzzling" and "obscure." But a letter came that assured Welty that "You are doing fine. You are doing all right ..." It was signed "Faulkner."

Forty years later, Eudora Welty gave a speech honoring the memory of her fellow Mississippian, whose work she once characterized as "twice as true as life" and whom she admired more than any other writer. "Faulkner sees with the eyes of the artist and can make us see what is here and at the same time through it to the truth about it, the human truth," Welty said. The same could be said of her own work, though her famous modesty would never allow her to say it. Eudora Welty sees with the eyes of an artist, but her vision has always been that of a woman who has lived.
salon.com | April 13, 1999

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