Eudora Welty, who was born on this day, in 1909, explained her popularity as a lecturer: “I’m so well behaved. I’m always on time, and I don’t get drunk or hole up in a motel with my lover.”
When Henry Miller set off to discover America, in October, 1940, there were several outstanding natives whom he was hoping to meet: Margaret Mitchell, Zora Neale Hurston, Walt Disney, Ernest Hemingway, and a little-known writer named Eudora Welty. Despite the alarmingly forward letter of introduction that Miller had sent her some time before, Welty—unfailingly courteous—received him as an honored guest.
Welty published her first story in 1936, when she was twenty-six. In the decades since then, the young author of wildly daring fictions has become a monument, the Pallas Athena of Jackson. She has received the Pulitzer Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom; the Municipal Library of Jackson has been renamed the Eudora Welty Library; and the Governor of Mississippi once decided that her birthday merited a statewide holiday.
It is telling that through the late thirties Welty tried to publish her stories and her photographs in a single volume. The impetus for what she knew to be her first genuine writing had come from the same shock of discovery—from her W.P.A. travels, when, as she put it, “my feelings were engaged by the outside world, I think for the first time.
At the story’s end, the wearied hero bids farewell, in a confusing speech of Yeatsian prophecy and horror, involving gold and slaves and buzzards and a planter who “makes a gesture of abundance with his riding whip.” A gesture of abundance? Welty was clearly struggling with some peculiarly knotted ideas.
“Everybody is asking about John Robinson these days,” Welty complained during an interview, in 1993. The role that Waldron gives him is indeed central—and justifiably so, in the light of his significance not only in Welty’s life but for her work. A tall and handsome man and an aspiring writer, Robinson became a friend of Welty’s in 1933, when he returned to Jackson from graduate school.
The inspiration for her first novel, “Delta Wedding,” was owed directly to John Robinson. In 1945, he suggested that Welty read the diaries of his great-great-grandmother, a Delta plantation mistress who recorded the events of her life from 1832 through 1870. The work that grew from this chronicle was a labor of love—in some ways literally, with Robinson reading each chapter as it was completed.
In the fall of 1946, Welty used her “Delta” money to follow Robinson to San Francisco, where he had moved after leaving the Army. She spent five months living alone in cheap single rooms, writing stories and nursing Robinson through colds and depressions, then returned to Jackson in the spring.
She hadn’t any choice. Her mother had undergone cataract surgery in 1955, and she did not recover well, becoming frailer and ever more demanding until her death, in 1966. Both of Welty’s brothers died in the same span of time. Only many years later, in “One Writer’s Beginnings,” did Welty acknowledge the heartfelt sacrifice and wild frustration of this period, her frantic scribblings at the steering wheel as she raced between hospitals.
There was one way left, for me to be ahead of you and stay ahead of you, by Dad, and I just taken it. Now I’m alive and you ain’t. We ain’t never now, never going to be equals and you know why? One of us is dead.
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