Free Eudora!

When Eudora Welty died in July 2001, at the age of 92, her last major publication was almost two decades behind her, One Writer's Beginnings (1984), an autobiographical memoir delivered in 1983 as the William E. Massey, Sr., Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University. Southerners in general, and Mississippians in particular, have had vexed relationships with Harvard. Harvard is where Henry Adams first encountered Southerners, one of whom was Robert E. Lee's son "Roony," about whom Adams wrote the choice line: "Strictly, the Southerner had no mind; he had temperament" (57). Quentin Compson's fictional corpse still haunts the Charles River. More recently, Rick Bragg, from Alabama, revealed in his memoir, All Over but the Shoutin' (1997), that Harvard got under his Southern skin, too: his Nieman Fellowship tenure began in defensive alienation and almost ended in fisticuffs when he offered to beat the crap out of a snooty Yankee at a Harvard banquet (223).

What goes around, in literary history as in life, comes around, and so Mississippian Eudora Welty, one of the finest "temperaments" in the nation's literature, became an official fixture in the "history of American civilization" with Harvard's blessing. Fifteen years later, in 1998, she was the first living American writer to have an authoritative edition of her work published by the Library of America. From what she hailed in One Writer's Beginnings as "the sheltered life" (104), Welty literally burst upon the public in her 70s and 80s as an icon. A similar late-life debut happened to her fellow Mississippian, William Faulkner, whose books were mostly out of print when he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949. Welty clearly savored the irony of the commemorative postage stamp issued in Faulkner's honor in 1987 (On William Faulkner 74). If someone relieved of duty at the Ole Miss post office for neglect of same can eventually appear on a stamp, can a stamp honoring the author of "Why I Live at the P.O." be far behind?

Celebrity status was a mixed blessing. If Welty was more temperament than activist during her long life, she became a focus for activists with the publication of her autobiographical memoir. Her admirers, of whom there are many, hailed One Writer's Beginnings as proof that an "ordinary" woman's life could produce extraordinary art. One need not possess the hauteur of Katherine Anne Porter, the terminal illness of Flannery O'Connor, or the bisexual verve of Carson McCullers to make a mark in literary history. But late-blooming fame pulled Welty unwillingly into the vortex of contemporary gender issues. The late Carolyn Heilbrun, in Writing a Woman's Life, expressed skepticism about Welty's unconflicted representation of her life as daughter, woman, and writer. "I do not believe in the bittersweet quality of One Writer's Beginnings," Heilbrun declares; "nor do I suppose that the Eudora Welty there evoked could have written the stories and novels we have learned to celebrate" (14). Furthermore, Heilbrun asserts, such "[n]ostalgia, particularly for childhood, is likely to be a mask for unrecognized anger" (15). Heilbrun's recent suicide, for no apparent reason other than to assert her control over her life in the leaving of it, gives her criticism an eerie echo.

Welty's defenders, loathe to admit anger in her life or writing, immediately went on the offensive. Gail L. Mortimer's Daughter of the Swan: Love and Knowledge in Eudora Welty's Fiction, for example, sought to bring the center of gravity of the Welty discussion back from anger to love. But despite book-length studies such as Mortimer's and numerous articles and conference presentations, the battle had been renewed between those who wanted a Welty embroiled in the gender issues and politics of her time and those who preferred to see her serenely above local circumstances, protected by trump cards such as "love" and "knowledge," the mainstays of Mortimer's title, and most recently by "imagination," the elusive...