What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell (review)

One of my favorite passages in What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, edited by Suzanne Marrs, comes in a 1953 letter from Welty to Maxwell responding to The New Yorker’s suggested corrections for “The Ponder Heart.” Welty writes, “I yield to The New Yorker in punctuation for knowing better than I do, except in a few cases where I restored the dash for reasons of Edna Earle’s speech or character. She’s essentially a lady of dashes, I think, with lots of after-thoughts and sudden additions to what she’s saying, and not a lady of the considered semicolon” (50). Welty’s insistence on this point confirms that her vision of her world and characters, vast though it was, found expression in even the minutest detail.

Such exchanges are among the great strengths of this volume, a collection that spans fifty-four years of correspondence. Maxwell, an accomplished writer of fiction himself, was an editor at The New Yorker who advocated for Welty’s work and became her lifelong friend. What There Is to Say both chronicles their deepening friendship and provides insights into Welty’s formal and informal working relationship with Maxwell—although not, it must be said, in equal measure. Readers—and I must confess that I am one of them—who are more interested in the development of Welty’s craft than the cultivation of her intimacies may finish the book slightly disappointed that discussions such as the one above are not more numerous. But to complain overmuch about the paucity of spirited punctuation-related debates would be to judge the book for what one might have wished it to be rather than what it is—an “autobiography of a friendship,” as Marrs aptly puts it in her introduction (15).

In that regard, the book succeeds admirably, effectively communicating how much Welty and Maxwell came to mean to each other over the course of their lives. It is clear that Welty valued Maxwell’s enthusiasm for her writing and, perhaps more importantly, his sympathetic comprehension of her ambitions. As she writes to him in the wake of some negative reviews of The Ponder Heart, “Of course I mind the bad notices but strangely enough they’re just like the good ones, and don’t seem to pertain to the work of the story. It’s still just that and what a handful of people think that can matter” (69). Maxwell and his wife Emmy, some of whose correspondence with Welty is also included in the volume, were clearly among that handful, offering support and encouragement in times when she wrote only with great difficulty, if at all. Commenting on an early draft of the work that would become Losing Battles, Maxwell frames Welty’s laborious progress on the manuscript as a virtue, writing, “It … has the richness of being the only thing you have been working on all these years” (152). And he urges Welty not to abandon the lush texture so crucial to the novel, exhorting her, “don’t whatever you do cut any of the physical description of the place, the night, the moon, etc” (152). (Good advice for a blocked writer, to be sure, although I confess to feeling mildly insulted when Maxwell writes in praise of the finished novel, “Only a very obtuse reader could want the book any shorter” [261]. Well, I’ve been called worse things.) And when we read a 1978 letter from Welty describing a collage she received from Joseph Cornell in the late 1930s, in which she tells Maxwell, “when I find it I will send it to you to join in my astonishment (which no one else ever did),” we can understand how he and Emmy provided a connection to the larger world of art and literature that may have felt enormously distant from Jackson...