The Clarity and the Mystery: Reading Eudora Welty

Editor's note: Elisabetta Rasy is a well-known Italian novelist and essayist. She was born in Rome, where she lives and works, but spent her childhood in Naples, the city where her family comes from. Her work includes The First Ecstasy (Mondadori 1985); Posillipo [a residential section of Naples] (Rizzoli 1997); The Science of Goodbyes (Rizzoli 2005); The Foreign Woman (Rizzoli 2007); and Memories of a Night-time Woman Reader (Rizzoli 2009). She is the author of many literary essays. Her short stories have been published in Italian and other-language anthologies, and her novels have been translated into several European languages. She is a contributor to the most authoritative Italian literary supplement, Il sole 24 ore. Rasy's essay, translated for EWR by Rosella Mamoli Zorzi and Gregory Dowling of the University of Venice, Ca' Foscari, was first presented at the November 2009 Venice Eudora Welty Centenary Conference.

It is not always easy for me, as a reader, to retrace my own steps. It is not always easy, I mean, to go back to a book which I have already read. It is not easy for me in particular when the book is one I have greatly loved and when a long time has elapsed since I read it; the book has become part of my interior landscape, which is not only a cultural landscape but is also a territory of the soul, and at the same time a part of my own personal history. In a small work I published recently, Memories of a Night-time Woman Reader, devoted both to my history as a reader and to some of my favorite women writers of the past century, I have underlined how important to me are the occasion and even the place where I read a book. Even if reading always transports us into another time and another space, it can happen, and it has happened to me, that the place and the time evoked by the book will interweave with the place and time of my own reading.

I am saying this because when I was invited to participate in this conference, a precise memory associated itself with the name Eudora Welty. It was a memory so intense that it made me overcome my reticence to speak among scholars who, unlike myself, have a deep and thorough knowledge of this writer. No—I should say this straight away—what unites me to Welty is not a profound knowledge, but an emotion, or it may be more precise to say the memory of an emotion: an emotion and a memory linked to one novel, Delta Wedding, the first book I read by this very special and extraordinary writer.

I believe writers are at the same time both the best and the worst possible readers, as they have a far from impartial relationship with the books they read, turning every reading into a personal affair. The story of the author hardly matters, the story of the book hardly matters, and the history of literature hardly matters; there is a bodily tussle which may be competition, envy, learning, rejection, indignation, sharing, appreciation, but also a very special form of admiration, which is in fact gratitude. I don't mean a purely intellectual gratitude. No, I mean gratitude of an existential nature: the feeling of being welcomed into a hospitable home, perhaps into the home we needed at that moment, even without being aware of it.

This is a preamble to legitimize a very personal reference as regards my relationship with Delta Wedding. I read this book twenty-nine years ago, in September 1980. I remember this well and will never forget it, because that was the seventh month of my pregnancy, before the birth of my first and only son. The seventh month had seemed threatening, and the doctor had prescribed forty days in bed to be on the safe side. This was an experience I had never had before, fortunately, not even during my long and tedious childhood illnesses. Moreover, I was not at all ill at the time, as I felt quite fit and...