Excerpt from What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell

Eudora Welty and William Maxwell were friends for more than fifty years. Emily Maxwell, their daughters Kate and Brookie, and Welty's mother and nieces Elizabeth and Mary Alice joined the friendship with visits, letters, good wishes, and gifts, often of plant exchanges. The Maxwells had a house in Yorktown Heights, New York, and also an apartment in Manhattan where Welty was always welcomed. Welty and Maxwell had a literary friendship that included their shared passion for writing and for reading as well as their professional acquaintance as contributor to and editor for the The New Yorker. In What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, Suzanne Marrs—Welty biographer and friend—has collected more than 300 letters recording "a remarkable friendship and a lyrical homage to the forgotten art of letter writing," according to the publisher's note. Novelist Lee Smith comments, "If friendship is an art, this volume is its masterpiece—the complex rendering of two long, literate lives well-lived, always written with care, intelligence, grace, and even humor!"

The excerpt printed below with permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt concerns the writing and publishing of The Ponder Heart enmeshed in visits, reports on roses, and new stories. Galleys were read, marked, and sent back and forth from New York to Jackson. The novel appeared in the The New Yorker in a single issue, December 5, 1953, and as a book the next month on January 7, 1954, published by Harcourt, Brace and Company.

Letters from What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, edited by Suzanne Marrs to be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in May 2011. Copyright © 2011 by Suzanne Marrs, Emily Brooke Maxwell, Katharine Farrington Maxwell, and Eudora Welty, LLC. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

In mid-January 1953, Eudora arrived in New York and spent the next six weeks there. During that time, she worked on a novella to be called The Ponder Heart, and one day she read the entire novella to Bill and Emmy Maxwell. In 1988, Bill recalled that day: "I see Eudora standing by the window with the manuscript in her hands. It went on all morning and all afternoon, as I remember, with time out for lunch. As a reader Eudora is better than a whole company of actors and when I am moved to laughter, it is often accompanied by tears of amusement. I shed them all through the first half of the book but was dry-eyed during the second half, not because it wasn't funny, but because the tear glands gave up."¹³

Emily Maxwell [Maxwell's wife] to Eudora Welty, April 10, 1953

Dear Eudora,

We loved hearing from you, and here are the pictures to remind us all of that lovely day of reading. Bill is very amused by the one where you and he are worrying the ending.

I thought your review of Jerry's stories was penetrating and beautiful—Like the best reviews it was within rather than outside the stories themselves.¹⁴

It's 11:00 o'clock, and we are boarding the boat at 1:00, with sandwiches, chocolate cake, and champagne. It is raining hard, but I love to see rain coming down on the water.¹⁵

Thank you for sending the letters from the high school student—weren't they lovely!

I must close as we are really leaving now—

With love from both of us—
Emmy

William Maxwell to Eudora Welty, July 17, 1953, Telegram

THE NEW YORKER HAS TAKEN THE PONDER HEART. SHAWN AND LOBRANO BOTH FEEL IT IS A CLASSIC OF AMERICAN WRITING. YOU KNOW HOW HAPPY I AM=
BILL

Eudora Welty to William Maxwell, July 17, 1953

Dear Bill,

Thank you for that wire. It was the nicest way to tell me. What marvelous news, it keeps on astonishing my head. How far from our heads that day we read the story was the thought we'd meet over it again some day...