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A Sense of Place h Eudora Welty has chronicled the legends and landscape of her native state of Mississippi with such tireless brilliance that she herself has become a legendary ‹xture of that landscape. As a young and unknown writer, she was an enthusiastic cicerone to the likes of Henry Miller (exploring the South for his “Air-Conditioned Nightmare” of depression America) and the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen. Who wouldn’t want to be shown around the ghost towns of the old Natchez Trace—the buffalo track turned Indian trail turned pioneer road—by Eudora Welty? In the following passage, from a vivid travel essay of 1944 called “Some Notes on River Country,” she summons up a vanished world from the landscape of the Trace: Winding through this land unwarned, rounding to a valley, you will come on a startling thing. Set back in an old gray ‹eld, with horses grazing like small fairy animals beside it, is a vast ruin— twenty-two Corinthian columns in an empty oblong and an L. Almost seeming to ›oat like lace, bits of wrought-iron balcony connect them here and there. Live cedar trees are growing from the iron black acanthus leaves, high in the empty air. This is the ruin of Windsor, long since burned. It used to have ‹ve stories and an observation tower—Mark Twain used the tower as a sight when he was pilot on the river. We see in the mind’s eye both the ruin and the empty air, but also a second layer of fantasy: the ›oating lace, the fairy animals, the ‹ve stories, and Mark Twain in the tower. In such passages, Welty 181 gives us what Wallace Stevens called “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Like Goethe in Weimar or Emerson in Concord, Eudora Welty, who died in 2001, became one of the obligatory sights of a tour of Mississippi. So V. S. Naipaul, making his “Turn in the South” in 1988, paid a formal call on her in Jackson. They talked about the presence of the frontier in her stories, and the temperament of the southern frontiersman. “Scare everybody, outwit everybody, beat everybody, kill everybody—that’s the frontiersman ’s mentality,” Welty explained. Then she quickly added that the violence in Mississippi was “not nearly as frightening as the Northern—urban—brand.” (Her much celebrated story of the murder of Medgar Evers, “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” is to some degree an attempt to blame southern racism on the rednecks , descendants of those “kill everybody” frontiersmen.) Naipaul, so conscious of the cultural privations of his own Caribbean homeland, wondered if living in “a frontier state” had been a limitation for Welty “as a writer, and as a woman writer.” Characteristically she dodged the second part of the question— she always refused the designation of “woman writer”—and reassured Naipaul that the “great variety of people” in Mississippi had given her plenty to write about. “In a place that hasn’t changed much you get to know the generations. You can see the whole narrative of a town’s history or a family’s history.” Her own family history is woven into two late works, a tightly plotted novella of 1972 called The Optimist’s Daughter and her relaxed autobiographical memoir, ‹rst delivered as a set of lectures at Harvard, called One Writer’s Beginnings (1984). Both these performances are thoroughly literary, crafted, and cagey about intimate details. Welty will write till the cows come home about the commanding presence of her father, a native Ohioan (and thus something of a latter-day carpetbagger) who made good as an insurance executive in Jackson. Her mother’s Yankee upbringing on a mountaintop in West Virginia, with a slew of left-handed, banjo-picking brothers, is another scenario Welty never tires of. She ends her memoir with an often quoted summation: “As you have seen, I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from 182 within.” There’s a quiet allusion here to a once famous novel of the South by Ellen Glasgow called A Sheltered Life, a novel in which the title is ironic. (The South must overcome its “sheltered ” past and enter the modern, merciless world of technology and commerce.) There’s also a ‹erce protection of privacy in Welty’s phrasing: don’t look for the daring because you’ll...

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