“The Inspired Child of [Her] Times”: Eudora Welty as a Twentieth-Century Artist

It is of course the way of writing that gives a story, however humble, its whole distinction and glory—something learned, and learned each writer for himself, by dint of each story’s unique challenge and his work that rises to meet it—work scrupulous, questioning, unprecedented, ungeneralized, unchartered and his own.

—Eudora Welty, “How I Write” 242

When asked to define what made her into a writer for the lectures that would inaugurate the William E. Massey, Sr., Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard in April 1983, Eudora Welty chose to open the series with a remarkable cosmogony. On the first page of what became One Writer’s Beginnings, she writes the creation of the world of her childhood as very American, very progressive with a passion for discovery, new technology, and a sense of wonder. Though deconstructed, this cosmogony is represented by three elements that function together as in a painting by Kandinsky: time, space, and modern technology to see beyond appearances. First are sound effects associated with clock time, chronology, and genealogy—her Swiss ancestors. Then is an awareness of space, within the house, abroad in Europe, and beyond with the immensity of the cosmos apprehended through her father’s telescope. That telescope, which Loch Morrison, a young figure of the artist, uses to spy on his neighbors in “June Recital,” symbolizes in this emblematic cosmogony the scientific discoveries that so radically changed the perception of the universe, of time and space, with Einstein’s theory of relativity, which Welty fictionalized in her magnificent representation of the artist. “My father loved all instruments that would instruct and fascinate” (OWB 839), such as those held in the drawer of the library table: a folding Kodak, a magnifying glass, a kaleidoscope, and a gyroscope. All three children received the same questioning, future-oriented education that culminated for Eudora with two years at the University of Wisconsin plus one year in New York at Columbia. Welty had been fully trained at home and at school to explore, understand, and make the most of what the twentieth century would offer her. I propose to show how in her fiction and essays she was both the child and the thinker of twentieth-century creativity.

Invited to give a speech for Willa Cather’s centenary in 1974, in her praise of two American writers with whom she felt some spiritual kinship—Willa Cather and Mark Twain—Welty stressed the adequation of the work with its times as it reflects the artist’s prodigious desire to explore new territories and invent new techniques, thus expressing her own attitude towards fiction writing:

Who can move best but the inspired child of his times? Whose story should better be told than that of the youth who has contrived to cut loose from ties and go flinging himself might and main, in every bit of his daring, in joy of life not to be denied, to vaunt himself in the love of vaunting, in the marvelous curiosity to find out everything, over the preposterous length and breadth of an opening new world, and in so doing to be one with it?

(ES 51–52, emphasis mine)

If for a moment we may be tempted to take the “opening new world” literally since Cather’s and Twain’s times were those of the last frontier, of the opening of the whole American continent, we soon realize the power of Welty’s metaphor, heralding modernity itself and the twentieth century on its way: “The works of these two are totally unalike,” she writes, “except in their very greatest respects, except in being about something big, in the apprehension of the new, and in movement, tireless movement in its direction” (ES 51). Her superb formula, “the inspired child of his times,” addresses the question of the interpenetration of contemporary culture with fiction.

Welty’s critical awareness, her commitment to the writing of fiction with its exhilarating challenges and constant questioning, and her passion for all that concerned her times have shaped her narrative strategies and fed her...