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  • Virtuoso Variations:Welty's Unstable Texts and Her Outtakes
  • Jan Nordby Gretlund

"[W]hen communication does happen, the style is in effect beyond praise."

—Eudora Welty, "Words into Fiction" 143

Eudora Welty was the master of many styles in her life and in her writing. Her style changed in accordance with the occasion and there are, of course, marked differences between her public, personal, and private styles. It is obvious to any reader that her literary style is deliberately varied, from short story to short story and novel to novel, and also that she changed her style much over the years. It is perhaps less known that there are wonderfully fascinating elements in Welty's impressive style and mental make-up that are most clearly expressed in her correspondence, interviews, and outtakes.

Her most endearing feature was perhaps the temper and humor with which she defended her friends among fellow authors, attacked literary critics' "silly notions" about her fiction, and rejected interviewers' too easily acquired assumptions about her life and work. And she did this in a style that was anything but literary. I will illustrate this with examples from her deleted passages, her matter-of-fact correspondence with me, and the two long interviews she graciously granted me and later proofread—without mercy.

During our interview sessions in February 1978, Welty spoke slowly and deliberately, and in a voice that held my full attention. It soon became clear to me that she was carefully guarding her privacy and refused to answer all personal questions. The first session lasted almost three hours—Welty gave the transcribed interviews her full attention, revised certain passages heavily, and cut a good number of other exchanges. Some were simply superfluous, as she saw immediately, others were too privately biographical, she insisted. There were among them passages that I hated to leave out.

Our second meeting in Jackson was in June 1978, and it lasted for about two hours. First we went over some of the revisions of the first interview, that is, I pleaded to be allowed to keep certain passages, without much [End Page 117] luck. Next I asked new questions, which were then reviewed by Welty and returned to me by mail, and much good material was reduced or deleted for various, sometimes mysterious reasons.

The 1993 interview was also carefully weeded by Welty and returned to me. So the interviews, as they now stand, were edited, revised, accepted, and authorized by Welty, for which I am grateful. But the interviews as published are without some highlights and fine passages that were removed by the author and not necessarily for literary reasons. It is this experience that makes me ask: what else did we lose at the editing stage? What artistic literary highlights, which might at one time have been removed for valid immediate personal reasons, can we now recover in good conscience?

When she collected her most famous essay "Place in Fiction," in The Eye of the Story, Welty cut three paragraphs or twenty-four lines. On proof page 129 for the collection, she asked Albert Erskine in a marginal note: "Albert—don't you think the essay could do without any of this? (I'd already cut part of the discussion of this point.) I feel it is dated & weakening probably. E." (Galley 70, qtd. in Marrs 22). I suggest that Welty was not always a good editor of her own material; and that her motivations for cutting were mostly non-literary. The distinction she claimed persistently between private and personal is not a good tool, because the distinction is not always clear. In our correspondence she chastised me for being too inquisitive about her "private," or was it, "personal" life. The other distinction, the one between political and literary, was easier to apply and Welty did. The version of "Place in Fiction" that we use as Welty scholars is perhaps not the best. We should note that many of her texts exist in multiple versions so that it makes sense to talk of the unstable text. At times it is more important to know the dates of Welty's revisions than it is to know the original date of...

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