Vision and Revision in Eudora Welty's "Death of a Traveling Salesman"

VISION AND REVISION IN EUDORA WELTY'S "DEATH OF A TRAVELING SALESMAN" Lawrence Jay Dessner* The much admired and widely anthologized story "Death of a Traveling Salesman" was the first story Eudora Welty wrote,1 the first one she thought "good,"2 the first one she submitted for publication "anywhere ,"3 and, in 1936, the first one accepted for publication, in Manuscript .4 When, in 1979, as part of a tribute to Miss Welty, The Georgia Review reprinted the story as it was first published, its author remarked in an accompanying essay that she had forgotten that the story "had undergone changes since its original publication." She recalled that while she was preparing materials for her first collection of stories, A Curtain of Green (1941), the typescript had been lost in the mail. Welty found that "it is almost impossible to type over your own words without changing as you go, and evidently I yielded to various temptations in typing 'Salesman'."5 Welty's reminiscences about the revisions she was tempted to make, while interesting and surely useful, are also misleadingly modest in that they do not do justice to the elaborateness of the revisions or to their significance.6 Analysis of these revisions and of Welty's remarks about them may shed light on this much discussed and debated story as well as on Welty's methods of composition. Welty recalled that "the seed of the story" had been nothing more philosophical, literary, or political7 than an anecdote a friend related to her in which occurred the words "he's gone to borry some fire." "Prometheus was in my mind almost at the instant," Welty remembered, but the Promethean figure most readers of the story know as "Sonny" had been "Rafe" in the original text. His new name "helped make the relationship of the man and woman one that Bowman could mistake at the beginning; and at the same time it harked back to the fire-bringer."8 The only other specific change Welty discussed in 1979 concerned "introducing an element of the salesman's life that very likely belonged in the story" but which Welty did not "know . . . enough [about] to bring . . . in at all," his sexual history. Welty deleted a reference to Bowman's early experience with a prostitute {Georgia, p. 769) and added, elsewhere, a 'Lawrence Jay Dessner is a Professor of English at the University of Toledo. His publications include a book on Charlotte Brontë, a textbook on creative writing, and articles on Dickens, George Eliot, Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and others. He has work in progress on Thomas Hardy and Anthony Trollope. 146Lawrence Jay Dessner vaguer reference to his sexual life {Stories, pp. 119-20). Welty did not think the change an improvement.9 Even a casual examination of the two versions of the story shows that it has undergone a much more thorough overhaul than Welty's recollections suggest. Many of the revisions made to "Death of a Traveling Salesman" were clearly done with the early version of a word processor Welty "made ... up for [her]self." She told an interviewer that working on a newspaper provided a model for this method: "I got in the habit of tearing off the strip, both what I wanted to save and what I wanted to throw away; so that I ended up with strips—paragraphs here, a section of dialogue, and so on. I pin them together and then when I want to cut something, I cut it with scissors." With pins, "you can move it, you can transpose. It's wonderful. It gives you a feeling of great moveability."10 This was surely how much of "Death of a Traveling Salesman" was revised, and a great many pins were needed to reassemble the innumerable sentences and paragraphs to which Eudora Welty took her scissors. Such complex structural changes are difficult to display systematically or summarize briefly, but something of the flavor of what Welty was doing to her text can be suggested by looking at what she was doing to some individual sentences, the story's first sentence for instance. (In this and subsequent parallel passages, words unique to either version are bolded. When...