Eudora Welty and the Writing Life

Throughout 2009, many celebrated the centennial year of the birth of Eudora Welty—April 13, 1909, in Jackson, Mississippi. She arrived a year before the visitation of Halley’s Comet, which we remember as having ushered Mark Twain in and out of the this world during its seventy-five year cycle. Welty writes in One Writer’s Beginnings that as an infant in arms she was carried to the window and shown the comet as she slept, a family story that likely came from a wealth of such memories of stargazing with her father. His telescope, with brass extensions, as Welty describes, exposed an awesome world—expansive and mysterious, with its comets and eclipses and numberless constellations. She writes that “bending behind me and guiding my shoulder, he positioned me at our telescope in the front yard and, with careful adjustment of the focus, brought the moon close to me” (OWB 848).

Both images, those of the infant and the young girl, forecast the story Welty will tell in One Writer’s Beginnings of how she came to be a writer. She was sheltered, and she was exposed. She was made acutely aware of all that lay beyond the sheltering, a world of mysteries and risks, of storied gods in the sky whose delights and pains were so like our own here on Earth. She describes her awareness, as a girl of six, of a passion for being consciously in the world, feeling and knowing. It is a passage reminiscent of Helen Keller’s moment at the well, when Helen discovers the symbolic power of language to connect the inner self with the outer world, the moment when teacher Annie Sullivan with her fingers spells “water” onto Helen’s hand. Welty writes:

In my sensory education I include my physical awareness of the word. Of a certain word, that is, the connection it has with what it stands for. At around age six, perhaps, I was standing by myself in our front yard waiting for supper, just at that hour in a late summer day when the sun is already below the horizon and the risen full moon in the visible sky stops being chalky and begins to take on light. There comes the moment, and I saw it then, when the moon goes from flat to round. For the first time it met my eyes as a globe. The word “moon” came into my mouth as though fed to me out of a silver spoon. Held in my mouth the moon became a word.

(847–48)

One may ask—my students do—is it likely that Welty, writing this memoir in her seventies, did actually remember this scene in such detail as she describes? No matter, an autobiography is not a life; it is a text, a narrative, a composed story. What is important to Welty here is to articulate for herself and her reader what the nature of writing is. How and why is it such a “daring” enterprise, as she calls it in the last sentence of her memoir (OWB 948)? In his essay, “The Mystery of Language,” Walker Percy reminds us that “language, symbolization, is the stuff of which our knowledge and awareness of the world are made, the medium through which we see the world” (151). Words connect us to the other and furnish an inner narrative by which we create our reality and the consciousness that we call “understanding.” In The Golden Apples, young Nina Carmichael says, “Spell it right and it’s real” (430).

I want to consider now some aspects of the writing life that Welty identifies as pleasurable and valuable to her personally. She never mentions, by the way, in her writings or interviews that fame or celebrity was in any way significant. In her recent biography of Welty, Suzanne Marrs calls her “perhaps the most honoraried writer in the history of American letters” (xi). There were indeed many awards—the Pulitzer, the French Legion of Honor, the Howells Medal for Fiction, the National Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of the Arts, membership in the American Academy of...