Eudora Welty: An Introduction

I was attending a college called Belhaven in Jackson, Mississippi, when A Curtain of Green appeared. Some of us there, getting a bit weary of our relentless education in how to become ladies, had taken up with literature and were well along with our own notions about it. I myself had recently got back to where I had started in the ignorant dreams of childhood, and was now daring to say again that I was going to be a Writer, yes, indeed, which is one way to get yourself elected president of the literary society; the other members being somewhat more cautious used to say they might decide to write, if they “had time,” which meant, I guess, if they didn’t get married right away or find something else more important to do. Our meetings were monthly; they lagged and got boring when nobody had a new story to read, and we used to sit there eating fudge squares and complaining about routine, which dulled our inspiration and blighted our native talent.

It gave us quite a pause to read in the paper when A Curtain of Green appeared that there was somebody right across the street (Belhaven is bordered on the South by Pinehurst Avenue) whose inspiration had not been dulled by routine and whose native talent was unblighted. We decided we ought to call her in for advice, or at least in order to look at her close up, always taking it for granted, I guess, that she would be more than delighted to look at us.

How it happened I don’t recall—maybe we drew straws—but it fell my lot to invite her.

As the time approached for actually doing this, I grew more and more nervous. I don’t think it would have bothered any of the other members to have picked up the phone and have respectfully invited Miss Welty to a meeting of the Belhaven Literary Society. I had consented to this because it mattered, but for that very reason it got harder every minute. When I finally dialed the Welty house I had to hang on to the receiver with two hands, both trembling. One of the world’s softest voices said: “Hello.” (Why I thought it would say anything else, is a mystery.) Somehow I got my message out: Would she come and talk to us? Well, no, she didn’t make speeches. (Oh.) But, she would love to come and just be a guest.… Could she possibly do that? The way she said it, it seemed the favor to grant was mine.

So of course she came, and it was a spring day on a lovely campus of a girls school in the South, and we talked and we listened and we read and she said in a phrase or so what others might have taken up a whole evening for and of course everybody was enchanted with her, the only thing that can be said about any of her appearances anywhere, from way out West to way up East, from Oxford, Mississippi, to Oxford, England, from Mexico to Maine. (I don’t really know if she’s ever been to Mexico, but it sounded right to say that; and I know that if she has ever been there the Mexicans were enchanted.)

In respect to this, the writer and the work are one—I mean by that, not that she writes about herself (hardly ever if at all), but that her work in every way bears her special imprint, and one hears it in the soft precision of her writing voice, no less than in her spoken one. There are astounding accuracies in her fiction—it takes a Mississippian to know that best—even if everything suddenly flies sky high or hits the ceiling in one of her grand comic explosions where everything suffers a loss of the usual gravitational center—then it can be counted on to fly sky high or hit the ceiling, according to its own nature, after its own notion. She would put it, I suspect, that “everything is in place,” and so it...