Textual Collations

W. U. McDonald, Jr., has over the years done Weltians many favors, first of all by founding, and for many years being the chief cook and bottle washer, of the Eudora Welty Newsletter, this beloved twice-yearly potpourri of miscellaneous scholarly notes and notices about the study of Eudora Welty’s work. Long before EWN, however, Mac had been practicing a form of scholarship that he made the newsletter’s hallmark for its first twenty years. That is, in such studies as “Eudora Welty’s Revisions of ‘A Piece of News,’” for one example, Mac taught us how important were the records of Welty’s revisions and corrections of her work to an understanding not just of the work’s interpreted meanings but also of her craft: how she does what she does.

In some ways, Mac created EWN to foster the study of Welty’s texts in all their variant complexity, and to that end encouraged the publication in these pages the raw material of textual study, the tables of collation, many of which he did himself, which present in tabular comparisons all the changes she made over the years in a substantial number of her stories. Mac thus both threw down the gauntlet to us and also provided us with fine examples of the use to which such collations might be put. Alas, however, almost no one has picked up that gauntlet to use Mac’s and others’ work: with few exceptions, the collations lie where thrown, sadly gathering dust.

For me, perhaps for others of us trained in a more distant generation of literary scholarship, criticism begins where the author begins, with the succession of scratches in pen or pencil on the succession of pages, typescript or page- or galley-proof on which Welty wrote and then edited herself to her own final approval. Welty once told Stan Lindbergh, editor of The Georgia Review, that she never could retype a story without working to make it better. These documents are palimpsests of sorts that record the layers and layers of thought and energy that drove the story or novel toward its final state.

I plead as guilty as I accuse, of course, since I have not yet actually drawn on any of EWN’s collations in the service of any Welty criticism. But I can testify from Mac’s results over the years and from some personal experience in dealing with William Faulkner’s manuscripts and typescripts that the rewards of such labor are plenteous. I have also discovered it to be a wonderful pedagogical exercise to assign my graduate students and upper-level students an essay which requires them to discuss Welty’s revisions of a story of their choice. In any event, I have looked at enough of the tables of collation, enough of Mac’s and of others’ work to know that any study of Welty’s acts of composition and editing is likely to teach us a lot that we don’t know about her work—knowledge we could surely use here, at this still-burgeoning infancy of Welty studies.