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  • Hunter McKelva Cole Reminisces about Eudora Welty and Country Churchyards:An Interview
  • Elizabeth Sweeney
Elizabeth Sweeney:

I know that you knew Eudora Welty, and I wanted to ask you how you knew about her, how you became interested in her.

Hunter McKelva Cole:

When I was a high school pupil in the 1950s, our eleventh-grade English class read a story by Eudora Welty, a person not known to us. As curious teenagers, the boys and girls were acquainted with Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, Franklin W. Dixon (Hardy Boys books), the author Carolyn Keene (Nancy Drew mysteries), and others. But Eudora Welty? Not at all. I still can recall the illustration placed within the text of her story. A witchy figure is bending down to pick up a coin that has fallen onto the path. By some fluke, I remember the name of the artist who created the illustration: Milo Winter. Amazed that some literary lady from our rustic state had produced something printed in a book, I told my family about this unexpected pleasure. It was unusual back then for school children to encounter fiction by living authors, much less by any Mississippi author. Although our schools were excellent, our literature books included mainly literary staples of the past—O. Henry (master of "surprise endings"), Jack London, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, "A Christmas Carol," Tom Sawyer, Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates, "The Lady or the Tiger," "Little Orphan Annie," Emily Dickinson, Helen Hunt Jackson ("October's Bright Blue Weather"), Edgar Allan Poe, and such. As a respite from diagramming sentences and deeply drilling grammar, school literature seemed to be valued as pastime entertainment rather than as serious art. When our books might include some anomaly such as Alphonse Daudet's "The Last Class," I wondered how chance had stirred a French writer, as well as Eudora Welty, into the edifying mixture.

Mother told me that she had been in college with this Eudora Welty. In fact, they were in the same class at Mississippi State College for Women. Mother recalled Eudora rather casually and said that their dorm rooms were on the same floor but that they were not close friends. I was astonished that my own parent had encountered this published writer and had [End Page 183] never before bothered to mention the fact. So, I knew of Eudora Welty from the time I was midway of my high school years. I did not meet her until 1958, when I was a college student in Jackson, a time that I was bowed down in admiration of her books of stories and of her literary life. Eventually, to my good fortune, I got to know her rather well, and I knew her for about forty-two years.

Occasionally, after I was living in Jackson, I would take her out to eat. We might take car rides in the country, but in late afternoons we would sit in her living room and talk. I loved listening, for she was indeed an accomplished talker, in addition to being a much admired fiction writer. Her soft voice was pleasing to my ears, and the light from the wall of windows made her eyes gleam. She got into the rhythm of her amusing narratives, by modulating her voice and gesturing broadly as though she were the comical person she was remembering. To my questions about E. M. Forster, Elizabeth Bowen, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, and other literary friends, she customarily would recount some association or experience in which their lives crossed. Her commentaries about them and about works she admired carried me ever more deeply into the living world of literature. She shared reminiscences, insights, and droll anecdotes, preferring almost never to speak about herself but always focusing on others. Her quick wit was a delight to me. Memories, I judged from our conversations, were precious to her. In her last years, like many other old people, she repeated stories she already had told. Enjoying every word, I sat hunkered on the sofa amid an unsorted clutter of mail, magazines, and unwanted books that hopeful writers had sent. Seated there across from me, she was very dear and inspiring. As...

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