2020 Welty Fellowship Research Report "Shelter for Secrets": Eudora Welty and the Craft of Identity in One Writer's Beginnings

Last Spring, I flew to Boston to participate in the Eudora Welty Society's panel revisiting Welty's One Writer's Beginnings thirty-five years after the memoir was published. A few years shy of thirty-five, I felt my inexperience as I presented among the scholars that made up the Eudora Welty Society, including those who knew Welty and those who sat in the room where she delivered those lectures. These sharp Welty scholars not only let me sit at their table, they also encouraged me, which is a dangerous thing to do to a grad student, not unlike feeding a stray cat. Hungry for belonging and inspired by their work, I applied for this Welty fellowship. I wanted to better understand my state of Mississippi's most likable genius.

I come to Welty's memoir from my own interest in contemporary American memoirs, especially memoirs out of Mississippi, such as Kiese Laymon's Heavy. Memoirs like Heavy deal in the currency of honesty, raw revelations about the self, the body, and the family in which a person becomes a writer. Honesty is both the activity and the thesis of Heavy, for as Laymon concludes, "we cannot responsibly love anyone, and especially not black children in America, if we insist on making a practice of hiding and running from ourselves" (230). Heavy shook me up and set me back down with new eyes to look at One Writer's Beginnings. And I began to wonder, how does Welty's memoir hold up today? Does it tell us the truth about Welty's life? I don't mean factually. I mean this truth Laymon is asking for. Is Welty really honest with herself and with us about her experiences? While One Writer's Beginnings is a beloved best seller, scholars such as Carolyn J. Heilbrun criticize what they see as a nostalgic performance of the polite self, a self that surely could not produce stories as fierce and dazzling as Welty's are. Heilbrun writes, "There can be no question that to have written a truthful autobiography would have defied every one of her instincts for loyalty and privacy" (14). In a genre where honest revelation is everything, how does a writer famous for her privacy survive?

Perhaps the first response to Heilbrun's criticism is to drop the word "autobiographical." One Writer's Beginnings is a set of lectures carefully edited into a memoir. As such, it is a chosen selection of life for meditation. A memoir is an unapologetically crafted work of literature, made out of the self but not bearing the burden of a full accounting of self. As Welty admits in One Writer's Beginnings, books are "not natural wonders" but artifice, crafted and shaped by human hands (5). Truthful autobiography is a different category than excellent memoir. Still, a memoir would not be excellent if it sunk to the level of nostalgia that Heilbrun discredits. Reading nostalgia achieves the opposite of what Laymon's work calls for: books that treat the past with an honesty that is not beholden to sentimentality. Nostalgia can choose to ignore the injustices, particularly racial and socioeconomic injustices, that still loom large. But nostalgia would surely bore Welty as much as preaching, something she never did in her writing. One of my first archival discoveries at MDAH was of potentially nostalgic material that Welty cut from One Writer's Beginnings before publishing it as a book. "It seems, looking back, that everything that went on in Jackson was done in[k] the unit of the family," Welty writes as she begins a description of families going swimming at Livingstone Lake (OWB, Lectures, Series 17, Box 216, Folder 1, p. 1). "When you look back from here, doesn't it seem that life then was very easily gravitated to the personal level?" (2). Notice how general these statements are: "everything … in Jackson" and "life then." These general and borderline nostalgic descriptions are not the direction that the edited version of One Writer's Beginnings takes...