A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty

THREE: The 1930s: Finding Her Eye and Her Voice

28 .3 The 1930s: Finding Her Eye and Her Voice Writing “Death of a Traveling Salesman” opened my eyes. And I had received the shock of having touched, for the first time, on my real subject: human relationships. Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing, once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake. —Eudora Welty, “Finding a Voice,” One Writer’s Beginnings B ack home in Jackson, Eudora reunited with old friends and felt more at ease than she had in Madison. She found part-time work at the local newspaper, the Jackson Daily News, writing witty journalistic pieces. Several of her Jackson friends, however, had plans to enter graduate school at Columbia University in New York and encouraged Eudora to attend. She applied and was admitted in the fall of 1930 to Columbia Business School,the university’s advertising and secretarial program, a practical course of study which assisted in gaining her father’s approval of her move. Eudora was quickly bored with the advertising/marketing curriculum , and engaged herself by auditing comparative literature courses, attending classes that her friends were taking, such as Abnormal Psychology, and enjoying all that New York City had to offer. Ranging from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to smaller galleries in Greenwich Village, from Broadway to Harlem, Eudora’s education was broader than her course of study at Columbia. In her account of Eudora’s youthful writings, Early Escapades, Patti Carr Black states 29 The 1930s: Finding Her Eye and Her Voice that Eudora“was enchanted with vaudeville and went as often as possible to the famous Palace Theatre.”According to Black, Eudora herself said, “I was the only college student who went to Broadway at ten o’clock on Saturday mornings and didn’t emerge all day. I went every week, never missed a change of the bill.”Friends originally from Jackson and even one of her closest from Madison, Felicia White,granddaughter of famed architect Stanford White, found permanent residences in the city, giving Eudora several “homes away from home.” But the fun would come to an end. At the conclusion of the spring term in 1931, although she had hoped to find work in the city and continue her studies, she was called back to Jackson because her father, only fifty-two, was seriously ill with leukemia.He would not live through the autumn . Chessie must have felt the same helplessness about Christian as she had when she was fifteen and her father had died in the Baltimore hospital on that cold winter night. On his final day of life, Christian was in the hospital and Chessie by his side; Eudora was the only child present to witness her father’s last moments. It is a sadly beautiful and poignantly described scene in her memoir One Writer’s Beginnings: When my father was dying in the hospital, there was a desperate last decision to try a blood transfusion. How much was known about the compatibility of blood types then, or about the procedure itself, I’m unable to say. All I know is that there was no question in my mother’s mind as to who the donor was to be. Eudora outside of Johnson Hall, Columbia, 1931. Christian Welty, circa 1930. 30 The 1930s: Finding Her Eye and Her Voice I was present when it was done; my two brothers were in school. Both my parents were lying on cots, my father had been brought in on one and my mother lay on the other. Then a tube was simply run from her arm to his. My father, I believe, was unconscious. My mother was looking at him. I could see her fervent face: there was no doubt as to what she was thinking. This time, she would save his life. . . . All at once his face turned dusky red all over. The doctor made a disparaging sound with his lips, the kind a woman knitting makes when she drops a stitch. What the doctor meant by it was that my father had died. My mother never recovered emotionally. Though she lived for over thirty years more, and suffered other bitter losses, she never stopped blaming herself. She saw this as her failure to save his life. Biographer Suzanne Marrs notes that “Eudora would be haunted by the loss of her dearly loved father and by the plight...