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72 Chapter Three “THE WHOLE HEART OF FICTION” Eudora Welty inside the Closed Society Eudora Welty, an incredibly productive writer for most of her career, published very little between 1955 and 1970, a period that coincides almost perfectly with the emergence of the civil rights movement as the dominant political and social narrative in the United States. These fifteen years contrast with the fourteen-year period from the debut of her first story collection in 1941 until 1955, when Welty produced a major work every two years, three novels and four collections of short stories in all, as well as dozens of book reviews and other essays.1 The only manuscript Welty produced between 1955 and 1970, during an increasingly trying time in her life, was a brief children’s story called The Shoe Bird to free herself of her commitment to Harcourt Brace.2 Welty neglected her writing during this period in part because her two brothers and her mother lost their health, and Welty, unmarried and childless, devout daughter and sibling, felt obligated to assist her ailing family in every way that she could.3 Welty was unable to accommodate her work because her family, particularly her demanding mother, Chestina, who invariably drove off the homecare nurses Welty retained, was difficult to care for.4 Despite this, Welty refused to place her mother in a nursing home unless she was called away from Jackson to lecture, which she did extensively throughout this period to make ends meet. Twice Welty submitted to the concerns of her friends and sent her mother to the Martha Coker Convalescent Home in Yazoo City, Mississippi, fifty miles from her hometown of Jackson, but she squandered any time that she gained from this arrangement by making the one-hundred-mile trip to visit her mother several times a week. As a result of her daughter’s devotion, Chestina Welty spent much of the final Welty inside the Closed Society 73 decade of her life at home, while Eudora’s production slowed almost to a halt. Despite Welty’s faithfulness to family, tragedy struck repeatedly during this period: her brother Walter died on January 9, 1959, her mother on January 20, 1966, and her brother Edward four days later on January 24.5 Freed from her familial duties, Welty threw herself back into her work, producing her two finest novels, Losing Battles (1970), which she had worked on intermittently while caring for her family, and The Optimist’s Daughter (1972), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. From 1955 through 1968, the material that would become Losing Battles consumed most of the time that Welty could wrench from her family. Indeed, her need to work on the novel was so pressing that she sometimes wrote notes for her draft while driving. Yet, despite devoting almost all her creative time to her novel, Welty published three important texts about the civil rights movement during this period, texts that engage American —and southern—innocence by condemning Mississippi’s repression of dissent and its violent opposition to civil rights. “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” (1963) and “The Demonstrators” (1966) are the last two short stories that Welty, a master of the form, published in her life. The third civil rights text, an essay titled “Must the Novelist Crusade?” (1965), grew out of a talk Welty gave at Jackson’s Millsaps College the year before, and considers the fiction writer’s responsibility of depicting the exigencies of the present in her work.6 Given the stresses associated with caring for her family while dashing across the country to lecture and the fact that Welty tried to work on Losing Battles whenever she could find the peace and energy, that she produced these three texts speaks to their importance as responses to the social unrest she witnessed daily.7 Welty claimed that “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” “pushed up through something else I was working on,” and her other civil rights texts imposed themselves upon her in similar fashion, forcing her to set aside precious time to contemplate and complete them.8 While Welty chose to avoid marches and demonstrations, these three texts collectively were her response to the problem of civil rights in Mississippi. Welty, an incredibly private person, generally refused to detail her creative process, even denying, in the face of friends and critics who knew better, that The Optimist’s Daughter was in any way autobiographical. Still, ten years after the publication of “Where...

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