Eudora Welty: A Biography (review)

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 156 in the South are comparatively recent and do not capture the attention of voters, elected officials, and bureaucrats as they do in the West, they are important public policy issues that affect economic development and determine the quality of life for millions of southerners. These essays provide an alarming notice of how developing water management systems in the river basins of the Deep South will require much more work. JAMES NEWMAN Idaho State University Eudora Welty: A Biography. By Suzanne Marrs. Orlando: Harcourt, 2005. xix, 652 pp. $28.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-15-100914-7. $16.00 (paper). ISBN 0-15-603063-2. Suzanne Marrs depicts Eudora Welty (1909–2001) as an outgoing woman with strong convictions, a woman who passionately loved friends, family, and country, a woman whose overarching concern was that all persons be treated with justice. Her Eudora is a woman energized by human contact, a woman who excelled as a conversationalist, and had the ability to listen to the nuances of the lives around her. The biography carefully traces Welty’s long relationship with John Robinson, initially a romantic relationship that turned into a warm friendship that endured until Robinson’s death in 1989. Marrs also explores Welty’s long distance relationship with Ken Millar, a detective writer who used the pseudonym Ross Macdonald, which lasted for nearly two decades, ending when Millar died in 1983. A third relationship with Reynolds Price, a kind of pseudo-son whom Welty first met at Duke University when he was still a student, rounds out the primary circle of male intimacy that sustained her throughout her life. By focusing on these relationships, Marrs provides insights into the ways personal suffering can fuel creative expression. Welty was always drawn toward relationships with men and she made lasting friendships with her male editors, literary agent, and colleagues. Nevertheless, many of her lifelong friends were women—Charlotte Capers, Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lou Aswell, Katherine Anne Porter, and Elizabeth Spencer among others. She also developed relationships with the wives of the men she treasured, but her shaping, nurturing relationships were with her male friends. Perhaps the major question for scholars is Welty’s failure to sustain the writing of fiction throughout her career. Her writing seemed inor- A P R I L 2 0 0 7 157 dinately tied to the demands of her private relationships. Although she remained vibrant on the lecture podium well into her seventies, she seemed unable to complete new fictional work past her fifties. Marrs’s treatment of Welty serves as an interesting study of how at least one older, intelligent, white Mississippi female responded to race relations and the emergence of the civil rights movement. Welty’s Depressionera photographs offer sensitive portraits of southern blacks struggling to cope with economic hardship. Her 1940 short story, “Powerhouse,” celebrated African American culture. During the turbulent years of the 1960s she promoted open readings of her work and coped with fears of living in Jackson. Marrs’s research in the Welty papers at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and other repositories has produced a biography that is a valid corrective to the mythic sense created in Ann Waldron’s Eudora: A Writer’s Life (New York, 1998). Although Marrs is faithful to her sources and provides the reader a sense of accuracy and objectivity, her accountability to facts may have obscured the larger picture of Welty. Although Marrs’s faithfulness to the details of Welty’s travel schedule, publishing record, and honors and awards constitutes a valuable resource for scholars studying Welty’s canon, readers seeking a comprehensive picture of the author behind the canon must wait for later biographies based on interviews with Welty’s colleagues, friends, and acquaintances and Welty papers that will be opened for research in 2021. Marrs had the advantage of knowing her subject well, living in the same environment, and appreciating the art produced by that life. She has previously published a study of Welty’s fiction, One Writer’s Imagination: The Fiction of Eudora Welty (Baton Rouge, 2002). The pleasure of reading this...