Eudora Welty: A Biography

Table of Contents

Title Page

Table of Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

Shelter and Beyond 1909–1931

Self-Discovery 1931–1941

Being Apart from What Matters World War II and the Home Front, 1941–1945

Love First and then Separateness 1945–1951

Finding a Way Out 1951–1956

Photos

Losing Battles 1957–1966

Defending Against Time 1966–1973

The Strong Present Tense On and Off the Road 1974–1980

Ceaselessly Into the Past Self-Portraits 1980–1984

The Lonesomeness and Hilarity of Survival 1984–1991

Old Age Hath Yet Her Honor and Her Toil 1991–2001

Acknowledgments

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Notes

Bibliography

Permissions Acknowledgments

Index

About the Author

Copyright © 2005 by Suzanne Marrs

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Permissions acknowledgments begin on [>] and constitute a continuation of the copyright page.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Marrs, Suzanne.

Eudora Welty: a biography/Suzanne Marrs.—1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Welty, Eudora, 1909—2001 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography.

I. Title.

PS3545.E6Z7728 2005

813'.52—dc22 2004030490

ISBN-13: 978-0-15-100914-5 ISBN-10: 0-15-100914-7

ISBN-13: 978-0-15-603063-2 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 0-15-603063-2 (pbk.)

eISBN 978-0-547-53931-7

v2.0215

To Wanda and Alton Marrs

INTRODUCTION

A wide-ranging cast of characters comes to us through the pages of Eudora Welty’s fiction: An aged African American woman walks miles through woods, over hills, across log bridges to obtain medicine for her grandson; a small-town postmistress proclaims that she is not one-sided. Bigger on one side than the other; a tenant-farming couple burn their few bits of furniture in an effort to stay warm; a nineteenth-century outlaw plans a slave rebellion in the American Southwest; a young woman commits suicide after a love affair fails; the sorceress Circe declares that it takes phenomenal neatness of housekeeping to put it through the heads of men that they are swine; a Depression-era prison inmate escapes a day before his scheduled release so that he may be on time for his family reunion. From the mouths of these characters or from the pen of Welty as narrator emerge dialogue and descriptions that are hilarious—Edna Earle could sit and ponder all day on how the little tail of the ‘C’ got through the ‘L’ in a Coca-Cola sign; or hauntingly enigmatic—Cutting off the Medusa’s head was the heroic act, perhaps, that made visible a horror in life, that was at once the horror in love; or tragically consoling—any life . . . was nothing but the continuity of its love. Widely considered a master of the short-story form, Welty wrote in many modes, creating the comic terror of a small-town beauty parlor, the 1807 season of dreams that arrived in Mississippi with Aaron Burr, the tortured interior monologue of a husband who imagines beating his wife’s lover with a croquet mallet, and a ghost story of sorts in No Place for You, My Love.¹ Her novels—Delta Wedding, Losing Battles, The Optimist’s Daughter—and her novellas—The Robber Bridegroom and The Ponder Heart—show a determination to experiment and to approach head-on issues of love and death, oppression and transcendence. Her collected essays and reviews delve into the writing process and offer appreciations of authors ranging from Jane Austen (The sheer velocity of the novels, scene to scene, conversation to conversation, tears to laughter, concert to picnic to dance, is something equivalent to a pulsebeat) to Virginia Woolf (Hers was a sensitivity beside which a Geiger counter is a child’s toy made of a couple of tin cans and a rather common piece of string), from Anton Chekhov (The realist Chekhov, speaking simply and never otherwise than as an artist and a humane man, showed us in fullness and plenitude the mystery of our lives) to Patrick White ("The common barriers of sex, age, class, nationality can, in uncommon hands, operate as gates . . . Passing us through these barriers is what Mr. White is doing in his writing").² And her photographs, taken in the 1930s and first collected in 1971, put a human face on the Great Depression as they evince empathy for and from her subjects, black and white, old and young, male and female.

Eudora Welty’s achievements were widely recognized during her lifetime: She received a Pulitzer Prize, the French Legion of Honor, the Howells’ Medal for Fiction, the Gold Medal for Fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the National Medal of the Arts. She was elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters and then elevated to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. And she received honorary degrees from at least thirty-nine colleges and universities, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Princeton among them. She was surely one of the most honoraried writers in the history of American letters.

Clearly, Eudora Welty was a major force in twentieth-century literature, but over the course of her nearly century-long life, she also became a cultural icon. Her awards came to seem tributes as much to her person as to her work. As she told New Yorker fiction editor William Maxwell, I’ve just had too much awarded me.³ Her legion of readers—and a legion of admirers who never read her work—remember Eudora Welty as someone they would like to have known, indeed as a person they felt they did know. In a world where writers have often proven imperfect public figures—indulgent and self-destructive or ardent recluses or intellectual snobs—Welty was not. She had a self-deprecating sense of humor and a genuine interest in people. She loved her parents and was unashamed to say so. She loved the natural beauty of her native Mississippi, the scale and pace of life, the close friends she had there. She granted interviews to reviewers and scholars, she spoke at colleges and universities, she allowed herself to be the featured attraction at fund-raising benefits for good causes, she appeared on national television, she even invited into her home strangers who knocked on her door. From her late sixties onward, Welty was a celebrity. But though she made herself accessible, she maintained a firm sense of decorum and a clear distinction between what she deemed her public and her private life. Her most deeply felt emotions—loves and fears, hostilities and insecurities—were not the subjects for interviews or speeches, but for fiction. Fiction, she wrote in her essay Must the Novelist Crusade, "has, and must keep, a private address. For life is lived in a private place; where it means anything is inside the mind and heart."⁴

Not surprisingly, therefore, Welty looked askance at being the subject for biography. In a 1979 interview, for instance, she said, I’ve always been tenacious in my feeling that we don’t need to know a writer’s life in order to understand his work and I have really felt very opposed to a lot of biographies that have been written these days, of which the reviewers say they’re not any good unless they reveal all sorts of other things about the writer . . . It’s brought out my inherent feeling that it’s good to know something about a writer’s background, but only what pertains.⁵ In 1984, at age seventy-five, Welty hoped to preempt future attempts at a biography of her life by publishing an autobiographical work that focused only on those elements of her life she deemed pertinent. In One Writer’s Beginnings, which had begun as a series of lectures at Harvard, she followed her hosts’ suggestion that she describe the ways in which her family, her community, her early reading, her youthful travels, her education, had shaped her career as a writer. These lectures-turned-essays spoke of family love and the tensions inherent in loving, the power of time and the urgency it imposes, the writer’s passion for her art, and her desire to give it until there is no more left to give. The most memorable events recounted in this book are tragic and emotional in nature: Welty’s mother, at the age of fifteen, taking her own father by raft and train to the Baltimore hospital where he died of appendicitis; Eudora, as a young child, discovering with delight two gleaming nickels in her mother’s bureau, only to learn that they had covered the eyes of a dead brother she had not known or been told about; and the aspiring writer witnessing, at age twenty-two, her father’s death during a blood transfusion. Painful memories, but she faced them and shared them. She also shared, in an understated fashion, the devotion and the discord, the admiration and the guilt, that characterized her relationship with her mother.

What she avoided were expansive accounts of her adult life. She made scant mention of her long sojourns far from home, or of her loves and her loneliness, or of her intense and enduring interest in politics. In its concentration upon childhood and her Mississippi roots, One Writer’s Beginnings helped to create an image of Welty as shy and retiring, though perceptive, provincial, and most reviews stressed this image. In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley wrote, A life spent . . . in the quiet of a house in a quiet Mississippi town will seem, to many readers, cramped and isolated. Welty argues to the contrary, and she is absolutely correct. She closes this lovely little book by saying: As you have seen, I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring one as well. For all serious daring starts from within.’ C. Vann Woodward in the New York Times, though he observed that in Welty’s fiction distinctions between love and hate, joy and sorrow, innocence and guilt, success and failure, victory and defeat are often left vague, described her life as less complex: In ‘One Writer’s Beginnings,’ we find that in a turbulent period when authors commonly wrote in anger, protest and political involvement and many of them had reason to do so, one of them led a sheltered, relatively uneventful life, never married and always made her home in a provincial community. The same could have been said of Jane Austen. And Edmund Fuller, in the Wall Street Journal, concluded his review by stating that all her work shines with . . . lovingness, none more than the present lovely book. In his 1990 convocation address at Dartmouth College, President James O. Freedman echoed the focus of such reviews. He spoke perceptively about Welty’s fictional portraits of individuals who encounter life’s terrors, but he depicted her life as cloistered indeed: With grace and energy, Eudora Welty has taught us that we have worlds to learn from a woman who has never married, who has rarely traveled, and who still lives in the home in which she spent her childhood.⁶

The writer whose beginnings included profound experiences of grief and guilt is not the woman reviewers portrayed. The adult who in 1937 would travel with friends by car to Mexico, or who in 1947 would spend several months in San Francisco in order to be near the man she loved, or make three long unaccompanied visits to Europe, England, and Ireland in the early 1950s, or enjoy a whirlwind of drinks, dinners, and plays during frequent trips to New York, or struggle with writer’s block for more than two decades, or spend more time on the road than at her typewriter during her later years, or write her local newspaper, denouncing racist demagogues—this is not the woman reviewers saw. And to the general public, who thought of Welty only as the happy child in scenes from One Writer’s Beginnings or as the witty, elderly lady being interviewed by Diane Sawyer or Dick Cavett, she came to seem, as her dear friend the writer Reynolds Price put it, not the worldly woman her friends cherished, but the Benign and Beamish Maiden Aunt of American Letters.⁷

Some accused Welty of failing to write a truthful autobiography. In her book Writing a Woman’s Life, the late scholar and writer Carolyn Heilbrun asserted, "I do not believe in the bittersweet quality of One Writer’s Beginnings, nor do I suppose that the Eudora Welty there evoked could have written the stories and novels we have learned to celebrate. Heilbrun argued that Welty must have been masking unrecognized anger, and she went on to suggest that women reared before the onset of the current women’s movement, before, let us say, 1970, at some level, conscious or unconscious, inevitably resented their mothers and dreamed of lives without the intrusion of a mother’s patriarchal wishes for her daughter, without the danger of injuring the much loved and pitied mother."⁸ She did not entertain the possibility that Welty’s mother might have encouraged her to reject patriarchal wishes, or that Welty might have accepted, comprehended, and transcended aspects of the past without feeling great residual anger, or that One Writer’s Beginnings was perhaps as truthful as her own account of experience, or indeed that truth resists categorical statements. Heilbrun accepted reviewers’ interpretations of One Writer’s Beginnings but offered a rather different assessment of the book’s veracity.

One Writer’s Beginnings thus left a vast territory for prospective biographers to explore, and it simultaneously helped to create a myth they might seek to debunk. A number of distinguished scholars began to consider undertaking a full-scale biography but were eventually deterred by Welty’s refusal to participate in the project. Then in the mid-1990s Ann Waldron, the biographer of Caroline Gordon and Hodding Carter, decided to make Welty her next subject and to press ahead without the writer’s cooperation. In Eudora, published by Doubleday in 1998, Waldron attempted to humanize the mythic Miss Eudora but instead created an equally reductive image: the charming and successful ugly duckling. In response to the biography, Claudia Roth Pierpont, writing in the New Yorker, offered a third condescending stereotype, depicting Welty as a perfect lady—a nearly Petrified Woman.⁹

I had been a Eudora Welty reader for twenty-three years and her friend for fifteen when these works appeared. I first encountered Welty’s fiction in 1975 when I read Losing Battles. I was hooked by the way she walked a tightrope between humor and tragedy, by the way she could structure a four-hundred-page novel so that it had the intricacy of a lyric poem, by the humanity of her characters, by the range of styles she incorporated into a single work. I immediately set about reading all of Welty’s works and incorporating some of them into my classes at the State University of New York at Oswego. In 1980 when I took my first sabbatical leave, I decided to write about Welty’s fiction. Having done so and published two or three short essays, I was eager to meet the author herself and to discuss Losing Battles.

In the summer of 1983, I drove from upstate New York, where I was still teaching, to Jackson, Mississippi. I had written to Miss Welty, as I then called her, asking for an appointment but had received no reply. I came ahead anyway, knowing that the riches of the Mississippi Archives would be in themselves worth the trip. I settled into a work routine at the Archives, looking closely at drafts of Losing Battles, and I asked the staff there about the possibility of interviewing Welty. A curator working closely with the Welty papers approached Charlotte Capers, Welty’s old friend and former director of the Archives, and Charlotte interceded on behalf of me and my friend Mary Hughes Brookhart, another Welty scholar. An interview was scheduled.

Mary Hughes and I arrived at the Welty house late on a hot July morning and took Miss Welty to lunch. We had a grand time. I asked about her ties to Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and John Crowe Ransom, three of the Nashville Agrarians who in the 1930 book I’ll Take My Stand had so ardently preferred the agricultural South to the industrialized North. She spoke fondly and admiringly of them as individuals and writers but asked me not to label her as a member of their group. A discussion of her debt to Proust, to his concepts of time and memory, ensued, but I only vaguely remember her response to that line of inquiry. What I do vividly remember is feeling a sense of connection, of ease, of the common sensibility that typifies friendship. At that first meeting, I, like so many of her visitors, felt that Eudora, as I soon came to call her, was my friend; she probably enjoyed our conversation but little expected that she and I would become close. Amazingly we did. In 1985–1986, I was the Eudora Welty Scholar-in-Residence at the Mississippi Archives and depended heavily on Eudora’s input as I cataloged her manuscripts, photographs, and correspondence. Then, in 1988, I joined the faculty of Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, and began to visit with Eudora on a regular basis. We met several times a week to discuss her fiction, or to watch the evening news and comment upon it, or to have drinks and dinner along with wide-ranging conversations, or simply to share stories we found amusing.

In 1998, though Eudora had often told me that she did not want her biography written and that she did not want a biographer to impose upon her friends, I asked permission to write my own account of her life, a request she promptly granted. (Unbeknownst to me, she had by this point already begun to retreat from her opposition to biography: She had given Reynolds Price permission to talk, as she had done, with the biographer of Kenneth Millar [aka detective novelist Ross Macdonald] and to reveal the love she and Ken had for each other.) She offered me only one caution: You may be getting into deeper water than you imagine.

Given Eudora’s past opposition to any biography of her, I was surprised to learn of the massive collection of additional correspondence, manuscripts, date books, and photographs that she planned to bequeath to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and which she and her nieces made immediately available to me. Reynolds Price and Ken Millar had both urged Eudora not only to save her correspondence but also to make it public. Her reading of the published letters of Virginia Woolf, Anton Chekhov, H. L. Mencken, and others had further discouraged any plan she’d had to destroy her letters. So the day I began research for a biography, I encountered a wealth of unpublished material that had yet to be seen by scholars. John Robinson, the man with whom Eudora was romantically involved from 1937 until 1952, had returned her letters from the period of their courtship. Both sides of Eudora’s extensive correspondences with Millar, with her agent Diarmuid Russell, with Harper’s Bazaar fiction editor Mary Lou Aswell, and with lifelong friend Frank Lyell were in her possession. Letters from William Maxwell, Reynolds Price, Katherine Anne Porter, Elizabeth Bowen, E. M. Forster, Robert Penn Warren, and many others were carefully stored in Eudora’s house. Family letters, however, were not available to me. In her will, Eudora provided that they be sealed for a period of twenty years from the date of her death. Though she did not seek to protect herself or those who had given their blessing to the preservation of the correspondence, she did wish to protect the privacy of her parents, her brothers, and her brothers’ families.

The letters Eudora wrote after 1984 are generally less revealing than earlier missives, largely because she had outlived most of her closest friends and confidantes. But other papers to which she and her nieces gave me access helped provide a comprehensive view of her entire life. Manuscripts of early stories, a novella, and three late unfinished novels, date books outlining her social and business engagements between 1976 and 1995, photographs of places she visited, of her friends, and of herself (belying the ugly duckling theory), as well as her mother’s travel journal and scrapbooks, provided a wealth of information. And Eudora’s blessing encouraged her friends and family to talk about her with me: The poet William Jay Smith, Reynolds Price, Diarmuid Russell’s daughter Pamela, and the publisher and book dealer Ralph Sipper, all of whom had been very close to Eudora, granted me long and informative interviews; her nieces and her sisters-in-law spoke with me, as did a number of old Jackson friends. And, of course, from 1983 until her death in 2001, Eudora and I had many conversations about her work and her life. Together we traveled to conferences, celebrated holidays and birthdays, and entertained visitors.

Never did I see the mythic Eudora. She was not prim or sheltered: She told me of admiring Orson Welles’s 1936 all-black production of Macbeth, with its nude, male Hecate, and of being impressed by the French film noir Diabolique. She was far from apolitical: Often she enlisted me to take her to the polls, and her long-term, enduring commitment to liberal causes and Democratic Party presidential candidates was well known in conservative Mississippi. And she was not provincial. She traveled widely, frequently, and for extended periods, being entertained by such notables as Bernard Berenson and David Rockefeller but also enjoying third-class shipboard accommodations, Parisian left-bank cafés, and the company of bohemian sorts.

This is but to say that a tremendous amount of new information is now available, information that should demonstrate what misleading public images of Eudora have emerged since the publication of her autobiography and subsequent portraits. In the biography that follows, I do not attempt to provide detailed analyses of Eudora’s work—my book One Writer’s Imagination: The Fiction of Eudora Welty is devoted to that task—but I use her work to illuminate, as best I can, her inner life, the private place where fiction is born. I focus on Eudora the woman, describing her routines and her travels, her friendships and enmities, her encounters with love and death, her responses to war and social change. I attempt to show the people and events that helped to make her a writer, to deal with the cultural and personal contradictions—the polarities and oppositional elements—that psychologists believe are a spark to the imagination, even as I acknowledge the mystery that lies at the heart of creativity. Recognizing that, as Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf’s acclaimed biographer, has asserted, there is no such thing as an objective biography, I attempt to present Eudora Welty’s life as fully as possible by allowing many voices to guide me—the voices in her fiction; the voices in her letters to friends, editors, colleagues; the voices of individuals who knew her not as a marble statue, but as a living, breathing, changing, developing, witty, sensitive, and complicated personality. Over the course of her ninety-two years, Eudora engaged the world with all her powers and never retreated into a single, narrowly defined role. Openness to experience complemented her creative genius and helped her to produce some of the most memorable fiction of the twentieth century. She was not the contentedly cloistered Miss Eudora in whom so many believed or wanted to believe, but was someone far more passionate and compelling: a woman and a writer with a triumphant vulnerability . . . to this mortal world.¹⁰

ONE

Shelter and Beyond

1909–1931

On April 13, 1909, Eudora Alice Welty was born to Christian Webb and Chestina Andrews Welty. The young couple had been living in Jackson, Mississippi, since their marriage five years earlier. He had come from Ohio, she from West Virginia; they had met when Chris, as he was known, worked one summer at a logging camp near her home. Courtship had led to love, and they had chosen to begin their married life in Mississippi’s rapidly growing capital city; Jackson’s population had been slightly less than eight thousand in 1900, but by 1910 it would have more than tripled. In this booming town, the Weltys prospered: In 1906 Chris joined the newly established Lamar Life Insurance Company as its cashier, becoming the assistant secretary by year’s end, and in 1908 the couple built their first house, on North Congress Street. Though Chestina, or Chessie as her husband called her, kept a cow and chickens in the backyard, the Weltys lived within six blocks of Chris’s office and of the downtown theaters, department stores, and grocers; within two blocks of the state capitol; and within three blocks of Galloway Methodist Church, to which they belonged. They also lived across the street from a grammar school and within sight of a cemetery. Their first child, a son born in 1906, lay in that cemetery, having died at the age of fifteen months. This loss had been devastating, but now the birth of a daughter was cause for both great rejoicing and great resolve. Chris and Chessie would be protective parents indeed.

An ardent amateur photographer as well as an excited new father, Chris constantly snapped pictures of his daughter—as a babe in her mother’s arms; in a specially ordered bonnet; on her first Christmas; on a trip to West Virginia and Ohio the summer after her birth; at home, attempting her first steps; with a miniature baby carriage and doll; in the yard with her mother’s chickens; in a fine dress for her three-year-old birthday party. Chestina gathered these pictures and many others into an album and wrote captions for the photos; below a picture of Chris and Eudora she wrote a proud Daddy, and below one of herself with the baby, she added and mother too. From the first, Eudora Welty was reared in an atmosphere of abundant parental love.¹

She was also reared in a book-filled environment. By the time she was two or three years old, Eudora knew, as she wrote in her autobiography, that "any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to. My mother read to me. She’d read to me in the big bedroom in the mornings, when we were in her rocker together, which ticked in rhythm as we rocked, as though we had a cricket accompanying the story. She’d read to me in the diningroom on winter afternoons in front of the coal fire, with our cuckoo clock ending the story with ‘Cuckoo,’ and at night when I’d got in my own bed. I must have given her no peace. Sometimes she read to me in the kitchen while she sat churning, and the churning sobbed along with any story."² From the start, Eudora loved the written word, and her keen ear for language and inflection began to develop long before she could read for herself. After she became a reader on her own, Eudora followed a pattern set by her mother and would often have several books underway, one for each of the various rooms in her house.

Having spent three years as an only child, Eudora might have felt displaced when her brothers, Edward Jefferson Welty and Walter Andrews Welty, were born in 1912 and 1915. But though Chris took a photo of Eudora pouting behind Chessie and the newly arrived Edward, Chessie’s photo caption noted that her daughter was not as sorry as she looks. Indeed, she was not. She and Edward proved kindred spirts from the start: I can’t think I had much of a sense of humor as long as I remained the only child. When my brother Edward came along after I was three, we both became comics, making each other laugh. We set each other off, as we did for life, from the minute he learned to talk. A sense of the absurd was communicated between us probably before that. Though Walter even as an infant proved more serious than his older siblings, his sister doted on him and sought to entertain him: Once, she reported, I snatched up his baby bathtub and got behind it and danced for him, to hear him really crow. On the pink bottom of his tub I’d drawn a face with crayons, and all he could see of anybody’s being there was my legs prancing under it. And of course Eudora’s parents were proud of the new additions to their family. When the city of Jackson held a baby parade in 1916, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported that Christian Welty participated with three-and-a-half-year-old Edward, who was on a velocipede—or tricycle, as we know it today—and that Chestina Welty strolled with six-month-old Walter in his baby carriage decorated with roses.³

The closeness of family life was something Eudora treasured. In One Writer’s Beginnings, she recalled hearing her parents perform their own version of Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow Waltz as she buttoned her shoes in the morning: They would begin whistling back and forth to each other up and down the stairwell. My father would whistle his phrase, my mother would try to whistle, then hum hers back. It was their duet. I drew my buttonhook in and out and listened to it—I knew it was ‘The Merry Widow.’ The difference was, their song almost floated with laughter: how different from the record, which growled from the beginning, as if the Victrola were only slowly being wound up. And she loved to lie in bed listening to her parents across the room talk or read to each other: I don’t remember that any secrets were revealed to me, nor do I remember any avid curiosity on my part to learn something I wasn’t supposed to—perhaps I was too young to know what to listen for. But I was present in the room with the chief secret there was—the two of them, father and mother, sitting there as one.⁴ The strength of her parents’ union betokened a larger union of parents and children. Family activities for the Weltys were constant. They went for early-morning swims, they attended lectures, concerts, and plays brought by the Circuit Chautauqua to Poindexter Park, they looked at the stars through Chris’s telescope, they flew homemade kites in pastures outside of town, they consulted the dictionary to determine the meaning of words that had baffled one of them during dinner conversation, and they journeyed to Ohio and West Virginia to visit grandparents, uncles, and cousins. Each summer mother and children also journeyed about fifteen miles from Jackson and spent several weeks trying to escape the city heat. Their destination was a small resort called Hubbard’s Wells, a place where healthful waters could be drunk, where paper lanterns hung from the trees, and where local pianist Eddie Stiles provided live entertainment some evenings. Chris joined his family on weekends.

Back home in Jackson, the Welty children were part of a lively neighborhood. They joined other children in riding velocipedes, and eventually, bicycles (Eudora was proud to own a Princess bicycle). With friends they played hopscotch and jacks, jumped rope, and roller-skated. At twilight they pulled their choo-choo boats made from shoe boxes, with holes cut out in the shape of the moon and stars and with lighted candles inside. And they shared rides in pony carts.

Eudora and her friends loved strolling to the movies.

Setting out in the early summer afternoon on foot, by way of Smith Park to Capitol Street and down it, passing the Pythian Castle with its hot stone breath, through the one spot of shade beneath Mrs. Black’s awning, crossing Town Creek—then visible and uncontained—we went carrying parasols over our heads and little crocheted bags over our wrists containing the ten or fifteen cents for the ticket (with a nickel or dime further for McIntyre’s Drug Store after the show), and we had our choice—the Majestic or the Istrione. At the Majestic we could sit in a box—always empty, because airless as a bureau drawer; at the Istrione, which was said to occupy the site of an old livery stable, we might see Alice Brady in Drums of Jeopardy and at the same time have a rat run over our feet. As far as I recall, there was no movie we were not allowed to see, until we got old enough not to see The Sheik.

The little girls, Eudora also recalled, spent entire summer days making batteries of paper dolls and having them perform exciting scenes we thought up.⁵ The future story writer was at an early age actively engaging her imagination.

Other activities were for children and adults alike. In Smith Park, neighborhood families picnicked or attended evening band concerts together. And parents, Chris and Chessie included, often organized more far-flung expeditions for the children, traveling to the clay banks on the Terry road or to the military park in Vicksburg. When a family whom Chessie saw as disreputable established residence on Congress Street, she sought to deny her children their company, but her daughter was eager to transcend class boundaries. In an early and never-published novella, Courtney, a character clearly based upon Eudora, longs to play with the Hockin children, whose family has rented an apartment across the street. Her mother discourages this practice: I can’t understand how those Hockins could have gotten into this neighborhood. They are as common as they can be. Courtney, I would rather you didn’t play with them so much, dear. The Hockins in this story are deemed objectionable not because of lineage or poverty but because they are loud, indecorous, impolite, even un-bathed. The mother in Eudora’s 1942 story The Winds makes class distinctions based on similar criteria, even as her daughter Josie looks up to the disreputable Cornella. Such aspects of this story, Eudora told her agent Diarmuid Russell, were little fragments out of my own life and what I sent you is the first story I’ve tried directly attempting to remember exact real sensations.⁶

Despite Chessie’s attempt to shelter her children, young Eudora was always listening for stories, typically from her elders. There was the lady who, Eudora recalled, invited me to catch her doodlebug; under the trees in her backyard were dozens of their holes. When you stuck a broom straw down one and called, ‘Doodlebug, doodlebug, your house is on fire and all your children are burning up,’ she believed this is why the doodlebug came running out of the hole. This was why I loved to call up her doodlebugs instead of ours. My mother could never have told me her stories, and I think I knew why even then: my mother didn’t believe them. But I could listen to this murmuring lady all day. She believed everything she heard, like the doodlebug. And so did I. Then there was the seamstress who came to the Weltys’ house and, along with her speed and dexterity, brought along a great provision of up-to-the-minute news. As exciting as the storytellers were the out-of-towners who appeared mysteriously: The acrobats who picnicked in Smith Park while they were in Jackson with the circus; the Mexican hot-tamale man who sold his delicacies on the street corner, and the blackberry lady and the watermelon man who sold door-to-door; the farmer who drove his wagon down residential streets as he sang, Milk, milk, / Buttermilk, / Snap beans—butterbeans—/ Tender okra—fresh greens . . . / And buttermilk; the gypsies who descended upon Jackson each fall; the organ grinder who, with his monkey, appeared at unexpected moments.⁷ To Eudora, all seemed to have emerged from the pages of fiction.

Not so exotic, perhaps, was an old African American man who ran the elevator at Mississippi’s state capitol and whom Eudora would later try to place in her early novella about a fictional alter ego.

He was an old servant of a family up the street from Courtney and still occupied the old servant’s house in their back yard. Every morning about nine o’clock Uncle Lewis, bent and mumbling (though not to himself, the children argued, because he was deaf) would hobble down the street. It was his manner of walking which most impressed the children. His feet, in long soft black shoes, slapped out in almost a straight angle, like a clown’s. Uncle Lewis would lean on his yellow cane with one hand and rest the other behind his back and proceed slowly on his way. The children would see him far up the street, run to meet him and call out Hey, Uncle Lewis? How come you walk that-a-way? Look! This is the way you walk! And they would all show him. He would pat their heads and give them licorice. One day Courtney and Sam and Martha and Edward all played follow the leader down the street, with Uncle Lewis, in front, as the unconscious leader. It was painfully funny to all the children. They made a practice of walking behind Uncle Lewis every morning, mocking him. One day he turned around and saw them. He did not understand the sight of four little children with contorted legs and thought nothing of it, but gave them licorice. I aint goin’ to do that agin, vowed Courtney. Fraidy-cat, said Sam. I am not, said Courtney. Fraidy-cat, said Martha. Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me, said Courtney, running into the house.⁸

Like Courtney, young Eudora, her brother, and friends, it seems, had mocked an arthritic old black man, as they would not have dared to mock a white man of their own social circle. But clearly Courtney, aka Eudora, felt tremendous guilt when Uncle Lewis saw what the children had been doing; at a young age, she learned to respect the dignity of this most vulnerable man, whatever other children might say.

By the age of five Eudora was able to read as well as be read to, and her mother felt the time had arrived for a more formal education than home and neighborhood could offer. Like the fictional Courtney of her unpublished novella, Eudora may have been so active that her parents needed some respite: When Courtney was five years old, her mother and father decided to send her to public school, although the term was well under way. Courtney seemed to them too exuberant to retain for another year in the home which was without, it seemed, sufficient outlet for her over-abundance of energy. Eudora did indeed begin grammar school at midterm. Chessie spoke to Miss Lorena Duling, the principal of Davis School, who agreed that after Christmas vacation Eudora should enter the first grade. There she would encounter some exceptional teachers and would make fast friends. Miss Duling set high standards, and a competent corps of classroom teachers enforced them. There were also a singing teacher, a physical-training teacher, and an art teacher. Each appeared for an hour once a week. From the start, Eudora relished learning. And she also relished the company of her classmates. Among her closest friends were Elizabeth Heidelberg, whose father ran a furniture store; Emily White Stevens, whose father was a lawyer and a judge; and Willanna Buck, whose father served as clerk to the Supreme Court. Willanna recalls that Eudora was at once shy and outgoing, someone who loved to be with people, to talk, and hear others talk, but someone who was never a showoff. She did command special attention from her classmates, however, for she owned a basketball and, during recess, could retrieve it from her house, just across the street.⁹

Outside of school there were other educational opportunities: art instruction under the tutelage of Marie Hull, whose works had been exhibited across the nation; piano and dance lessons under more provincial instructors; and the public library, a mere three blocks from Eudora’s house. There she encountered Miss Annie Parker, the librarian whose rules could not be violated. Girls had to wear as many petticoats as were required to keep Miss Parker from seeing right through them. And no one could check out more than two books a day—returning books on the same day they had been checked out was strictly forbidden. Eudora chafed under this restriction, for she was an avid reader. The Five Little Peppers, The Wizard of Oz, The Little Colonel, The Green Fairy Book, V. V’s Eyes, Randy’s Spring, Randy’s Summer, Randy’s Fall, Randy’s Winter, were among the many books that captured her imagination. Though the library could not supply books quickly enough, there were other, and often more interesting, books at home. At the age of nine or ten, Eudora received the ten-volume set of Our Wonder World and found herself especially entranced by volume five: Every Child’s Story Book. In its pages she found fairy tales like The Goose Girl, The Fisherman and his Wife, and Snow White. Here she also discovered nonsense songs by Edward Lear. And in the travel narratives contained in Our Wonder World, she encountered a cultural diversity not to be seen in Jackson, Mississippi. In a section entitled Child Life in Many Lands, were descriptions of China, Spain, Turkey, India, Russia, Japan, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Persia, and the islands of the South Pacific. But even Our Wonder World could not long satisfy Eudora. Happily, there was her parents’ collection of Mark Twain, a collection she began to read before she had left grade school.

Not content with reading the works of others, Eudora herself was a youthful author. Before she even entered school, Eudora had composed in her imagination plays for her dolls: she did not want to mother baby dolls, but to own larger dolls that she could use in her theatricals. Before long, impromptu dramas gave way to written work. In 1921 twelve-year-old Eudora won the Jackie Mackie Jingles contest and received twenty-five dollars along with a citation expressing the hope that she would improve in poetry to such an extent as to win fame. Evidently in that same year, she became her own publisher, creating a book to entertain her brother Edward. In The Glorious Apology, Eudora set forth the preposterous and hilarious adventures of Fitzhugh Green (the son of the whispering saxophonist Artimus H. Green) and his wife, Lallie. She illustrated this text with clippings from newspapers and magazines, and she also began the book with blurbs selectively cut from magazines and pasted on construction paper: HEAR WHAT THE CRITICS SAY ABOUT IT! ANDREW VOLSTEAD—‘Never heard of it.’ WAYNE B. WHEELER—‘I haven’t read it.’ JOHN ROACH STRATTON—‘I know nothing about it.’¹⁰

In September of 1921 Eudora entered the eighth grade at Jackson High School. This brought about an important widening of her world, and she granted such expanding vistas to her fictional counterpart, Courtney: Until she was sent to high school, Courtney’s life centered almost wholly on her neighborhood. Experience for her was bounded on one end of the street by the state capitol, where kidnappers were believed by all the children to lie in wait, and on the other end by the blind institute, from whence at intervals of once a month two white-headed young men came down Allen street with large black spectacles and armfuls of brooms which they carried gun-like over their shoulders.¹¹ There were neither kidnappers nor white-headed broom carriers threatening Eudora’s access to Jackson High, and there she met students from other parts of the city and from the local Baptist and Methodist orphanages. She did not, of course, attend class with any African American students, for schools were racially segregated. Black schools were woefully underfunded and included no grade above the ninth. Richard Wright, who was seven months older than Eudora but whose formal schooling had been sporadic, entered the fifth grade at Jackson’s all-black Jim Hill School as Eudora entered the eighth at Jackson High. Wright knew a Jackson from which Eudora had largely been sheltered, one where because of race he was barred from libraries, denied opportunity for advancement, subjected to violence. An outstanding student nevertheless, he moved through his classes on an accelerated basis and graduated as valedictorian of Smith-Robertson School in 1925. He and Eudora never met, though both would eventually be numbered among America’s finest writers.

Instead of racial diversity, Eudora encountered another sort of diversity at Jackson High. John Robinson and Lehman Engel, for instance, came from different grammar schools and rather different backgrounds from Eudora’s. John, who lived near Jackson’s Millsaps College, came from a pioneering Mississippi Delta family with large landholdings; his stepgrandfather was a former governor and senator, J. K. Vardaman, the ardent racist who had been hung in effigy for his opposition to World War I and defeated in his senate-reelection bid for the same reason. Lehman Engel, on the other hand, was Jewish, the grandchild of immigrants, the son of a traveling salesman with a penchant for gambling, and the nephew of a prominent businessman and civic leader. Not only did Jackson High students come from such divergent backgrounds, many also went on to lead notably accomplished lives. Among Eudora’s friends who graduated between 1923 and 1928 were an artist (Helen Jay Lotterhos), a composer and conductor (Engel), two college professors (Frank Lyell and Bill Hamilton), a journalist (Ralph Hilton), a lawyer (Joe Skinner), an Episcopal priest (George Stephenson), and a New York Times Book Review editor (Nash Burger). Amid this talented group of students, Eudora thrived academically, compiling a ninety-five percentile scoring average for her four years of class work and continuing to think of herself as a writer-to-be. In 1924, when Jackson High School officials decided to add grade twelve to their program, the eleventh graders were divided: Those with the top grade averages were named the senior class; the others would become seniors the following year. Eudora, who had begun her schooling at age five, was chosen for the senior class and would graduate from high school at the tender age of sixteen.

Her life was active outside the classroom, as a story she penned for the 1924 school yearbook, Quadruplane, reveals. The Conference Condemns Caroline describes a teenage girl studying late into the night only to find that from her textbooks living figures begin to emerge, seemingly arriving for a committee meeting: Cicero, Archimedes, Shakespeare’s Touchstone, and a contemporary legislator greet Caroline and begin to criticize the hour of their meeting. Cicero, in particular, bitterly complains: [W]ho of us do you suppose does not know the reason of this outrage? It is Caroline of the Junior class, Caroline of the Basket Ball Team, Caroline of the Picture-Show Club! It is Caroline, I say, who does everything else before she studies her lessons, and then falls asleep over a masterpiece like my oration against Catiline! The legislator then moves that they adopt a series of resolutions condemning Caroline, but before the resolutions can be enacted, the clock strikes eleven thirty and wakes the young woman, who realizes she must have dreamed it all and who declares, Tomorrow I’m going to study in the afternoon. Surely Eudora was writing comically about herself, for in 1924, she was almost as busy as Caroline: She was a substitute forward on the girls’ basketball team, worked on the yearbook staff, drew four illustrations for the Quadruplane, and wrote a Toast to the Class of ’25.¹²

In 1925 Eudora published a second poem in St. Nicholas—the first had appeared in a 1923 issue of this national publication for young people—and this time around, she won a silver badge. In the Twilight is a poem indebted to both Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard and Edgar Allan Poe’s anapestic Ulalume.

The daylight in glory is dying away;

The last faded colors are fast growing gray;

The sun nears the beckoning portals of night,

And leave [sic] to the skies his long, ling’ring light.

The sunbeams had hid ‘neath a sad, misty veil,

And softened to shadows—dim, silvery, pale.

The Queen of the Night shyly peeps o’er the hill

And reigns in her radiance—soft, cold and still.

A lone cyprus-tree, with its feathery grace,

Casts delicate shadows, like old Spanish lace,

On the cool, trembling waters that meet the gray sky,

And the moon rules supreme in her palace on high.¹³

The young poet had not found her own voice; she must have known as much. Though she had won national attention, Eudora’s head was not turned. She continued to work hard on the JHS yearbook, supplying in 1925 fourteen illustrations, writing Youth and Age (a conversation between the new Jackson High building and the old), and contributing another witty story called The Origin of Shorthand. During her senior year, she was secretary to the Dramatic Club, appeared in a play called Three Live Ghosts, and served as literary editor of the Jackson Hi Life. She and several girlfriends also formed a study group, whose members met over lunch to prepare for their Virgil class: The Girgil Club’s motto was Listen, cram, and be careful / For eighth period you may read, its colors were black and blue, and its club book was The Aeneid.

Active as she was, Eudora was not the typical Jackson High student. She was absolutely uninterested, for instance, in being a cheerleader or being the girlfriend of a sports hero, two goals of the JHS southern belle. Though she lacked the appearance and flirtatious manner of a belle, she did not crave them. And though she was not a siren, neither was she the ugly duckling biographer Ann Waldron suggests she was. She was a tall, pleasant-looking young woman (as pictures reveal), with brilliant blue eyes and a bit of a toothy smile, in love with language and ideas, and smitten by male classmates who shared those loves. Her intelligence, geniality, sense of humor, and reliability made her popular, and classmates named Eudora Demeter (Most Dependable) and Irene (Best All ‘Round). But neither of these was the title she most desired. When an article called What They Intend to Do appeared in the 30 April 1925 issue of Jackson Hi Life, a single word was listed opposite Eudora’s name: Author.

One popular high school group Eudora belonged to despite grave reservations—the Hi-Y Club. In this club, Eudora recalled, You won points for doing good, specific points for specific good. You had ceremonies by candlelight and your first achievement was a thin wire ring, the Golden Circle. You were supposed (I think you were asked to swear) that you would never take it off even when you were married and after you were old and gray you were supposed to hang onto it still—not die until you had asked to be buried in it. It had to do with purity. The teacher who sponsored this club was obsessed with puritanical notions and often told the girls cautionary tales: "They were awful stories. One was of a girl who let herself be kissed, and wherever those lips had touched her, a great black mark came out on her skin and no soap or water would ever wash it off. It was like some befuddled version of The Scarlet Letter . . . I thought then of the corollary, everybody would know it too if you hadn’t been kissed."¹⁴ A narrow-minded and moralistic mind-set did not then, or ever, appeal to Eudora. Perhaps she was even able to move the club away from this mind-set when she appeared in the suggestively titled (though quite innocent) burlesque Wild Nell: The Pet of the Plains at her senior Hi-Y banquet.

In 1923 the Welty family had temporarily moved to rental property in Belhaven, Jackson’s first suburb, where they would build a house. Edward and Walter enjoyed skinny-dipping in a nearby lake. Eudora had fun enlisting her brothers and other young people to perform in neighborhood theatricals. But all the Weltys were eager for their own house on nearby Pinehurst Place to be completed. Chris had steadily progressed in the Lamar Life hierarchy—becoming a member of the board of directors, then general manager and vice president. Under his direction, Jackson’s first skyscraper was being erected, and the architect for that building had also designed the Pinehurst Place house for the Welty family. Chessie and Chris expected to bring a new baby to their new house. Then, on the evening of January 26, 1924, a very premature daughter was stillborn in a local hospital and the next morning was buried. Just as a few years earlier they had kept Chessie’s surgery for breast cancer a secret from their children, and just as they tried not to mention the 1907 death of a son, Chessie and Chris never discussed this new loss with Eudora, Edward, and Walter. In silence they sought to anesthetize themselves and shield their children.

Chestina’s grief at the loss of an infant daughter further strengthened an already intense devotion to her surviving daughter. Such devotion seems likely to have prompted an act of self-sacrifice that summer and to have resulted in a double-edged response from Eudora. Eudora had in recent years enjoyed traveling with her father to New York and Chicago. Now Chestina resolved that her daughter would see the West Coast. As Eudora recalled, When I was 15 she suddenly decided, the day before she & my father were to take the train to California on a ‘company trip’ for my father’s best insurance agents, that she would stay at home and I should go. They already had the family friend arranged . . . to be with the children at home. She had all her clothes. I had no clothes for traveling on a fine trip. My father said he would take me shopping in New Orleans [the city from which the westbound train departed]—The first thing, in the hotel room in Los Angeles, I washed my hair and sat brushing it out of the window to blow in the day, smelling and breathing the Pacific air, transported with the strangeness and the distance from home. As I sat drying my hair at this high window, I was aching with guilt for all my mother had given up and all that was ahead of me.¹⁵ For Eudora, the transporting pleasures of travel seemed sadly, as they would again and again, to have been purchased by her mother’s deprivation.

In May 1925 the Pinehurst house was still not ready for the family, but Chessie, who was already engaged in landscaping the property, organized a graduation party for Eudora to be held in the garden. Perhaps dreading the day their daughter would leave home for college, her parents took the family on a long car trip that summer. On July 19 they headed for Trout Lake, Wisconsin, spent a week there, then visited Chicago, where they purchased clothes for Eudora and toured the city with Grandpa Welty, who had journeyed up from southern Ohio. Chris’s mother had died when he was a child, but his father remained hale, hearty, and able to travel in his later years. The Mississippi Weltys drove Grandpa back to his home, before heading to West Virginia and a reunion with Chessie’s family.¹⁶ When they returned to Jackson, it was time for Eudora to prepare for life as a college student in Columbus, Mississippi. Her parents had wanted sixteen-year-old Eudora to remain in Jackson, at Millsaps College, while she had longed to go farther afield. Visits to major cities with her father, the wanderlust instilled by Our Wonder World, and her need for independence made going away to college seem imperative. The Mississippi State College for Women, more commonly known as MSCW, was the compromise parents and daughter reached.

At MSCW Eudora discovered the very environment her parents had hoped she would—an academic community focused upon shelter. The college was also in many ways the epitome of provinciality: Its marching drills, which students performed in costumes modeled on those of French colonial Zouave troops, must have seemed exceedingly strange and amusing to a girl who had hoped for more contemporary sophistication. So, too, must have seemed her elevation to fire chief of Hastings Hall. And as she told Jackson friend Dorothy Simmons, daily prayer meetings in the post office lobby drove her to distraction: The way it makes me feel is what I call hell. Nevertheless Eudora warmly embraced many aspects of college life. She wrote plays and performed in them, composed articles for the student paper, and penned her own stories and poems. Her skit The Gnat, a takeoff of a Broadway hit called The Bat, poked fun at the college faculty and staff in a rather Perelmanesque fashion; Eudora had read the young S. J. Perelman and was smitten. Her fiction of the time was clearly in the Perelman vein, and in two stories Eudora looked ironically at her own literary ambitions. In The Great Pinnington Solves the Mystery, the narrator asserts, I am going to write a book. All my friends say that they are confident I can write something big and different, and this is it. In a second story, titled ’I’ for Iris—Irma, Imogene, the narrator begins, It was while I was sitting helplessly at the table during one of those inevitable Ohio Sunday dinners, wherein meat, bread, potatoes and kinfolks make a prim struggle for supremacy, that one of the last named made the fatal suggestion. Wouldn’t it be nice if I should go to see the new neighbor! She was an artist, they said significantly, and paused. It is generally believed among my relatives that I have an artistic temperament, although they go by only the first two syllables. Eudora’s poetry, on the other hand, tended away from the satiric or ironic. A stanza from the poem Autumn’s Here, for example, shows her debt to the English romantics, for it offers, despite a wry glance at James Whitcomb Riley, a sort of seasonal variation on William Wordsworth’s Written in March.

Oh, the autumn of the year has come

   —there’s color everywhere!

There’s a dusky, husky, musky,

    smoky smelling in the air!

And the leaves are dancing gaily—

    they don’t give the world a care,

        Autumn’s here!¹⁷

Perhaps this poem also shows Eudora’s debt to Mr. Lawrence Painter and his English-literature survey, but her interest in verse was not merely backward-looking. At MSCW she discovered the power of contemporary poetry, reading the work of William Alexander Percy, the Mississippian who in the years since 1915 had had three books of poems published by Yale University Press.

She also discovered that she could escape the shelter of MSCW’s walls. Though unchaperoned students were forbidden to leave campus for such places as the Gilmer Hotel dining room—doing so was a so-called shipping offense that could result in dismissal—Eudora found ways to dine downtown without college officials discovering her crimes. Presumably the Princess Theatre was not off-limits, and it was there that Eudora, always a good dancer, won a Charleston contest. So, too, did she, along with friends, occasionally manage to leave campus and walk fifteen miles, cross a railroad bridge, and picnic at the abandoned antebellum mansion called Waverley. The house, vacant for over a decade, had never been vandalized; its massive chandelier, piano with mother-of-pearl keys, and double stairway ascending to the top of the octagon-shaped foyer would twenty years later provide Eudora with the appointments for the house Marmion in Delta Wedding. However useful these excursions would prove to the future writer, they may have been ill-advised: On one of their country adventures, the girls were greeted by a woman from Memphis who sold them cigarettes, invited them to come to her home, and made vaguely lesbian propositions to some of them. No takers. Their rebellion took other routes. Eudora wrote to the Hershey company in Pennsylvania, complaining that poverty in Mississippi left her and her pals hungry at day’s end. Could the company provide them with chocolate nourishment? It did. Then on April Fools’ Day 1927, Eudora placed a note in the society column of the student paper: "Misses