Eudora Welty - One Writers Beginnings

Eudora at home, working in her bedroom, 1940s.

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Copyright 1983, 1984 by Eudora Welty

Copyright 2020 by Eudora Welty LLC

Introduction copyright 2020 by Natasha Trethewey

Excerpt(s) from The Optimists Daughter by Eudora Welty, copyright 1969, 1972 by Eudora Welty. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

A Memory from A Curtain of Green and Other Stories by Eudora Welty. Copyright 1937, renewed 1965 by Eudora Welty. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

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Cover design by Tristan Offit

Cover Artwork: Flower Pattern Gibon Art / Alamy Stock Photo; House Illustration Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia / Bridgeman Images

Endpaper background pattern Gibon Art / Alamy Stock Photo

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-1-9821-5177-5

ISBN 978-1-9821-5298-7 (ebook)

To the memory of my parents

Christian Webb Welty

18791931

Chestina Andrews Welty

18831966

F or a long time Ive kept a copy of Eudora Weltys One Writers Beginnings close at hand, among the collection of books stacked on my desk. Though I swap them out as I move on to new projects, Weltys always remains: a favorite reminder of the great task to which Ive set myself. My copy is well worn, heavily annotated: passages underlined, once, twice, in different-colored inkone for each successive readingor highlighted in yellow, dotted with stars or exclamation points in the margins that bear, on many pages, a record of my thoughts on a given day, my responses to Weltys words. Thats one of the pleasures of beloved books: reading them again and again, going back to some seemingly familiar territory and finding things that went unnoticed before or that you might have seen in a different light. Its a way of encountering the selfof meeting a former selfthe reader you were at another time.

I cant recall when I first read One Writers Beginnings, nor exactly who I was back then. Two things come to mind: My mother was already lost to meshe had died when I was nineteenand that great loss was pushing me toward some necessary articulation, toward becoming a writer. Perhaps my father, also a writer and professor, had suggested I read it to make sense of my own inclinations. Or perhaps I sought out Beginnings to make a connection with a writer from my native geography, from my Mississippi. I had long since encountered Weltys fiction, but meeting an author in autobiography is a different thing, a way to see behind the stories into the life that led to their making.

This is what strikes me on the very first page. Welty begins as we all do, rooted in a particular time and place, a child encountering the sensory world she inhabited at home in Jackson, Mississippi. She describes the sounds of that house: her parents signaling to each other from up and down the stairs, her father whistling, her mother humming the tune back to him; the clocks in the house chiming the hour in their different voices. All of it a dialogue, each call inviting an answer to which the child was acutely attuned. Children, like animals, Welty writes, use all their senses to discover the world. This is one of the humble gifts of her memoir, the generosity with which she shares her experience while reminding us of how similar we are despite how vastly different the particularities of our experience may be.

Reading the discoveries of her life offers not only revelation into the mind of a great writer but also an invitation to recall our own discoveries, to meet ourselves again in our memories. It is our inward journey that leads us through time, she writes, forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge.

I did not have the opportunity to meet Miss Welty in person, and yet I feel a kind of intimacy meeting her in her words: a convergence of two women, two Mississippiansone white, one blackborn more than half a century apart. It is that convergence, what Welty would call confluence, that each of us enacts when reading this slender and lovely narrative. Our separate journeys converging.

Even as the title proclaims its singularity, the origins of a particular writer, One Writers Beginnings seems to me both timeless and necessary for any of us going about each daya kind of primer for being a citizen of the world, for answering our own particular callings and joining the long conversation that is human history. Whether or not we are writers, we tell a story to ourselves about our lives, the arc of themwhat gives meaning and purpose, and connects us to others.

I am reminded of that each time I read One Writers Beginnings, each time I meet myself in her words, each time I am compelled to respond in the margins to some new discovery. An answering that expands the conversation. I think shed welcome that.

Natasha Trethewey

W hen I was young enough to still spend a long time buttoning my shoes in the morning, Id listen toward the hall: Daddy upstairs was shaving in the bathroom and Mother downstairs was frying the bacon. 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 itI 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. They kept it running between them, up and down the stairs where I was now just about ready to run clattering down and show them my shoes.

I Listening

I n our house on North Congress Street in Jackson, Mississippi, where I was born, the oldest of three children, in 1909, we grew up to the striking of clocks. There was a mission-style oak grandfather clock standing in the hall, which sent its gong-like strokes through the livingroom, diningroom, kitchen, and pantry, and up the sounding board of the stairwell. Through the night, it could find its way into our ears; sometimes, even on the sleeping porch, midnight could wake us up. My parents bedroom had a smaller striking clock that answered it. Though the kitchen clock did nothing but show the time, the diningroom clock was a cuckoo clock with weights on long chains, on one of which my baby brother, after climbing on a chair to the top of the china closet, once succeeded in suspending the cat for a moment. I dont know whether or not my fathers Ohio family, in having been Swiss back in the 1700s before the first three Welty brothers came to America, had anything to do with this; but we all of us have been time-minded all our lives. This was good at least for a future fiction writer, being able to learn so penetratingly, and almost first of all, about chronology. It was one of a good many things I learned almost without knowing it; it would be there when I needed it.