Intersecting Visual Art and the Art of the Setting
Eudora Welty (April 13, 1909 – July 23, 2001), daughter of Christian Welty and Chestina Welty, was a short story writer and photographer, born in Jackson, Mississippi. As seen from her memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings, she grew up in a supporting and loving family which included her mother and father, and her two younger brothers Edward and Walter. As a child, she attended Davis Elementary School then graduated from Jackson’s Central High School in 1925. She attended college at the Mississippi State College for Women and later, at the University of Wisconsin. From there, she studied and graduated at the Columbia University School of Business. To start off her career, she worked as a publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration. In her free time, she would take photographs, usually of the poor, as well as people suffering from the Great Depression. She continued to take photographs until the 1950s. Welty’s first short story was, “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” published in 1936. She then went on to have a number of short stories published and her first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green, was published in 1941. Some awards and honors that she was given included the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel The Optimist’s Daughter, the National Book Award for Fiction, for The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, and more. She was successful as a photographer too: her early photographs have appeared in books including One Time, One Place (1971), Photographs (1989), and Eudora Welty as Photographer (2009). She passed away on July 23, 2001, due to cardio-pulmonary failure, in Jackson, where she is buried.
In Welty’s childhood, we can see a great sense of comfort taken from her environment. From the very second she was born, she felt so much love from her two parents. Welty’s mother introduced her and taught Welty her love for books. “She read to me in the big bedroom in the mornings… She’d read to me in the dining room on winter afternoons in front of the coal fire… and at night when I’d got in my own bed” (OW’sB 5). Her mother showed her how there is so much that can come from reading: experiencing different lives and a whole world of imagination. Her father also loved her endlessly and would show Welty and her siblings little gadgets, how to look at stars, and other things. This would help her learn how to experience new things, whether it was just little toys in their house or things in life. These things would benefit her as “[she] developed a strong meteorological sensibility”(4), and could help her find her way home if they “were lost in a strange country” (4). She also would get to play with toys, not only for girls, but also “as soon as the boys attained anywhere near the right age, there was an electric train, the engine with its pea-sized working headlight, its line of cars, tracks equipped with switches, semaphores, its station, its bridges, and its tunnel” (5). Welty had the privilege to live with incredibly loving parents who would no doubt do what was best for she and her siblings. And of course, a place that she could always count on: a “bookcase in the living room, which was always called ‘the library'” (6). Even more than that, their house had encyclopedia tables and a dictionary stand under windows in their dining room. Welty took advantage of this home library and as soon as she could read, she “[read] them all alike and as they came, straight down their rows, top shelf to bottom.” She was never away from the love of her parents, her siblings and her home.
In the first few years of her life, she, with the help of her parents, would learn life lessons that can be seen in some of Welty’s stories. Her father buying she and her siblings many gadgets “represent[ed his] fondest beliefs—in progress, in the future.” She also mentions how “neither of [her] parents had come from homes that could afford to buy many books… [her] father was all the while carefully selecting and ordering away for what he and Mother thought we children should grow up with. They bought first for the future” (6). This belief of doing things for the future comes up a couple of times in the first few pages of One Writer’s Beginnings. Since both of her parents believed in this, it is possible that she could have included this in her story “Livvie”. She grew up with many things in her house like oak grandfather clocks, cuckoo clocks, Kodak cameras, instruments, and much more.
As previously mentioned, Welty grew up in a very stable family and community. In her autobiography, One Writer’s Beginnings, Welty shares a story of a time her family set out on a journey. The Welty family owned a five-passenger Oakland touring car and took it on a trip to Ohio and West Virginia.
Her mother was the navigator, holding in hand, an AAA Blue Book. Her father’s “sense of direction was unassailable” (43), and he liked to travel “through the country” (43). She and her brother Edward would sit in the back seats “with [their] legs straight out in front of [them] over some suitcases.” This particular journey lasted for about two weeks total, there and back, and “each day had my parents both in its grip” (44). Eudora would sit behind her father which led her to “[inheriting] his nervous energy in the way [Eudora] can’t stop writing on a story” (44). Many of these trips uncovered realizations like how “writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations (44).” Eudora proceeds to write about her great grandfather, the lawyer Ned Andrews. She learned about the time her mother agreed to cutting off her hair in exchange for a set of Dickens, Ned’s “courtroom flair” (47), and Ned’s many other talents. Eudora had a very fortunate and happy childhood where she could hang out with her siblings, had good relationships with her parents, experienced normal childlike things, and took trips with her family. Things as little as this trip helped her become the writer she is so famous for being.
Passionate Observer: Eudora Welty among artists of the thirties is published by Mississippi Museum of Art with three sections about Welty’s career: first, Welty as photographer, second, Welty as a writer, and third, Welty and her artistic colleagues that grew alongside her. One Writer’s Beginnings
was transcribed and enlarged upon from her William E. Massey Sr. lectures in the history of American civilization, at Harvard University in 1983, and was on the New York Times bestseller list for 40 weeks. It includes her life leading up to her writing career and what inspired her and created the pathway to her accomplishments. Throughout the book, she reveals her childhood to her early adulthood, in fine detail.
After Welty’s years at the University of Wisconsin where she majored in English literature, she returned home to where both she and some of her friends had reconnected and caught each other up and their accomplishments of their early careers. She was lucky, for her talent was, while perhaps the brightest light in the town, not the only one. Lotterhos, Hemmingsworth and others were gaining national reputation.
“All three were interested in figurative work and landscapes. The tradition of realism, with only slight echoes of their training in European modernism, dominated their works. They were all active in the Mississippi Art Association, presenting their shows and the work of others at the Jackson Municipal Art Gallery. Their lives were entwined with each other and with Welty as she embraced their talents and efforts” (Passionate Observer, 43).
Through the art scene, Welty met many people and soon became friends. Helen Jay Lotterhos returned home to Jackson the same year as Eudora. Together, they “became good friends, sharing a lively interest in art and writing” (43). Lotterhos and Welty took sketching trips around Jackson where they would find a place of interest and have picnics while sketching. “Lotterhos wrote of one such occasion ‘in early November’ when Eudora took her to see an abandoned house that had caught her imagination” (43). Lotterhos went on as an active artist and teacher and became very successful. Her art was exhibited in exhibitions by the Mississippi Art Association, Mississippi Federation of Women’s Clubs, and many more.
Another one of Welty’s artist friends was William Hollingsworth.
They both grew up in Jackson just a block apart from each other. Hollingsworth and Welty shared an interest in drawing cartoons. However, he eventually transitioned to focus more on serious art. When the FERA (Federal Emergency Relief Administration) office shut down in 1938, he created a studio in his father’s house. Later, his paintings were featured at the Jackson Municipal Art Gallery. He also won the gold medal from the Mississippi Art Association. Hollingsworth’s art began gathering attention from exhibitions all over the country. He and Welty “collaborated on a show of work by Welty’s friend Karnig Nalbandian…” (45). At this time, Welty took a one-year master’s course at Columbia University in New York where she spent more time absorbing the city than sitting in the classroom; her photographs from this period are very important… but when her father died, she moved back to Jackson, permanently.
Another mutual friend was Karl Wolfe. “Wolfe must have been a welcome figure to Eudora who had reluctantly given up the riches of the New York art world to return home” (47). Wolfe moved from Columbia, Mississippi to Jackson the year Welty had returned from Columbia University. Wolfe returned home to just wait out the Great Depression but after surprising success he moved permanently from Columbia, MS, to Jackson and set up a studio. He won prizes early in his career from the Mississippi Art Association, the Alabama Art League, and more. Wolfe and Hollingsworth became good friends and took sketching trips similar to Lotterhos and Welty. Wolfe’s new wife was an artist as well and they both lived a life dedicated to art.
Marie Atkinson Hull had an impact on many artists in Jackson during the Great Depression. “She taught painting to both Eudora Welty and Helen Jay Hotterhos, her cousin, and was an art colleague of Karl Wolfe and William Hollingsworth” (48), influencing many artists during that time. “She was for over a half century the dynamo that turned the wheels of art in Mississippi” (48). As a young artist herself, Hull had taken lessons from people like Aileen M. Phillips Shannon, and as she got older and more experienced, she became the teacher.
Some other artists around Jackson were John McCrady, Walter Anderson, Caroline Russel Compton, Leon Koury, Richmon Barthe, and more. Although Welty may never have known each of them personally, she knew of their work. Welty was inspired by many artists of her time and was able to stand alongside them as they each became successful.
From these friends, she may have gained inspiration for some of her stories. In Eudora’s story “A Worn Path”, when Phoenix Jackson arrives into town, it is all festive and decorated for Christmas. People walk around the streets carrying “an armful of red, green, and silver wrapped presents.” Though not very deeply described, one can imagine the crowded town filled with large groups of people purchasing presents or decorating the town for the season. A painting, High Farish by William Hollingsworth, looks similar to the town in “A Worn Path”.
In this painting, there is a busy street with a lot of people walking around. Lots of people seemed to be dressed in dresses or summery clothes. There are buildings and stores lined down the street and many people going into them. Although it may not be winter, it does look to be raining since many people carry umbrellas held over their heads. Welty could have been inspired by this painting by an old friend and included it in “A Worn Path.”
Another one of Eudora’s stories, “The Whistle” has a setting very similar to William Hollingsworth’s painting Three in a Wagon. In “The Whistle”, Sara and Jason Morton live on a farm that is isolated from everyone else in the woods. The first paragraph of this short story describes the setting of where they live. It is said that “A farm lay quite visible…among the stretches of deep woods in their colorless dead leaf.” In Three in a Wagon, there are a couple of small houses far away from anything else. No one is around besides the three men in a wagon and a small figure following close behind. There seems to be dead grass surrounding the area with bare trees and dying bushes. The leafless trees show that it is winter and cold. In “The Whistle”, “the moonlight covered everything, and lay upon the darkest shape of all, the farmhouse where the lamp had just been blown out.” In the painting, there is the smallest house in the very center which is the darkest point of the painting. Later in the story, we learn that there is a fire going in Sara and Jason’s house. Coming out of the chimney of the house in the painting, is smoke. That means there must be people living inside and a fire going as well. This house exactly describes the Morton’s house. Three in a Wagon resembles Sara and Jason’s house very similarly in “The Whistle.”
In one of the most visually stimulating scenes in “The Wide Net” Welty brings us to a hill where two boys are watching “far down and far away a long freight train passing”. Welty turns to several figures of speech to convey her meaning, “it seemed like a little festival procession” and “the tiny pink and gray cars like secret boxes” and when it comes to actually depicting the scene, she must revert to the ocular effect it has on one of her characters: “tears came to Grady’s eyes, but it could only be because a tiny man walked along the top of the train, walking and moving on top of the moving train.” John McCrady’s Oxford on the Hill shows a couple houses and buildings far in the distance. There are winding roads through the many hills, and countless trees surrounding the area. As a person standing on top of the hill, it would be quite hard to see a person walking in the town or along the path. Similar to how hard it is for Grady to see the man moving on the moving train, it is hard to even see a person standing near the houses in the painting.
A fourth story written by Welty is “A Visit of Charity,” which is about a Campfire Girl, Marian, who has to visit an old lady at a senior center. She is taken to the room of two old ladies who both have snobbish attitudes and bad manners. As Marian walks in, “something was snatched from [her] hand – the little potted plant. ‘Flowers!’ screamed the old woman.” The first old lady stares at the flowers in awe while the second old lady, who is in bed, says they’re “stinkweeds.” They go on to argue back and forth about pointless things while Marian stands to the side shyly. Though not perfectly similar, a sketch by William Hollingsworth resembles the two old ladies. In reality, this sketch is of the same person from two different angles, but it can be seen as two different people. In this sketch, they are both sitting on chairs painting or drawing something. The lady does not seem very young. She wears a sun hat, a knee-length skirt, a sweater over a shirt, and some sandals. One might imagine the old lady with Marian to look somewhat similar.
Almost all stories contain a setting or an imaginary place that readers must picture in their minds if not specifically detailed out. The images in paintings by Eudora’s friends capture the emotion of the story and helps me understand what perhaps was direct inspiration, perhaps indirect. Being able to match these friends’ paintings to a specific story opened a whole new view of the writing and reinforced a clearer picture in my mind. Welty has said “Authors use setting to create meaning, just as painters use backgrounds and objects to render ideas.” My appreciation of art and its deeper meanings has grown. A painting could have the force to impact a story, inspiring the setting and ideas.
Bibliography
- One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty, Harvard University Press, 1983
2. Passionate Observer: Eudora Welty among Artists of the Thirties, Mississippi Museum of Art, 2002