The Realism of Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty (April 13,1909 to July 23, 2001) was an American author of short stories and novels, fiction mostly set in the Depression-era of the South. From Jackson, Mississippi, Welty was a celebrated and respected author and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for her novel The Optimist’s Daughter. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and was the first living author to have her compositions published by the Library of America. Welty was not only a master in fiction as is displayed in her collection of autobiographical essays, which explain the connection between her Mississippi childhood and her later career as a writer. One Writer’s Beginnings, published in 1983, is a collection of three lectures given at Harvard University. Welty shares details from her childhood including her relationship with her parents, Christian Welty, a director of Lamar Life Insurance Company who loved to dabble in photography, which inspired her, and Chestina Andrews Welty, a schoolteacher who reinforced Welty’s love of reading. Nineteen years later, in 2002, an author by the name of Suzanne Marrs published a book called One Writer’s Imagination: The Fiction of Eudora Welty. This book draws upon Marrs’s nearly twenty years of conversations, interviews, and friendship with Eudora Welty in order to describe Welty’s ability to transform experience and transfigure facts, utilizing them in fiction. Marrs analyzes the subtle ways Welty reacted to important historical and personal events of her time.

 

Welty shared a love of gardening with her mother and her editor, Diarmund Russell, that was evident in her short story “A Curtain of Green”. The story takes place in Mrs. Larkin’s large, wild, and densely grown garden. This lush hideaway has become her obsession since an accident that caused her husband’s death:

“Within its border of hedge, high like a wall, and visible only from the upstairs windows of the neighbors, this slanting, tangled garden, more and more over-abundant and confusing, must have become so familiar to Mrs. Larkin that quite possibly by now she was unable to conceive of any other place. Since the accident in which her husband was killed, she had never once been seen anywhere else. Every morning she might be observed walking slowly, almost timidly, out of the white house, wearing a pair of untidy overalls, often with her hair streaming and tangled where she had neglected to comb it” (Selected Stories of Eudora Welty, 187).

There, in the untamed mess that is Mrs. Larkin’s home, accompanied by her worker, a colored boy by the name of Jamey, she tries to deal with the fact that her love for her husband was not enough to save him from his tragic death. “In the story, the gardener, like the writer, confronts the dark irrationality of human experience and attempts to deal with that irrationality” (OWI, 6-7). Mrs. Welty also dealt with death of her husband through spending time in the garden. However, “Mrs. Larkin seeks not Chestina Welty’s ‘well designed [garden] plot,’ but seeks ‘to allow an over-flowing’” (OWI, 7) and in the garden, Mrs. Larkin, now a thoroughly distraught woman, nearly kills Jamey. As Jamey is working, she finds herself standing behind him holding and raising a shovel, preparing to strike at his head. Mrs. Larkin’s realistic character has the same love, which “seeks to but cannot protect the beloved” (OWI, 7) as Mrs. Welty has, and both loves are over-wrought in intensity. “A Curtain of Green” “found its starting point in the depth of Mrs. Welty’s love for her husband, in her abiding grief at his loss (a grief that loomed over a concerned daughter), in her intellectual and creative toughness, and in her inability to retreat into a mindlessly conventional consolation” (OWI, 7). The observation of character and attention to anguish is evident in “A Curtain of Green”.

“A Worn Path” is one of my favorite short stories. Eudora Welty was able to create such realistic and authentic characters and scenery – it was incredible. This story shows the readers “the primitive roads, ramshackle hotels, dogtrot houses, oil lamps, open hearths for cooking and heating, and desperation” (OWI, 12) in the poverty-stricken Depression-era of Mississippi.

“…On she went. The woods were deep and still. The sun made the pine needles almost too bright to look at, up where the wind rocked. The cones dropped as light as feathers. Down in the hollow was the mourning dove–it was not too late for him… It was not possible to allow the dress to tear. ‘I in the thorny bush,’ she said. ‘Thorns, you doing your appointed work. Never want to let folks pass, no sir. Old eyes thought you was a pretty little green bush’” (Selected Stories of Eudora Welty, 241-242).

“A Worn Path” has “death as a backdrop, but not a controlling factor, in the lives of her characters who find sources of meaning and fulfillment despite economic deprivation” (OWI, 13-14). For example, in “A Worn Path”, when Phoenix Jackson received a nickel from the nurse for Christmas, she set it in her soul that she would go find and buy a little paper windmill for her grandson – her meaning and fulfillment despite the economic depression and her advanced age. Furthermore, the character Phoenix Jackson takes a journey that is definitely not appropriate for her age, determined to get medicine for her sick grandson. However, according to Welty in an interview with fellow Pulitzer Prize winner Beth Henley (also a native of Jackson, Mississippi), Welty imagines that Phoenix Jackson would go and complete the route even if her grandson had died.

Welty had a friend named Helen Jay Lotterhos, an accomplished Mississippi artist and longtime friend. She was active in the Mississippi Art Association and presented her pieces, which were inspired by European modernism, at the Jackson Municipal Art Gallery. Because she and Welty worked closely together, their friendship developed over the years. Lotterhos was interested in figurative work and landscapes, and “…they often went on sketching trips around Jackson” (Passionate Observer: Eudora Welty Among Artists of the Thirties, 43). One day, when Lotterhos took Welty on an art trip, Welty saw a figure in the distance going somewhere with a purpose; she wasn’t just walking outside for a breath of fresh air or to take an afternoon stroll. Welty’s attention to truth and character is also evident in the confrontation of Phoenix Jackson (a black woman, for those who haven’t read the story) and the hunter (a white man). It was a “truthful interpretation, I mean, truthful picture, of this, of the two races confronting, meeting each other on the street like that” (Welty, Eudora, interview with Pulitzer-prize winning Beth Henley). Welty came up with the character of the hunter because she “wanted a contrast between her attitude toward the whole world and what she was doing and his” (same interview), which shows Welty’s attention toward revealing Phoenix Jackson. When she meets the hunter on her trip, after he scares a large dog away with his gun, he points the gun at her. Rather than being frightened as the hunter expected, old Phoenix Jackson didn’t even flinch. Here, we can sense the opposition between the hunter and main character:

“…and then he laughed and lifted his gun and pointed it at Phoenix. She stood straight and faced him.

‘Doesn’t the gun scare you?’ he said, still pointing it.

‘No, sir, I seen plenty go off closer by, in my day, and for less than what I done,’ she said, holding utterly still.

He smiled, and shouldered the gun. ‘Well, Granny,’  he said, ‘you must be a hundred years old, and scared of nothing…’”  (Selected Stories of Eudora Welty, 247).

However, Phoenix Jackson goes through life humble and determined, and when she is faced with a life-threatening situation, she stares it down and stands up straighter. For Welty to create the hunter, the antithesis of Phoenix, she had to understand her well and that is prominently displayed because Jackson is described realistically:

“She wore a dark striped dress reaching down to her shoe tops, and an equally long apron of bleached sugar sacks, with a full pocket: all neat and tidy, but every time she took a step she might have fallen over her shoelaces, which dragged from her unlaced shoes. She looked straight ahead. Her eyes were blue with age. Her skin had a pattern all its own of numberless branching wrinkles and as though a whole little tree stood in the middle of her forehead, but a golden color ran underneath, and the two knobs of her cheeks were illumined by a yellow burning under the dark. Under the red rag her hair came down on her neck in the frailest of ringlets, still black, and with an odor like copper” (Selected Stories of Eudora Welty, 240-241).

In this excerpt from “A Worn Path”, Welty depicts Phoenix Jackson so specifically that she becomes a real person that we can envision.

Picture a tiny one-room house, built with some spare plank boards, all uneven, and barely standing. Then, enter through the doorway – no door, just a doorway – and what do you see? You see clothes hastily packed away on the dirt in a corner, some rusty pots and pans, a few rickety chairs, and grimy blankets on the floor – the beds. That’s what a good shelter was in the Depression era, as Welty saw in her travels when employed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The setting for “The Whistle” was based on these sharecropper shacks and the plot is based on “a one-crop, cash-crop tenant farming system that Welty saw in her WPA work” (OWI, 13). In the story, a Mr. Perkins is the landowner, on whose land farmers pay rent with their crops. No wonder it seems like you’ve been transported eighty years back into the Depression when you read “The Whistle”. This story is based on actual events: “… a friend of Welty’s lived in Utica, Mississippi, a truck farming center near Jackson, and Welty occasionally visited her there. In the thirties, during an overnight stay, Welty heard a piercing whistle warn local tenant farmers of a coming freeze… though she had heard the whistle from the comfort of a fine house, the next morning Welty encountered visible signs of a poverty and a desperation she had never imagined: The fields were covered with clothes and bedclothes, anything the tenants could muster to protect their fragile crops” (OWI, 20-21). After Mr. Perkins’s whistle shrilly blew through the cold night sky:

“Promptly, Sara and Jason got out of bed. They were both fully dressed, because of the cold, and only needed to put on their shoes. Jason lighted the lantern, and Sara gathered the bedclothes over her arm and followed him out. Jason took off his coat and laid it over the small tender plants by the side of the house. Then he glanced at Sara, and she reached down and pulled her dress over her head. Her hair fell out of its pins, and she began at once to tremble violently. The skirt was luckily long and full, and all the rest of the plants were covered by it” (Selected Stories of Eudora Welty, 111).

This, and the fact that Jason burned every single piece of furniture in the house to protect Sara from the cold claws of winter, proved how well Welty was able to generate a true to life setting and plot through her actual experiences during the thirties.

In a Paris Review interview with Linda Kuehl, Welty says, “Well, if you write about an actual event, you can’t shape it the way you can an imaginary one.” Although there is a tone of regret in this sentence, I like that Welty uses actual events as muses because it makes her stories that much more bona fide. As evident in “A Curtain of Green”, “A Worn Path”, and “The Whistle”, Welty wrote her life into magnificently vivid short stories and novels.

 

 

 

Bibliography

1. One Writer’s Imagination: The Fiction of Eudora Welty by Suzanne Marrs

2.  One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty

3.  Selected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty

4.  Interview with Pulitzer-prize winning Beth Henley

5. Passionate Observer: Eudora Welty among Artists of the Thirties René Paul Barilleaux, Mississippi Museum of Art

6. The Paris Review, Fall, 1972, Vol 55