In Mississippi: A Diamond Jubilee

By Gregory Jaynes

A few years ago, Anne Tyler was interviewing Eudora Welty, and they got on the subject of driving. Welty, who was getting up in age, allowed that she continued to drive but that she found propelling herself off the approach ramp onto superhighways particularly difficult, like insinuating yourself into a game of hot pepper, the furiously fast jump-rope play that still goes on in schoolyards everywhere. The sharpness of the image suggested a writer's mind at work, which in fact was the case.

A few days ago (April 13, to be exact), Eudora Welty turned 75, and again a question surfaced concerning motoring one's aged self around. Welty said she continued to take the wheel, even though she found this approach-ramp business "like trying to enter an eggbeater." The vividness of the simile shows an author still polishing, still looking for the sharpest edge; it is a reflection of Welty today.

Recognizing her skills as well as her birthday, her home state of Mississippi declared a Eudora Welty Day. In Jackson, the capital and her home town, Millsaps College tossed a three-day "Southern literary festival" honoring the occasion. The affair drew pipe-smoking academics, fellow successful novelists and short-story writers, worshipful young writers-to-be, men who have had intimate relationships with plows, veiny-handed country women, root pullers--friends all.

Wearing an orchid corsage the size of a catcher's mitt, the stooped honoree attended the whole symposium, a taxing thing when you consider the hard slogging certain scholars can subject an audience to. "I just feel like, well, it's all for me, and it would be rude to miss one of the speakers," she said early on. "I can just hear my mother saying, 'Girl, you're getting a little too much attention,' " she said toward the end.

It was not always so, as one speaker recalled, reading reviews from nearly a half-century ago: "Clear as literary gumbo"; "Easy to read as a road sign way down on Miasma River." In 1946 a New Republic critic found Delta Wedding such tough going he did not finish the book. And Diana Trilling said of the same creation that she was vexed trying to determine "how much of my distaste" had to do with the work and how much to do with the culture.

With The Golden Apples, published in 1949, Welty began being praised for her command of narrative technique. The Optimist's Daughter, 1972, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. This year, a year that seems to be her year, she is on the bestseller lists with One Writer's Beginnings. The sun is indeed shining bright on her old Jackson home, on Pinehurst Street, where she was saying the other morning, "Do sit down. I'm going to raise a window." She said she was wondering whether she might not have sounded incoherent at a late hour the night before, when she was called on to respond to some of the papers the literary scholars had presented.

A Frenchwoman, whose tongue had trouble with the th sound, so that "South" came out "Souse," as in "Old Souse," had gone down so deeply into symbolism in the Welty fictions, often in passages where many in the audience were unaware it existed, that one wondered whether the author had stuck the symbolism there or not. (Breathes there a survivor of contemporary freshman lit who has not wanted to collar Kafka and ask, "Is that what you intended?")

For her part, Welty gave her listeners a graceful dodge. She said you do not think of precisely where everything is coming from at the time you set it down. "I drew quite freely--true life, real people, fairy tales, Southern lore--I drew it all quite freely. I made it into this great big bouquet of fun and pleasure."

Looking frail but sounding strong, she said, "The connection between the writer and the reader is very mysterious." Both, she said, bring imagination to the work.

There was nearly a full moon over Jackson that night, just a nick of it was missing, and the azaleas and the dogwoods were out. When at last allowed to retire, Welty woke from slumber several times, according to a friend, "but not unhappily so." There had been in all the ceremonies a eulogistic tone, and though she was "terribly grateful" for the fuss, she had thought fleetingly during the day that "I had gotten so much praise, so many honors, that I really felt I had no use here on earth." Her parting words at the lectern were, "It's just about all I can do to say that I do continue writing."

Practically her first words the next morning were, "That was just my reply. I wanted to let them know I felt like I could go on." A friend arrived with a batch of lilies of the valley. The postman came with a typically bulky lot of Welty daily mail: a far-flung classroom sends its regards. Invitations to speak. Books. Magazines. Entreaties for advice. (In an interview with Journalist Henry Mitchell some time ago, she was going through her mail, saying, "And here's a letter from a nun--I think nuns write letters a good bit--complaining some story I wrote is unfair to Camp Fire Girls or Girl Scouts. I don't know how to answer that. Here's another one, from a nun in India who has fallen in love with a priest and wants my advice. How would I know? I do so wish these people well, but I have no idea how to write them or even how to begin.")

"I never think of age," Welty was explaining, "neither mine nor anybody else's. Now that it's just been brought upon me, I think, 'Girl, you better start adding up.' It has been a strong experience. So much unique attention. It's going to take me some time to come to terms with everything that's happened this week."

At a party in one of those porticoed palaces that seize an otherwise perfectly sane person with the desire to summon up some hounds and go terrorize a fox, the anniversary of her birth had been toasted with champagne. They put the author in a prominent chair, and people came and knelt to share a word. Elsewhere in the rooms, literary conversations were going on. The theme of the annual William Faulkner conference this year upstate at Oxford, one organizer volunteered, is the humor in Faulkner's works. "A lot of people just don't see it," he added.

"Some people just analyze the work flat into dullness," his interlocutor replied. "I remember one year at the Faulkner conference I heard somebody say, 'Well, I went to the Louvre, and I was able to determine what was hanging when Faulkner was in France. We know he saw the Monets and the Manets, and there was some Cezanne, but Picasso is questionable. I think I'm about to change my mind on whether Faulkner was a cubist.' Now that's numbing stuff, and some of it went on with Eudora's work today."

When talking about analysis of her work, Welty has been known to mention W.C. Fields, "who read an analysis of how he juggled. He couldn't juggle for six years afterwards. He'd never known how it was done. He'd just thrown up the balls and juggled." But on the Saturday morning after her birthday party, she addressed the subject more solemnly, saying the writer builds something, while the analyst tears it apart to see what it is made of. "I think," she said charitably, "that whatever makes people feel in touch with a [she paused to think this through] . . . with a work of art--let's call it what it is, or what we all hope it is--is helpful."

Then, speaking of age, she said hearing is the only faculty she has had diminish. She possesses good eyesight, imagination and memory. "The memory is a well," she said, "united" with the imagination in producing fiction. "Whatever you send down it comes back up deeper." From down the street there came the sound of little girls singing, a Ring-Around-the-Rosy sort of lyric, and if Welty did not hear it, it was nothing she had not heard before. Comes the day she needs the sound of child song for a page, she will remember it, sharply. --By Gregory Jaynes