Eudora Welty (1909–2001)

An extraordinary record of a deep and long friendship between two of America's finest writers. They had known and supported each other for over fifty years. They were family. And for a lot of the time Maxwell was Welty's editor, and the workings of their working relationship are sometimes found between these pages.

Alike in much of their early experience, always recommending and gifting new books or other cultural finds. Supportive of other creativity. Reporting on meetings with other writers, as in this report by Maxwell of meeting Isak Dinesen:

She herself at times looked like a falcon. Though we talked all through dinner, she didn't do more than consider and reply to my remarks, until the dessert, and then something, I forget what, the fact that I had just finished making a doll house, perhaps, for my daughter, made her melt, and she talked to me-but still not personally, not as if she liked me or ever wanted to see me again. But in such a way as to make me love her forever. Her voice is so beautiful, the accent isn't either British or American. It has notes that are like cello music. It's like listening to Hayden (Haydn). And those burning black eyes. It is several years too late to be her friend, but it is not too late to remember what she is like, as long as I live. p133.

Isn't Dinesen now vividly in your imagination?

It is also amazing to think that they each carried out multiple correspondences, although this was the closest to them both I think. How lucky we are to have it.

Of course I now want to read more of both of their stories, I just ordered Maxwell's complete stories, and am trying to put my hands on my volume of Welty's.… (more)

Laurel returns to her small Mississippi town from Chicago in time for her father to die after eye surgery. Her own husband died in the war a year earlier. Her mother has been dead for years after going blind.

Her father's clueless and stupidly cruel second wife, Fay, is Laurel's age. While Laurel embraces the past, her family's past, Fay shuns it. "The past isn't a thing to me. I belong to the future, didn't you know that?" The future doesn't look good to Laurel. She returns to Chicago after burning her mother's letters, her past life gone.… (more)

This is a collection of Welty's public writings about Faulkner, including a review of Intruder in the Dust; a deliciously wrathy letter to Edmund Wilson, who had critiqued the same novel with blinkers on, in her view ("there's such a thing as a literary frame of reference that isn't industrial New York City in 1948" she points out); a memorial tribute written for the Associated Press news service when Faulkner died; and some lectures and speeches. Lordy, I love this lady. She is right up there at the top of my list of people I wish I could sit down and talk to. And I'm pretty sure if she lived down the road, I could sit down and talk to her. She comes across as warm, witty, gracious, possessed of an intelligence I could learn from, totally lacking in Attitude but not about to take a lot of nonsense either. And, of course, she loves Faulkner the way I do...not academically, but like a slightly surly uncle who nevertheless tells terrific stories and sees things the rest of us would miss if not for him. She also reviewed a collection of Faulkner's Selected Letters. After pointing out that Faulkner would have hated the idea, but accepted the inevitability, of their publication, Welty dealt a bit with the content and the chronological presentation of the letters Joseph Blotner included in the chunky volume (there it sits, right on the shelf at the top of my desk). But then she wrote a paragraph that exemplifies why I do love her so. She said:
"No man ever put more of his heart and soul into the written word than did William Faulkner. If you want to know all you can about that heart and soul, the fiction where he put it is still right there. The writer offered it to us from the start, and when we didn't even want it or know how to take it and understand it; it's been there all along and is more than likely to remain. Read that."
Reviewed 2017… (more)