That rejoinder was pure Welty–funny, practical and unexpected, qualities that turn up in everything she wrote and most of what she said. This Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and extraordinary short-story writer may well have been the most lyrical American prose writer of the 20th century, but she always kept her feet on the ground. Maybe that’s why novels like “Delta Wedding” and stories like “June Recital” and “Moon Lake” seem so original. As the author and critic Elizabeth Hardwick has said, “She had her own voice and her own tone and her own subject matter. There was no one quite like her in American literature.” Even her jokes were like no one else’s. In “The Wide Net,” she wrote, “Edna Earle… never did get to be what you’d call a heavy thinker. Edna Earle could sit and ponder all day on how the little tail of the ‘C’ got through the ‘L’ in a Coca-Cola sign.”
Welty never married, and lived almost her entire life in the family home in Jackson. She wrote and rewrote, revising her stories by cutting them apart at the dining-room table and reassembling them with straight pins. What others called a sheltered life she called crucial to her art. “Southerners tend to live in one place,” she said, “where they can see whole lives unfold around them. It gives them a natural sense of the narrative, of the dramatic content of life, a form for the story comes readily to hand.” During the Depression, she worked for the WPA as a photographer, an experience that she claimed taught her to watch and wait for people to reveal themselves. “My wish, my continuing passion, would be not to point the finger in judgment but to part a curtain, that invisible shadow that falls between people, the veil of indifference to each other’s presence, each other’s wonder, each other’s human plight.”
Toward the end of Welty’s life, the honors poured in. She received the French Legion of Honor. She became the first living writer to have her works included in the Library of America. And the popular e-mail program Eudora was named in honor of her story “Why I Live at the P.O.” Even as her health deteriorated in her 80s, she could never say no to an interviewer. But while she was generous with her time, she was jealous of her privacy. If asked why she never married, she was apt to reply, “I wasn’t brought up to answer questions like that. And I don’t think you were either.”
Her stories and novels are never directly autobiographical, but everything she knew about life is there–a unique blending of myths, folk tales, domestic comedy and harsh realism, in combinations that always leave you wondering what’s coming next. So whenever you meet someone who says they don’t like her work, your first question should be “But what have you read?” Because if they didn’t like the story about the beauty parlor, they might like the one about the jazz piano player. Or the one where Audubon meets the circuit-riding Methodist preacher Lorenzo Dow and the outlaw James Murrell on the Natchez Trace. Or the novel that’s based on the Grimm brothers’ tale about the Robber Bridegroom. Welty’s stories are not “about” something. They do not have themes, and they do not come loaded with symbols. When an academic once asked her to explain where she got the symbolism for a marble cake in one of her stories, she replied with a straight face, “It’s a recipe that’s been in my family for some time.”
The only symbol worth talking about is the wide net in the story of the same name. In that story, a man believes his wife has left him and thrown herself in the river, so he persuades a group of his fellow townsmen to help him drag the river for her body. They don’t find the wife, but the net they use hauls up everything from fish to old shoes to a baby alligator. There is a terrifying electrical storm, and the King of the Snakes, a sort of backwoods sea monster, puts in an appearance. With each paragraph the world becomes a more magical place, like something in a dream or a fairy tale, and the men pass through it all as through a spell but say nothing of it. In the end, the man goes home to find his wife waiting for him. Nothing has changed, and yet everything has changed, because Eudora Welty has cast the wide net of her talent over the world and drawn its treasures up before our eyes.
