Welty documents the fall (her loss) in a very Protestant way, as something immutable. And its fall, as replayed in the literature, is endlessly contemporary, from the menace of Injun Joe to the march of Margaret Mitchell’s carpet-baggers, from Faulkner’s tentacular Snopeses to Flannery O’Connor’s blackhearted preachers. The blues of this complex, cruel and sensuous culture is a constant undertone in the fanfare of America’s self-foundation outside history. In the continental psyche, the South is not only a sort of decadent Europe, historically crushed by the forces of progress it lives on symbolically as a snake-infested Eden. For she is the Optimist’s Daughter whose father died tragically in the prime of life, of leukaemia – ‘a disease that even he had never heard of’.ĭynasty, civility, quality, feeling: the things Eudora Welty both exemplifies and mourns are what the American South has been mourning ever since the first slave got above himself. She deals with the loss of the past, by adjusting through a small and exquisite opus to the downward slide of the whole world it’s this that makes of her a more divided and indeed interesting writer than Paul Binding’s new study, in its pursuit of a resolving wholeness, will allow. She is an almost mystical witness to pre-ideological family values. Miss Welty comes across as a prophet from the vanished realm of unembarrassed love and unfractured personality. Warm, affirmative, gently humorous, the book does more than finger some of the connections between everyday experience and literary truth. The memoir One Writer’s Beginnings, which in 1983 spent months on the New York Times best-seller list, makes clear Welty’s rootedness in a blissful childhood, and the importance to her of what is intimately known.
Soon she was back with her mother in Jackson, where she lives to this day, setting almost all her work within a hundred-mile radius of her home. She wandered only briefly, to the University of Wisconsin and then to Columbia, NY, an episode which left no trace in her writing. Born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1909, the daughter of two ‘outsider’ parents, an Ohian and a Virginian, Eudora Welty has made a life’s work of belonging.
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