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More than 60 years since the publication of her first book, A CURTAIN OF GREEN, Eudora Welty's status as a major voice in American letters is unquestioned. One of the chief joys of her art is evinced in the ways her finely wrought short stories and elaborately patterned novels capture colorful characters whose depth and dignity are matched by a spirited, often unselfconscious zest for life and living. It is furthermore acknowledged that the range of men and women who people Welty's narratives offers consistent proof that "regional literature" is as varied as it is universal, that even the most geographically cloistered characters (think "Livvie" in the story of that name) are capable of feeling and sensing the same sort of complexities of the most sophisticated, urban-dwelling aristocrats who people Henry James's fiction.
With respect to the author, however, most scholars tend to dismiss Welty's emotional and active life as devoid of incident or color. In a widely read "Introduction" to the author in THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, VOLUME 2, for example, the editors insist that her "outwardly uneventful life and her writing are most intimately connected to the topography and atmosphere of the season and the soil of the native Mississippi that ha[d] been her lifelong home." Such logic assumes Welty sacrificed the chance of a fulfilling personal life in the service of her art.
Suzanne Marrs, the author of EUDORA WELTY: A Biography, insists that this is a reductive view that fails to consider the author's full engagement in matters of family, romantic love, travel, and politics over the course of nine decades. In a patient, well-documented, thoroughly considered overview of the writer's life, Marrs debunks the notion that Welty's existence was "uneventful"; and if, even after such a painstaking process, Welty's personal narrative seems tame in comparison to the high drama of her mentor, Katherine Anne Porter, or the intense personal trials of her contemporary, Richard Wright, Marrs's EUDORA WELTY amply documents the writer's full participation in almost every aspect of a long and fulfilling life.
Organized into 11 chapters, EUDORA WELTY first traces the author's sheltered upbringing by two well-educated parents who migrated from the north shortly before her birth; it then delves into key moments of the author's self discovery. (Marrs's careful, patient analysis reveals that Welty's talents weren't simply literary; her lifelong passion for photography began as early as the 1930s.) Just as Welty's formative years as a young writer led to the publication of her first and perhaps most celebrated book, she was confronted by the atrocities of World War II --- an event that affected her on a political and personal level. It is in the ensuing decade that we witness a passionate, albeit frustrated, long-distance love affair between Welty and longtime friend John Robinson. Exactly why this relationship did not progress into a physical one leading to marriage is, with a good deal of evidence, attributed to Robinson's ambiguous sexuality, a fact that he was painfully slow to realize and one that ultimately placed Welty, a longtime friend to many homosexual men, in a strained position with regards to same-sex couples.
Several other subjects are thoroughly considered from this period as well, including extensive travel throughout the United Sates and Europe and the author's prolific string of largely acclaimed publications that, from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, led to a conspicuous 15 years of creative silence. During that time, Marrs documents Welty's heavy involvement in Mississippi politics, her stand on hot-button issues, such as racism, and her earnest attempt to break writer's block through prolonged work on LOSING BATTLES, her most ambitious and fully developed novel, that ironically grew out of a short story.
By the early 1970s, Welty worked through her writer's block with another string of impressive publications, including THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER, which earned her the Pulitzer Prize. But Marrs's EUDORA WELTY is not an in-depth study of the writer's work. (For this readers should consult the biographer's ONE WRITER'S IMAGINATION: The Fiction of Eudora Welty.) Instead, Marrs here considers Welty's fiction as representative of the writer's personal struggles. The brutal rape scene that concludes the story "At the Landing," the final fiction in Welty's short story collection THE WIDE NET, is read as a "misuse of power and violation of individual sanctity that Eudora associated with fascism and even at times with politicians more generally." Such readings are insightful and well-considered, but I often wondered if Marrs might go a bit further: in the previous example, the rape victim, Jenny, is first brutalized by a man who, though he "violates" her, still holds her heart. Is this perhaps a projection of her feelings about her frustrated passions for Robinson?
Marrs also considers a second romance in Eudora's life, this one with writer Kenneth Millar, a relationship that bloomed from a platonic, mutual admiration for one another's work. This romance, which appears to have remained unconsummated, was mutually nourishing for both parties until Millar's sad death to Alzheimer's. In addition to these romances, Marrs discusses Welty's close but difficult relationship with her mother, her fruitful correspondences with fellow writers, and her evolution from woman-as-letters to elder statesperson in the arts.
Far surpassing Ann Waldron's 1998 EUDORA, Suzanne Marrs's EUDORA WELTY is altogether an engaging, well-researched and --- to my way of thinking --- necessary read for any self-respecting Americanist and Welty scholar.
--- Reviewed by Tony Leuzzi
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