Eudora Welty: A Biography
By Suzanne Marrs (Harcourt, 672 pp., $28)
The image of Eudora Welty as a homely loner is a pervasive one. The dust jacket of Welty's 1980 Collected Stories notes, "Miss Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi, where she has lived all her life, in the house built by her family." Ann Waldron's 1998 biography, as well as a subsequent New Yorker profile, present Welty as an intensely private ugly duckling, a "petrified woman" who kept friends and loved ones at arm's length. Welty never married, and biographers speculate that she may have died a virgin.
In a new biography, Suzanne Marrs, who teaches English at Millsaps College and has written a previous study of Welty's work, attempts to correct Welty's spinster image. Drawing on recently available letters and a career spent researching the great writer, Marrs presents Welty's life as a physically and emotionally peripatetic existence, at times directly and aggressively arguing with Waldron and other previous biographers. "The suggestion that Eudora was a silent and withdrawn spinster must have seemed ridiculous to her," Marrs writes.
While Welty spent the bulk of her life in Jackson, living with her mother until the latter's death in 1966, Marrs shows that she was a traveler at heart. After two years at Mississippi State College for Women, she transferred to Wisconsin, and shortly after graduating moved to New York to study advertising. Though she soon returned to Mississippi, Welty would continue to travel between Jackson and New York throughout her career. "The city," Marrs writes, "was a tonic for her," a place of expansive culture and limitless adventure, so different from the relatively narrow confines of Jackson.
Like William Faulkner, Welty was often criticized during the 1950s and 1960s for writing apolitical fiction during a time when the civil rights movement seemed to demand activism on every front. But here too Marrs undertakes a corrective, arguing that while racial tensions were rarely front and center in Welty's work, in her life she was very much a political animal, campaigning for Adlai Stevenson, penning letters to the newspaper, and writing friends about her discomfort with the ugly turn that Mississippi had taken. "Jackson, despite Eudora's close ties, was not a place with which she was content," Marrs writes. "She simultaneously wanted to leave Mississippi and remain there."
But if politics and culture drove Welty away from home, a force equally powerful kept her coming back: despite spending months at a time in New York, New England, Europe and San Francisco, Welty wrote the vast bulk of her work in Jackson; her creativity, she wrote to a friend, required "my own easygoing lighthearted people...and all that is domestic." Like many Southern writers, Welty's fiction revolved around a sense of place, and the place she knew best was Jackson. Thus, Marrs notes, a paradox: "New York with its many distractions was a place where Eudora might happily live but not one where she could work consistently and effectively."
Marrs acknowledges at the outset that she and Welty were good friends until the author's death in 2001. Throughout she refers to Welty, and to many of her friends, by their first names. It's no surprise, then, to find Welty painted in the most flattering light possible. Yet even with Marrs' highlights, Welty's life seems unmistakably sad. John Robinson, a fellow Jacksonian with whom she pursued a passionate but likely unconsummated love affair from 1937 to 1952, was a depressed closet homosexual who eventually came out and moved to Italy; the only other love in her life (excepting Reynolds Price, for whom she was more of a mother figure) was Ken Millars, a Californian who wrote detective fiction under the nom de plume Ross McDonald and who was, for the most part, happily married, at least enough to forestall any romantic possibilities with Welty.
Marrs works hard to show that people can go through life without a lasting romance and still be happy, but no matter how true that argument may be, it seems not to have been true in Welty's own case. As Price notes in a letter to Marrs, "It seems to me that the life-long absence of an intimate love silenced her before she was ready for silence. And it left her somehow deeply puzzled for the last decades of her life." Though Marrs emphasizes Welty's "many profound and sustaining friendships," those seem like cold comfort, particularly for a woman deeply rooted in a region that places a heavy emphasis on the marital bond. Welty even lacked the religious fervor typical of her region and age. Thus a second paradox in her life: a deep attachment to her region through her writing, but an unfortunate failure to find the same sort of attachment with people.
Marrs has written a compelling, if admittedly biased, work that should be read by Welty fans and scholars alike. It will prove frustrating, however, to anyone less interested in Welty per se than in the world she inhabited. Despite Welty's close friendships with such noteworthy literary figures as New Yorker fiction editor William Maxwell and fellow writers Katherine Anne Porter, Elizabeth Bowen and Walker Percy, Marrs tells us little about them outside of their relevance to her subject. The same goes for Jackson, Mississippi and the South: Anyone looking for clues about what they were like during the Depression and the civil rights era should look elsewhere. Which is a shame, because Welty's long life and writer's perception should be a unique portal through which to view that history. At times, Eudora Welty reads less like a biography than a fleshed-out edition of Welty's social calendar and travel journal.
It will be at least 16 years, however, before we can know the whole story. That's because Welty's will forbids access to her family correspondence until 2021, or 20 years after her death. Given that her relationship with her mother was by far her most complex and long-lasting, it's likely that the best insights into the thoughts of this highly enigmatic woman remain unseen.
