A Eudora Welty Alphabet: Part One1
By: Mariella Oakley
With this essay, using the raw material of words, “A Eudora Welty Alphabet” pays homage to a woman of letters who gave America a life’s work of dazzling density. Each letter serves as a point of departure for a different path of analysis, freely exploring theme, figure, and motif from varied and fragmented perspectives. Far from spanning the entirety of the Weltian oeuvre, this patchwork of literary criticism is stitched on the model of a network or a web, with many points of entry. The reader isReaders are [R1]invited to enter and exit at will, extending the network according to his their own personal alphabet, offering stitches and patches of one’s their own to be posted on the Eudora Welty website.1[R2]
This alphabet will be delivered in installments, starting here with “A is for Alphabet” all the way to “D is for Delta” and followed in a future publication by “E is for Engaged” down to “Z is for Zarro,” passing of course by way of the “M for Memory,” the “Q for Quilt,” and the “S for Sister.” Here is the first part of my offering of a Weltian alphabet.
A is for Alphabet
According to Welty, to write is to engage in a story with words, words which themselves have their own stories. She explains that “we start from scratch and words don’t, which is the thing that matters—matters over and over again.” (Eye 134). Shaped by time, invested with meaning acquired elsewhere, words have an identity, redefined with every new text. To write, then, is to take part in this vast dialog between what has already been said and what is yet to be said. This statement of Welty’s statement about writing metaphorically relates to the process of patchwork, recycling odds and ends to create new arrangements. In this perspective, writing is the art of creating links between words, stitching them sometimes loosely, sometimes closely. The product, by definition, is always second-hand.
This principle must be taken to the individual letter: for Welty, the love of words begins with the love of letters. Like Nabokov, Welty conceived of writing as the infinite reorganization of the letters of the alphabet. Words, as Nabokov points out in his Bend Sinister, even personal names, are all anagrams of each other: “one should constantly bear in mind that all men consist of the same twenty-five [sic] letters variously mixed” (61). Whereas in Speak, Memory, he recalls those first wooden blocks imprinted with colored letters—toys for the child he was, and objects of fascination for the writer he would become. Welty also lets her memory speak, recalling the excitement of discovering the calligraphy of letters on the pages of her very first books, particularly the decorative capitals at the beginning of each chapter:
“In my own story books, before I could read them for myself, I fell in love with various winding, enchanting-looking initials drawn by Walter Crane at the heads of fairy tales. In “Once upon a time,” an “O” had a rabbit running it as a treadmill, his feet upon flowers. When the day came, years later, for me to see the Book of Kells, all the wizardry of letter, initial, and word swept over me a thousand times over, and the illumination, the gold, seemed a part of the word’s beauty and holiness that had been there from the start.” (One Writer’s 847-8)
Of all the vowels, it are was the “O” that she liked best: the “O” of “Once upon a time,” the “O” of the words “love[R3],” “book,” “world,” “gold,” and “holiness” that made her attachment to the letter seem almost sacred. But she also loved the double “O” of “moon,” whose round splendor Welty discovered at age 6, in a synesthetic experience: “For the first time it met my eyes as a globe. The word “moon” came into my mouth as though fed to me out of a silver spoon. Held in my mouth the moon became a word. It had the roundness of a Concord grape Grandpa took off his vine and gave me to suck out its skin and swallow whole” (One Writer’s Beginnings 848).
For Welty, the alphabet is also a metaphor of a certain kind of order that mark the division between masculine and the feminine. In The Optimist’s Daughter, for example, Judge McKelva’s files were organized alphabetically, while his wife[R4] Mrs. McKelva arranged her desk drawers according to her own idiosyncratic classification, which her daughter Laurel discovers after her death: “There were twenty-six pigeonholes, but her mother had stored things according to their time and place…not by ABC” (Welty, The Optimist’s Daughter 965). Instead of the order of the alphabet, Mrs. McKelva had created a timeline of her personal thoughts and feelings, collecting assorted objects that had held importance to her at various stages of her life. By doing so, she had reinvented her own alphabet of time.
Reading Welty alphabetically is a way to explore, if somewhat haphazardly, some important themes of her dense body of work. This critical approach was originally inspired by a desire to open up fresh aspects of her work, to try to seize its substance letter by letter, on the margins of classic linear critical discourse, offering a different exploration of themes, figures, and forms (see Ffig.ure 1).2[R5] [R6]
Each letter allows for one entry only, eliminating all the others. This does not prevent a certain form of resonant interaction, rich with secondary themes or parallel interests. Just as anagrams uncover “the words behind the words,” this ABC of Welty’s work lends itself to being enriched by the many alternative options it holds within themselvesitself. Letter after letter, the themes are linked together by a form literally like a patchwork, a side-by-side arrangement which is based on organic connection, contrast, and difference outside of any organized unity. Far from being a comprehensive review of the Weltian oeuvre, this piece is a multiple-entry reading of her work, inviting the reader to roam freely in every sense and grasp some of it’s essence.
B is for Body[R7]
“There is more wisdom in your body than in the very essence of philosophy,” Nietzsche declared in Zarathustra (101). Welty is wise to the body, which inspires her dynamic creative process. Her writing unfolds around the body, whose effects and affects she maps out. In return, the body is itself at work, fleshing out the corpus of her creations. In motion or petrified, vibrant with delight or undone by disease, the body exposes itself, in the photographic sense of the word, but also in the sense that it boldly steps out. The dimension of humour is never absent from its representation: from the lightest touch of irony to grotesque farce, laughter shakes Weltian bodies and gives her fiction its singular comic verve.
Within the full range of these registers (desire, disaster, exposure, laughter), myriad Weltian bodies come to mind. Desire, one may recall, is eloquently expressed by the delicate trouble of “A Memory,” a short story whose anonymous heroine tries feverishly to relive the exquisite memory of her hand brushing a young boy’s wrist, a brief encounter which had once filled her with joy. Despite her efforts, she fails. The sensation is gone, leaving behind only the want of it. Lying by the waterside, she is tormented by the spectacle of a family sprawling next to her, whose loud and heavy bodies incarnate all the vulgarities of life, and whose mere presents presence blocks her retreat into the refuge of her mind.
Although it is overwhelmingly women who provide the Weltian corpus with its glorious and expansive flesh, there is a man (at least one) who is the exception to the rule: George Fairchild in Delta Wedding, whose charm fascinates all those around him. A He’s a mature man (married to the flamboyant Robbie) yet free;, George’s intoxicating presence engenders a flow of desire that fills the text with moments of exceptional sensual density. Disastrous bodies are also present: take the tragic Clytie who kills herself in a barrel and is found dead by the servant Old Lethy (lethal) in the back of the garden: “with her poor ladylike black-stockinged legs up-ended and hung apart like a pair of tongs ” (Stories 110). Welty’s last work of fiction, The Optimist’s Daughter, closes on the dying body of Judge McKelva, before the abject and demeaning indistinction of death, which the pomp and ceremony of the funeral strain to conceal, only to reaffirm its inexorable obscenity.
In Welty’s photographs, bodies expose themselves with a superb panache, even in times of trouble. A most radiant body is that of the barefoot Gioconda leaning against the balustrade of her porch, disarmingly unconcerned (One Place 31, also featured on the cover page of Photographs). Enduring and dignified, the “woman in the buttoned sweater” (Eye of the Story 353) on the title page of One Time, One Place stands as a figurehead of the collection. Welty likes to photograph women and men of self possession with pride of their function such as the midwife holding a child she is presenting to its mother (Photographs 6), the nurse proudly standing in her uniform in front of her house, or the schoolteacher in floral blouse and white skirt, with her hand on her hip (see Fig. 2; Photographs 7, 4).[R8]
Last but not least, the Weltian bodies are also apt to make us laugh. Welty’s eye is attracted by fairground billboards which entice fairgoers with the promise of extravagant spectacles or even freak shows, direct descendants of the Southern tradition of the grotesque (as illustrated in the story Welty’s “Keela, the Outcast Maiden Indian” in A Curtain of Green). The world of fairgrounds teems with amphibious creatures, like the “Mule Face Woman” (Photographs 136) or conversely the “Cow with a Human face” (Photographs 132). The two of them make quite a pair. Other living curiosities join the extravagant troupe, such as the woman with no head (at all) (“Headless Girl,” Photographs 133), the contortionist coiled in on himself —“Twisto Rubbber Man,” or “Two Bodies 8 Legs” (Photographs 135, 134), a strange creature composed of two Siamese calves undeniably worthy of the epithets “wonderful ” and “amazing” printed on their billboard.4[R9]3
Filled with life force and energy, Welty’s bodies provide the setting for experiences from which visions and revelations spring forth. Thus, Welty promotes a real philosophy of the body as a world in itself, the primary system of reference and, in the end, the only valid one.3[R10] 4
C is for Curtain
There are many curtains in Welty’s writing (see Figure 4. 3). One curtain frames her first published book, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories. This is a collection of short stories in which the protagonists are swept up by violent emotions, turning the text into a stage for spectacular confrontations. The conflicts revolve around sex (“Flowers for Marjorie”), family (“Why I live Live at the P. O.”), generations (“A Visit of Charity”), class (“A Memory”), and race (“Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden”), stirring all forms of often repressed resentment, often supressed and forming only more barriers of communication between the characters.[R11]
The apparently benign “curtain of green” which gives its name to the collection hides a story filled with pain and loss: the young Mrs. Larkin has lost her husband, who was crushed to death by a tree falling on his car. When she saw the accident happening, Mrs. Larkin never thought for one moment that it would be fatal: “You can’t be hurt,” she had said, calmly (Curtain 109). In fact, she was so sure of her love for her husband that she thought it could reverse the irreversible: “It was[R12]accident that was incredible, when her love for her husband was keeping him safe” (109). And yet the unthinkable did happen. Her husband is died. Nothing can be done about it, except to draw a curtain on the past. The inconsolable Mrs. Larkin cuts off all interaction with the outside world. Her aim is simply to go back to a total absence of will. She even lets her hair grow wild, as if to return to a feral state. Yet it is precisely through the curtain of her tangled hair that her mourning can be seen, for as much as she tries to do nothing at all, her hair keeps growing, as does the vegetation in her garden, to which she has to attend: nature reasserts itself, no matter what happens (or what has happened). This is what is known as the order of things, which of course has nothing to do with order when the chaos of loss is still there. The extreme fertility of the curtain of greenery, is both a matter of concern and a challenge. The story ends with the enigmatic image of her body lying in the garden, in the middle of a storm, to dissolve into the universe in a state of complete abnegation, or to be reborn with it, after having absorbed it’s sap and substance.
The theme of passage is concentrated in the motif of the curtain in Welty’s last novel, The Optimist’s Daughter. Centered on the experience of mourning, the story draws on the potential for meaning of the motif in the sense that every curtain that closes (on the land of birth, the time of childhood, the family, the myth of marriage) is also a curtain that opens out on other horizons (the return to Chicago, adult life, freedom, self-reliance). These metaphorical curtains are given physical form in the thick folds of a theater curtain, which Laurel, a textile designer, works on before her father’s funeral.4[R13] 5It is to this curtain that her thoughts return when she prepares to go back north. Everything seems to suggest that when she returns to it she will weave into it all the emotions she has gone through.
Finally, and very typically for Welty, the theme of the curtain is taken one step further as a metaphor, and becomes a reference to writing itself, seen as an opening of the self toward others:
In my own case, a fuller awareness of what I needed to find out about people and their lives had to be sought for through another way, through writing stories. But away off one day up in Tishomingo County, I knew this, anyway: that my wish, indeed my continuing passion, would not be 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 (The Eye of the Story 354–355).
D is for Delta
Delta, the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet, is represented by a triangle, a geometric figure of rich significance in the Weltian world. In geography, a delta refers to the deposited sediments emerging at the mouth of a river, dividing it up into branches (see Fig. 4). Before Welty, the Mississippi River powerfully inspired Mark Twain (among other Southern writers) who called it “the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun” (Life on the Mississippi 253), and then embarked on the most famous of pioneer river adventures in American fiction in Huckleberry Finn.[R14]
The banks of the great river also saw Welty embark on her journey into fiction: The Robber Bridegroom opens with Clement Musgrove stepping on shore at Rodney, which in colonial times was a busy port on the Mississippi. And The Optimist’s Daughter ends on the magnificent confluence of the Mississippi and the Ohio, which gives the text its most lyrical pages. Present again in One Writer’s Beginnings, this confluence becomes a metaphor for memory, the source from which sprang the whole of her work.
The cartographic references of Delta Wedding are rooted in the Mississippi’s rich cotton growing region, the Delta, defined by the Mississippi: A Guide to the Magnolia State as
“a leaf-shaped plain lying in the northwestern part of the state accepted as more than
a distinct geographical unit—it is also a way of life”. (3).
The story, which takes place not far from the town of Fairchilds, includes two other places, thus mapping out its space in a wider triangle: the town of Jackson, where Laura, the young orphan, comes from and Memphis, of sulphurous reputation, “the Old Delta synonym for pleasure, trouble and shame” (160), where the flamboyant couple of George and Robbie live. The topographical map provided in the book shows two mounds at the mouth of the Yazoo river: —Mount Field, and Moon Field, and,. Ffurther into the interior of the land is, Shellmound, the plantation where the story takes place, like a circle coiled up in a triangle. The Delta itself is a vast field of cotton glistening with light, which imposes its powerful presence.
In mathematics, delta refers to difference. With Welty, it is generally the myth of the South which is subjected to a differential treatment. Far from subscribing to a nostalgic vision of history, Welty tries to break up any form of allegiance to the myth of the past, repeatedly denouncing its dead ends, dismantling its mechanisms and stereotypes. In short, she makes fiction a space of friction. To make this critical distancing work, Welty subtly constructs her narrative from different viewpoints, which confront and contradict one another. In her novels, Welty constrasts chronological temporality with the timelessness of the fable (The Robber Bridegroom), deconstructs the pastoral (Delta Wedding), and re-stages the eternal battle between myth and history (Losing Battles) and the contentions between collective and individual memory (The Optimist’s Daughter). One way or the other, to discover Wetlty is to engage in complex equations of reading, equations that make all the difference.