I could also reflect that as my mother well knew, her brothers could swear a blue streak with the best of them and indulged in drinking and gambling whenever they liked. A good many of her lifelong women friends were the same. She had heard all the local scandals and could see I had scrupulously used none of them in my book, preferring to invent others. Still, the shock registered high on her Richter scale. She was more than a little mystical, more than a little childlike in her views of life. If she had dreams about her children, her feeling was that her dreams, being right, ought to be true. I was sorry not to live to please her.
Years later, I read a story by Henry James called “The Jolly Corner.” It’s the tale of the man who came back after a lifetime of absence to his proper family residence and met the pale ghost of what he might have turned into if he had stayed put. I was never cut out for the life I was supposed to live.
The family spent that winter of 1946-47 in a kind of limbo, dreading publication of “that book.” I continued to hear regularly from David Clay and worked on a number of cuts and editorial suggestions. Beginning writers need the sort of detailed attention he was able to give me. But writers with twenty books behind them, still need the encouragement, advice, stimulation, and line-by-line attention of a good editor. Editors are the invisible heroes of the book trade. One can confidently say that behind every good book stands a good editor. And behind every great book, a great one? Such as those do exist.
That winter I took a brief substitute teaching job at Belhaven, at the suggestion of Ellene Ransom, whom I had known at Vanderbilt. She was the sister of the poet John Crowe Ransom, and was now head of the English department. She wrote to ask me to come to Jackson and help her. Here I once again got to see Eudora Welty, and found her overjoyed to hear of the forthcoming novel. Her visit that memorable spring had led to a friendship that continued, though I often still have to regard it as sheer luck.
Eudora’s loyalty to the friends she chooses to make is a wonder. When I think back to our meeting at Belhaven, I also must note the time: 1942! The last time I saw her was in December 1996. A number of my friendships have lasted, but some, unhappily, have dwindled or vanished into quarrels or simply disappeared. One that has gone on for over fifty years is a treasure to rejoice in.
The many good times I had in Eudora’s company occurred at far-apart intervals. I had always more to learn about her, there being a brush of unexpected magic in what happens when she is present. Once, in Jackson, we had driven out to dinner in her car, a Plymouth, of a model that was so good it had had to be discontinued. Eudora told me that because the front seats were built exceptionally high, boys often wanted to buy the car from her to go fishing. I took this as one of her inventions, but on the way back, we stopped at a service station for gas. Out of the night, a young man in rough clothes and a pulled-down cap showed up at the window. “What you want for yo’ car?” he asked. Eudora said she didn’t want to sell it. “I need it for fishing,” he said.
For Eudora life is lived close to the everyday detail of it, but it isn’t boring. Nothing is too small to be noticed, and once noticed, there is nothing that can’t also be extraordinary. The best way to catch her quality is to be in her company, but next best is to read her. Those who know her can see how her fiction joins seamlessly to the actual. Are many writers like what they write? I don’t think so, but she is.
I recall numerous samples of Mississippi lore that she has either invented or brought to light: the girl so dumb she would sit for hours wondering how the tail of the C got through the L in the Coca-Cola sign; the woman who caught her husband’s dying breath in a balloon; the fire ball that rolled through the room when Uncle Daniel Ponder was tickling his wife during a thunderstorm. Are all these actual stories? It’s a strange state. In the story “Moon Lake,” two little girls are walking through a swamp, golden light filtering down through the lofty treetops, beneath myriad vines looping downward. She writes that it was like being on the inside of “something that breathed.” Couldn’t any writer think of that? But only Eudora could have written the rest: “… something that breathed and might turn over.” That last is pure Welty.
Once when I was in Jackson she asked me to go on a picnic with her and her lifelong friend John Robinson. We were getting toward fall, and everything seemed golden. She had made up a box of tomato sandwiches and cold fried chicken. We sat on the banks of the Pearl River looking down at the water and talked— of what? Who can ever recall really charmed exchanges word for word? A dazzling dragonfly sat down on the lunch box. “He looks as proud of his colors,” said Eudora, “as if he got up and put them on every morning. Maybe he does,” she added.
From her chance remarks I occasionally learn surprising things about her fiction. One story that has always puzzled me is “Music from Spain.” Laid in San Francisco, it concerns the daylong wandering of a Morgana, Mississippi, man with a mysterious guitarist, who had given a concert the evening before. I told her I had never understood the story. She offered no explanation for it whatsoever, but of the guitarist she said, “That was Segovia.” Had the great Spanish musician played in San Francisco during her visit? How did he wander into a Welty story? So, too, did I learn that much of Delta Wedding was drawn from somebody’s diary. Whose? And where is it? There are no end of strange origins for anyone’s fiction, but Eudora’s might be a box full of wonders. She once said she liked to start a story with some conversation she overheard between people she didn’t know and couldn’t be sure what they were talking about.
One could follow a good many false leads in knowing Eudora. So gentle and charming? Watch out! A temper fierce as a buzz saw is something to pray to avoid. When she feels some matter of conviction is being coarsened, mistaken, or set aside, she will blaze up. A sharp remark will jerk the rug from under confident feet.
A prime example that reached public attention was her response to an adverse review in The New Yorker by Edmund Wilson of Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust. Her letter of reprimand was a polemic. The magazine did publish it, but Wilson’s meek reply to her, which she showed me, was never printed, so far as I know. To our astonishment, Wilson said he’d never read Faulkner (besides the book in question), though he “had been intending to” for some time. One thinks eternally less of a major critic after an admission like this.
Each time I see her, a different story will spring up. On my last visit, December 1996, I entered the long-familiar living room on Pinehurst. She now sits in a chair with multiple levers to adjust her position and help her rise. Someone has made a beautiful walking cane for her, and she never fails to mention the carver by name. We go slowly to the car, get her inside, and, more slowly still, out of it at a favored restaurant.
We settle down to her regular bourbon, brought by a knowing waiter, and order bowls of fresh seafood gumbo. This time the story that comes out is about, of all things, Hershey bars!
She has been reading a book on the great flood of 1927, an event we both remembered. She was a student at Mississippi State College for Women in Columbus at the time of the flood. As a prank, she wrote a letter to the president of Hershey’s chocolates in Pennsylvania, saying that the students at her college were starving because of the flood. Columbus is in the far eastern part of the state, near the Alabama line, nowhere near the flooded area in the west, where broken levees along the Mississippi had made the entire Delta a still sea of flat gray water. However, her letter evoked a response she had scarcely foreseen, and a huge box of Hershey’s chocolate bars arrived from the company president, hoping to prevent starvation.
During the short period I taught at Belhaven, I became closer to a remarkable family, the Blissards. I had known them all before, in Jackson and Nashville, but now they were in walking distance of Belhaven, and I made full use of calling privileges. We had good talk of books and politics and people, played interminable games of bridge on the front porch, and enjoyed lots of laughter. The three sisters—Thomasina, Frances, and Jo Anne—and their mother became like k
in, and the sister I always wanted to have was multiplied by three. Their father, often out on business, was widely known as “Breezy” Blissard.
While I was in Jackson, David Clay came down from New York with news that I was to head Dodd, Mead’s 1948 fall list. I had thought publication would be sooner, but trusted him that fall was the best season to launch a book. (David was becoming my oracle.)
Together we telephoned and went over to see Eudora. She received us in the memorable living room where through the years she could always be found, with its friendly disorder of mail and stacked-up books, its comfortable armchairs and view of trees and shrubs out the front windows, with Pinehurst Street and the white buildings of Belhaven beyond. She and David knew many people in common in New York, and the conversation went well. He told me later that he had never heard a more beautiful voice than Eudora’s. Later she gave a wonderful “quote” for the book jacket. Robert Penn Warren was approached for a similar favor. I perceived that I was being “launched.” Regret for my family’s attitude continued, but how not to become excited after so many years of fruitless trying?
Fire in the Morning had not yet appeared when I knew I would have to find work outside Carrollton. My love of Mississippi was such a constant with me that though I did write to Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, and one or two other schools, I had the strongest hopes for going to Ole Miss. I had actually wanted to go to that university when the family had decided on Belhaven. My brother had gone there, and my mother’s brothers. It was less than fifty miles away, and driving home would be easy. I got an immediate response, the interviews went well, and my course was set for the next few years, teaching as an instructor in freshman English and “sophomore lit.”
My novel came out during my first year at Ole Miss. It was widely and well reviewed, with considerable excitement from the national press at finding a “new Southern talent.” David Clay’s able work had paid off, though he thought the advertising Dodd, Mead was willing to commit to the book was too scanty, and soon after, to my surprise, he left the firm. I was given to understand from various sources that he had done this in protest for the lack of support given my book. This created for me a feeling of indebtedness to David, and I determined to pay him back for his support whenever I could.
Ole Miss that first year was full of interest. It sprang up everywhere.
Ella Somerville appeared, that cousin of the redoubtable Miss Beauregard, familiar with the Carrollton terrain. Her mother’s people, the Vassars, had come from Carrollton. In fact, the old Vassar property, its cedars everywhere encroaching, its fallen porches and wasted walls, was the “haunted house” of my childhood, where on Halloween the most daring would venture to locate spooks.
Ella was the Oxford lady to reckon with, known everywhere, a portly agreeable well-dressed woman with reddish hair, unmarried but scarcely old-maidish. She held the social reins of Oxford, as Cousin Beaurie, sitting straight in her chair, had ruled Carrollton.
Her main genius was for entertaining. She often did it, and she did it right. Her home was a white Victorian structure on South Fifth Street, and as was common in a hill town, it was reached by steep concrete steps up to the front lawn, thence to the deep porch, with its swing and porch furniture. The position of the house made it seem larger and more imposing than it would have seemed on a level terrain. Within, a curving stairway led to the upper floor, and two parlors, one formal, flanked the hall. Her maid, Willie Mae, wore black with a white apron; her silver was flawlessly polished, and highballs were crisp and amber in her tall glasses.
But the best of Ella was her talk. She had the Southern lady’s gift for telling a story, and you knew when she told it that she had told it right, with all the social nuance brought to surround every person who figured in it. The tone of her voice when she mentioned a name could let you know how they figured. “Of course, I never knew the little man,” I can remember her saying of some slight acquaintance then being discussed. What did she mean? At least three things: (1) He was unimpressive and not worthy of her interest. (2) His family were not anyone important. (3) His masculinity was dubious. No doubt the subject in question deserved all this.
But those she chose to love were always to be held dear.
I had no sooner got to Oxford than some news of my writing had reached her, and she knew already of my background. She called. An invitation came. I found myself, in no time, standing in a receiving line in the formal parlor with a bunch of flowers stuck on my shoulder. It was the amazing start of a long friendship. I admired her, I liked her—no, let’s be clear about it. I loved her.
I’ve not even to close my eyes to see her vividly still, sitting across the room from me, for she took to ringing me at times to come alone to what she called “a funny little Sunday-night supper.” Her rich voice, her drink in one hand, the huge square-cut emerald she wore on the other flashing with her gestures.
Others in Oxford came to the fore. Again, the Carrollton connection. Elizabeth Hamilton Willis was living there with her husband, William Willis, who was head of the classics department. She was from a Carrollton family who had moved away to Meridian, Mississippi, the year I was born, but my mother’s affection for them never wavered. To be asked to the Willis home was then, as it remains, a treasured experience.
To know a man more learned than William Willis would not be possible, neither to find courtesy and right judgments in such a degree as his. His father, a gentleman like himself, had worked at a modest job in Meridian all his life, but had somehow managed a life of the widest cultural interest. He collected first editions of works by Conrad, James, Yeats, the Rossettis, and others, and corresponded with many of them. He owned a copy of William Morris’s Kelmscott Chaucer: it was fascinating to be allowed to turn its pages. He had a collection of classical recordings, among them Brahms himself playing one of his own compositions, and for amusement also collected gemstones, which his daughter-in-law loved to be given for setting.
Elizabeth Willis was stunning to look at. Her talk ran on without effort, in a friendly, interested way. When William spoke in easy reference to Greek literature, philosophy, or culture, or for that matter to anything at all, she gave him the setting of sober respect, but she had a racy, girlish side as well and loved parties, going to them and giving them. William’s convivial side was easy to awaken. With them we all enjoyed high moments.
Within a week or two at Oxford, I must have realized I had landed on my feet.
Oxford was constantly aware of Faulkner. Whether absent in California or resident at Rowan Oak, he was a felt presence, a subject of endless gossip and speculation. (Ella, of course, knew him well. She accorded every respect to his gifts.)
But the ways in which Oxford at large viewed William Faulkner were a strange and wonderful carload. For one thing, the town seemed full of derision and dislike. The stories of his contemptuous behavior were widely circulated, with whatever truth in them being constantly questionable: Southerners exaggerate. The “Count No ‘Count” label was freely applied. His arrogant incompetence as university postmaster was fully noted. His tendency to drink limitless quantities of whiskey, his long absences in Hollywood, his scandalous way of dress and shocking attitude toward— But the list grows longer, and once the premises were established, it all became repetitious, a bore.
Faulkner’s lifelong friend Phil Stone and Phil’s wife, Emily, also lived in Oxford. Emily’s one ambition was to be a published writer, a goal that eluded her all her life. She and Phil soon sought me out. They invited me for an evening of sipping whiskey and talking. Their stories about “Bill” were many. But these were of a different quality than the town stories and mainly concerned the writing itself. Phil, a lawyer, had a lifelong interest in literature and was widely known as having been the young Faulkner’s mentor and encourager.
One wonders at the effect of such a friendship when the protégé role slowly reverses itself and the mentor seems left flailing about, isolated more and more on the lonely rock o
f an outgrown relationship; yet talking of it, talking critically, talking affectionately, talking in a superior way, talking, talking compulsively, on and on.
The Southern Literary Festival was still meeting annually, and the turn of Ole Miss to host it came round that very spring.
It was April, one of Mississippi’s most ravishing spring times, a riot of bloom and fresh green and soft nights laced with scent. Ella Somerville would figure largely in this university occasion, for her old friend Stark Young was invited to speak.
Mr. Stark, as I later came to call him, was originally from Como, Mississippi. He was, in fact, a distant cousin, deriving from another branch of the same Young family that my grandmother came from. He had gone to New York many years before, bent on a literary career, and had built a strong reputation as America’s leading drama critic. But he was also a novelist, author of So Red the Rose, which to my mind still ranks as a fine novel. Others now consider it a romanticized version of Mississippi society; I prefer to think he wrote from established facts, out of genuine admiration for some fine characters, the likes of whom he had personally known. His translations from Chekhov, which were performed in New York and elsewhere for many years, perhaps still have a place. He had done the first English translation of Machiavelli’s comedy La Mandragola. He had traveled extensively, especially in Italy, and had known Eleanora Duse, as well as Eugene O’Neill and a host of other names of note in the theater.
Stark Young’s speech was beyond a doubt the high point of the festival that year or any other. He titled it “Oil from Strange Lamps.” He wished to encourage young writers to read literature in the original languages, to find a second language (at least one) and come to know what its writers were actually saying in their own tongue. To illustrate he chose, among others, the Greek inscription at Thermopylae: “Go tell the Lacaedonians that we lie here still obeying the commands of the fathers”; also Francesca di Rimini’s speech from Dante: “The book was to us a Galahad. In it we read no more that day.” There were others from Virgil, from St. John of the Cross, from the French dramatists—I quite lose my way trying to remember them all. Like the whole audience, I sat enthralled. It was approaching noon of a fine April day, the windows open, the soft air entering. I even remember the dress I wore: it was lavender.
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