Meanwhile There Are Letters

by Suzanne Marrs

  The point during Eudora’s visit when Ken seemed best able to overcome the “non sequitur of his thinking” and to have access to once-cherished memories came when Eudora told him of her travels on the trans-Canadian railroad: “I remembered as much as I could, because everything I could tell him was something that rang a bell. It was amazing. But I was thrilled, because it turned out that we could really talk [. . .] You know it both broke your heart, and—you realized how much would go through his mind, even fleetingly, and clue him in on something, and he knew it. And I know so much of his boyhood was with him all the time, and he could call on it if he needed to.”19

  Heartsick at leaving Ken, Eudora eventually settled down to work on a series of three lectures for Harvard University—the William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization—to be delivered in April 1983. Harvard professor and old friend Daniel Aaron had invited her to discuss how she became a writer. Eudora, having observed Ken’s memory loss, set about this project, which required that she exercise her own memory, and the project itself ultimately became one that extolled the importance of remembering. In the published version of her lectures, Eudora declared that memory was “the treasure most dearly regarded by me, in my life and in my work as a writer. Here time, also, is subject to confluence. The memory is a living thing—it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives—the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead.”20

  As January 1983 drew to a close, Ralph Sipper wrote that Ken could no longer remain at home. Sustained periods of total memory loss kept him from tending to daily tasks of dressing and grooming, and his Alzheimer’s had also led to falls. At a doctor’s recommendation, Ken was now living, serenely according to Sipper, in the city’s best convalescent facility. 21

  Eudora was far from serene. A fictionalized account she wrote for a story about Ken seems to describe her response to Sipper’s letter:

  This was Meadowbrook, but surely [I] was driving on it in the wrong direction. Now [I] was moving along North State, supposedly, but it looked unfamiliar and the intersections empty of life and movement. [. . .] A letter that morning from a mutual acquaintance told [me], “He is no longer able to sign his name.”

  This was the town where I was born, but [. . .] the years had, it seemed, without warning, changed it. He could no longer read, or write a word, even his own name. Driving over the streets of my home town where he had never been, finding myself nowhere that looked familiar, finding wherever I turned, and then reversed myself and turned again, that I was lost, I thought now that I had been very close to him. It had brought [us] together when [I] needed it most, this aimless and timeless ride through the gray rain of a city which had proved itself thus easily slipped from memory, as if we had clasped each other one last time. I felt a surging comfort of not knowing where I lived, the loss of any certainty—almost blindness itself—this was all nearness to him. As if it were a confidence or a promise, I treasured that hour and forty minutes just given to [me]. Anything, anything can affirm love. And I am seizing it.22

  Ultimately, Eudora moved beyond her imaginative identification with Ken and coped by visiting friends, by continuing to work on her lectures, and by seeing the effect those lectures had on overflow audiences at Harvard, but more bad news lay immediately ahead. In mid-June Ken suffered a “cerebrovascular accident” and was hospitalized. Then his condition deteriorated, and on July 11, he died.

  Eudora’s response was intense and complex but expressed to only a few close friends. To Mary Lou, she described the wrongs she felt Ken had endured in life and death: “I’m glad it is over for him, and what I’ve come to feel is that he is FREE. In particular of Margaret Millar, whose screaming abuse of him (it was in public) never did cease, when all he could do was stand there and take it. After he was dead, when she was talking to her agent Dorothy Olding (also Ken’s agent) in New York, when Dorothy asked if Ken had yet been cremated, she said, ‘Well, I really don’t know—he may have been. At some point a charter plane scatters the ashes over the Santa Barbara Channel, it’s a service—I have nothing to do with it, and I’m working.’ She was home working the night Ken died, and I don’t know whether or not anybody was with him.”23

  Six weeks later, in a letter to Bill and Sonja Smith, Eudora wrote less of anger and more of the love she and Ken shared and of the sense of loss that was now hers.

  “I’ve been grieving,” she told the Smiths, “about Ken Millar who died of Alzheimer’s Disease, or so it was diagnosed. I went out to see him [. . .] and we had a good visit—talked together and got to be together every day for a while for about a week—As you know, we loved each other, and what happened to him was so abominable—He hadn’t been able to write for two years but a mutual friend in Santa Barbara had kept me in touch. He remained himself—gentle and enduring.”24

  To Eudora, Ken’s “gentle and enduring” spirit seemed powerfully present as months passed and the first anniversary of his death drew near. “I feel that Ken has knowledge of what you’ve been going through and is sending love and encouragement,” she told Reynolds Price, who had recently undergone surgery for a tumor “intricately braided” within his spinal cord. Then she added, “I’ve never ceased to feel close to him in matters close to me. I can say this just to you.” Perhaps it was this mystical sense of connection that gave Eudora the courage, after she had finished revising her Harvard lectures and seen them published as One Writer’s Beginnings, to confront again the horror of Ken’s final years. She believed, as had Ken, that “the best thing for a writer to do with a trouble is to translate it into his work.” Indeed, she had found during occasions of personal crisis that relying upon the disguise of fiction both protected privacy and enhanced understanding. That was certainly the case in the late sixties when writing The Optimist’s Daughter helped her cope with the loss of her mother and brothers. In the spring of 1984, she returned to this strategy, drawing upon accounts of Ken’s suffering and memories of their relationship as she once more labored over the story about a character named Henry. But this time her strategy failed. So painful was the story to write that it remained in a most fragmented state, almost an enactment of Alzheimer’s itself, with some scenes written by hand on envelopes or bank-deposit slips, with bits of dialogue or description on partial pages of paper. Eudora could not and would not complete it.25

  APPENDIX

  “Henry”: An Unfinished Story

  “We all write on the verge of silence”

  —Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty

  EARLY in the 1970s both Eudora and Ken published fine novels and received critical acclaim for them, but in the wake of their accomplishments both struggled with writer’s block. Ken’s ongoing memory loss seriously hampered his work and left him depressed. For her part, Eudora’s difficulty writing became tied to Ken’s memory problems. She wanted to write about his plight as a way of coming to terms with it and of honoring him. In a letter encouraging Ken to write about his father, she had asserted, “We somehow do learn to write our stories out of us, however disguised and given other players who can move and act where possibly we can’t—and all, but in the end, if the hurt still stays, that’s wrong.” 1

  She had been working on an incipient novel called “The Shadow Club,” one drawing upon Jackson’s recent and distant past, when she first learned of Ken’s efforts to retain his memory. Ken’s deepening troubles prompted Eudora to change the course of this piece so that it included references to the relationship she and Ken shared. Then by the fall of 1981, she abandoned “The Shadow Club” for a different story called “Henry,” one focused upon Ken’s present situation but also incorporating long-ago incidents from their separate lives. As she wrote, Eudora even attributed her own memories to the character Henry, metaphorically declaring the confluence of their lives.

  As hard as she worked to translate Ken’s experience into fiction, Eudora remained dissatisfied with her efforts. At some point, she
began to develop a second version of the Henry story, which seems to have been titled “The City of Light.” This new version included elements rather overtly based upon Ken, Maggie, and herself; the tensions in the Millars’ marriage; and the love she and Ken shared. Then in 1985, as a letter from Eudora to William and Emily Maxwell indicates, she destroyed nearly one hundred manuscript pages of this text, leaving a number of fragments, but without order or sequence supplied. “Henry” she did not destroy, at least not on this scale, perhaps because its “players” were more deeply disguised. Unfinished, disjointed, but extensive, the surviving narrative evocatively makes use of Ken’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease and Eudora’s response to that battle even as its characters exist at a greater remove from actuality than those in “The City of Light.”

  We are proud to include “Henry,” abridged for readability, in the following pages.2

  HENRY

  by

  Eudora Welty

  Part 1

  IN the text labeled “Part 1 Affinities,” there is no sustained narrative, but these eighty, randomly filed bits and pieces do establish the beginnings of a story line. At times Eudora has lined out passages in the eight fragments included here; we have, when they seemed crucial, kept these passages in the text with strikethroughs indicated. Editorial ellipses within brackets indicate omitted passages, which are either illegible or too cryptic to be understood. Omitted or errant punctuation marks that seem clearly to be typographical errors have been silently corrected.

  Eudora called the following fragment her “opening scene.”

  “Mrs. Paulding? I’m Rachel Guest. I was in Dr. Paulding’s class in Linguistics 14-A.”

  “You’re who? In what?”

  “I’m an English teacher from Columbus, Alabama. I was here in summer school summer before last.”

  “What have you come for? Dr. Paulding is not teaching any longer.”

  “I was in New Orleans for the day—I called at Dr. Paulding’s office at the University. Dr. Fields thought it would be all right if I called to see Dr. Paulding—I have something to give him.” I let her see my package, the unmistakable book. “Dr. Fields thought it would be all right if I called here.”

  “He ought to have his head examined.”

  “I’m a teacher, too.”

  “You didn’t need to tell me. It’s written all over you.” Her look added, “So is old maid.”

  I’m sure it’s true; and that is what I am. But what blazed in front of my eyes was her belligerence. She challenged me as to who did I think I was in coming here. Could it be that she thought Henry and I had been lovers? She would not have been able to understand at all what H. & I had been to each other—I found it hard to believe, looking at her now . . . that she would understand the meaning of the word for it, the word Henry had used almost at the beginning.3

  In various fragments that were to follow this opening scene, Mrs. Paulding or Donna, who will later be called both Connie and Beverly, describes the Alzheimer’s disease that has stricken her husband Henry.

  “He used to get so upset. In the beginning,” said Donna. “He didn’t know what things there in front of him were for. He didn’t understand, oh, the return-address labels he found on his desk. He just sat at his desk looking at them. My husband didn’t understand what those little stickers were for with his name and address on them. That was the first time he blacked out. Down on the floor breaking his glasses. I just threw the labels away. All I could do when Henry was upset was put things out of his sight. He sits in here content, like you see him now. I don’t think he’d even ask if he saw them today what the labels said. He’s more contented now than he ever was in his life.” She looked at me. “You understand he’s lost his memory.”

  “Now he doesn’t worry any longer that he’s lost something he knows he once had without knowing what it is. He doesn’t try to understand what’s happening to his mind. Well, that’s a good thing.”4

  “His book,” I said. “When he sees all he’s written, and hasn’t finished.”

  “Oh, that’s gone,” she said. “When he came home from the hospital I had everything cleared out of his room, his desk moved out, and he’s never spoken a word about it to this minute.”5

  Donna cooking the egg, while Henry waits seated at the kitchen table.

  “He knows what’s the matter with him,” Donna said. “We talked it over right at the beginning, right here in the kitchen. He was capable of understanding at the time. This thing is irreversible, just keeps on.” The egg sizzled. “But Henry doesn’t feel things. Henry’s content with things now, whatever way they are.” With a furious jab of the spatula, she turned the egg over. “It’s me!” she screamed. “What am I going to do? What am I going to do with him?”

  She carried Henry’s breakfast plate to him where he sat at the table.

  “Won’t one of you join me?” He looked up and asked. He couldn’t help his courtesy. But I felt I couldn’t bear it that he was making no distinction between us.6

  She carried his tray into the kitchen and I followed her. “Donna, is there nothing anybody can do?”

  “It’s Somebody’s Disease—not a name anybody could ever remember . . . Or they said they thought it was that. They would assume it was what Henry had. No, there’s nothing they can do. It just has to get worse. [. . .] Oh, God.” She was standing in the door looking out at Henry sitting in his chair. “He goes somewhere, I don’t know where.”7

  “He doesn’t take any medicine! There’s no medicine he can take. There’s nothing can be done for him. Or for me either!” she cried in her sudden dramatic way. “He’s not the only one in this house!” At whatever she saw in my face she replied, “He doesn’t feel much, not any longer.”

  I said to Henry, rising & going toward him with the book, “I came to give this back to you—it’s something that belonged to you a long time ago and still does.—I found it right here in New Orleans—” [. . .]

  As if he were deeply willing for what could still hurt him to be cut out of him. But what had hurt him, I thought, was deprivation of everything else—everything else but the pain. As if the way to heal deprivation was to cut out the pain it had left.8

  Donna then tells Rachel about a troubling incident.

  “He left home to meet his class & walked into Lake Ponchartrain at three o’clock in the afternoon with his good clothes on. Of course he could quite easily have drowned. But they saw him drifting, floating face down, and pulled him in. He never remembered a thing about it. They said he had a mild seizure, whatever that is, out there in the water.”

  “Where was Cuchulain?” I asked.9

  “Who?”

  “Henry’s dog?”10

  Part 2

  PART 2, which Eudora labels a flashback, is the only place in the group of manuscript pages about Henry where there is a sustained narrative. The names of the characters, however, are not sustained. Dr. Paulding is often called Dr. Duling, and Rachel is Caroline, May, Nell, or Justine, or is simply unnamed. Though Eudora intended to change the story from a third-person to a first-person narrative, she did not do so consistently. Nor did she manage to prepare a fair copy. The pages are heavily revised and can be difficult to decipher, with handwritten insertions and deletions and with typed insertions pinned-on over the original text. In addition, a lined out title “The Shadow Club” indicates that she had used parts of an earlier story, never completed, in this flashback to a time before Henry’s catastrophic memory loss.1

  “Linguistics is the study of the human language,” he said in a voice of uncommon politeness and uncommon deliberation. Directly seated in front of him in my molded plastic chair, alone on the front row, I wrote this down and so started my notebook.

  Linguistics e-409 was scheduled from two to three o’clock every afternoon, Monday through Friday. The classroom on the second floor was windowless and lit by fluorescent bars tracked across the ceiling but the light of day could be seen through a door onto an iron fire escape. Co
ld air was nozzled down through gratings high in the walls. The city of New Orleans, for all that it could not be seen or heard or smelled, was out there just the same.

  I knew on sight that the other members of the class were high school teachers too. And she, like them, must be washed with lavender by the fluorescence, her outline flickering with it from time to time like theirs. But when the teacher walked in and stood before them, he seemed to face and to withstand its fluctuations. This was Mr. Duling, sandy-haired and middle-aged, who looked out at a point just over the heads of his class [and] hardly moved his body, his hands, or even his head, as he talked.

  On the second Monday, Professor Duling placed a china dish on his desk, and opened class by saying, distinctly and formally What was he about to say? [. . .] “I hope that Linguistics e-409 will not object seriously if my young dog attends for a few days while my wife is away from home.” He walked out again into the hallway and a young Collie walked in alone, like a leading actor making his first entrance onstage, and stood looking at the class down his slender white nose. Waving a plume-like tail, he investigated what proved to be listening cubicles and shelves of cassettes. The teacher, who was taking up “General Features of Language,” touched him quietly on the ear, and he settled down beside the desk, lowering his head onto damp sandy paws.

  One of the class, perhaps inspired by the interruption of the dog, waved her hand and asked why they couldn’t make it all come alive by letting members of the class join hands and act out the parts of speech to make a living sentence. Prof. Duling didn’t appear to have heard what she said, and after she sat down he rose, picked up the china dish and went out into the hallway to fill it from the drinking fountain. He brought it back carefully. It was a rather pretty small tureen, with a faded floral pattern and only one handle.