One Writer's Beginnings by Eudora Welty

First published: 1984

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: The late nineteenth to the early twentieth century

Locale: Mississippi, Ohio, West Virginia, and Wisconsin

Principal Personages:

• Eudora Welty, a distinguished American author
• Christian Welty, her father
• Chestina Andrews Welty, her mother

Form and Content

Against all odds and expectations, Eudora Welty’s modest memoir about her childhood in Jackson, Mississippi, stayed on The New York Times best-seller list for almost a year after it was published. It is difficult to explain the appeal of this lyrical evocation of a sheltered and uneventful life in the small-town backwater of Mississippi. Although the title suggests that the book will offer some secrets of the wellsprings of the writer’s art, one does not find much of that here. With the exception of a few paragraphs near the end of this slight, one-hundred-page meditation, Welty actually says little about the sources or secrets of her magical short stories or her richly poetic novels.

Nor is the book an autobiography, for although Welty was in her seventies when she wrote it, and therefore had had a long life about which to write, it is hardly comprehensive, primarily focusing on her early childhood, with only a few pages devoted to the early days of her writing career. Instead, it may be more properly termed a memoir or a meditation, a lyrical recollection of how one writer learned to see the world in such a way that she could re-create it in narrative.

If the book is not an analytical account of the sources of Welty’s work or a detailed account of her life, what indeed is it? Welty herself was asked the same question by interviewers, and she admitted that the book is unlike anything else she had ever done, for she had never before written directly about herself. In spite of the intensely personal and lyrical nature of the book, it actually began as a series of lectures at Harvard University for the William E. Massey lecture series in the history of American civilization. As Welty tells it, when she was invited to give the lectures, she protested, saying she was not an academic and thus could not possibly say anything of value to graduate students at Harvard. Yet, when told that she could talk about whatever it was in her life that made her become a writer, she probed her keen memory to evoke the particular feel of her childhood.

The three lectures (given in April, 1983) which make up the book are titled “Listening,” “Learning to See,” and “Finding a Voice.” “Listening,” the longest of the three, deals primarily with Welty’s early childhood and her relationship with her parents. It is not so much chronological as it is made up of what Welty calls the “pulse” of childhood, for childhood’s learning, she says, is not steady, but consists of moments. Welty’s focus, as befitting a book titled One Writer’s Beginnings, is on her discovery of the magic of letters, sounds, words, talk, and stories. Thus, much of the first lecture deals with teachers, books, music, and films, all of which fed her hunger for the sound of story.

The lecture on “Learning to See” takes Welty out of Jackson on her summer trips to Ohio and West Virginia to visit the families of her parents. Thus more of this section focuses on her parents than on Welty herself; the primary influence is the West Virginia background of her mother’s life. In vignettes that indeed could be short stories, Welty tells of her mother’s running back into a burning house to get her precious set of Charles Dickens novels, which her father (Welty’s grandfather) had given her for allowing her hair to be cut. Welty also recounts the remarkable story of her mother, at age fifteen, taking her father to Baltimore, Maryland, because of a ruptured appendix, and then bringing his body home alone on the train. Because, as Welty says, her mother had brought some of West Virginia to Mississippi with her, Welty brought some of it with her also.

The final section, in many ways the least memorable of the book, focuses on Welty’s “finding a voice”: that is, her move from Jackson to college in Wisconsin, her first job with the Works Progress Administration as a publicity agent, and the writing of her first stories—stories such as “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” “Livie,” “A Still Moment,” and “A Memory”—which brought Welty to the attention of the influential editors, writers, and critics who constituted the New Critics at The Southern Review. Thus, Welty’s writing was introduced to a relatively small group of discriminating readers of quality journals, where she established her early reputation. Of her writing career after her earliest works, the book says nothing.

Critical Context

Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings is a firsthand account of a life lived in pursuit of story. As such, it is an almost irresistible personal testimony, a narrative which, as slight as it seems on the surface, is actually a profound document about the birth and development of an artist’s consciousness. When Welty first gave the lectures that make up this memoir, students stood in line and sat in the aisles to hear her speak. The book itself was just as enthusiastically received.

The remarkable reception of the lectures and the book suggests a belated appreciation of a lifetime of careful and caring artistic creation. It seems that the older Welty gets the more precious she becomes to those who know her work. During the 1980’s, she was interviewed, written about, lauded, and heaped with more academic accolades than she had ever received during the time she was doing her most celebrated work. Each Welty birthday becomes the occasion for pilgrimages to Jackson by her admirers and the excuse to publish new collections of appreciations and explications.

One Writer’s Beginnings is required reading for anyone who knows Welty’s fiction, for although it does not give specific sources for the material of her stories, it does provide the basis for all of her work—a keen eye for detail, a sensitive ear for the nuances of speech, and most important, a kind and noble heart. This memoir will remain a classic in American literature, for it is a deeply felt personal document about a most sensitive lady of letters.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. Eudora Welty. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Although this compilation includes no specific discussion of One Writer’s Beginnings, it does contain several classic essays on Welty: Katherine Anne Porter’s introduction to A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (1941), Robert Penn Warren’s essay “Love and Separateness in Eudora Welty,” and a key chapter from Ruth Vande Kieft’s important early biography (below).

Dollarhide, Louis, and Ann J. Abadie, eds. Eudora Welty:A Form of Thanks. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1979. Selected from presentations at the 1977 University of Mississippi symposium honoring Welty, these essays include a discussion of her use of Southern speech by Cleanth Brooks, an essay by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw on the relative positions of men and women in her works, and an essay by Noel Polk on love in her collection The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories (1955).

Evans, Elizabeth. “Eudora Welty and the Dutiful Daughter.” In Eudora Welty: Eye of the Storyteller, edited by Dawn Trouard. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1989. Analyzes the image of the dutiful daughter in a number of Welty’s stories and novels and discusses the origin of the image in One Writer’s Beginnings, focusing particularly on Welty’s return home after the death of her father to assume the role of the dutiful daughter to her ailing mother.

Kreyling, Michael. “Subject and Object in One Writer’s Beginnings.” In Welty: A Life in Literature, edited by Albert J. Devlin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987. The most important discussion of One Writer’s Beginnings as uniquely a woman’s autobiography. Discusses the significance of a woman choosing writing as her work and thus disturbing an established set of relationships.

Prenshaw, Peggy Whitman. “The Antiphonies of Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings and Elizabeth Bowen’s Pictures and Conversations.” In Welty: A Life in Literature, edited by Albert J. Devlin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987. Discusses the friendship between Welty and Bowen and compares their autobiographies, especially in terms of their being typical of women’s autobiographies.

Prenshaw, Peggy Whitman, ed. Eudora Welty: Critical Essays. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1979. In addition to articles on myth, language, and narration in Welty’s stories, of particular interest in this large collection are “The World of Eudora Welty’s Women,” by Elizabeth M. Kerr, and Margaret Jones Bolsterli’s essay on “women’s vision.”

Tiegreen, Helen Hurt. “Mothers, Daughters, and One Writer’s Revision.” In Welty: A Life in Literature, edited by Albert J. Devlin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987. Discusses the autobiographical elements in Welty’s novel The Optimist’s Daughter (1972) as reflected in One Writer’s Beginnings. Analyzes Welty’s use of the key word “confluence” in her memoir, especially as it concerns the nature of memory.

Vande Kieft, Ruth. Eudora Welty. 1962. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Still the best full-length discussion of Welty’s fiction, this early study by Ruth Vande Kieft has been revised.