Eudora Welty once said that people should read a writer’s creative work instead of a biographical account, adding that she did not think anyone would be interested in her private life. Perhaps partially to forestall anyone poking into her affairs, Welty published her own autobiographical memoir, “One Writer’s Beginnings,” in 1984, which interested enough people to keep it on The New York Times best-seller list for almost a year.
While Welty’s book is not an autobiography in the traditional sense, but rather a lyrical meditation on how one writer learned to see the world in such a way that she could re-create it in stories, Suzanne Marrs’ new biography of the author, “Eudora Welty,” is very traditional, charting the events of Welty’s life from birth to death in extensive, well-researched detail.
Whereas the irresistible magic of Welty’s little memoir largely can be attributed to the personality of the writer – a model of gentility – the prosaic formality of Marrs’ hefty tome is the result of scrupulousness of the scholar and the loyalty of a friend.
Ann Waldron’s 1998 biography of Welty, who died in 2001, was hampered by Welty’s unwillingness to cooperate, but Marrs, an English professor who lives in Jackson, Miss., and who visited Welty for many years, was given access to letters and diaries, and was welcomed by Welty’s friends. Waldron, perhaps piqued by Welty’s reticence, made much of the writer’s physical appearance and Southern seclusion; Marrs, obviously an adoring friend and fan, burnishes the iconic image that Welty became in American literature and presents her as a sophisticated, well-traveled woman of letters.
Each chapter of the book, dutifully introduced and summarily concluded, covers a significant block of time in Welty’s life, including her somewhat protected childhood, her creation of the wonderful stories in “A Curtain of Green” and “The Wide Net,” her caretaking of her sometimes demanding mother, her fans’ veneration of her in her old age.
Welty’s longtime, unrequited love for classmate John Robison is a continuing theme throughout the book, as is her long-distance relationship with Ken Millar (California writer Ross Macdonald) later in her life. Her friendships with many other writers, including her close ties to Katherine Anne Porter, Elizabeth Bowen and Reynolds Price are also documented. There are no sly insinuations about these relationships, however, as were inferred by reviewers from Ann Waldron’s unauthorized biography.
In an effort to belie the frequent stereotype of Welty as a spinsterish Emily Dickinson recluse who seldom ventured from her childhood home, Marrs seems to describe every trip that Welty made – and indeed there were many – to New York, London and countless colleges and universities across the country. As a result, a somewhat tedious “Eudora Welty’s date book” effect slows the work.
Moreover, Marrs’ occasional attempts at meaningful metaphor and editorial comment are often superfluous and clichéd: for example, “New life would emerge from the season of death,” “Sexism was alive and well,” “Metaphoric oceans had already irreparably separated them.”
But these are minor quibbles. This is indeed the authoritative biography, and we are unlikely to have a more complete one. Those who love Welty will relish every documented detail, and there is nothing wrong with that. Those who do not know her work may be drawn to her fiction by Marrs’ account. And that would be a good thing, indeed.
The central key to the secret of the writer, Welty suggests in “One Writer’s Beginning,” is his or her ability to determine the difference between mere events and “significant” events. A relation of mere events may be simply a chronological retelling; however, significant events follow what Welty calls a “thread of revelation.”
Writing develops a sense of where to look for these connections, she says, how to follow the threads, for nothing is ever lost to memory, which unites the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead.
You may read Marrs’ chronological retelling of Welty’s life for its mere events. But by all means, read Welty’s fiction for the “thread of revelation” that unites us all.
Charles E. May teaches the short stories of Eudora Welty and others at California State University at Long Beach.
Eudora Welty: A Biography
By Suzanne Marrs
Harcourt, 652 pages, $28
