Eudora Welty, without the spinster cliches

EUDORA WELTY was, toward the end of the 20th century, arguably the most revered and the least known of American authors: revered for her lifetime oeuvre of much-honored fiction and a bestselling memoir (the classic “One Writer’s Beginnings”); least known because she so guarded her privacy and refused to discuss her personal life with interviewers.

Not that some didn’t think they knew her. A cliched picture of Welty, fostered by a sketchy 1998 biography, depicted the writer as a sort of compensating wallflower, a sad spinster burdened by family ties and hindered by regional prejudice.

The inadequacy of that caricature is evident now with the publication of this richly researched, absorbing, serenely written and definitive Eudora Welty biography.

Drawing on a wealth of posthumously available archival material, Suzanne Marrs, a scholar who was friends with Welty, gives us a detailed portrait of an author and a woman much more vital and adventurous than even her most sympathetic readers may have imagined.

Yes, “Miss Eudora” lived virtually all her life in Jackson, Miss. But she spent weeks, months and years traveling to and working in places as diverse as New York, California, Canada, Mexico, England, Ireland and Italy.

Yes, Welty, whose first published story saw print in 1936 and who died in 2001 at age 92, wrote in and largely about the American South, where she was admired by such colleagues as William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Penn Warren, Walker Percy, Reynolds Price and Shelby Foote. But she also was seen as a peer by such non-Southern authors as Elizabeth Bowen, V.S. Pritchett, Henry Green, Lord Dunsany, Ford Madox Ford, S.J. Perelman and (brace yourself) Henry Miller.

And, yes, Welty stayed single her whole life. But (as Marrs documents through an abundance of never-before-published correspondence) she had two intense, long-lasting and emotional relationships with talented and devoted men.

In the 1930s and ‘40s, she cared deeply for an apprentice writer named John Robinson. When, in 1951, he began living with another man, Welty’s relationship with Robinson modulated into a lifelong friendship.

Then, in the 1970s and ‘80s, Welty shared, through letters and occasional visits, a deep emotional union with Santa Barbara author Ross Macdonald (real name, Kenneth Millar) -- “an opening of the heart,” he called it -- that affected her life and even her art in crucial ways.

The strong affection between Welty and the married Millar did not express itself in a physical affair, guesses the refreshingly judicious Marrs: “Given Ken’s code of fidelity to his wife [author Margaret Millar], it seems unlikely ... he had asked Eudora to be less than saintly. And given Eudora’s open, honest, and cautious nature, it seems equally unlikely that she would have precipitously begun a secret liaison. It seems quite likely, however, that Eudora and Ken’s relationship had taken on a romantic, though not a sexual, dimension.”

It was Welty’s nature all her life, it seems, to be at once a romantic and yet a purposely isolated figure. Even as she partook fully of the cultural and social life in different places over the span of nearly a century -- photographing black and white Mississippians during the Depression, going to Harlem nightclubs and Broadway plays in the 1930s, working at the New York Times Book Review in the 1940s, visiting the White House in the 1970s and ‘80s to be honored by three consecutive presidents -- she always stood a bit apart, watching in astonished wonder and exercising an imaginative intuition that sometimes seemed almost psychic.

Those complementary gifts for isolation and empathy fueled her art, resulting in stories (photographs too) that could seem both naturalistic and mystical (such as “A Worn Path”), gothic and comic (“Petrified Man”), heartbreaking and consoling (“Death of a Traveling Salesman”).

Marrs, who has written in depth about Welty’s work elsewhere, especially in her 2002 study “One Writer’s Imagination,” concentrates in this lengthy biography on the particulars of the author’s personal life, but a fascinating view of Welty’s career is provided by another new and essential book: “Eudora Welty: The Contemporary Reviews,” a collection edited by Pearl McHaney (also a Welty scholar) of about 200 critiques and articles printed in American newspapers, magazines and journals from 1941 to 2000. (Included is a 1998 piece by this reviewer.)

Welty attracted world-class critics. Among those who analyzed and mostly appreciated her highly individual work, from the 1940s right on into a new millennium, were Malcolm Cowley, Joyce Carol Oates and Carol Shields.

Among the pleasures afforded by the generations-spanning “Contemporary Reviews” is having the Manhattanite Diana Trilling glance askance in 1946 at Welty’s Southern vision (“I find it difficult to determine how much of my distaste for Eudora Welty’s new book, ‘Delta Wedding,’ is dislike of its literary manner and how much is resistance to the culture out of which it grows and which it describes so fondly”) countered in time by New Yorker Gary Giddins’ 1984 celebration (“The ‘exacerbation of poeticism’ that Diana Trilling found so objectionable in the 1940s is in large degree the lifeblood of Welty’s writing”).

The previously concealed poeticism of Welty’s personal life is, of course, Marrs’ concern. “Eudora Welty: A Biography” contains many delights and surprises.

Those who assumed that the author of such celebrations of Southern ways and characters as “The Ponder Heart,” “Delta Wedding” and “The Optimist’s Daughter” viewed her state’s racially repressive politics with ignorance or equanimity will be enlightened by accounts of her anti-establishment comments (private and locally published) and actions (appearing, for instance, at integrated college events) during the years of the civil rights struggles.

Readers of “One Writer’s Beginnings,” that loving paean to the family that raised her, will perhaps be startled by the accounts given of Welty’s difficult years providing diligent care to a querulous and demanding mother -- years during which Welty’s creative output was greatly curtailed.

The greatest revelation, for all but a handful of her closest friends, will be the written proof of the extent and depth of Welty’s friendship with Millar.

The two met after the deaths of Welty’s mother and Millar’s only child, and each found in the other a responsive and compatible spirit. Welty turned more and more to the taciturn but eloquent Millar as a loving confidant whose sensibility she treasured and whose counsel she valued.

In 1973, Millar wrote Welty: “I don’t know of anyone who has given more than you have to other people, or has more love resurging back to her ....[Y]ou’ve had long joyful seasons -- you’ve left a full record of them; you’re the most irrepressibly joyous person I know

After Millar prompted Welty to read a book on Ford Madox Ford by Millar’s friend Richard Lid, Welty told Millar how Ford had tried, out of the blue and just before his death, to find her a publisher. Millar experienced an uncanny resonance: “When I got your letter today, something went through me like a vibration of light, as if I had had a responsive echo from a distant star. As if a half-imagined relationship to the great past had come real in my life before my life ended .... I sometimes think, don’t you, that these musical and moral recurrences are almost the whole meaning of life and art .... “

Welty concurred, with passion: “I believe in it, and I trust it too and treasure it above everything, the personal, the personal, the personal! I put my faith in it not only as the source, the ground of meaning in art, in life, but as the meaning itself.”

Around 1980, Millar began showing symptoms of what would be diagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease. The more his condition worsened, the more open Welty was in stating her ardor. “You’re dear in every way to me,” she wrote him at Christmas of 1980, “and I think of you in such concern and love.”

In the spring of 1982, after he had ceased being able to answer or even read letters, she wrote him: “Dear Ken, I have all your letters to keep me company. Every day of my life I think of you with love.” Worry over Millar both prompted her to try to complete new fiction and prevented her from doing so. “It is on my mind all the time,” she confessed to Reynolds Price. “He doesn’t write or read -- really unbearable.”

After seeing Millar one last time in Santa Barbara, in late 1982, with him adrift but still able to communicate with her in a manner she found meaningful, and after his death in 1983, Welty worked on a story about him and her (and Margaret Millar) -- a tale she “could not and would not” finish.

“So painful was the story to write,” Marrs notes in a startling perception, “that it exists 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.”

In one fragment, written in the first person, Welty’s female narrator describes a scene of wordless communion with her memory-impaired beloved: “I went forward to my knees, put my head down on his pillow, touching him ... I was as still as he, as if some safety might be discovered to run back and forth between our heads, like words, more urgent than words between our skulls. As if we could tender our foreheads from bud and budded, to each other, like deers unseen. This was my own momentary dream.”

Later, the woman reflects on what she has had and not had in this chaste but loving friendship: “I think that I was simply afraid of great joy .... Does anyone know how to love?”

And in a final extraordinary fragment, this character returns to her hometown, where the disorientation she experiences driving its rerouted streets becomes an epiphany of identification with her soul mate and his evaporating mind, “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 ... I treasured that .... Anything, anything can affirm love. And I am seizing it.”

That astonishing urge to seize what joy the world presented made Welty’s whole life, with its frustrations and omissions, not sad or even bittersweet but a quiet triumph. In chronicling that life so thoroughly and sympathetically, Suzanne Marrs has written an admirable, engrossing and gently gripping biography fully worthy of its remarkable subject.