I Fell in Love with Eudora Welty by Walking Through Her Home
Good afternoon,
I’m currently training to become a docent at the Eudora Welty House and Garden. Hopefully in a week or so, I’ll be giving tours at least once a month on Saturdays. I won’t give away every little specific detail (you’ll have to come take a tour for that), but I would like to tell you a bit about what I’ve learned about Miss Welty (I love that people call her Miss Welty) by spending some time in her home.
The act of preserving a home, of turning it into a museum, is fascinating to me for a number of reasons, but mostly because of its naked intimacy with the historical figure, with their possessions. You can see so many of Miss Welty’s quirks and daily habits just by the way she kept her home, by the objects she chose to display and the way each room is structured. You can also see what made up the whole of her life, what was important to her. I am, quite frankly, obsessed with her house. It’s beautiful and well-maintained and full of life and personality and full of her, and to be honest, walking through it makes me feel that yes, there is something to my obsession with the home, with the stories it can tell in its careful construction.
Eudora Welty has always been a confusing figure for me as not only a Mississippi native, but a central Mississippi native. We read her stories in school, but I don’t think we really thought about them deeply. I once starred in a one act play adaptation of her short story “Why I Live at the P.O.” as the narrator, Sister, but I don’t think I examined the work much further than the strange sort of kinship I felt with my character. People both did and didn’t talk about Miss Welty in the same way they talked about William Faulkner. They didn’t deny her accomplishments (she won pretty much all the same awards Faulkner did, except for the Nobel Prize), but for some reason she just never filled out for me as a person, as someone with a life, a life that happened to have taken place in many of the same places I grew up and my parents frequented. Faulkner didn’t either, but I viewed him as a monolith, as some sort of giant. Miss Welty was smaller in my imagination, taking up much less space.
For some reason I remember people talking a lot about how Miss Welty never married. I have this memory of a horrible boy in my class who, after seeing a picture of her, made some pitying joke about how hard things must’ve been for her, because she was ugly. For some reason in my adolescence, Miss Welty occupied the space as some sort of strange spinster writer. Think Emily Dickinson, but with much less mystique.
When I moved to Oxford, the focus of course shifted to Faulkner, but also to other writers I had not learned about in school, chiefly Barry Hannah and Larry Brown. No one really had much to say about Miss Welty. It didn’t seem like anybody had read her work at all, nor did she take on the same mythic proportions that these Oxford writers did. Part of it was being in the same space, but I think it was also this obsession with drinking and hard living and loud, boisterous existences. Miss Welty didn’t have that. To sum it up: people thought she was quiet. Uninteresting. Boring.
I am here to tell you that that was not the case at all, at least as far as I can tell.
Miss Welty didn’t lead a loud, boisterous existence. But that doesn’t mean her life wasn’t one filled with excitement, with adventure and new experiences. She traveled across the state during her time with the Works Progress Administration, which you can see documented in her photographs, because she was multi-talented like that, not only a world-renowned writer, but also an accomplished photographer. She traveled to France, England, Ireland and Germany on a Guggenheim Fellowship, spent time as a lecturer at Oxford and Cambridge.
But what Miss Welty loved most was her home. She loved to entertain, loved to have people over for her Night-Blooming Cereus Book Club and loved for her house to be filled with people. Walking through her house, I find myself filled with warmth for this woman who cared so deeply about her family that she left New York to care for her dying father, stayed after her father died to care for her mother in a house she never left, a house that would become hers. I find myself aching for the kind of life she had, a life where people would just show up on her doorstep and want to come into chat, and she would take them in, shuffling all the books strewn across the furniture onto the floor so they could have somewhere to sit. A kind of life where one is so deeply rooted to the place and people that matter the most to you. A kind of life where you can trace your history back, can see it everyday.
You can feel the life in Miss Welty’s home, feel the people she loved and the people that loved her as you walk through the rooms, can smell it in the garden when the roses or camellias are blooming, depending on the season. The house radiates warmth and affection, which is what I want so desperately for my own home, wherever I make it. My home will never be made into a museum, may not even be cleared after my death for an estate sale, but when someone walks through it to divvy up my possessions in whatever way they see fit, I want them to be able to feel that warmth, to know that this was a place where people gathered and felt joy.
Miss Welty has this quote that I love, from her memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings: “A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.” I no longer really think Miss Welty led a sheltered life per se, but I can see how other people might. And I hope they can also, one day, be able to see the daring in it, the excitement and the love.