I love Southern American writing. It's almost always highly place-centered, meaning it could only take place in that one spot; this is very appealing to me. I like being FROM the South, and i *adore* not having to live there. I can get my fix in books!

 

At my blog http://tinyurl.com/mlqkhpp I praise very highly the Queen of Southern Writing, Miss Eudora Welty. I am in awe of and in love with her stories. This one happens to be her own story, told with great simplicity and bone-deep appreciation for her roots and her branches.

I knew absolutely nothing about Eudora Welty when I picked up this book. I quite enjoyed her simple retelling of her past, and how she realized she wanted to be a writer. A quick, interesting read.

"Listening," "Learning to See" and "Finding a Voice," Eudora Welty entitled the three chapters of her autobiography "One Writer's Beginnings." And while these may be steps that most writers will undergo at some point, Welty's compact memoir is notable both because it allows a rare glimpse into the celebrated writer's otherwise fiercely protected private life and it illustrates the roots from which sprang such extraordinary protagonists as "The Ponder Heart"'s Edna Earle and Daniel Ponder, Miss Eckhart and the Morgana families in "The Golden Apples" and, of course, the anti-heroes of her Pulitzer Prize winning novel "The Optimist's Daughter," Judge McKelva, his second wife Fay and (most importantly) his daughter Laurel.

 

If you've never heard Eudora Welty speak, well then my friend, you've never heard Eudora Welty speak.

I found an audiobook copy of this at the library and, liking to hear authors read their own work or talk about their experiences, I picked up this aptly named title. One Writer's Beginnings is of Welty's beginnings in the deep south, early 20th century Mississippi. These lectures, performed by Welty toward in the latter part of her life for a Harvard audience, have a free-flow feel and yet they are mostly scripted. They are simple, occasionally seem to meander, but are incredibly endearing.

Rating: 4.5* of fiveThe unassuming, delight-filled, unsparingly indulgent prose of Miss Eudora's fiction is surpassed in this expansion and revision of her Massey Lecture in the History of American Civilization, delivered at Harvard in 1983. For anyone unacquainted with Miss Eudora's literary output, I recommend starting with short fiction ("The Bride of the Innisfallen" is a good starter, followed by "Why I Live at the P.O."), moving on to her chef d'ouevre, the novel "The Ponder Heart"; this memoir, all 104pp of it, should come after one knows whether one is able to appreciate the particularities and glories of Miss Eudora's work. While I think she would appeal to any able-minded reader, I know from experience that her beautiful sentences sound like preciosity to some readers: eg, "Over a stronghold of a face, the blue hat of the lady in the raincoat was settled on like an Indian bonnet, or, rather, like an old hat, which it was." ("The Bride of the Innisfallen")This, to me, is equalled in English by Nabokov's terse clarity, and by little else; but it has been cited to me several times as unendurably cutesy or simply overwritten. I so completely disagree that it's hard to credit the opinion-havers with a shred of taste; however, there are tastes, and there are tastes, so I move on from my digression.One Writer's Beginnings is told in a narrative voice much like her fiction; it is constructed like the linear tale that a life is when it is reflected on at leisure; and there are so many things in her history, from 1909 and her birth until her last entry in the lecture, a trip by train to New York during the Great Depression as a WPA junior publicity agent, that clearly formed a consciousness of time and place and rightness of things that she uses to such telling effect in her stories. An anecdote early in the book of her parents' morning routine of whistling and humming back and forth up and down the stairs phrases from "The Merry Widow Waltz" illuminates for me the means by which this shy, never-married lady "got" the signals of relationship that are so necessary to the parties in happiness. Another moment, the discovery of two nickels preserved in a hidden box, teaches me that Miss Eudora never felt any unmixed emotion (I won't tell that story, it must be read to be understood) and that is why "The Ponder Heart" is such a landmark in Southern ficiton.The death of Miss Eudora's beloved father in 1931 is simply too painful for her to go into; she elides the details and leaves us to infer her pain. It fits with her lifelong lack of interest in talking about herself, but it leaves the reader without an anchor in what had to be a turbulent passage in her life. I can't fault the lady for her reticence, but in this as in several other areas, it would have behooved Miss Eudora to have let others guide her in preparing these talks so as to answer more questions.Well, and therein the rub: It was the last thing she ever wanted to do, answer questions, and it's also why she wrote such marvelous stories, to answer them all unasked. Miss Eudora Welty, thank you for it all, and a safe journey into the future for your gifts to us who follow along behind you.