- [Announcer] A conversation with Eudora Welty.

Talking with novelist and writer Eudora Welty today is Mr. Frank Hains, arts editor of the Jackson Daily News.

- Of all the words which have been written about Eudora Welty, none I think are more beautiful than these by the great dancer, Martha Graham: "These dark days," she said, "it is all the clearer "that her novels and stories are a national treasure.

"We must guard it zealously "for such a glory as Eudora "does not often come to look at us, "to study us, and sing about us."

Here now is the source of that national treasure, the author of "Losing Battles," "The Ponder Heart," "Delta Wedding," "Bride of the Innisfallen," "Curtain of Green," and so many others.

Miss Eudora Welty, come for a change to let us look at her, study her, and hopefully not to sing about her.

Thank you for coming, Eudora.

- Very nice to be here indeed.

- Martha Graham, of course, is not the first person to speak of your singing.

Life Magazine referred to "Losing Battles" as Motzartian music.

Often this reference to musicality in your work is made.

Are you conscious of singing?

- No, not at all.

The only relation I can see to that is that I believe most short stories have a lyric source, which is where a song comes from too.

I think the impulse is to praise, in a way, of whatever singing can be said to do.

I do think they have the same source.

Of course, I don't even know music.

- [Frank] Has music been any part of your life, your background?

- Well sure, I took when I was a little girl, and I love music, but I'm not knowledgeable about it.

- I guess your favorite story with any musician, I'm not of course, is "Powerhouse."

It's so often referred to as being music in itself.

How did "Powerhouse" come about?

- Well, I went, I have always loved Fats Waller and his music, and I'd played his records a lot.

He gave a concert in Jackson and I went.

I had no idea I was going to write a story, of course.

I wouldn't have dared if I had been in my right mind.

And when I came home, I wrote the story while I was still so wound up from hearing it.

But actually, I don't think, I wasn't consciously writing it about a musician as such, and certainly not as a Black, which many people think that it's a race story.

I mean, a story about, I was writing it about an artist.

The being of an artist traveling about, and the gulf that is between his work and the people who come, and how they bridge across it, or don't bridge across it.

- You just came home that night?

- Yeah, I wrote it all that night, and I knew better than try to touch it the next day.

It either had to be a story or not, 'cause in the cool light of reason, I wouldn't have been able to revise it.

- Do you revise much, as a rule, or?

- Yeah, I'm a big reviser now.

When I first began, it didn't occur to me that you could probably improve something a whole lot if you just worked at it.

I was inclined to leave things as they were, and go to the next story.

- You grew up in Jackson, of course.

- [Eudora] I was born there.

- What was it like being a girl in Jackson in the 1920s and '30s?

- Well, it was nice.

Jackson was a little town, I guess, and I went to Davis School where nearly everybody my age and grade went, because there was only a school, at least in this part of Jackson.

We all knew each other, and played together, and are still friends, most of my old classmates.

- How important to a writer is the place in which he grows up, do you think?

- To me, it's terribly important.

Of course, each writer speaks for himself.

Some people are, that isn't important to them.

But to me it defines the-- it's the-- it's what is the boundary of a story.

It explains why these people are there, and explains their origins, and really defines their actions in a large way, which I think can be true, especially in the South.

- So much of your work is set in rural Mississippi.

How did you get acquainted with that particular milieu?

- I wasn't too acquainted with it, but I really did, I suppose it was instinct to narrow my stage down, simplify life, instead of having five or six people of a certain kind in a town there would be only one.

I was just simplifying, for my own abilities.

I've seen little towns, but I didn't know them too well.

- Everything I've read about you always mentions during the '30s, your work with the WPA, traveling around Mississippi.

Exactly what did you do with the WPA?

Maybe you better tell the young people what the WPA was.

- Maybe so.

What did it stand for?

- [Both] Works Progress Administration.

- I was asked to take the job by a neighbor.

I never would've thought I could.

I had no experience.

It was called junior publicity agent.

That meant that I was a girl.

(both chuckle) The senior publicity agent was a man.

We traveled, it was a state office so we traveled all over the state looking at people working on projects, and writing them up.

Interviewing people, road workers, blind weavers, all kinds of people like that.

Juvenile court judges, air field openers, old ladies writing histories of churchyards, everybody.

And our object was to try to get news stories about them in the paper.

It was a great eye-opener to me, and just gave me a complete, well I was just introduced into Mississippi.

I'd never seen any of it before.

- Was this when you became interested in photography?

- Yeah.

It was, I guess.

I can't, I don't think I used any of my pictures in the WPA, but I may have, I've forgotten.

I just kept taking pictures along the way.

- And there is now to be a book of your photographs.

- Yes, there's gonna be a book, a collection made of them.

Not because they're great photographs, because they're strictly amateur and not very good, but the subject matter, through the sheer passage of time, has become interesting as a record, I think.

- Most of these are from the '30s, are they?

- [Eudora] Yeah, the late '30s to the early '40s.

- And mostly in Jackson and- - No, they're from all around.

Country, out in the country most of 'em.

- [Frank] Is there a title for the book yet?

- What I call it, I don't know if it'll get by, is "One Time, One Place."

'Cause that defines it.

- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, and you will write captions for it.

- Yes, my editor says that I've been awfully tight-lipped about those.

He said most of 'em just say Hinds County.

(both chuckle) I wrote an introduction simply to define what I'd-- why I was presuming to make a book out of 'em.

To just explain, really, what they were.

So that's done.

- They have been shown locally, but not as, not the complete collection really.

- No, the complete collection never was, I guess.

They were once shown in New York when I first, I took them to New York hoping that if someone, some publisher would be interested in the stories that they might be slowly persuaded to look at my stories, which I was trying to sell.

But it didn't work.

- When did you sell your first story?

- In 1938, I think, to a little magazine in Ohio.

- And the story was?

- "Death of a Traveling Salesman."

- Which predated Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" by quite a long time, didn't it?

I wonder if he ever read your story.

- Oh I doubt if he ever heard of it, no.

- Speaking of your photo book, what other works are in progress at the moment, or publications coming up?

- Well, at the time I published "Losing Battles," I had a lot of work that I had written, both during that and since then, but I wanted to publish the novel first 'cause I'd been at it such a long time, and I wanted to clear the decks.

So once that's out, I think there'll be a book of short stories, which I've almost finished.

I may write one or two more.

And a book of nonfiction.

Oh you know, essays and- - [Frank] Critical works, yes.

- Some, and some are just reporting things.

Some I did during the WPA.

- Oh really?

- That I wrote at the time.

- I know that writers as a rule hate to, I think artists in general, hate to talk about how they work.

What can you tell us about the way in which you work?

- Well, I can tell you pretty well by now, but of course each writer's different.

I don't think it signifies anything, but the way I work with a short story, which is my natural form, something has undoubtedly been building up in my mind a long time on some personal feeling, or my reaction to something.

But it's just the way all thoughts in everybody's mind about things, and all of a sudden, I see something in the living world that will dramatize it for me, just as if a figure had come out of the wings of my mind, and there was the stage all ready.

Everything was all ready for it.

And so then everything just pours into the, into the cast of characters that is sort of made for it.

And then I can write it quickly, but I couldn't make it up.

It's always after a long period of thinking without really knowing what form it will take.

- Can you look back on every story and remember, well, who the character was who came out of the wings, or what the particular thing was?

- Well it's easy in some of 'em, especially the early stories when things were much simpler for me.

One case like that was in a little story called "A Worn Path."

- [Frank] Yeah, that little story which is anthologized in every- - Well, I like the story, and I think that's why it sticks in my mind.

But I, oh I'd been thinking about how people have some kind of drive, or obsession, a dream or something.

You know, just in a sort of general way I suppose I had to myself, and I was sitting out in the country with a friend of mine who was painting.

I was just sitting there reading, and I saw in the distance, the middle distance, a figure of an old woman just emerge and slowly cross a field right in front of me.

Just a little processional figure.

I never did see her, I mean never did talk to her, but she seemed the embodiment of what I was thinking, as if she were bent on some driving errand, and then at once you know it would be for someone else, and the whole thing came clear to me, just like a picture.

So I just went home and wrote the story.

But it wouldn't have happened if I had just seen her with no, no feeling that I was having at that time.

- I think that people are fascinated to know how these stories that they know so well began.

Like, well, "Why I Live at the P.O.," one of your most popular stories.

Where did it come from?

- Well, that's pretty easy because another thing, I love to listen all the time, and hear people talking.

I did it even as a little girl.

My mother said I used to sit down between her and other ladies and say, "Now talk."

And I was thinking about speech patterns, especially in Southern families, how, and especially in remote or isolated places, how we all make our own entertainment by dramatizing ourselves, and so on.

I was thinking about that, and I went into a little post office to mail something and I looked through the window, and there was an ironing board back there.

I thought, somebody's moved into the post office.

So then I started hearing all these reasons why.

Just you know, everything went together.

The self-dramatization, the story just wrote itself at that point.

- It's of course a very funny story.

In fact, one reviewer I read recently said, "Eudora Welty possesses the surest comedic touch "of any writer in America today," or something to that effect.

How consciously do you work for comedy?

Is that- - Oh, well I work for everything very consciously, because it's, you know, it's hard.

I mean, I think comedy is probably the hardest thing to do because it has to be so concentrated and pure, and nothing come in the way of the single thing you're focusing on.

I think it's much harder, and also much more fun to write comedy than anything else.

- Speaking of reviewers, I have a quote here from Jack Kroll of Newsweek in reference to "Losing Battles."

"It's sad to reflect that not many people under 30 "will read this book.

"The act of reading is not central "to the youthful sensibilities of our age, "which have forgotten that this act," the act of reading, "is the original, the true psychedelic experience."

How do you feel about that?

Are young people reading your works, do you think?

- I've had letters from young people telling me that they are young people, and that they're reading my books, and that they like them, which I must say, set me up because that's something you never know, of course.

And I was proud of the fact that they did.

And they're letters from all around in the country, everywhere, different parts.

- So you don't agree with the popularly held belief that the novel is dying, and the- - Oh, I can't believe the novel will die.

I'm sure it will change its form, as it always has, but I think as long as there are readers, and I can't imagine life without people reading, I think there'll be novels.

Because what it actually is is it's a reflection of our life, and as long as we're living, you don't live without seeking some reflection of it in different forms of art.

- I think the only unfavorable comment I read among the glowing reviews of "Losing Battles" was from Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who said something to the effect that this is one of those masterpieces which is gonna be put on the shelf and never read.

How did you feel about that?

- Well I was as mad as I could be.

I was quite provoked.

- Well, he called it a masterpiece, didn't he really?

- Yeah, but that just made it worse.

(Frank chuckles) No, of course I was sad to read that.

- Do you pay much attention to reviewers?

- I'm always interested in what people say.

They can't have any effect, 'cause by that time the work is long since done.

Of course you care what people think.

- Have you ever been influenced in a later work by anything that someone said?

- No, I can be quite sure I've not because when I'm working, I'm not conscious of anything but the story, not what anyone said.

I think that would be paralyzing.

- The reviewer, of course, I think exists only for the reader, and not for the person whose work he's reviewing.

I don't think he can teach the writer anything.

- I don't know, I don't know.

- Speaking of teaching.

You know, you work a lot I know with students.

Do you think it's possible to teach anybody to write, or?

- No.

No, I don't think you can, because it's an interior process.

You can't teach people to feel, or to think.

I think it is possible to give a student a sounding board, an audience.

You know, the other end of the story when it comes out the other end.

There's a great feeling of being at a loss if you think no one's going to read it.

I mean, if you write a story and no readers come along, it's in a vacuum, really.

And it does provide the student with, with a sounding board.

How does it sound, and how does it seem?

And I think, I also think that a short story really is the voice of, of an individual writer.

I think everything connected with writing and reading is personal.

And I think that a story writer, a story is the personal voice of this person, and I've found that I ask a student to read his own story aloud, in his own voice, taught him a lot of things probably that other people didn't know.

Just teaches him, hearing what he has said and done.

- Now this is a big question: How did you learn to write?

- I don't know.

I just-- I loved to read and I wrote things that pleased me.

Things I'd like to read.

I never did study it, but I don't know what would've happened if I had.

- Is there anyone you ever have considered an influence, a particular writer or?

- I would find that awfully hard to say.

I love to read, and I read everything, and I'm sure everything eventually reacts on ya, but I believe when writing stories you should write from life, not from literary.

I don't mean you should.

There's no rule about anything, but anything that makes me want to write a story is the living world, not a read book.

And so, although there are probably many unconscious influences, I don't know of any conscious one.

- What about admirations?

Who do you- - Oh I have, well of course.

I mean, I love-- I have hundreds of admirations.

It leaves me at a loss.

- Speaking of admirations, Jean Stafford said in The New York Times recently that she wrote for Eudora, Katherine Anne Porter, Peter Doyle, I believe, and she mentioned about four people.

- Peter Taylor.

- Yes.

But at any rate, Eudora was first.

Who do you write for?

- I really write for the story, but, I don't think of myself being the writer, or a single person in particular being the reader 'cause I just love the work, the piece of work.

When I finish it, I can hardly stand it until certain friends of mine have read it to tell me what they think, and everything seems to depend on that.

But while I'm writing, I must say I'm just writing for the story, 'cause that's what I love.

- That is your greatest satisfaction in writing?

- Nothing pleases me more than for somebody I admire to like something.

And I would pay the greatest attention if they didn't, you know, but that's after it's done.

During the work, I don't think about it.

- Have there been any major disappointments in your writing life?

- You mean in what I've been able to do?

- Right.

- I'd like to have written more, but I, it's not that I was prevented from it in any way.

Well, I mean, not in any, I was prevented from it at the time I was lecturing and all, so I quit it cold.

I didn't have the energy leftover after lecturing, pleasant as it was.

I liked being with young people, and moving about.

But I was not one who could go home at night and write a story after working all day.

That disappointed me, but I solved it by quitting.

I quit the right one, I hope.

- Well, I don't think there's any question about that.

Speaking as we were a while ago about sources of stories, I'd like to get back to that.

I'm intrigued by how they began, and I suppose, would you say that "The Ponder Heart" is your most popular work as far as the general audience- - I expect so.

- Where did "The Ponder Heart" come from?

How did it come about?

- Well since it's not a short story, it's probably more complicated in its history.

But I think it really came, again, from thinking about people in my part of the world.

How they tend to be protective of anyone who is a little different from other people, or did then.

Someone like Uncle Daniel who was quite a problem, and sometimes in places would just be shuttled off to the hospital, or the asylum or something.

But in this way of living, everyone not only in his family, but in the town strove together to try to protect him.

I've known people like that, and I just had that, I wasn't trying to write a story about it, but I've always been aware of it.

And just one day, again, a heard story.

The boss of Edna Earle.

I began thinking, and I just let her start off and wrote, wrote from her.

I could've, as you know, I could've made it better construction.

I should've done that.

But stories you write by ear are hard to revise.

- It seems to flow so naturally.

I would imagine that there is a book which came very, very, very straight, and did not have a great deal of revising.

- That's right, it did.

Even though it needed it, I didn't.

- No, I think that spontaneity is one of its greatest charms.

- Well, that's it.

And you know, you've got enough sense not to try to hurt that.

I mean, and yet you think, there are things that should be done.

I'm not very good- - I'm sure you often get asked, why did you go on living in Jackson, Mississippi?

- [Eudora] Well, I love it here.

- Is it, do you think you could work anywhere else?

- I have worked other places, 'cause I love to travel just as well as I love, I like being here because it's the easy life for me where I feel at home, and everything, I sound like "Why I Live at the P.O."

Everything is catty-cornered, the way I like it.

No, but all my friends live here.

A lot of them do, and I know how to get to where my other friends live.

You can write anywhere.

- We think people in show business know everybody else in show business, and I guess we feel that way about writers too.

Do you have many friends among writers?

- No, by accident perhaps, but I know them best as friends who may happen to write.

They don't, I don't know too many writers, and I know lots of other kinds of people better, really.

I have some good friends who are.

- And, I suppose that these friends and you never talk about each others' work.

- Never did.

When I met Mr. Faulkner, neither he nor I ever mentioned writing.

Well, he didn't, and so of course I wasn't gonna bring it up.

No, I don't really, I love shop talk.

I have talked to Elizabeth Bowen with shop talk.

That's great fun.

But, none of the cocktail party sort of talk do I ever do.

I don't like any of that, where you go around and talk about oh, contracts and deals, and all this and that doesn't interest me.

- Have you considered doing anything in the dramatic form?

Of course, various of your things have been dramatized.

- That is one of the disappointments in my life.

I should've thought of that first a while ago.

I've always wanted to, and I don't know if I ever will.

I've tried a couple of times, but not even good enough things resulted to show it to anybody.

Just threw it out.

- Well, I think that was a mistake.

I hope somebody was watching your wastebasket when you did that.

- No, I might make a novel out of it someday when I feel on safer ground.

But, I think the drama is very close to the short story.

And perhaps the film is closer still, with its ability to shift back and forth in time and place, and maybe dream sequences, or something like that, correspond to flashbacks, or close-ups, or shifting in focus, which a film can do.

It's a lot like a short story.

- [Frank] Why don't you write a film script?

- I wish I could, I've tried that too.

- [Frank] Have you?

- But, never to show anyone.

I didn't, it didn't please me.

But.

- I read the other day that Bing Crosby had said he wanted for his epitaph, "He could carry a tune."

And of course, we all know that W.C. Fields wanted for his, "I'd rather be in Philadelphia."

Have you ever thought about what you'd like for your epitaph?

- Oh Lord, I couldn't care less.

Just as long as I'm, all I'm interested in is a piece of paper in my typewriter in the present moment.

That's enough writing.

- The present is always very important in your stories, I think, and I always have a sense of something coming after.

There's always an expectancy about your stories.

- Oh good, I'm pleased to hear that.

- Do you, they don't come to a pat ending.

They lead on.

- I want them to.

- That is a- - Yes, because I feel that's part of the life to them, because life doesn't begin and end like this.

As always, you should suggest I think, and to show, and to show forth, and bring forth, and reveal in a short story.

Not state, and not declare, and not criticize, really.

Just, and certainly not judge.

- I'm sure you would have to be pleased with the really enthusiastic response, which "Losing Battles" got.

- Of course I am.

- I guess it has been your biggest success to date, has it not?

- Oh yes, probably the only one.

Well no, I think I once was on the bestseller list with something.

"The Ponder Heart," perhaps.

- Yes.

- No, it certainly is totally unexpected, and a great pleasure to me.

- I believe you told me sometime back that England did not want "Losing Battles."

- So far as I know, they still don't.

- Isn't that strange?

Can you account for that, because your other works have been so popular there.

- Well, I don't think an author can ever account for whether people like something or not.

I know that they don't like anything very long anymore.

They hate long-winded books, and they think Americans write books too long.

- [Frank] Isn't that funny?

When we think of the long-winded novel as being definitively English.

- Certainly, but that was a couple of years ago.

- [Frank] Yes.

- I don't really know why.

They may just plain not have liked it.

That was their privilege.

- [Frank] Your works have been translated, of course, into many, many languages.

- Yeah, the Japanese were the first people to buy "Losing Battles."

That's rather odd.

- [Frank] That is strange.

- And the Italians have bought it.

- Uh-huh.

I wonder if they look at these quaint people, you know, who live in Mississippi as we tend to look at quaint people who live in Japan, or whatever.

- We may.

As someone in France told me once that the reason that French people liked Faulkner was that all, nearly everything that happens in his novels, of course they were mistaken, happens indoors, in snug little interiors, which is the way they see life.

Everything very intimate.

And so that they-- and also a bit, I guess they would say morbid.

That isn't at all the way I look at Faulkner, but that's the way they looked at him.

And they said it was very much to their temperament.

- [Frank] How do you look at Faulkner?

- Well, I just think he's a great outdoor giant, I guess.

- Are you an indoor or an outdoor writer?

- Well, I don't know.

I think I have a pretty good view of the world.

That is, I have a visual mind, so I like to have it in front of me, whether indoor or out.

That's not really what you were asking.

I don't know, I hope I'm not a boudoir writer, which someone said I was once.

- Oh, really?

Who, why did they say that?

- Well he said you go upstairs to your bedroom to write everything.

Well I do, that's where my typewriter is.

But I don't feel that I- - [Announcer] This has been a conversation with novelist and writer, Eudora Welty.

- We hope that you will go on writing for a long, long time for whoever it is that you're writing for.

- Thank you, and I'm glad this isn't my epitaph.

- Indeed not, indeed not.

Again, you were awfully good to come and chat with us.

- Thank you.

- And we shall look forward to expanding on it at some other time.

- Fine.

I would be glad to.

- As I said, I know it's always difficult for anybody to, it's like a mother talking about her children, I suppose, in a way.

- It is, and yet in a way you can be tougher on something you've done than on anything.

You know, because you want it right.

- Yes.

- As you see it.

And, I think that's the whole joy of writing is to make something in the world, or some object.