Welty Reads, Part 1 - Click here for Part 2

(“Petrified Man,” “Losing Battles,” and “The Wanderers”)

 

 

Host Gene Edwards’ opening comments

 

Petrified Man—it’s a wonderful, funny short story written by Mississippi’s Eudora Welty in 1937.  She published this tale in 1939. Then, in 1975, this Pulitzer Prize winning author read her story for filmmaker Richard Moore. This film—and five others—were archived at the National Endowment for the Arts, where they were “rediscovered” some 30 years later. Now, we’re delighted to bring this treasure to you.

 

 

Host Gene Edwards’ comments introducing “Petrified Man”

 

Welcome to this special edition of Writers. I’m Gene Edwards. And we’re thrilled to bring you these films featuring Eudora Welty. She’s one of the treasures of American letters. Her novels and short stories won nearly every prize for literature which could be won, including the Pulitzer. She kept that award in a box in a closet in this house in Jackson, in Mississippi. It’s a house her parents built. She moved in as a teenager and lived the rest of her life here. She wrote in her bedroom upstairs.

                  Although she won her Pulitzer for a novel—the Optimist’s Daughter—she was known for her short stories. Honing every element tightly is the challenge—and the art—of the short fiction author. There’s no room for extra characters, or words, or plot twists. Every element counts. And Eudora Welty is always considered among the best of the best. In addition to having her work appear regularly in The New Yorker, she published four collections—A Curtain of Green was her first. When it came out in 1941, it put her on the literary map.  Petrified Man, the tale you’re about to hear, was one of its many wonderful stories.

Miss Welty’s career as a writer really began in 1936, when she published Death of a Traveling Salesman in a small magazine called Manuscript. A year later, she was regularly sending stories to the Southern Review, whose editors were the distinguished Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth (say “Klee anth”) Brooks. Eventually, they accepted seven of her stories, but when she sent them Petrified Man, Warren rejected it. In despair, Eudora Welty burned her only copy—in the stove in her kitchen. Then Warren asked to see it again. He was having second thoughts. So Miss Welty rewrote it, completely from memory; Warren accepted the story; and it became one of her most anthologized pieces. When she met Warren for the first time, she confessed to the rewriting and asked if he thought she'd been dishonest. No, he answered, you wrote it, didn't you?

As you listen to Miss Welty read this story, listen carefully to her words. Petrified Man is one of her stories told largely with dialect. There may be no other writer with a more accurate ear for the individualities and regional distinctions in the spoken word.

Here, in Petrified Man, she uses dialogue not in a belittling manner, but to add dimension and authenticity to her characters, to help them come to life. That’s one of the many wonders of Eudora Welty. Listen and imagine Leota and Mrs. Fletcher and the beauty shop.

 

Host Gene Edwards’ comments introducing “Losing Battles”

I love Miss Welty’s last comment—that it took her ten years to discover a pun she had written. Mr. Petrie…petrified. All of us who knew her and loved her appreciated her gentle genius!

Eudora Welty wrote that story here, on a manual typewriter, in her bedroom. She wrote the rest of her books here, too. She liked to sit in near the window when she worked, and people driving by would strain for a glimpse of her. This was Eudora Welty’s place, this house… this Jackson…this Mississippi.

Miss Welty called place one of fiction’s lesser angels, but it was central to her work. She said it made stories genuine, believable. She used places in Mississippi as the setting in many of her stories. After all, it was her home state and a state where she knew the landscape and the characters intimately. In the 1930s, she worked as a junior publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration and traveled rural Mississippi extensively. As a young woman, she studied in Wisconsin and New York, and as a famous author, she traveled the world. But she always returned home to write.

After her father died in 1931, Eudora Welty lived in this house with her mother. They gardened and had an active social life. All the while, Miss Welty was writing, and in 1955 she began work on a story to be called Losing Battles. Soon after beginning, she faced family problems that prevented her from working consistently. Her brother Walter suffered from a virulent form of arthritis; her mother from eye problems and a series of small strokes. Walter died in 1959; her mother and brother Edward in 1966. Grief then prompted Eudora to write The Optimist's Daughter, her novella focusing on the power of memory to compensate for loss. She published it for the first time in 1969 in The New Yorker. Only then did she return to Losing Battles and complete what had become a long, comic novel –with tragic elements—about a family reunion.

As one critic aptly observed, Losing Battles is a “comedy that releases, illuminates, renews our own seeing, that moves in full knowledge of loss, bondage, panic, and death.”

 And now, Eudora Welty reads from Losing Battles.

 

 

Host Gene Edwards’ comments introducing “The Wanderers”

 

What a great line—People don’t want to be read like books…! It tells us not only about the character but also about Eudora Welty. When it came to people and relationships, Miss Welty had an unerring eye and ear. She has proved it here.

                  Our next story is introspective, told more through narrative than dialogue. It’s also an excerpt, this time from The Golden Apples, a set of seven interrelated, yet independent stories. The Wanderers is the last, and the words you’re about to hear are the last part of that story.

                  Virgie Rainey’s mother has just died and been buried. Virgie is moving away. She stops for one, final look around. And through Miss Welty’s vivid descriptions, you can see the courthouse and feel the cleansing rain.  You can share Virgie’s moment of revelation.

 

 

Host Gene Edward’s final comments

 

Wasn’t that wonderful? It’s good to hear Miss Welty’s beautiful voice again. We’d like to thank Richard Moore, the filmmaker, as well as the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and of course, the Eudora Welty House for allowing us to bring this to you. I’m Gene Edwards. Thank you for joining us.