One Writer's Beginnings Eudora Welty 81

One Writer's Beginnings

Eudora Welty
Eudora Welty, one of America's most revered twentieth-century
writers, was born in 1909 on North Congress Street in Jackson,
Mississippi, in the house that she would live in almost all her long
life. Although she attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison,
Studied business for a year at Columbia University, and traveled
widely, Welty always returned to the family home in Jackson. She
never married. Her brief autobiography, One Writer's Beginnings
(1980), from which this selection is drawn, ends with these words:
I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a
daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within." The
sheltered life to which Welty alludes is the life of a white woman in the
Deep South in the first decades of the twentieth century. The ways of
life in rural Mississippi are the subject of most of her acclaimed
writing. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the 1972 Pulitzer
Prize, and her total work has been collected in two volumes for the
authoritative Library of America series. But as this selection shows, her
sheltered life was not limited or narrow. Rather, it was rich in
sensations and emotions, and through reading she reached out to the
ends of the earth and the depths of the heart. Eudora Welty died in 2001.

PREREADING: THINKING ABOUT THE

ESSAY IN ADVANCE

What attitudes did your family have toward reading when you
were a child? Did books surround you? Which books did your
parents or other relatives read to you or suggest that you read?
How did you feel about books as a child growing up?
 Chapter 2 On Reading
82

I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, 1
at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to. My mother read to
me. She'd read to me in the big bedroom in the mornings, when we were in
her rocker together, which ticked in rhythm as we rocked, as though we had
a cricket accompanying the story. She'd read to me in the diningroom on
winter afternoons in front of the coal fire, with our cuckoo clock ending the
story with "Cuckoo," and at night when I'd got in my own bed. I must have
given her no peace. Sometimes she read to me in the kitchen while she sat
churning, and the churning sobbed along with any story. It was my ambition
to have her read to me while I churned; once she granted my wish, but she
read off my story
before I brought her butter. She was an expressive reader. When
she was reading "Puss in Boots," for instance, it was impossible not to know
that she distrusted all cats.
It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that 2
story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders,
coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they came from,
I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them—with the books
themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their
smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and
carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all
the reading I could give them.
Neither of my parents had come from homes that could afford 3
to buy many books, but though it must have been something of a strain on
his salary, as the youngest officer in a young insurance company, my father
was all the while carefully selecting and ordering away for what he and
Mother thought we children should grow up with. They bought first for the
future.
Besides the bookcase in the livingroom, which was always 4
called "the library," there were the encyclopedia tables and dictionary stand
under windows in our diningroom. Here to help us grow up arguing around
the diningroom table were the Unabridged Webster, the Columbia
Encyclopedia, Compton's Pictured Encyclopedia, the Lincoln Library of
Information, and later the Book of Knowledge. And the year we moved into
our new house, there was room to
 One Writer's Beginnings Eudora Welty 83
celebrate it with the new 1925 edition of the Britannica, which my
father, his face always deliberately turned toward the future,
was of course disposed to think better than any previous edition,
5 In "the library," inside the mission-style bookcase with its
three diamond-latticed glass doors, with my father's Morris chair
and the glass-shaded lamp on its table beside it, were books I could
soon begin on—and I did, reading them all alike and as they came,
straight down their rows, top shelf to bottom. There was the set of
Stoddard's Lectures, in all its late nineteenth-century vocabulary
and vignettes of peasant life and quaint beliefs and customs, with
matching halftone illustrations: Vesuvius erupting, Venice by
moonlight, gypsies glimpsed by their campfires. I didn't know then
the clue they were to my father's longing to see the rest of the world.
I read straight through his other love-from-afar: the Victrola Book
of the Opera, with opera after opera in synopsis, with portraits in
costume of Melba, Caruso, Galli-Curci, and Geraldine Farrar, some
of whose voices we could listen to on our Red Seal records.
6 My mother read secondarily for information; she sank as a
hedonist into novels. She read Dickens in the spirit in which she
would have eloped with him. The novels of her girlhood that had
stayed on in her imagination, besides those of Dickens and Scott
and Robert Louis Stevenson, were Jane Eyre, Trilby, The Woman
in White, Green Mansions, King Solomon's Mines. Marie Corelli
's name would crop up but I understood she had gone out of favor
with my mother, who had only kept Ardath out of loyalty. In time
she absorbed herself in Galsworthy, Edith Wharton, above all in
Thomas Mann of the Joseph volumes.
7 St. Elmo was not in our house; I saw it often in other houses.
This wildly popular Southern novel is where all the Edna Earles in
our population started coming from. They're all named for the
heroine, who succeeded in bringing a dissolute, sinning roué and
atheist of a lover (St. Elmo) to his knees. My mother was able to
forgo it. But she remembered the classic advice given to rose
growers on how to water their bushes long enough: "Take a chair
and St. Elmo."
8 To both my parents I owe my early acquaintance with a beloved
Mark Twain. There was a full set of Mark Twain and a short set of
Ring Lardner in our bookcase, and those were the volumes that in
time united us all, parents and children.
9 Reading everything that stood before me was how I came upon
a worn old book without a back that had belonged to my
 Chapter 2 On Reading
84
father as a child. It was called Sanford and Merton. Is there anyone left
who recognizes it, I wonder? It is the famous moral tale written by
Thomas Day in the 1780s. but of him no mention is made on the title
page of this book; here it is Sanford and Merton in Words of One
Syllable by Mary Godolphin. Here are the rich boy and the poor boy
and Mr. Barlow, their teacher and interlocutor, in long discourses
alternating with dramatic scenes—anger and rescue allotted to the rich
and the poor respectively. It may have only words of one syllable, but
one of them is "quoth." It ends with not one but two morals, both
engraved on rings: "Do what you ought, come what may," and "If we
would be great, we must first learn to be good.'
This book was lacking its front cover, the back held on by 10
strips of pasted paper, now turned golden, in several layers, and
the pages stained, flecked, and tattered around the edges;
its garish illustrations had come unattached but were preserved, laid in.
I had the feeling even in my heedless childhood that this was the only book
my father as a little boy had had of his own. He had held onto it, and might
have gone to sleep on its coverless face: he had lost his mother when he
was seven. My father had never made any mention to his own children of
the book, but he had brought it along with him from Ohio to our house and
shelved it in our bookcase.
My mother had brought from West Virginia that set of Dickens; 11
those books looked sad, too—they had been through fire and water before
I was born, she told me, and there they were, lined up—as I later realized,
waiting for me.
I was presented, from as early as I can remember, with books 12
of my own, which appeared on my birthday and Christmas morning.
Indeed, my parents could not give me books enough. They must have
sacrificed to give me on my sixth or seventh birthday— it was after I
became a reader for myself—the ten-volume set of Our Wonder World.
These were beautifully made, heavy books I would lie down with on the
floor in front of the diningroom hearth, and more often than the rest
volume 5, Every Child's Story Book, was under my eyes. There were the
fairy tales—Grimm, Andersen, the English, the French, "Ali Baba and the
Forty Thieves"; and there was Aesop and Reynard the Fox; there were the
myths and legends, Robin Hood, King Arthur, and St. George and the
Dragon, even the history of Joan of Arc; a whack of Pilgrim's Progress
and a long piece of Gulliver. They all carried their classic illustrations.
 One Writer's Beginnings Eudora Welty 85
I located myself in these pages and could go straight to the stories
and pictures I loved; very often "The Yellow Dwarf' was first
choice, with Walter Crane's Yellow Dwarf in full color making his
terrifying appearance flanked by turkeys. Now that volume is as
worn and backless and hanging apart as my father's poor Sanford
and Merton. The precious page with Edward Lear's "Jumblies" on
it has been in danger of slipping out for all these years. One
measure of my love for Our Wonder World was that for a long time
I wondered if I would go through fire and water for it as my mother
had done for Charles Dickens; and the only comfort was to think
I could ask my mother to do it for me.
13 I believe I'm the only child I know of who grew up with this
treasure in the house. I used to ask others, "Did you have Our
Wonder World?" I'd have to tell them The Book of Knowledge
could not hold a candle to it.
14 I live in gratitude to my parents for initiating me—as early as
I begged for it, without keeping me waiting—into knowledge of
the word, into reading and spelling, by way of the alphabet. They
taught it to me at home in time for me to begin to read before
starting to school. I believe the alphabet is no longer considered
an essential piece of equipment for traveling through life. In my
day it was the keystone to knowledge. You learned the alphabet as
you learned to count to ten, as you learned "Now I lay me" and the
Lord's Prayer and your father's and mother's name and address and
telephone number, all in case you were lost.
15 My love for the alphabet, which endures, grew out of reciting
it but, before that, out of seeing the letters on the page. In my own
story books, before I could read them for myself, I fell in love with
various winding, enchanted-looking initials drawn by Walter
Crane at the heads of fairy tales. In "Once upon a time," an "O"
had a rabbit running it as a treadmill, his feet upon flowers. When
the day came, years later, for me to see the Book of Kells, all the
wizardry of letter, initial, and word swept over me a thousand
times over, and the illumination, the gold, seemed a part of the
word's beauty and holiness that had been there from the start.

16 Learning stamps you with its moments. Childhood's learning is

made up of moments. It isn't steady. It's a pulse.
17 In a children's art class, we sat in a ring on kindergarten chairs
and drew three daffodils that had just been picked out of the yard;
and while I was drawing, my sharpened yellow pencil and the cup
 Chapter 2 On Reading
86
of the yellow daffodil gave off whiffs just alike. That the pencil doing
the drawing should give off the same smell as the flower it drew
seemed part of the art lesson—as shouldn't it be? Children, like
animals, use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come
along and discover it the same way, all over again. Here and there, it's
the same world. Or now and then we'll hear from an artist who's never
lost it.
In my sensory education I include my physical awareness of 18
the word. Of a certain word, that is; the connection it has with what it
stands for. At around age six, perhaps, I was standing by myself in our
front yard waiting for supper, just at that hour in a late summer day when
the sun is already below the horizon and the risen full moon in the visible
sky stops being chalky and begins to take on light. There comes the
moment, and I saw it then, when the moon goes from flat to round. For
the first time it met my eyes as a globe. The word "moon" came into my
mouth as though fed to me out of a silver spoon. Held in my mouth the
moon became a word. It had the roundness of a Concord grape Grandpa
took off his vine and gave me to suck out of its skin and swallow whole,
in Ohio.
This love did not prevent me from living for years in foolish 19
error about the moon. The new moon just appearing in the west was the
rising moon to me. The new should be rising. And in early childhood the
sun and moon, those opposite reigning powers, I just as easily assumed
rose in east and west respectively in their opposite sides of the sky, and
like partners in a reel they advanced, sun from the east, moon from the
west, crossed over (when I wasn 't looking) and went down on the other
side. My father couldn 't have known I believed that when, bending
behind me and guiding my shoulder, he positioned me at our telescope
in the front yard and, with careful adjustment of the focus, brought the
moon close to me.
The night sky over my childhood Jackson was velvety black. 20
I could see the full constellations in it and call their names; when I
could read, I knew their myths. Though I was always waked for
eclipses, and indeed carried to the window as an infant in arms and
shown Halley's Comet in my sleep, and though I'd been taught at our
diningroom table about the solar system and knew the earth revolved
around the sun, and our moon around us, I never found out the moon
didn't come up in the west until I was a writer and Herschel Brickell,
the literary critic, told me after I misplaced it in a story. He said
valuable words to me about my new profession:
"Always be sure you get your moon in the right part of the sky."