SOURCE: "A Visit with Eudora Welty," in The Yale Review, Vol. 74, No. 1, Autumn, 1984, pp. 147-53.

[In the following interview, Welty discusses how she develops her characters and what she thinks about writing.]

She's worn a pretty hat for the occasion, an occasion she says she has dreaded ever since she decided to make an exception to her rule, no interviews. Her smile is shy, her voice soft and hesitant: "You look like a Virginia girl." She reaches for my bag, but I protest—after all, she is seventy-five. Her hair is white. She is slight and walks with slow care in a shiny new pair of loafers. Her azure knit dress is the color of her eyes. The next day, when we have settled into pants and comfortable shoes, she tells me, "I would have worn pants to the airport, but I thought, 'She'll think I'm some sort of hick!'"

She eases herself behind the wheel of her car. She's tired. "I've been on the go ever since the first of the year. And this weekend I signed 400 of those Harvard books for a limited edition. Are you going to use a tape recorder? I always think I sound as if I don't know what I'm talking about on tape. You'll have to excuse me if I don't hear you. I don't hear as well as I used to."

The book to which she refers is her autobiographical One Writer's Beginnings. It was developed from the Norton lectures she gave at Harvard and was, she says, "the hardest thing I've ever had to do. First there were the lectures. I don't know why they wanted me. I'm no scholar and I hate to lecture. I much prefer conversation—a back-and-forth exchange. I've always had to teach to supplement my income, but I think if I had to do it again, I'd do something completely different. Not different from writing. Different from teaching. I think I'd do something mechanical, something with my hands."

"Such as plumbing?"

"Such as painting chairs. You paint a chair in the morning, and there it is in the afternoon."

In talking more of the book, she says, "It was amazing to discover that nothing is ever lost. Thomas Mann was right, the memory is a well. In writing this book each memory uncovered another. It was probably important for me to remember these things, but it was very hard. I kept thinking, 'If only I'd known then what I know now.' Or, 'If only I'd said …' And I'm so sorry I never had the chance to tell my father how I felt about him. We were a very reserved family. But passionate."

Given the reserve, it is no surprise that in One Writer's Beginnings part of her self remains in shadow. She tells, for example, of her father's death and the blood transfusion that was a desperate attempt to avert it, but what is left unwritten is how she felt. "I originally had it in the book," she says, "but I took it out. I thought it would be too self-indulgent. What I remember is that there were venetian blinds in back of me, that the heat of the sun was coming through the slats and onto my back. I suppose that was my creeping horror. That's what a person remembers—the physical sensation. I'd never seen anyone die before. Have you?"

She often asks such questions. "Don't you?" "Can you imagine?" "Don't you find that to be true?" It is her attempt to bring you into the circle, to include you. It goes beyond Southern hospitality and seems to be a complete turning over of the self to another's sensibilities. "Are you warm enough?" "Are you hungry yet?" "Land! You shouldn't have spent so much money on that book. I would have given you a copy." "I worry about you."

It is not possible to capture on paper the rich melody of her accent, but there are certain words that, once you have heard her pronounce them, seem unmistakably hers. "Buzzard" and "sinister" are two of these. As we drove along the Natchez Trace, the setting of many of her tales, two birds were spotted weighing down branches atop a dead tree. "Buzzids," she shuddered, "I hate buzzids. I always knew, when I was coming home on a train, when we had entered Mississippi because you would see buzzids out the window." She notes the cypress swamp beneath their perch: "Isn't it sinista?"

Because the Natchez Trace is what we think of as Eudora Welty country, it is jarring for me to leave it behind and drive into Jackson, a city of 300,000. Jackson's population is up 297,000 since Eudora Welty's parents settled there as a young married couple—her father from an Ohio farm and her mother from the mountains of West Virginia. The grand homes that once graced State Street have given way to Cooke's Prosthetics and Cash-in-a-Flash Pawn Shop. The architecture is that of any town in commercial, suburban America. "I used to play in all these yards," she says, pointing to parking lots. "And that is where the insane asylum used to be. Imagine—it said 'Insane Asylum' on the gates. That's what they were talking about in The Sound and the Fury when they said they were going to send Benjy to Jackson. In those days Jackson meant the loony bin."

Her own street, back from State, is quiet and slightly elevated. Her father chose the site in part to ease her mother's homesickness, but "my mother never could see the hill." Her childhood home, a 1920s Tudor designed by her father, is solid and graceful. "I feel awfully selfish living here alone, and I can't afford to keep it up the way I should, but I can't imagine moving. And it's home." The lawn is full of pine needles and is dominated by a huge oak tree. "The builder told my parents to chop down that tree, but they said, 'Never chop down an oak tree.' They were country people. I guess that was something country people say. Well, they were right. That's the only one left—all the pine have died."

We enter through a vestibule. "My father was a Yankee. He thought all houses should have vestibules." There is a living room to the left and a library to the right. Between is a solid mahogany staircase. Books are everywhere—they've overrun bookshelves and have moved to tables and desks. There are books by friends—Walker Percy, Reynolds Price, Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Anne Porter, Elizabeth Spencer, William Jay Smith, and Robert Penn Warren. There are the diaries of Virginia Woolf and a new biography of Ford Madox Ford ("Can you imagine that he held a chair for Turgenev?" she asks). There are Seamus Heaney, Barbara Pym, Chekhov, and all of Henry Green, one of her favorites. On the mantel is a Snowden photograph of V. S. Pritchett, looking spry and amused—she's cut it from a magazine and mounted it. A similar photo is on her desk—"for inspiration." The desk is in the bedroom, where she has always worked. "When there were five of us here it was the only place I could work," she says, referring to the days when her parents and brothers also occupied this house.

She is generous in her praise and encouragement of other writers. "Anne Tyler was a whiz from the time she was seventeen!" she exclaims. She laughs as she recalls that "Reynolds Price had Anne for one of his first students. He thought, 'Teaching is going to be great!' He thought all his students were going to be like Anne." She thinks the title of Tyler's latest novel, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, is "inspired," and that the last sentence is a tour de force. "If I had written that sentence, I'd be happy all my life!"

When asked about another prize-winning writer whose works she has reviewed, she says, "I wanted so much to like her book, but I found some of it impossibly precious. I did not put my misgivings in the review because it was the first book by a young writer and I couldn't hurt somebody like that. She was a bit self-indulgent, which is perfectly natural for someone of that much talent. I tried to point out the parts that I thought were marvelous."

Although she enjoys talking of writers and books, she warms most to speaking of the act of writing itself. "I love the function of writing—what it is doing." (She offers to pour us some Jack Daniels—"what Katherine Anne Porter called 'swish likka.' Just a jigger. This is powerful stuff. Whenever Red Warren is coming he calls and says, 'Eudora, get out the Black Jack, I'm comin' to town.'") "Elizabeth Bowen, in her marvelous notes on writing a novel in Collected Impressions, pointed out that dialogue is really a form of action. Because it advances the plot, it's not just chatter. She was so succinct in what she said. I think television may have ruined that for us. If you watch serials and talk shows, you would probably think that one-liners were the answer to conversation. That is what has hurt Broadway so: dialogue has been sacrificed for the one-liner. That's putting it too extremely, but the building of a conversation is designed to gradually reveal something.

"Elizabeth was a marvelous writer about writing and very helpful to me. So was E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel. I don't think that can ever be outdated. It's important to read these books, but you can't teach a person how to write. That has to come directly from inside the writer.

"What I try to show in fiction are the truths of human relationships. But you have to make up the lies of fiction to reveal these truths—people interacting, things beginning one way and changing to reveal something else. You show a truth. You don't tell it. It has to be done of itself."

She feels the same way about moralizing in fiction. "A writer has to have a strong moral sense. You couldn't write if you yourself didn't have it and know what you were doing. But that's very different from wanting to moralize in your story. Your own moral sense tells you what's true and false and how people would behave. And you know what is just and unjust, but you don't point them out, in my view. I don't think it works in fiction because fiction is dramatic. It's not a platform.

"That worried me in the sixties because I was asked so many times by strangers why I didn't come out for civil rights, something I'd worked for for years. They would call me in the middle of the night, mostly from New Jersey and New York City. They would say, 'Eudora Welty, what are you doing down there sitting on your ass?' I just told them that I knew what I could write and what I couldn't. That I was doing the best I could in my own field. I would be so shaken up that I couldn't sleep the rest of the night."

Glasses emptied, we depart for dinner at Bill's Burger House: burgers by day, native redfish by night. She is welcomed more like a football captain of a local, undefeated team than a literary eminence. Bill grabs her hand and tells me with Greek-accented gusto, "Everybody love this charming lady." And for the final flourish, "God Bless America!" A pretty young woman approaches our table. "Miss Welty, you honored us by gracing our wedding tea. I just wanted to say hello." After she leaves I'm told whom she married. The parents and grandparents are identified, as are the members of the family who are Yankees. I begin to understand what she meant when she told me that she agreed with Walker Percy's response, "Because we lost," when reporters asked him why the South had so many fine writers. "Since we never really industrialized—reconstruction saw to that—the pace is slower," she explains. "People don't move around as much. You know who a person's mother is. We're more introspective, interested in the psychology of people."

The next morning when we meet she shares the mail with me, mail that keeps her awake at night because "I feel so guilty that I never have time to answer it." This morning's includes a letter form a sixteen-year-old, Christine from Georgia who writes, "I really loved 'Why I Live at the P.O.' because it is so true to life. My brother and sister are always trying to get me in trouble." Then she asks whether the narrator of the story "will come back home, and do you think her parents will take her in if she does?"

"Of course." The answer is as natural as though we were speaking of a flesh-and-blood neighbor. "These people live by dramatizing themselves. She'll come home, they'll take her in, and it will start all over again."

There are letters asking for explanations. "I think that bears a lot on the fact that young people—students and children—are not taught and don't understand the difference between fiction and nonfiction. I recently heard about a student who, having found my name in a directory, said to his teacher, 'It says here that Miss Welty lives on Pinehurst. I thought she lived at the post office.' Well, after all," she says, pretending this is perfectly understandable, "'Why I Live at the P.O.' was written in the first person.

"[Students] are not taught. They don't experience what a story does. They just try to figure it out. I think that television has something to do with that. People don't believe events. I remember when man landed on the moon, I called my cleaning woman in to watch it on television. 'You should see this,' I told her. And she said, 'Now Miss Eudora, you know that ain't true.'"

She tells of a phone call received shortly after publication of The Ponder Heart. "The phone rang and a voice said, 'Miss Welty?' 'Yes?' 'This is Officer Ponder.' He was a policeman. 'I'm standing on the corner of State and Manship. I understand you've written a history of my family.' I explained to him, 'Mr. Ponder, that was a story. I love my characters. But they are not real.' Ponder. Isn't that a wonderful name? So he said, 'Oh. Well. If you ever need me I'm here at the corner of State and Manship.'"

That her characters have names similar to or the same as her neighbors' is no accident. "It must always be a name that people really name their children." Even when that name is chosen for mythological significance. "Of course I knew what that meant when I named Phoenix Jackson, but it was also a name that was common among old black women. White owners often gave their slaves mythological names, so we have lots of Homers and Ulysses and Parthenias. Also, poor people in the South tend to give their children beautiful names. They think, 'Well, at least I can give her a pretty name.' And they do."

Asked about Old Man Fate Rainey in The Golden Apples, she says, "The South is full of Fates. It turns out to be short for Lafayette who was a real hero down here." And Miss Ice Cream Rainey? "I learned that in Wales they give people names like Tree-Chopper Jones to distinguish him from the other Jones. My dancing-school teacher was called Miss Ice Cream McNair because her husband owned the ice cream parlor. Of course we never called her that to her face."

In a sense these names are found poetry. From obituaries, the telephone book, memory, bus rides, and conversation come Old Mrs. Sad-Talking Morgan, Miss Billy Texas Spights, Mr. Fatty Bowles, Stella-Rondo, Homer Champion, Miss Snowdie MacLain. All characters existing in the nimbus of Welty's love.

"I loved all my schoolteachers. And I loved everybody in The Golden Apples. The good ones and the bad, the happy ones and the sad ones. I loved them all." I bring up Phoenix Jackson again, the old black lady in "A Worn Path" who makes death-defying trips to town for her grandson's medicine. "I worried about her so much," I say. "I still do," she murmurs.

Of course there is the famous exception—the character she created out of anger rather than love the night that Medgar Evers was shot. The similarity was so striking between the arrested suspect and the imagined murderer, the narrator of "Where Is the Voice Coming From?", that changes had to be made before the story appeared in The New Yorker. "There was concern that it would be like convicting him before the trial. Of course I didn't know him. I just knew the type of person who might do that and I got inside his head." The title was chosen because she "really did not know where the voice was coming from that was telling the story.

"It's so queer. Your material guides you and enlightens you along the way. That's how you find out what you're after. It is a mystery. When I'm not writing, I can't imagine writing. And when I'm writing, it doesn't occur to me to wonder. Sometimes I feel like a completely split personality. I think the really true self is probably the one that is writing. But the other self is trying to protect me. Sometimes I think, 'While I'm out at the jitney will be a good time for me to retype this.' That is, that my daily life will leave me alone to do my work." She pauses to consider this, then laughs shyly, "They're really going to think I've lost my marbles if you print that."

She speaks of other aspects of the work. "Your ears should be like magnets. I used to be able to hear people in back and in front of me and on the street. I don't hear as much as I used to. It's so maddening not to overhear remarks. I hate that. When you're working on a story it's always with you. You hear somebody say something and you know that is what one character is going to say to another." Her friends delight in bringing her snatches of dialogue. Reynolds Price recently came bearing what she considers a treasure. "Reynolds was coming here from the airport in a taxi. He said that the driver told him that the reason the reservoir keeps flooding is because 'That dam is done eat out by crawfish.' Isn't that marvelous! 'Done eat out by crawfish.' Eager to contribute, I tell her something I overheard earlier in the day. "Maybe you could use it," I jest. "Or it could use me," is her serious response.

"The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there," she writes in her new book. As she and I stood staring into the silent gloom on the cypress swamp in the Natchez Trace, I asked her, "How would you describe that color?" I was referring to the water's strange shade of beige beneath the darker brown of tree shadows. "Oh, sort of blue. Like an ink wash." Blue? Ink wash? What was she talking about? And suddenly there it was. She had seen the color of the air.