SOURCE: "Some Talk about Autobiography: An Interview with Eudora Welty," in The Southern Review, Vol. 26, No. 1, January, 1990, pp. 81-8.

[In the following interview, conducted in July, 1988, Welty discusses the autobiographical aspects of her novel The Optimist's Daughter which correspond to sections of her lectures presented in One Writer's Beginning.]

The inspiration for this interview came partly as a result of a conference on southern autobiography at Arkansas State in the spring of 1988. In July of that year I visited Eudora Welty at her home in Jackson, Mississippi, where we discussed correspondences between One Writer's Beginnings and her highly autobiographical novel, The Optimist's Daughter. Miss Welty also relates memories and details which reveal more of her personal involvement in this novel.—SW

[Wolff:] One of the issues raised at the recent conference on southern autobiography is whether there is a distinct body of work that might be thought of as southern autobiography. Do you think certain aspects of southern life and culture might predispose writers to autobiography?

[Welty:] Yes, I think probably so, don't you? It occurs to me that southerners take certain things for granted—such as certain classes, certain strictures, different backgrounds—people immediately make certain assumptions. Southerners want to place everybody. This was especially true in former times, when someone might say "Oh, so-and-so, his father was so-and-so." It used to be so simple—you might be born on the wrong side of the track. I remember as a child being taught not to make this count. I was warned against it. But it's a way southerners have of locating themselves.

What else in southerners might encourage them to write about themselves?

It's entertaining when it's done well. It helps you get a narrative sense of continuity when there are so many stories through the generations—something that connects people together. I missed that when I lived in other parts of the country. People were friends but had no sense of their ancestors. No one was interested. I did have a good friend—David Daiches—who invited me to visit his family in Edinburgh. The family I met there was so warm and welcoming. His three aunts met me at the door with arms extended. I felt at home with them. In the South we combine a feeling of family and of place. They are twin strands, the sense of family and place. I didn't grow up with this sense of the whole family. As you know from One Writer's Beginnings, much of the family was away.

In West Virginia?

Yes.

The feeling of being somewhat isolated from the extended family also comes through in The Optimist's Daughter in Becky and Laurel's memories about West Virginia.

Yes, I used it in the work in general. I used the point of view of the child coming to something new. I did the same thing in Delta Wedding where the child's perspective is a narrative device to lead the reader into something new. In lots of stories it's the stranger to the family that provides this perspective. Maybe that is my point of view.

The rejection of Flags in the Dust seems to have turned Faulkner inward, down into himself, after which he began writing The Sound and the Fury. I'm thinking about that introduction to the book in which he says, "One day I seemed to shut a door between me and all publishers' addresses and booklists … and set out to make myself a beautiful and tragic little girl." That book seems autobiographical to me, so much a reminiscence of and a lament for lost childhood. Can you say that some set of events or some factor led you to turn to autobiography?

Well, in One Writer's Beginnings a particular event did. I was asked, as you know, to give the series of lectures at Harvard, and I thought, "I can't possibly say anything they don't already know." But Dan Aaron, my good friend, came to see me and said, "Yes, there is something you know that they do not—what books were in your grandfather's library." I thought, "That's intriguing to think about it that way." If it hadn't been for Dan the book wouldn't have happened. I wrote a great deal more material than I used. I threw away four times what I kept. I may not have chosen well, but I had to choose. One memory calls up another. Like Thomas Mann says, memory is like a well: the deeper you go, the more you recover. It's probably a good thing the book had to be compressed or I might have gone on forever. I'm not used to writing anything but fiction. I didn't make up anything in One Writer's Beginnings. I couldn't help but use my experience in knowing, for instance, what makes a scene—the dramatic sense. I think of things in scenes—trips in the car, being on the ferry boat, my mother and father arguing about their different attitudes about drowning—it was better than making a simple statement. I remember things that way—in scenes, as little wholes.

Would you say, then, that the autobiographer uses the same tools in writing autobiography that the fiction writer does?

My own bent is to use those tools. I would want certain things to be brought out in act, in deed, and in what can be observed. It's natural for me to do it that way. A poet would do it differently, I suppose, as would a railroad engineer.

Could you say that any other factors in particular led you to write autobiographically, especially in The Optimist's Daughter?

I did use things about my mother, as I have said. In The Optimist's Daughter I was trying to understand certain things, some of which are reflected in the character of my mother. All that was true. But my mother did not marry a southerner the way Becky does. So much of what I wrote about was not my mother. And that is true for the other characters.

I could not imagine that there was a "Fay" anywhere in your family.

There is no Fay in any of my life, except as she exists in the world.

Fay has always seemed highly symbolic to me.

Yes, I think she is.

What other aspects of the novel might you say were particularly autobiographical?

There are things I never realized growing up that I began to realize. I used certain things that I had been familiar with. You do this when you write any character. My mother had eye trouble, but she didn't have a detached retina. I did know someone who had a detached retina, though. I nursed my mother through cataract surgery, and some of the details I used for the judge. She had sandbags, for instance, and she couldn't move her head. It's not literal, though. If it were it would be a damn difficult task to write the literal truth. It was hard to do in One Writer's Beginnings, to give an account of family illness. I don't think I could have done that in a novel.

Would you say, then, that writing autobiography is more difficult than writing fiction?

When I was writing The Optimist's Daughter, I never gave a thought to myself—my self did not enter into the novel. It's much easier for me to write fiction. I try to put myself into the characters and see how they felt. Any nonfiction is so different from fiction. A book review, for instance, is completely different from using your imagination in a story.

In an earlier interview, you said that in One Writer's Beginnings you wrote for the first time about yourself and that the experience was enlightening. Could you elaborate about what this writing experience taught you?

Well, I'd like to think about that for awhile. I will say that it came about without my realizing it at the time. Writing about anything teaches you—it teaches you the recognition of things in your life that you remember, but you might not have recognized their portent. It's like you have an electric shock—and you can say that's when I recognized so-and-so. Writing is a way to come to terms with whatever you've done or not done—what your life has meant to you—good or bad. One thing leads to another subjectively, and you could probably go on forever.

Do you have that same experience writing fiction?

Yes. That same feeling comes from writing fiction. In the course of writing a scene of interplay between two characters, you build to a confrontation that needs to take place—and you realize that's why you were diddling with it and fooling with it in the first place—there was something in there. It's like a belated understanding. I seem to come to understanding belatedly.

Lately I read a statement by Sarah Orne Jewett that all the materials you need to be an artist you know by the time you are ten years old. Would you agree?

How could you ever prove it, though? But yes, I think I know what she means, don't you? Your capacity for realizing the other people in the world, your physical world, even if you can't define them, you know what they are.

And memories of childhood are an important source for the artist.

Yes, they are a fund.

I'm interested in the remark you made earlier that when you were writing The Optimist's Daughter you did not envision yourself in the novel. Laurel has characteristics which are both similar to and unlike yours, doesn't she?

Yes. In a wider sense, I would say it was my own inquiring mind that corresponds to the girl's in the novel, to the effort to understand your roots and the decision in the end that you can't be held back by the past. I used things that would be useful in the novel. The war was very important, for instance. My friend in World War II married into—well, when someone was lost—like Phil is—I knew what that feeling was like. How could I not have? That was a war people believed in. We still had the belief in World War II that war could be ended by licking the Nazis. The difference in attitude toward war now is striking. Some of my friends put on a production at the New Stage of the songs of Irving Berlin. The young girls were giggling at songs like "Over There!" and the director stopped them and said, "When those songs were written, they meant that." It was a bad war. The boys we knew were involved and we were with them. These young people in the theater couldn't conceive of fighting for a cause. This applies to Phil. The part in the novel about the kamikaze happened to my brother Walter. He was in the Navy at Okinawa, and later he was asked, "How close have you come to a kamikaze?" and he said, "Close enough to shake hands with." So I put that in the story. Who could ever make up a thing like that?

No one could. Was Phil made up?

Phil is an amalgamation of a lot of boys I knew. My other brother, the middle child, has some of his characteristics—those double-jointed thumbs, and he was an architect. Phil has not got his character, though. Although he did make a breadboard. But no one ever acted badly about it.

No one ever acted the way Fay does?

Not in my family: but I've seen a-many, a-many. And anyone who's ever had anyone in the hospital will recognize the people who sit in the waiting rooms and eat and drink and talk. I wouldn't want anyone to think that I was using their sick in the novel, but these things come back to me, like air, and I use them.

Everybody told me I was absolutely right with the hospital scenes. I heard people say some of those things, like "I'm not gonna let him die wanting water." It's the inadequacy of their comprehension, or maybe they can't express it. They say, "What is yours doing? Mine is doing OK."

Mr. Dalzell's line, "Don't let the fire go out, son!" is tragic and funny at the same time.

I love Mr. Dalzell. The fire, of course, is life too. He talks in terms of the things he knows—country things. He and the judge were so different, but I thought it would be good to have them in the same room together. They each had a sense of honor and would have respected each other. He was a gentleman—like Fay's old grandfather—these are affinities among characters that don't have anything to do with their circumstances.

Let me go back to Laurel for a moment. I was surprised to read in one of your interviews that you identify most with your character Miss Eckhart rather than with Laurel.

It's not that I shared any of my life with Miss Eckhart. She was devoted to her art. I could identify with Laurel in wanting to know about family and relationships, in living through World War II when my friends and brothers were fighting, and also in my sense that Laurel had left home and had a life elsewhere that had something to do with the arts. I wouldn't have thought of making her a writer. The fact that she was in the arts allied her with Phil, who is also a maker, and in the end she goes back to that life, but without leaving anything behind. She knows the future is to be valued. I sympathize with all these attitudes. I am not Laurel. But I have the feeling of the close-knit family—do you remember the scene where they're holding each other's hands? I've gone through that feeling a lot though my own father died when I was just out of college.

Miss Eckhart and Laurel are alike, then, in their dedication to their art?

Miss Eckhart is a teacher, though—I've never seen myself as a teacher. Both Miss Eckhart and Laurel had belief in the individual—in what an artist does. In her own way—you know, I really hadn't thought of it until now—Laurel was as isolated in the town as Miss Eckhart was. Laurel was protected and pampered by the town, but when it came down to it no one could share in her deepest feelings about life and responsibility. We don't ordinarily talk about things like that in the South, or maybe anywhere.

Laurel's privacy and isolation are reflected in the narration, too. We do not see into Laurel's thoughts until the very end of the book.

She is subservient to what she endures going on around her, and then she is activated by this. She has a muted position. It's not her place to yell and scream. She's kept a lot of things inside her. In the part about New Orleans, when she and Fay are in those cheap rooms where you can hear through the walls—I wanted that to be foreboding.

It is, especially when Fay sees the bride and groom skeletons at the carnival.

I took that part from real life. I took a picture one time at Mardi Gras in New Orleans of a man and woman dressed as skeletons, and she was holding a bouquet of white lilies. And I saw the man with the Spanish moss; he was dressed entirely in Spanish moss. It was all over his hair, like he had a permanent of long curls, and he was dressed in a whole suit of Spanish moss.

In one of the early versions of The Optimist's Daughter you wrote out some scenes depicting Phil and Laurel courting, and in one scene Phil's mother asks Laurel how far apart their children will be spaced. Why did you decide to delete this material?

That's a good middlewestern touch in the kitchen, isn't it? I remember writing the courtship scene, but maybe I left it out because it didn't fit my purpose as well. I wanted the relationship of Phil and Laurel to be taken for granted for my purposes in the novel. It gave it a more proper depth and allowed me to concentrate on the scene in which Phil says, "I wanted it! I wanted it!" It's really a short novel, and I still think of it as a long short story. You have to get the proportions right. You have to keep in mind the good of the whole story. That is true for writing short stories, too; you have to get the balance right. Dozens of possible scenes show the same point, and I have to choose as in One Writer's Beginnings. I just have to feel my way to it.

Did you save the material for One Writer's Beginnings that you did not use?

I saved the notebooks I wrote it from. I did write those as lectures, and I did have the deadline of timing—length was one thing I had to go by because they were lectures. I probably threw away some of it that didn't show an event as well. I can remember things in stories—the choice I made for stories—more than in that book.

You said earlier that in the end of The Optimist's Daughter, Laurel learns to move to the future. She packs up the family home, and she leaves for the North. Would you say that autobiographical writing allows you to imagine your own life choices in another way? Is this a freeing experience?

It can be. The end of the novel embodied Laurel's whole experience. It had to be settled and then done with as far as her practical life is concerned. She would never forget any of the past, though. Miss Adele was very sensitive to what was going on with Laurel. I like my character Miss Adele. Laurel could not be the only one who felt things, who was aware. That just worked out as I was writing it. I'm glad it happened.

Do you recall any other changes that emerged from the experience of writing The Optimist's Daughter?

The publisher might have wanted to go ahead and print the novel as it was published in the New Yorker. But I wanted a waiting period to let things settle to see how I felt about it. I wanted to let a little time pass. I always change things. I don't know exactly what changes I made in the different versions; it all seems the one thing to me now.

There are some provocative changes; one is the change from the New Yorker title—"An Only Child." Would you comment on that change?

I wanted to have something about the eyes. I first wanted to call it "Poor Eyes," but that was voted down. Bill Maxwell and Diarmuid Russell didn't like it. Bill did like The Optimist's Daughter. He said it gave a nice "chill of apprehension." But I've never been very good at titles. After the book came out I had letters that had the title wrong: "I so much enjoyed The Optimistic Daughter." Another one said The Optometrist's Daughter. That's a good one, don't you think? The Optometrist's Daughter? Because of the eyes?

Yes, that's good. Is there a sense in which "An Only Child" is an autobiographical title, even though you are not an only child?

Yes, I dramatized the sense of being an only child. If Laurel had had brothers, like I had, she wouldn't have had the trouble she did. I was not an only child but the only girl—that is difference enough to understand the feeling that you are by yourself.

By yourself in confronting the deaths of so many family members?

Yes.

That reminds me of Mrs. Chisom's summation of Laurel's predicament: "So you ain't got father, mother, brother, sister, husband, chick nor child." I like that: "chick nor child."

Isn't Chisom a good name for them? And I like the sound of Wanda Fay. I love that.