SOURCE: "A Conversation with Eudora Welty," in Conversations with Eudora Welty, edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, University Press of Mississippi, 1984, pp. 252-67.

[In the following interview, Welty discusses her approach to writing and presents insights into some of her characters and stories.]

[Royals:] What do you think about the concept of what we're trying to do here, that is to say, to interview a writer and try to arrive at something worthwhile through the medium?

[Welty:] I don't rightly know. I've always been tenacious in my feeling that we don't need to know a writer's life in order to understand his work and I have really felt very opposed to a lot of biographies that have been written these days, of which the reviewers say they're not any good unless they reveal all sorts of other things about the writer. I know you're not talking about that kind of thing, but it's brought out my inherent feeling that it's good to know something about a writer's background, but only what pertains. I'm willing to tell you anything I can if I think it has that sort of value. You asked me what I thought the value was, and I'm just not sure.

[Royals:] Not sure as to whether knowledge of the writer has a value? The works may stand on their own. Is that what you mean?

Well, take somebody like Chekhov. It's important to know that he was the grandson of a serf, that he was a doctor, that he had tuberculosis, and that his wife was an actress. All these things matter in understanding his work. But there are a lot of other things, as you know, that don't matter.

[Royals:] The idea of interviewing writers is fairly recent, isn't it?

I don't know. I think mostly in the past they relied on letters, because, you know, people were great letter writers, and they wrote seriously and fully to their friends, relatives, and so on, so there was a written record of many things about people's lives that just doesn't exist now. Nobody writes letters anymore.

[Little:] But do you think it helps to know about your family life to interpret The Optimist's Daughter?

No, I don't think it's necessary in the least. I think the key fact in my case—I can only speak for myself—is that I have to write out of emotional experience, which is not necessarily out of factual experience. What I do is translate something that's happened to me into dramatic terms. And they don't coincide; well, they almost never coincide. But I couldn't write about any important emotional thing if I hadn't experienced it; that wouldn't even be honest. You have to understand the feelings, and of course, I've got my feelings out of my own experience, but the experience itself is altered, transmuted, made to convey the story. For instance, in Optimist's Daughter, I write about the death of a middle-aged woman's elderly father. My own father died at the age of 52 of leukemia. That was entirely different from what happens to the judge; I made him up from whole cloth. But my mother did have operations on her eyes, though not his operation, and my mother did die within my recent experience. So, you can see what happened, it's a transposition, but a complete change, using feelings I understood about the daughter and her parental experience.

[Little:] You can see things in the novel like the recipe, and I know about your mother's use of recipes from reading other background stuff, but neither of us probably knows that this kind of knowledge is essential to interpret the novel.

I don't think it is. But as a writer who tried to be convincing and honest and detailed, I don't hesitate to pluck detail from everywhere; but real observed detail doesn't mean that the source of it in life has any existence in the imaginary world of my book.

[Royals:] Flannery O'Connor. I've heard people say one needs to know about her Catholic religion to interpret her works.

I may have said that too, because I know when I did learn something about that, a whole lot of her work opened up for me, and I wish that I had had that benefit in the beginning.

[Little:] When did you learn about her Catholicism?

Well, I knew she was a Catholic, but I heard her give a lecture at, I think it was Converse College, called "The Catholic Writer," in which she dealt with that relationship directly and it was a revelation to most of the young students and to me too.

[Royals:] Does it open up new views into O'Connor's works?

Yes, more specific at the time than I can think back to now. But the whole idea of salvation and …

[Little:] grace …

Yes, grace and redemption and all of that are so much more deeply rooted in her fiction, enhancing her stories more than I had realized because I didn't know much about the church itself.

[Royals:] Which of her stories did we study in your class, Eudora?

We read several—"A Good Man is Hard to Find."

[Royals:] That's the one. I read that and thought it was a tremendous story and knew nothing about her Catholicism, or …

Me too, Tom. That's exactly how I read it. And it is a tremendous story.

[Royals:] What else would I have gotten out of it if I'd known about the Catholic aspects?

Don't ask me that, because I can't be specific enough. But we should go back to the scene with the old lady and the criminal and their confrontation, to some kind of state of grace that is achieved, to be aware of the difference that conviction made in a violent story.

[Little:] We read "The River," the story with the Reverend Bevel Summers and the baptism in it, and we talked about the name Bevel.

Yes, we did. I don't know whether I said that or whether I knew it then. I didn't realize it but Bevel is a common name over in Georgia and so she got it perfectly legitimately. It wasn't just a symbol thrown in. It was complete with antecedents. She would be the first to underscore that!

[Royals:] You said you didn't think it was absolutely necessary to know a writer's background to find out what they're all about. Do you think Flannery O'Connor was an exception to the rule?

No, I don't really. I expect a lot of people simply know more about Catholicism than I happen to, but I shouldn't say "it's a rule" that you don't need to know about the writer's life. What I said about Chekhov would apply. I do think that we need to know general things, somebody's century, and where they come from and what kind of people; those general things, I think do belong. They pertain.

[Royals:] What profession they are, maybe, and that sort of thing.

It's important if it's illuminating to a writer's work. I didn't mean writers should be completely anonymous.

[Little:] But do you think it's helpful if the reader knows, for example, that "Why I Live at the P.O." grew out of your seeing a woman at a post office with an ironing board?

No, I don't think that's any help at all.

[Little:] It's important, I think, to other writers if they learn more about the process of creativity, how stories evolve, how stories are born.

But that's a good example of how something like that could be said that's a fact but nothing like the truth, the real truth. I did see a woman like this, but what the story grew out of was something much more than that. I mean, it was a lifelong listening to talk on my own block where I grew up as a child, and that was in my head to write out of all the time. The sight of the lady ironing was the striking of the match that set if off, but I wouldn't have written a story just about seeing somebody with an ironing board in the post office. It's nearly always too simplifying to say that any story, however slight, comes from one thing.

[Little:] Sure. It's like, you hear it said that the germ which produced Anna Karenina came from an obituary that Tolstoy saw in the paper about a society woman who committed suicide. It's interesting to know about the spark in understanding how a story gets started or the impulse that triggers it in terms of understanding, I guess, the process or craft. But it doesn't help you to interpret or understand the story itself to know where the writer got the idea.

I think most stories and especially novels have long fuses that run way back, you know, so long that you don't even know the origin, probably. It started so long ago out of something so deep in you. Something sets it off. But you can't say that from that you can certainly see right off what made the story, because you have lived with it, of course, in the meantime.

[Little:] Did you ever tell a real story or an incident, and from the verbalization of that, realize you've got a story?

Never. In fact, that isn't the way I work. It reminds me of what I've heard of the author James Stephens in Ireland, though. He was like so many of the Irish, they were great talkers, and they met night after night and talked. And people who knew him said he talked all of his stories away, because he told them all and that was it. Of course, he wrote a lot, too, in spite of the talk. But stories don't exist to me in those two elements, sound and penmanship. Not at all.

[Little:] You mean you make an effort not to tell about something you are working on?

No. It just never occurred to me. You know, it also reminds me of what a club woman asked me to do once: "Would you just come and tell us one of your stories in your own words?"

[Royals:] That's fantastic.

Honestly.

[Royals:] Speaking of telling stories, I think that's the difference between a writer and a story teller. A writer writes them. A story teller tells them. I don't see the same thing occurring among writers I know. Jim Whitehead tells stories but mostly he listens and writes.

Well it's two different gifts.

[Royals:] Right.

And I think, John, this is not to say that when you're writing dialogue stories, you don't hear them in your head, which I do, and I think most writers do; they can be tested. But when you're writing a story, you're constructing something. You really are making something using dialogue, and using what the ear tells you to help you out. When you're telling a story, it's just different. It's just different.

[Royals:] Did you ever ask anybody to read drafts of your stories?

I couldn't work that way, Tom. I have to get a thing as well made as I can do it before I let anyone see it.

[Royals:] And then that is the publisher.

Yes—or editor. I like my friends to see them, and I have shown things to friends, but they've been completed sections of something, for instance in Losing Battles.

[Royals:] Didn't you ever do that? Most writers, when they're beginning, go and ask teachers or somebody for suggestions.

I never have. Perhaps it's shyness. Wanting to get something right and not trusting myself until I get it as well as I can, and probably pride. I don't want anyone to see it if it's not the best I can do.

[Royals:] Do you feel like the magic of it might be taken away or the spirit let out or something like that?

I don't know … I don't mean to sound … I think I am superstitious, not pretentious. I am superstitious that something would go—its possibilities would go—if you … told it before you wrote it. It would take off the bloom before you ever got to write it down. For me. Different people work different ways.

[Little:] I guess it varies among writers. Do you remember telling us about one of your earlier stories that you'd sent to the Southern Review? When they rejected it, you burned it and then they wrote back and accepted it. Then you had to sit down and rewrite it from memory?

That was "Petrified Man."

[Royals:] It was?

Yes, I had sent it all over to every magazine in the U.S.A., I guess, and everybody had sent it back. The Southern Review like it but had faults to find which were certainly legitimate. You know it was a very wild kind of story. They had published me pretty regularly, but they said they didn't think this one was quite right and sent it back. So after that, I burned it up. Then the Southern Review wrote and said "We would like to see it again," and so I did write that over from memory. But that was a "by ear" story.

[Royals:] A what?

By ear. I could just listen to it, and, click, could play it back as if it were on a tape. You couldn't do an interior story that way, at least I couldn't.

[Little:] Do you feel that when you played it back you got everything exactly as you had it the first time?

As far as I know. It was pretty easy to do. I could probably write that again from scratch if I burned it up because that kind of thing is just like hearing a song—once heard—you could sing it again.

[Royals:] How much of your work do you get from current events?

I should say I get more general information than particular information. Things stay in my head a long time, maybe years, before I use them, and by the time they would ever surface in one of my stories in some general way, the news story might be old hat, politically.

[Little:] Are you ever bothered by your fame in Jackson, or is it usually the telephone and strangers that bother you?

Jackson is very understanding of me. I'm very proud of it—my relationship with my hometown. Oddly enough, it's since the recent television interviews that came out this year on public television that I have had an absolute inundation of letters and manuscripts and people wanting interviews. I must have about ten of those requests a week, and I'm so behind in correspondence as a result of that. These letters have been very—many of the letters have been just plain—they don't ask or want anything. An entirely different audience from my book audience. Although it is pleasing to me, I must be hundreds of letters behind with answering.

[Little:] I want to follow up on something you said at the March 1978 writers' conference in North Dakota. You said during a panel discussion that you didn't think your stories had the ability to change society. What sort of response would you expect a Southern white person to get from your writing? What kind of understanding would you shoot for?

Well, for any reader I always hope that my story justifies itself as a revelation of character, and I would hope for recognition of the common humanity there. I would hope that readers might look in there and see themselves, as I was trying to look in there and see the Southern character. I write of my fellow Southerners out of a conviction that I know what they are like inside, as well as outside. They're my credentials.

[Little:] Do you think that is true for both your stories, "The Demonstrators" and "Where is the Voice Coming From?"

Well, for any story, I hope, and in "Where is the Voice Coming From?" about the murder of Medgar Evers—I was definitely hoping to say, "This is what I think these characters are like on the inside. This is what is going through the mind of that murderer," and I would hope that story could be recognized as such by the readers.

[Little:] All right. The readers should recognize that they have inside themselves something like the murderer in "Where is the Voice Coming From?" had inside himself?

Well, not literally—but I felt able to suggest they might have—in those bad times in particular. The different members of the human race are not very different potentially, you know—I mean we're all able to recognize the elements of good and evil in human behavior—we comprehend good and evil, we're familiar with violence in our world. And that particular element of evil was running all through the South at that time. And I feel that anybody who read that story would recognize things they had seen or heard or might even have said, in some version, or imagined or feared themselves.

[Little:] When "The Demonstrators" came out, you said it was not primarily a civil rights story. Would you comment on that?

Well, all of it was a reflection of society at the time it happened. Every story in effect does that. And I was trying for it in both those stories and in several others that I have underway here in the house that will be in my next book. They all reflect the way we were deeply troubled in that society and within ourselves at what was going on in the sixties. They reflect the effect of change sweeping all over the South—of course, over the rest of the country too, but I was writing about where I was living and the complexity of those changes. I think a lot of my work then suggested that it's not just a matter of cut and dried right and wrong—"We're right—You're wrong," "We're black, you're white." You know, I wanted to show the complexity of it all.

[Little:] Ok, let me ask you a technical question. There is a great deal of light imagery in "The Demonstrators." There is moonlight, electric lights, sockets left out of bulbs on the theatre sign that spells "Broadway." There are also lots of shadows. Was this imagery designed to show the obscurity and confusion that people see in things?

I think it was, John. I never had looked at it in that calculated way, but I saw it like that, was guided by my imaginary scene. I go by that, as a rule. In a story I'm writing now, I'm using light to suggest the shadowy nature of what we know and what we can see and observe. I try in all stories to use the whole physical world to assist me. I think I probably do that instinctively.

[Little:] Ok, That is something I noticed in "The Demonstrators."

It's odd that I'm doing the same thing now in what I'm writing but very consciously as opposed to unconsciously in "The Demonstrators."

[Little:] What are you writing on now?

I can't talk about that for the same reason I've already told you. I can't discuss things in progress.

[Little:] Yeah. Sure. With "The Demonstrators," there was Eva Duckett, the Fairbrothers, Alonzo Duckett and Horatio Duckett. One owns a newspaper, one is a preacher, and one is married to the mill owner. Are they sisters and brothers? Are they of the same family?

Sure. Sure they would be. Because in a small town like that you know how it is.

[Little:] Uh huh. Are you making a point with that?

Yes. I was. I was absolutely.

[Little:] What exactly is that point?

Well, it was an observation of the way a small town society in the South is often in the control or the grip, whether benevolent or malevolent, of the solid, powerful family. It makes it all the harder for any change to penetrate a town like that. Some may be good people and some not so good, and they may be in themselves helpless to bring about change. They may be victims too.

[Little:] At the end of "The Demonstrators," Dr. Strickland says to Eva Duckett, "If I had what Herman has, I'd go out in the backyard and shoot myself." Is Dr. Strickland showing a more compassionate, human side than what is usually visible in a powerful person?

He is showing the vulnerability of all of them.

[Little:] And with Marcia Pope, are you saying that she may be the only one who has the strength to come through it all?

Well, she—I meant she was tenacious to the kinds of things in her teaching and her understanding in a removed, elderly way that was maybe not as affected as the day to day things. She was trying to hold on, to keep the principles. I guess that's what I intended to say about Marcia Pope. She remained impervious.

[Royals:] It comes off, and I wonder if you did a technical thing that made it come off that well. The first and last paragraphs of the story deal with Marcia Pope. So the action was bracketed by Marcia Pope. How much thought did you give to that technique?

Well, that's important to me, Tom. I like the form of something like that. That is a loose form but yet I feel that it has its own strictness.

[Royals:] I agree.

I've sort of developed new forms for my more recent stories. They're not nearly as compact in one way as they used to be, but they're more compact in another. That is, they have density of another kind than the plot itself. I want there to be a "felt" form running through that the reader will get. You know, it's like what you said about Miss Marcia Pope, a "felt" connection between things that has its own intensity, its own development.

[Royals:] I think your compactness and density come from the economy of your prose. You just don't waste words.

Thank you.

[Royals:] In North Dakota when I introduced you at the writers' conference, I said that you were honest in your writing and also an honest person. I might add to that "cautious." Maybe caution has to do with honesty. I've learned here this morning that you're getting ready to publish a new book containing several stories about the sixties. Do you think that you're just now publishing a book about the sixties because of your caution and your desire to be honest—the desire to give such difficult and complete material plenty of time to mature in your mind?

That might be. Time is an important ingredient in understanding a situation. But the practical reason why I haven't produced more stories of any kind is that they've turned twice into novels. Losing Battles was to have been a story. (They weren't all to have been about the sixties.) The Optimist's Daughter turned into a novel. Now I still have some others that I'm working on and I'm praying that they won't turn into novels.

[Little:] Before we leave "The Demonstrators," I want to know what the term "I bid that" means in the story. Twosie, the sister, says to Dr. Strickland, who is about to remove the necklace from the fatally wounded woman, "I bid that." Is bid a verb?

[Royals:] B-I-D. As in "I bid that."

[Little:] I made that? Is that what it means?

No, no, no. She bids to have it.

[Royals:] I put in a bid for that? Would that be closer?

Yes, I bid that. That is to say, I want it to be mine.

[Little:] Wow, she's anticipating the death and wants the necklace.

Oh, yes. She wants it.

[Little:] For her own, I see.

She wants to get her name on it. You may not have heard that before. That was an expression when I was a child. You know, somebody would bring back a stack of sandwiches; "I bid the ham."

[Royals:] You say so much so fast, and I think you're pretty literal about it in your fiction.

Well, I try to be.

[Royals:] We need to talk about "The Demonstrators" some more. Did anybody ever ask you who the demonstrators are in that story?

I can't remember that I've been asked that.

[Royals:] When John told me he was teaching the story, I hadn't read it yet. I said "What's it all about?" He said, "The Demonstrators." And I asked, "Who are the demonstrators in the story?" and he said "That's a darn good question."

It is a good question, though I think every character in it is a demonstrator. In fact, I wanted to suggest that. Even the birds at the end when they—

[Royals:] Clothes on the clothesline even?

Yes, everything is to show. Everything, everybody's showing something.

[Royals:] It's a visual story?

A visual story. It is a visual story.

[Royals:] And that's where the demonstrators come in.

Well, I have some real, literal demonstrators who came in off-stage. But also, everybody was showing something to anybody, including the victim … those birds at the end, the flickers that showed the red seal on the back of their heads. Everything was showing themselves. Everybody was showing themselves.

[Royals:] You mentioned that the literal demonstrators were off-stage.

They were.

[Royals:] You write about them in the newspaper, and the guy who …

[Little:] And Dr. Strickland sees this picture about a guy burning his draft card, and the front pages of the newspaper …

[Royals:] Yeah. But they're really giving the energy to the story. I thought the story might be about the effect the demonstrators have had on that town.

Well, it was in a way, I think. But also, the demonstrators, who falsified their position, soon exemplified what already existed there. The society.

[Royals:] You know, I've heard that great tennis players and great baseball players have 20-20 vision, or 20-10 vision and that things really look slower to them than they do to people without really good eyesight. I've begun to think that your vision is probably like that of a great athlete. Maybe you see the world more slowly and in more detail than many people do. How is your eyesight?

That's very generous of you to say that. I thought I'd just seen it longer than most people by now. I don't know. I have got a visual mind. Most people do have, I think. I observe closely because I'm interested. I want to see, but I don't think I have any special gift. I remember reading that Goya had trained himself as an artist to see action, and when he drew a falling horse everyone said the figure was completely grotesque, but that was before the invention of photography, which proved that Goya's eyes saw everything absolutely right, the way a falling horse looked in mid air. Isn't that extraordinary?

[Royals:] That is.

[Little:] Well, when you read a story like "Petrified Man," you know you must have awful good ears. Would essential ingredients of a writer be good ears and good eyes?

I believe that. I think that they're the tools of your trade. They're not only the tools of your trade; they're probably what made you a writer to begin with, if you did like to look and to listen. You can't tell which came first. At least in my case. I think everything begins with a given, you know, like a proposition to prove. You set out with a given and then you follow that through, and there are all kinds of givens you can start with, that we give ourselves to begin with.

[Little:] Is that like in the form of an idea? In the form of a theme?

Sure. Sure, and intention and the whole germ—no, not the germ of a story—the nucleus, whatever one starts from. The whole beginning of a story, which unfolds in it.

[Little:] OK. You don't start with an incident or character. They're included, but you start with an idea?

There has to be an idea. What is alive in it is this idea. But what gives me the idea is always people. In general, human life gives me the idea; the character, the situation.

[Little:] How articulate, how fixed is that idea when you start? Is it something that happens as the story develops?

No, I think it's the very heart of it, this idea.

[Little:] And that's there to begin with.

It's alive in the story.

[Little:] Can you say the theme?

It develops. Well, I never know what any of these different terms mean. They're all in the story in embryo form, I guess you could call it, before you ever begin writing. Of course, they develop as you go, but it's all toward the fulfillment of the story's whole that you had to begin with. Working without that, I think your characters would be rattling around in a vacuum. With me.

[Royals:] What we're talking about mostly is you start with the character.

I just mean the way ideas come to me is through people from the living world, not from the abstract, but from the living world. I don't say, "I'm going to sit down and write a story about Greed." But if I'd grown up with somebody that I thought was a terribly greedy old man, and had come to see what that does to a human being, then I might write a story to show what it does to a human being, but I'm not making up an abstract character to illustrate a moral judgment. That wouldn't interest me in the least. Neither do I think I could make it come alive.

[Royals:] What kind of emotional distance and separation do you feel you have to keep from your work?

I don't know, Tom. I'm sure there's been a variation of those distances in my work, depending on the story and depending on what I'm trying to do. Some subjects I'm much closer to personally than others. I think the closer you are, the more difficult the work is. I'm sure it depends on the story in my case.

[Royals:] I've read books or stories by people who were too emotionally involved. That seems to show … but I'm not talking about passion or having creativity or energy.

Well, getting too close is the easiest thing in the world to have happen, you know, and that is the danger. When it interferes with your impersonality. You have to show—impersonality is not the word.

[Royals:] Objectivity?

Objectivity. That's exactly it. You can't let anything interfere with that.

[Royals:] I think you do a good job of letting those characters be their own people. You don't even impose your own political beliefs on them.

I try not to.

[Royals:] In "Where is the Voice Coming From?" was it difficult for you to create that character and not feel some contempt for him because he was a murderer?

Oh, yes, sure. In fact I did feel it, but I was trying to. Since I wrote it on the night it happened, I was terribly emotionally involved in the writing, but I think that gave me a kind of steely feeling about it, you know, the need for understanding a murderer, which I couldn't have done maybe if I'd thought it over for a period of time. In retrospect, I would have lost my daring, picked the story up with tongs or something.

[Royals:] So, it was a kind of anger, almost anger, you steeled yourself …

It was, it was …

[Royals:] … not to get soppy about the situation.

I made myself do it.

[Royals:] I don't believe that could be done by a lesser writer.

Well I don't know if it was done by this writer or not.

[Royals:] I think it was very successful.

Thank you. It was hard to do and I was still … I stayed in the same mood for a long time afterwards as if I really hadn't finished the story, you know, I should have done more with it. Too late. It was pushing—I was writing Losing Battles at the time, it just pushed right through it.

[Little:] How many stories have you written in one sitting? I remember your saying "Powerhouse" was done in one sitting.

I did. Almost never have I done anything else in one sitting.

[Little:] This one and "Powerhouse" and …

And both of those were completely outside my usual orbit. In both cases I was writing about something that I couldn't personally have known too much about.

[Little:] The amazing thing about "Powerhouse" is that it seems that you did know exactly what you were writing about.

I know it. I knew about my feelings. Well, I knew it, sure I knew that man's music from way back, but not technically. Sure, I knew it. And it was the experience of seeing the man alive …

[Royals:] The man you are referring to is the jazz musician, Fats Waller, right?

Sure.

[Royals:] You know, we were talking about believability of characters. I think the jazz musician in "Powerhouse" was a little hard to believe in everything he said. I never knew for sure whether he was putting us on or not.

Yes, well, I tried to make that a little ambiguous that way, I intended it to show he was really improvising the whole thing. I meant it to be that way.

[Little:] Which is what the story is about. And all his band members don't even know he is improvising the whole thing, right?

Yes. That's right.

[Royals:] The more you read that story, the more you do realize it is about improvising. I went into it knowing it was about improvising, but I still kept asking, "Is that true?" And then I'd remember that this is a story about improvising.

Yes, but all the same I wanted the improvising to be kind of mysterious. Powerhouse is an artist. He improvises, they fall in with it—I think it is mysterious. Another consequence is, Tom, I was not in a position to revise that story, because how could I do it? You know, I didn't know enough to have started it to begin with.

[Royals:] Well, I don't think …

So I never did. I knew that it was either that or nothing. So that was it. It could have been helped as a story but not by the author.

[Little:] One last question. Are there any rules beginning writers should follow?

No. God knows writing is the most independent and individual thing you can do.