SOURCE: "Time and Confluence: Self and Structure in Welty's One Writer's Beginnings," in The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. XXVI, No. 1, Fall, 1993, pp. 78-93.

[In the following essay, Ciuba discusses Welty's One Writer's Beginnings, asserting that Welty's "narrative confluence abolishes distances and divisions in time, links generations, connects seemingly disparate events into the pattern of a lifetime."]

The first picture in the photo album that forms part of One Writer's Beginnings shows the young Eudora Welty in a telling moment: the delighted child is clenching her father's pocket watch, dangling its fob before the camera. "Life doesn't hold still," she later comments about her own photographs. "A good snapshot stopped a moment from running away." Like her own art that seeks the revealing gesture in the fleeting scene, the emblematic photo of the one-year-old halts Eudora Welty forever in the paradoxical position of keeping time—of marking its passage and holding it as a possession. One Writer's Beginnings is written precisely at the point of such temporal convergence. It reveals the confluence of past and present as the design of Welty's life and art by making such intersection the structural principle behind her lifestory as an artist.

In writing her autobiography at such a junction, Welty turns what seems like a necessity of the genre into a statement of her self. Augustine's description of memory as the "present of things past" defines the dual temporal perspective basic to autobiography. But as if following Ben Franklin's annals of the self-made man, a long tradition in American autobiography has arranged memory into chronology and emphasized the past over the present. One Writer's Beginnings duly acknowledges the custom of organizing a retrospect by hours and years. The pocket watch held by the infant Eudora in the photo keeps the conventional passage of time echoing throughout Welty's memoirs. As a child, she recalls growing up to the sound of a grandfather clock, cuckoo clock, and bedroom clock. As a college student, she felt the tolling of the chapel clock shake her bed at Mississippi State College for Women. And when Welty later got her first paid job in communications, she worked for a radio station in the base of the clocktower at Lamar Life. Published when she was seventy-five, Welty's reminiscences frankly confess the steady and straight-forward progress of time. She knows that the past—when infants had calling cards, the night sky over Jackson was nothing but blackness, and gargoyles graced her father's office building—is past. She even uses a loosely linear structure to plan the three sections of One Writer's Beginnings. "Listening" attends to her childhood years in Jackson; "Learning to See" reviews a journey in 1917 or 1918 to visit her maternal and paternal grandparents; and "Finding a Voice" speaks of her years in college and her first works as a serious writer.

But if the whole triptych shows how Welty gained the ears, eyes, and tongue of a storyteller, her fragmented and wayward memories ultimately reject the external organization of clocks and calendars. Her roundabout narrative flows with the casual immediacy of the raconteuring that Twain described as basic to his own Autobiography: "Start it at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life; talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale, and turn your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that has intruded itself into your mind meantime." Twain hoped that such formless form might provide the model for all future autobiographies. Originally delivered as a series of lectures at Harvard, One Writer's Beginnings shifts and drifts along the most vital currents of the Southern oral tradition. Welty omits sizable portions of her life and travels through her past without being restricted by fidelity to historical sequence. The problem with organizing her memories according to the rigid succession of years is the same as the problem with the rigorous windows that the narrator of Welty's quasi-autobiographical "A Memory" wants to impose on the transiency and turbulence of her girlhood. Both devices overlook Welty's discovery that greater than any perspective is "a single, entire human being who will never be confined in any frame."

The structure of One Writer's Beginnings repeatedly violates chronological framework to portray the integral, elusive self as the confluence of past and present. "It is our inward journey that leads us through time," Welty explains, "forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling." Her allegiance to the dynamics of inner time typifies the increased appreciation of subjectivity in modern and postmodern autobiographies. Paul John Eakin sees traditional examples of the genre as encouraging the reader to believe that "the play we witness is a historical one, a largely faithful and unmediated reconstruction of events that took place long ago." But Welty rejects such documentary drama for what Eakin calls the play "of the autobiographical act itself, in which the materials of the past are shaped by memory and imagination to serve the needs of present consciousness." One Writer's Beginnings makes the process of recollection as revealing as the recollections themselves. Welty does not remember and then write, as if her life were a finished pageant that simply needed to be chronicled by an objective and anonymous observer. Rather, Welty writes as she remembers. She follows the dictum of veteran autobiographer Wallace Fowlie, "Living belongs to the past. Writing is the present." Living out the writing, Welty shows how personal and family history are always flowing together in the consciousness of the storyteller.

Welty defined the subjective temporality of One Writer's Beginnings in her 1973 essay "Some Notes on Time in Fiction." Although clock time "has an arbitrary, bullying power over daily affairs," fiction wrests from time such authority by subjecting it to plot. The story can accelerate, reverse, prolong, or contract time. "It can set a fragment of the past within a frame of the present and cause them to exist simultaneously." Such freedom, Welty claims, "bears a not too curious resemblance to our own interior clock; it is so by design. Fiction penetrates chronological time to reach our deeper version of time that's given to us by the way we think and feel." One Writer's Beginnings is autobiography as fiction—not because it explores the problematic relation between memory and imagination like Mary McCarthy's Memories of A Catholic Girlhood but because it records the same irregular, internalized time that flows through all of Welty's stories and novels.

Yet despite its highly individual course, the structure of One Writer's Beginnings is not haphazard. Welty shuns what is merely amorphous, much as does the designing narrator of "A Memory." Hence, her reminiscences are ordered by the same insight that guides her fiction. Writing stories and novels, Welty asserts, has given her a "sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists." Her memoirs pursue a strand of discovering affinities and continuities between apparent disconnections. "The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time," she recognizes, "but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a time-table not necessarily—perhaps not possibly—chronological." Welty's distinctive rearrangement of the years does not keep events fixed to the standard autobiographical timeline but allows them to flow together or be forgotten according to their importance to her. Her ostensibly erratic play of recollection conveys the free and fluid exploration of her lifetime as one memory leads back or ahead to others, connected with it, commenting on it, the whole forming out of lives and generations a "continuous thread of revelation." If One Writer's Beginnings does not follow a straight line, it does pursue what Lewis Simpson has called the "southern aesthetic of memory" to discover the plot strands of Welty's life.

At the end of One Writer's Beginnings, Welty finally names the temporal design that has organized the stream of recollections from the start. As if the preceding hundred pages were a prelude, she writes, "I'm prepared now to use the wonderful word confluence, which of itself exists as a reality and a symbol in one. It is the only kind of symbol that for me as a writer has any weight, testifying to the pattern, one of the chief patterns, of human experience." Confluence provides an image for both the content and the flow of Welty's memories, for the self formed by the various tributaries of her past and for the formal structure of Welty's autobiographical essays. One Writer's Beginnings pursues this primal pattern by showing the connections between apparently different times in Welty's life as well as the intersections between obviously different lives and Welty's own time. All of these crossings coexist in memory, "the greatest confluence of all."

The title of Welty's memoirs explains this fundamental confluence. Since memory finds a meaningful conjunction between now and then, Welty traces her present identity as a writer back to the very beginnings of her life. In the first paragraph of an autobiography that dispenses with the ordering of clock time, she tells of being formed in and by clock time. "In our house on North Congress Street in Jackson, Mississippi, where I was born, the oldest of three children, in 1909," she begins "Listening" with her typical rootedness in time and place, "we grew up to the striking of clocks." But even as Welty recalls their tolling throughout her house, she displaces the supremacy of linear tick-tock. Since the author is not just the remembered child but also the remembering adult, this memory of time's sound does not exist by itself but immediately flows into other tenses. It leads her to speculate about the significance of her ancestral past and then to anticipate its consequence in the future, her present time as autobiographer. Welty writes by confluence, not by chronology. She first wonders whether her father's Swiss heritage may have predisposed the Weltys to being "time-minded all our lives." When Welty returns to her father's family in part two, she seems to circle back to the very beginning of her book and of her life as well, but on her first page she does not take the traditional opportunity to retell these distant origins. Instead, Welty interprets her memory of hearing time by its later reverberation in her career: "This was good at least for a future fiction writer, being able to learn so penetratingly, and almost first of all, about chronology." If the novel cannot begin until the clock starts, as Welty observes in "Some Notes on Time in Fiction," she already heard in childhood the mechanism animating every short story and her life story as well. Although Welty concedes that she made these clocks her own without even realizing it, she grants, "it would be there when I needed it." For her as for Faulkner, "Memory believes before knowing remembers."

From the first paragraph of "Listening," time is ticking, but its typical sequence is undermined because incidents from various points in Welty's life are always "subject to confluence" in memory. Welty views past events from the perspective of the present and joins these episodes with others unrelated in time to disclose the larger pattern of how she began as a writer. In writing her memoirs Welty rewrites her life so that she reveals not just how the past seemed to her but how it seems to her now as autobiographer. As she recalls listening to songs, sermons, conversations, monologues, lessons in school, her own and her mother's reading, Welty shows how she heard her way to becoming a writer. All the earmarks of her fiction—her attention to dialogue and narrative voice, her pleasure in the sounds of words and cadences of sentences, her sense of story and dramatic scenes—begin in her youth. The child crafted the writer, but Welty the writer also crafts the child. She brings all the author's resources, which she began to discover in her early years, to capture her photographs of the artist as a young woman. Eudora is one of Welty's own best characters. And as her narrative skill in the present shapes her account of the past, the events in her life often follow the pattern of a short story.

Welty recalls discovering a classic epiphany about confluence while home from grammar school for several months due to a fast-beating heart. The memory charges a conversation between her mother and father with an erotic subtext to show how Welty the writer was born of a girl who loved to listen and who made listening into a virtual act of love. As the young Eudora lay at night in her parents' bed while they sat in rockers by a shaded lamp, she listened to their voices, hearing the murmur but not the actual words of their conversation. The daughter was privy to the subtle balancing of opposites in her parents, the "design for patterning and formulating complementarities" that Peggy Whitman Prenshaw shows is basic to Welty's fiction. Connecting early and later selves, Welty explains that her girlhood detachment disclosed what she afterwards turned into the necessary preparation to tell any story: she must find a frame, get a perspective, determine her distance. However, the adult writer never became a mere voyeur in her fictional world because her early stance as private observer was balanced by discovering another home truth.

Welty conflates not only her younger and older selves but also herself and her parents. In the bedroom, she was participating in a primal scene of linguistic intercourse. The child-writer sensed "the chief secret there was—the two of them, father and mother, sitting there as one." The daughter heard in her parents' tête-à-tête the flowing together of their lives, and she felt like a deeply responding part of their marital union. "I was conscious of this secret and of my fast-beating heart in step together," she writes, as if the quickened rhythm of her body were joining in such heartfelt lovemaking through language. Welty understands that this combination of childhood inclusion and aloofness gave her the eyes by which she would see her stories. "I suppose I was exercising as early as then the turn of mind, the nature of temperament, of a privileged observer; and owing to the way I became so, it turned out that I became the loving kind."

The second part of One Writer's Beginnings makes clear that its author had her beginnings not only in Chestina Andrews and Christian Welty but also in all the ancestors that preceded them. Whereas "Listening" turned its ear to her parents, "Learning to See" surveys a trip when Eudora was eight or nine to visit her grandparents in West Virginia and Ohio. What she learned to see on this journey was her own identity as a part of a community in time. The journey motif gives the section a more linear structure than that of its predecessor. However, part two is not so much a travel log as a free-flowing excursion into time past that connects events widely-separated over many years to show that Welty is the confluence of family history.

Although autobiography implicitly seems to announce that "I am I," Welty cannot define herself in narcissistic isolation but only through her kinfolk. Her abiding attachments confirm Susan Friedman's argument that women autobiographers often view themselves not simply in opposition to a world of others but also in relation to it. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese refines this feminist reading of lives that become texts by emphasizing the specific social and historical conditions that shape a woman's self-representation. She shows how this position between individualism and community is especially typical of the autobiographies of Southern women. Yet for Welty, the central community is neither Friedman's sisterhood nor Fox-Genovese's culture of race, class, and region. It is the family. Welty does not become a self by leaving her forebears behind but by taking them with her. Hence, she recounts not just her emergence from the abandoned world of childhood but also her continued rediscovery of bonds with the still present and interdependent past.

The West Virginia homestead of the Andrews family was a site for such temporal confluence. Its stories connected people of different times into generations. Welty's grandfather, the high-spirited Ned Andrews, loved to provoke his wife with tall tales, and since he died early, his sons knew him by oral tradition rather than by actual experience. Welty turns the home that Ned built into a memory house, for each place in it serves as the beginning of a narrative about the past. "Here in the center of the Andrews kitchen" was the long table where Ned prepared to transcribe music for the family band or to defend his cases at Clay Courthouse. "It was in the quilted bed in the front room of this house" where Ned suffered with an infected appendix and called upon Welty's mother, only a young girl at the time, to plunge a knife into his side. "It was from that door" that the fifteen-year-old Chessie left with her father to travel by raft and train to the Baltimore hospital where he died. "It was from this house" that soon afterwards Chessie set out to teach, reciting poems from McGuffey's Readers along her way to the one-room school. The Andrews home locates Welty not just in the hills so beloved by her mother but in the storied past. As each memory of the house leads to a more distant memory about her mother's beginnings, Welty's family history dramatizes the consanguinity that she describes in "Some Notes on Time in Fiction": "Remembering is done through the blood, it is a bequeathment, it takes account of what happens before a man is born as if he were there taking part." Part two of One Writer's Beginnings traces the bloodlines of Welty's ancestry and of her art.

Since Welty's narrative is governed by the personal time of its writer as she remembers rather than by close adherence to chronology, she interrupts this sequence on the Andrews home with a recollection from almost fifty years later: her elderly mother, helpless in bed and nearly blind, reciting with unabated ardor the same verses that she had memorized years ago from the primers of her students. Welty remembers, "She was teaching me one more, almost her last, lesson: emotions do not grow old. I knew that I would feel as she did," and the autobiographer makes that moment near the end of her mother's life circle ahead to her own life of seven decades by adding, "and I do." Welty neither recalls her mother's West Virginia origins as a prelude to her own beginnings in part one nor records the debilities that preceded her mother's death in 1966 as the finale to part three. Instead, her memory works by confluence. It reduces the original order of events and the half century that separates them to accidents of time, and it then rearranges these episodes according to the interpretive sequence of the artist's consciousness. Linking Chessie's girlhood with her passionate old age, Welty combines both of these memories with her own present as a writer at age seventy-five. The same enduring vitality makes the apparently discrete times of mother and daughter flow together.

Welty tasted the very wellsprings that nourished the independent spirit of her mother's family during her girlhood summer on the mountain. Then she became one of the folk of the West Virginia hills. Welty recalls that as she drank of the family well and of her homeland, the water's metallic flavor and ferny smell "all said mountain mountain mountain as I swallowed." Welty's deep draught grounded her in the locale that she had imbibed. "Every swallow was making me a part of being here, sealing me in place, with my bare feet planted on the mountain and sprinkled with my rapturous spills. What I felt I'd come here to do was something on my own." Inspired by such communion with the genius loci, the child tried to embody this newfound self-determination by taking a different course from the path along which her mother and uncles dawdled. However, the bold wayfaring led not to a triumph of autonomy but to a discovery of communal identity. Welty was initiated into the vast company of Southern women that Shirley Abbott names the "daughters of time." After the errant adventurer fell and was presented with torn dress to her grandmother, Eudora Carden brushed aside her grandchild's hair and peered into her eyes. What the gentle lady discerned in her namesake was the peculiar confluence of their lives as mountain women. "Hadn't we come right to the point of our both being named Eudora?" Welty wonders. And Eudora Carden saw that well-given bond in the context of a wider kinship when she looked from her granddaughter to her daughter and then back again. "I learned on our trip what that look meant," Welty explains in "Learning to See": "it was matching family faces."

In name and features generations converged. And as Welty juxtaposes memories, heedless of temporal order, she repeatedly makes the same kind of match. She writes her sense of self—communal, historical, regional—into the structure of her autobiography by selecting, omitting, and connecting so that widely different times in her life and family come face to face and show their similar identities. As Welty remembers her childhood trip into matrilineal history, her past of sixty-five years ago turns into her mother's past and finally into her grandmother's past. Welty follows her mountaintop meeting with Eudora Carden by recording the story of her maternal great grandparents, Eudora Ayres and William Carden, who came to West Virginia before it was a state. She finally ends the account of her visit to the high country with a memory that is evoked not by chronology but the logic of association. Once again Welty recalls her mother feebled by age, this time in her wheelchair as she tries to pick out "The West Virginia Hills" on the piano, fingering keys that she could not even see. The song that Chessie had once sung while washing supper dishes for her family was now the anthem of her independence in old age. "'A mountaineer,' she announced to me proudly, as though she had never told me this before and now I had better remember it, 'always will be free.'" The conflux of Welty's memories illustrates how the independence that Eudora first tasted on the mountain as a girl lasted throughout her mother's lifetime and has now become a personal inheritance that must not be forgotten. All the folk of the West Virginia hills wear this same proud countenance.

If Welty's journey to her mother's kindred was a discovery of liberating connections with the past, her summer visit to her father's family in Ohio was a frustrating search for confluence. The Andrews' household remembered by talking, but the Weltys denied memory by silence. Although Welty traces her father's roots back to three brothers from Switzerland, who came to America before the Revolutionary War, she recalls that her father never told her a single family story. Indeed, his Ohio home was so empty and silent that his daughter could not even imagine Christian as a child there. At the heart of Welty's disconnection from her father's past was Allie Welty, the grandmother who died when her son was still a boy. Unlike the uncles' banjos that delighted Eudora with ballads and hymns in West Virginia, Allie's organ in the Ohio parlor was never played or approached. The stilled instrument was a way of not remembering her just as Welty's middle name was an accidental way of misremembering her. Much as she bore the first name of her grandmother Carden, Eudora had been given the middle name of Alice after her paternal grandmother. But it was later discovered that her kinswoman's name was Almira. "Her name had been remembered wrong. I imagined what that would have done to her," Welty writes. "It seemed to me to have made her an orphan. That was worse to me than if I had been able to imagine dying."

Eudora Alice Welty should have been the name of the dead grandmother's ongoing connection with her family, but instead it became the sign of her absence and abandonment. The word did not work as Welty had long expected it. From childhood the writer believed in the real presence embodied in speech. In "Listening" Welty recalled feeling the rondure of moon as a six-year-old, and she remembered how when she saw the Book of Kells as an adult, she sensed that the illumination was "a part of the word's beauty and holiness that had been there from the start." In Welty's beginning was the sacred, potent word; she even quotes the first line of John's gospel when she witnesses to how the King James Bible has resounded in her prose. But when her mistaken middle name recorded how even language had not kept hold of the past, the future novelist glimpsed a dereliction more terrible than death. Almira Welty lived not in the spoken present of a story but only in her unsaying—in oblivious silence and misnomer. The closest that Eudora Welty could come to her half-forgotten ancestor was the poignant vision of a childlike inversion: her grandmother had not died to the family but the family had died to her. In the Ohio parlor, there was no matching of names, faces, and lives as in her hillcountry rendezvous with Eudora Carden—no confluence.

Although the young Welty heard in Ohio the aesthetics of loss, this disconnection finally leads the mature writer back to a connection with her father's past. Through memory and imagination the daughter attunes herself to the deprivation of his childhood. Welty recalls that as a girl, she occasionally heard in her father's quiet home a music box, playing a tune from a faraway time, but she only comes to understand the melody in retrospect. "Now I look back, or listen back, in the same desire to imagine, and it seems possible that the sound of that sparse music, so faint and unearthly to my childhood ears, was the sound he'd had to speak to him in all that country silence among so many elders where he was the only child." Welty understands that "sound of unspeakable loneliness" better because she discovered after her father's death a worn giftbook from his youth. Besides various consolations from relatives and friends, it contained a message that his mother had written on the day of her death. "It had been given him to keep and he had kept it," Welty affirms. Her recollections of her childhood visit to Ohio conclude with the discovery of this memento as an adult because the keepsake makes sense of the lasting sadness that Welty heard when she was young. Welty's present rounds about her past and then curves back farther to her father's past. Like the music box, the memory books of Christian Welty and, to some extent, of Eudora Welty keep the same time of old bereavement.

Welty's trips to the homes of her mother and father schooled the child of memory in the continuity of the present with the past, the continuation of the past in the future. They made her feel the temporal confluence that she would later define in "Some Notes on Time in Fiction" by quoting Faulkner: the past is "a part of every man, every woman, and every moment. All of his and her ancestry, background, is all a part of himself and herself at any moment. And so a man, a character in a story at any moment in action, is not just himself as he is then, he is all that made him. If Welty's focus on her precursors seems to deflect attention from herself, it actually reflects her sense of self more profoundly than any supposedly more candid confessions. To be Eudora Welty is to live in the context of a particular history and in concert with her family.

In "Finding A Voice" Welty tells how her childhood expedition in part two formed part of a longer journey toward becoming a writer. She makes the two essays flow into each other by beginning the last section of One Writer's Beginnings with another trip. As the near ten-year-old traveled by rail with her father, her awareness of passing through the passing world reinforced the sense of place and transiency that would later define her stories and novels. The girl who rode through her life in time anticipates the writer whose characters would repeat the same transit in her fiction. Having discovered her point of view in a ready-made frame of the window, the young Eudora watched whole towns leap before her gaze and then disappear. And what she could not spy beyond the pasture or over the hill, she invented. Even before she was ten, Welty was seeing as she would from first novel to last. Laura McRaven's reverie on the train at the beginning of Delta Wedding as well as Laurel McKelva Hand's dream of the train ride to Mount Salus at the end of The Optimist's Daughter grew from precisely such play of the mind over the terrain. Weltyland, despite its celebrated depiction of the Southern locale, is a highly subjective country for the child who first sees as much as for the adult who later remembers and recreates it in her fiction.

As Welty reviews her childhood train ride, it becomes a circuitous passage that reconnects her with the origins of her life and art in her parents. On the journey, Christian Welty saw the vanishing scenery by memory rather than through fantasy, for he had passed its landmarks during the course of many trips. But his daughter never learned exactly how customary was this route until years later. Throughout One Writer's Beginnings Welty continually calls attention to what she did not know and to when she later found it out. She does not present herself as the eternally omniscient narrator of her own life who reads back into the past what she only discovered in the future. Rather, Welty shows how she has learned the whole of her own story only in time. Memory discovers the confluence hidden in personal history. Welty remembers learning after her father's death that he used to travel the thousands of miles from Mississippi to West Virginia by train to court Chestina Andrews. And when he could not afford the trip, the couple wrote daily letters. Kept over the years by Welty's mother in an attic trunk, these pages "brought my parents before me for the first time as young, as inexperienced, consumed with the strength of their hopes and desires, as living on these letters." The writer read her beginnings in the fervent writings of her parents. Welty's initial memory of a childhood train ride leads her to recall a later discovery of an earlier time, a revelation of her parents' passion before she was ever born. Their letters, which once bridged space, now bridge all of these overlapping times—especially those sent by her father. "Annihilating those miles between them—the miles I came along to travel with him, that first time on the train," they were "so ardent, so direct and tender in expression, so urgent, that they seemed to bare, along with his love, the rest of his whole life to me." Retrospect turns into prospect as Welty recovers a proleptic image of her father's life journey.

Since Welty's memory makes the recent and distant past into contemporaries, One Writer's Beginnings holds all of these times together—the memoirist as imagining young daughter and discovering adult, Christian Welty as parent and future husband. By seeing her father as a fiancé, a role that she could never have envisioned when only a girl herself, the much older writer at last understood how Christian Welty must have seen the landscape on her childhood train ride. She arrived at the truth of the past only by way of what was then the future. And as an artist, the daughter of Christian Welty eventually came to share his passionate vision. Welty recalls a final confluence with her father when she began writing seriously in her twenties, for then she found the world as revealing as the countryside that he had passed on the train. Conflating tenses, superimposing her later discovery on her girlhood recollections, Welty explains that she achieved this new perspective "because (as with my father now) memory had become attached to seeing, love had added itself to discovery," and she felt the desire to connect herself to the outside world. Welty's father knew the train route not just by heart but with his heart—with the tender recollections of all the journeys before his marriage. Writing repeats the same interior progress for Welty because it involves not just vision but re-vision, not just insight but intimacy.

When Welty concludes her memoirs with the publication of her early fiction, she shows how her stories join in confluence with her life story. These first works not only mark the end to her beginnings as a writer but also record the same time of her life, the same search for pattern, as do her autobiographical essays. "Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience," she explains, "of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life." Fiction finds the proximity between origin and distant end, and then it connects events "too indefinite of outline in themselves" into "a larger shape." Welty brings that form into focus by an image from the railroad trips that cross so much of her life and art. As when a train rounding a curve throws its light back on what could not be seen, the storywriter beholds "a mountain of meaning rising behind you on the way you've come, is rising there still, proven now through retrospect." One Writer's Beginnings discloses just such a looming, backward view as does all of Welty's writing from the beginning.

The revelations of once-obscured design make Welty's autobiography so continuous with her fiction that the story of how she came to collect The Golden Apples is also the summary story of how she structures each of the essays in One Writer's Beginnings. As she was writing her tales of Morgana, Mississippi, Welty did not know that they would form a cycle, but she noticed afterwards that they were about the same characters—sometimes under different names or at different parts of their lives. "They touched on every side," she realized, joined unwittingly from their creation "by the strongest ties—identities, kinships, relationships, or affinities already known or remembered or foreshadowed." One Writer's Beginnings composes Welty's life as if it were just such a suite of stories. It manifests the hidden continuities and contiguities that hold together her own identity in time, the characters of her family, and the course of her career. Like the individual pieces in The Golden Apples, all of her memories touch on every side. "In writing, as in life," Welty observes, "the connections of all sorts of relationships and kinds lie in wait of discovery, and give out their signals to the Geiger counter of the charged imagination, once it is drawn into the right field." If writing and life share such buried correlations, these networks of associations find their natural confluence when Welty writes her life.

In the final pages of One Writer's Beginnings, Welty dramatizes her vision of such latent connections throughout time when she quotes the beginning of the last chapter from The Optimist's Daughter. Her novelistic autobiography and autobiographical novel fittingly converge in a passage about convergence. Having dreamed about a train ride over a long bridge with her dead husband, Laurel awakens to realize that it was actually a memory of the trip years ago when she and Phil traveled from Chicago to Mount Salus, where they were to be married. The story that she told herself while asleep was a revelation of confluence. As Laurel and her fiancé looked down from the transcendent perspective of the bridge, they saw not just the commingling of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers but the coming together of the whole world: below them, trees advancing from the horizon, and above them, birds meeting in a V and descending along the common course of the waters. "And they themselves were a part of the confluence," for while Laurel sat by the window, Phil touched her arm, and the two rode together toward their mutual act of faith. As if this immense panorama might localize the time of their conjoined lives, Laurel believed that they were going to live forever as one. But when her husband died in the war a year later, she separated herself from the underlying connections at the center of life and of Welty's writings. After remembering her earlier vision of unity, Laurel realizes that "Phil could still tell her of her life. For her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love." Just as Laurel believes that the great rivers will still flow together at Cairo although she will not see them when she flies back to Chicago, the optimist's daughter places her faith in such confluence.

Welty writes her memoirs at the same point of intersection. Like Laurel in beholding the central design of life as the pattern of the heart, at the end of One Writer's Beginnings Welty sees the successiveness of time suddenly freed by an embracing simultaneity. The past is not behind her but beside her. And to remember is to renew membership in this enduring commonality: "I glimpse our whole family life as if it were freed of that clock time which spaces us apart so inhibitingly, divides young and old, keeps our living through the same experiences at separate distances." Flowing by linked associations rather than governed by chronology, Welty's memoirs duplicate exactly such temporal coincidence. Her narrative confluence abolishes distances and divisions in time, links generations, connects seemingly disparate events into the pattern of a lifetime. "The memory is a living thing—it too is in transit," Welty writes, always aware of the progress through time. "But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives—the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead." Memory suspends tenses to create a meeting place for what can never or no longer meet in time. In One Writer's Beginnings Welty can be always with herself and her family at the start of her own life story. Like the one-year-old in the photograph, the writer can hold time in her hands.