Struggling Against the Plaid | An Interview with Eudora Welty

By Jo Brans

Eudora Welty is the author of five collections of short stories, a book of photographs, a volume of essays, and five novels. For her novel The Ponder Heart she received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Howells Medal in 1955, and for The Optimist’s Daughter she was awarded the 1973 Pulitzer Prize. Among the most honored of American writers, she has also received the National Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for the Novel and in 1979 the National Medal for Literature for lifetime achievement.

Jo Brans is a member of the English faculty at Southern Methodist University. Brans interviewed Eudora Welty when she visited Dallas in November 1980, to speak at SMU’s sixth annual literary festival.

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BRANS: One thing that especially impressed me in the conversation yesterday was that you said you wrote because you loved language and you love using language. I know you are a photographer, and you’ve painted too.

WELTY: Well, I was never a true or serious painter, just a childhood painter.

BRANS: How does writing compare in your mind with those other art forms?

WELTY: Oh, it’s in the front. The others are just playthings. I didn’t have any talent for photographs. I was strictly amateurish. I think the book I did {One Time, One Place} has a value in being a record, just because it was taken in the 1930s. And I was in the position of being perfectly accepted wherever I went, and everything was unselfconscious on the part of both the people and myself. There was no posing, and neither was there any pulling back or anything like that. Our relationship was perfectly free and open, so that I was able to get photographs of things really as they were. I think today it has a sort of historical value, which has nothing to do with any kind of professional expertise in taking pictures, which I knew I didn’t have. But I am a professional writer. That is my work and my life, and I take it extremely seriously. It isn’t just the love of language, or love of the written word, though that is certainly foremost, but the wish to use this language and written word in order to make something, which is what writing is. It’s a tool. It’s the tool, not the end result. So I guess that would be how you could describe what I’m trying to do.

BRANS: To create a reality with words. Why is dialogue, spoken language, so important to you—say in Losing Battles?

WELTY: I tried to see if I could do a whole novel completely without going inside the minds of my characters, which is the way I do in most of my writing. I didn’t tell how anyone thought—I tried to show it by speech and action. I was deliberately trying to see if I could convey the same thing by speech and outward appearance, as I used to do by going inside people’s minds.

BRANS: It seems to me that in your writing you’re hardly ever autobiographical. I’ve heard you say that you’re working out of your feelings, but not your own experiences. Are there any stories that are autobiographical?

WELTY: I don’t deliberately avoid being autobiographical; it’s just that when I’m writing a story I have to invent the things that best show my feelings about my own experience or about life, and I think most of us wouldn’t be able to take our own experience and make a dramatic situation out of that without some aid. And I do much better with invented characters who can better carry out, act out, my feelings. I don’t think you can describe emotion you have not felt. You know, you have to know what it’s like—what it is to feel a certain thing—or your description or your use of these emotions will be artificial and shallow. So I certainly understand what my characters are feeling, but I try to show it in a way that is interesting dramatically.

And I don’t lead a very dramatic life myself, outwardly. So it’s not that I’m concealing myself, it’s just that I’m using whatever—a lot of the details come out of my own life, things that I’ve observed. There was a scene in my novel, The Optimist’s Daughter, about a three-year-old child in West Virginia, a whole section in there that I suppose you could call autobiographical, but actually it was my own memories of being at my grandmother’s, on the farm, and all the things that the child felt—the rivers and the mountains and all those things. Nothing like that could be made up, you see. If you’ve never been in the mountains, you wouldn’t know how to say what it was like to be in the mountains. But it was not me as the character. It was my feelings, my memories, my experiences, but it was that character that was feeling them, not me. The character was not me. So, that’s an example.

BRANS: You sort of projected your feelings into this creation.

WELTY: Yes, and use them to describe this character. I didn’t use all that I had, I used just what would help me to explain the character.

BRANS: How do those characters come to your mind? Do they just spring full-blown into your mind? Or do you work them out . . . ?

WELTY: Well, it’s just part of the whole process of making a story. I mean, they are all one with the plot and the atmosphere of the story and the weather and the location. They don’t exist apart from the story—they’re not even in the world outside the story. You can’t take a character out of this story and put it into another.

BRANS: It doesn’t work?

WELTY: Well, they wouldn’t live. So the characters are all integral parts of the story in which they occur. Of course you use many sources to make a character—occupation, memory, knowledge, dreams, newspaper articles, many things. You may get little bits here and little bits there, because the character is a sort of magnet and attracts different kinds of observations. Not just any, you know; it’s just what applies to the character. So how can you tell where they come from, any more than you can tell where anything comes from—where a tune comes from to a composer?

BRANS: Do you have any set pattern of working? That is, do the characters occur to you first, or a trick of plot, or some idea that you want to express? Is there any particular order that seems to be the same?

WELTY: It’s different with every story. It just depends. Sometimes the story begins with the idea of a character and then you invent a plot which will bring this out. Take that one story that’s used lots of times in schools called “The Worn Path.” That character called up the story. Such a person as that would take a trip like this to do something. That’s a good simple case.

BRANS: What I love about “A Worn Path” is not so much the endurance of the walker as the windmill or whatever you call it at the end. For me that was the beauty of the story, that all of a sudden old Phoenix does move above the . . . just the endurance . . .

WELTY: I love that, too.

BRANS: And walking all the way back down the path with the windmill. I have a clear picture of that. It made the trip into town worth the coming.

WELTY: Absolutely.

BRANS: In one of your essays you talk about Faulkner, and you say that Faulkner has this sense of blood guilt about the Indians and then about the blacks. In your own work you don’t have that.

WELTY: Well, it’s not my theme. You know his work encompassed so much and so many books and so many generations and so much history, that that was an integral part of it. I don’t write historically or anything. Most of the things that I write about can be translated into personal relationships. I’ve never gone into such things as guilt over the Indians or—it just hasn’t been my subject. My stories, I think, reflect the racial relationships—guilt is just one aspect of that. Certainly I think any writer is aware of the complicated relationship between the races. It comes out in so many even domestic situations.

BRANS: Very few of your stories deal directly with blacks, though. And those that do, I’ve wondered if the blackness is a necessary part of the character. For example, old Phoenix. Why is she black?

WELTY: It’s not a deliberate thing, like, “I am now going to write about the black race.” I write about all people. I think my characters are about half-and-half black and white.

BRANS: Really?

WELTY: I would guess. Considering the novels and everything. I think it’s the same challenge to a writer. It doesn’t matter about color of skin or their age or anything else. Then again, I never have thought about “The Worn Path” as being anything but what it was; but one thing may be that when I wrote that story, what started me writing it was the sight of a figure like Phoenix Jackson. I never got close to her, just saw her crossing a distant field early one afternoon in the fall. Just her figure. I couldn’t see her up close, but you could tell it was an old woman going somewhere, and I thought, she is bent on an errand. And I know it isn’t for herself. It was just the look of her figure.

BRANS: It’s not true, then, what I read—that you were the lady old Phoenix asked to tie her shoe.

WELTY: Oh, no. I was out with a painter who was painting this landscape, and so we were sitting under a tree. I was reading, and I watched her cross the landscape in the half-distance, and when I got home, I wrote that story that she had made me think of. She was a black woman. But then I suppose it would be more likely to be a black woman who would be in such desperate need and live so remotely away from help and who would have so far to go. I don’t think that story would be the same story with a white person. The white person could have the same character, of course, and do the same thing, but it wouldn’t have the same urgency about it.

BRANS: Well, old Phoenix does fox white people. You know, she takes the nickel from the hunter, then asks the lady to tie her shoe.

WELTY: It wasn’t because they were white, though. Those are two different things altogether. It was the desperate need for the money and for the child that she needed that nickel—she knew it was a sin, too. But asking the lady to tie her shoe—she knew who would be nice to her. She picked a nice person, because she was a nice person, and she picked one. Those are two entirely different motives, taking the nickel from this really nasty white man and asking a favor of a nice lady. She knew in both cases.

BRANS: She had a wonderful graciousness.

WELTY: She knew how to treat both.

BRANS: One of my students went to your reading Sunday night, and she came in with a paper on it. She had misunderstood the title of the story called “Livvie,” and she referred to it as “Living,” which showed she understood the story anyway.

WELTY: That’s very cute. I’m glad to hear that.

BRANS: A misprision, I guess, but a nice one. What I’m saying is, I know sometimes I fix interpretations on the things I’ve read.

WELTY: Well, I do too. We all do that. And I don’t feel a thing bad about it, because a story writer hopes to suggest all kinds of possibilities. Even though it may not have been in the writer’s mind, if something in the story suggests it, I think it’s legitimate. You know, it doesn’t have to be exact. The only way I think to err is to be completely out of tone or out of the scope of the story or its intention. No, it doesn’t bother me one bit if someone interprets something in a different way, if I think the story can just as well suggest that as not, because you try to make it full of suggestions, not just one.

BRANS: As a teacher I’m very sensitive to this whole question, because students frequently say, at the end of the discussion of the story, where you really are trying to get at all the things that make the story possible, “Now do you think that Eudora Welty really intended all of that?” And of course there’s no defense for a teacher, and all I can say is “How do I know?”

WELTY: That’s all we say when we read anybody’s work.

BRANS: How can I know what she intended? But if we find it here in the story, the story belongs to us when we’re reading it.

WELTY: Exactly. The only thing that I know bogs a lot of students down, because I get letters all the time, is in the case of that dread subject, symbols. You know, if they get to thinking, This equals this, and this equals that, the whole story is destroyed. Symbols are important, I think, but only if they’re organic—you know, occur in the course of the story, are not dragged in to equal something.

BRANS: No, no. It takes all the life out to do that.

WELTY: Of course. And symbols aren’t equivalents.

BRANS: —not algebraic equations!

WELTY: I know it. But, you know, some students get the idea, and it’s very troubling to them. And what I hate about it is it might discourage them from ever enjoying reading stories, if they think they’re supposed to make an algebraic interpretation, as you said.

BRANS: In connection with “Livvie,” let me ask you something that’s really off the wall, probably: Was there any thought in your mind at all of reflecting Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying? Just the name of the character Cash, and then the fact that Livvie . . .

WELTY: No, that was a coincidence. No indeed—I mean, I wouldn’t. You’re not aware of any other person’s work when you write your own. At the time I wrote that story, I didn’t know about Faulkner’s Cash. When did he write As I Lay Dying?

BRANS: I think about 1930.

WELTY: You know, Faulkner was out of print when I was growing up.

BRANS: For a long time, right.

WELTY: It was about 1940.

BRANS: When Malcolm Cowley did The Portable Faulkner.

WELTY: Everything I have of Faulkner’s I’ve bought through searching in secondhand bookstores in order to read them. He wasn’t in the libraries. He wasn’t to be had—at least in Mississippi. I don’t think he was to be had anywhere. He was out of print, for a long time.

BRANS: That’s right. I had forgotten that. That’s important.

WELTY: Well, I guess I hadn’t read him until I had been writing for some time. But, at any rate, the presence of Faulkner’s writing in Mississippi—I was glad he was there, and I loved his work, but he wasn’t hovering over my work. Because when you’re writing, you’re just thinking about your story, not how would Faulkner do it, how would Chekhov do it, how would Katherine Anne Porter do it?

BRANS: I wasn’t really asking you that. I know that’s not true.

WELTY: Well, a lot of people do wonder, just because he lived there, and of course it is a formidable thing.

BRANS: His shadow.

WELTY: I wish that he could have helped me.

BRANS: What I was thinking was just that sometimes I feel that you’ve taken some of the same themes. I suppose that was inevitable.

WELTY: Because we get them out of the same well.

BRANS: But that, in your mind, is more or less unconscious. And you give them a comic twist. In Losing Battles, for example, all the Beecham kin decide at one point that Gloria might be a Beecham, and that her father might be one of the Beecham brothers, and they seem to be delighted with the whole idea.

WELTY: Yes, they’re thrilled. That makes her okay.

BRANS: Right. Even though, by Mississippi law at the time, that would make the marriage incest. But that’s kind of a Faulknerian—I’m thinking of The Sound and the Fury, where Quentin says he’d rather have slept with his sister, Caddy, himself than have an outsider—incest would be better. I always think of Faulkner in connection with that idea, because I got my first gasp of shock from him.

WELTY: Well, I didn’t mean anything serious and tragic at all. I just meant it to show what the Beechams were like. That is, to be a Beecham made everything all right. That was what I was showing.

BRANS: You have commented that Faulkner’s comedy may have more of the South—more of the real life of the South—in it than his tragedy.

WELTY: I think it has everything.

BRANS: And it seems to me that your writing is basically comic. There is almost always that sense of harmony and reconciliation at the end.

WELTY: Yes, I think it’s a part of tragic things. It intrudes, as it does in life, in even the most tragic situations. Not comedy—I would say humor does. Yes, I like writing comedy. It’s very difficult, and it’s much harder, because one false step—and I’ve made many of them . . . That’s why I have to work very hard on the comic theme, because it’s so much more difficult to do. One false step and the whole thing comes down in a wreck around you.

BRANS: When I think of comedy, I don’t so much think always of humor, as I think of the something at the end that suggests that the world will continue—that life will continue. A kind of optimism for the species. You always suggest this, usually with a synthesis of opposing elements. I love that line in Losing Battles—in Miss Julia’s letter—“The side that loses gets to the truth first.”

WELTY: Oh, yes—that’s when she was in her desperate state.

BRANS: Had she thought of herself at that point as having lost?

WELTY: Oh, I’m sure. She did.

BRANS: She did lose?

WELTY: Well, look at all the people around her. All her class, all the people she’d taught, they didn’t know a thing, except the thing that mattered most to them, which I think is most valuable—that is, their love for one another and dependence upon one another, and their family, and their pride, and all of that. But nothing Miss Julia had tried to teach them had ever taken root. Nothing.

BRANS: In your mind is she like Miss Eckhart in The Golden Apple?

WELTY: She filled a function in the story perhaps that would be kind of similar, in that she was a person unlike the world in which she lived, trying to teach and help somebody. But Miss Eckhart was a very mysterious character. Julia Mortimer was much more straightforward and dedicated and thinking of the people as somebody she wanted to help. Miss Eckhart was a very strange person.

BRANS: I hope you know that in some ways these questions are meant to serve as checks for me if I need checks in reading your books, and apparently I do. I thought I saw this pattern in several of your things—Miss Eckhart, Julia Mortimer, those characters in the same mold. That is, they represent a discipline. Could I ask you what your sense is of the differences between male and female characters in your stories? I keep thinking about that line from “Livvie” that I mentioned yesterday, “I’d rather a man be anything than a woman be mean.” And also, in Delta Wedding, say, the women are obviously making demands on the men.

WELTY: Well, men and women are different. I don’t mean they’re not equally important. But they’re different. That’s the wonderful thing about life. No, in those different stories I’m not writing about them as men versus women. In the Delta it’s very much of a matriarchy, especially in those years in the twenties that I was writing about, and really ever since the Civil War, when the men were all gone and the women began to take over everything. You know, they really did. I’ve met families up there where the women just ruled the roost, and I’ve made that happen in the book because I thought, that’s the way it was in those days in the South. I’ve never lived in the Delta, and I was too young to have known what was going on in anything in the twenties, but I know that that’s a fact. Indeed it’s true of many sections of that country after the Civil War changed the pattern of life there. So I’ve just had that taken for granted—it was part of the story. That was something the men were up against. I think that in many of my stories I do have a force, like Miss Julia Mortimer or Miss Eckhart, but those two are so poles apart in their characters that I can’t see much connection.

BRANS: There’s a real passion in Miss Eckhart.

WELTY: There certainly is. Well, it’s a passion for getting some people out of their element. She herself was trapped, you know, with her terrible old mother. And then no telling what kind of strange Germanic background, which I didn’t know anything about and could only indicate. I mean we don’t know—they had tantrums in that house, and flaming quarrels.

BRANS: Well, there’s that one quarrel that surfaces when the girls are there. She hits her mother, doesn’t she, or—?

WELTY: Or something. I think her mother hits her. But anyway, I wanted to indicate that they were passionate people. And Miss Julia was passionate too. Most of my good characters are. Virgie Rainey had it too, and Miss Eckhart saw it, that Virgie had that power to feel and project her feelings, and she wanted her to realize all of this.

BRANS: Do you think Virgie does?

WELTY: I think at the end of the story she is saying good-bye to the life there in Morgana. I think she’s got it in her to do something else.

BRANS: Remember that line about Virgie’s sewing? Virgie is cutting out a plaid dress, trying to match up the rows, and Miss Katie says, “There’s nothing Virgie Rainey likes like struggling against a good hard plaid.” I’m thinking of the struggle in Losing Battles too—Jack and Gloria, who in a way have come from separate worlds. Although Gloria resists it, she’s very much the child of Miss Julia Mortimer. She was brought up to be the teacher. And Jack is very much the hope and promise of the Renfro clan, and yet I felt reading the book that even though they’ve been apart most of the time they’ve been married, they’ve already impressed their worlds on each other. Is that what you intended?

WELTY: Yes, indeed. I certainly did. That’s exactly correct. And why Gloria—I think every instinct in her wants them to go and live to themselves, as they put it there.

BRANS: Yes, in that little house.

WELTY: It’s going to be mighty hard to do. But she knows where she stands all right, and she’s not intimidated at all. And Jack, of course, is just oblivious to the fact that there could be anything wrong with his staying there and having the best of both.

BRANS: He wants her to love Granny. Granny is just so unlovable.

WELTY: Granny doesn’t want to. “She didn’t say anything, she nodded. She would love you.”

BRANS: I thought Granny was just as mean as she could be.

WELTY: Well, she’s living in her own world, too.

BRANS: And she wants to be a hundred instead of ninety.

WELTY: She thinks she is a hundred.

BRANS: But the most amazing thing is that Jack is willing to love Miss Julia Mortimer.

WELTY: Yes. He’s willing to.

BRANS: Nobody else in his family is.

WELTY: No. He is. I really love Jack.

BRANS: When I asked you in the panel yesterday which of your characters you thought spoke for you, I kind of expected you to say Jack.

WELTY: Oh, I was thinking about stories yesterday, I wasn’t thinking about the novel. Well, Jack is really the reason I went on and made a novel out of this. Because when I first began it, it was a short story which was to end when Jack came home. The story was about why he happened to go to the pen. All that crazy story about the fight. And he was to come home and wonder why they thought anything was wrong. You know: “What’s happened?” Well, as soon as he walks in the door, I think, “No, I want to go on with him.” I had to start all over and write a novel. Yes, he’s willing to love Miss Julia. In fact, he says in there, “I love her. I feel like I love her. I’ve heard her story.” I think that’s very direct and penetrating: because he’s heard her story, he knows what’s happened to her.

BRANS: And she has a reality for him even though he “never laid eyes on her.”

WELTY: And the people who have gone to school to her didn’t really see her. Jack is really a good person, even though he is all the other things.

BRANS: I don’t see anything bad in Jack.

WELTY: No, except that he allows himself to be used by everybody.

BRANS: But that comes out of his goodness.

WELTY: It comes out of his goodness, and it’s so typical also, I think, of just such situations. Haven’t you known people like this? We all have. Yes, I really like Jack. He’s a much better person than Gloria.

BRANS: Well, she’s a little have-not. Don’t you see her in that way? A have-not, so that she’s clutching.

WELTY: An orphan.

BRANS: And that’s what Miss Julia represents too. But when Jack says, “I’ve heard her story,” he’s really—

WELTY: They’re all living on stories. They tell each other the stories of everybody. And he heard her story. They were blinded to her by having gone to school to her. They just took her as their bane. They’re struggling against her. But he heard her story.

BRANS: Now Virgie Rainey—she struggles against herself. Isn’t Virgie essentially a wanderer, who really wants to wander, but for years she makes herself stay there in Morgana?

WELTY: I guess so. I use that term rather loosely because it also means planets, and I have got a number of characters that I try to suggest can move outside this tiny little town in the Delta, though it’s not a cut-and-dried kind of thing. It’s not A, B, C, D. But I wanted to suggest it.

BRANS: They could make it in a larger world.

WELTY: Yes. That there was a larger world. Whether they could make it or be broken like Eugene MacLain is something else. They know something else is out there. It’s just an awareness of the spaciousness and mystery of—really, of living, and that was just a kind of symbol of it, a disguise. I do feel that there are very mysterious things in life, and I would like just to suggest their presence—an awareness of them.

BRANS: Is the sense of mystery and magic related to your use of mythology?

WELTY: I think it is. Exactly, that’s what it is. Because I use anything I can to suggest it.

BRANS: And myths then seem to suggest something timeless?

WELTY: Yes, or something . . .

BRANS: Perpetually reborn or recreated?

WELTY: I think so. Something perhaps bigger than ordinary life allows people to be sometimes. I find it hard to express things in any terms other than the story. I really do. Some people can, but I can’t. I never think that way. I only think in terms of the story. Of this story.  

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“Struggling Against the Plaid: An Interview with Eudora Welty,” by Jo Bran, Vol. 66, No. 33, Summer 1981.