Reading Eudora Welty:
Some Notes on  “A Worn Path,” The Optimist’s Daughter, and One Writer’s Beginnings
by Sally Wolff

    Eudora Welty’s writings are complex, subtle, and imminently deserving of careful attention. However, they are not an easy read; to stop in the middle, or to read too quickly, is to miss the full meaning.  They require thorough reading—and then considerable reflection.  The first task, then, for those who approach Eudora Welty’s writings, should be to read them through to the end-- and attentively, for Welty was an astute observer and a keen listener, and those qualities come into play in her writing.  Know, too, the writer’s life: consider that she archived life experiences for the fiction to come.
    Take, for example, the Welty short story “A Worn Path,” one of her best.  Like the title, a concise and clear expression of the story’s main theme, each word deftly and lyrically tells the story—in this case, that of an old woman walking through a woods filled with obstacles and on to town to procure medicine.  What at first seems to describe the vicissitudes of old age, becomes in the final moments, a story with a darker political comment.  The nurse patronizes the old woman and speaks down to her.  The old woman stiffens in response to the insult, recovers her dignity, and begins her long walk home.  A short story, Welty said, should be “like a string pulled taut.” In this story, as in so many of her others, she pulls “taut”—at the end, by giving the reader a startling realization: what might at first seem familiar and reliable is instead tightly knotted ethically, morally, and politically.
   Tellingly, a biographical note precedes “A Worn Path”:  in the story, during her long walk, the old woman mentions to a stranger, although she does not explain exactly what she means, that “I was too old at the surrender.” Welty once heard an old woman utter this phrase, and it caught the writer’s acute ear.  She asked the old woman what it meant, and the reply was that she was too old at the surrender that ended the Civil War to learn to read. This very phrase set Welty on her course to compose the story.  Here is Welty’s power—the moral tale of an old woman who is free yet still shackled by age, illiteracy, poverty, and prejudice.
 
   Here is another example.  Like those of her short stories, the title of Welty’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel The Optimist’s Daughter has that same succinct,  ironic edge; the same piercing focus on the psychological portrait of one main  character; the same scrutiny of difficult topics: death, loss, grief, finally  ameliorated with a lighter tone of healing.  The novel is a brooding, highly  autobiographical work about the relationship with parents, about the difficult choice of leaving home—or not. The Optimist’s Daughter offers a wrenching,  poignant ode to memory that reaches its transcendent moment near the  end—her parents dead, the daughter confronts her great personal loss and  grapples with the somber and bitter realities of her own life.  Memory is at  once the faculty that connects her to her past—but simultaneously memory becomes the blind and threatening “somnambulist,” harrowing her nights and  her dreams and demanding “its rightful tears.” For this character, moreover,  religion offers no salvation from her terror.
   One Writer’s Beginnings, so much more than a craft manual for writers, is a memoir that reverberates with the same disturbing issues of death and self-assessment found in The Optimist’s Daughter.   The chapters “Listening,”  “Learning to See,” and “Finding a Voice” initially trace how family, place, and  time influenced Welty, how she sees and hears the world, and how what she saw and heard became part of her own writer’s voice.  Both books eventually focus on how memory bears on the idea of personal survival.  In a  concatenation of ontological inquiries, she asks: What is it like to be the last member of your original family?  What is it like to survive everyone else?  “Surviving is the strangest fantasy of them all,” Welty wrote in a modern  allusion to Hamlet’s ominous question.
   Her answer comes in One Writer’s Beginnings:  “Memory is a living thing—it too is in transit.  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.”  Neither her intellectual existence, nor her moral/ethical stance is sheltered, removed, or contrived.  She wrote that “a daring life starts from within,” and her subtle, complex, and daring expression of life deserves full and careful attention.

   Welty’s work has touched the hearts of many.  Take time to be a thoughtful reader.  
Sally Wolff King is Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences,
 Emory University, Atlanta, GA, where she teaches
 Southern Literature in the Department of Literature