Faber & Faber

I spent the major part of 1978 travelling round the American South - mostly by Greyhound or Trailways buses - interviewing its leading writers in situ. I had become fascinated by the paradox that some of the most imaginative, humane and inclusive literary works of our times had come from a region whose unhappy tensions and propensity to flare up into cruel violence had, until quite recently, horrified the world. But during my travels I became aware that for the responsible Southern writer it had become of the greatest importance to preserve, to encourage - often against terrible external evidence to the contrary - a belief in the human capacity for generous conduct, for spontaneous love for other beings, and to cherish the imagination as a place where such a belief could grow.

Writers and readers everywhere I journeyed spoke to me of the salutary, indeed inspiring effect on their minds of the work - and often of the personality too - of Eudora Welty. And the more closely I read her myself, the more I appreciated the validity of these testimonies, realising that - together with her older fellow-Mississippian, William Faulkner - she was the profoundest, the most universal-minded of all the fine writers that the South had produced.

When I at last met her in her native Jackson, Mississippi - at the end of a long swelteringly hot journey down from Memphis, Tennessee, through the cotton-fields of the Delta - I knew, from the very first moments of our encounter, that my life was to be changed. Eudora Welty actually met me at the bus station with her car - me, a total stranger to her - and then took me to her house, the coolness, order and civilised nature of which were overwhelmingly refreshing after my day’s fatiguing ordeal, and were to remain with me as a metaphor for her art.

All this I described in my book, Separate Country (1979). When I got back to Britain, I applied myself to promoting Eudora’s work some of which had never been published here. The admirable Virago Modern Classics issued The Robber Bridegroom and Delta Wedding with introductions by me, and Marion Boyars, following my recommendation, brought out her new Collected Stories. But, though I did not realise this, my relationship to this writer, was in fact at its first, earliest stage.

In 1984 I received an invitation to go back to Jackson, Mississippi to give a speech on Eudora’s 75th birthday (April 13). I accepted. Now I could really appreciate what she meant, and had meant for years, to her city, her state and region, and to literary America as a whole, how she had represented - and through very harsh, ugly times - indispensable virtues: kindness, empathy, the rights of the individual and the importance to his/her evolution of a just, harmonious community. Her house, 1119 Pinehurst Street was where she had lived ever since childhood, from which time she had known many people who were still - for all her outside literary fame - her close friends and companions.

After my speech and participation in some local events I was invited to become the Eudora Welty Visiting Professor of Southern Studies 1985-86 at Millsaps College, a period which must rank as one of the most interesting and satisfying of my entire life. I lived only a street away from Eudora, of whom I saw a good deal, she even coming to classes and lectures of mine at the college. Some years later, when I had returned to England, she stayed in London, and a particular memory of her visit then is her going with a friend and myself to the house in Chawton, Hampshire, of Jane Austen, a writer for whom she felt a deep affinity.

But it would not be right to over-emphasize her gentle friendliness, her rootedness in her community, her appreciation of the civilised, inestimably important though these are. My study of her takes its title from one of her finest stories, ‘A Still Moment’ (1943), set in 1822 on that road through the forested wilderness called the Natchez Trace, which brought dangers to travellers from both unfettered Nature and roving lawless bandits. It concerns the apprehension of a snowy heron by three very different men, one of whom is the celebrated naturalist, Audubon. In its intense probing concern with the layers that constitute every single moment of consciousness, and the baffling conflict each existence, human or animal, experiences between ‘Love and Separateness’, this is a mystic’s, a visionary’s story. And yet - another paradox - no writer could be more deeply versed in the actual than Eudora Welty.

Her writing life began as a result of her returning from college and a fledgling business career to Mississippi in the Depression and accepting a job in the Work Progress Administration, one of the creations of Roosevelt’s New Deal. She was sent out to all 82 counties of her own state, the poorest in the Union, with shockingly bad roads, and with villages many inhabitants of whom, black or white, had never been photographed before. Eudora’s photographs of that time, that place - which happily not only survive but have been catalogued and are available to the public - stand behind all her subsequent art.

As she says of herself, the young woman employed on behalf of a humane, economically redemptive mission, through countryside and town of often great primitiveness: ‘I learned quickly enough when to click the shutter, but what I was becoming aware of more slowly was a story-writer’s truth: the thing to wait on, to reach there in time for, is the moment in which people reveal themselves. You have to be ready, in yourself; you have to know the moment, when you see it.’

Eudora’s last two books were One Writer’s Beginnings (1984), which became a best-seller, and Photographs, published by the University Press of Mississippi, Jackson. My book on her work, and on the development of her imagination, came out in 1994. She read it in progress, and was extremely helpful, but she made no attempt whatever to influence my interpretations or assessments.

I was very pleased that she received the finished copy on her 85th birthday. She died on 23 July 2001, but I have felt no inclination to tamper with or update the text of my book. Coming out again in time for her centenary, it surely affirms the intensity, the vitality of her work by speaking as though the author were still alive - and responding creatively to life in all its varieties and complexities.