At the Center of All Beauty by Fenton Johnson

Author:Fenton Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2020-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

From the first, Welty writes of the challenges faced by the joyous heart, living among people who lack sensitivity or who, having possessed it in youth, are taught or teach themselves to let it go. In “Innisfallen” she writes, “You must never betray pure joy—the kind you were born and began with—either by hiding it or parading it in front of people’s eyes; they didn’t want to be shown it.” Welty’s observation brings to mind a poem by Emily Dickinson:

Why—do they shut Me out of Heaven?

Did I sing—too loud?

[#248]

“I don’t know why people marry at all,” Welty wrote to her first great love, a largely epistolary relationship that extended over many years—though Welty followed him to San Francisco before the man decamped to Europe with his boyfriend. For so many of Welty’s characters, marriage is the “lowly thing” (Marianne Moore again) of satisfaction. What interested Welty—what she lived out—was the “pure thing” of joy.

Therein lies the answer to that precocious Stanford undergraduate’s question. I revisit Welty’s description of herself and her character Miss Eckhart as “exposing [themselves] to risk.” She dedicated herself to the ideal of art over the compromise of marriage; to be vulnerable not to a particular individual but to the whole world. Was this by circumstance or by choice? The answer, revealed in her correspondence and her work, is surely and simply “yes” and “yes.”

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