See What Can Be Done by Lorrie Moore

Author:Lorrie Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-04-03T04:00:00+00:00

By this time, however, she was more than a little in love with a Jacksonian, John Robinson. He was also a writer (with Welty’s help he had a story published in The New Yorker before she ever did), though more uncertain in his talent and ambition, and she had known him for years and corresponded with him throughout his military service in Africa and Italy during the war. She retained lifelong contact with him, and for long stretches they were close; Welty’s 1946 novel Delta Wedding is dedicated to him and uses historical material about his local ancestors, which he provided. Robinson’s homosexuality, however, would eventually make her see that intimate romance was impossible.

She had a gift for friendship but was not lucky in love. Another romantic infatuation came later in life—one with the married Ken Millar, a detective novelist who wrote famously and successfully under the name Ross Macdonald. She was probably seduced by Elizabeth Bowen on a trip she took to Ireland in 1950 (one particular Welty letter strongly suggests it), and she remained good friends with Bowen until Bowen’s death, but Marrs takes great pains to dispel any idea that Welty was a lesbian. If the lady doth protest too much, it seems that this is part of the task of the authorized biography: rumor dismissal, perhaps even counterintelligence. But it does seem clear that although she had many gay friends, male and female, Welty, like so many other women writers, had a predilection for the handsome, literary, unavailable man, though Elizabeth Bowen, it will be noted, was often said to resemble just that.

Elsewhere, Marrs’s biography becomes pretty much a rat-a-tat-tat of Welty’s many publications, trips, parties, and dinners. Welty seemed to love any populated room that did not have Carson McCullers in it. (McCullers was notoriously disliked by many.) In trying to combat the image of Welty as a reclusive spinster, Marrs may have erred in the other direction, making “Eudora,” as both she and Waldron call her, seem tirelessly social, a rollicking Holly Go-Welty, dining with the David Rockefellers, sailing off to Europe. Marrs’s book can seem a reaction formation to such comments as this, from the president of Dartmouth, who said rather humiliatingly of Welty, while bestowing on her an honor:

Eudora Welty has taught us that we have worlds to learn from a woman who has never married, who has rarely traveled, and who still lives in the home in which she spent her childhood.

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