Signposts in a Strange Land by Walker Percy

Author:Walker Percy [Percy, Walker]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: ebook
ISBN: 9781453216378
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Eudora Welty in Jackson

WHAT IS MOST VALUABLE about Eudora Welty is not that she is one of the best living short-story writers. (It was startling that when I tried to think of anybody else as good, two women and one man came to mind, all three Southerners: Katherine Anne Porter, Caroline Gordon, and Peter Taylor.) Nor is it that she is a woman of letters in the old sense, versatile and many-voiced in her fiction and as distinguished in criticism. No, what is valuable is that she has done it in a place. That is to say, she has lived all her life in a place and written there and the writing bears more than an accidental relation to the place. Being a writer in a place is not the same as being a banker in a place. But it is not as different as it is generally put forward as being.

It is of more than passing interest that Eudora Welty has always lived in Jackson and that the experience has been better than endurable. This must be the case, because if it hadn’t been, she’d have left. Although I do not know Eudora Welty, I like to imagine that she lives very tolerably in Jackson. At least, she said once that she was to be found “underfoot in Jackson.” What does such an association between a writer and a town portend? It portends more, I would hope, than such-and-such a trend or characteristic of “Southern literature.”

For Eudora Welty to be alive and well in Jackson should be a matter of considerable interest to other American writers. The interest derives from the coming need of the fiction writer, the self-professed alien, to come to some terms with a community, to send out emissaries, to strike an entente. The question is: How can a writer live in a place without either succumbing to angelism and haunting it like a ghost or being “on,” playing himself or somebody else and watching to see how it comes out? The answer is that it is at least theoretically possible to live as one imagines Eudora Welty lives in Jackson, practice letters—differently from a banker banking but not altogether differently—and sustain a relation with one’s town and fellow townsmen which is as complex as you please, even ambivalent, but in the end life-giving. It is a secret relationship but not necessarily exploitative. One thinks of Kierkegaard living in Copenhagen and taking great pride in making an appearance on the street every hour, so that he would be thought an idler. But it is impossible to imagine Kierkegaard without Copenhagen. Town and writer sustain each other in secret ways. Deceits may be practiced. But one is in a bad way without the other.

The time is coming when the American novelist will tire of his angelism—of which obsessive genital sexuality is the most urgent symptom, the reaching out for the flesh which has been shucked—will wonder how to get back into a body, live in a place, at a street address.

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