Eudora Welty: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 2)
Eudora Welty, One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression: A Snapshot Album (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996).
"Out front was a clean dirt yard with every vestige of grass patiently uprooted and the ground scarred in deep whorls from the strike of Livvie's broom. Rose bushes with tiny blood-red roses blooming every month grew in threes on either side of the steps. On one side was a peach tree, on the other a pomegranate. Then coming around up the path from the deep cut of the Natchez Trace below was a line of bare crape-myrtle trees with every branch of them ending in a colored bottle, green or blue. There was no word that fell from Solomon's lips to say what they were for, but Livvie knew that there could be a spell put in trees, and she was familiar from the time she was born with the way bottle trees kept evil spirits from coming into the house--by luring them inside the colored bottles, where they cannot get out again. Solomon had made the bottle trees with his own hands over the nine years, in labor amounting to about a tree a year, and without a sign that he had any uneasiness in his heart, for he took as much pride in his precautions against spirits coming in the house as he took in the house, and sometimes in the sun the bottle trees looked prettier than the house did." --- Eudora Welty
Eudora Welty called her photographs "snapshots." It was a private passion and did not receive widespread attention until much later in life and after her death. In the 1930's, just as her writing career began to take off, she considered both as a possible profession. While she let photography drop out of her life (she left her Rolleiflex in the Paris metro and obstinately never replaced it), she believed in the connection between the two arts. She wrote in the memoir One Writer's Beginnings:
Making pictures of people in all sorts of situations, I learned that every feeling waits upon its gesture, and I had to be prepared to recognize this moment when I saw it. These were things a story writer needed to know.
The 1972 Paris Review interview does not touch upon her photography or its connection to her writing. This is not surprising; The Paris Review was interested in her fiction and her photography did not reach a large audience until 1978 (One Time, One Place). The bulk of the interview explores the qualities of Southern dialogue, of Southern places, and of a Southern propensity to stay close to home and talk. Place and talk -- that's the core of the interview, and given Welty's life long connection to the place and people of Mississippi, it seems fitting. She is an artist (writer) who has followed her subjects thoroughly.
Eudora Welty, Home By Dark
Despite the absence of talk about photography, I tried to catch its echo somewhere within all the other remarks. It happened in Welty's discussion of dialogue. I picture her moving through the city, her ears her camera as she collected the snapshots of the day. Rather than "street photography," she gives us "street expressions." I quote it at length because the opening offers an excellent description of how dialogue can and should function in a dramatic scene:
Welty: In its beginning, dialogue's the easiest thing in the world to write when you have a good ear, which I think I have. But as it gones on, it's the most difficult, because it has so many ways to function. Sometimes I needed to make a speech do three or four or five things at once -- reveal what the character said but also what he thought he said, what he hid, what others were going to think he meant, and what they misunderstood, and so forth -- all in his single speech. And the speech would have to keep the essence of this one character, his whole particular outlook, in concentrated form. This isn't to say I succeeded. But I guess it explains why dialogue gives me my greatest pleasure in writing. I used to laugh out loud sometimes when I wrote it -- the way P.G. Wodehouse is said to do. I'd think of some things my characters would say, and even if I couldn't use it, I would write the scene out just ot let them loose on something -- my private show.
Interviewer: Where does the dialogue come from?
Welty: Familiarity. Memory of the way things get said. Once you have heard certain expressions, sentences, you almost never forget them. It's like sending a bucket down the well and it always comes up full. You don't know you've remembered, but you have. And you listen for the right word, in the present, and you hear it. Once you're into a story everything seems to apply -- what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you're writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.
Eudora Welty, Window Shopping
Aside from a discussion of dialogue, something else resonates in the background. Welty was emphatic about calling her images "snapshots" in order to privilege the sense of a Southern family album unfolding before the viewer. She was not interested in creating social documents, in pointed contrast with what she saw Walker Evans and others doing during the Depression. She was interested in seeing what was before her and recording it, something she could do well because she was a part of that world. A similar insider/outsider, recorder/social documentator comparison appears in discussion of a particular event in her hometown: the Medgar Evans assassination. The murder became the subject of her only topical story:
I'm certain it is. It pushed up through something else I was working on. I had been having a feeling of uneasiness over the things being written about the South at that time because most of them were done in other parts of the country, and I thought most were synthetic. They were perfectly well-intentioned stories but generalities written from a distance to illustrate generalities. When that murder was committed, it suddenly crossed my consciousness that I knew what was in that man's mind because I'd lived all my life where it happened. It was the strangest feeling of horror and compulsion all in one. I tried to write from the interior of my own South, and that's why I dared to put it in the first person.
The editor of Eudora Welty as Photographer puts the connection between the two arts as simple and direct as possible before the reader/viewer: The snapshots "illustrate both the formal and narrative skills of framing the world as only a great short story writer could." In the Paris Review interview, Welty explains the short story as the domain of mood and of the ephemeral: "Characters , setting, time, events, are all subject to the mood. And you can try more empheral, more fleeting things in a story -- you can work more by suggestion -- than in a novel. Less is resolved, more is suggested, perhaps."
This is exactly what we find in her images.
