Listening, learning to see, and finding a voice. These three skills that Eudora Welty developed during her childhood served her well later as an author. In this work, Welty describes experiences growing up and relates those to the skills she used being an author.
She listened for stories in the conversations of the adults around her and discovered that these stories were made up of scenes. Everyday “lies, strategies, jokes, and tricks” that people used were the stuff scenes were made of. And these scenes were full of “hints, pointers and promises” of things to find out about people. The events in our lives happen in a sequence, Welty describes, but not chronologically. The time the events follow is the “continuous thread of revelation.” Welty describes clearly the scenes she heard growing up, including trips in the car with her family, which she partially recreated in her short story, “Death of a Traveling Salesman.”
In college, she described learning to see through a passion for poetry: “I had come unprepared for the immediacy of poetry.” She discovered that “there’s so much more of life that only words can convey.” I read two of the short stories she referred to in One Writer’s Beginnings, “Death of a Traveling Salesman” and “Livvie.” It was clear how she incorporated years of experience listening and seeing while growing up into these stories with a very acute and descriptive eye.
Some of the best moments of One Writer’s Beginnings are her sharing the background of, and her reaction to, the stories she wrote. Regarding “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” she shares that she began it “writing from a distance,” but the story “led me closer.” She put the character in a scene and let him figure out why he was there. She writes, “greater than scene is situation, greater than situation is implication, and greater than all that is a single human being who can never be confined to a frame.”
It’s clear how she uses this understanding of character in “Death of a Traveling Salesman” to focus the story on the salesman as a human and more than just a person in a predicament or a situation by implication. The salesman’s experience is much more than a situation (though it clearly is on a shallow level; it’s almost a predicament when his car goes into a gulch), and, at the end of the story, it’s clearly more than just implication. The juxtaposition of the salesman with the couple is the conduit by which the reader watches the salesman be transformed in a profound way that only a human can be.
Though she states that none of her characters are biographical, she argues that a “writer is in part all of his characters.” Things she’d observed throughout her life emerge into her characters. People she had been, and people who were her antithesis, both get written into characters she creates. She believes that a character comes alive when a writer gets inside a character’s “skin, heart, mind and soul” to write that character’s experience as he or she experiences it.
Finally, she discusses the concept of confluence as a time or place where separate journeys converge. She believes that we experience remembering most intensely when we are at this juncture of two journeys. She writes that the living experience at those meeting places is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction.
This very intimate and penetrating work is well balanced between biography and reflections on writing. It’s fascinating to read thoughts on her own work, to watch her discuss themes and efforts she made in writing her stories, and to listen to her search out possible connections between different stories and characters. It seems Welty could not have been anything but a writer with her years of experience listening, seeing, and finding her voice.
No comments:
Post a Comment