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30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A well-researched, engaging look at the life of a powerful American voice, August 11, 2005
More than 60 years since the publication of her first book, A CURTAIN OF GREEN, Eudora Welty's status as a major voice in American letters is unquestioned. One of the chief joys of her art is evinced in the ways her finely wrought short stories and elaborately patterned novels capture colorful characters whose depth and dignity are matched by a spirited, often unselfconscious zest for life and living. It is furthermore acknowledged that the range of men and women who people Welty's narratives offers consistent proof that "regional literature" is as varied as it is universal, that even the most geographically cloistered characters (think "Livvie" in the story of that name) are capable of feeling and sensing the same sort of complexities of the most sophisticated, urban-dwelling aristocrats who people Henry James's fiction.
With respect to the author, however, most scholars tend to dismiss Welty's emotional and active life as devoid of incident or color. In a widely read "Introduction" to the author in THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, VOLUME 2, for example, the editors insist that her "outwardly uneventful life and her writing are most intimately connected to the topography and atmosphere of the season and the soil of the native Mississippi that ha[d] been her lifelong home." Such logic assumes Welty sacrificed the chance of a fulfilling personal life in the service of her art.
Suzanne Marrs, the author of EUDORA WELTY: A Biography, insists that this is a reductive view that fails to consider the author's full engagement in matters of family, romantic love, travel, and politics over the course of nine decades. In a patient, well-documented, thoroughly considered overview of the writer's life, Marrs debunks the notion that Welty's existence was "uneventful"; and if, even after such a painstaking process, Welty's personal narrative seems tame in comparison to the high drama of her mentor, Katherine Anne Porter, or the intense personal trials of her contemporary, Richard Wright, Marrs's EUDORA WELTY amply documents the writer's full participation in almost every aspect of a long and fulfilling life.
Organized into 11 chapters, EUDORA WELTY first traces the author's sheltered upbringing by two well-educated parents who migrated from the north shortly before her birth; it then delves into key moments of the author's self discovery. (Marrs's careful, patient analysis reveals that Welty's talents weren't simply literary; her lifelong passion for photography began as early as the 1930s.) Just as Welty's formative years as a young writer led to the publication of her first and perhaps most celebrated book, she was confronted by the atrocities of World War II --- an event that affected her on a political and personal level. It is in the ensuing decade that we witness a passionate, albeit frustrated, long-distance love affair between Welty and longtime friend John Robinson. Exactly why this relationship did not progress into a physical one leading to marriage is, with a good deal of evidence, attributed to Robinson's ambiguous sexuality, a fact that he was painfully slow to realize and one that ultimately placed Welty, a longtime friend to many homosexual men, in a strained position with regards to same-sex couples.
Several other subjects are thoroughly considered from this period as well, including extensive travel throughout the United Sates and Europe and the author's prolific string of largely acclaimed publications that, from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, led to a conspicuous 15 years of creative silence. During that time, Marrs documents Welty's heavy involvement in Mississippi politics, her stand on hot-button issues, such as racism, and her earnest attempt to break writer's block through prolonged work on LOSING BATTLES, her most ambitious and fully developed novel, that ironically grew out of a short story.
By the early 1970s, Welty worked through her writer's block with another string of impressive publications, including THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER, which earned her the Pulitzer Prize. But Marrs's EUDORA WELTY is not an in-depth study of the writer's work. (For this readers should consult the biographer's ONE WRITER'S IMAGINATION: The Fiction of Eudora Welty.) Instead, Marrs here considers Welty's fiction as representative of the writer's personal struggles. The brutal rape scene that concludes the story "At the Landing," the final fiction in Welty's short story collection THE WIDE NET, is read as a "misuse of power and violation of individual sanctity that Eudora associated with fascism and even at times with politicians more generally." Such readings are insightful and well-considered, but I often wondered if Marrs might go a bit further: in the previous example, the rape victim, Jenny, is first brutalized by a man who, though he "violates" her, still holds her heart. Is this perhaps a projection of her feelings about her frustrated passions for Robinson?
Marrs also considers a second romance in Eudora's life, this one with writer Kenneth Millar, a relationship that bloomed from a platonic, mutual admiration for one another's work. This romance, which appears to have remained unconsummated, was mutually nourishing for both parties until Millar's sad death to Alzheimer's. In addition to these romances, Marrs discusses Welty's close but difficult relationship with her mother, her fruitful correspondences with fellow writers, and her evolution from woman-as-letters to elder statesperson in the arts.
Far surpassing Ann Waldron's 1998 EUDORA, Suzanne Marrs's EUDORA WELTY is altogether an engaging, well-researched and --- to my way of thinking --- necessary read for any self-respecting Americanist and Welty scholar.
--- Reviewed by Tony Leuzzi
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Woman of the World Models Vigorous Aging, June 13, 2006
Solid research by a top Eudora Welty scholar is coupled here with close friendship in the last 15 years of Welty's long life. Suzanne Marrs friendship with Welty gave her unparalleled access to papers and a wide circle of Eudora Welty's friends.
In addition to the text there is a delightful section of 16 pages of photos ranging from Welty's childhood through old age--including a few she took herself.
Welty emerges from the pages of Marrs' biography as a woman engaged in the world--not sheltered from it as the popular myth of her life suggested. Even during the years of her so-called Writer's Block, she traveled widely and worked hard to craft and deliver speeches at colleges and universities that are later gathered into essays.
I was particularly touched by the passages relating to her involvement in taking care of her mother in old age and of how she strove--ultimately not for publication--to transform her pain at Ken Millar's (aka Ross Macdonald) Alzheimer's.
Although she grieved as close friends died, Eudora Welty also seems a wonderful model for vigorous aging as she kept active, involved, tried new things, and kept a cadre of acquaintances of all ages in her orbit.
--Janet Grace Riehl, author Sightlines: A Poet's Diary
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Saint Eudora, December 12, 2006
This review is from: Eudora Welty: A Biography (Paperback)
I like Suzanne Marrs' book but it is less a conventional biography than an annotated account of every social visit and trip abroad taken by Eudora Welty during her eighty plus years of living.
Welty seemed to enjoy her reputation as an outsider artist, and from her Mississippi roots she took strength, but she sure was connected to the bigtime power brokers of New York and London. No wonder her career took off so early. If your best friends were Mary Lou Aswell, the premiere fiction editor of the day, and oh, William and Emmy Maxwell, the NEW YORKER fiction editor and his wealthy wife, your career would skyrocket too. She won them all over with a winning combination of direct honesty, Southern charm, a real curiosity about the lives of others, and a nose for showing up all the right parties. Marrs shows us a Welty obsessed as Paris Hilton with making the rounds and being seen everywhere, and if you took out all the parties, dinners, and chic foreign travel, this giant biography would be about 80 pages. Elizabeth Bowen told British readers that DELTA WEDDING was "new" and "great," didn't mention their deep friendship. As one reads the book the spectacle of one hand washing the other, of sheer log rolling, is a living thing, frightening in its implications. First Welty created her own career, then it seemed to take over
And sad, sad, sad! If you credit Marrs' reading of Welty's life, she spent years pining after a man who turned out to be gay, and then when she was an old lady she fell in love with a fellow novelist, one married to yet a third. Pining away after Ross Macdonald (Ken Millar), she didn't care what people thought. She would give his books favorable reviews in the NEW YORK TIMES, why not? They dedicated books to each other and played out their celebrity romance in public, a mutual admiration society people enjoyed observing the way they liked to see Agatha Christie married to the archaeologist Max Mallowan, as two orders of celebrity drawn to each other like iron filings to a magnet. Was Millar in love with Welty? He told Reynolds Price he was. However, Marrs is big on "perhaps" (a word used over two hundred forty times in her biography) and it's hard to pin her down. The thrust of Marr's biography is to utterly destroy what's left of the reputation on Margaret Millar, the brilliant crime writer Ross Macdonald stayed married to. It's as if I was writing a biography of Angelina Jolie and felt compelled to obliterate poor Jennifer Aniston by concentrating solely on her bad habits and not on her possibly hurt feelings. When Welty hears the news that Margaret Millar has finally died, her response is terse and grim. "'Thank you for the information,' was Eudora's only reply."
Marrs, an academic working in Mississippi loved Eudora herself and by her own admission became one of her best young friend. And hence she might be chary of saying anything analytical or remotely critical about Welty. Unseemly is the number of pages she spends demolishing a previous biographer who had the temerity to call Welty "homely." It's pathetic that Marrs should have found it necessary to insist on Welty's good looks. I'm sorry, but if Ann Waldron's book may have suffered from a lack of cooperation from Welty's friends, at least it tried to penetrate the surface of America's best loved author. Too many friends will obscure the real subject of a biography, as well as too little. The one place where Marrs' book is compelling is in the slow, detailed analysis of Welty's last 30 years and how she wound up in a nightmare of being unable to write fiction. Surrounded by sycophants and scholars who, by the 1970s, had established a Eudora Welty industry, she lived in a state of denial, accepting by Marrs' count 39 honorary degrees in part, or so it seems, to reassure herself that she was universally adored. She had trouble saying no, and she'd go to the opening of an envelope. It was a terrible waste, and yet, what else could she do to find a scrap of happiness? She had to know people loved her. Scholars and helpers wound up keeping her name in the public eye by compiling new books of her own writings, publishing limited editions of her juvenilia, having her sign limited edition copies, and arranging for numerous TV interviews.
Occasionally Marrs lets the "beloved" mask slip and shows us glimpses of what might have been the real Welty. Her unexplained hatred of Martha Gellhorn--that "phony"--is one such opening. Or when Bill Maxwell, exasperated by Welty's whining, asks her how she could possibly be "broke" when she has a musical running on Broadway. Marrs has an empathic, eccentric style of her own, given to oratorical repetition. "This is not to say that Eudora had become a pacifist. She had not." Sometimes she seems to have an axe to grind herself. What's the point in demonizing the late Norma Brickell, for example, referring to her offhandedly, without a single citation, as a "notoriously dominating personality"? Could it be that Eudora resented Norma for having married Herschel Brickell, one of Welty's platonic boyfriends? If so, why not say so? Norma Brickell is unjustly maligned here and no one is going to speak up on her behalf. It wasn't Norma who voted against Eudora getting her nth Guggenheim--no, it was Herschel, "because, as he put it, "Them as has gits."
I hope that Marrs will devote her energies on Welty's behalf to the extent of preparing editions of the two abandoned novel projects that caused her idol so much suffering, the novel called "Nicotiana" or "The Last of the Figs," and the 70s rape revenge tale she refers to as "The Shadow Club." It would be a shame indeed if none of this material was made available to Welty's vast public. Look how Hemingway's estate authorized the publication of novel after novel, after Hemingway's suicide. Spruced up and with forewords by Richard Ford or Reynolds Price, we'd have a new couple of Welty bestsellers on our hands.
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