Centennial literary observations are frequently billed as occasions of rediscovery, opportunities to revisit a forgotten writer and observe again what made them memorable, or even merely fashionable, to begin with. What though of the case where a writer never really went away at all? That’s the situation in many ways of Eudora Welty, whose 100th birthday takes place in April. For many readers, she requires no reintroduction, and particularly in the Deep South her work still maintains a certain pleasant familiarity. I suspect that most people who would fail the softest literary pop quiz would instantly know that the e-mail software they use was named in homage to the author of “Why I Live at the P.O.”
The University Press of Mississippi is one of the happy beneficiaries of all things Welty. Photographs, the collection of the author’s camerawork that the press brought out in 1989, has sold over 20,000 copies in hardcover and a further 13,500 copies in paper. In all, at the beginning of the year, there were 23 titles published by the University Press of Mississippi — for sure, a backlist ATM, though one that begs the question as to what else the press could do on the occasion of the centenary.
The solution may be in the two books UPM has just brought out, both edited by Eudora Welty Society director and Georgia State professor Pearl Amelia McHaney, Occasions, an omnibus publication of previously ungathered essays, journalistic pieces, reviews, and commemorative writings; and Eudora Welty as Photographer, which includes 43 images, most of which have been previously uncollected. The first title includes such novelties as Welty’s parodic take on Edmund Wilson’s damning review of Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust (she published it in the Department of Amplification in The New Yorker), a goofy send up of a Popular Mechanics article “101 Things Any Bright Girl Can Do” whereby Welty instructed lady readers on how to make a homemade turban; and even a recipe for a savory chicken pie.
The last item notwithstanding, the essays offer up a wry and knowing side of Welty’s writing, one that puts a small dent in the simplistic but pervasive view of her as a quaintly sheltered mascot of relatively genteel southern writing and something like what Claudia Roth Pierpont once called “a kind of Eleanor Roosevelt of literature” (Pierpont’s view is included in a short but very good overview of Welty’s career, reception, and reputation in Elaine Showalter’s terrific new book A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx.)
Meanwhile, Eudora Welty as Photographer continues the argument McHaney has made previously for seeing the author’s work behind the camera not merely as a propaedeutic incitement for writing but as a career path that she might have pursued but for the good fortune she found in getting her writing published. In her essay in the book, McHaney, who is also overseeing the expansion of the Eudora Welty Newsletter into the Eudora Welty Review, asks us to imagine that the writer had instead taken a different path and devoted herself fully to photography. She lays out how seriously Welty pursued photography in the 1930s — and the lengths to which she went to consider photography, rather than writing, as a career. (A lapidary exhibition of Welty’s New York City photographs of the 1930s just closed at the Museum of the City of New York; it is traveling to the Mississippi Museum of Art, in Jackson, and potentially other venues.)
Welty’s Native Daughter popularity even figures in the renaming campaigning underway at the Mississippi University for Women —the formerly single-sex state college that began admitting men in 1982. Enrollment has long lagged by comparison to other colleges in the state, and some administrators believe that dropping the “W” tag could help in recruitment efforts (an assertion that has incidentally been part of a nasty spat with the school’s alumnae association). Welty-Reneau is one of the three names being considered (the shared name belongs to Sallie Reneau, a 19th-century advocate of women’s education in the South and founder of Reneau Female Academy, predecessor to the present-day MUW) — and this despite the fact that Welty never actually graduated from the school. (She left after two years before receiving her bachelor’s degree at the University of Wisconsin.) The results of a survey of the potential new name will be announced in the next several weeks — maybe the biggest Welty birthday present of all.
(Brainstorm illustration incorporating a portrait of Welty at the Southern Folklife Digital Archive and a Mississippi landscape photo by Flickr user NatalieMaynor)