Buy This Book: A Writer's Eye: Collected Book Reviews by Eudora Welty

From the University Press of Mississippi, a collection of Eudora Welty's book reviews which I whipped onto my Kindle recently in hopes of educating myself on how to review books. Welty's intelligent, compassionate, funny, and insightful reviews appeared in the NYT Review of Books, the NY Post, Sewanee Review, and other publications between 1942 and 1984. Just thinking about the tectonic shifts in literature and American culture during those four decades is kind of mind-boggling. Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Colette, Isak Dinesen, E. B. White, E. M. Forster, J. D. Salinger, Annie Dillard -- the list goes on. Check it out.

A Loving Observer (the photography of Eudora Welty)

Agent and Author: Eudora Welty and her "benevolent parasite"

While we're core-dumping a lot of hard info about the agent-author relationship this week, we're not saying much about the fairy tail romance that happens between an author and agent (or an author and editor) once in a blue moon, the marriage of true minds that breeds not only good money, but the more elusive goal: good art. One such exquisite click is chronicled in Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell By Michael Kreyling.

In his first letter to Welty, Russell wrote, "An agent is rather a benevolent parasite because authors as a rule make more when they have an agent than they do without one." He pulled no punches with her. He challenged her. Never let her off the hook. I read this book about a thousand years ago (I think it came out in the early '90s) because I was in a delicious all-things-Eudora phase, devouring any and all words of hers, but I ended up getting a lot more than I expected from this exchange of letters between her and Russell, who encouraged and guided her career. Author and Agent is a warm bath of beautiful language, but it's also a gimlet-eye look at the world of publishing, much of which has not changed a bit in the fifty years since these letters were written.

This astute observation from a New York Times article:

One of the bases for the "absolute trust" between him and Ms. Welty was his determination to respect the integrity of her work yet somehow translate it into an income for her. And the times were right; though publishing was always commercial, it had not yet developed its capacity to make the megabuck deal.

Mr. Russell first offered to be Ms. Welty's "benevolent parasite" in 1940, shortly after he had founded his literary agency with Henry Volkening, an English teacher at New York University. Ms. Welty accepted though she doubted the agency would be able to help her, since all she had to offer was "a collection of short stories by an unknown writer who doesn't ever want to write a novel first," and all that publishers wanted from her was that first novel she didn't wish to write.

What we then follow in the correspondence is her curious evolution into the novelist she thought she would never become. Mr. Russell encouraged her to go on writing her stories and found a market for them, both in national magazines and in a collection that was brought out by Doubleday...

Publishers had a feeling Eudora Welty had the talent to spin straw into gold, and they were right, but she needed her Rumpelstiltskin. As do we all.

All You Really Need to Know

I hear a lot of writers lamenting their lack of higher education, as if college classrooms hold the keys to the kingdom of publishing rather than academia.

Here's all I think you really need, other than a lifelong love of the written word:

"Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever really lost."

-- Eudora Welty,
One Writer's Beginnings, Finding a Voice

They don't teach that in Comparative Literature Studies, or English Literature of the Seventeenth Century, nor do you learn such a thing in Freshman Comp. It comes of keenly observing people, looking into your own heart, and daily exploring your discoveries on the page.

And oh, yes, read Ms. Welty's stories to glimpse a master at her work.