Virtuoso Variations: Welty's Unstable Texts and Her Outtakes

Eudora Welty was the master of many styles in her life and in her writing. Her style changed in accordance with the occasion and there are, of course, marked differences between her public, personal, and private styles. It is obvious to any reader that her literary style is deliberately varied, from short story to short story and novel to novel, and also that she changed her style much over the years. It is perhaps less known that there are wonderfully fascinating elements in Welty’s impressive style and mental make-up that are most clearly expressed in her correspondence, interviews, and outtakes. Her most endearing feature was perhaps the temper and humor with which she defended her friends among fellow authors, attacked literary critics’ “silly notions” about her fiction, and rejected interviewers’ too easily acquired assumptions about her life and work. And she did this in a style that was anything but literary. I will illustrate this with examples from her deleted passages, her matter-of-fact correspondence with me, and the two long interviews she graciously granted me and later proofread—without mercy. During our interview sessions in February 1978, Welty spoke slowly and deliberately, and in a voice that held my full attention. It soon became clear to me that she was carefully guarding her privacy and refused to answer all personal questions. The first session lasted almost three hours—Welty gave the transcribed interviews her full attention, revised certain passages heavily, and cut a good number of other exchanges. Some were simply superfluous, as she saw immediately, others were too privately biographical, she insisted. There were among them passages that I hated to leave out. Our second meeting in Jackson was in June 1978, and it lasted for about two hours. First we went over some of the revisions of the first interview, that is, I pleaded to be allowed to keep certain passages, without much