Was Eudora Welty Beautiful?

I lay in bed longer than usual this morning, thinking I didn’t really want to write this story. It always seems so indulgent when I let my muse have free rein. I worry that it reads like I’m much more pleased with myself than I am.

It began with a dream—a dream about Martha Hammond. She was my first neighbor. Her property backed into ours when I was a baby, and we lived on Northside Drive. She saw something in me that even my mother couldn’t see. I stuttered, or I should say I “stammered,” and that made it difficult to communicate, so I just didn’t. Many years later, Jess Roberts told me that Bell’s Palsey had paralyzed one of my vocal cords, and I laughed because it was just one more thing to make it difficult for me to speak.

In the dream, I met her at Galatoire's, which is a top-shelf restaurant in New Orleans. It’s funny because I don’t remember ever meeting Martha Hammond in New Orleans, but there’s a sort of spiritual connection between Jackson and New Orleans. I’m convinced it has something to do with the water flowing from the Pearl River into the Mississippi River and into Lake Pontchartrain.

I return to the table where my mother, my sister, Suzanne Marrs, and a woman who was not my wife but was playing my wife have been joined by Martha Hammond. I make excuses for the men, who apparently are at the bar discussing something with a guy from Hibernia Bank. So far, all of this could have actually happened. Both my dad and Rowan Taylor had regular dealings with Hibernia, even though they never wanted to.

The surreal part of the dream started when Martha Hammond asked about my book.

“The one just printed or the one I haven’t finished?” I asked.

Apparantly, she’d read the one just printed (which doesn’t exist), so she wants to know about the one I haven’t finished. And, in the dream, I gave air to an idea I’ve had for a long while now but have never dared breathe life into.

“Well,” I said, “It’s about William Winter’s 1982 Education Reform Act, told as an Arthurian legend.”

I’m not the author of the idea that the William Winter years were Mississippi’s Camelot, but I’ve quietly, and not so quietly, been trying to further that story for as long as I can remember.

Every culture needs a mythology. Mythology means “stories of the gods.” The word “Myth” has nothing to do with whether something is true or not. Sometimes, it’s very, very true.

Myths help people in a culture see themselves as better than they are. They illustrate their weaknesses and point to a way through them. Mississippi doesn’t have a Ulysses or a Philocotites, but we do have William Winter, and for four years, Governor and Mrs. Winter and their round table called “The Boys of Summer” tried to change Mississippi for the better. If that’s not Camelot, then I don’t know what is.

My problem with actually writing this book in the real world is that I have this vision of pitching the idea to a publisher and they might say something like, “We think it’s a great idea, but why should we hire you to write it and not Ray Mabus, Andy Mullins or Dick Molpus,” and then they laugh at me, and I walk away very sad. Truth be told, it’s not my story to tell, but I’ll continue planting that seed everywhere I can find a bare spot of ground for as long as I’m living.

Besides political mythical heroes, Mississippi has a pantheon of literary mythical heroes. It’s not hard to see William Faulkner as Hercules or Tennessee Williams as Prometheus, but I don’t know if there’s a parallel for Eudora Welty. She had the qualities of so many gods and demigods.

For the women of Eudora Welty’s generation, and the one after, and the one after that, it wasn’t uncommon for people to say really, very ugly things about her. That happens when you distinguish yourself, particularly in a creative field. It carries on until you die, and then the very same people sanctify you.

Wyatt Waters is too nice for people to make up stories about, but it often happens to painters. I once had a conversation with a guy who attributed all the stories about George E. Ohr (the Mad Potter) to Carl Wolf (the Millsaps professor). I tried to correct him, but he was adamant that he had the story right.

Among the stories other women told about Eudora Welty was that she was a lesbian. I honestly don’t know the truth about that, but I honestly don’t give a fuck. People will often say that she was “in love” with John Robinson, but from what I know of Eudora Welty, I can’t imagine there ever being a time when she didn’t know what John Robinson was. I believe they had a meeting of the minds. I believe she loved him dearly, but I’m not going to spread stories about how she “fell in love with him, and he broke her heart, so she never found another man.”

For one thing, she did find other men. She might have been guilty of falling in love with people she could never be with (I’m guilty of that myself), but there were other men, and she never removed John Robinson from her life.

Eudora Welty sought people whose minds were almost as remarkable as hers. If you were ever part of her retinue or even rumored to be part of it, it meant she considered there was something remarkable about your mind.

Eudora Welty, Charlotte Capers, and Jane Reid Petty formed a sort of three-headed hydra that ruled Mississippi's intellectual life for decades. Other brilliant people lived in awe of them. Lance Goss was once part of their collective and then not a part of it. I don’t know the details, and now that they’re all dead, I don’t know if I want to know the details.

One day, Lance told me that a young boy who was a witness intended to write a book about the murder of Frank Hains. “Oh,” I said. “I wish he wouldn’t.”

Now that I’ve read “Mississippi Sissy,” I can say there’s more to it than just Frank’s death, but I’m not at all satisfied with what’s been entered into Mississippi Mythology about Frank. The theater kids at Millsaps consider Frank their theatre ghost. He used to build our sets and review our plays. He was Lance’s closest friend. What good are myths if you can’t make a ghost of them?

I’ve thought about writing my version of the Frank Hains story. I consider it a gift to Lance and Frank himself. My research into the story consists mainly of old newspaper accounts, and to be honest, they turn my stomach. Frank worked for the Clarion Ledger in the years when my Uncle Tom ran it. He devoted a good bit of his life to the paper. I would have assumed the writers would have kind feelings toward him, even though he was dead, but you sure can’t tell it from the stories they published about the murder trial. You would have thought they worked for the defense.

The defense was basically that Frank was a promiscuous gay man, and promiscuous gay men are disgusting, so it’s not so bad that he got murdered with a hand tool. It’s a defense attorney’s job to say whatever he has to say to get a better deal for his client. I’m trying not to judge the lawyer here, mainly because I knew him and know how things ended badly for him. A journalist should have seen that for what it was, though, and not reported on the trial like it was a judgment on homosexuality itself.

The other thing you hear about Eudora Welty that came from the women in her generation but is preserved in our culture because people suck is one I heard just the other day.

“You know, she was just too ugly ever to get married, so of course, she had to write.”

As Miss Eudora got older and osteoporosis began to hit her pretty hard, the “too ugly” stories about her grew without any regard for whether they were true or not.

To begin with, when she was younger, there were men who found Eudora physically appealing. I’m not going to get into who they were, but they absolutely existed. If you look at photographs of a young Eudora Welty, you will see that she was tall and muscular and had the confidence that many women in Mississippi in her generation lacked, which is probably why they told stories on her.

She wasn’t ever the kind of woman to powder her face and make herself seem stupid and vulnerable to attract a man, and that alone could be the source of the “ugly” and the “lesbian” rumors. She was something the other women were not, and I suspect that caused a ripple in their vision of the world, especially when she started getting attention for her work. Once intellectuals in New York started to take notice of Eudora Welty, there were women in Mississippi who felt honor bound to take her down a peg. It never really worked out that way.

When I knew Eudora Welty, she was a little old lady with a hat and gloves who played bridge with my grandmother and went to the eleven o’clock service at Galloway on Sundays. Just the way people talked about her made me so nervous I could pee. I’d speak to her for a word or two, but not much more. Like most women in her generation, she knew me mainly from my Uncle Boyd, who I never met but shared a name with.

As a child, I thought Eudora Welty looked like Patience and Fortitude, the marble lion sculptures guarding the New York Public Library entrance. They guarded the concept of books, and she wrote actual books. It made sense to me. As an artist, when I see Eudora Welty’s face, when she was young, and when she was old, I mostly see eyes and mouth and a sort of drawn-out height to her visage. Her face is iconic.

My cousin Ben Watts sculpted a life-size bronze of Miss Eudora sitting on a bench not a hundred feet from where we used to smoke in Lance Goss’s office at Millsaps. The kids like to bring her beers and dress her in scarves and hats when it gets cold. Making the statue was such a brilliant idea. As a mythical character, Miss Eudora is now a part of the Millsaps experience, and she shares a space with the ghosts of Lance Goss and Frank Hains.

When Frank died, Miss Eudora took over his collum for one issue and told the world the story of Frank Hains as she knew him. Whenever I see people discuss other aspects of Frank’s life or death, I always send a copy of that to them. What she wrote should be the myth of Frank Hains, and Mississippi needs myths.

I consider myself something of an expert on women who are beautiful. I can see it in them even when they’re seventy pounds overweight or well into their nineties. You can’t hide beauty from me.

I used to correspond with and talk with Fay Wray, the actress, on the phone. Fay Wray was a huge fan of Eudora Welty. As much as I wanted to talk about her time in Hollywood, she wanted to talk about life in Mississippi with Eudora Welty.

She once told me that she had dinner with Eudora Welty and Lauren Bacall, and a photographer took their picture. If she could find a copy, she’d send it to me. She never found a copy. Fay was in her nineties by then, so I didn’t press her on anything.

I don’t talk about it often, but I consider Lauren “Slim” Bacall one of the most beautiful women who ever lived. I completely understand what Humphrey Bogart saw in her. Fay Wray was up there, too. Howard Hughes pursued her for years, as did many other men. There was an awful lot more to Fay Wray than just King Kong.

I can’t detect even the slightest incongruency in Eudora Welty sitting with Lauren Bacall and Fay Wray. From what I can see, they’re three of the most beautiful women of their generation, even though they looked nothing like each other.

I can’t really divorce the ferocious mind or generous creativity that Eudora Welty had from her face. Looking at photographs of when she was young, I can say without a doubt that I would have noticed her if I had been a young man in the nineteen-thirties. I sure as hell noticed her in all the decades after the sixties.

I think she was beautiful. Whatever physical beauty is, and whatever it means, she had it. That’s just a tiny part of a much bigger story, though. Mississippi needs a pantheon. Our culture can be quite anemic sometimes. For me, she’ll always be a marble lion guarding the library. For me, that’s enough.