Eudora Welty Writing Elizabeth Bowen, “Feeling into Words”

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Welty’s letters to Bowen quoted in this article are in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Elizabeth Bowen Collection. For all such correspondence see Welty, Eudora Welty to Elizabeth Bowen.

² All quotations from Welty’s short fiction are from The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, 1^st ed., Harcourt Brace, 1982. Page numbers will be noted parenthetically in the text.

³ Glendinning 108; Ellmann 30; Toomey; d’Alton. The unconsummated marriage claim arises from a letter to Bowen from Henry House after their first tryst in 1933. Bowen, 34, had been married to Cameron for 10 years. House, surprised that Bowen “is a virgin,” writes doltishly, “I thought you had some malformation … had I known … how much less gloom would have sat across that breakfast tray!” (qtd. in Feigel).

⁴ Glendinning shoehorns Bowen into behavioral boxes, arguing that “femme” characteristics trump “butch” mannerisms. In conversation and in “knocking back drinks” Bowen presented as a gentleman, though her personality was “preeminently considered feminine.” Her “fondness for cosmetics” and care for her appearance overcame the “gentlemanly” (238).

⁵ Deirdre Toomey, in the Dictionary of National Biography, dismisses Bowen’s emotional stakes in intimate relationships, believing she used them pedagogically, describing a “brief affair” with May Sarton, “which [Bowen] took lightly.” Toomey argues that Bowen delimited her affair as one between an older woman mentor and a younger woman, which Toomey insists was not lesbianism. Ian d’Alton’s entry on Bowen in the Dictionary of Irish Biography claims “She had admirers of both sexes,” detailing only affairs with men. Biographers fixate on Bowen’s ongoing relationship with Charles Ritchie.

⁶ See Marrs 216–217.

⁷ Trouard questions Marrs’ conclusions about the letters, responding to the “smoking gun of ardency” passages with rhetorical questions that imply a romantic relationship (“Missing Bowen” 269). Like Trouard, Kathryn Stelmach Artuso writes about Welty’s and Bowen’s affinities as global southerners, overshadowing her discussion of their relationship. Artuso reinscribes the “smoking gun” passages that Trouard quotes, condescendingly arguing that one of the passages “gush[es] with schoolgirl rapture of infatuation.” Another “teems with rather erotic ecstasy and nearly inarticulate ardor, as her pseudo-sentences run with delirium” (41). Artuso here internalizes misogynist quashing of relationships between women as immature. Neither reads Welty’s letters through a lens of linguistic innovation or queer identity. In her unauthorized biography, Waldron speculates that Bowen and Welty were lesbian lovers (332). Within her description of the Welty-Bowen correspondence, Marrs attempts to diffuse such assumptions by quoting homophobic passages from Welty and Robinson’s correspondence. The passages she quotes read, however, as compulsory cultural performance of heteronormativity (202–204).

⁸ Millar chronicled the hard-boiled detection of Lew Archer as the mystery writer Ross MacDonald.

⁹ Judith Butler argues that the definition of “queer” remains in flux, its primary quality a means of contesting constructed identities (228). Teresa de Lauretis coined “queer theory” in 1991 to bypass the binary “gay” and “lesbian.” In any binary category encompassing men and women, women lag behind (v–vii). “Queer theory,” however, is a misnomer; queer opposes categories, systems, logic, and consistencies. De Lauretis clarifies that “queer” rejects heterosexuality as the measure for all sexual identities.

¹⁰ Scholars have begun to perceive Welty’s work in a frame of queer theory but have yet to contextualize her relationship with Bowen.⁠ Draucker, Nissen, Pratt, Tipton, and Trefzer are most germane to this essay.

¹¹ Work by Bennett and Royle, hoogland, Murphy, and Tucker offer generative queer readings of Bowen’s work.

¹² See Glendinning, who echoes Virginia Woolf’s assessment that the novel has “too many knots in the rope” (81–82). See also Ellmann 88 and Lee 64.

¹³ Hermione decorates a punt for a meeting of the Mother’s Union, an Anglican organization underscoring the value of Christian mothers. See Moyse, chapter 1, for the organization’s history.

¹⁴ Rebecca Mark begins the conversation about gay sexuality in The Golden Apples (175–231).

¹⁵ John Robinson’s nephew, Michael Robinson, reports pulling a steamer trunk stuffed with Welty’s letters from storage under Robinson’s house. He took them to Welty in a garbage bag (Laney).

¹⁶ The letters to Robinson in this period are in the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections in Hill Memorial Library at LSU; the library granted permission to quote from these letters. For all such correspondence see Welty, Eudora Welty to John Robinson.

¹⁷ Marrs surmises that Welty’s reaction to the story resulted from her understanding it as critical of her (216–217).

¹⁸ Dawn Trouard also argues for Robinson as the key biographical influence in Bride (“Nightingales” 670).

¹⁹ In her essay on Bowen and Welty, Trouard argues for Bowen’s centrality to the collection, though basing her claims on Glendinning’s disqualifying assertion that Bowen’s intimate relationships served her aesthetic program. Trouard contends that Welty absorbs Bowen’s “galvanizing view of the artistic uses of intimacy and the erotics of friendship,” allowing her to write Bride “during this critical emotional period” (“Missing Bowen” 261). I agree that Welty depicts autonomous women in Bride as those unencumbered by conventional relationships, free from heteronormative gender construction and “compulsory heterosexuality” (Adrienne Rich’s coinage in “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”). However, autonomy and freedom do not obviate intimacy; Welty’s shared intimacy with Bowen shapes the crucial stories in Bride.

²⁰ Bowen’s letters to Welty are in the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson, Mississippi. The letters must be read in the context of both Bowen’s and Welty’s desire to keep their personal lives private. Bowen required discretion and emotional control in her friends. In a letter to Welty on May 21 of 1950, Bowen describes her distaste for the drama of Carson McCullers trying to seduce her, referring to her sarcastically as a “suffering gem.” She quips, “You and I had better start being suffering gems, out of sheer self-defense” (Bowen, Letter, 21 May 1950). Trouard offers that Bowen often aborted relationships with women abruptly when she sensed overstepping, as with McCullers (“Missing Bowen” 262–63). Welty’s guardedness, honored by her friends, matched Bowen’s. She intended to destroy her private papers, for example, believing writers reveal themselves wholly in their work. None of Welty’s friends spoke with Waldron for her unauthorized biography.

²¹ Waldron dates this letter 1951. Trouard claims that Welty uses the star image in a letter to Ken Millar, setting up the two recipients of the image, Bowen and Millar, as equal objects of Welty’s passion. Crucially, however, the image is in a letter from Millar to Welty (Trouard, “Missing Bowen” 270; Marrs 358).

²² From Bowen’s Court Welty responds to her agent Diarmuid Russell about The New Yorker editor’s critique: “[Harold Ross] is coming up extra hard against something he couldn’t know, wouldn’t care about either—that it’s my favorite story I ever happened to write so I am specially sensitive and tender on the subject” (quoted in Kreyling, Agent 155–56).

²³ Welty romanticized Bowen’s Court, sparked by her feelings for Bowen. The days of aristocratic entertaining long passed, Bowen nevertheless threw large dinner parties and accommodated guests stylishly. Objectively the house was in ruins. Bowen had to sell it in 1959. Its new owner knocked it down. Bowen’s book, Bowen’s Court, gives a complete history of the house.

²⁴ Welty begins the letter postmarked April 27, 1951, with thanks to Robinson and Enzo for a gift, albeit in comic syntax, “get the bird I did—so red the bird! I do admire him and thank you and Enzo for the wish and love” In the margins of page one of the typed letter, she pens a note: “Dear Enzo, Good luck! Thank you for signing the bird—Eudora.”

²⁵ Welty uncannily anticipates Sara Ahmed’s thinking about “the relationship between the queer struggle for a bearable life and aspirational hopes for a good life.” She argues that even struggle is hard without aspiration, and aspirations must have form. She continues that Latin root for “aspiration means ‘to breathe.’ I think that the struggle for a bearable life is the struggle for queers to have space to breathe.” Breathing freely is aspirational, she adds. “With breath comes imagination. With breath comes possibility” (120).

²⁶ In this letter, Welty tells Bowen of her plans to sail on the Liberté March 14, arriving at Plymouth on the 20^th.

²⁷ Marrs attributes Welty’s unhappiness at this time to racist politics and living with her mother (231).

²⁸ Welty read three stories at the 92^nd Street Y on January 22, 1953.

²⁹ Thank you to archivists at the Hill Memorial Library at LSU and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas for providing copies of Welty’s letters. I am grateful to Derek Hackett, Sarah Kersh, Wendy Moffat, Claire Seiler, and Emily Wylie for insightful readings of an early draft. Thanks to Audrey Schlimm for invaluable bibliographic copyediting. Conversation with Robert Aguirre, Elizabeth Frost, Raphael Gunner, and Sharon O’Brien has been indispensable. Sarah Ford and Rebecca Mark have been unstinting in their generosity. Any infelicities are my own.