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Welty's One Writer's BeginningsStephen M. Fuller aa University of Southern MississippiPublished online: 30 Mar 2010.

To cite this article: Stephen M. Fuller (2002) Welty's One Writer's Beginnings, TheExplicator, 60:3, 157-159, DOI: 10.1080/00144940209597695

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Slide, Anthony. Gay u d Lesbian Churucters and Themes in Mystery Novels: A Criticul Guide ica, 1999. 387-585.

to Over 500 Works in English. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland and Co., 1993.

Welty’s ONE WRITER’S BEGINNINGS

Two particular episodes mark themselves out as of crucial importance in the evolution of Eudora Welty’s personality as One Wrirer’s Beginnings documents it. Both appear in “Learning to See,” the second section of the book, and they both take place in West Virginia, the state of her mother’s birth. In the first episode, Welty recollects encountering a “rolled up” (49) scroll upon which appears a drawing of the Andrews (Welty’s family on her mother’s side) fami- ly tree. In the second, she remembers ascending a nearby mountain and drink- ing spring water. Both scenes constitute profound moments of self-realization, although the knowledge gained, different in each instance, changes her in dis- tinct and opposing ways. Exposure to the family tree introduces Welty to a nar- rative that confines and restricts her sense of self; the epiphany on the moun- tainside liberates and restores her individuality that she loses early in life, wins in adulthood, and loses again in old age. Midway through section 2, Welty meditates on this process of gaining and losing independence: “To grow up is to fight for it, to grow old is to lose it after having possessed it” (60).

When Welty describes the “home-made drawing of the Andrews family tree” (49), she does not “know from whom it came or to whom it was passed” (49). The mysterious circumstances of the drawing’s origin identify it as an artifact that has an unknown author who has solely determined its configura- tion. Welty does know that it tells her a story that she cannot refute because the facts, as they reach her from the past, remain beyond her grasp. A child does not have the intellectual wherewithal or the canniness adulthood brings to alert him or her to such a drawing’s import.

The tree details the Andrews family history, its narrative details Andrews family history-who married whom, who mothered children, who fathered children, who did neither, who died, and who still lives. Not knowing the cir- cumstances of the tree’s production disempowers those whom its knowledge affects. The document, which seamlessly binds the family history together in a “massed whole” (50), exerts a nearly insurmountable control over the present because the mystery surrounding its authorship and its preservation within the Andrews family as an heirloom add an unwarranted gravitas to its narrative.

Welty seems attuned to the contradiction inherent in a “home-made” (49)

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family tree, however. The tree suggests the stability of the natural environ- ment, which provides the earth into which trees sink their roots. To an extent, trees grow regardless of human events and owe their existence to unknown powers, perhaps incommensurate with human comprehension. A document made by hand, however, springs not like grass from the ground or trees from seeds. Deliberately, the family tree “was drawn as a living tree,” and the “names and the dates,” which perch upon “every branch, twig, and leaf,” appear in an apparently immutable and unyielding “copperplate handwriting” (49). Welty’s exacting description of the drawing exposes the assumption con- tained in the parallel it draws between families and nature: to equate the con- figuration of a tree with the configuration of family ancestry suggests that the former’s organic wholeness and innate hierarchy-bough surpassing branch surpassing twig surpassing leaf-is replicated in the chain of power relation- ships found in the latter. Welty’s dramatizes the imposition of a constructed family narrative on descendants, whom the drawing commands to accept its rigidity and its essentially conservative impulse.

Welty recalls herself finding, as “you were supposed to find,” her mother’s leaf “hardly big enough to hold her name” (50). This recollection replays Welty’s subtly coercive entry into and acceptance of the family narrative. Welty intimates here that her compulsion to find her mother in the drawing originates in her own deeper need to find herself, connected by birth to her mother. Welty remembers the picture as a “children’s puzzle” (50), which she has to solve in the same way she has to find an answer, earlier in the autobiography, to the question of where babies come from. However, the social and cultural envi- ronment surrounding a child in such circumstances conspires with uncertain- ties of chance conspire to limit the possible answers to these formative ques- tions. Presented with the puzzle of locating where her mother fits into the family tree, Welty seems to argue that the question posed by the tree’s narra- tive inherently restricts her range of possible solutions to ones that conform with and reinforce the tree’s master design.

If the family tree insists upon subordination to its narrative, Welty’s epiphany on the mountaintop in West Virginia militates against supplication: “It took the mountain top, it seems to me now, to give me the sensation of independence.” On the mountainside, intense feelings, which generate a sensation of separate- ness from other people and places, wash over her. To describe rediscovery of singularity, Welty uses the metaphor of spring water “brimming and streaming” to the surface: “The coldness, the far, unseen, unheard spring of what was in my mouth now.” The mountain water fortifies her newfound independence. Using the “common dipper,” she draws the well water into her mouth, tasting its “iron strength” and smelling its “fern-laced” aroma. The water imparts to her the mountain’s strength and unity; urging oneness upon her in the voice it speaks: “[It] said mountain mountain mountain as I swallowed’ (57).

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By juxtaposing her encounter with the Andrews family tree and her epiphany on the mountainside, Welty demonstrates two contrasting ways of relating to nature. The family tree demands Welty experience nature indirectly through the anonymous drawer of the picture. The drawer establishes a certain relationship between humans (the family) and nature (the tree), which Welty the child must accept. The family tree asks her to recognize nature’s features as somebody else constructs them: stable, solid, immutable, and unchallenge- able as the family structure it symbolizes. Her direct encounter with nature, on the other hand, frees her to affix what feelings and words she might choose to the landscape and the emotions it elicits in her. The taking-in of the water val- idates, celebrates, and consolidates her individuality, firmly rooting but not constricting her in place and time: “Every swallow was making me a part of being here, sealing me in place, with my bare feet planted on the mountain and sprinkled with my rapturous spills.” The incompleteness of the Andrews fami- ly tree negates Welty’s existence because its narrative stretches no further than Chestina Andrews Welty, whose name appears only in miniature on a “tiny leaf on a twig of a branch near the top” (50). The mountainside, free of imposing and coercive narratives, provides a setting for Welty to imaginatively create herself out of and yet part of the natural environment.

Later in “Learning to See,” Welty claims she inherited her independence from her mother, whose autonomy also “was most deeply connected to the mountains” (60). Although the author’s fierce independence probably con- tributed to the uncompromising vigor of her artistic vision, Welty says that it ultimately formed a barrier between herself and her mother. The relationship between parent and child and the necessity for a child to move beyond the love of a parent seem of paramount importance in One Writer’s Beginnings.

-STEPHEN M. FULLER, hiversify of Southern Mississippi

WORK CITED

Welty, Eudora. One Wrirer’s Beginnings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983.

Beckett’s KRAPP’S LAST TAPE

A masterpiece of minimalism. Krupp’s Last Tape owes some of its most wrenching moments to a few resonant allusions in seemingly straightforward passages. Although the reference to Orhello is unmistakable, less obvious is the way Beckett complicates that allusion. By the same token, although T. F. Powys’s MI: Tusker’s Gods is surely the primary source of Krapp’s memory

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