"One Writer's Beginnings," by Eudora Welty

A few days ago, I wrote about three recent books on reading and writing. Today I am writing about an older such book, a classic in the genre, a must-read: "One Writer's Beginnings," by Eudora Welty (Harcourt, 1983). The book is divided into three parts: Listening, Learning to See, and Finding a Voice. It is a mixture of memoir and thoughts on books and writing; it clearly and delightfully illustrates the influence of childhood on writers and readers. Welty remembers her parents' great love of books, their sacrificing to buy books for her, and their gentle encouragement of her fascination with books and writing. She provides much indirect advice for both writers and readers. The book also weaves in various strands related to growing up in the South, education, families, race, and much more. It is enhanced by several pages of family photographs.

There are so many passages I would like to quote, but I will confine myself to three excerpts:

"It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they came from, I cannot remember a time that I was not in love with them -- with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself" (pp. 5-6).

"I live in gratitude to my parents for initiating me -- and as early as I begged for it, without keeping me waiting -- into knowledge of the words, into reading and spelling...My love for the alphabet, which endures, grew out of reciting it, but, before that, out of seeing the letters on the page. In my own story books, before I could read them for myself, I fell in love with various winding, enchanted-looking initials...at the heads of fairy tales" (p. 9).

"Ever since I was first read to, and then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn't my mother's voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself. The cadence, whatever it is that asks you to believe, the feeling that resides in the printed word, reaches me through the reader-voice" (pp. 11-12).

As this book is an adapted version of a set of lectures that Welty gave at Harvard, and as these lectures are available on CD (Harvard University Press, 1984), we are fortunate to be able to hear that "reader-voice" quite literally. Hearing Welty's own voice is a wonderful pleasure that further deepens our appreciation of her work.

Welty (1909-2001) wrote five novels and several collections of short stories. I especially recommend two of her novels, "Delta Wedding" and "The Optimist's Daughter," as well as "The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty."