This is a collection of Welty's public writings about Faulkner, including a review of Intruder in the Dust; a deliciously wrathy letter to Edmund Wilson, who had critiqued the same novel with blinkers on, in her view ("there's such a thing as a literary frame of reference that isn't industrial New York City in 1948" she points out); a memorial tribute written for the Associated Press news service when Faulkner died; and some lectures and speeches. Lordy, I love this lady. She is right up there at the top of my list of people I wish I could sit down and talk to. And I'm pretty sure if she lived down the road, I could sit down and talk to her. She comes across as warm, witty, gracious, possessed of an intelligence I could learn from, totally lacking in Attitude but not about to take a lot of nonsense either. And, of course, she loves Faulkner the way I do...not academically, but like a slightly surly uncle who nevertheless tells terrific stories and sees things the rest of us would miss if not for him. She also reviewed a collection of Faulkner's Selected Letters. After pointing out that Faulkner would have hated the idea, but accepted the inevitability, of their publication, Welty dealt a bit with the content and the chronological presentation of the letters Joseph Blotner included in the chunky volume (there it sits, right on the shelf at the top of my desk). But then she wrote a paragraph that exemplifies why I do love her so. She said:
"No man ever put more of his heart and soul into the written word than did William Faulkner. If you want to know all you can about that heart and soul, the fiction where he put it is still right there. The writer offered it to us from the start, and when we didn't even want it or know how to take it and understand it; it's been there all along and is more than likely to remain. Read that."
Reviewed 2017 ( )

Filed with Faulkner’s books

Small, but what's here is choice. I give 'er both thumbs up.

Briefly. Eudora Welty, like William Faulkner was born and raised in Mississippi. This book is a collection of her writings and talks about Faulkner and his writing. We read her review of [Intruder in the Dust], published in Hudson Review in 1949; an excerpt from "Looking at Short Stories", collected in Welty's [The Eye of the Story], on "The Bear"; and a review of Joseph Blotner's [Selected Letters of William Faulkner] that appeared in the NYT Book Review in 1977. We get the full text of her letter to The New Yorker poking a stick at Edmund Wilson for his unfavorable review of Intruder in the Dust.

Following are some excerpts. First, from Welty's review of Selected Letters…:

...Faulkner put down the best things he ever said about his writing in a series of letters to Malcolm Cowley..when Cowley put to Faulkner his idea of a Viking Portable Faulkner, to be compiled and edited by him...
  "I would like the piece," Faulkner initially replies to Cowley, "except the biography part. You are welcome to it privately, of course. But I think that if what one has thought and hoped and endeavored and failed at is not enough, if it must be explained and excused by what he had experienced, done or suffered, while he was not being an artist, then he and the one mak­ing the evaluation have both failed."
  Then to the letter that's the masterpiece: "I'm trying primarily to tell a story, in the most effective way I can think of, the most moving, the most exhaustive. But I think even that is incidental to what I am trying to do ... I am telling the same story over and over, which is myself and the world . . .I am trying to go a step further [than Thomas Wolfe] ... I'm trying to say it all in one sentence, between one Cap and one period. I'm still trying to put it all, if possible, on one pinhead. I don't know how to do it. All I know to do is to keep on trying in a new way . . . Life is a phenomenon but not a novel­ty ... Art is simpler than people think because there is so little to write about. All the moving things are eternal in man's history and have been written before, and if a man writes hard enough, sincerely enough, humbly enough, and with the unalterable determination never never never to be quite satisfied with it, he will repeat them, because art like poverty takes care of its own, shares its bread."
  ...The[se] letters, the best in Blotner's book, can still better be read in Cowley's own 1966 Faulkner-Cowley File, where they appear, along with the other side of the correspon­dence, in uninterrupted sequence, and where, so read, they can move you to tears.

In the same review, Welty cites a different sort letter from Faulkner:

In the occasional—even rare—letter to a literary peer, his feeling for, appreciation of, the other writer's gift—not shop talk—is almost sure to be the subject. Just as it is to a young unknown black poet whose manuscripts Faulkner read and helped him with: "Put the passion in it, but sit on the pas­sion. Dont try to say to the reader what you want to say, but make him say it to himself for you. I will edit the second one and send it to you when I get it right. . . Your idea in both is all right." ("All right" emerges in Faulkner's let­ters as his strongest, surest term of praise.)

From a speech—the Keynote Speech—that Welty presented at the Southern Literary Festival, held in 1965 at the University of Mississippi in Faulkner's hometown, we learn Faulkner's tale about writing [As I Lay Dying]:

Not too many yards away from where we now sit is still a room about which the author has remarked:
  "I got a job in the power plant, on the night shift, from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., as a coal passer. I shoveled coal from the bunker into a wheelbarrow and wheeled it in and dumped it where the fireman could put it into the boiler. About 11 o'clock the people would be going to bed, and so it did not take so much steam. Then we could rest, the fireman and I. He would sit in a chair and doze. I had invented a table out of a wheelbarrow in the coal bunker, just beyond a wall from where a dynamo ran. It made a deep, con­stant humming noise. There was no more work to do until about 4 A.M., when we would have to clean the fires and get up steam again. On these nights, between 12 and 4, I wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks, without chang­ing a word. I sent it to Smith and wrote him that by it I would stand or fall."

Finally, here's a excerpt from her letter to The New Yorker, cited above. (You really must read the entire letter.) It appeared in the magazine's "Department of Amplification." In it, Miss Welty quotes from Wilson's review an excerpt ending: "Faulkner's provinciality, stubbornly cher­ished and turned into an asset, inevitably tempts him to be slipshod and has apparently made it impossible for him to acquire complete expertness in an art that demands of the artist the closest attention and care." She replies:

That last sentence, born in New York, has the flaw of a grammatical mis­take; I don't know what being out of date in feeling means; and I didn't mind looking up "anacolutha"—but to get through to the point, Intruder in the Dust itself having been forgotten earlier in the piece, I shy at this idea of novel writing as a competitive, up-to-the-minute technical industry, if only for the picture it gives me of Mr. Faulkner in a striped cloth cap, with badge and lunchbox, marching in to match efficiency with the rest only to have Boss Man Wilson dock him—as an example, too—for slipshod bolt-and-nut per­formance caused by unsatisfactory home address. Somehow, I feel nobody could go on from there, except S. J. Perelman, and he works in another department.
  It's as though we were told to modify our opinion of Cezanne's painting because Cezanne lived not in Paris but by preference in Aix and painted Aix apples—"stubbornly" (what word could ever apply less to the quality of the imagination's working?).