Eudora Welty wrote her last piece of fiction, The Optimist’s Daughter, in 1972. She died in 2001, and in between, she started many things, but the words just wouldn’t come. What she did instead, and what many people thought hindered her fiction writing, was travel.
Welty was a writer-at-large in the grandest sense of the word. She earned almost 40 honorary degrees, all from prestigious universities. She was invited to give lectures and hold seminars and chair programs. At Harvard, her lectures were eventually published as her last book,One Writer’s Beginnings. Along the way to these various writerly activities, she visited friends she’d made all over the world. Visits to writers and other cherished friends were always reckoned into the lecture and teaching travel.
Somehow, as the holiday season continues to carry on its merry way, I find comfort in the fact that someone like Welty allowed relationships and love of travel to overtake her writing life. She seemed to feel that life, that connecting to others, was of more importance than yet another story. If it bothered her that she lived her last 29 years as one of our country’s most venerated and beloved authors without producing a single short story, her biographer, Suzanne Marrs, who was also Welty’s close friend, didn’t say.
I would like to find a way to have writing in my life without the gulit I inevitably feel if I’m not working on something. As I read Welty’s biography, I kept waiting for some word about her anguish that she couldn’t seem to finish anything (she DID start several projects in her final quarter century). It appears there was no anguish, and I really admire that. The tortured artist as a model has never appealed to me. I want to be a joyful person–mother, daughter, partner, friend–first, a writer second. And I don’t want to waste a minute of my life regretting the things I didn’t do.
More than “revising new novel” or “sending 50 queries a week” I want that to be my new year’s resolution: to live joyfully among my tribe and to take comfort from writing, but only in its proper place.
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