THE WEEKEND READ
Y'ALL TALK: MEMORIES OF MY SHORT TIME WITH EUDORA WELTY by DR. J. KIM SESSUMS
I sat down today to post a 1998 profile of Eudora Welty by Claudia Roth Pierpont which had appeared in The New Yorker for THE WEEKEND READ. It had recently been sent to me by my younger brother, Kim, who is not only an OB/GYN in Mississippi, but also a renowned sculptor and artist. We have come to bond in our 60s over our love of literature and art, a needed common ground on which our own love for each other (and our need for it) can more comfortably reside. I was texting him yesterday from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, where I had gone to see the David Hockney exhibit embedded into its collection, a fascinating way to curate a show based on juxtapositions and the way that Hockney sees the world through his art. I wrote in my second memoir, I Left It On the Mountain, about how we two boys from the Mississippi countryside, Kim and I, had been mentored in some way by our two Andy’s. Kim’s artistic mentor was Andy Wyeth. He sculpted the only bust for which Wyeth posed. Mine in some way was Andy Warhol who owned Interview magazine where I began my career in magazines. I wrote my first interviews there and was on its masthead as both a Senior Editor and its Executive Editor. I sometimes smile at that happenstance in our lives, two little orphan boys longing to look outside ourselves to make some sort of art from the trauma of our orphaned lives which finally was the fodder that fed our art, that conundrum of going outside ourselves thinking that was going to heal us but digging more deeply inside the pain in order to do it. It is a re-sculpting more than a sculpting. We embed our curated lives into a more artful way to see them.
(Above: “The Road Less Traveled.” Bust of Andy Wyeth by J. Kim Sessums. 1996. One resides at the Brandywine Museum in Pennsylvania and another in the permanent collection of the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Maine. Wyeth’s wife, Betsy, had a plaster cast made of it to go with her Houdon plasters of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.)
Kim recently sent me that 1998 profile of Miss Welty in The New Yorker. I pulled it up today to post it here. But first I went to find his bust of Miss Welty to illustrate it at his art site. He had sculpted the bust in 1998 as well. After pulling up an image of it, I read his remembrance of the day he put the finishing touches on it as she posed for him. I often write EVERYTHING CONNECTS because it does, and that day as Kim was sculpting Miss Welty he dug deeper inside his own pain as he did it. He made the connections as he re-sculpted them into his sculpture of her.
I will post Claudia’s profile next weekend. But this weekend I was led to this remembrance in order to post it. I hope you enjoy it.
(Above: “Storyteller.” Bust of Eudora Welty sculpted by J. Kim Sessums. 1998. One resides at the Jackson Public Library named for her and another at the Welty House Museum.)
(Above: Kim concentrating in his studio on a commissioned public work.)
Kim wrote:
I lifted Miss Eudora with hands cupped under her frail arms that seemed longer than natural for her size, helping her maneuver into her motorized lounger. The hands could have been a portrait in themselves - long fingers gracefully reaching.
She seemed weightless, as easy to lift as she was to talk with. Nine decades had allowed time to weave her genius and she spoke with a pleasantness and humor and kindness that drew attention from her conversant.
That Sunday afternoon, for the first time in her presence, I sensed a rush of emotions and nostalgia, flashing back to my childhood, and more poignantly, my transition to adulthood. Until then I couldn’t have expressed why the woman intrigued me so, or why I was there in her home, sharing with her my recently completed bronze portrait bust. I had been driven to do it. A catharsis of sorts.
“How can one accomplish this and practice the art of medicine at the same time?” she had asked with that unique voice.
“Kept it in the clinic break room and worked between pap smears,” I had spontaneously responded. A gynecologist could sculpt. No reason to confine one’s passion to puerperal pathology.
“We should call it “between paps” then. It would be a true name. Telling.” Even her verbal phrasing sounded like her short stories. The revelation was logical. She simply typed down what came into her head. Type and speak the words or speak the words and type. It did not matter.
I had researched for a year, formed the peculiar face in clay, completed the mother mold and then cast the figure in bronze. Yet, I realized in that moment the work had actually begun twenty years earlier.
I was no literary scholar, a casual reader at best. I hadn’t known her work very well. Not her writing. Her wonderful use of language had not led me to the bust, but the bust had lead me to her words. Wonderful language.
I had first been connected to her through her images and not the verbal ones. For twenty years I had absorbed her published photographs. Though she considered herself simply a recorder of life through the lens of her camera, she, despite all humility, obviously possessed a natural gift, an eye for composition. I saw it. Even then it helped form my own eye.
At the time, I couldn’t express an opinion about her images in as many words but I could express them with pencil on paper, and I was doing just that on a Fall weekend in 1977.
It was there as I sat at the foot of my grandmother’s hospital bed on that cold tile floor, in a room that smelled like the doctor’s offices of my youth, complete with alcohol and porcelain basins and white sheets, that I met Eudora Welty for the first time.
I had given Mom (my grandmother’s nickname) a Welty photo collection as a Christmas gift and I sat studying the black and white images as I watched her lie there still, life slowly moving to a new place. That was the year she was finally told what she seemed to be waiting her whole life to hear; at least her whole life as my grandmother. She had cancer, pancreatic no less.
And though I had no conscious memory of my own mother’s death from cancer fifteen years earlier, I was indeed living her mother’s illness, and that day, that one time and one place, was the last chapter, last verse, last word. A sigh would describe it better as we shared her last breath together, face to face, eye to eye, heart to heart.
Now I knew. In some strange way Miss Eudora had been there too. An unknowing comforter.
I lacked a coherent agony, one I could express. My grief was beyond simple emotion. Not something here today, gone tomorrow. Maybe if I could write it down, but I couldn’t find the words, the authorized version of my distress.
But there, two decades later, Mom’s frailty and unchanging kindheartedness came flooding back in my mind as I sat in the parlor on Pinehurst Street. Despite the months of work, it was only then that the connection and relationship became obvious. Mom had never known Eudora Welty, nor had Miss Eudora known Mom. And Mom, to my knowledge, had never read the work, though the simple life in Harperville, Mississippi, could certainly have read like a Welty short story. The dots were connecting.
Eudora Welty never liked being labeled a “southern writer”. She simply communicated life where and how she knew it. Mom never declared or denied being a southern woman, she had simply been born in rural Mississippi, lived there, and died there. And she, like Miss Eudora, had made life richer, more worthwhile, for those around her.
Mom never won a Pulitzer Prize, or the French Legion Honor, or was referred to as America’s First Lady of anything. But she did what she thought God put her on earth to do, and did it with equal courage and passion. Sharing life.
So I sat in the parlor sipping ice tea, talking and listening. The worn sofa rested underneath the window that looked out to the neighborhood of her childhood and the rest of her life. A personalized photo of Bill Clinton sat casually on the fireplace mantel. On the far wall, a William Hollingsworth watercolor of a wet, slippery, sloping Jackson street announced her personal friendship with the long deceased local artist from another era. Books filled a bookshelf along one wall and more books covered an upholstered love seat. It had become a place to sit stacks on stacks of books – words making up sentences making up paragraphs making up pages and bound together to be held in the hand; a temporary resting place, a seat for what she loved. More books were scattered about the room. No particular order or filing system was evident. Nothing marked them as particularly outstanding except that they were hers.
“What do you think?” I nodded towards the bronze portrait.
“Well, I suppose I shouldn’t offer an opinion since I am no master of the medium. But if you were to ask, do you like vanilla ice cream, I could render an opinion.”
I pondered the response. Then I thought of another Mississippi writer, Willie Morris, asking Eudora as they rode leisurely down a kudzu enfolded Mississippi back road, referring to a road sign that read “PARADISE ALLEY”, “Eudora, should we take this turn?”
With her usual quick wit she had responded, “Why, Willie, we’d be fools not to.”
When she was a girl, little Eudora had loved to take Sunday rides in the family car just to see the town and listen to the adults converse as she sat in the back seat middle. With the bronze Eudora Welty in front of me and the real lady beside me, I was reminded. I smiled.
One day, Lord willing, on another Paradise Alley, riding in the back seat middle myself, I will turn to Mom and Miss Eudora to say, as little Eudora had so many years ago, “Now, ya’ll talk.” Two women, sharing life in a new time and a new place.
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ADDENDUM
(Above: I am in Miss Welty’s home in Jackson, Mississippi, reading a letter to her from E.M. Forster.).
ONLY CONNECT
E. M. Forster wrote the first draft of his novel Maurice in 1914 and did a revision around 1939 and another around 1960. He died in 1970. The novel was published the next year. I remember the stir it caused even then. When I was 16, I bought a copy of it and read it in one weekend. It helped to assuage the abject loneliness that I was feeling as a gay teenager living outside the "city limits" of a small Mississippi town of 4000 people, a place as constricted in its social mores as Victorian England.
The next year I was cast as Toby in a production of The Medium at New Stage Theatre in Jackson and was brought into the fold of a literate, liberal, cosmopolitan set of people who orbited around Miss Welty. It was as kind of cultural salvation for me. One of Miss Welty's best friends was my first mentor, a gentleman named Frank Hains, who was the Arts Editor of the Jackson Daily News. I rented a room from him my first year at college.
Forster was one of Miss Welty's favorite writers and she was writing an essay in 1973 for the New York Times Book Review about a collection of his short stories called The Life to Come. She brought over the first draft of the essay for Frank to read one night since she was troubled that she was going to criticize Forster slightly in it and wanted to know if she were getting the tone right. She trusted Frank to tell her the truth about such matters. I poured them each their Maker's Mark as we sat around Frank's big kitchen table and I listened to them discuss Forster and his work. "I've read Maurice," I told Miss Welty, now that I was all of 17 and much more worldly. "It's the only book of his I've ever read though."
Miss Welty downed the last of the Maker's Mark then tapped the rim of her glass three times with her finger, always her signal to me to hit her up again. "Of course you have, honey," she said, smiling and touching my bottle-less hand gently with that same finger as I poured her a bit more liquor. "But he's written some other books you might want to read that are kind of nice."
Miss Welty wrote in that essay that "it will be sad if the aspect of homosexuality, which kept Forster's stories from reaching print in his own day, turns out to be their only focus of interest for today's readers." Forster himself said that one of the reasons he stopped writing novels was that he could no longer bear to write about the one subject open to him, the love between men and women. Without commenting precisely on this, Miss Welty wrote that when the women went out of Forster's stories, they took the comedy with them. And Maurice - both the novel and the film - for all their strengths are rather drab affairs.
In the photo above, I am at Miss Welty's house in Jackson during my book tour for my first memoir, Mississippi Sissy. Her niece Mary Alice - who called her Aunt Eudora, "Dodo" - opened the house to give me a private visit that day. I am reading a framed letter that Forster wrote to Miss Welty. "Finding myself in your country, I feel I should like to give myself the pleasure of writing you a line and telling you how much I enjoy your work," he wrote. "'The Wide Net,' with the wild and lovely things it brings up, have often been with me and delighted me."
While I was standing there reading that framed letter, the books on the desk behind me shifted and several fell to the floor as if the ghosts of Welty and Forster were sweeping through the room. Mary Alice and I were spooked by it. "Well, that's never happened before," she said. "That must be their spirits." I helped her pick up the books.
“Only connect,” Forster wrote in Howard’s End - which is a connection itself. My father - whose name was Howard - died in 1963 and his end presaged all the ends of the others, my mother’s, my grandparents’s, Miss Welty’s, Frank Hains’s, Will Morris’s, Andy and Betsy Wyeth’s, Andy Warhol’s, and E.M. Forster’s. “Y’all talk,” said my daddy this morning, and they did.
My first read since becoming a paid subscriber (overdue). I love so much about this piece and all the paths to yours and your brother's past that you take us down. What gift to have had Eudora Welty as such a pivotal influence so early. I love you relay her gentle directness in suggesting you might want to read more Forster to get a broader sense of his scope. Just out of college and living in DC, I met Andy Warhol in 1979, at a party for the kick-off of Liza Minnelli's Kennedy Center run. At the time I was working at U.S. News & World Report in the art department. Andy was standing by himself; he'd flown down to support LM and did not have his usual coterie of hangers-on around. I introduced myself and he asked what I did. I did not want to mention to the artist at the center of the counter-culture, who'd founded the edgiest magazine in America that I worked for the most conservative newsmagazine in America. But I didn't want to make up something, so I told him. He lit up like a candle. "That's my favorite magazine! I just did an ad campaign for them last year. Do you like it there?" We chatted for a few minutes more, and Andy said, "If you're ever in New York you should come to the Factory." Someone took our picture so I still have a snapshot of the moment. A year later, prior to moving to New York, I called him. He said to stop by, so I did. He came out, gave me a tour of the art wing, then called Bob Colacello over from the magazine wing; they asked if I had any good DC gossip. It was a lovely visit. He was lovely. Would you have been working there yet? This would have been fall of 1980. Were you working there then?
Thank you, as always, for connecting with me.