It gives me a terrible sense of exposure, as if I’d gotten sunburned. Proofs don’t shock me any longer, yet there’s still a strange moment with every book when I move from the position of writer to the position of reader, and I suddenly see my words with the eyes of the cold public. He called me up and read me from the manuscript-word for word what the proofs said. He was kind, not even surprised-maybe this happens to all writers. I wrote to my editor, John Woodburn, and told him something had happened to that page in the typesetting. It was a page of dialogue-I might as well have never seen it before. When I received them for my first book-no, I guess it was for Delta Wedding-I thought, I didn’t write this. It’s so much an inward thing that reading the proofs later can be a real shock. But in the writing, I have to just keep going straight through with only the thing in mind and what it dictates. I care what my friends think, very deeply-and it’s only after they’ve read the finished thing that I really can rest, deep down. I believe if I stopped to wonder what So-and-so would think, or what I’d feel like if this were read by a stranger, I would be paralyzed. I thought about the opinion of a handful of friends I would love to have love that book, but not about the public.Īt the time of writing, I don’t write for my friends or myself, either I write for it, for the pleasure of it. Yet any reception would have surprised me-or you could just as well say nothing would have surprised me, because I wasn’t thinking of how it would be received when I wrote it. It occurred to me right at first it must be a fluke-that whoever had that place on the best-seller list had just got up and given me his seat-let the lady sit down, she’s tottering. Remember-“I’m not very far along, but I think I have my statues against the sky”?* Isn’t that beautiful?Ībout your own work, are you surprised that Losing Battles was on the best-seller list-a first for you, I believe? Any day you open it to will be tragic, and yet all the marvelous things she says about her work, about working, leave you filled with joy that’s stronger than your misery for her. I’ve read it many times since, though more often these days I go back to her diary. When I read To the Lighthouse, I felt, Heavens, what is this? I was so excited by the experience I couldn’t sleep or eat. Anyway, I took a temperamental delight in Chekhov, and gradually the connection was borne in upon me. That kind of responsiveness to the world, to whatever happens, out of their own deeps of character seems very southern to me. Like in The Three Sisters, when the fire is going on, how they talk right on through their exhaustion, and Vershinin says, “I feel a strange excitement in the air,” and laughs and sings and talks about the future. Yet there’s a great love and understanding that prevails through it, and a knowledge and acceptance of each other’s idiosyncrasies, a tolerance of them, and also an acute enjoyment of the dramatic. You know, in Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard, how people are always gathered together and talking and talking, no one’s really listening. It’s the kind that lies mostly in character. He had the sense of fate overtaking a way of life, and his Russian humor seems to me kin to the humor of a Southerner. He loved the singularity in people, the individuality.
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Chekhov is one of us-so close to today’s world, to my mind, and very close to the South-which Stark Young pointed out a long time ago. He did offer me either Jane Austen or Chekhov, and Chekhov I do dare to think is more “kindred.” I feel closer to him in spirit, but I couldn’t read Russian, which I felt whoever wrote about him should be able to do. Tolerate? I should just think so! I love and admire all she does, and profoundly, but I don’t read her or anyone else for “kindredness.” The piece you’re referring to was written on assignment for Brief Lives, an anthology Louis Kronenberger was editing. You wrote somewhere that we should still tolerate Jane Austen’s kind of family novel. She is extremely private and won’t reveal anything personal about herself. As she herself might say, she was “not unforthcoming.” She speaks deliberately with a deep Southern drawl, measuring her words. Once the interview got underway, she grew more at ease. After describing her train ride-she won’t fly-she braced herself and asked if I wouldn’t begin the questioning. She was admittedly nervous about being interviewed, particularly on a tape recorder. A tall, large-boned, gray-haired woman greeted me apologetically. She had given me the wrong room number, so I first saw her peering out of her door as the elevator opened. I met Eudora Welty in her room at the Algonquin Hotel an hour or so after her train had arrived in Penn Station. Interviewed by Linda Kuehl Issue 55, Fall 1972