Quote of the Day (Eudora Welty, on a Teenaged Girl’s Winter ‘Visit of Charity’)

“It was mid-morning—a very cold, bright day. Holding a potted plant before her, a girl of fourteen jumped off the bus in front of the Old Ladies’ Home, on the outskirts of town. She wore a red coat, and her straight yellow hair was hanging down loose from the pointed white cap all the little girls were wearing that year. She stopped for a moment beside one of the prickly dark shrubs with which the city had beautified the Home, and then proceeded slowly toward the building, which was of whitewashed brick and reflected the winter sunlight like a block of ice. As she walked vaguely up the steps she shifted the small pot from hand to hand; then she had to set it down and remove her mittens before she could open the heavy door.

“ ‘“I’m a Campfire Girl. ... I have to pay a visit to some old lady,’ she told the nurse at the desk.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning Southern novelist, short story writer, and photographer Eudora Welty (1909-2001), “A Visit of Charity,” in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1983)

Quote of the Day (Eudora Welty, on Writing and Reading)

“Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.” — Southern short-story writer and novelist Eudora Welty (1909-2001), On Writing (2002)

Quote of the Day (Eudora Welty, on Art and Experience)

“I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.” —Southern novelist / short-story writer

Eudora Welty (1909-2001), “Eudora Welty, The Art of Fiction No. 47” (interviewed by Linda Kuehl), The Paris Review, Fall 1972

Quote of the Day (Eudora Welty, on Writers and Memory)

“I think any writer has more to thank memory for than most anything. I don't mean writing about the past. What you remember can apply just as well to something you are writing today.”—Novelist-short story writer Eudora Welty quoted in Mississippi Writers Talking, edited by John Griffin Jones (1982)

Quote of the Day (Eudora Welty, on a Place Once Lived In)

“A place that ever was lived in is like a fire that never goes out. It flares up, it smolders for a time, it is fanned or smothered by circumstance, but its being is intact, forever fluttering within it, the result of some original ignition. Sometimes it gives out glory, sometimes its little light must be sought out to be seen, small and tender as a candle flame, but as certain.”—Eudora Welty, Some Notes on River Country (1944)

(The accompanying photo of the Eudora Welty House in Jackson, Miss., was the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist-short story writer’s home for nearly 80 years. It’s now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.)

 

Quotes of the Day (Eudora Welty and Gary Giddens, on Fats Waller)

“Of course you know how he sounds--you've heard him on records--but still you need to see him. He's going all the time, like skating around the skating rink or rowing a boat. It makes everybody crowd around, here in this shadowless steel-trussed hall with the rose-like posters of Nelson Eddy and the testimonial for the mind-reading horse in handwriting magnified five hundred times. Then all quietly he lays his finger on a key with the promise and serenity of a sibyl touching the book.”—Eudora Welty, “Powerhouse,” in A Curtain of Green, and Other Stories (1941)

“His greatest joy was playing Bach on the organ, but he buttered his bread as a clown, complete with a mask as fixed as that of Bert Williams or Spike Jones. It consisted of a rakishly tilted derby, one size too small, an Edwardian moustache that fringed his upper lip, eyebrows as thick as paint and pliable as curtains, flirtatious eyes, a mouth alternately pursed or widened in a dimpled smile, and immense girth, draped in the expensive suits and ties of a dandy.”—Gary Giddens, “Fats Waller (Comedy Tonight),” in Visions of Jazz: The First Century (1998)

My exposure to the joyous songbook of Thomas (Fats) Waller—born on this date in 1904—dates back to a 1992 performance of the revue based on his work, Ain’t Misbehavin’, at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, Mass. If you love jazz, it’s almost impossible not to come across at least one cover version of one of his standards, especially “Honeysuckle Rose,” “I’ve Got a Feeling I’m Falling,” “I’m Crazy ‘Bout My Baby,” and “Keeping Out of Mischief Now.”

But Waller’s death at the all-too-young age of 39 deprived us of more than a chance to experience additions to an already sizable songbook. It also deprived white America of the opportunity to see him under the circumstances he deserved, free to play his music before audiences undivided by race or class. (In her short story “Powerhouse,” Welty’s eponymous musician—a very thinly disguised version of Waller—plays before an all-white crowd in the segregationist South.)

Nobody who saw the elegance of Duke Ellington or the easy banter of Dizzy Gillespie is likely to forget those jazz masters anytime soon. Even the photo accompanying this blog misses something captured by Welty and Giddens in print—the insouciant artist in motion, whirling like a keyboard dervish, weaving his magic over audiences. For an idea of that, please see this clip from Stormy Weather.