“For her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love” (160).
First published as a short story in The New Yorker in March 1969, Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter was later revised, expanded into a novella, and published in 1972 before it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1973. This actually occurred toward the end of Eudora Welty’s lauded literary career which included numerous accolades, primarily for her short stories —in fact, The Optimist’s Daughter was technically the final novel Welty ever published (though she did continue publishing essays and short stories for years to come until her death in 2001).
Told in four parts, The Optimist’s Daughter tells the story of Laurel McKelva Hand, an only child, World War II widow, and fabric designer who lives in Chicago. She is “a slender, quiet-faced woman in her middle forties, her hair still dark” (3) with dark blue eyes and she was named after the state flower of West Virginia where her mother was raised. She heads to New Orleans during “Carnival” (or Mardi Gras) to care for her 71-year-old dying father, Judge Clinton “Mac” McKelva, who is suffering from an ocular issue –a slipped right retina, with a central tear, and a cataract forming on his other eye. He declares himself to be an “optimist” but following a kerfuffle in the hospital, he suddenly dies shortly thereafter. About a decade earlier, Laurel’s mother Becky was bedridden and also died of an issue concerning her eyes. And this theme of sight and vision is a thread that runs throughout the book –there is something lacking in how Laurel’s parents see things. Eudora Welty, a celebrated author of the American South, explores the flawed views of the older generation of southerners, in contrast to a more aspirational, forward-facing person like Laurel who claims “The past isn’t a thing to me. I belong to the future, didn’t you know?” Apparently, Judge McKelva was doing some yard work on his late wife’s garden –in other words, there is something wrong with the metaphorical garden that was tended by the older generation in the South. There is need for a new way of seeing.
Cue the entrance Judge McKelva’s infuriatingly flighty, vain, petty, obnoxious wife of only a year and a half, Wanda Fay, a forty-year-old woman from Madrid, Texas who causes all sorts of problems for Laurel, from her father’s hospital stay (in which Fay has a meltdown attempting to yank her ailing husband out of bed that contributes to his death bemoans that he chose to die on her birthday) and onward to his funeral in the small Mississippi town of Mount Salus where the McKelva family is from. Here, Laurel is reacquainted with many of the colorful characters from her upbringing –gossipy old ladies, her group of “bridesmaids,” the Bullocks, and other friends and well-wishers of her late father. However, Laurel is disappointed by the false compliments many fawning admirers attribute to her father. She is upset by the disingenuousness of the funeral and yearns for a more honest accounting of her father’s memory.
When Fay abruptly departs for her family home in Texas (after lying to Laurel about the very existence of her family), Laurel spends several days reflecting on her upbringing and scattered memories –her father being a respected figure in Mount Salus after serving as mayor and a prominent judge, as well as the money that came to him in old age from an oil well investment, and especially the letters exchanged between her parents. Laurel admits to herself that she truly admires her mother’s courage and wishes she had the same strength. It is in these fragile, delicate moments that Eudora Welty really shines in my opinion:
“A flood of feeling descended on Laurel. She let the papers slide from her hand and the books from her knees, and put her head down on the open lid of the desk and wept in grief for love and for the dead. She lay there with all that was adamant in her yielding to this night, yielding at last. Now all she had found had found her. The deepest spring in her heart had uncovered itself, and it began to flow again” (154).
Laurel also reflects on her late husband Philip Hand, an Ohio country boy who apparently died in a kamikaze attack. His character featured more prominently in the original New Yorker, but was mostly eliminated for the publication of the novel. But Laurel reflects on their short-lived marriage in an imagine I found memorable: her marriage to Philip is likened to the confluence between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. “But Phil was lost. Nothing of their life together remained except in her own memory; love was sealed away into its perfection and had remained there” (154). As an aside, the picture of the South Welty paints is as complex as it is rich –people from Madrid, Texas are far more raucous and rowdy than the kindly, gossiping, neighborly people of Mount Salus, Mississippi; and we are also told of Virginians, like Laurel’s parents, who are vastly different from people in Louisiana. In some respects, The Optimist’s Daughter is a tour de force through a vision of the American South that is anything but a monolith. And while Chicago serves as a place of hope for Laurel, she will never be fully rid of her roots in the traditions of the South.
In the end, Laurel stays behind in Mississippi for an extra day or two in order to confront Fay when she returns from Texas. Laurel accuses Fay of damaging a breadboard (broken apart and covered in cigarette burns) which was once made in loving care by her late husband as a gift for her late mother. It is a symbol for the harmony and love that was once shared in her family by people Fay will never understand. When Fay refuses to show any kind of apology for remorse, Laurel shouts at Fay –“you desecrated this house”—before contemplating striking Fay and taking the breadboard back to Chicago, but then Laurel changes her mind. As the novel concludes, she decides to let go of the sentimental objects in her family home that once bound her to ghostly memories of her late husband and parents. She abruptly leaves the house and heads back to Chicago. Having burned many of her parents’ letters and having abandoned desecrated objects like her mother’s breadboard, Laurel permits the past to live in her memory only. But she balances this weight with her decision to live optimistically in the life-affirming present, unburdened by the need to perpetually mourn the glamorized past. Similarly, the cultural memory of the Old South must live on, for good or for ill, in the service of its present denizens, absent the “desecrated” memorabilia it once celebrated. With this in mind, to what extent does Laurel end the novel in becoming an “optimist” like her father?
“Memory lived not in initial possession but in the freed hands, pardoned and freed, and in the heart that can empty but fill again, in the patterns restored by dreams” (179).
Notable Quotations:
“As though he had all the time in the world, Dr. Courtland, the well-known eye specialist, folded his big country hands with the fingers that had always looked, to Laurel, as if their mere touch on the crystal of a watch would convey to their skin exactly what time it was” (4).
“Laurel looked for a moment into the experienced face, so entirely guileless. The Mississippi country that lay behind him was all in it” (9).
“The house took longer than Fay did to go to sleep; the city longer than the house. Eventually she heard the ludicrous sound of chirping frogs emerge from the now completed excavation next door. Toward the morning there was the final, parting shot of a pistol fired far off. Nothing came after that; no echo” (44 –the night of Laurel’s father’s death).
“People live their own way, and to a certain extent I almost believe they may die their own way, Laurel” (56).
“The mystery in how little we know of each other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought” (81).
“Shoulder to shoulder, they had long since made their own family. For every book here she had heard their voices, father’s and mother’s. and perhaps it didn’t matter to them, not always, what they read aloud; it was the breath of life flowing between them, and the words of the moment riding on it that held them in delight. Between some two people every word is beautiful, or might as well be beautiful” (118).
“Neither of us saved our fathers, Laurel thought. But Becky was the brave one. I stood in the hall, too, but I did not any longer believe that anyone could be saved, anyone at all. Not from others” (144).
“What burdens we lay on the dying, Laurel thought, as she listened now to the accelerated rain on the roof: seeking to prove some little thing that we can keep to comfort us when they can no longer feel –something as incapable of being kept as of being proved: the lastingness of memory, vigilance against harm, self-reliance, good hope, trust in one another” (146).
“After a stroke had crippled her further, she had come to believe –without being able to see her room, see a face, to verify anything by seeing –that she had been taken somewhere that was neither home nor ‘up home,’ that she was left among strangers, for whom even anger meant nothing, on whom it would only be wasted. She had died without speaking a word, keeping everything to herself, in exile and humiliation” (151 –Laurel reflecting on the death of her mother).
“But the guilt of outliving those you love is justly to be borne, she thought. Outliving is something we do to them. The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Surviving is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all” (162-163).
On the 1973 Pulitzer Prize Decision
Having previously been snubbed by the Pulitzer Board in 1967 and then again in 1971, Eudora Welty was finally recognized in 1973 for her last novel. In John Hohenberg’s book The Pulitzer Prizes he writes: “For 1973, at last, the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction went to Eudora Welty and this time there was no quibbling, either from the Pulitzer Prize organization or the critics. Happily, the announcement of the award coincided with a state-wide celebration of her career proclaimed by the governor of Mississippi. It was, in effect, a Welty festival” (323).
The three members of the fiction jury in 1973 were:
- Herman Kogan, chair (1914-1989) spent 50 years covering the city of Chicago for the Chicago Daily News as a cultural news editor and the Chicago Sun-Times where he was a drama critic and editor of “Book Week.” He was an alumnus of the University of Chicago in 1936 and authored some sixteen books primarily about the history, culture, institutions, and personalities of Chicago. Upon his death in 1989, Kogan was survived by his wife and two sons. His papers are held at the Newberry Library, an independent research library in Chicago.
- Guy Davenport (1927-2005) was a multi-faceted man –a painter, author, teacher, and scholar. He was a professor of English at the University of Kentucky for some three decades and wrote voluminously, from critical essays to translations to poetry. Per his obituary in the New York Times, he was perhaps most admired for short stories in the modernist tradition of Pound and Joyce which earned him a MacArthur genius grant in 1990. Earlier in life he was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford where he studied Old English under J.R.R. Tolkien and wrote his thesis on James Joyce. He served in the US Army in the 1950s and befriended Ezra Pound. He was married briefly in the 1960s and lived with a companion (“Bonnie Jean” Cox) until his death of lung cancer in 2005. He does not appear to have had any children. Amusingly, in one of his essays he claimed that he survived “almost exclusively off fried baloney, Campbell’s soup, and Snickers bars.”
- Edmund Fuller (1914-2001) was the chief book critic at The Wall Street Journal for 32 years until his retirement in 1987. What followed was a sunset career writing for the Saturday Review of Literature, the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times. He was an adherent of traditional Christian humanism, as such he was a critic of “the post-Chatterley deluge” among writers like Nelson Algren, James Jones, Norman Mailer, and Jack Kerouac. He preferred writers who portrayed mankind as essentially rational, free, responsible, purposeful, albeit fallible, as found in writers like Thornton Wilder, Gladys Schmitt, Alan Paton, C. P. Snow, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. Throughout his career, he wrote several novels, a biography of Milton, other books on Gertrude Stein and George Bernard Shaw, taught playwrighting at The New School for Social Research, served as editor-in-chief at Crown Publishers where he edited several compilations, and taught English and theology at the Kent School in Connecticut. He served on two juries for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1969 and 1973) and retired to a 262-acre farm in Vermont (which turned out to be a headache) before relocating to Chapel Hill, NC in retirement. When he died at the age of 86 in 2001, he was survived by two sons and two daughters.
In 1973, several amusing letters were exchanged with John Hohenberg and the jurors –including one from Guy Davenport complaining that publishers that year acted “uncritically, greedily, and stupidly” in submitting such a high volume of entries. He claimed he “had to read through far too much trash to sort out the hopefuls.”
Guy Davenport’s top selections for the prize were as follows: 1) Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev; 2) Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter (“an almost perfect novella” but also “an awkward choice for the Pulitzer, as her far more important Losing Battles did not win it” despite Welty being “probably the best writer of fiction in the USA today”); 3) Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies: A Love Story; 4) John Gardner’s The Sunlight Dialogues; 5) Donald Barthelme’s Sadness; 6) Harry Crews’s Car; 7) Alexander Theroux’s Three Wogs; 8) Richard Brankowsky’s The Barbarian at the Gates; 9) George V. Higgins’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle; and 10) James Park Sloan’s The Case History of Comrade V. He then listed a variety of runners-up.
Edmund Fuller’s top selections were: 1) Thomas Rogers’s The Confessions of a Child of the Century; 2) John Gardner’s The Sunlight Dialogues; Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter; 4) Gladys Schmitt’s The Godforgotten; 5) Frederick Buechner’s Open Heart; followed by several other honorable mentions.
In Herman Kogan’s letter, he mentioned that there was no consensus, but after significant telephone conversation all parties agreed they would “not be unhappy” if Eudora Welty won the prize. Kogan appeared to be the great champion for Eudora Welty. He said: “…I must admit that my steadfastness was influenced by the fact that Miss Welty, surely one of our finest writers, has never received a Pulitzer Prize. If the advisory committee sees fit to sustain this proposal I suppose we would, as Mr. Fuller suggests in his excellent letter, really be giving the prize to Miss Welty for her ‘cumulative body of work.’ This may go contrary to Pulitzer Prize regulations and tradition, but perhaps the rules can be stretched somewhat in this instance to give long-overdue recognition to a major American writer.”
Who is Eudora Welty?
Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was born in Jackson, Mississippi where she lived for much of her life. Her family was methodist –her mother was a schoolteacher and her father was insurance executive who loved all things mechanical. In high school, Welty’s family moved to a Tudor home at 1119 Pinehurst Street in Jackson, Mississippi which was Welty’s address until her death (now, the home is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, known as the “Eudora Welty House and Garden”). Notably, she grew up in the same neighborhood as fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Ford, near Jackson’s Belhaven College.
Welty was educated locally at Mississippi State College for Women, the University of Wisconsin (English), and the Columbia University Graduate School of Business (Marketing), but she graduated from the latter during the Great Depression and found it difficult to secure work. Welty then returned to Jackson in 1931 and cared for her ailing father who was diagnosed with leukemia (he died in 1931). She worked at a radio station, a Memphis newspaper, and as a publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration (during this period she collected stories and photographs of Mississippi’s poor residents during the Great Depression), before devoting herself to writing full-time. Around this time, Welty organized an informal group of fellow writers for regular meetings at her house –the group was known as the “Night-Blooming Cereus Club.”
Her first published work was “The Death of a Traveling Salesman” in the literary magazine Manuscript (which drew the praise of fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Anne Porter), and she soon published stories in several other notable publications including The Sewanee Review and The New Yorker. Ford Madox Ford was an early champion of Eudora Welty’s stories shortly before he died. And as examples of other notable Welty short stories, she published “Why I Live at the P.O.” which was inspired by a photograph Welty took of a woman ironing at the back of a post office; and after the notorious murder of Medgar Evers in Mississippi, she published a story in The New Yorker, “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” which was controversially written from the first-person perspective of the assassin. Her stories were gathered in numerous short story collections from 1941-1988. Her reputation garnered a seat on the staff of The New York Times Book Review, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship which enabled her to travel to France, England, Ireland, and Germany. While abroad, she spent some time as a resident lecturer at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, becoming the first woman to be permitted into the hall of Peterhouse College. In 1960, she returned home to Jackson to care for her elderly mother and two brothers (her mother died in 1966 followed shortly thereafter by her father).
Welty delivered a series of addresses at Harvard University, later revised and published as One Writer’s Beginnings –it was the first book to be published by Harvard University Press to be a New York Times Best Seller, and runner-up for the 1984 National Book Award for Nonfiction. In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize, in 1992, she was awarded the Rea Award for the Short Story for her lifetime contributions to the American short story. Welty was a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, founded in 1987. Additionally, she won numerous other accolades throughout her career –she won many O. Henry Awards (eight to be exact), the William Dean Howells Medal for Fiction, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for the Short Story, National Humanities Medal, Charles Frankel Prize, and maintained close affiliation with the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Her major works include: The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1980), winner of the National Book Award; On Writing; One Writer’s Beginnings; and other novels like Delta Wedding, Ponder Heart, The Bride of the Innisfallen, The Robber Bridegroom, and many short story collections.
Eudora Welty never married, though she did have a long-term relationship with a man named John Robinson. He never proposed and some scholars have speculated that he may have actually been homosexual.
Welty died of natural causes in 2001 and never had any children. She is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Jackson, Mississippi. Her headstone proudly displays a quote from The Optimist’s Daughter: “For her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love.”
In 1972, Eudora Welty gave a delightful interview to Linda Kuehl for the Paris Review. In it, we are given the portrait of a shy woman (who does not fly) but who nevertheless opens up when given the chance to discuss Jane Austen, Anton Chekov, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and many other little details about her writing habits and literary relationships.
Film Adaptations:
- None.
Literary Context in 1972-1973:
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1972): awarded to the German author Heinrich Böll (1917–1985) “for his writing which through its combination of a broad perspective on his time and a sensitive skill in characterization has contributed to a renewal of German literature.”
- National Book Award Winner (1973): jointly awarded to Chimera by John Barth and Augustus by John Edward Williams.
- Booker Prize Winner (1973): G. by John Berger.
- Per Publisher’s Weekly, the #1 bestseller in 1972 was Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach. Other notable books on the bestseller list that year included: August 1914 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Word by Irving Wallace, The Winds of War by Herman Wouk (fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner), and My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok.
- The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov was published.
- Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino was published.
- The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin was published.
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson was published.
- My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
I found The Optimist’s Daughter to be a compelling little novel. I was particularly struck by a few passages of deep reflection and introspection that Eudora Welty managed to draw out in brief, tender moments of the story. And since I know of no other novel that could have easily unseated The Optimist’s Daughter for the Pulitzer Prize in 1973, it stands as an acceptable choice for the prize in my view, though by no means is this a particularly strident, triumphant selection. It seems to me as if something is missing in The Optimist’s Daughter –perhaps reintroducing the removed details about Laurel’s husband, Philip, which had previously existed in the original New Yorker story would have further rounded out the story; or maybe adding more memories of Laurel’s mother into the story might have helped. Some of these details might better flesh out the story, but far be it from me to rewrite a Eudora Welty novella. Still, I cannot help but feel slightly unsatisfied with this Pulitzer Prize-winner. I suspect it will take me some time to wrestle with the true meaning of The Optimist’s Daughter.
Welty, Eudora. The Optimist’s Daughter. Vintage International, a division of Random House, Inc., NY, NY, 1990 (originally published in 1972).
The Optimist’s Daughter is dedicated to C.A.W. (or Chestina Andrew Welty, Eudora Welty’s mother).