Eudora Welty Interviewed by Dick Cavett, 1979

Abstract

Eudora Welty Interviewed by Dick Cavett, 1979 Eudora Welty and Transcription by Matthew C. Hawk Dick Cavett hosted his eponymous television talk show on ABC at various time slots from 1969 to 1975 and on PBS from 1977 to 1982. Thereafter, Cavett's show aired on USA, ABC, CNBC, and TCM. For a series subtitled Authors, Cavett welcomed Eudora Welty to the studio for two 30-minute shows, May 19 and May 20, 1979. Recordings of the conversations were made publicly available a few years ago. We are pleased to publish a selection of the interviews here with the permission of Eudora Welty, LLC, and we encourage our readers to view the full shows for themselves to enjoy Cavett and Welty's repartee, the timbre of Welty's voice, and the liveliness of her facial expressions.1 The editors of EWR appreciate the excellent work of Matthew Hawk in transcribing The Dick Cavett Show episodes. The Dick Cavett Show: Authors: Eudora Welty May 19, 1979 After introducing Eudora Welty and mentioning her recently published collection of essays, The Eye of the Story, Dick Cavett welcomes the "southern-born and bred" author. He begins by asking Welty if she feels culture shock when she comes to Manhattan. "No, I love Manhattan; I spent all my girlhood trying to get here, coming up here. It used to be you could get on the train, come to New York and live three weeks and go home for $100." A sense of shock does occur, she says, when "I first enter the street and see people's faces that aren't looking at anyone else." [End Page 7] Cavett asks if her writing career would be over if she were "exiled to New York for the rest" of her life. Welty first refuses the premise of the question by indicating that she hopes that would not be the case and also notes that she cannot predict the future. Cavett presses her about the importance of her roots, and she explains. "I can take things for granted [in the South.] All the answers to my questions are right out the window … because if I write about characters that live there, I can take everything for granted. Up here, I feel I wouldn't be quite sure about … I mean, I tried to write some stories about Europe. I wrote some short stories laid there, but they were from the point-of-view of a visitor such as myself." It was not, as Cavett suggested, that it was fashionable to write about Paris but that the stories were from when she had a Guggenheim in 1949. "I went to Europe, and I didn't mean to write there because I was too busy looking, but I did after I got home, things that stayed with me, … on the boat to Italy and Ireland and so on." Are these stories "unsuccessful," wonders Cavett, because they are not set in Mississippi? "Critics used to complain about me, 'Why does she always write about Mississippi?' and when I wrote [about other places] they said, 'Why didn't she stick to what she knows best?' I liked the stories. I was learning a lot by writing them, trying to imagine myself into minds I didn't know." Shortly thereafter, Welty quips, "I don't know a thing about the [Mississippi] Delta," and Cavett comments that "the people have another way of talking," but asks, "What is it that would make you, a native Mississippian, uneasy about being able to authentically write about that part of your state?" "At the time I wrote Delta Wedding, I didn't know how little I knew. I did take the precaution of making my storyteller a nine-year-old child, so if any mistakes were made they could say—'well, she didn't know any better' … every part of Mississippi [is different], I suppose every part of every state is a little world to itself, you know that. But the Delta … was always so much richer, and everybody had so much, did so much, owned so much, spread over so much, and it was flat. All of it was different from Jackson, where I...