Recollections of Eudora Welty: Monteleone Hotel, New Orleans to Pinehurst Street, Jackson

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Recollections of Eudora Welty:Monteleone Hotel, New Orleans to Pinehurst Street, Jackson Hunter McKelva Cole I recall that Eudora rode back to Jackson with me after giving a reading at an annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses. I forget the year,1 but the occasion was soon after the publication of One Writer's Beginnings. The site was the Monteleone Hotel in New Orleans. On Sunday after the close of the AAUP meeting, I connected with Eudora in the hotel's coffee shop. She was having breakfast there with Seta Sancton, a dear friend from Old Jackson but then living in New Orleans. (Seta's family had lived a few blocks from the Weltys during Eudora's high school days. Eudora told me that Seta was one of those girls who could not resist pausing to play a few chords whenever she passed a piano. "Fur Elise"2 was her theme song. She often would run her fingers over the keys of the Welty's piano. Tom Sancton, Seta's husband, was a novelist and national journalist, and their son Thomas Jr. was the Paris bureau chief for Time magazine.) During the ride home, Eudora remarked that prior to giving her presentation before the AAUP audience, she had had her hair done in the hotel beauty shop and that, as it happened, the hairdresser was a young man from Jackson. He told her he was a graduate of the Fondren School of Beauty. Eudora was amused by his account of having participated recently in an international hairdressing competition held in Las Vegas. Competing hairdos had absurdly fantastical names, which he cited and which Eudora remembered and then jotted on the back of an envelope. She opened her purse and read the list to me. The titles delighted her. And me. They had names such as these that I'll make up: "Fantastical Parisian Holiday Extravaganza" and "A Venetian Night in the Gondola of Love." A few months later Eudora drove down to Baton Rouge to Louisiana State University with me for the fiftieth anniversary celebration of The Southern Review, at which she was one of the main speakers. On stage she read aloud one of her stories3 that had been published in that journal when Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren were the editors. The story was "Petrified Man." Perhaps I was the only one in the audience who noticed, [End Page 307] but in reading a passage of dialogue in the beauty parlor Eudora slyly inserted the names of those wild hairdos from the Las Vegas competition. This, too: For her public readings, Eudora usually read from the Modern Library edition of her stories. It was well-worn, coverless, and probably fitted conveniently into her purse. Once, I noted it lying on her coffee table, and I realized its significance. I recall noting pencil annotations, although I did not touch the book. So, I surmise that book still exists somewhere, perhaps in the Archives. If so, I wonder if her Las Vegas annotations are included in "Petrified Man."4 Hunter McKelva Cole Brandon, Mississippi Notes 1. According to the website of the Association of American University Presses, the New Orleans meeting was in 1985, the same year The Southern Review celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 2. "Für Elise," Beethoven's Bagatelle No. 25, is featured in Welty's short story "June Recital" in The Golden Apples. 3. "Petrified Man." Southern Review, vol. 4, Spring 1939, pp. 682–95. 4. In the Modern Library edition of Selected Stories of Eudora Welty, 1954, the very copy Cole noted at Welty's house, added at the bottom of page 44 to replace the line "She's a beautician," Welty wrote, "Listen, she won 2nd prize at the Convention for the best Fantasy Comb-Out." One does smile at the thought that she also spontaneously amended her reading with the name of that prize-winning comb-out. Copyright © 2021 Department of English, Georgia State University