The Traveling Word: Eudora Welty’s Literary Correspondence with the Postal South Donnie McMahand and Kevin L. Murphy Curated and brought out in three separate volumes, first by Suzanne Marrs and most recently by Julia Eichelberger, Eudora Welty’s published correspondence confirms her fondness for witty observation, sympathy, and affection. The second collection, edited by Marrs and Tom Nolan, has ignited (or reignited) speculations concerning Welty’s romantic interests, namely in crime novelist Ken Millar, better known to the public by his nom de plume Ross MacDonald, with whom she corresponded throughout the 1970s. Many readers find in their exchanges passages of longing and sensuality that surpass mere friendship. In a letter dated September 23, 1978, Welty tells Millar, “Depressed or happy and serene, our spirits have traveled very near to each other and I believe sustained each other—This will go on, dear Ken” (Welty and MacDonald 408). Whatever else turns up about the romantic interest Welty had in Millar, she clearly realized the pleasure of sending and receiving personal letters, detailing a fundamental desire to access the wider world. The prospect of modernized mail delivery holds greater complexity in the fiction where some characters favor the insularity of their local communities over the potential of long-distance communication. Welty’s fictional backwaters typify the locations that substantiate the eponymous thesis of Winifred Gallagher’s 2016 book How the Post Office Created America: A History. Revealing where the post office intensely bolstered a culture of communication among outposts and settlements and thereby connected otherwise isolated regions into a unified nation, Gallagher explains how the institution “also subsidized [End Page 117] the delivery of newspapers to the entire population, which created an informed electorate, spurred the fledgling market economy, and bound thirteen fractious erstwhile colonies into the United States” (1). Not everyone, to be certain, championed communication via mail as personally or publicly advantageous or even perceived it as such. One prominent figure of dissent, Henry David Thoreau, wryly declares in Walden his disdain for the nation’s postal service, declaring, “I could easily do without [it]. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. . . . I never received more than one or two letters in my life . . . that were worth the postage” (397). As for the broadsheets, his remarks read as similarly acerbic: I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident . . . we never need read of another . . . . To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. (397) Thoreau’s rejection of the post office says less about his philosophical quest for simplification than it does his elitist male privilege, which makes his quest more imminently feasible. In complete contradiction to Thoreau’s sentiments, Welty declares in her introduction to The Norton Book of Friendship (1991), “All letters, old and new, are the still-existing parts of a life. . . . To come upon a personal truth of a human being however little known, and now gone forever, is in some way to admit him to our friendship,” adding, “What we’ve been told need not be momentous, but it can be as good as receiving the darting glance from some very bright eye, . . . arriving from fifty or a hundred years ago” (37–38). In these comments, Welty calculates a correspondent’s ability to mark the separateness of a space while defying the physics of time with intimacies permanently imparted between sender and recipient, whether that recipient be immediate or not, intended or not. Finding and reading her parents’ premarital correspondence, Welty remarks in her memoir One Writer’s Beginnings (1984) that she would have recognized her “mother’s voice in her letters anywhere” but that her father’s letters, written from his home state of Ohio to hers in West Virginia, surprised her with their “direct and tender . . . expression, so urgent . . . they seemed to bare, along with his love, the rest of his whole life.” Peering into her parents’ private utterances, [End Page 118] Welty...
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Feb 1, 2022
Benjamin Adam Saidel 
Open Access