30 September (1941): Eudora Welty to Diarmuid Russell

In a previous heyday of American publishing, Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell shared an unusual—and in many ways, ideal—relationship as author and agent; the pair were close confidants as well as loyal business partners. Find below one of the “non-business” letters in this long and curious correspondence.

September 30, 1941

Dear Diarmuid,

…This is not a business letter—just the opposite, for I just gave the Jr. League Magazine 3000 words free and neither of us will get any money. Is that all right?…

The sweet smells of late summer are everywhere, with drifts of woodsmoke coming in from the country. I did find what in a small way I felt. “As I walked in the evening down the lanes scented by the honeysuckle my senses were expectant of some unveiling about to take place…The tinted air glowed before me with intelligible significance like a face, a voice. The visible world became like a tapestry blown and stirred by winds behind it. If it would but raise for an instant I knew I would be in Paradise.” Except that I could not say Paradise or be sure. I read The Candle of Vision and the books I have again. I don’t know what I apprehended from them when I read them first—it was not what I understand now or what I may understand later—but I suppose it was what I needed. It was the first crisis of a certain kind in my life, and I was frightened—it was when I was sent to the Middle West to school. I was very timid and shy, younger than the rest and those people up there seemed to me like sticks of flint, that lived in the icy world. I am afraid of flintiness—I had to penetrate that, but not through their hearts. I used to be in a kind of wandering daze, I would wander down to Chicago and through the stores, I could feel such a heavy heart inside me. It was more than the pangs of growing up, much more, I knew it then, it was some kind of desire to be shown that the human spirit was not like that shivery winter in Wisconsin, that the opposite to all this existed in full. It was just by chance, wandering in the stacks of the library, that I saw one of these books open on one of the little tables under a light. I can’t tell you and it is not needed to, what it was like for me to read A.E. but it was a little like first waiting on a shore and then being enveloped in a sea, not being struck violently by a wave, never a shock—and it was the same every day, a tender and firm and passionate experience that I felt in all my ignorance but with a kind of understanding. I would read every afternoon, hurry to read, it was the thing the day led to, and at night what I had read would stay in my secret heart, for I did not let anybody there really know me. What you look for in the world is not simply for what you want to know, but for more than you want to know, and more than you can know, better than you had wished for, and sometimes something draws you to a discovery and there is no other happiness quite the same…

Yours
Eudora

From Tell About the Night Flowers: Eudora Welty’s Gardening Letters, 1940-1949. Selected and edited by Julia Eichelberger. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2013