The pitch-perfect talk she puts in their mouths seems to render moral judgment weightless it is present but invisible, rising up like gas. “How’d you like to be married to a guy like that?”) It is the uncertainly educated denizens of Welty’s ingrown, post-historic, Coca-Cola-sodden South who are more truly akin to monsters-albeit, at Welty’s dismaying best, entirely guileless and extremely funny ones. (“He’s turning to stone,” Leota the beautician observes sagely of the Petrified Man.
She knew her outsiders, and she understood what people used them for. Welty had a notably vivid sympathy for the freak and the grotesque, for the pygmy and the pickled and the blinkingly dim, characters who served to set the wider population in her stories at a disadvantage. Another story, called “Petrified Man”-in which the horror of a carnival freak show is easily outdone by the horror of a small-town beauty parlor (“this den of curling fluid and henna packs”)-was rejected so many times that she burned it in disgust, and then rewrote it from memory when Robert Penn Warren, the editor of The Southern Review, changed his mind and wanted it back. The uproariously surging “Powerhouse” was completed in a single sitting, after she came home one night from a Fats Waller concert and felt an urge to spin the music’s high-flying, improvisatory riffs out into words. She had an uncannily keen ear, and she tended to write quickly in bursts of energetic prose that required little or no revision. Welty knew that she was writing “something new,” and she didn’t expect success to come without a struggle. At roughly the time she was boring Miller stiff-necked, editors of The Atlantic Monthly were worriedly censoring Welty’s inspired black-jazz improvisation, “Powerhouse,” and trying to explain to the genteel Southern-lady author why her story could not conclude with the lyrics to “Hold Tight, I Want Some Seafood, Mama” (“Fooly racky sacky want some seafood, Mama!”). Although she had published only a handful of stories, Welty already flaunted a distinct and not unshocking literary manner: deadly honest, ruthlessly funny, and as subversive of complacent American normalcy as that of any jaundiced expatriate. But, if Welty had reason to dismiss this wandering libertine as “the most boring businessman you can imagine,” the contrast she offered to her own writing was hardly less extreme. The only shocking aspect of Miller’s behavior, though, turned out to be his stupendous lack of interest in Southern history: he refused to take off his hat on a picnic at the local ruined plantation, and his apathy reached the point where he wouldn’t turn his head to look out the car window. I’m always on time, and I don’t get drunk or hole up in a motel with my lover.” Illustration by Riccardo Vecchio Welty explained her popularity as a lecturer: “I’m so well behaved. In the extensive touring plans that Welty had devised for her exotic visitor, she arranged for at least two male chaperons to accompany her wherever they went. Welty’s greeting was not only gracious but bold, since her mother refused to let Miller into the house-not because of his books but because of the letter, in which he’d offered to put Welty in touch with “an unfailing pornographic market” for her talents. For three days, she drove Miller around the sights and surrounds of her native Jackson, Mississippi, the city where, at thirty-one, she lived with her widowed mother in a large Tudor-style house that her father had built. Despite the alarmingly forward letter of introduction that Miller had sent her some time before, Welty-unfailingly courteous-received him as an honored guest. When Henry Miller set off to discover America, in October, 1940, there were several outstanding natives whom he was hoping to meet: Margaret Mitchell, Zora Neale Hurston, Walt Disney, Ernest Hemingway, and a little-known writer named Eudora Welty.