Written by Chase Wynn
Thank God she didn’t have a Kindle.
She being Eudora Welty, I mean. Have you been to her house? If you’re a reader, you really should. Not just because she was a great writer—and not just in the way you’re imagining. The little white-haired lady who wrote about quaint things like weddings in the Delta and people who lived in post offices? She was so, so much more than that. Read “No Place for You, My Love” sometime, or “The Hitch-Hikers,” or “A Still Moment.” Read “The Burning.”
That’s not why you should visit the house. Come look at her books. She had a lot of them—between five and six thousand in the house when she passed on. They’re everywhere. On shelves, yes, but also stacked on the couches, the tables, the spare beds. I’m told she liked to keep a different book going in every room of the house, so that no matter where she sat down, she could just keep going.
The usual suspects are there—Faulkner, and Proust, and Woolf—but so many others, too. Things I didn’t expect. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. A Confederacy of Dunces. True Grit. And mysteries, mysteries, mysteries. A snobby reader our girl was not.
A man named Tim Parks wrote an article for The New York Review of Books that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, especially when I walk in the Welty house: “The conditions in which we read today are not those of fifty or even thirty years ago… [today] every moment of serious reading has to be fought for.” I don’t mean to sound snarky when I say, “Thank God she didn’t have a Kindle.” This isn’t some sort of anti-tech rant. Heck, you’re reading this on a blog, right? But in a time when serious reading is so hard to do, in a time when you really have to fight for it, it’s nice to walk through her Tudor arch doorway and into a place that feels like a monument not only to a great writer, but to a truly great reader.
It’s the collection of a real reader, too. Yeah, there are some beautiful, leather-bound volumes in there. Mostly, though, there are tattered paperbacks and creased, worn out spines. She read the hell out of those books. She loved them—you can tell.
Come check her out sometime.
The Eudora Welty House will be hosting Ken Murphy for a signing of Jackson: Photographs by Ken Murphy Monday, August 11th @ 5 p.m. The book is also available for purchase at Lemuria (800-366-7619, or online at lemuriabooks.com)
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