Serious Daring

The Fiction and Photography of Eudora Welty and Rosamond Purcell

Susan Letzler Cole

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781610755955
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Biographies

Serious Daring is the story of the complementary journeys of two American women artists, celebrated fiction writer Eudora Welty and internationally acclaimed photographer Rosamond Purcell, each of whom initially practiced, but then turned from, the art form ultimately pursued by the other.

For both Welty and Purcell, the art realized is full of the art seemingly abandoned. Welty's short stories and novels use images of photographs, photographers, and photography. Purcell photographed books, texts, and writing.

Both women make compelling art out of the seeming tension between literary and visual cultures. Purcell wrote a memoir in which photographs became endnotes. Welty re-emerged as a photographer through the publication of four volumes of what she called her "snapshots, " magnificent black-and-white photographs of small-town Mississippi and New York City life.

Serious Daring is a fascinating look at how the road not taken can stubbornly accompany the chosen path, how what is seemingly left behind can become a haunting and vital presence in life and art.

1

Eudora Welty

Nine Photographs of Talking

A picture of someone talking is to me an elemental example of the problem of the outside and the threshold. . . . [E]very viewer of the picture can “hear” something different. Talking escapes, and so it is itself an image of what is both included and never included in a picture.

—Jeff Wall, Jeff Wall: Selected Essays and Interviews

The Canadian photographer Jeff Wall offers an illuminating version of W. J. T. Mitchell’s “paradox of the image.”¹ The “talking” that is so firmly embedded in Eudora Welty’s fiction is both “included” and at the same time “never included” in her snapshots. This chapter will look at visual images of conversation Welty may have heard as she was taking the pictures from which it escapes.

In her twenties, Eudora Welty traveled across Mississippi, working as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) junior publicity agent and taking photographs on her own, eventually amassing “a collection of three hundred unposed studies”² of African Americans. Doris Ulmann had published Roll, Jordan, Roll in 1933, with its “romanticized, staged photographs of African Americans.” The photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White, like the photographer Dorothea Lange, also carefully arranged the poses of her subjects. Erskine Caldwell, Bourke-White’s collaborator and later her husband, said of her technique as a photographer: “‘She was in charge of everything, manipulating people and telling them where to sit and where to look. . . . She was almost like a motion picture director.’”³ In contrast, Welty says of her photographic subjects: “I would never have dared to interfere with the poses.”⁴

Welty was interested in the work of Berenice Abbott, to whom she had written in 1934, applying, unsuccessfully, for admission to Abbott’s photography class at the New School for Social Research in New York. Undaunted, Welty continued actively to pursue a career in photography even while she was writing her early fiction.⁵ In 1935 she attempted to publish Black Saturday, a book that included a collection of her photographs, and was rejected by Smith and Hass in New York.⁶ In 1936, Eudora Welty sprang into public view as both photographer and writer. She had a one-woman show of black-and-white photographs at the Lugene Galleries in New York City from March 31 to April 15, 1936.⁷ In June of that year, the first short story she had ever submitted for publication, “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” was published in Manuscript magazine.⁸ In the same month, her short story “The Doll,” was published in The Tanager, a Grinnell College magazine; that fall, Manuscript published another story, “Magic.” In November, The Camera House announced that it would exhibit her photographs in New York the following year.⁹

Thus began the two vocations of Eudora Welty, one far overshadowing the other. Four collections of forty-one stories and five novels, along with essays, book reviews, and a remarkable memoir, were eventually joined by four collections of her photographs, beginning with One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression, A Snapshot Album in 1971.¹⁰ “What [Welty] the photographer recorded on film,” Suzanne Marrs points out, “the writer recorded in memory. . . . [Welty] did not, as she later told interviewers, consult her photographs when writing, but the memories of those photographic occasions stood her in good stead and would frequently appear in her fiction.”¹¹ Memory is an increasingly pervasive theme in Welty’s writing. Her “memories of . . . [certain] photographic occasions” inform both her stories and her novels, as will be seen in the next chapter.

The following snapshots of people talking show particularities of dress (worn, torn, soiled, missing buttons) as distinctive markers of social and economic status; facial expressions and telling gestures; physical postures that represent individual character or relationships: people standing upright, bent forward, sitting in groups, squatting on the ground; occasional cityscapes; a background of trees, grass, sky; the play of light and shadows; pieces of paper (content unknown); the presentation of a scene from changing angles and distance; and, above all, conversation. However, as Alan Trachtenberg has rightly observed, one “cannot rely on the viewer’s understanding of a picture as if it were a voice, a word in a story.”¹² Welty does not bring voice to her visual images; she brings voice to the people who populate her writing.

The black-and-white snapshots discussed in this chapter segregate blacks and whites, who do not appear together in any of these pictures, as would generally be true of the Mississippi Welty inhabited and photographed.¹³ Her photographic practice both discloses the reality of racism in the South and defies it by allowing a white woman to witness and share intimate moments in the lives of the black community. As Welty said in an interview, “my pictures were made in sympathy, not exploitation. If I had felt that way, I would not have taken the pictures. . . . Human feeling for human beings was a response to what I saw.”¹⁴

In the introduction to her photographs in One Time, One Place, Welty says that the majority of her photographs were taken either without the knowledge of the subjects or with “only their peripheral awareness. . . . The snapshots made with people’s awareness are, for the most part, just as unposed; I simply asked people if they would mind going on with what they were doing and letting me take a picture. I can’t remember ever being met with a demurrer stronger than amusement.”¹⁵ In perhaps another variation on Mitchell’s paradox of the image—or rather the paradox of Welty’s photographic practice—Timothy Dow Adams makes the intriguing suggestion that in “many of [Welty’s] group pictures, the people . . . , either because of the novelty of having their picture taken or because of the complicated familiarity combined with distance that characterized black and white relations of the time, often seem to see her and not notice her at the same time.”¹⁶ Several group snapshots reproduced here may illustrate this noticing and not noticing of the photographer: Making a date/Grenada/1935, Saturday trip to town/Hinds County/1939, and Union Square/New York City/1930s.

Eudora Welty never shied away from taking pictures of the talking that escapes. While the captions¹⁷ of the following images do not always focus on conversation, the composition of the photographs does.

Tall story/Utica/1930s (Plate 1)¹⁸ captures two black farmers, side by side, their forearms touching. Each wears a somewhat worn hat. The face of the larger man is in three-quarters view, the brim of his hat tipped up, his eyes downcast; his lips, slightly apart, begin a sweet or cautious smile. He is listening. The hat of the thinner man to his right is pulled down over his partly shadowed profile; his eyes are cast downward across the bulk of the man next to him, as if he is inwardly assessing the effect of his “tall story” on his companion. His mouth is open, his upper teeth visible; a gesturing right hand is raised in illustration or emphasis. He is talking. We are invited to look, not listen.

The two men wear denim or cotton jackets, the shirts beneath buttoned to the neck. The larger man wears a sweater with large checks. As I look more closely, I am moved by a large, square-shaped hole near the bottom of his sweater, just above the waist. The camera has caught marks of poverty without eclipsing the dignity of the black farmer.

In the background are trees and buildings, slightly blurred, and grass. Behind and to the right of the larger farmer is a small figure with a sack over his shoulder, his face turned away. In the midground behind the men stands a telephone pole. A horizontal line suggestive of a telephone wire seems to connect the heads of those in conversation. Foregrounded is the talking that escapes.

Farmers in Town/Crystal Spring/1930s (Plate 2) shows three white men, all wearing less worn, somewhat more expensive hats than those of the two farmers in Tall Story. The large central figure in overalls has his back, crisscrossed by suspenders, to the camera, his right hand pressed against his right hip with thumb pointing upward toward his waist, his left hand digging into a back pocket, his sleeves rolled up to the elbow. The thinner man to his right, seen in profile, stands, bent slightly forward, with hands neatly folded behind his back, the ends of the fingers of his right hand stretching out beyond the frame of the picture. His slightly shadowed gaze is focused intently on the face of the farmer to the far left, whose bushy white mustache covers lips that seem to have just finished speaking, as if they are for a moment in silent communion. The upper bodies of the two men to the left and right of the picture are partly concealed by the jutting arms of the bulky farmer who stands between them.

It is impossible to know what is being discussed or what the photographer might have heard, if anything. The casual intensity of the figure to the right and the somewhat stoic expression of the man who meets his gaze contrast with the slightly tense, seemingly overbearing posture of the central figure, whose face we cannot see; even the back of his head, just below the brim of his hat, is in shadow. The act of talking, like its content, is hidden from the viewer even as it controls the scene.

Political rally on the courthouse grounds/Pontotoc/1930s (Plate 3) presents a much larger group of white people: in the foreground are three figures, two men and a woman, squatting on the ground, while two others, a man and a woman, stand, bending forward. In the middle background are at least four men, all hatted, in light slacks and shirts; beyond them, in the far distance, are more figures, smaller and indistinct. The main conversation occurs in the foreground. To the left of center squats a man, wearing glasses, a white shirt, striped slacks with cuffs, and black hat with an elegantly elongated brim, his mouth slightly open and his head tilted upward to meet the intently focused eyes of a thin man to his right, bending toward him with hands on knees. Both men are seen in profile. Their hats, one lower than the other, form a diagonal axis reaching upward to the sharply focused leaves of what seems to be a white ash tree in the upper right of the frame. The unbuttoned, partly soiled left sleeve of the man bending forward and the creased, perspiration-soaked back of his white shirt beneath light-colored overalls suggest some time spent toiling in the sun, presumably in a common cause. A third man in dark overalls, squatting just behind him and to his right, is gazing downward at something, possibly a note, in his hands; his lips are pursed, perhaps in response to what he looks at or in response to the courthouse rally. To the far left, an extremely thin woman in a polka-dotted dress squats on the ground, her dark hair in a bun, her taut, wrinkled face half hidden by the black hat of the man squatting next to her. Part of her torso disappears outside the frame. She seems to be gazing upward at the man bending forward: it is not clear if he is still talking or listening. The other woman in the foreground, wearing a light-colored, open-necked dress, her hair pulled sharply back from her face, stands slightly left of center, bending forward toward the space between the two squatting men. Her face is fully visible, and yet it is not possible to say exactly what she is looking at or reaching toward—perhaps the hollowed-out watermelon halves lying on the ground.

Clearly, an important event in which people with a shared interest have participated has occurred or is about to occur. The camera focuses on talk, the kind of talk that may follow or precede a political rally. The squatting and bending figures are all in slightly uncomfortable positions, positions that we know will have to change at some point—perhaps an image of the need for, and inevitability of, change. The talking we do not hear will be followed by action we do not see.

In a picture titled Conversation/Grenada/1935 (Plate 4), no one at the moment the snapshot was taken seems to be talking to anyone. In the background, against a bare white sky, are a tall, dark, deciduous tree, blurred city buildings, and two parked cars. To the right is the rear of what seems to be a delivery truck with a few letters visible (“JAS”).

In the foreground are three figures. Two young black women, wearing somewhat similar light-colored, wrinkled dresses and heels,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Eudora Welty: Nine Photographs of Talking
• 2. Photography in Fiction
• 3. The Visualizing Mind
• 4. Doubling
• 5. Reverberations
• 6. Rosamond Wolff Purcell: Beginnings
• 7. Alchemy
• 8. Double Vision
• 9. Foraging and Reconfiguring
• 10. Images Rich and Strange
• 11. Wonder
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Author