Far Out in the Country

In their book, A Dictionary of First Names, Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges supply the following entry for “Eudora.”

Eudora (f.) English: ostensibly a Greek name, composed of the elements eu well, good + a derivative of dōron gift. However, there is no saint of this name, and it is more probably a modern combination of elements which are both common in other given names. [Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges, A Dictionary of First Names (Oxford University Press, 1990), s.v. “Eudora.”]

The word “ostensibly” and noting that no saint is named Eudora are offered as support for the authors’ claim that Eudora is probably a modern construction of Greek elements to create the name. However it came about, the name embodies the love many parents feel for the birth of a child; their child is a good gift. I once worked with a man named Theodore whose parents must similarly have felt their son to have been a gift, a divine gift to them. Hanks and Hodges tell us that “Theodore” was popular among early Christians, and several saints bore the name.

I know only one person named Eudora, the Mississippi author Eudora Welty (1909-2001). Ms. Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi. She graduated from Central High School in Jackson, and about the time of her graduation from Central, she moved with her family into a home her parents had built for them at 1119 Pinehurst Street in Jackson. It was Ms. Welty’s address for nearly eighty years until she died in 2001. It is now the Eudora Welty House and Garden. The house and garden were opened to the public in 2006.

Pinehurst is one of the streets bordering Belhaven College (now University), where I was a student from 1968 to 1972. I often passed Ms. Welty’s house, going to and from school. In 2015, before emigrating from the US to Israel with my wife, we paid a farewell visit to Mississippi. One of the stops on our agenda was Ms. Welty’s house. As luck would have it, it was closed during our visit. I hope someday to make the trip again and see the house.

Whether I ever get to see inside Ms. Welty’s home, I have the wonderful fortune to see inside her soul insofar as it is present in the astounding beauty of the prose in her short stories and novels. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for her novel The Optimist’s Daughter. Her collected stories were published in 1980. I have them on my Kindle with an introduction by Ann Patchett from 2019, a writer in her own right. One of the features of Welty’s writing, which Pachett notes in her introduction, is Welty’s handling of landscape. “There is no writer I know of who tells the truth of the landscape like Welty. The natural world is the rock on which these stories are built, and its overbearing presence informs every sentence.” [Welty, Eudora. The Collected Stories Of Eudora Welty: A National Book Award Winner. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.]

If you’ve never read Welty and would like to know a good place to enter her world, I recommend you start with her short story “A Worn Path.” The story is one of her most anthologized works. Let me whet your appetite with the opening paragraph.

It was December—a bright frozen day in the early morning. Far out in the country there was an old Negro woman with her head tied in a red rag, coming along a path through the pinewoods. Her name was Phoenix Jackson. She was very old and small and she walked slowly in the dark pine shadows, moving a little from side to side in her steps, with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock. She carried a thin, small cane made from an umbrella, and with this she kept tapping the frozen earth in front of her. This made a grave and persistent noise in the still air, that seemed meditative like the chirping of a solitary little bird.

Welty, Eudora. The Collected Stories Of Eudora Welty: A National Book Award Winner (p. 129). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. 

Ms. Welty never married and lived in her parents’ home in Jackson most of her life. I know writers who believe where they live and were born is an aesthetic problem, an obstacle to their writing, something that holds them back. They long for far-off, exotic, and sophisticated places like New York, Paris, London, and Rome. Their world, they feel, is too small, too backward, too protected, too sheltered. Not so, Eudora Welty! “I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.” [One Writer’s Beginnings. Finding a Voice.]

If you are a writer, the next time you crave to move, repeat aloud, as many times as you need to, “All serious daring starts from within.” Then, sit down and write.

All the best,
Gershon