Coaxing the Flower:PLANTS AND GARDENS IN THE STORIES, NOVELS AND LETTERS OF EUDORA WELTY - Part Two: The Letters

摘要

I ended the first of this two-part article — the part about plants and gardens in Welty's stories and novels — with a sentence spoken by Aunt Beck in Losing Battles: 'You copy who you love'. The person to whom Eudora Welty herself was closest for longest and whom, in one sense at least, she most loved was her mother, Chestina, who didn't die until 1966, when Welty herself was almost sixty. (She loved in another sense two men but neither relationship ended well: John Robinson eventually decided he was gay and spent the later decades of his life in Italy with his Italian boyfriend, while Kenneth Millar — the writer, as Ross Macdonald, of distinguished detective novels — was unhappily but faithfully married and even the largely epistolary relationship into which he and Welty eventually settled came to a premature end when he developed Alzheimer's and died in his early sixties.) And certainly, whatever else Welty learnt by copying her mother, it was by copying her that she learnt about gardening.