“To Absent Friends” is a compilation of letters between author Eudora Welty and her friend, Frank Lyell, selected and edited by Julia Eichelberger.
Across the 350 letters in this book, we see the ways the fifty-year friendship between Welty and Lyell was forged and continued to grow and develop into something that for Welty had to have become totally necessary in her life.
The letters show how intimate Welty could be — in ways that come through as surprising, friendly, sisterly, affectionate — and unfailingly wry, clever and intelligent.
Welty was a genius — by any critical standard or measure. She was unassuming, having stayed in her childhood home in Jackson, Mississippi most of her life. Still today her novels and stories are studied and admired for the ways she portrays her southern settings — with characters that have rich inner lives, something to say, something we learn from, no matter what our own background is.
One has only to read a favorite story like “No Place for You, My Love” to examine and understand the ways she could present characters we might not ever consider until she can bring to life a full sensory experience of their secret wishes, unspoken ones that we somehow understand.
Lyell and Welty were contemporaries, and both were from Jackson. Their friendship began in the 1930s when both attended Columbia University.
Of tremendous interest to me was that at one point, Lyell ended up in Austin and in San Antonio — and letters were mailed from these cities in Texas to Mississippi.
Welty and Lyell obviously had time to visit and spend time together, but it was their letters, perhaps, that allowed the friendship to develop in more profound ways.
I found very moving the times Lyell commented on Welty’s work. He’d taken such care to read her drafts, to offer his comments.
Welty could vent to Lyell, too, about clumsy editors, her long trips abroad, her writing, among many other things.
The jacket photo of “To Absent Friends” alone shows something of the friendship between these two. They seem to be posing for the camera as if they were movie stars on a film set. They are young, silly, carefree, unselfconscious with each other. That speaks volumes about their connection.
We don’t write letters thinking anyone will ever share them or that they will be published. But the letters — particularly the ones from Welty to Lyell are poetry ... well, prose ... the kind of writing from Welty that has made so many of us admirers of her work for almost all of our lives.
I was a young reader when I first read “A Worn Path,” a story so often anthologized. Much later, as a teacher, I also assigned that story to my own students and venture a wild guess that I’ve read and re-read that story across many classes over 200 times. I still marvel at it.
Since that initial story, of course, my reading of Welty has grown across her many publications. The magic of technology means I can even watch YouTube videos of old interviews she did later in her life. She is fantastic.
Welty cared for her ill mother during the 1950s and 1960s. Her brother Walter died in 1959. In 1966 in the span of one week, she lost both her mother and another brother, Edward.
During this time, she was writing the book “Losing Battles” and struggled to finish it.
Welty could write about people and situations she could experience in her own imagination. But the grief and loss she suffered actually lived through must have been some difficult teachers for her, too.
At the end of the book, we learn of the death of Frank Lyell in 1977 at the age of 65.
Welty wrote to another friend, Kenneth Millar, to try to express her profound shock and grief over the loss of Lyell. She understands that at their age, death is not necessarily surprising but, she writes, “I am not going to learn to accept it for being not surprising.”
In the novel, “Losing Battles,” the character of Gloria Beecham says, “There is only one way of depriving the ones you love — taking your living presence away from theirs; no one alive ever deserved such punishment.”
“To Absent Friends” draws its title from a favorite Welty toast. In writing letters, in connecting mostly through written correspondence Lyell’s absence could likely have been felt more palpably for Welty at times. But they lived very independent of constant commiseration. And yet, such concern and love for each other persisted.
In a letter from January 21, 1975, from Jackson Mississippi to Austin, Texas, Welty wrote to Lyell to say that she had visited his mother who was ailing. They were quite worried that they had not received a letter from him in a long while. “I told her,” says Welty, "that I believed a letter must have got lost in the mail — maybe one did — so anyway, do write a good one now — I hope you are fine. … Love, Eudora.”
“To Absent Friends: Eudora Welty’s Correspondence with Frank Lyell” selected and edited by Julia Eichelberger is published by the University Press of Mississippi.
