Status Updates From What There Is to Say We Hav...

Emmy (Emily) Maxwell writing to Eudora about the fruitcake Eudora sent: "...And it was good to have something from your hands. I only like the parts of Christmas that people make."

Welty presented Maxwell with his Howell's medal and said of So Long, See You Tomorrow: "There is nothing between us and the realization that without love and without death we should never have come into the presence of human mystery at all." Profound.

Speaking of a photograph of Willa Cather, Maxwell says, "Steichen could never photograph the inside of an artist; only their fan mail."

I loved that!

What blew me away about this comment by Maxwell was that he was referring to Over By the River, which happens to be one of the best short story collections I have ever come across. I wonder what this man wanted from himself!

"I'm trying to put together a book of short stories, and finding it difficult. So many of them are either stuck fast in the copy of the New Yorker they appeared in, or in a period that isn't like now. I keep wishing that somebody (myself for instance) had only said, "Couldn't you try harder?" A few are all right. But only a few. And what bothers me is that I didn't see this at the time."

Continued in next update.

I am tickled that Maxwell seemed to think Losing Battles an exceptional work. I personally think it is Welty at her best.

It makes me very sad to think of these two brilliant minds and vital persons as gone. I know they live on in their writings, but I should like to think of them out there still teasing one another, visiting one another, sharing their marvelous thoughts and feelings.