Drop me a lifeline

She’d seen, she wrote, “an untoward number of picture galleries and 15¢ movies lately, and could review them with my old prosperous detachment. . . . [M]y mind works . . . quick, and away from the point. I read simply voraciously, and can drum up an opinion afterwards.’’ It was an offer the magazine, neither an intimate nor disarmed, could manage to refuse, though it’s not clear it bothered to.

Eighteen years later it published its first Welty piece. And this was after years of resistance despite the wide acclaim she had received for her Mississippi novels and stories. Harold Ross found them too “arty’’ and rejected them in the face of years of impassioned advocacy by the magazine’s William Maxwell, one of America’s most perceptive fiction editors.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has published an extensive selection of letters between Welty and Maxwell, lovingly edited by Suzanne Marrs, a Welty specialist. The correspondence is extraordinary. It extends over 50 years; but more than that, it goes far beyond literary exchanges to become deeply personal. It is an all-but-lifelong rescue mission beneath the virtual weekly rustle of news, activities, flower-growing (the letters seem crowded with people until you realize that Mme. Staechelin, Duchess of Wellington, Clarice Goodacre are roses).

Welty’s fictional material, her care of an aged and ailing mother, the obligations and errands involved in running and maintaining the house, kept her rooted in Jackson. Her longings for society, art, activity stretched imaginatively toward the New York of a year’s graduate study and her early job-seeking attempt. Her letters write of her Jackson life with a dignified sprightliness and lack of self-pity that fail to mask a depressive fragility.

Maxwell, through his love for her writing, and soon of her, took it on himself to lift her out. Not through any preachment but through a one-man chorus (joined sometimes by his wife, Emmy) that supplied her vicariously with life to populate her — call it that — exile. Part of that life was his family’s: He wrote in detail about himself, Emmy, and their two daughters. Her replies, more than news of herself, were loving celebrations of his news. A hermit crab, she found shelter in his sea-snail shell; only, instead of vacating he moved over to make room.

Room, literally: On her frequent visits to New York she stayed with the Maxwells, sharing their visitors, their outings, their fun. And wrote back later, recalling and savoring them. When Welty was unable to make the trip herself, Maxwell’s letters furnished her with her longed-for New York.

And as she struggled with her writer’s block (it took 15 years for her to finish “Losing Battles,’’ though during one interval she managed to complete “The Optimist’s Daughter,’’ winner of the Pulitzer Prize), she was buoyed by Maxwell’s praise. He had almost a genius for it; his praise has the sharp specificity and wit that is found mainly in critical disparagement.

Reading her collection “The Golden Apples,’’ he tells her of stumbling in a daze through chores and errands, anxious to get back to it. “This writing is corrective, meaning of course for myself and all other writers,’’ he writes. “You had gone as far as there is to go and then taken one step farther.’’

And he was her big-world acoustic; the reassuring resonance for what, lacking Faulkner’s armored assurance, she was trying to accomplish from her provincial world. It gave her confidence for a rare revelation of her writing struggles: In this case the years it took her to complete “Losing Battles.’’

“What happened to it was time. I was writing it and writing it, all through life and other stories, with one hand while I drove the car every day to Yazoo City, before day at home. Time let them all (the different people) come into flower, insomuch as I could convey it, but I’m sure that was the reason for the strange experience that made me think I could still keep on.’’

Richard Eder, who writes reviews for numerous publications, can be reached at ederculloch@gmail.com.