In Progress: 'What There is to Say We Have Said'

This spring break I'm spending time with Eudora Welty, whose writing I've loved for years, and William Maxwell, whose work I now plan to glom. The Southern chronicler of human foible and The New Yorker editor/novelist were friends for decades. Many of their letters, as well as some from Maxwell's wife Emily, are gathered in What There Is To Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

The introduction by Welty friend and biographer Suzanne Marrs, who edited this collection, sets the loveliest tone about friendship and discoveries that friends want to share with each other over the years about their own writing, each other's writing, books, roses, the places they travel. Marrs also begins by quoting Welty's own introduction to the famed Norton Book of Friendship. It brings to mind long-lasting friendships formed online, where we put ideas, hopes, dreams and disappointments into words to each other every day:

All letters, old and now, are the still-existing parts of a life. To read them now is to be present when some discovery of truth -- or perhaps untruth, some flash of light -- is just occurring. ... To come upon a personal truth of a human being, however little known, and now gone forever, is in some way to admit him to our friendship.