The only shocking aspect of Miller’s behavior, though, turned out to be his stupendous lack of interest in Southern history: he refused to take off his hat on a picnic at the local ruined plantation, and his apathy reached the point where he wouldn’t turn his head to look out the car window. I’m always on time, and I don’t get drunk or hole up in a motel with my lover.” Illustration by Riccardo Vecchio Welty explained her popularity as a lecturer: “I’m so well behaved. In the extensive touring plans that Welty had devised for her exotic visitor, she arranged for at least two male chaperons to accompany her wherever they went. Welty’s greeting was not only gracious but bold, since her mother refused to let Miller into the house-not because of his books but because of the letter, in which he’d offered to put Welty in touch with “an unfailing pornographic market” for her talents.
For three days, she drove Miller around the sights and surrounds of her native Jackson, Mississippi, the city where, at thirty-one, she lived with her widowed mother in a large Tudor-style house that her father had built. Despite the alarmingly forward letter of introduction that Miller had sent her some time before, Welty-unfailingly courteous-received him as an honored guest. When Henry Miller set off to discover America, in October, 1940, there were several outstanding natives whom he was hoping to meet: Margaret Mitchell, Zora Neale Hurston, Walt Disney, Ernest Hemingway, and a little-known writer named Eudora Welty.