'Hold Tight, I Want Some Seafood, Mama'

“My eyes fall on [Henry Green’s novel] ‘Party Going’ and I know you were here. Reading is going to be my Christmas present to myself. The Fats Waller records are delightful.” 

Why have I never thought of reading as a Christmas present to myself? That’s an excellent idea, and so inexpensive. Prerequisites: a book, corrective lenses, time – so I’m covered. I know for certain I’m getting at least three books for Christmas this year, only one of which I have read before. A good haul, as we said as kids on Halloween. Of course, one makes a desultory effort to be sociable and agreeably festive. Few acts, in the eyes of many, are more anti-social than reading with others in the room, though I’ve been in a house where five televisions were playing simultaneously and no one was watching even one of them. On Christmas, there’s always cooking to be done and all that wrapping paper to stuff into the recycling bin, and that will interrupt my reading.

 

As to specifics, over the years I’ve accumulated all of Henry Green’s books and much of the Fats Waller discography. Try “Swingin’ Them Jingle Bells.” William Maxwell wrote the passage above to his friend Eudora Welty on Christmas Day 1978. Welty wrote her short story “Powerhouse” after seeing Fats Waller in performance. The original version she sent to The Atlantic concluded with lyrics from Sidney Bechet's “Hold Tight, I Want Some Seafood, Mama,” but the editors deemed them too lewd for their readers and had Welty remove them.

 

Fifteen years later, on December 19, 1993, Maxwell wrote to Welty: “My message to Santa Claus was please don’t give me anything, I have more than I know what to do with. But he is so busy and may well not get the message.”

 

[The letters quoted are from What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell (2011).]