by Tom Nolan
He nursed a crush on Margaret Sturm and secretly followed her home after classes. He loved her sharp humor, her self-assurance (she was nearly a year older), her intelligence, her coltish legs. “Someday I’m going to marry that girl,” he told a buddy (echoing a man in Hammett’s The Glass Key who’s smitten with a politician’s daughter). But to Margaret, Kenneth said not a word.
Millar felt insecure in nearly every way and craved knowledge of how to live in the world. He felt himself pulled along dangerous paths. It was as if two sides of his nature were in a race: sometimes the sensitive, studious boy was leading; sometimes the angry, destructive boy dashed ahead. For the first time in his life, Millar did poorly in school. Then he was caught in a crime, something serious enough to warrant calling the police. But police were not called. Whoever nabbed Millar (perhaps a KCI teacher, a store employee, or a YMCA worker) meted out their own punishment—possibly forcing Kenneth to run behind a moving automobile he was tied to, a penalty mentioned in later Millar notebooks. Whatever happened had the desired effect: Ken Millar resolved to stop his downward slide.
Some teachers helped him. One was Cyril Phelp, his debate-team coach, who gave him firm guidance and good counsel. And there was a Mr. Archer, who taught at KCI in 1931. With good father figures encouraging him, Millar did well in his senior year’s finals—but not well enough to cancel a poor early-semester showing. Ken Millar graduated in the middle ranks of a class he’d headed the previous term. There’d be no university scholarship. His change of heart had come too late.
Canada was still frozen in a bad financial depression. Millar couldn’t afford college, and without a degree he’d be scuffling for work with the rest of the unemployed. His aunt Adeline, who’d already done a great deal for the family, got him an interview for an office job at Mutual Life in Waterloo, a position that paid ten dollars a week and that once secured could be his for life. But Ken Millar didn’t want to work in an office forever, or even a year. He wanted to be a writer, and he knew this job would prevent it. He purposely botched the interview. Not long after, Aunt Adeline died.
Millar’s future was as uncertain as his past was unsettled. At sixteen, he counted the number of rooms he’d lived in and got fifty. He’d been frightened, bored, or intellectually insulted by Mennonites, Christian Scientists, Methodists, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians (the Anglicans were okay, he thought), and he turned his back on all of them. But he believed in his potential, and he refused to be a criminal.
He bought himself time by working for room and board on the Snyder family’s Oxbow farm, six miles outside Kitchener. Here he continued his self-education, reading Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard into the night. The Snyders liked Millar and tolerated his late risings. Farm life agreed with him; he put on fifty pounds, bringing his weight to 180. He enjoyed being away from his mother and other relatives. Alone, he could set his own rules and goals. He gave up stealing. An affair with an older girl confirmed his heterosexuality and helped him renounce the homosexual acts that had shamed him since he was eight. He drew a moral code for himself to follow, using Western thought from the Greeks to Freud. Philosophical ideas weren’t mere abstractions to Ken Millar but words to live by. Though he rejected formal religion, the standards he set for himself were as strict as the Mennonites’. “Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart,” he later wrote, “and you find it by expressing your personality.” Millar dealt with the worst impulses of his own personality—rage, self-pity, the urge to do harm—by suppressing them. He’d keep himself under rigid control. This was as serious to him as life or death, for he knew he had the strength and the anger to kill. Thoughts of succumbing to evil terrified him.
While Ken Millar wrestled with such matters, his father Jack (thanks to Annie Millar’s efforts) was admitted in September 1932 to Toronto’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Incurables, a good facility where he’d get decent care. Millar went to see him there. Jack Millar was unable to speak, barely able to move, but he still scrawled lines on paper. “His writing was so shaky that I couldn’t make out the words,” Millar wrote later. “But I could see that it was written in rhymed couplets.”
Ken Millar had been at the Snyder farm for fourteen months when his father died in Toronto. John Macdonald Millar, fifty-nine, was buried in Kitchener on May 24, 1933. A quarter century later, his son penned this tough appraisal: “The best of his talents were wasted on bad verse à la Burns, Ingersoll atheism, the company of masculine friends who loved him truly but stupidly. ‘Poor Jack’ was a futile Ulysses, a Jack London with more heart and less brains. His son has spent his life trying to forgive him his bad luck.”
Some good luck now came Millar’s way. Unbeknownst to his wife and son, Jack Millar had a life insurance policy, no doubt thanks to Aunt Adeline, who apparently arranged for its premiums to be paid even after her death. Anna Millar received $2,212 and used it to buy an annuity for her son. Two thousand dollars would pay for four years of college. Millar would get his degree.
A parent’s death, a sudden windfall: linkages of bad and good fortune would plague and bless Millar’s life and occur often in his fiction. In the fall of 1933, seventeen-year-old Kenneth Millar entered Waterloo College, a Lutheran seminary with a liberal arts section. Primed by self-imposed study and the fear of failure, he was ready to excel.
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Thou sad-voiced sky-born Fury, thou storm-child of the North;
Swift arrow of His vengeance, what Bowman launched thee forth?
—Kenneth Millar, “Wild Goose,” The College Cord, 1934
Ken Millar has a reflection on ice-breaking:
Candy is dandy. But liquor is quicker.
—The College Cord, 1934
In his first Waterloo semester, Millar earned ten A’s and moved to the head of the thirty-six-member class. Second semester he went out for sports and won seven track events. He became a reporter for the College Cord and published fiction and poetry in that school paper. All the energy that had once gone into furtive rebellion was now channeled into achievement and study.
Socially he was less adept and used alcohol to fight his shyness. He kept company with a blue-eyed brunette named Gretchen Kalbfleisch, a smart scholarship student who found him intense but withdrawn. He talked easily about literature though and was excited by Esquire, an American magazine publishing stories by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Hammett, and Canada’s Morley Callaghan. Millar submitted some things of his own to this New York monthly; when they were rejected, he wrote and informed the magazines editors that someday Esquire would publish his work.
Ken Millar was alive to all great writing, new or old. He loved the modern verse of T. S. Eliot, but when he found Coleridge’s unfinished 1800 poem “Christabel,” he so fell under its spell that he tried to complete it. What he wanted most was to be a writer, but he also wanted to do the right things: to be responsible, and not to be selfish or destructive. He wanted for instance to repay his mother for his college education. The best way to do that, he decided, was to become a high school teacher, which would let him support her and at the same time begin a writing career. He wasn’t going to do what his father had done and walk away from family duty. In the fall of 1934, Millar transferred to the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, to pursue a five-year honors course with history and English majors, after which he’d get his teaching certificate.
At Western too he was an outstanding student. But his writing plans got revised after one of the school’s best instructors, Frank Stiling, introduced Millar to the work of D. H. Lawrence. He could never write fiction as good as Lawrence’s, Millar decided, so the novel as a form was closed to him—because whatever sort of writing he did, he wanted to be the best at it. He’d have to make his mark elsewhere. Since he liked modern drama (Ibsen, Strindberg, O’Neill, Pirandello), maybe he’d be a playwright. To acquire stagecraft knowledge, Millar got cast in the university production of Lady Windermere’s Fan.
He a
lso went out for sports and made Western’s wrestling and swimming teams (his dad’s events). And he made some good friends, notably Robert Ford, son of the managing editor of the London (Ontario) Free Press. With girls, though, Millar was still ill at ease. Craving sex but unwilling or unable to seduce coeds, he went to prostitutes, assuring himself these encounters were “truly human.”
After one semester at Western, Millar asked his mother in Kitchener to come live with him. He saw it as a formal reconciliation: the two hadn’t stayed under the same roof for three years. In late 1935, mother and son moved into a small apartment on Askin Street in London. Though Ken and Anna Millar still clashed, she stopped nagging him to attend her church services; their months together were fairly peaceful. Millar felt he’d come a long way toward forgiving his mother his childhood.
One day around Christmas, Kenneth came home and found Annie Millar lying naked and helpless. At the hospital she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She lay delirious for weeks, having conversations with the past. Millar visited his mother but didn’t keep vigil at her bedside. He wasn’t present when Anna Moyer Millar died on January 26, 1936.
Guilt and depression hit him hard. He hadn’t realized she might suddenly die, but he sensed he may have stayed away to punish her for not making a good marriage—and for those orphanage gates. In time he’d appreciate all that she’d done for him when he was young, how she’d encouraged his talents and kept his spirit alive. He’d struggle for years with her memory and the knowledge that he’d failed her.
Anna Millar was buried in Kitchener’s Woodland Cemetery, in the same plot as the husband she’d never divorced. Millar had lost both parents, as well as the aunt who’d made his education possible. He drank a lot of beer and felt miserably lost, though he soldiered through the school term, keeping his grades up and drawing “roars of laughter” as a bourgeois American businessman in Noël Coward’s The Young Idea. But in June, he arranged to drop out of Western for a semester. With a bit of money from his mother’s death (Anna’s share of Adeline’s estate), he booked steamship passage for Ireland, where one of his aunts lived.
After visiting her, he bicycled all around Ireland, Scotland, and England, ending in London, where he stayed a month in a youth hostel. Halfraised on English books and journals, Ken Millar saw London as the capital of the civilized world. In the reading room of the British Museum, he caught up on new English writers such as W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. At the Duchess Theatre he saw Emlyn Williams’s Night Must Fall. The city was full of political ferment; Millar threw himself into it: marching in an antifascist demonstration, getting chased by mounted police. He met English university people, and German Jews who’d fled to London. With Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco in power or gaining it, the Continent was about to explode. Millar wanted a firsthand look at the prelude. He tried and failed to get to Spain, then went to Munich for eight weeks in Hitler’s Reich.
Thanks to his German friends in London, he made good Munich contacts: a teacher whose father was a Nazi general, the daughter of a Reichstag deputy, Jews who’d stayed in the city. He had an affair with a melancholy German girl. He had his English pipe knocked from his mouth while watching a military parade. He acquired enough anecdotes to last a decade, the sort of stories from which first novels are made (as his would be). Millar spent his twenty-first birthday in Munich, two days after Edward VIII abdicated the English throne, then went to Paris and saw in the New Year. He had what he wanted from his trip: he’d shaken the worst of his depression and gotten some kind of grip on manhood.
During these months Millar flirted with possible futures. He considered staying in England to study, but that meant “going British”—a badly regressive move for a Canadian, he felt. He thought of chucking school and going to sea, like his dad; but despite a strong romantic bent, he wasn’t really willing to give up normal life and culture—though he was pretty sure he’d never marry, so as not to pass on his mother’s emotional problems to any children. With a school term approaching, Millar took the sensible course of returning to Ontario to resume classes at Western. He’d banished the ghosts of his childhood, it seemed. But time, Millar learned, is a closed circuit. His ghosts would reappear.
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MILLAR SPEAKS OF RECENT JOURNEY
Last evening the Hesperian Club met at the home of Professor and Mrs. W. F. Tamblyn, 973 Waterloo Street, and conducted one of its most successful meetings. The feature of the evening was Kenneth Millar’s sketch of his recent sojourn in Europe, with special reference to Germany. Mr. Millar’s talk, delivered in his usual droll manner, was sprinkled with lively anecdotes, and did not fail to provide humour and interest for the large number of students present.
—University of Western Ontario Gazette, March 1937
I came after Armageddon,
And it’s very heavy sleddin’
—Kenneth Millar, 1937
Most of Western’s undergrads and many teachers wouldn’t acknowledge Millar’s news of impending world war; they laughed at his picaresque vignettes but yawned at his warnings. He felt more isolated than ever in provincial Canada.
The costume he’d acquired in Europe set him farther apart. Millar strode campus in an English trench coat and a green Bavarian fedora with white cable-cord trim. He cut a romantic figure, but some peers were wary of this traveler from the newsreel continent. Donald Ross Pearce, a junior, kept his distance from Millar. “I thought he was not only sort of sinister,” remembered Pearce, “but probably a dangerous person. Someone who’d been to the Third Reich? Who knew what he’d been up to there?”
But Pearce and Millar were thrown together in rehearsals for Twelfth Night, in which the lean Pearce was cast as Feste the clown opposite Millar’s stolid Duke Orsino. The two stood side by side in the wings one day, listening to a sea captain’s first-act speech about a shipwrecked comrade. “Isn’t that magnificent!” Pearce exclaimed. “ ‘I saw him hold acquaintance with the waves, so long as I could see!’ ” Millar retorted, “ ’S’not magnificent atall, that’s just rhetoric, Elizabethan rhetoric.” Shocked, Pearce took issue. A friendship began.
Pearce found the physically imposing Millar was also a person of great verbal and mental strength. “There was a kind of awful force that you quickly came to recognize,” he said. “He could really and truly, without any brutality, put a sort of conversational headlock on you. At the same time there was something enormously gentle about him. He used to blink bashfully, with almost a fluttering of the eyelids, whenever he was moved to say something of a critical nature; then these great baby eyes would stare at you while he expounded. So there were two sides: a moral wrestler’s strength—he wrestled with problems—and something very vulnerable, because he was so open to people.”
Thanks to his wrestling and swimming, not to mention bicycling around Europe, Millar was a handsome human specimen: tall and powerfully built, with an unusually deliberate manner. He walked with a long, slow stride: frame erect and well positioned, never hurrying, never turning rapidly, but going ahead with force and purpose. And the way Millar moved, Donald Pearce saw, was much the same way he expressed himself in speech and on paper. Physically and mentally, Millar was of a piece; the Cartesian mind-body split didn’t seem to exist for him—in fact, Millar deplored that Cartesian idea and blamed it for most of civilization’s woes.
Pearce became a close observer of Millar. “He loved and was terribly skillful at making careful and obvious distinctions you had never noticed before,” Pearce saw. “Like a poet, like Baudelaire, he could find connections between apparently disparate things. Ken created pedagogical symposiums whenever he was present! The level of the conversation would rise after Ken was in the room. He wouldn’t be trying to do that. He somehow caused it. It always mystified me. I think there was something mystical about him, not just mysterious.
“He loved perspective. Distant connections. Loved the narrative among events that tied things hi
storically. Loved to know what went before, so that he could understand what was coming after. He was a structuralist about life, and he used an X ray on it. It’s no surprise he should have been a history major too. And then the English poetry and so on was the love of the immediate texture of an actual work of art or piece of writing: savoring it in and of and for itself. There were two sides, and they came together.”
Complementing Millar’s intellectualism was a playful sense of humor, Pearce said: “He could make up interesting aphorisms and little witticisms. Sometimes he would really let himself go and become a sort of boisterous and cavorting comic. On the other hand, he had this need to have rational control at all times. And there was a dynamic struggle between his emotional, passionate self and the intellectual, rational self. They really were in primal contradiction, keeping that volcano capped. Yet that force underneath the rational Ken was what gave his reason such passion and feeling. He could see the truth of situations or people or fictions better than anyone. He knew his own value, knew he had superiority; on the other hand he was dogged by humility, ill at ease and self-conscious with people—though he was marvelous at seeing through them or into them, interpreting them. God, he was good on people.”