by Tom Nolan
He was ripe for a course of action Professor Thorpe urged during his Ann Arbor visit: return to university, finish the dissertation, get the doctorate. It made sense, Millar told himself, to wrap up his Ph.D. before he lost the academic habit. With the doctorate he could get a part-time teaching post, maybe at Santa Barbara College, and be free to write fiction without pressure to do bread-and-butter mysteries or magazine novelettes.
The more he thought about it, the better the solution seemed—not only to his career “crisis” but to the constant tensions he felt from a daughter he didn’t know how to father, a wife whose moods got on his nerves, and a town he couldn’t adapt to. Frustrated in California, he’d escape to Michigan.
As he and Margaret drank Black Horse ale and enjoyed the Ontario countryside, Millar found his wife sympathetic; she said she might even be willing to spend the winter in Ann Arbor. Margaret had a better understanding now of a freelance writer’s problems and accepted her share of the blame for their shaky situation; the Millars were now down to their last three thousand dollars.
By the time they got back to Santa Barbara, Millar’s plan had taken shape. He’d drive the Chevrolet to Ann Arbor in September and find a furnished house, after which Margaret and Linda would join him. But the plan changed. Margaret, revising a novel and afraid she couldn’t write in Ann Arbor, said she and Linda would stay in Santa Barbara for the first of his two semesters; he’d be on his own for half a year at least.
Millar expected to spend August in Santa Barbara revising his Archer manuscript to Knopf’s specs, but August passed with no comment from New York. Then on the first Saturday in September, as he packed for his Michigan trip, Millar got a hand grenade of a letter from Alfred Knopf.
“Cut it any way you like,” Knopf wrote, this new book was “a big comedown for Kenneth Millar, not only from THE THREE ROADS but even from BLUE CITY. The latter was outstanding as a hard-boiled tough story, the former lifted itself right out of the run-of-the-mill thriller category. But THE SNATCH—a perfectly impossible title of course, as I am sure you will understand—goes right back to ordinary, average, fair-to-middling run-of-the-mill stuff.” The book was well written, Knopf conceded, but how could its publisher expect to do “anything out of the way” with it? The firm expected to keep him as an author, Knopf said—“we’ve put far too much time and money into your work to want to drop it at this stage”—but he advised Millar to forget the current work: “take your courage in both hands and put this book to one side, writing it off as a bad debt.” (A bad debt to whom? Knopf hadn’t paid an advance.)
Millar quickly wrote a long, forceful letter to von Auw, telling the agent he wanted by all means to keep his affiliation with Knopf: “I have a serious novel on the fire, half-a-dozen more in my head, and I hope that Knopf will publish them. . . . Beside that hope for the future, and the books I am going to write, THE SNATCH is not of major importance.” In fact, given this reaction, he doubted he’d ever do any more straight mysteries like The Snatch (one of his least accurate predictions). Yet he didn’t agree that this private-eye work was mediocre. “I think it’s an interesting book, and rather well-constructed. . . . I wrote hard on it, and wrote it twice. It wasn’t thrown together, by any means. The ‘twist’ at the end was planned for and prepared from the beginning. I admit it’s unconventional to end a murder novel with the main murder, but I’m not a wholly conventional writer, nor do I consider my book ‘average’ or ‘ordinary.’ George Harmon Coxe, who is ‘ordinary,’ couldn’t touch it. Ray Chandler can, but doesn’t. If it isn’t saleable, I miss my guess, and Margaret misses hers.”
Every publisher had his blind spots, Millar reminded his agent: Dodd, Mead had rejected Blue City, Doubleday had turned down Margaret’s Wall of Eyes, and Random House had hesitated over It’s All in the Family, a book now doing quite well for that firm. Millar didn’t want to quit Knopf, but he didn’t want to scrap this “really very interesting” book either. “I can’t easily afford to throw away six months’ work,” he said (actually more like a year’s), “especially when I honestly believe that the book stands up and that people, if not critics, will like it—as my very persnickety wife does.” Millar had a solution: von Auw could submit the book elsewhere, under a pseudonym.
It was an impassioned and persuasive fifteen-hundred-word “hasty note” Millar penned on the eve of his long car journey. Included were detailed plans for revisions von Auw thought necessary. He’d be happy to make these or other changes, Millar said—but not until some publisher actually bought the book. In a later letter, Millar proposed a new title for the work: The Moving Target (a suitable challenge for an Archer); and as a pseudonym he suggested “John Macdonald,” the first two names of his father, John Macdonald Millar.
He was shocked and shaken by Knopf’s rejection, which made a hard departure to Michigan all the more painful. Keeping the speedometer at a strict fifty-five (as he’d promised Margaret), Millar reached Salt Lake City September 6 and telephoned his wife. After they spoke, he wept a bit, he wrote her: “Utah will always be my personal landscape of grief.” Driving fourteen or fifteen hours a day, he got to Ann Arbor late on a Friday evening and went to the Bransons, where he’d arranged to stay briefly. Hank and Anna welcomed him with beer, but Millar didn’t feel festive. Waiting for him was a letter from von Auw, forwarded by Margaret, in which the agent reiterated how “bitterly disappointed” both the Knopfs were by Millar’s book. “Son of a bitch!” he swore as he read the letter. “Son of a bitch!”
A gloomy Millar moved into rented rooms two and a half miles outside town. It seemed strange being back on the campus he’d worked so hard to escape. “Crossing from California to the middle west,” he wrote Maggie, “is like living a brief lifetime in reverse.” To Blanche Knopf, he said, “My drive across the country got me nowhere.” Millar enrolled in a creative writing course, to get academic credit for his Winter Solstice revisions; he hoped to enter the manuscript in competition for one of the university’s annual Hopwood Prizes, and started referring to Solstice as “the Hopwood novel.”
He faced a grinding regimen: dissertation research and writing in the mornings, teaching freshman English three days a week at noon, revising Solstice at night. He didn’t expect to see his family except at Christmas and Easter visits to Santa Barbara. After only a week Millar was “bitterly lonely,” holding back tears as he paced his rooms, needing beer or wine to sleep. “I love you better than I love myself (or I wouldn’t be here),” he wrote Margaret. “I feel almost trapped by my sense of duty or something.” Maggie, also “terribly heartbreakingly lonely,” wrote him, “You’re everything I want; I’ve found that out in the past 2 years. No yachts, no swimmingpool, no big house, no diamonds, no furs.”
On September 20, Millar got some “peculiar news” to lighten his mood. In a letter thanking Millar for his “understanding” and “wonderful spirit,” Alfred Knopf told him that Knopf itself would publish “THE MOVING TARGET by John Macdonald,” providing Millar made revisions already discussed. The announcement surprised and cheered him, and he told his agent to take Knopf’s offer: “Why not?” Whatever money deal von Auw worked out was okay with him.
Knowing how much Millar valued his imprint, Knopf offered stiff terms. Target’s advance would be five hundred dollars, half what Knopf had paid for Millar’s earlier books. After Millar and von Auw accepted this cut rate, Knopf reduced the author’s royalty from 17 to 15 percent. Von Auw grumbled but agreed. Thus the first entry in what the New York Times would twenty years later call “the finest series of detective stories ever written by an American” slunk inauspiciously into the Knopf catalog.
Millar was glad the Target matter was resolved, but his isolation and sink-or-swim schedule were still getting him down. In October he proposed to return to California next semester and finish his dissertation at UCLA. “It’s weak of me,” Millar told his wife, “but I really can’t help it,” though he promised, “I’ll do whatever I have to to insure our future.” A de
sperate-sounding Margaret (“I could never stand another separation, I’d rather kill myself”) begged, “PLEASE don’t stay the second semester, no matter What. It’s a whole year out of our lives practically.” She had a counterproposal: since her writing was going better than expected, she’d rent out the Bath Street house and come with Linda to Ann Arbor right now. Millar seconded the idea and thanked her profusely: “I feel like weeping but must work instead.” He added, “I couldn’t have survived the winter without you.”
Hard as it sometimes was to cohabit, the Millars found it impossible to be apart. “There’s no one I feel completely at home with but you,” Millar told Margaret. “You’re not only the woman I love, but the most decent person I know, and the best thing in my life is being able to live with you (most of the time).” Margaret responded, “I love you awfully! I don’t feel worthy of you, & I’m not.” She said Millar felt like “my other, better half, my miraculous twin.”
Millar rented a roomy house in Ann Arbor at 204 Burwood Place. Soon he had extracurricular chores, as the once-scorned The Moving Target was hurried toward print as part of Knopf’s 1949 spring list.
Knopf himself stopped in Ann Arbor in November 1948, during one of his periodic trips around the country to touch base with bookstore owners and librarians. Ken and Margaret Millar met the fifty-six-year-old living legend for the first time. The New Yorker ran a three-part profile of Knopf this month (“The only advantage of living in Ann Arbor,” Millar said, “is that you get the New Yorker four days sooner”); writer Geoffrey T. Hellman conveyed the dramatic impression made by the bald publisher: “Knopf is at once Olympian and dressy; few literary men can stare him down. His aspect is bold and piratical. He has bushy black eyebrows; a bristling moustache, once jet and now gray; reproachful liquid brown eyes; and an expression at the same time intolerant and long-suffering.”
This bold pirate brought Millar good news: Doubleday’s fledgling Mystery Guild book club was snagging The Moving Target as an early selection, for two thousand dollars, which Millar and his publisher would split. Knopf had already doubled his five-hundred-dollar investment in Target.
His wife, Blanche, shepherded the manuscript toward publication, coaxing Millar (who didn’t need coaxing) through a last-chapter rewrite by mail. Mrs. Knopf came up with what she thought an “amusing and fun” idea for an author portrait of “John Macdonald”: a full-length photograph taken from behind. Such a gimmick, she thought, might well stir reader and reviewer interest. Millar was doubtful and conveyed his misgivings in a letter whose careening idioms reflect the schizoid perspective of a man involved simultaneously with a doctoral dissertation, a mainstream novel, and a private-eye yarn: “While I hesitate to disagree with you in a matter that you know a great deal more about than I, and while I very much appreciate your suggestion as a mark of your interest in selling the book—I do wonder whether its pseudonymity should be underlined. And wouldn’t a picture taken a tergo have that effect? I don’t mean to be refractory, and I have no personal objection to the gag. . . . I simply have a feeling that a thing of this kind either goes over with a bang or falls as flat as a pancake.”
Mrs. Knopf persisted, arguing that the alternative to presenting “a mythical Macdonald” was to pretend John Macdonald was a real person and concoct a fake biography. Millar took her point. He arranged a session with an Ann Arbor photographer on December 14, the day after his thirty-third birthday. Don Pearce, sworn to secrecy, accompanied him. Wearing his own trench coat and soft-brimmed fedora, Millar was photographed in full-length silhouette, smoking a cigarette. The image of a pensive watcher in the urban shadows seemed to loom out of a Warners crime movie, the type the French would call film noir. “It’s a specter, a ghost figure becoming real,” said Pearce. “Kenneth Millar lost his identity in North America; Ross Macdonald acquired one. And Archer became more real than Macdonald, a distillation of Ken.” This moody shot would be used for a decade to picture a pseudonymous author whose persona was fused from the start with his leading character’s. Millar wore several masks in his fragmented and uneasy life: Canadian, American, delinquent, academic, husband, father. In Macdonald he found his most fitting role.
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The next chapter will attempt to show how the Aristotelian theory of Imitation was used by Coleridge to free poetry from scientism, and completed by his conception of imagination. This conception arose, as Chapters III and IV will demonstrate, from the dynamic theory of cognition and creation which constituted Coleridge’s answer to the eighteenth-century machine psychologies, and from the principle of unity which he opposed to the seventeenth-century dualistic philosophies described in Chapter V.
—Kenneth Millar, “The Inward Eye: A Revaluation of Coleridge’s Psychological Criticism”
Even theses end.
—Kenneth Millar to Blanche Knopf
This would be one of their good years, Millar insisted when Maggie joined him in Ann Arbor. He made sure they socialized at night and saw a good deal of the Pearces and the Bransons. As usual, beer fueled the festivities. Millar bought bottled brew by the case and saved the empties to return; at one point there were twenty-one cases of empty beer bottles stacked in the Millar rec room. Music was another constant in Millar get-togethers. Maggie could still be coaxed to play the piano. “I’d Like to Get You on a Slow Boat to China” was a new number her husband especially liked her to do, one that made him writhe with pleasure.
Strangely, music could also bring out the odd mean streak in Millar, Anna Branson said: “We had a copy of the Berlioz Requiem. This record had a special significance for me, because it was recorded in France at the time of the Occupation of Paris. The musicians when they recorded it were in this church with all the doors and windows closed. Anyway I was moved by the music, and the one thing I especially liked was the Sanctus, where this tenor’s voice really soars out. As usual I got tears in my eyes, you know? So Millar comes over to me and says, ‘Does that send you?’ And I said, ‘Yes, it does.’ He said, ‘Well, it shouldn’t.’ ”
Don Pearce recalled trying to introduce Millar to another classical piece: “I figured he ought to hear something on the phonograph, a piece I was overwhelmed with but wasn’t exactly sure why: Sibelius’s Finlandia. I tried to convey why the concluding sections were so impressive; I must have been taking a long time, and at last he said, ‘I know, I know, it’s hope in a context of despair’—and of course that is precisely what that piece is all about. Another instance of that succinct defining power he had, the critic’s power to nail something down neatly.”
That power found irritating expression in Millar’s frequent phrase What you mean is. “I used to hate that secretly,” Pearce admitted. “ ‘What you mean is’—then he would rephrase what you were saying and you’d have to privately admit maybe that was it, but you’d also lose track of what you wanted to say. He had this liability built into his nature, the need to clear things up for other people. Margaret and he were great at doing that: straightening out other people’s lives. Forthrightly and candidly, explicitly and angrily, telling you where the hell you’re wrong about everything.”
Both Millars liked to point out the “real” reasons behind your behavior. “They were great ones for explaining things through psychology,” Anna Branson said. “Once I was griping about some forty-dollar pharmacy bill I’d forgotten to pay, and very seriously Ken said, ‘That’s because you didn’t want to pay it.’ See? There was always a little explanation, something that made you do what you did. I got to the point where I decided, I’m just gonna be careful what I say.”
The Millars became more of a trial for their friends as the winter wore on. As feared, Maggie was unable to write in Ann Arbor. She often suffered bronchitis and sinusitis, and her presence at any event was problematic. One evening when Anna Branson made a special meal for both Millars, he arrived alone, bearing an extravagant peace offering. “Ken was really grave,” Anna said, “because Maggie
had been invited and she wouldn’t come. He handed me a book. It was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up. Ken and I both loved Fitzgerald’s work; it was a special bond between us. And this was Ken’s own copy of The Crack-Up from when he was in the navy; it had his name and the name of his ship written in it. I said, ‘Oh, Ken! These are hard to come by, and they cost a lotta money!’ He said, ‘I know. That’s why I’m giving it to you.’ ” He didn’t tell Anna the book was a wartime present to him from Margaret.
It wasn’t just other people’s events Maggie ducked. Anna Branson recalled a night at Burwood Place when Margaret failed to come to her own dinner party: “The tables were set up and everything, but Maggie never showed. Ken just took over; he didn’t bat an eye.”
Evenings with the Millars could be “unpredictably gruesome,” Don Pearce found. He was present for one especially awkward event at the Millar place attended by several U of M people, including the dean of the graduate school. “For some reason or other the conversation didn’t exactly get off the ground,” Pearce said, “and Ken went and stood by the mantel, and holding out a glass of beer, he said, ‘Excuse me, would you all mind if we shifted to another topic? I can’t quite get my hooks into what you’re talking about, and I feel completely left out.’ He suggested another subject for discussion. And that one didn’t get very far. After a while Ken disappeared from the room. And he stayed disappeared. After a bit Margaret went after him—and came back alone. The party went on and it got not too bad, but—Ken had simply gone to bed! Eventually everyone decided to go home. I was the last to leave. Margaret sat there, putting cigarette after cigarette into her long cigarette holder, with a smile that never came off her face; she sort of loved the way the whole evening had fallen apart and eventually vanished.”