by Tom Nolan
Millar was acting more oddly than usual as he worked to finish his dissertation. In grappling with Coleridge, Millar was wrestling with thoughts and concepts that had preoccupied him for twenty years. “It’s not just a subject he happened to turn up that could satisfy the requirements for the Ph.D.,” said Pearce. “This was a life-and-death matter with him in some ways. It’s no mystery that he should have done a dissertation on Coleridge, because Ken resembled Coleridge. Both of them had profound awareness of the chief intellectual currents of their time—the subtle intellectual philosophical side of life—and wanted to synthesize them; and on the other hand both Coleridge and Ken had serious knowledge and experience of the dark side of human life in their time, the nightmare side. That’s a pretty powerful similarity when you get right down to it. You could see why a person would do a dissertation on a father figure of that kind. He’s Ken’s ancestor in many ways.”
The anxieties Millar struggled with were both global and personal. On another evening this summer, at Pearce’s house, Millar expounded on some of these. “He spoke of how the great encyclopedic syntheses of everything known in the world had formerly been shaped by men,” Pearce said, “how Hegel and Kant and other eighteenth-century philosophers attempted to erect great conspectuses so that everything could have relationship to everything else and there could be coherence to the world. Men produced these systems. And with the collapse of those things during the disastrous nineteenth century, men dropped the ball and have never been able to get it back. He went on in this fashion: now it is women who are beginning to produce the new synthesis, but because they are different psychological beings, it’s probable they will restore flux rather than order. He was very worried about the subject, he really was. One thing that worried him more than anything else along this line was the presence and emergence of the homosexual. I can remember his telling me that a new kind of anarchy would result from the increasingly dominant presence of homosexuals in institutions of higher learning and in various other responsible organizations. Ken had this tendency to construct a universal generalization out of very few compass points; for all his stress on objectivity and fact and information, he was profoundly intuitive. Anyway he had these nightmare things.”
What Millar feared would emerge in society he was afraid was within himself. The “homo-sex” of his youth was a shameful memory. Some of his books showed homosexuals as evil grotesques (in the hard-boiled tradition, be it noted, of Hammett and Chandler). Millar was concerned that a homosexual tendency ran deeper in him than he’d imagined.
He told Pearce of a disturbing experience he had had on the train from California. “There was a young man sitting opposite him,” Pearce said. “They’d been talking, and eventually the young man took a blanket and went to sleep. Ken got sort of drowsy too. And every now and then his eyes would open, and when he looked over, he saw that the young man appeared to have turned into a young woman. Ken said that was one of the most shocking things that had ever happened to him. I said, ‘Ken, for heaven’s sake, what’s so shocking about that? You just sort of normally misread the features for a moment.’ He said, ‘Don’t tell me what psychology was involved. I wanted to see that young man that way.’ He wanted an opportunity to view him in a permissibly feminine form, I think is the way he put it; he wanted to see him as a young woman, in order to make it possible for him to feel the way he did about him. And he seemed shocked and horrified by it. He said, ‘I wonder if I’m not a covert homosexual,’ words to that effect.”
Pearce and Millar spoke until four or five that morning. When Pearce saw him to the door, Millar embraced him. “After a second I backed off normally,” said Pearce. “He said, ‘Don’t draw away, don’t be afraid,’ and he just very lightly held me. It wasn’t unpleasant. I don’t think it was a kind of homosexual hug; that would have felt different, I’m sure. But it wasn’t called for. It was strange. There was this peculiarly tender side to him. I think Ken believed physical friendship between men was not easy in our culture, and he was trying to overcome that.”
Millar’s long summer culminated on an August Saturday in a room at Angell Hall, with his oral examination for the doctorate. The Michigan orals were a daunting ordeal, something like an academic wrestling match with the challenger facing a tag team of opponents. One heckling assistant professor seemed especially bent on making trouble for candidate Millar.
“The whole thing was a discussion of poetical and human knowledge,” said Pearce, to whom Millar described the occasion. “Ken was maintaining that all we can have is symbolic knowledge of something, since you can never be it, and so on; and this fellow was upsetting the discussion in gratuitous ways. ‘He played a dirty trick on me,’ Ken said, ‘he tried to trip me two or three times with peculiar references. So I just began playing into his hand, I decided to risk it. I fed him along and fed him along—and then eventually I said, “In that case, what do you make of Shakespeare’s The Tempest?” He had to admit that he didn’t know how what he had said applied to The Tempest and didn’t think he could come up with an answer without a lot of thought. I just let him hang there, and hang there.’ This fellow disgraced himself, and Ken sailed free. Apparently the oral was tremendously successful—partly because of that event!”
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An exhausted Millar took the train to California the next day. It had been a tough season in a tough year, during which it sometimes felt that the combined weight of writing a novel and rewriting a thesis might break his back (“1000 pages longhand since January 2”). Five days after leaving Ann Arbor, Millar walked into a Santa Barbara household in turmoil.
Margaret had been upset by his leaving but had done her best to put a good face on things (“Please don’t worry about me going to pieces. I know I am an emotional problem to you, but I can try, & I am trying”). Her brave facade didn’t last. While he was gone, she had an operation to remove a benign tumor (“But how can a tumor be benign?” Millar wondered), something he thought probably a physical manifestation of her anxiety; and she had some “hysteria.” In his absence, Margaret and her sister got word of the bizarre death in Canada of their brother Ross. “The accident was pretty ghastly and mysterious,” Margaret wrote. “He was killed by a train on Fri & so mangled he wasn’t identified until Sun. & then only by the drain tube he was wearing in his chest—he’d just been released from the hosp. after a pneumonia siege. Apparently he’d been wandering around or something—details are vague.” Margaret didn’t feel she could afford to fly back for the funeral. “I feel bad about it all, of course,” she told her husband. “Had stomach cramps etc, but my greatest feeling was that thank God, it wasn’t you.”
She was in poor shape when Millar returned. So was Linda, with mother and daughter often brawling. Abetted by her mother and a good teacher, Linda was practicing the piano furiously these days, substituting music for social interaction. Approaching puberty and the start of junior high, the lanky twelve-year-old was ogled now by teenaged boys at the beach club pool; but she still shared a bedroom with her mother. Their room, their house, their family, seemed too small to contain two such strong-willed people—not to mention a couple of frisky dogs and the sometimes explosive Millar. As Maggie said of herself and Linda, “We’re getting bloody sick of each other, I guess.”
Millar had held himself together through several difficult seasons since the war—since his marriage—but faced with this situation, he gave way. Ken Millar “attempted suicide.” The quote marks are his, the details unknown. What occurred was serious enough that Maggie and her sister urged Millar to have himself committed. He refused all professional help and was grimly determined to solve his own problems. He’d write of himself, “Grant’s words were much in his mind: ‘We’ll fight it out on this line if it takes all summer’ . . . perhaps an ill-chosen motto for a man faced with the irrevocable past, the built-in past.” For weeks he wrestled his demons, later judging he’d escaped hospitalization by the skin of his teeth.
Several things vexed
him. Millar blamed Margaret for making his academic career impossible, though he acknowledged his own ambivalence in the matter. He felt trapped in Santa Barbara—a Canadian adrift in California, an intellectual in a land of hedonists, a democrat in a town of aristocrats. He believed in equality of the sexes but doubted his wife’s wisdom and was ashamed of his reluctance to be the head of the family. Most of all “he saw the necessity for incorporating into himself, instead of rejecting à la Hemingway, the feminine forces which had been so strong in forming him.”
Unable to work, he grappled with depression and anger, though in a letter to Boucher he claimed to be “happily rusticating and vegetating.” Santa Barbara friends sensed his inner struggle, but the closemouthed Millar spoke not a word. Hugh Kenner recalled a day when Millar came to his house on Bluff Drive and silently drank a can of beer: “He was sitting in a chair, holding an empty beer can”—in a year when beer cans were made of thick metal—“and suddenly he just crushed the can in his hand and said, ‘Strangler’s hands.’ Strangler’s hands. That was an eerie moment.”
Though he lacked the energy to start a new book, Millar had to attend to the already written The Ivory Grin. Alfred Knopf said he’d read the manuscript “with a good deal of pleasure” but thought it lacked something crucial: “Archer never in the book finds himself on a really hot spot—physically speaking I mean. . . . Doesn’t the reader expect to be kept for a while every now and then on the edge of his chair wondering how the devil the hero is going to get out of this one.” In Knopf’s opinion such scenes were desirable in “whodunits” (a word Millar hated). “We didn’t as you know do too well with THE DROWNING POOL,” Knopf reminded the author, adding the outlook for The Way Some People Die wasn’t “too rosy” either. “Perhaps what I have pointed out is a factor worth considering.”
Millar didn’t appreciate this second-guessing of what he thought was his best novel, one in which he’d tried to ease away a bit from the tough-guy school. But he promised he’d see what he could do about “injecting some fear into it,” assuring Knopf, “I am quite as eager to produce saleable books as you are to sell them.” He drafted a scene with Archer menaced by a gunman, but decided it didn’t work. Margaret didn’t like it either, and they both thought it a bad idea to fiddle around with his carefully structured narrative. “With all due respect for Alfred’s opinion and the hard-boiled convention,” Millar wrote Knopf’s ad manager Dave Herrmann, “and all due humility, I think the book has an imaginative and moral impact which is pretty independent of physical violence or terror, and which might be damaged by an attempt to have one’s bloody meat and eat it too.” Yet Millar also was discouraged by his novels’ disappointing sales, and he couldn’t blame Knopf: the publisher had promoted Way with nice ads and clever bookstore teaser cards. “You’d think a book like that, with such good backing, would sell five thousand anyway,” he wrote Herrmann. “Maybe it even will. In the meantime, I’ll write another good one. It’s either that or have a prefrontal lobotomy so I can write like Mickey Spillane.”
Spillane, whose crude tales of brutal private eye Mike Hammer sold in the millions, had apparently drained or scared away many readers who might otherwise be buying books in the literate Hammett-Chandler mode. “Is the hardboiled mystery on the way out, or having a bad interlude, or what?” Millar asked Boucher plaintively. Maybe he should drop Archer and try his hand at something else—except his Santa Barbara bookseller friends told him the Archer series was just starting to catch on and it would be a big mistake to stop it now.
Ivan von Auw, knowing his client’s concerns, prodded Knopf to meet with Millar during a West Coast visit. On a September Tuesday, Millar drove south to the Bel-Air Hotel for a one-hour conference with his publisher. He had no real gripes, Millar said; and after his recent run in “the doctoral rat-race,” he was more certain than ever that he wanted to be a writer. He worried about money, was all, what with a daughter who said she hoped to go to medical school; Millar would only make about five thousand this year, his wife less than three thousand. On the other hand, it was heartening that Pocket Books had agreed to reprint The Drowning Pool and would probaby also take The Way Some People Die. Surely paperback exposure would cause greater hardcover sales? And while Millar knew critical praise didn’t sell books, he did feel the high opinion of his work expressed by Boucher, the dean of mystery reviewers, meant eventually “Macdonald” and Knopf were going to hit it—if “it” existed anymore.
It was a useful meeting, Millar thought, and one that reached some conclusions. Knopf agreed it was unnecessary to inject violence and fear into his books when what Millar wanted was to emphasize greater psychological range. Since the Archer books didn’t sell well under the hard-boiled label, Knopf (starting with Grin) would stress the quality of their prose. Let Spillane have the kick-’em-in-the-teeth crowd; “Macdonald” would lure a more literate bunch. To ease Millar’s money woes, a novel scheme was hatched: The author would do an annual “Kenneth Millar” in addition to “Macdonald” ’s Archer, thus doubling his income. A deadline of February 1952 was fixed for the first “Millar” book.
Things improved at home too. The Millars took a mortgage on the Bath Street place, which they kept as rental property, and bought a bigger house where Linda could have her own room. In October, three Millars and two dogs moved into a white stucco ranch house at 2136 Cliff Drive, on the mesa above the business part of town. Their new residence (once the horse barn of the Meigs Ranch, a historic spread) wasn’t in the best neighborhood, but it overlooked the ocean. Maybe here the volatile family would find more domestic tranquillity. Hopeful but broke, Ken and Margaret Millar each began writing a book.
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After the first ten books they come a bit harder.
—Kenneth Millar to C. D. Thorpe
The annual bash at the estate of detective-fiction enthusiast E. T. “Ned” Guymon Jr. was a much anticipated fifties event among West Coast members of the Mystery Writers of America. “He had a mansion in the old part of San Diego,” recalled Bob Wade, half of the writing team Wade Miller, “and everybody’d come there and get drunk.” Guymon, an affiliate member of the MWA who had begun collecting mystery fiction in 1930, had the country’s biggest library of detective books, some eight thousand volumes (the collection eventually quadrupled), including rare Doyle and Poe items.
The affair the Millars attended in December 1951 was specially themed: invitations were mock court summonses commanding one and all to arrive in costume as the title of a well-known detective, mystery, or horror book. Some traveled long distances to Guymon’s gathering: Fredric Brown, writer of the “Ed and Am” mysteries, came from Taos, New Mexico. Stuart Palmer (of the “amazing Miss Withers” books) drove down from LA, as did James M. Fox. Raymond Chandler, who lived next door in La Jolla (and who summered with his wife in 1951 at a dude ranch near Santa Barbara), had come to Guymon’s party the previous year but (busy with a new book) skipped this year’s. William Campbell Gault of Pacific Palisades showed up, though, in company with Hal Braham, who published in Black Mask under the name Mel Colton.
The forty-one-year-old Gault, born in Milwaukee, had written dozens of short stories for the waning pulps and was about to bring out his first novel (which would win the MWA’s Edgar Allan Poe Award). Gault was impressed by his first sight of Guymon’s spread, with its lawns and tennis courts: “God, they got black guys, servants, all around, you know, big foyer—oh, a rich guy.” The feisty Gault had ignored his host’s command to come in costume: “I thought it was kinda corny, kinda high school. I’m not about to go around with a funny hat on at a party; I’ll leave that to the Rotary people, and if they didn’t like it, they could lump it.” Plenty of others went along with the gag, though, including Lawrence G. Blochman, who wore a turban in honor of his own book Bombay Mail. Millar had a gold-colored plastic sheath over one jacket sleeve: The Man with the Golden Arm. Bill Gault introduced himself: “ ‘Are you Ken Mi
llar?’ I says. ‘That’s Nelson Algren’s book, isn’t it?’ He said, ‘I’m surprised you should know about a man of that caliber, how would you know that book?’ Pretty snotty, right? So I said, ‘Well, I’d like you to meet the fellow who came up with me: this is Nelson Algren’s cousin.’ Hal Braham, yeah. I said, ‘I’ll tell you something else: your wife writes better than you do.’ I thought she did. Maggie’s in the toilet and overhears me. When she comes out, she says, ‘Some little son of a bitch out there says I write better than Ken!’ So we got to be, not enemies but—frictional.”
The Millars were unique among married mystery writers: they didn’t collaborate, and their works were equally praised by critics. Margaret’s books made Boucher’s and Sandoe’s best-of-year lists nearly as often as John Ross Macdonald’s. In 1952, when Maggie published both Rose’s Last Summer (from a plot given her by Ken) and Vanish in an Instant and Macdonald had The Ivory Grin, Millar could rightly tell their Hollywood agent, “Between us we’ve had about the best critical receptions of the year in the mystery field.”
Though several other good writers were working the private-eye street in 1952 (such as Wade Miller, Thomas Dewey, and Bart Spicer), Macdonald and his Archer novels received the lion’s share of reviewers’ praise. As the tough style grew dumber and more brutal after Spillane, and as Boucher continued to hail Macdonald as the successor of Hammett and Chandler, Millar tried to make his books less violent and more individualized, and (not so incidentally) to distance himself from Chandler.