Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  Archer drives with Bolling to Luna Bay near San Francisco (and Los Gatos), where construction work has turned up a skeleton thought to be Galton-Brown’s. Coincidentally a young man calling himself John Brown Jr. has been asking about someone he claims was his father.

  The friendly, angry, volatile fellow claiming to be John Brown’s son bears intentional resemblance to Millar. His life history is a fun-house reflection of the author’s. He shares Millar’s birthdate and northern California origins. Like Millar, he “never had a father.” His mother, he says, placed him in a Midwestern orphanage (a fate Millar narrowly escaped); the orphanage’s iron gates have an ironic counterpart in the fortresslike gates at the Galton estate. John Jr. was the virtual ward of a Michigan teacher (a man like the Kitchener teachers who took Millar in hand), lived at 1028 Hill Street in Ann Arbor (quite near the Millars’ residence at 1020), and paid for college with two thousand dollars left by his (substitute) father. (Unlike Millar, John Brown Jr. kept faithful vigil at his “parent”’s hospital deathbed.) “I’m bright, and I’m not ashamed of it,” John proudly declares—a variation on a Millar epigram: “An intellectual is someone who’s smart and insists on it.” Now John’s returned to the Golden State of his birth, a place with a fairy-tale aura: the prince is back from the poorhouse to reclaim his kingdom.

  What happened to John Brown Sr. and whether this man is his son are the matters of fact with which The Galton Case is concerned. But for Millar, the novel’s central events were John Brown Jr.’s crossing of geographical and psychological borders; they represented Millar’s entering into his estate as an American citizen, “rejoining” a life he’d been told he belonged in. Millar created once-removed emotional autobiography. As Archer probes the early life of this possible faker, and as John Jr. confronts the same problematic past, Millar in a way faces down his own history and makes peace with his angry young self.

  Another character also stands in for Millar: Tommy Lemberg, the apprentice hood who steals Archer’s car at gunpoint. (Having his car stolen was becoming a habit for Archer.) Violent, easily manipulated, desperate for approval, Tommy’s another there-but-for-fortune picture of what Millar might have become without good guidance and his own strong will. The second time Archer encounters Lemberg is at the desert lair of mobster Otto Schwartz. The suave lawyer Sable is one fictional projection of Millar’s Winnipeg uncle; Schwartz is an alternative fantasy of the same uncle as a low-echelon crime boss. The living room of Schwartz’s place near Reno is fitted with slot machines (like the slots Millar thought his uncle supervised for U.S. crooks) and an electric player piano (like the one in his aunt’s apartment). When Lemberg activates the machine, it plays “In a Little Spanish Town,” a song popular when Millar lived with Aunt Margaret and Uncle Ed in 1927.

  Alternate aspects of Linda Millar are presented in Sheila Howell and Alice Sable. Sheila’s nineteen (like Linda in 1958), healthy but morose, not yet at home in the world: “Her eyes were candid, the color of the sky,” Archer observes, as she sits “with a pale, closed look, undergoing the growing pains of womanhood.” In love with the enigmatic Galton heir, Sheila “seemed to be moving heavily and fatally out of her father’s protective control.” If Sheila seems headed for trouble, borderline psychotic Alice Sable has emerged on its other side, her psyche fractured by a death she’s either caused or witnessed. Doctors shield Alice from police questioning while trying to help her sort memory from delusion.

  By twisting his and others’ experience into fictional Möbius strips, Millar transmuted the messy stuff of life into fiction without succumbing to overemotional prose (as he had in the botched Winter Solstice) and without overtly invading his own or others’ privacy. And he did it in the context of a tightly plotted detective novel. Images are often joined to make two sides of an ironic coin: Archer says of a woman yearning for the long-gone Galton, “Cassie’s emotion was like spontaneous combustion in an old hope chest”; later, when Archer’s shown the bones of the late John Galton, they’re in “a metal box about the size of a hope chest.”

  The most evocative objet trouvé yet found by Lew Archer is a murdered man’s suitcase: “It was a limp old canvas affair, held together with straps, which looked as if it had been kicked around every bus station between Seattle and San Diego. . . . Its contents emitted a whiff of tobacco, sea water, sweat, and the subtle indescribable odor of masculine loneliness.” Millar eventually revealed, “These were the smells, as I remembered and imagined them, of the pipe-smoking sea-captain who left my mother and me.”

  Galton gathers momentum and excitement as it unfolds, moving beyond Kierkegaardian bleakness toward forgiveness and hope. “I know it sounds wild,” Sheila says of her boyfriend’s strange story, “but it’s only as wild as life.” Archer’s perception of young Galton shifts as he sees the young man first as genuine, then phony, now as a true heir, now a fraud. Finally he’s all of these. As Archer and he comprehend this, the reader feels the author accepting equivalent truths of himself.

  The Galton Case, in conception and style, was several cuts above even The Doomsters. It was the first of Macdonald’s mature works: a dozen or so books that belong with the best American mystery fiction. Galton would hold special meaning for those who knew Millar when he wrote it. “I still think The Galton Case is the finest thing he ever did,” Donald Davie said thirty years later. “Very very profound and moving fiction indeed.” Millar, though, was already looking ahead. “Now let’s see if I can write a better book,” he proposed to Alfred Knopf. “This one doesn’t satisfy me by a long shot.”

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  Harold Brodkey’s collection is simply dumbfounding, not fiction but a cosmetic application of the limberest and most knowing fauxnaif manner to the most elementary preoccupations of women’s-magazine maudlin. . . . If you go for chromium melancholy and like to think of life and art as essentially uncomplicated by anything more than the need to turn a phrase, Mr. Brodkey is your man. . . .

  [T]he glassy glitter of the style and the patness of plot-making seem to testify as surely to Mr. [Angus] Wilson’s boredom and distaste as to the characters’. Stories like Mr. Wilson’s and Mr. Purdy’s make one wonder about the relation of the artist, not to society necessarily, but to the human race. . . .

  Albert Camus, at least, is concerned with such large issues as the dignity of man and the need for compassion. . . . Nevertheless, serious and humane as Camus clearly appears in these stories, the stories themselves are as solemn and restricted as philanthropy, with none of the true storyteller’s gaiety of impulse. . . .

  —Marvin Mudrick, “Is Fiction Human?”

  The Hudson Review, Summer 1958

  Kenneth Rexroth, a poet of more scholarly attainments who knows the long case history of hobohemia, seems out of place at first on this cable car named despair. But this manifesto of beatmanship comes blandly to the conclusion that the current generation of young people may have to kill themselves off, “voluntarily, even enthusiastically,” to make way for he doesn’t know what. . . . The currency of such inverted values suggests that a failure of humane leadership, in and out of school, has exposed an eager body of adolescent and semi-literate readers, and writers, to the addled pretensions of poolroom mystics and nihilists posing as saviors. The self-enclosed contemporaneousness, without history or future, which Mailer praises and his beat ones enact, is a special circle of hell reserved for stone-age savages, the mentally ill and retarded, and writers who have succumbed to intellectual and moral sloth.

  —Kenneth Millar, “Passengers on a Cable Car Named Despair,”

  San Francisco Chronicle, 1958

  When Oscar Dystel and Saul David of Bantam Books came to Santa Barbara on a blustery day in September 1958, they brought splendid news: Ross Macdonald was now Bantam’s number one mystery writer, with highest sales and lowest rate of return. (Other crime authors currently on the Bantam list included Rex Stout, Georges Simenon, John Dickson Carr, Eric Ambler, Julia
n Symons, Bart Spicer, and Margaret Millar.) Bantam was eager for more Macdonald. In October they’d bring out Millar’s Blue City under the Macdonald byline; Dystel and David proposed reissuing all the Millar/Macdonald books. “It appears that the market is there if we can reach it,” the author told Knopf, as he sought help getting reprint rights to his earlier titles back from Dell and Pocket Books.

  Hearing of Bantam’s plans, though, Pocket Books decided they wanted to bring out new editions of five Macdonald works. This miffed Bantam (“Pocket Books didn’t care until we did,” David complained), but it worked to Millar’s (and Knopf’s) benefit: Pat Knopf negotiated a new fifteen-thousand-dollar contract with Pocket. Millar was delighted with the deal, further proof of Macdonald’s commercial potential. “I’ve always believed there was mileage in my work,” he wrote Alfred. “Things do appear to be looking up, don’t they?”

  There was television interest too. Producers of another proposed MWA anthology wanted to option the non-Archer Meet Me at the Morgue (as well as Margaret Millar’s Vanish in an Instant). MCA-TV asked about adapting the Archer novelettes for Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer. More flatteringly, Millar was approached about doing a Lew Archer series. He proceeded with caution in all cases; Millar didn’t trust TV people and didn’t want to spoil any chance of a movie sale. He did agree (for $750) to sell his 1945 story “Find the Woman” to an upcoming hour-long, live CBS show, Pursuit, on condition the play’s private eye be called not Archer but Rogers.

  Millar thought this TV interest and the paperback deals might mean Macdonald was about to break big. He urged Knopf give The Galton Case all feasible help “going over the hump.” Encouraged by Bantam, Millar toyed again with the idea of doing a separate “Kenneth Millar” series, and maybe even (à la Graham Greene) dividing future work into serious “novels” and mystery “entertainments.” He still hoped to do things outside the genre; after reading Camus’s guilt-obsessed novel The Fall, he informed Knopf (Camus’s U.S. publisher), “I have the ambition to undertake an office of that sort for the American conscience.”

  The open intellectual range Millar roamed was reflected in the growing bunch of writers he got to attend the alternate-Wednesday lunches at Harry’s El Cielito on State Street: there were Saturday Evening Post and Argosy veterans, academic-quarterly contributors, News-Press reporters, crime novelists, the occasional screenwriter. When William Campbell Gault (met memorably by the Millars at Ned Guymon’s 1951 bash) moved to Santa Barbara in 1958, he became a luncheon regular. Breaking bread and drinking beer this year at the same El Cielito table as the raspy-voiced Gault, writer of The Bloody Bokhara and The Convertible Hearse, was the suave Donald Davie, author of Purity of Diction in English Verse and Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry.

  Davie also liked gathering with Millar and others at Bob Easton’s house, where talk could be about anything from early American literature to the ideal death: Millar, with his small smile, said he wanted to die “in the act of love.” Easton recalled, “All agreed with Ken’s hopes.”

  Davie again urged Millar to revise his Coleridge dissertation for publication, something Millar undertook now in spare nighttime hours. “It’s not a book that will make money,” he acknowledged to von Auw, “but it’s likely to become a ‘standard’ work of scholarship, and I’m eager to have it published for a number of reasons.” It was a way to show he was a serious writer. Also toward that end, he stayed up late doing free book reviews for editor Bill Hogan at the San Francisco Chronicle. If his literary reputation was going to be made, Millar thought, it had better be in the coming ten years. He’d be forty-three at the end of this one. “It’s not a case of now or never,” he wrote Knopf, “but now is beginning to look like a good time.”

  The notion was underscored by Macdonald’s The Ivory Grin being included in late 1958 on a London Sunday Times list of “The 99 Best Crime Stories” from 1794 to the present. The list’s compiler was Julian Symons, the rising crime novelist and man of letters who (as the Times Literary Supplement’s anonymous mystery reviewer) was England’s equivalent of Anthony Boucher or James Sandoe. Symons in fact consulted Sandoe and Boucher when making this list; he also invited suggestions from Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Ellery Queen, and Raymond Chandler.

  The seventy-year-old Chandler was in London at the time, Symons later wrote: “While we talked about the idea, he . . . sat back with his diluted whisky talking pontifically. It was clear that he didn’t like being contradicted, at least by me, although he kept saying that I was a critic and had read twenty times more crime stories than he had even heard of, so why come to him, and so on.” Symons thought America had three important private-eye writers: Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald. Chandler praised Hammett but not Macdonald, Symons wrote: “This lack of generosity to another writer was untypical, but something about Macdonald’s work rankled.” When Chandler sent Symons suggestions for his London Times list (none of which Symons used), “he remarked that he had ‘omitted numerous gentlemen who have paid me the compliment of imitation,’ and this was principally a hit at Macdonald.” On the Times list, Symons noted Macdonald’s early debt to Chandler but said he’d since “developed a personal style and feeling” that was “wholly individual”; in addition to Grin, Symons cited The Way Some People Die and The Barbarous Coast. (“Less surprisingly,” Millar modestly noted to von Auw, “he listed M’s Beast in View.”)

  Given his rising critical and publishing stock, Millar resurrected a favorite plan: if he taught creative writing at a university, he’d have the financial freedom to write books without Archer. The chance for such employment seemed obviously present in Santa Barbara. Millar’s friend Kenner (still on sabbatical) was head of the UCSB English department; Pearce, who’d idolized Millar for twenty years, was acting chairman. Millar’s rapport with guest lecturers McLuhan and Davie gave him even more reason to think UCSB was ideal for him. Late in the year he started lobbying for a job.

  The English department was a treacherous place in Kenner’s absence, though, with hard-fought turf scuffles and (in Claire Stump’s phrase) “a dagger behind every velvet curtain.” Pearce supported Millar’s bid for employment but was opposed by Marvin Mudrick, who’d also blocked UCSB from hiring Marshall McLuhan. Notorious for his scathing fiction critiques in the Hudson Review, Mudrick was not among those who thought Millar made literature out of the detective story. He told Pearce he regarded Ken Millar as a man trapped and victimized by an inferior art form. “Marvin loathed Ken,” Pearce said. “Loathed, hated, and despised him.” “Oh, sure,” Mudrick said sarcastically of Millar to Donald Davie, “I love to associate with the ruins of once-great minds.”

  Davie felt caught in the middle between the pro- and anti-Millar factions, he said: “I had a bad time as sort of the visiting character, with both sides trying to enlist me to say yea or no. I think I was used by the anti-Ken lobby in a way that I wasn’t aware of at the time. I seem to remember that at their instigation I actually spoke to him and said, ‘Back off, Ken.’ Didn’t like it. That rather spoiled the end of the year.”

  Mudrick next went to work on Pearce, who agreed with Mudrick that the English department needed drastic overhaul. But Millar was friendly with teachers who had to go, Mudrick said; if hired, he’d polarize and destroy the department, trying to play peacemaker between the forward-thinking newcomers and the targeted “dinosaurs.” Pearce was forced to concede: “If Ken had a social friendship with somebody, he wasn’t going to falsify it when he became a colleague; it would have been impossible.” In a maneuver worthy of a Shakespearean intriguer, Mudrick used Millar’s integrity against him in persuading his best friend to deny him a job.

  Pearce brought the bad news. Millar took it angrily. Walking Hendry’s Beach with Pearce, he spurned the university that spurned him. Face contorted in rage, he declared, “I hereby re-nounce that institution!”

  Proving Mudrick correct, though, Millar wouldn’t renounce his friends. He didn’t break with Pearce,
not over this. And when Davie left town for his next academic post, Millar alone among his Santa Barbara chums showed up at the bus station to see him off.

  That sort of unannounced generosity was typical of Millar, Dick Lid learned. Lid, another new UCSB faculty member hired by Kenner, came with wife Betty to Santa Barbara from Michigan in 1958, when Lid was thirty; after renting awhile, the Lids bought a small house. “Not having much money,” Lid said, “I was getting a trailer to move everything myself over a very long day. Ken knew what day it would be, and my God, he just showed up to help me.”

  Lid first met Millar at the Pearces’, where Lid recognized Millar as author of the best Ph.D. dissertation he’d ever read. Seeking a model for his own doctoral work a year or so earlier in Ann Arbor, Lid had found “Coleridge and the Inward Eye” among dozens of otherwise dismal theses in the Michigan stacks. “It was so beautifully written,” Lid recalled. “I went back over to Angell Hall to the person in the English department I was doing my dissertation under and said, ‘Who is this Kenneth Millar?’ And they said with a lotta contempt, ‘Oh, he’s a mystery writer.’ ” Millar became one of Lid’s first California friends, and a guide to his new town.

  “Santa Barbara was a strange community to live in,” Lid said, “at least in those days. Had that kind of crazy small-town feel. Tom Storke, who gave the land for UCSB, was the owner of the town newspaper; he’d walk down main street wearing his Boy Scout or Highway Patrol-type peaked cap, and you could say, ‘Hello, Mr. Storke’—and he would stop and talk to you! It wasn’t like living in Canoga Park or one of these other nameless, sprawling communities; if you were living in Santa Barbara, you were someone special. It was full of seeming Bohemians with money who lived up in the hills. I’d never conceived of anyone having such wealth as the sort of money-people I encountered in Santa Barbara. Walking near the Biltmore with Ken one time, we stepped over the bodies of two multimillionaires on the beach: both of them dead drunk at ten-thirty in the morning.”