Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  Phoebe’s divorced father, Homer Wycherly, learns she’s gone only when he returns from a long cruise. Through Wycherly, Millar mocks the way he acted at Davis, having Wycherly threaten in a similar manner, “They’re going to admit that they’re at fault. . . . They’re going to know who they’re dealing with before I’m through with them.” Archer observes, “I suspected they knew already: a foolish man full of passions he couldn’t handle.”

  But Homer Wycherly—smoothly charming but tense beneath the surface—actually looks and acts a lot like Alfred Knopf: “He wore imported-looking tweeds buttoned over his stomach. On his face he wore a home-grown expression of dismay.” Homer uses Knopf-like expressions like “heavens, no” and “stir up the animals.” His best effort at friendliness is a fierce grin; he keeps his real self hidden.

  Harding “Pete” Lemay, Knopf’s publicity manager, witnessed the fascination that Alfred Knopf held for Millar. “Ken and I would talk about Alfred,” said Lemay, whom Millar met in New York. “Alfred was bigger than life, like a pirate. And I think Ken, who was a modest man, found that rather amusing. Alfred wasn’t like anything he’d grown up with, any more than he was like anything I’d grown up with. Alfred was a great character, and to somebody like Ken—a very observant, quiet man who sat back and watched people—he was I suppose a source of inspiration.”

  Wycherly lives in Meadow Farms, an edge-of-the-desert town like Bishop. His Phoebe is missing from Boulder Beach College, a northern California school where Archer finds Phoebe’s roommate, Dolly, typing a sociology paper on a twenty-year-old Royal suspiciously like the machine Millar won in Toronto the year Linda was born. “The e’s were out of alignment,” he notices. “Maybe it was a clue.” This is a nicely wry joke on Archer as sleuth—but later it turns out the typewriter is a clue.

  Wycherly speeds up the Bay Area Peninsula and into the heart of Sam Spade’s Maltese Falcon turf; Macdonald tips his fedora by describing a fellow in a San Francisco office with a telephone receiver “perched like a black bird against his short neck.” Lew encounters the usual coterie of sharply observed types. Some folks Archer sums up in a single line, such as this aging employee in a third-rate hotel: “Forty years as a bellhop hollows a man out into a kind of receptacle for tips.” Not that Lew spares himself: “Twenty years as a detective works changes in a man, too.”

  Archer undergoes chameleonic change while hunting Wycherly’s daughter and (not incidentally) Wycherly’s ex-wife. Posing as Homer, the better to ask after his missing women, Lew takes on Homer’s emotional attachments: “I was beginning to feel his load of grief, as if I’d assumed it magically with his name.” Macdonald thus draws directly on Millar’s sense memories of his 1959 ordeal. This creates a weird vertigo: a view at once close-up and distant. In an essay Macdonald said his detective gave him a protective disguise in which to approach autobiographical ore, “a kind of welder’s mask . . . to handle dangerously hot material.” Having Archer experience Millar’s life through Wycherly—the equivalent of going from first- to third-person and back again—is like looking through a triple layer of safety glass.

  A startling disguise is central to the plot of Wycherly, a role reversal that (despite foreshadowing and ex post facto explaining) some reviewers found hard to credit. They should have seen a 1955 photo of Millar in Kitchener with his wife and daughter: two “glamour-gals” gussied up for Canadian relatives, looking more like distant sisters than women separated by twenty-four years; Linda started wearing her mother’s clothes when she was fifteen. If fiction can be as strange as life, Wycherly’s surprise works.

  This book went further into what Millar felt was important moral terrain, not in a ponderous way but intimately, conversationally. When sociology student Dolly asks Archer who’s to blame for juvenile delinquency, he says, “I think blame is one of the things we have to get rid of. When children blame their parents for what’s happened to them, or parents blame their children for what they’ve done, it’s part of the problem, and it makes the problem worse. People should take a close look at themselves.” Archer’s not arguing for a lack of personal responsibility; he insists on an unflinchingly hard-boiled fate for the book’s ultimate villain. It’s misplaced guilt he’s against. Phoebe’s emotional strain stems (like Linda’s?) from protecting someone she loves and assuming more blame than she should. Archer’s not blindly tolerant of the young, but he offers them help finding their way in a world that can seem alien. “What can you do when they lie to you?” a parent asks Archer. “You can give up lying yourself,” he says. It’s the adults’ job to be honest, moral, caring—and to live by the same rules they lay down for the young. Implicit is a belief that life is sacred. If there’s a God, Archer tells Dolly, “He worked in mysterious ways. Like people.” He counsels, “Don’t stop praying. . . . It keeps the circuits open. Just in case there’s ever anybody on the other end of the line.” But Archer puts his faith in people, each one of whom is irreplaceable.

  When Phoebe asks would it be all right for her to bear the baby she’s pregnant with, even though she might pass on a troubled “heredity,” Archer unhesitatingly says, “It would be all wrong not to.” His words ring like a reaffirmation, on the far side of a good deal of trouble, of the life-affirming decision made in Toronto by Kenneth and Margaret Millar some twenty-one years before.

  * * *

  * * *

  * * *

  Jan. 27, 1961

  Dear Ivan:

  . . . I had a nightmare last night, dreaming that I received one of Alfred’s old-style letters in which he savagely announced that Wycherly Woman sold a total of 3339 copies. Ora pro nobis.

  As always,

  Ken

  May 29, 1961

  Dear Ken:

  Just a line to say that we have shipped out six thousand copies of “The Wycherly Woman.” . . . I hope all goes well and remain, with my best,

  As ever,

  Alfred A. Knopf

  The publishing matter most preoccupying Millar in 1961 had nothing to do with Lew Archer. It was his quest to get “Coleridge and the Inward Eye” into print, something the author thought vital to establishing his literary reputation (especially in England). After Knopf turned the Coleridge work down as too academic, Millar asked von Auw to submit it to university presses. The agent started at the top, with Harvard University Press, and the response was extremely good. The press’s anonymous reader (actually, noted Coleridge scholar Earl Leslie Griggs) praised the book with an enthusiasm rare in such critiques, calling it “admirable,” “excellent,” “illuminating,” and “masterly.” “It is a pleasure to recommend Mr. Millar’s work,” he concluded. “No Coleridge student . . . can afford to ignore it. Indeed, the book should prove of the greatest interest to the general reader as well as the specialist.”

  Millar was overwhelmed. To have his doctoral work published by Harvard University Press would go a long way toward balancing the unfairness of Harvard’s having shut him out of graduate school in 1938. But it was not to be. Twenty years after quashing Millar’s Ivy League dream, Harvard did it again. Despite their reader’s enthusiasm and their editors’ endorsement, the imprint’s Board of Syndics turned thumbs down on the book. “The rejection from Harvard was one of the shittiest letters I’ve ever seen from a publisher in my life,” said Dick Lid, who’d had a lot of dealings with university presses. “Earl Leslie Griggs was a brilliant man; you’d have thought his name would have cut enough ice. But their attitude was, ‘We can’t publish a book by a mystery writer! ’—even if the mystery writer had a Ph.D.”

  Nudged by Donald Davie, the English firm of Routledge said they’d print Millar’s Coleridge work in the U.K.; but they required a U.S. press to copublish. Von Auw sent the manuscript to Columbia University Press; meanwhile Don Pearce promoted a query from Indiana U.P., where he’d published. Millar preferred his book be done by Columbia, but he told von Auw, “I hardly care what auspices I appear under in this country so long as Routledge does the book in England. I
am most anxious for that not to fall through.” Adding to his urgency was the knowledge that other Coleridge scholars (including a fellow he’d known at Michigan) were “catching up” to him. When Columbia was slow on the uptake, Millar mailed a manuscript to Indiana—“not wholly without misgivings,” he admitted to von Auw, “including the thought that you might think me an ass; but still with a hope that this may settle the problem for us and assure that English publication on which I have set my heart.” Millar confessed to having been made gun-shy by Harvard: “I suppose I wince away from the prospect of another such time- and emotion-consuming accident. . . and I feel, perhaps foolishly, safer exposing my love of learning and of my book to a publisher where I am already favorably known through my friends. . . . Well, let’s see if Indiana can come up with a reader able and willing to recognize the substantial merits of my book.”

  The mills of the academic gods ground exceeding slow. Indiana took ten months to tell Millar they hadn’t reached a decision. “As at Harvard,” Millar wrote von Auw, “they have a pro-report and an anti-report, I gather, and are seeking a third, according to the troika principle.” Marshall McLuhan tried to resolve the matter by proposing the manuscript be read for Indiana by a Toronto woman said to be “the greatest living Coleridge scholar.” This woman professor agreed to the task but then “rather eccentrically changed her mind,” Millar told von Auw, “and I have no interest in trying to change it back.” He asked Indiana to return his work so that von Auw could send it to Boston’s Beacon Press, where Hugh Kenner (all Millar’s academic friends were trying to help) had talked it up. Millar wrote his agent, “I presume at least it won’t take them a year, as it did Indiana, to make up their minds.”

  Meanwhile Millar got on with the writing of the tenth Archer novel, eventually titled The Zebra-Striped Hearse. He went to Lake Tahoe to case the scene there, then also for research purposes took a ten-day trip to Ajijic, Mexico, where John Mersereau, an old writers lunch friend, lived in a sort of expatriate artists colony. Millar invited Maggie, but she stayed home and during his absence got intrigued by the abundant bird life at Chelham Way.

  Margaret signed up for a bird-watching course and soon (loaded down with binoculars, sack lunch, and guidebook) was trudging with other birders over mudflats and sandy sloughs. Millar encouraged her new hobby by building bird-feeding stations behind their house and assuming the daily chore of stocking them. Before long he too was an apprentice birder and could ID many species by common and Latin names.

  He’d always had a strong affinity with animals, especially dogs. In Toronto he’d made friends with neighborhod squirrels and even trained one to take food from his mouth, to his wife’s mixed admiration and disgust. “Ken adored all animals,” Margaret said. “He wouldn’t kill a fly. If there was a fly in the house, he’d get it on his hand and take it outside—where it would promptly come in the other door.” Birds had long soared through Millar’s books, and now Lew Archer would notice even more of them.

  The literary aspect would be a bonus. Millar started watching birds because it was something he and Maggie could share. Marriages needed common interests, he said; he was good at facilitating them. Bird-watching and its attendant tasks were incorporated into the Millars’ schedules with typical efficiency. They arranged their routines for maximum productivity. Staples such as wine were bought by the case, to save time. Usually the Millars ate separately and fixed their own meals. Each answered the phone or handled emergencies during the other’s shift; writing hours were inviolable. Once Margaret lost her car keys in town; since it happened during his work stint, she managed without calling home.

  Millar wrote in his downstairs room, where cheap Picasso and Miró reproductions hung. Sometimes he’d draw the curtains and make the dimly lit chamber even dimmer; he might wear a green plastic visor like an old-time newspaper editor’s eyeshade. Sitting in the same big, oft-reupholstered easy chair Margaret had bought him in 1945, a pine board balanced across its arms to hold a spiral-bound notebook and a ballpoint pen, Millar looked like a pilot cocooned in a cockpit, or a navigator sealed in a bathysphere, as he moved his made-up characters in and out of his fiction’s mutating light.

  * * *

  Busy as he was, Millar always took time to help friends and colleagues. These included Al Stump, who in 1961 published a book written for and with Ty Cobb: My Life in Baseball: The True Record, a sanitized autobiography that (on Cobb’s insistence) was anything but wholly truthful about the mean-tempered sports giant’s tumultuous years. Before the book came out, Cobb died in an Atlanta hospital room with a Luger pistol and a paper sack stuffed with a million dollars in stocks and bonds. True magazine asked Stump to write an honest account of his hair-raising months in Cobb’s company. Not only did Stump paint a vivid picture of his bizarre collaboration with the violent and hard-drinking Cobb, he included much of the explosive material Cobb made him leave out of his authorized book, including melodramatic family events that might have been lifted from a Ross Macdonald novel. “Cobb was not sane,” Stump said. “The story came to the conclusion that because his mother killed his father when he was seventeen—blew his head off with a shotgun—that he was damaged. The father was a very prominent man: a state senator, publisher of the town newspaper where Cobb grew up. He loved that father immensely; he told me, ‘It changed me for the rest of my life.’ Well, the conclusion was that he was possibly getting even for his father, winning those games to please old dad, and rules didn’t count; if you got in his way, he’d cut you down. Before I mailed the manuscript, I took it to Ken. I knew I had my hands on something unusual here, and he was such a grammarian; he was a master of the language. So he took it home for the weekend, and on Monday he came back to my little studio. He said, ‘You’ve got a helluva good piece here.’ He said, ‘I made a few suggestions.’ So I went through it, and on almost every page he’d made a suggested change; he just wrote it on a side slip, ’cause that’s the kind of a guy he was: he wouldn’t deface anybody’s manuscript. But he liked it so much that I began to realize that maybe I really had something here. Anyway the story was such a hit with all the editors, they paid me forty-five hundred or five thousand dollars, the second-highest price they’d ever paid for an article; only Hemingway had been paid more money for a story by Fawcett. Well, it was syndicated all over the country; I made all kinds of money with the damn thing and got a lotta baseball people mad at me because I told the truth—we don’t do that in this country about our sports idols. Bob Considine, who was the top authority at that time, called it the best sports story he ever read. It won national first place in the Best American Sport Story contest. Anyway, Ken’s help in editing that, in suggesting some changes—the rearrangement of some paragraphs was one thing he suggested—well, I remember when the check came, we all went out and got drunk.” Thirty-two years later, Stump’s True piece was the basis for a hit film in which Robert Wuhl played Al Stump to Tommy Lee Jones’s Ty Cobb.

  Millar did him other good turns, Stump recalled: “For years Ken recommended an agent named Gideon Kashor, so I wrote to him finally; and Gideon was a wonderful guy. He helped get me started in the Saturday Evening Post, which was the hardest market in the country to crack; Gideon was a real loyal guy, he represented me right up until he died. Yeah, Ken helped me on that. He was always doing nice things where I was concerned. He got me a Bantam book, a collection of my sports pieces from the Post, Collier’s, Liberty, True, Esquire; he says, ‘Why don’t you put together a conglomeration?’ Ken recommended me to one of the Bantam editors, who said fine, but we need it right away to bring it out with the spring list. I’d remarried and was going off to Europe for six months, so I had to grab all the material and notes and sit up at night over there on the bloody Riviera updating these stories. It was called The Champion Breed, about athletes who’d succeeded despite handicaps: race, physical, financial, so on. That came about because of Ken.”

  The dissolution of Al and Claire Stump’s marriage saddened the Millars. The en
d of Don Pearce’s long union shocked and angered them. Millar and Pearce, for all the history they shared, saw things from very different points of view.

  “I nearly had a nervous breakdown when I had to leave my home and get a divorce and marry somebody else,” Pearce said. “I practically collapsed under it. That’s not the sort of thing that Ken would tolerate for a moment. He understood life in different terms, I mean: ‘you stay, through thick and thin. Anyway, no one ever promised you a rose garden, you know? If life is difficult, if life is a serious matter at which you must work—well, other people may be more fortunate, but if you have a job to do, you do it.’ I remember him telling me—it fell on my astonished ears, but I tried to believe him because I always believed Ken—he told me, ‘Sex is not that important. What matters is keeping your word and being on top of temptations to break it or change it. You stay where you’re needed, and you don’t give in,’ and so on. I think had he lived to be a hundred, he still would not have relaxed those things that he thought held communities and civilizations and personal relationships together. He said things to me that only my habitual stance of worshipful friendship enabled me to take without buckling. You know, when someone says, ‘I think you’re a goddamned jerk’—clearly, that was changing something. I can’t imagine anybody who had been and could always be more useful to me than Ken, for advice or for things he didn’t even know he was helping me with. I was like a bloodsucker, drawing various kinds of intellectual and informational strength from him; I must have seemed to him a bit like a child, in comparison. But that’s when his usefulness to me ended. His capacity to help me ceased, because he ceased to approve of me. I doubt if he ever mentioned me again.”