Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  Millar, in several letters to the Bransons, told his side of the break with Pearce: “No, I didn’t turn my back on him. He quit me because I persisted in telling him that he was making a mistake. . . . You misunderstand me if you think I think a man has no right to divorce a wife; but one has to consider the manner and the consequences. Don’s course has been destructive. . . . I grieve for him and his family. . . . It makes no sense to me.” A quarter-century friendship was over. At the Pearces’ divorce trial, Margaret testified as a witness against Don. (Despite Millar’s prediction that Pearce’s new relationship would last no more than a year, Donald and Dorothy—“a most remarkable person,” Pearce attests—have stayed happily married for more than four decades.)

  So many of his friends were getting divorced or going into therapy (or both), Millar said, maybe he’d give up watching humans and just watch birds: “They are stupider than people, but not much, and they can fly unassisted.”

  There was one bright development on the scene, like a hopeful subplot in a Macdonald book: in September 1961, twenty-two-year-old UCLA senior Linda Millar married a twenty-nine-year-old engineering major working as a missile-guidance technician. Millar told von Auw that Lin’s fellow was “an excellent man” and she seemed happy. Soon husband and wife were both working (she as a secretary) for the company handling the Saturn space rocket computers. Millar wrote Olding, “All the news from here is good, health-wise, daughter-wise, wisdom-wise?”

  The Archer book he mailed to New York in the spring of 1962, The Zebra-Striped Hearse, gave him a different sort of satisfaction. “It is, I think, more of a novel and less of an adventure story than anything I’ve done,” the author told von Auw. To Knopf he wrote, “I’ve tried to give it more of my personal style and tone than any of its predecessors.” Millar was pleased with the book (an elegantly designed and typically complex cat’s cradle involving painters, surfers, the neurotic rich, and the resentful poor), and he’d stay pleased with it over the years. Looking back a decade later, he’d tell journalist Paul Nelson, “A lot of people think that’s my best book. I don’t really have an opinion, but I think it worked; I think it’s well constructed. I take for granted some of the things that I value, like style and so on; but to me, structure is the really difficult thing. It involves a great deal of mental effort, to take this kind of material in its complexity and not just impose a structure on it but find the structure that’s inherent in the material; and at the same time obey the rules of the mystery, with your conclusion in your last sentence and your beginning in your first sentence. . . . I think The Zebra-Striped Hearse could probably be described as my first book that really comes off in the various ways that I wanted a book to come off; and then it was followed by several other books which did too.”

  As with The Wycherly Woman, Olding sold The Zebra-Striped Hearse for abridgment in Cosmopolitan magazine, which paid five thousand dollars for such condensations. The author could either cut the book himself or let the magazine do it. (“Well,” Margaret Millar said dryly, “some choice.”) Millar struggled with the Zebra condensation, whittling at his carefully crafted novel. His wife, an old hand at such chores, stepped in to help. “It’s difficult to cut a book down to twenty-five thousand words,” she said, “unless you really know how to do it, and it just came natural to me. Ken would look laboriously through a chapter, thinking he could spare that deft line, spare this one. You can’t do that; you have to cut out the whole shebang. Then, when he learned it, he became very proficient at cutting his own work. That was one little thing I could teach him.” When Olding praised the shortened Zebra, Millar wrote, “Good bold transitions are the secret and (I cannot tell a lie) Maggie was responsible for many of them. So I just helped her plot her new book.”

  He dedicated The Zebra-Striped Hearse to Harris Seed, who (waiving a fee) had recently handled the formalities to bring Linda Millar’s long probation to a quiet end. Millar got Seed to check Zebra for errors of jurisprudence or logic, something both Millars regularly asked the lawyer to do for their manuscripts. The only thing Seed recalled ever correcting in any Ken Millar book, he said, was when someone leapt on a car’s running board: “This was in the sixties. I said, ‘Ken, cars don’t have running boards anymore.’ ”

  Dick Lid was someone else Millar asked to read his typescripts. Lid caught a mistake in Zebra in time for it to be corrected: a reference to Malibu railroad tracks where none existed. Though Millar took research trips for Zebra and other books, he always relied on memory to describe LA, a place he didn’t like to visit. He’d depend increasingly on Lid and others to keep him accurate on LA geography.

  Betty and Dick Lid knew the Millars pretty well by 1962. “Maggie was very much in control, and she pretty much presided,” Betty Lid said. “Maggie liked you answering back; you had to assert yourself with Maggie, keep your own sense of self, because she was a very forceful person. Ken, in his quiet way, was different. He had this clear sense of his own power; it was not the power that she had, it was something else. I felt he was invulnerable somehow. Ken never raised his voice. Ken was just calm, always. He was really such a sweet man. I don’t think a lot of people knew him very well, because—I don’t think he was knowable, in that way. He had this thing around him, this shell. Whatever it was he had, you couldn’t penetrate it. He was a very perceptive guy. If you weren’t genuine, you just didn’t get into his circle. And yet he was never rude. When he didn’t like somebody, he wouldn’t even bother with them. He just dismissed them as moral human beings. I was complaining about somebody very dramatically once, saying he’s this and he’s that, making him into a real monster; and Ken said to me, ‘Betty—he’s not an important person.’Just simply wiped him out!”

  Something Millar couldn’t dismiss so easily was the 1962 publication in the United States and England of Raymond Chandler Speaking, a book that included an edited version of Chandler’s 1949 letter to James Sandoe about The Moving Target. Readers, critics, and colleagues on two continents could now chuckle at (and quote in print) Chandler knocking the “pretentiousness” of Macdonald’s phrasing, Chandler sneering at Macdonald’s similes, Chandler calling Macdonald a “literary eunuch.” It wounded Millar to be heckled from the grave by a man whose work had once inspired him. Worse than that, it seemed to Millar (who’d learn of other anti-Macdonald letters by Chandler) that the older writer had tried to thwart his career.

  “He was very mild about the Chandler business,” Dick Lid said, “although it must have hurt. One night he hauled out the exact quotation from that letter of Chandler’s, criticizing the simile about the automobile ‘acned with rust.’ He thought Chandler simply didn’t understand how that worked, didn’t understand the difference between someone who was writing with a college education and someone who hadn’t had one. That was probably defensive, on Ken’s part; I’m sure it was. He thought you’re writing for an audience that mostly will never know what’s gone into a book in terms of erudition or education, anyhow, and that the allusions and all of that are going to pass over that reader—but that’s what you should expect in a popular art form; and by and large, at least in talking to me, he was willing to accept that.”

  What he couldn’t ignore was the posthumous wound Chandler had inflicted. Millar sensed it would take years for Ross Macdonald’s reputation to recover from Raymond Chandler Speaking, and he’d be alert for a chance to defend himself.

  Also unignorable was the continued rejection of “Coleridge and the Inward Eye.” Millar’s dissertation made its disappointing way from Beacon to Duke to Oxford University Press. When no American publisher would commit to the work, England’s Routledge cooled on it. Donald Davie suggested Millar’s European agent next offer it to the U.K.’s Chatto and Windus. Millar wearied of the struggle. This Coleridge book was his personal albatross. “Patronage seems to be a powerful force in this field, of U. Presses,” he wrote von Auw, “and unfortunately I’ve never kept my academic fences mended. Or fortunately—I prefer open country.” He f
inally accepted the inevitable, Lid said: “He could not get that book published. It was a marvelous case of the academic world just plain shitting on somebody who was a mystery writer: ‘You wanna publish? You gotta ask my permission.’ Eventually he said, ‘I’m not gonna be humiliated anymore; I’m not gonna keep trying to do this.’ That was a major shame.”

  Yet he rolled with the punch. Millar seemed more able now to take disappointments in stride; maybe, as he’d hinted to Olding, he was getting wiser? Anyway, he seemed to be having more fun. He and Maggie, both between books at the same time for a change, took several group birding trips in 1962: to the Santa Barbara islands, to Joshua Tree and Twenty-nine Palms, to Teton Park and Yellowstone. Millar bought an eight-foot boat he strapped atop the Ford and drove to the beach for sails with Dick Lid or Bob Easton. His new jauntiness was caught in a photograph taken for the sleeve of The Zebra-Striped Hearse: standing near the Coral Casino diving boards, wearing his Harris Tweed jacket from Kitchener, a jack-o’-lantern grin on his face, he’d never looked thinner, healthier, happier—a Canadian living in California and damned glad of it. He wrote Anna Branson, “I like it better now than I ever did. What it? It, all of it!” Millar had a new catchphrase: Writing well is the best revenge. He was getting good at putting what bothered him into his fiction, and so many things that affected him this year—his best friend’s divorce, his disgust with academia, his preoccupation with Coleridge, his anger at Chandler—he’d channel into the next Archer novel, a book he said would have “my most horrible plot yet”: a masterpiece-in-the-making that he’d title The Chill.

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  The spirit who bideth by himself

  In the land of mist and snow,

  He loved the bird that loved the man

  Who shot him with his bow.

  —S. T. Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

  In every case, my friend, one principle is to know what the investigation is about.

  —Plato, Phaedrus

  A Mess of Shadows was the book’s working title, from a line in the Yeats poem “Among School Children.” Millar had written a paper about that poem for Cleanth Brooks in 1942; a decade later he spent two hours discussing the same poem with Don Pearce. “He saw ‘Among School Children’ as a poem about one thing: blocked sexuality, or sexual longing,” recalled Pearce. “He said, ‘It’s about deprived sexuality, and that chestnut tree blossoming at the end is obviously a transmogrified phallic image.’ ”

  At the heart of Macdonald’s novel is the blocked and deprived Roy Bradshaw, dean of the college at Pacific Point, an unmarried man of early middle age living with his mother. Millar seems to have taken the framework of Bradshaw’s story from a fifties Santa Barbara court case, then added some of his feelings about Don Pearce’s personal situation: a “continually developing mess,” he wrote Anna Branson, that “shadowed” Millar’s year. More than one commentator (including Joyce Carol Oates) guessed Millar also put to fictive use here the private life of Raymond Chandler, who, as soon as his mother died, married a woman twenty years his senior.

  Harvard Ph.D. Bradshaw, who wears his formal manner like a suit of armor, represented everything the proletarian-intellectual Millar hated about the academy in general and Harvard in particular. Bradshaw also seems partly modeled on a Harvard-trained Michigan professor Millar despised and went out of his way to avoid, a man with a famously lofty demeanor (“It was like talking to the Matterhorn,” Pearce said) and close ties to his mom, who presided at his departmental teas.

  Coleridge gave Macdonald the structural and spiritual framework for his novel, a streamlined tale of modern California lashed to the eighteenth-century rigging of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (with a bit of the same poet’s “Christabel” thrown in for atmosphere). As it starts, Archer, like the wedding guest narrating “Mariner,” looks forward to a pleasant event: a fishing trip to La Paz. But like the wedding guest, Archer’s waylaid by a supplicant: the bristly Alex Kincaid, who, like Coleridge’s Mariner, seeks someone to hear his sad story. During Kincaid’s Pacific Point honeymoon, his bride, Dolly, was visited by a bearded man named McGee (a sometime sailor carrying a load of Mariner-like grief); afterward Dolly disappeared. Archer says he’ll look for her. His first stop is the honeymooners’ hotel, the Surf House, where he quizzes the photographer, whose heavy camera hangs from his neck “like an albatross”: the bird slain by Coleridge’s unhappy Mariner (an archer).

  Lew sends Kincaid to the nicely named Mariner’s Rest Motel, then traces Dolly to the local college. Among those he meets there is Helen Haggerty, a saucy young teacher of modern languages. The provocative Haggerty takes Lew to her apartment and tries to hire him, claiming her life is in danger; but he spurns her. When she’s found murdered, Dolly Kincaid is suspected of killing her.

  By now The Chill’s Coleridge allusions are as common as seagulls on a beach. The eyes of the college’s dean of women look like “the beautiful core of an iceberg, all green ice and cold blazing light”—reminding “Mariner” readers of when “ice, mast-high, came floating by, as green as emerald.” A pigeon dead on Haggerty’s patio stands in for the albatross. For the book’s first half, Pacific Point is wrapped in an obscuring fog like the enveloping mist the Mariner encounters “where no living thing was to be seen.” The fog lifts, as in the poem, at the rising of the moon, which casts light toward a difficult redemption. On a ship called the Revenant, McGee unburdens himself of “his horrible penance,” hoping Lew will in effect shrieve his soul (“wash away the Albatross’s blood”). Archer does bring about McGee’s deliverance from “the Spectre-Woman and her Deathmate,” the grotesque “Death and Life-in-Death” pair behind The Chill’s modern horrors.

  By this point in his career, Ross Macdonald seemed a bit like the Ancient Mariner himself, telling Freudian variations on the same few stories, such as the Oedipus tales so meaningful to Millar (an exile returns, a man “marries” his mother), and the plight of the damaged or endangered daughter. Like the Mariner, whose action begat disaster, Millar did penance by repeating, reimagining, realizing, what happened.

  The Chill’s Linda figure is Dolly Kincaid. Like Linda, Dolly disappears on a Labor Day weekend. Accused of murder, she’s eager to be blamed, saying, “I want to die. I deserve to.”

  With Dolly “on the verge of a psychotic breakthrough,” Archer collaborates with her psychiatrist in having her admitted to a rest home, where a psychiatrist probes Dolly’s memory with sodium pentothal.

  The psychiatrist is named Godwin: another Coleridge connection. William Godwin, eighteenth-century psychological and social reformer (and father of Frankenstein’s creator Mary Shelley), was a Coleridge correspondent; and, as author of the 1794 semimystery The Adventures of Caleb Williams, a sort of great-grandfather of crime fiction. There are other mystery-story allusions in The Chill, further linking high art and popular culture: Coleridge’s albatross and Spade’s black bird. In the book’s first scene, Archer’s in court testifying in a case involving one Bridget Perrine, whose name splices Brigid O’Shaughnessy and Effie Perrine, the main women in The Maltese Falcon. When Lew consults Phyllis and Arnie Walters, his Reno colleagues, we learn they’re both (like Hammett) ex-Pinkerton agents. Arnie recalls an old Bay Area case of his that’s a droll variation on the Flitcraft story in Falcon.

  Another mystery writer crucially evoked in The Chill is Margaret Millar. Trailing Dolly at the college, Archer remembers “a girl I used to follow home from Junior High. I never did work up enough nerve to ask her for the privilege of carrying her books.” This comes on the heels of Lew hearing this exchange between a coed and a varsity man:

  She was explaining something to him, something about Achilles and the tortoise. Achilles was chasing the tortoise, it seemed, but according to Zeno he would never catch it. The space between them was divisible into an infinite number of parts; therefore it would take Achilles an infinite period of time to traverse it. By that time th
e tortoise would be somewhere else.

  The young man nodded. “I see that.”

  “But it isn’t so,” the girl cried. “The infinite divisibility of space is merely theoretical. It doesn’t affect actual movement across space.”

  “I don’t get it, Heidi.”

  Millar had been prodded into writing for Ontario magazines by John Buchan’s account of the race between tortoise and hare. But Margaret Millar won the sprint into hardcover. His wife had written five books by the time Ken sold one; the professional space between them seemed indivisible then, and Millar changed their career metaphor from Buchan’s fable to Zeno’s conundrum. After Margaret’s Iron Gates success, Kenneth had told her, “The tortoise will never catch Achilles.” But the tortoise kept plodding—and with The Chill, his eighteenth book, for the first time drew even.

  And in this book he exceeded his past achievements, as he deftly incorporated not only Coleridge but pre-Socratic philosophy into his California fable. Fogbound in a house with a corpse and Dean Bradshaw, Lew uses Zeno’s riddle like a Zen koan: “I shut off the violent images with an effort of will and forced myself to think about Zeno, who said that Achilles could never traverse the space between him and the tortoise. It was a soothing thought, if you were a tortoise, or maybe even if you were Achilles.”

  Poets as well as philosophers inform perception in The Chill: Coleridge, Yeats, Verlaine. Poems are clues in this sophisticated mystery in which Macdonald’s poetic style is sharper than ever and especially apt. Critic Thomas J. Roberts noted, “Archer, Macdonald’s narrator, thinks and sees in one-line poems.” Here are some: