Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  Some new correspondents in 1971 included top people from Millar’s English hardcover house, Collins, including Sir William Collins himself, who urged that Macdonald come to London in October for the British publication of The Underground Man. Collins promised a major publicity campaign to boost Macdonald’s U.K. profile and sales. “I don’t think there is a chance in this world of Ken going to England,” Ivan von Auw wrote an overseas colleague. “He stays pretty much a hermit in Santa Barbara.” But Millar could still surprise people. Gratified by how well the New York trip had gone, he made up his mind to try London—and got Maggie to say she’d go too. “We’re very glad to have the opportunity after all these years,” he told Olding.

  Once decided on London, the Millars began expanding their proposed itinerary. It would be nice to get out in the English countryside, they agreed. Scotland beckoned too: Ken and Maggie each had Scots ancestry. Bantam’s Marc Jaffe, in Santa Barbara in July, stirred them up about the Frankfurt Book Fair in October, and they said they’d try to attend; both Millars sold well in Germany. And shouldn’t they go to Switzerland to meet their good mutual publisher there? Another Santa Barbara visitor, a publicity woman from the French house Hachette, suggested Millar go to Paris for the October publication of L’homme clandestin. What about—Millar was serious—Moscow, where Bob Ford could arrange a fine welcome? “Hell, I may never come back,” he told Wolfe. Informed of an eighty-thousand-copy Czech edition of one of his books, he astonished an Ober agent by saying, “I hope to visit Czechoslovakia some time in the next few years.” She quipped to a colleague about the pause-prone Millar, “Do you think he’s going to become the U.S.’s most silent roving ambassador?”

  But there were limits, he knew. To Julian Symons, who’d suggested during a 1969 trip with wife Kathleen and daughter Sarah that the Millars visit England, Millar now wrote, “If I was dubious, when you were here, about our ever being able to come to England, it had to do with Margaret’s difficulty in travelling and doing other things that people ordinarily and quite easily do. Well, I have got her up to the point of abandoning, for a week or two, this continent. But there are still severe limitations on our movements. I am being brutally frank with you and Kathleen because you will understand me. It would be difficult for Margaret to meet any number of people at your house. . . . She asks if we could have lunch together, perhaps at a pub, instead? M. thrives on informality, as you may have noticed.” He felt he’d expressed himself poorly and wrote Symons again: “I’m not so night-bound as Margaret is and I’d dearly love to visit your house and if possible meet some of your friends, while Margaret will be content, she says, to stay by herself. . . . This self-disinvited guest doesn’t seem to know how to handle his social mistake without making the further gaffe of reinviting himself. Conceivably—I blunder on—we might manage to meet at your house and eat somewhere afterward, with or without dear M. . . . I hope this note hasn’t further muddied the waters and made Kathleen and you give up on us. That would really make me feel badly.”

  The Millars dropped Frankfurt from their plans when it conflicted with other events, and Millar gave up Moscow when Ford was unexpectedly recalled to Ottawa for a month. Still their schedule was ambitious: five days in Paris, four in Geneva, three in Edinburgh, three in Yorkshire, ten in London. “It’s a little late for us, perhaps,” the fifty-five-year-old Millar wrote Harker, “but better late than never.” He said to Green, “I’m at the same time keen and a little frightened, as if I might run into my own young prewar ghost.” He told Wolfe his anxiety had as much to do with his wife as himself: “I’m poised at the intersection of fear and expectation. It’s a long time since I’ve crossed an ocean, but I’m not afraid of that as much as of the sheer unexpected, like my wife’s walking into a plate-glass door and falling unconscious into my arms. . . . We humans have so little, and we set such store by it, as indeed we must.”

  Despite elaborate preparations, the Millars’ trip threw them some curves. They landed in France on the first day of a subway strike that flooded the capital with what seemed like “every car in Paris”; their cab took three hours to crawl from airport to hotel. Millar found the odyssey “strange and exciting”; Maggie complained about the exhaust fumes. Anyway they both liked the bird-watching in a courtyard behind the Hotel George V. Millar lunched with half a dozen journalists, some of whom wrote about him for their papers; and he was greatly taken with his French publisher, Alex Grail. Switzerland was less of a success. After visiting Byron’s Castle of Chillon, the Millars took a cable car twelve thousand feet up Mount Blanc; Margaret hadn’t dressed warmly enough and caught cold, forcing them to cancel Scotland and northern England. They went straight to London, where Collins people scrambled to find them hotel rooms.

  Collins scheduled a lunch for the Millars on Tuesday, October 19, with the important English crime reviewers. About fifteen people (including Symons, Matthew Coady, Billy Collins, and H. R. F. Keating) came to the meal at the Collins offices in a rambling house in St. James’s Place off Piccadilly. “We were there at a big oval table in a boardroom up at the top,” recalled Keating, then the London Times’s mystery critic. “Ken and I sat next to each other, and I was a little embarrassed because I’d written a very short and not altogether enthusiastic review about his book before, in which I’d said he was something like a third-generation descendant of playwrights like Webster. I was implying that the books had about them a certain derivative element, but he took it as more of a compliment than it was meant to be. He thought, here’s this British critic saying I’m comparable to Webster, which, indeed, you know, it’s something one could easily think; he was pleased with this comparison. And I think I rather attempted not to talk about books, and his books, and talked about his reaction to England or whatever. So, yes, that was a little embarrassing, as a lunch.”

  The next day, Symons and a radio producer came to the Millars’ suite at Duke’s Hotel across from the Collins building, to tape remarks for a BBC program. Symons wrote:

  He talked with characteristic gentle candor about the background of his own books, and their quality for him as an attempt to come to terms with his own childhood. The producer Robin Brightwell intervened once, twice, three times, suggesting questions of a more direct kind that he thought I might put. At length Ken broke off and, without raising his voice or showing any sign of annoyance, said—I am giving the gist of what was said, not exact words—“Mr. Brightwell, I understood I was being interviewed by Mr. Symons. I should have been told in advance if I was to be interviewed by you, and perhaps I might not have agreed to it.” It was one of the most effective put-downs I have heard, the more so because of its perfect politeness.

  “And the producer squashed,” Symons remembered, “and said, ‘Oh, yes, yes, of course, Mr. Macdonald, of course!’ ” Afterward Symons lunched with the Millars: “I was intending to take them to a French restaurant; but I just said casually, ‘Well, now, what kind of food would you like?’ Margaret said, ‘Well, what we don’t want is any of that filthy French food!’ So I thought, ‘Oh, well, farewell to that restaurant.’ I took them to a pub in London, a very pretty pub called the Salisbury in St. Martin’s Lane. Ken was perfectly happy. And I said to Margaret, ‘What would you like to drink?’ And she said, ‘Well, I’d like a cup of tea.’ And I said, ‘Margaret, I’m afraid this is a pub, and I’m afraid I can’t get tea for you.’ And she said, ‘What! You’re telling me this is an English pub, and tea is a great English drink, and I can’t get tea here?’ I said, ‘No, I am telling you that, I’m afraid.’ So she settled for, I don’t know what, something like cider.”

  The main event of Macdonald’s visit was a party given him at the St. James’s Place building on October 20 by Sir William and Lady Collins. About two hundred authors, publishers, critics, journalists, booksellers, and others attended, including the Millars’ friend Nolan Miller, in London this fall with a group of Antioch students. “I never thought I could enjoy such a party but simply did,” Millar admitted to
Wolfe. “After it was all over I had my first Scotch-and-water of the trip.” Millar went alone to dinner at the Symonses’ Battersea home, where he hit it off well with journalist Matthew Coady. But a BBC interview done without Symons’s assistance was “a complete bust,” he wrote Wolfe: “The interviewer told me as he began that his only knowledge of me came from his reading of my Who’s Who entry and his opening question was: ‘I understand you’re both a Ph.D. and an M.A. Isn’t your writing detective stories rather a waste?’ It went downhill from there.”

  As for print reporters, Millar told Olding, “Got along very well with the journalists, or so it seemed.” Philip Oakes in the London Sunday Times, Bill Foster from the Edinburgh Scotsman, and Mike Fearn of London Express Features all did long, positive pieces; but the Guardian’s Peter Preston poked fun at Millar’s “shuffling modesty” and mockingly contrasted Archer’s supposed image (“Flip, maudlin, and black as the bleakest hangover”) with Millar’s reality: “Adlai Stevenson meets James Stewart, played by Henry Fonda. . . . Blandly humane; generous; kind; and jetting home to Santa Barbara tomorrow in case any goddam factories were thinking of moving in to sully the literary peace.”

  The Millars attended to business in England: he signed a Serbo-Croat contract for The Underground Man; her publisher Gollancz arranged to reissue three books in hardcover. London was generally successful, Millar judged, and probably necessary; though he shrugged to Olding: “It’ll be interesting to see if it helps the book, or indeed if books are helpable or simply live their own lives.” As for the city itself, the Millars found it comfortable (“Canadians seem to feel at home in London,” he told Harker) but a disappointment; it struck them, Millar wrote Ruehlmann, “as a rather large damp Toronto, littered with the loot and monuments of Empire, populated by the world’s most polite people, who seem rather sad and uncertain at this moment in history. But who isn’t?”

  Unexpectedly, the long flight home was the most interesting part of the journey for Millar. Headwinds over the North Atlantic kept their 747 so low that land was visible. Millar gazed with awe at the icy coasts of Greenland, the frozen floes of Hudson Bay, and Lake Athabasca where his parents had lived before he was born. “Those sights,” he wrote Harker, “and not Switzerland and not Paris and not London, were the real culmination of the trip.” His thoughts were recurring more and more these days to Canada and especially to Winnipeg, site of that story he planned. He’d been wanting to go back there—and now this 747, needing to refuel, by pure luck landed in Winnipeg, where Millar hadn’t been for forty years: “so once again I made a loop in my life,” he wrote Knopf. The place hadn’t changed much, he told Symons: “There are many more tall buildings but the prairie is still absolutely flat as if rolled.” For Millar, and Macdonald, the bittersweet past was forever alive in the present, so long as memory served.

  * * *

  * * *

  * * *

  His genre are exciting plots—in the tradition of Dashiell Hammett, a well-known American communist writer. . . . It is characteristic of Kenneth Millar to give a social portrait of a modern American society with all its vices, to show the almighty power of money and the way powerful capitalist syndicates merge frankly with gangsters’ syndicates nowadays, and the way organized crime gets closely interwoven with politics.

  —Introductory note to Blue City, Znamya (USSR), 1972

  The critical backlash against Ross Macdonald (which Millar claimed to have expected) began about half a year after Welty’s review. In a piece in the Catholic World, Bruce Cook conceded “Archer is a masterful creation” and Macdonald “an extremely able and resourceful writer, one who understands the uses of metaphor and can coax more out of mood and setting than most practitioners of the mystery story manage to get from plot and character”; but Cook chided Macdonald for his recurring themes (“He seems to be rewriting the same novel over and over again”), his recent “terribly involuted and complicated” and “incredible” plots, his supposed resentment of his genre’s restrictions, and for “mangling” the mystery form. Cook deemed The Underground Man “a failure,” Macdonald’s “worst novel to date.”

  Richard Schickel, in a Commentary essay, was less generous. While claiming “one does not really [sic] begrudge Ross Macdonald his recent success,” Life’s movie critic said Macdonald’s “great defect as a novelist” was his “failure to evoke a milieu [i.e., southern California] and the related failure to develop a wide range of memorable characters to populate it.” Schickel regretted that Archer didn’t talk more like Chandler’s Marlowe, “whose marvelous, wisecracking style—cynicism partially masking idealism—was one of the great delights of modern detective fiction.” Schickel suggested “Macdonald’s present eminence does not depend on the literary quality of his work but on the fact that he is our only writer of generation-gap mysteries at a moment when that gap is much on everyone’s mind.” Schickel judged Macdonald “a writer of severely limited capabilities.”

  Yet Macdonald’s readership grew. After The Underground Man’s strong hardcover showing (45,000 sold for Knopf and another 50,000 for the Book-of-the-Month Club), Bantam upped its print run; in January 1972, Marc Jaffe reported 445,000 Underground paperbacks published—which meant over forty thousand dollars in author royalties, as Millar calculated by hand. “What interests me most about our current strong sale of THE UNDERGROUND MAN,” Jaffe wrote, “is that it’s priced at $1.25. In a curious kind of way this is a breakthrough if you consider the novel to be a ‘mystery.’ I don’t think there’s ever been a $1.25 mystery. You are therefore leading the pack.” Bantam now had over 8 million copies of thirteen Macdonald titles in print; their new in-store Macdonald promotion program included a forty-five-copy, prepacked floor display. As a sort of investment in his future, Millar bought (for $10,694.50) seven hundred shares of Bantam stock in late 1971 and early 1972. He could afford a flier: he was getting paid for his Filmways deal in quarterly $30,000 chunks. With royalties on the rise, Millar would gross about $137,000 in 1972.

  Bantam’s big edition of The Underground Man introduced the book and Macdonald to many new readers and brought Millar an increased amount of fan mail. A letter from UCLA’s Meteorology Department chairman complimented the accuracy of the novel’s fire-weather description: “It is fascinating to see the interplay of Santa Ana and sea breeze. The growing intensity of the fire naturally tends to accelerate the sea breeze; so the fire, like your other characters, is working toward its own destruction.”

  Another interesting letter came from Bob Langfelder, the Isla Vista trial defendant, who wrote:

  A reader only rarely has to justify why he is reading a particular book, but in this case I had to. I was sitting alone in my apartment reading your book. I was about half way through and really into it and not wanting to be disturbed when a local, Isla Vista radical friend stopped by to give me sympathy about going to jail in a week. At the moment, I didn’t need any sympathy and wanted to go on with the book, but I stopped to talk to Barry. (One has to take sympathy when they can get it.)

  However, his words were not sympathetic but hostile. He saw the book I was reading and wanted to know why I was reading that “crap” right before I was going to jail. Barry had in his hand a copy of a novel by George Orwell.

  “What do you think I should be reading right before I go to jail?” was my counter. “Do you think I should be reading Orwell or Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle or One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich?”

  “Yes, something like or George Jackson’s Prison Letters,” was Barry’s reply.

  To defend my radical integrity, I told him that I just finished reading Solzhenitzyn and it was “heavy,” but Russia and even Soledad seem so far away and abstract. I thought that I would read a book that takes place right here in the county. I thought it might give me a better sense of the area I live in.

  Langfelder analyzed Underground’s psychological characterizations (which he found credible), criticized its ideology (“for my beliefs you overdo the F
reudian determinism [e.g. the lost father theme] that accounts for the breakdown of the family which in turn leads to crime. . . . I would have had Brian Kilpatrick commit the murder out of jealousy [possessiveness] and then consciously or unconsciously start the forest fire with the cigarillo in order to collect fire insurance on his waning real estate investments. So he would be the jealous, mentally ill land exploiter who destroys his family, the environment, and himself not so much out of guilt but as the natural evolution of such a mentality. [Would that sound too forced?]”), and praised Macdonald’s prose: “ ‘He pointed to the offshore islands which lay on the horizon like blue whales,’ p. 110—Beautiful image.”

  The Underground Man brought several unexpected contacts. New York filmmaker Craig Gilbert, seeking a suitable California household as subjects for an ambitious TV documentary (“It had to be California. The American culture is fashioned on California”), read Underground and found it “described with absolute accuracy the kind of family I was looking for.” He called Millar in Santa Barbara, he said: “He invited me out. He had a lot of newspaper people over from the Santa Barbara News-Press and we talked.” Soon the director found his subjects (the Louds of Montecito) and began seven months’ shooting on An American Family, a twelve-hour series that got a lot of attention when shown on PBS in 1973. More Underground feedback (“That book continues to surprise me,” Millar told Bruccoli) came from Osvaldo Soriano, a twenty-nine-year-old Argentine literary critic, who sent Millar his full-page review of the novel from the newspaper La Opinion. Soriano himself was writing a novel, he said, set in Los Angeles (a city he’d never been to) and featuring Philip Marlowe, with a cameo appearance by Lew Archer. This book, Triste, solitario y final (from a phrase in Chandler’s El largo adiós), would be the first of six for Soriano, who’d become internationally known as one of several Argentinians using the hard-boiled form to confront Latin American issues.