Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  Simon saw Millar often in the next two years, he said: “I must have gone up there maybe a dozen times to the Coral Casino and the writers’ luncheons. I swam with Ken a few times; he was a really powerful swimmer.” Like others, Simon felt Millar’s essence elusive: “I think now I never really got to know him. I think he was an essentially private person, and a human being of tremendous pain; you could just see it in his body, and in his eyes. I was loath to talk to him about the personal tragedies of his life, which were so reflected in his fiction; I was so much younger, I think I was too shy. I would confine conversation to literary chitchat or events of the day or films. All I remember is a kind of tension around the family; being introduced, but not a real feeling of what was going on, and I couldn’t ask.

  “I was so transfixed by Ken, so enamored of him as a human, as a writer. My feeling is that by the midseventies he was the most respected writer in California, on a serious level. I was fascinated with Ken because he was to me a serious artist. And I think part of the reason I’ve only written six of these detective novels is I have this ambivalence around detective fiction—that it’s not really serious. And he was so clearly serious as a writer that it made me feel okay about it.

  “You could tell what interested him was people who were trying to do something different with the detective form, trying to push it forward. He was really a true literary personality, in that he didn’t like a lot of those detective novels that were merely imitating the past; but he was not the kind of person that would bad-mouth people—a unique thing among writers, I think. I’m pretty willing to do it. He just didn’t. Rather than say ‘Boring’ or ‘What crap,’ his way was to politely bypass something.”

  Millar touted Simon’s work in ways that exactly counterpointed the bad turns Chandler had done Macdonald. Chandler knocked The Moving Target to James Sandoe; Millar praised The Big Fix to Matt Bruccoli and to Julian Symons in England, where Simon’s book got fine reviews and won a Crime Writers Association award. Chandler bad-mouthed Macdonald to an important Chicago bookseller; Millar praised Simon to Ralph Sipper, his Bay Area bookman friend. “Oh, he was a big booster,” Simon said. “It was a tremendous generosity.”

  Simon sold The Big Fix to Hollywood and then wrote its screenplay. In coming years he alternated Moses Wine books with movie scripts, and he sensed the Hollywood work caused a change in his and Millar’s relationship: “When The Big Fix was made into a movie, I think in an odd way he was really impressed, simply because I had written the script myself and negotiated shoals he hadn’t been able to. Part of the reason was that he was such a withdrawn person; he wasn’t comfortable taking his gloves off in the Hollywood environment. It was a weird feeling I would have, because I considered him such a superior writer I couldn’t understand why he’d be impressed. He wanted to do it, I know. Everybody who puts down Hollywood is also mesmerized by it; I knew he in his own way was mesmerized by it, Ken. As I became more successful working as a screenwriter, he would seek my counsel about the ways of Hollywood. He had an inflated sense of my connections; he assumed I had great entrée into this mysterious world of the cinema! He would play the faux naïf a little bit: ‘You know all about these producers; what do they really want? They’re just making monkeys of us poor intellectuals.’ I never believed it. Because first of all, I don’t think there’s anything too complicated about greed.

  “He’d ask what I thought about certain producers or executives; did I know so-and-so, because so-and-so was calling him up. I’d give my opinion, but it always made me feel slightly tarnished in an odd sort of way—like I was the Grub Street author and he was up there in sylvan Santa Barbara staying on the narrow path, writing book after book after book. I felt sometimes like I was his conduit to hipness, and he was my conduit to quality! I saw him as a devoted person; and if I was going off in one of my other directions, I was embarrassed to be around him because then I’d have to explain to him—and to me—why I hadn’t been doing the detective fiction. I felt a little embarrassed because I felt like I’d failed him, and myself. That’s why I didn’t see him that much in the late seventies.”

  * * *

  When Simon first went to Santa Barbara in the spring of 1973, many Americans (including Millar and Simon) were transfixed by the Senate’s televised Watergate hearings in which the unseemly doings of Richard Nixon’s Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP) were exposed: break-ins, dirty tricks, enemies list, payoffs. “Those are the cosmic criminals of our times,” Simon wrote Millar of all the president’s men, “and the question is how to write them without it coming out propaganda or a turgid rehash of the television news.” Millar told Bob Ford in Moscow, “We sit in front of the television set spellbound by the stories of the reign of Richard the Terrible.”

  Some saw similarities between Washington’s alleged high crimes and misdemeanors and the doings in a Ross Macdonald book. The New York Times asked Macdonald to write an op-ed piece on “Watergate as ‘caper’ or ‘whodunit.’ ” Millar turned the assignment down, but he had plenty of Watergate thoughts. “There is some kind of general family history,” he wrote Bill Ruehlmann, “based on my own, that I write of—the history of my lifetime told in family terms—and I must say recent events support my long suspicion that there is something very much wrong. Now we’re headed for the rapids, I’m afraid, betrayed by a philosophy that began to take over with the second war, but I think we’ll come out on the other side.” The whole affair, he said, only went to show “the essential meaning-lessness of evil.”

  Nixon was a prime source of his own trouble, Millar told journalist Jeff Sweet: “He’s almost infallibly wrong in his choice of help. He picked all of those people, and they picked him, too. . . . He magnetized the elements of . . . a thoroughly corrupt administration. He’s always behaved in the same manner. I’ve followed him ever since my own activities in the Helen Gahagan Douglas campaign, which he won by making her out to be a Communist. He’s always operated by the same principles. It’s no secret to anybody.” Millar analyzed the president as deftly as he’d sketch a witness in the box at the Santa Barbara courthouse: “I think that Nixon has divided values and he’s never been able to make them jibe. On the one hand, you know, he comes from a very strict religious family. And on the other hand, he grew up in a tradition or a feeling where you’ve got to make it big. And the two things, between them, have been the upper and nether grindstones, and they’ve destroyed him.”

  Millar could comprehend Nixon, but he couldn’t abide what he’d done. “You see,” he told Sweet, “that’s the mistake people like Nixon make. They think that understanding power and all the various faculties and abilities a man has are intended for his own self-aggrandizement and to do things to other people. It’s not true.” Nothing made Millar angrier than abuse of power. Easton said, “He could be extremely violent in likes and dislikes where his own feelings and principles were involved. He made me feel he ferociously hated Reagan, Nixon, what they stood and stand for, likewise the big oil-company executives who directed development in the Santa Barbara Channel.” The Skylab space module was going to crash to earth during the Watergate hearings; most hoped it would destroy itself in some barren desert, but Millar wrote Ruehlmann he knew what to do with Skylab: “You’ve heard of the Florida White House? and the California White House? Well.”

  * * *

  While Washington staged Watergate, Jackson, Mississippi (“cradle of the Confederacy”), prepared a more cheerful happening: a six-day “Eudora Welty Celebration,” part of the tenth annual Mississippi Arts Festival. Eudora Welty Day, a state-proclaimed holiday, would be May 2, two weeks after Welty’s sixty-fourth birthday.

  “I’ve lived here all my life in Jackson,” Welty said, recalling the event. “Everybody knows me, and they wanted to give me a party. They said, ‘Now we want to bring all of your closest, best friends, no matter where they live; bring ’em to Jackson, we’ll put ’em up at a hotel’—I’m afraid they didn’t pay for it, but anyway—‘we’ve pla
nned everything nice, for three or four days.’ I said, ‘How can I ever choose, and besides, they all live far away and it might not be possible.’ They said, ‘That’s not for you to worry about; just make a list of the people you’d most like to have.’

  “So that’s what I did. And I put Ken on it. And Margaret too. And they accepted. But Margaret—on again, off again—at the last, she didn’t come. But all my oldest friends, in New York and around Santa Fe, they all came. And I’m so happy now, because so many of them are gone; and that was a time that everybody got to meet one another. It was wonderful that Ken came. And my agent, Diarmuid Russell, an Irishman, from Dublin, he was my dear friend and agent, and he liked Ken’s work.” Russell, Welty’s agent for thirty-three years, and dying of cancer, had never been to her hometown. “They met at my house,” she said of Russell and Millar, “and afterwards Diarmuid said to me he’d so much enjoyed meeting Ken. He said, ‘He’s a man with a great deal of tenderness in him.’ Which is true; it was so apparent to somebody like Diarmuid, who has a good deal of tenderness in him too.

  “Everybody got to be close to each other. It was an incredible experience. Everybody was invited to someone’s house for a luncheon, for about six of them, all over town. And at night, the New Stage Theatre, which is a small regional professional theater—they put on a play made from one of my stories, which had been on Broadway: The Ponder Heart. They did it just for the guests, you know. And then we had a big party afterwards. It was just lovely.

  “I was remembering the things that Ken brought. He brought an alarm clock! But that’s what you needed. And binoculars, to see the birds. And notebooks and things. He walked all around, he really found out about the place. He investigated things on foot.”

  “It was a very pleasant three or four days of hanging out in Jackson in the springtime and going to lots of parties, and then to a reading Eudora gave,” said Reynolds Price, of North Carolina, another guest for the celebration, which was organized and run by a committee of a thousand (mostly women) volunteers. “I certainly had a sense that this was not Ken’s world at all; at times he did seem like a kind of retired detective trapped in a ladies’ tea or something! But he certainly kept his dignity, although I very much had the sense of a very powerful man whose top could blow off and one wouldn’t want to be near.”

  But Millar declared later to Ash Green, “Mississippi was a lot of fun, and a moving experience, too—not unlike visiting the birthplace of a saint in her own lifetime. I was very glad to be asked, and glad I went.” Millar had never been deep in Dixie to speak of and thought he’d hate it, but didn’t. “We all had a splendid time immersed in the vast differences of the south,” he wrote Julian Symons, “which is an oral agrarian culture floating still on a quiet ominous sea of blacks.” To Green, he admitted, “Except or but for the blacks, omnipresent and rather quiet, I became almost sorry we won the civil war.” In the Old State Capitol (now a museum), he viewed Jefferson Davis’s books and weapons and lingered at an exhibit of photos (many by Welty) of poor country folk, then spent hours in a room filled with Welty correspondence and memorabilia. Past and present seemed to merge in Welty, of whom Millar wrote Ruehlmann: “She is one of the world’s gentlest minds, at the same time one of its keenest.”

  “The nation’s foremost lady of letters” and “a woman of quiet dignity and charm” was how Mississippi governor William Waller described her to a crowd of five hundred in the Old Capitol’s Hall of Representatives, as he proclaimed Eudora Welty Day. Nona Balakian described the scene for the New York Times Book Review: “Amid the clatter of radio and television equipment, photographers and such, Miss Welty in a pink dress sat quietly, obviously pleased, her blue eyes as unguarded as a young girl’s. Later, in grateful response to the Governor’s words and a standing ovation, she expressed wonder at the whole event: ‘If anything like this has ever been done to another author,’ she quipped, ‘then I think we can beat them.’ ”

  Millar, in a letter to Symons, described what happened next: “Eudora boldly read aloud, in that same chamber where secession was first declared, and in the presence of the current governor, a passage from Losing Battles celebrating the sexual life.” Asked about this later, Welty said, “Well, it was not chosen for that reason. I read the part at the end of the big family reunion, and it had things that I feel about reunions: ‘Don’t leave anybody out,’ one of those things. But all the time they’re talking, the wife and husband are being reunited after two or three years, so they’re in each other’s arms. I suppose it could be called ‘erotic,’ but—I was trying to draw us all into one circle, which I felt we had done.”

  The main private events of the week for Millar were a party at Welty’s house Tuesday night and a smaller dinner there Thursday, after which guests talked until midnight. “In those days I had a screen porch here, just outside,” Welty remembered later, sitting in her Jackson living room, “which a hurricane tore away. This was all open then, all these rooms; so people were all over and could move around. I had food in there; that’s my mailing room now, but it used to be the dining room. So it was a nice evening in May, the time of the little, fresh Louisiana strawberries about this big, along with the drinks and everything.”

  “Altogether a lovely experience,” Millar wrote Symons. In a sentence that hinted how deeply he’d come to feel about Welty, he said this “demi-week” in Jackson was for him nearly “the biggest week since a week in June 1938 when M. and I got married.”

  Millar was a bit more candid during long talks in Jackson with Reynolds Price. “He and I had these two rooms side by side in the Sun and Sand Motel,” Price recalled. “We sort of followed each other around that particular set of days, and we would meet in the evenings and have a nightcap and talk about things.” Price, forty in 1973, was often referred to as Welty’s protégé. He and Millar had begun a correspondence, at Price’s instigation; Millar was surprised and touched when Price thanked him for the pleasure and instruction of Ross Macdonald’s work. (Asked in a 1972 interview who his favorite novelists were, Price said, “Eudora Welty is the living writer that I admire most. . . . I very much respect a number of living people—Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, some of the early work of John Updike, some of the work of William Styron, the detective novels of Ross Macdonald . . . the sort of people that most everybody else likes who reads much fiction.”) Millar tucked a Reynolds Price reference into Sleeping Beauty: going through Laurel’s things, Archer finds a book of stories called Permanent Errors, a 1970 Price collection.

  “One night he and I had a few drinks and were sitting in the motel in Jackson,” Price said, “when this one particular very memorable moment occurred. We were talking about Eudora and what a wonderful person she was; and I went on you know about how important she’d been to me, and how I’d met her when I was a senior in college—Eudora’s twenty-four years older than me—and we talked on in that way. And Ken stopped me and said, ‘No, you don’t understand.’ He says, ‘I’m saying I love her as a woman.’ And I’ll take a Bible oath that he said that to me, and it kind of practically blew me out of the chair. And I don’t know—at that point I didn’t feel I knew him well enough, or hadn’t gathered my wits about me enough, to pursue that in any way, and nothing more was ever said by him or me about it, but—he obviously was not a man who used words of that sort lightly. Of course he was the soul of taciturnity, but I think there was a lot of power in that relationship. I think that for both of them this was an emotional relationship of great importance, in both their lives.

  “She took great delight in him too. Eudora’s always been this tremendous mystery fan, and she’s also been a great fan of men in her life. She really loves the company of men, and I think there were just all sorts of ways in which they hit it off together at the particular time they met. It wasn’t news to me. I mean, as a well-wishing sort of younger friend of both of them, I’d thought that’s what I’d seen developing, just from hearing her talk about the times they met and the fact that they corres
ponded voluminously. I think she was a great romance of Ken’s life, at the end of his life. And Kenneth Millar was of great importance to Eudora Welty; I think it ran very deep for her. My own sense is that they were in love with one another. And it was late in both their lives.”

  Recalling that week in May, Welty said, “I never did get to see Ken by himself; not till I took him to the airport when he left did we really get to be by ourselves. He had a good time, I think. He said he did. He’s so shy, and quiet. And it didn’t matter at all.”

  * * *

  Home from Jackson, Millar read in the newspaper that Welty had won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her 1972 novel, The Optimist’s Daughter (which, like Sleeping Beauty, has a title character named Laurel). Sleeping Beauty’s first reviews were printed that same week. Newsweek’s, by Peter S. Prescott, was a rave; the critic said Macdonald’s classic motifs were elegantly developed in this new novel: “the search for the lost child; the idea that family determines fate; the need to restore order to the past as well as to the present; the balance between natural and moral disaster; scattered images suggesting the imminent end of man and his endeavors; and a harmony of structure: the bird that is washed up from the oil-slicked ocean at the book’s beginning is paired a little later with a man who is similarly oiled and destroyed. Most interesting of all is the pairing that Macdonald has made uniquely his own: that of the victim, who is immobilized by her consciousness of the world’s violence and cruelty, with Lew Archer—‘thief catcher, corpse finder, ear to anyone,’ as he says of himself—the competent man.” Time’s review, on the other hand, was nasty: “Sleeping Beauty is a blurry effort,” claimed John Skow, “far less vivid than The Underground Man, the Archer thriller whose appearance two years ago caused the world of belles-lettres to proclaim the discovery of a new Dostoevsky. . . . At best, the writing is rechewed Macdonald. At worst, the words might have been bought by the carload from the Erie Stanley Gardner estate. The world of belles-lettres is subject to cyclical hysteria, some of it fairly predictable, and it seems likely that Ross Macdonald (whose new novel carries a wistfully belletristic dedication to Eudora Welty) will be sent back to the cellar, where nature has ordained that detective-story writers should work.” The book sold briskly (“in spite of Time,” Millar wrote Harker, “or maybe because of it”) and hopped onto Time’s own best-seller list, where it went to number three.