Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  Back in Santa Barbara, Millar soon had another occasion with which to distract himself: the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, an affair that had grown in a few years from a small event with a couple dozen attendees to a weeklong gathering that drew people from all over the Coast. The conference in a way was an outgrowth of the writers’ lunch, and Ross Macdonald had taken part in every one so far. Barnaby Conrad, the main organizer, had gotten Joan Didion to participate in 1974. This year Millar arranged for Eudora Welty to attend.

  “I don’t do those things much, but I wanted to do that,” Welty said. “It meant I could spend a week in Santa Barbara. When I got there, it was late in the evening, like ten-thirty. Ken met my plane, and he said, ‘Now I thought maybe the first thing you’d like to do would be to sort of get your bearings; I wanted to show you where the ocean is.’ Well, that’s exactly what I would like, you know: I had reached there, and I wanted to know how I was located. So he drove me around, in that soft California dark; and we got out of the car, and we walked down to the ocean, someplace where the road goes down to a beach house or something. So he had thought of everything to show me, and I just loved it; I had a wonderful time.”

  Welty stayed at the Miramar, where the conference was held. “Ken drove me all over the place,” she said. “He showed me everything that he loved about Santa Barbara. He really gave me a sort of look at what his life was like. One of the things that he took me to see was the courthouse, to sit in on some trial, which he and Margaret did all the time. And I could see them at their cabana and everything. We were sitting looking off at some view once and all of a sudden this man flew out, just like a miracle of some kind; I’d never seen anybody hang-glide before. But the best times I had in Santa Barbara were the long rides we took in the car, when Ken took and showed me everything.”

  Millar’s feelings for Welty were as strong as ever. When Jill Krementz sent him a print of a photograph she’d taken of Welty in her Jackson garden, he described the qualities he saw in it: “Pathos, gentleness, courage, feminine fluorescence and iron discipline, the blessed light at the windows. Your picture goes to the heart, as its subject does, and I am going to have to hang it on my wall.” Welty’s admiration for Millar was also undimmed. “A supremely moral writer” who “cares about the welfare of each human soul in his novels” is what Welty called Ross Macdonald when she introduced him at the Writers Conference—at the same time noting the “basic absurdity” of her presenting this author in a region he’d made his own. She likened it to someone “on a first visit to the Mediterranean Sea, introducing to it the Rock of Gibraltar.”

  Macdonald was probably known on Gibraltar too. His work was finding admirers in ever more remote corners. From Moscow, Bob Ford wrote and asked would Millar send an inscribed copy of one of his novels for the poet Andrey Voznesensky, protégé of Boris Pasternak: Voznesensky, Ford said, had been reading Macdonald with great pleasure in both English and Russian. Millar was overwhelmed. “He is the most eminent poet I ever heard from,” he told Ford, “and I still haven’t gotten over it.”

  Adding a bit to Macdonald’s American fame was The Drowning Pool film with Paul Newman as Lew Harper, released in the United States in the summer of 1975. “Harper days are here again!” claimed its ads, but this movie had none of Harper’s style. Some critics were harsh (“The film is poor,” Penelope Gilliatt, the New Yorker) and some tolerant (“Just enjoy it for the intelligent escapism it is,” Vincent Canby, the New York Times). Millar found the film violent and unpleasant, as when Harper rebuffs a teenager’s sexual advance by slapping her and saying, “Sorry about that.” “No, you’re not,” she taunts. “You’re right,” Harper admits, “I’m not.” Jokes about hitting kids weren’t funny to Millar. “You didn’t miss a thing with the Drowning Pool,” he wrote Ping Ferry. “I finally saw it last week and considered it a poor amoral movie, I’m sorry to say.” He was starting to think that if he wanted a decent film made from one of his books, he’d have to write it himself. Other movies meanwhile were siphoning off some of Macdonald’s feel and material. Night Moves, said by reviewers to show a Macdonald influence, seemed to draw on Millar’s biography for the character of its private eye, “driven to search out his own father, who had long ago abandoned him.”

  As Macdonald’s presence on the popular-culture scene grew, envy of his success seemed to increase. Jane S. Bakerman, a professor of English from Indiana State University, said, “The first time I went to Bouchercon,” an annual gathering of mystery authors and readers begun in 1970 in honor of Anthony Boucher, “a bunch of younger hard-boiled writers were sitting around on a panel talking about how out-of-date Ross Macdonald was. And I was getting madder and madder, thinking, ‘You guys should be grateful for his keeping the genre alive so you could all eventually get published.’ What they were really saying was they wanted to be as famous as Ross Macdonald, and right now.”

  Though some of Macdonald’s “colleagues” felt he had it made, Millar worked as hard as ever on his new manuscript all through 1975. It was turning into his longest book yet, and for some reason the hardest to write. “I seem to be getting wordier,” he told Ferry. After having been in love for so long with his Blue Hammer title, he now had doubts about it and asked what Ferry thought of Portrait of the Artist as a Dead Man. When he mailed his typescript to New York in September, it was officially called The Tarantula Hawk. A few weeks later, he dropped that for The Silent Hammer, from a variant line in the same Coulette poem. Finally Millar went back to The Blue Hammer.

  A similar uncertainty seemed reflected in the text. “When I read the manuscript of The Blue Hammer before it was submitted, I sensed a change, a softening, not only in tone but in diction,” Bob Easton wrote. “I mentioned this to Ken as part of my usual criticism. He said it was deliberate. He said he wanted to be deliberately a little mellower, a little gentler, a little more tolerant. But I sensed also a lessening of tension, a loosening of overall grip. . . . I was a bit shocked and startled at what appeared to be lapses such as I’d never seen.” Easton advised several word changes and even some structural revision. Millar surprised him again by not bristling at the suggestions but simply following them. He made other changes suggested by Ralph Sipper.

  Millar complained mildly that everything took him longer these days, and that there was less time to do it in. “My life seems to be spaced out by endless delays,” he told Steven Carter. Some were of his own making. He agreed to go to England alone for three weeks in October to attend a crime writers’ conference and get out in the countryside he and Margaret had missed seeing on their truncated 1971 trip. His ticket was bought and his hotel booked, but the day before he was due to leave, he canceled. “Margaret had a cancer removed from her face the other day,” he explained to Ferry, “and while they got it all (all the way down to the bone) it’s been causing her distress both physical and emotional, and she’s not in the best shape to be left alone.” On the plus side, Margaret had recently begun writing a mystery: her first manuscript since Linda’s death five years ago, and another reason for Millar not to upset her equilibrium. (Maggie’s plot, which she’d first tried to get Ken to use, involved a woman shackled to a husband whose mind veers in and out of awareness, causing him to confuse past with present.)

  Millar used the weeks of his canceled trip to make still more revisions on The Blue Hammer. Working every day of October, he came up with another five thousand words: an entirely new last chapter. On November 5 he mailed this latest typescript to Knopf, who scheduled the book’s publication for June 1976. It might not be the best Archer, Millar told friends, but it was certainly the longest—and his first in three years.

  Knopf was quick to let booksellers know about it, listing it with other titles in an ad on the front cover of Publishers Weekly in December: “Ross Macdonald. His new Lew Archer novel, THE BLUE HAMMER, is certain to be yet another bestseller. June, $7.95.” In Sarasota, Florida, Millar’s old colleague John D. MacDonald, whose Travis McGee books had color-coded ti
tles (The Deep Blue Goodby, Nightmare in Pink, etc.) glimpsed this line and saw red; he typed a two-page, single-spaced letter to Millar that reached him a few days after his sixtieth birthday. MacDonald was “bemused and depressed” about the new Archer title, he wrote, for it was sure to cause confusion with his McGee books:

  I will assume that neither you nor anyone at Knopf had the slightest idea of any meretricious opportunism in going with a color title at this stage. Let me even assume that you and Knopf will feel outraged and insulted that I should imply that there was anything deliberate about it.

  I am willing to believe you.

  But there is a big sleasy commercial world out there, to which such hitchhiking is a way of life. Dozens of dim little talents have come out with bad books with color titles since McGee became successful. Regardless of your and Knopf’s innocence on all counts, people are not going to believe that you and Knopf have no knowledge of the McGee books, the color titles, the public acceptance etc. People are going to chuckle, nod wisely and accuse you of a deliberate opportunism.

  I really think it is a pretty dumb thing to do. . . . I feel that if it is not too late to alter that title, it would be a wise move.

  There was a symmetry here, if Millar cared to see it: MacDonald’s two out-of-the-blue letters a quarter century apart, the first concerning Archer’s debut, the second about what might or might not be his farewell. But this time Millar didn’t bother to respond. Life seemed too short.

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  The big guns of the Beat Generation, if their half of this fascinating anthology provides a fair sampling, are manned by culturally underprivileged poets and their critical mentors, and a mixed group of fiction writers who share an embarrassed distrust of traditional human relationships. . . . Broyard, significantly the only beat humorist, does very much better work.

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

  San Francisco Chronicle, 1958

  People have been telling me about Margaret Millar for years and now I am glad I didn’t listen to them. Now that I have finally read one of her books, I have 21 more to look forward to.

  —Anatole Broyard, “Ay, Ay, Ay, Margaret Millar,” New York Times, 1976

  In a way it was like the good old days: she working away on a book, he about to have one published. But while Maggie was fired with creative energy at the start of 1976, Millar was worn out from wandering a year and a half in a forest of words called The Blue Hammer. When it was time to read the novel’s proof, he called on fellow Fitzgerald-lover Bill Gault for help.

  “We met in the parking lot of a country club near his home,” Gault said. “Maggie’s there with him. The day is dark, gloomy, windy. He hands me the proofs, and Maggie says, ‘You guys look like a couple of secret agents, exchanging documents!’ She was a funny woman; didn’t take herself that seriously. He said, ‘Look, this book—I’m havin’ a little trouble, maybe you could check it.’ I thought, ‘Well, what do I know about this intellectual prose?’ So I took it home and read it, and some of the things—I just couldn’t get the connection. I said, ‘Ken, I liked this, but this part here I didn’t like.’ Certain things I didn’t understand. Well, he didn’t say anything. But when the book came out, the stuff I’d suggested he take out was sorta taken out. So he must have listened to me, you know: the peasant, the paisan.” Millar dedicated The Blue Hammer to Gault.

  Without resting, Millar took on the writing of a first-draft screenplay of The Instant Enemy for a novice producer. Since film rights to Archer were tied up, he changed the story’s detective’s name to Lou Darnell. He didn’t do the job for the money (though he was paid Writers Guild scale and was allowed to join the union health plan); he did it in hopes it would lead to a good movie. Millar wanted to see one first-rate film made from a Ross Macdonald book: something as good as The Big Sleep or The Maltese Falcon or Chinatown. Completing this rough-draft treatment on top of Hammer left him mentally exhausted. For the first time in thirty-five years Millar had no definite writing plans.

  “I said, ‘Well, what are you going to do now?’ ” recalled Frank MacShane, who saw Ken Millar in New York City in April 1976. “And he said, ‘How do I know? I’m going to relax and have some fun.’ ”

  MacShane, who’d just published his Chandler biography (which Millar thought excellent), saw Millar at a small cocktail party thrown for Ross Macdonald by Knopf in the library of the St. Regis Hotel, which the aging Knopf attended with wife Helen. MacShane was present by Millar’s request; others Millar made sure were invited were Michael Avallone, Nona Balakian, Ray Sokolov, Walter Clemons, Joan Kahn, Lee Wright, and John Leonard.

  MacShane saw more of Millar during his visit. On a Thursday afternoon, Millar guest-conducted a session of MacShane’s graduate nonfiction workshop at Columbia. “In the class he was wonderful,” MacShane said. “He was very responsible, and I suppose a little bit nervous because I think he found it awkward to speak off-the-cuff, so he had these notes; and he talked about his childhood, and how he and his wife had grown up together in that village in Canada, and how they’d got started. And it was very interesting!” MacShane especially wanted him to read the work of student Jane Bernstein (later a novelist), a great Macdonald admirer.

  “I had started to read mysteries with my husband,” Bernstein remembered, “and we’d read everything that Macdonald had ever written; we really loved him. I think of myself primarily as a fiction writer, but who knows these days. And in that nonfiction class I wrote for the first time about my sister’s murder. My sister was murdered in 1966 in Tempe, Arizona, by somebody she’d never met. After ten or eleven years, I was really just at a point where I was ready to think about it in any way. So I wrote about that, and Ken was a visitor to this—I guess they called them master classes in those days. He was running the workshop the day I handed in that piece, and he was very affected by it. So it was kind of a nice moment for me, to be admired by somebody I admired very greatly.” Bernstein’s story seemed to remind Millar of his own late daughter, she said: “He was extremely moved by it. Now, hearing about Linda, I think part of what really attracted him in some way was the story about a troubled young woman; I think that’s what must have connected in such a strange way for him.” To Bernstein, Millar seemed extremely shy: “Very very quiet, very uncomfortable, very uneasy with himself. It felt as if he was kind of a stranger in his own body.”

  She and Millar corresponded. In his first letter, he told her, “To a writer who has been at it for quite a while, nearly forty years, and especially to one who has been a teacher, too, it means a great deal to have been of interest or use to a writer from a succeeding generation. You throw something—a horseshoe?—into the air, and if you’re lucky you’ll later hear a clang. Your letter was a clang.” Of her work in progress, he volunteered, “I’d be glad to help in any way I can, at whatever stage.”

  MacShane saw Millar again during his April trip, at a National Book Critics Circle panel MacShane moderated. Nona Balakian, secretary of the year-old NBCC, had asked Ross Macdonald to be part of the group’s first symposium on criticism, held at Columbia’s Low Library. Other panelists included novelists Hortense Calisher and Wilfrid Sheed, book editors Tom Congdon and Richard Seaver, and critics Maurice Dolbier and Anatole Broyard. They were all to talk about “the state of book reviewing in the country today from various perspectives.” Millar spoke first and argued for a gently civilized approach by reviewers: “Even when they’re faced with fairly worthless books, such as some of my early books were, one thing that the critics should do, I think, is avoid unnecessary punishment. ’Cause I really think it’s possible for an extremely unfriendly review to silence a man, sometimes permanently.” In an analogy that seemed as much a Millaresque formula for a happy home life as a critical method, he said, “The relationship between author and critic is really, and should be, a very intimate one: almost like a marriage, or a brotherhood. Each should be willing to listen to
the other—and I think the closest to silence the transaction can become, the better.”

  The panel’s other reviewers disagreed, especially Anatole Broyard, the waspish Times man who’d savaged Sleeping Beauty. Broyard said, “Mr. Macdonald says a bad review might silence certain novelists. I’ve tried as hard as I can! A publisher told me that the sales of a certain well-known writer, a best-seller, have fallen off appreciably—he flattered me—he said as a result of my review. . . . I said in that review that a well-established reputation is the hardest thing in the world to lose. And I think it’s the critic’s job to shake a few of these well-established reputations.” The Louisiana-born Broyard was an interesting case. Supposedly at work for years on an unseen piece of fiction (in introducing him, Balakian referred to his “forthcoming novel,” which never did come forth), he was thin and strikingly handsome, so fair-skinned that most assumed he was Caucasian; few knew Broyard was African-American. He might have been a character from a Macdonald novel, one of those people who move to another state and discard an unwanted past. (In fact in plot notebooks, Millar often considered the idea of a black person “passing” for white.) Like Anthony Boucher, whose initials he shared, Broyard won fame reviewing fiction for the New York Times. Unlike Boucher, Broyard seemed gleeful at his Times-given power to wound. Millar, with a novel coming out soon, might have been wise to ignore Broyard’s provocative statements (“On a given day of the week, there’s only one book perhaps that’s reviewable. . . . I can remember taking up a book and saying, ‘This is the only reviewable book that I have in front of me, and it’s not good’ ”), but they went too much against his grain. He told Broyard, “I don’t accept your premise that there are just good books and bad books; most books are somewhere in between.” Other panelists took courage and spoke back to Broyard too. “I don’t think I said that,” the reviewer countered, “but I’ll let it go.” Ross Macdonald would hear from Anatole Broyard later this year.