by Tom Nolan
Nelson roused Millar’s ire one day with a discussion of Raymond Chandler. “He said he preferred Chandler’s first books to The Long Goodbye, which was my favorite,” Nelson said. “And I kept trying to explain what I thought was so good about Goodbye, and finally he just exploded. He said, ‘To hell with Chandler! Chandler tried to kill me!’ He had me stop the tape then and insisted I erase that part, and he explained to me all about what Chandler had done: writing negative letters to people about Macdonald’s first book and so on. And we began taping again, and then he spoke quite calmly about Chandler and said how he’d aped him at first and how Chandler was a great writer and all that. But I could tell that I’d talked a little bit too much about Raymond Chandler.”
Nelson introduced Millar to another avid Macdonald fan: singer-song-writer Warren Zevon, whose highly praised eponymous Asylum album was released in 1976. Nelson had met Zevon and wife Crystal recently in New York, where (he later wrote) they brushed aside questions about Warren’s work to ask about Ross Macdonald: “They’d read all his books and could quote passages verbatim. I was impressed. ‘Provided it’s all right with Millar,’ I said, ‘I’ll take you with me to visit him for a day or two.’ It was as if I’d invited them to meet God.”
Zevon recalled years later getting hooked on Macdonald while living in Spain: “My ex-wife Crystal and I started reading him based on a review somewhere of The Underground Man and maybe on the movie Harper—two reasons the literary community would not want to admit that people are ever drawn to read authors. I did not come to Ross Macdonald, like people imagined, through Chandler and Hammett; I was not a mystery fan. Through the sixties I read John Updike and John Fowles and of course Mailer, that’s who I liked. Crystal and I thought Macdonald was a great great writer. And that, combined with the Los Angeles stuff—the fact that we were abroad and he was so evocative of Los Angeles—caused us to read one book of his after another.”
There were personal reasons for Zevon to respond deeply to Macdonald’s work: his biography straddled cultural and psychological fault lines not unlike the splits in Millar’s. The Chicago-born son of a Russian-immigrant boxer-gambler and a quiet Scots-Welsh Mormon woman, Zevon grew up in half a dozen different cities (Fresno, San Pedro, San Francisco, Los Angeles), with his often-absent father looked down on by his mother’s family. Like Millar, he had a powerful maternal grandmother, he told Nelson: “My grandmother is very senatorial—a big lady in every way. She ran the family.” His childhood sounded like something out of a Macdonald novel (The Galton Case, say): “I grew up with a painting of an uncle, Warren, who looked just like me. He was a military man, a golden boy, an artist. He’d been killed in action. Uncle Warren was sort of the dead figurehead of the family.” His ideal as a child, Zevon said, was “a dead man—with my name, looks, and career intentions.” As a teen, Zevon struggled with conflicts similar to ones that had formed Millar: studying classical music and seeking out Stravinsky, and at the same time playing folk and rock and being an avid surfer (“I was that kid in The Zebra-Striped Hearse,” he told writer Grover Lewis).
Primed as he was to meet his idol, Zevon wasn’t ready for Millar’s cool facade. The budding rock star’s exuberance collided with the author’s imperturbable presence. “Zevon came bouncing into the cabana around noon,” Nelson remembered, “and his opening line was ‘I just had the Lew Archer Special downtown at the Copper Coffee Pot!’ Macdonald didn’t say anything. Zevon blurted out something else. Still nothing from Macdonald. Finally Zevon shrank back in a chair, and a bit later he slunk outside again; it just destroyed him.” But Zevon recovered. Two years later, he’d tell a journalist Ross Macdonald was his favorite writer: “Macdonald has still not let me down. A nice balance between blood-and-guts and humanitarianism, with just the right acceptable amount of formal poetry. He’s my ideal. I got the opportunity to meet him: he’s a profoundly kind, gentle, nice, intelligent man.”
Nelson grew fond of Millar too. “I liked the man extremely,” he said. “He felt like he didn’t belong anywhere: sort of a citizen of nowhere. I suspect he lived for books and learning. A very shy man, and I gather his life as a child had been so terribly tough that the social graces were almost beyond him. He could talk one-on-one nicely, but—They chose not to go to people’s houses, Ken and Margaret; he was not at ease that way. Both of them were somehow Midwestern, like they were living in the past; their values were from the forties and fifties. But educated to the teeth, both of them. It was an odd marriage, I’m sure; I don’t know what kind it was, but it wasn’t a normal one.”
Nelson found Millar’s wife harder to deal with, he said. “Margaret was impossible: the most highly strung person I’ve ever met in my life. If she went twenty miles out of Santa Barbara, she flipped out. There seemed to be a lot of repressed little kid in her; I think she was scared to death. The kind of person who had to have her whole life planned in advance: know that she was going to have a Spanish class on Monday at ten, things like that. I never knew what her reaction might be when I showed up at the house: sometimes she’d give me a big hello, maybe offer me cookies; other times she’d stare at me, say nothing, and leave the room. All summer she promised to sit down and talk for an interview, but she’d keep putting it off. Finally it was the day before I had to leave. She said, ‘Okay, we’ll do it tomorrow morning at eight.’ The next morning, Macdonald called me at six. He was seething; he’d gotten up and found a note from Margaret saying she’d gone out birding and he should call and cancel her interview. So he said to come over anyway and we’d talk instead. And eventually, later in the day, Margaret showed up and started chatting, and he just slipped away and left us. She spoke with this kind of naive openness about their courtship and all, as if they were still sixteen years old and he was carrying her schoolbooks. But she seemed psychologically incapable of digging any deeper than that. It was great while it lasted; then she changed gears again, and that was that.”
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Margaret was prone to changing gears. In September, she and Millar were about to go to England and Switzerland to meet press and publishers (both had books coming out in Europe) and see some sights. At the last moment Margaret, at work on another novel, canceled. “The basic truth,” Millar wrote Ferry, “is that both of us, and M. in particular, are not good at staying away from home for very long. Indeed our last and only previous visit to England was cut short by Margaret’s illness, which I’d hate to see a repetition of.”
So he went “Margaretless” to London, where tragic news greeted him: a letter from Julian Symons told of the death by accidental pill overdose of the Symonses’ daughter Sarah (whom the Millars had met in Santa Barbara). “You of all people will know how we feel,” Symons wrote. “We’re deeply sorry that at present we’re not fit for any company. . . . Our hearts are full of grief.” Millar respected his privacy; he wrote Symons later: “My feeling when Linda died was simply that the days were burdens to be lifted and that other people, no matter how close, tended to add to the burden. . . . Even on me the effect of your loss—my loss, too—was to turn me away from people and their pleasures so that, apart from business-related meetings, I spent my time in London quite alone. I walked a great deal through the city, with you and your wife and family much on my mind.” Millar did enjoy a meeting with his English publisher, Sir William Collins. In his late seventies and in seemingly good health, Sir William took the stairs two at a time when Millar saw him greeting a Bible group led by Malcolm Muggeridge. Two days later, Billy Collins dropped dead, putting a melancholy closing bracket to Millar’s London stay.
From England, Millar went to Zurich. He didn’t much care for that stuffy-seeming city (“overhung by the unfriendliness of the small ungenerous rich”), but he very much liked his agent there, Ruth Liepman, and his German publisher, Daniel Keel, a cultured and amusing man who reminded him of the young Alfred Knopf. It turned out Keel had taken Margaret Millar’s latest novel for publication without knowing she was married to Ross Macdonald: “Such
are the occasional pleasures of writing books,” Millar told Wolfe.
On his own in Europe, maybe for the last time, on the spur of the moment Millar went to Venice and surprised himself by greatly liking that canal-riddled city, “in all its beautiful broken down strangeness.” He wrote Wolfe, “I seem to be crazy about places surrounded or indeed half inundated by the sea (like the Vancouver of my earliest memories?).” While he was at it, he went to Amsterdam (“I like the watery places,” he told Symons) before flying home via New York City, where he caught a glimpse of Frank MacShane getting into a taxi, a chance sighting that made him oddly happy.
In Santa Barbara again after his lonely European odyssey, the sixty-year-old Millar found his thoughts returning once again to the land of his youth. “More and more my mind bends back toward Canada,” he wrote Ferry; “indeed, I am planning a book about somebody’s childhood there, not exactly mine.” But he put off starting it.
He took pleasure in his wife’s renewed career, which made Maggie boisterous. “Here is proof positive,” she inscribed her twenty-second book, “that reports of my retirement have been greatly exaggerated, mostly by me.” Ask for Me Tomorrow got good reviews, the most surprising being Anatole Broyard’s long notice in the New York Times; possibly Ross Macdonald’s harshest critic was perversely drawn to this suspense tale by its having been written by Mrs. Kenneth Millar. Broyard found it full of “character, atmosphere, wit, passion—the same things, in fact, that I read serious novels for.”
Millar’s standards were high too. That was why he postponed starting a book, he confided to Jane Bernstein in the fall of 1976: “I’m unable to write for long periods, or perhaps I should say unwilling because I hate to write badly. So I wait. Right now I’m waiting, somewhat washed up in feeling, and conscious that I may never write again as well as I once did. But then I may. Even age has its compensations, and you become more intelligent, like a light in a cellar, as your energy fails.” Not the most hopeful simile.
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Some are born Canadian, some achieve Canadianness, and others have Canadianness thrust upon them.
—Margaret Atwood
You thought the national flag was about a leaf, didn’t you? Look harder. It’s where someone got axed in the snow.
—Margaret Atwood
Macdonald may have been the best-known writer in his field by the late 1970s, but Millar didn’t take it for granted he’d be recognized in person, even by someone who’d traveled halfway across the country to see him. When he met Jane S. Bakerman, a young Indiana academic come to interview him for Writer’s Yearbook, he carried a copy of The Blue Hammer as photo ID, holding Jill Krementz’s somber portrait of the artist up next to his real-life smiling face.
“Isn’t that nice?” Bakerman asked later. “I was touched. The day was full of pleasant gestures like that. I’d stayed at a motel where he’d made a reservation for me, and he said he thought I would like it because Julian Symons had stayed there. That was a test, sort of: Did I register ten on the Richter scale? I did recognize Julian Symons’s name, of course. He was kind of sly and playful in little ways like that.
“We did the interview in his cabana at the beach club. I was struck by the symbolism that you could see an oil derrick outside the window. I didn’t know what I was doing, I had never done one of these before; I went out very well prepared but the way a scholar would prepare. And he knew how to conduct an interview. Oh, he was wonderful. He thought carefully about what he said. I did not feel he was holding back at all. He was extremely patient with me; I was kind of shy. He didn’t volunteer oodles of personal information. He spoke of the pleasure they took in their grandson. I don’t think he was a smoker, and that was painful for me; there was no ashtray in the cabana. We had lunch there; he sat quietly at table, with his hands folded. Margaret came by briefly in the afternoon; I was struck by how pretty she was. And he dropped me off at the airport.”
Millar’s manner with young women was often gentlemanly protective. Such females seemed to remind him of his daughter or of the girl he’d married or of roads taken and turnings missed. In his most mannered style he wrote Jane Bernstein: “My epistolary ennui is dissipated by such a clear and honest prose as your letter commends, and the fact that you wish to mention your concerns to me, and perhaps the fact that my late daughter’s middle name was Jane and I may imagine beneath the top level of consciousness that I have swum, or could, back up to the top of Niagara Falls.”
Whether acting fatherly or like a smitten teen, Millar was noticeably affected by females. “He was somewhere between a spectator and the kind of man who would dance attendance,” said Brad Darrach. “I don’t think he could see through women: I think there was a sort of sheen over them that he could not penetrate. He wasn’t childish in any way about it, but he was not behaving like a male as sophisticated as he had every right to be, given his intelligence and the range of his experience.”
A young woman journalist who preferred not to be named had a mildly unsettling experience in Santa Barbara with the ambiguously appreciative Millar. “He was not an easy interview,” she said. “Then he drove me around to see the sights up in through the mountains. I then went back to the hotel across from the beach club; and as I was getting ready to go into the dining room to have dinner alone, the phone rang. It was Ken. He spoke very slowly; he said, ‘Hel-lo. . . . This is Ken . . . Millar . . . speaking. I just. . . want . . . to tell you . . . how much . . . I enjoyed our day . . . and how much . . . you meant to me.’ It was a little too nervous and heartfelt; it seemed like a boyish-crush thing to me. So I said in my best Mary Tyler Moore voice, trying to short-circuit this, ‘Oh, Ken, and it meant so much to me too! And I enjoyed it so much!’ And just parroted his words back at him. And in the middle of this, there was a huge clatter on the line, like a crash of something—like he was interrupted or something fell or he dropped the phone—and then it hung up. And I sat there, waiting, not knowing what to do. I was afraid if I went into the dining room, he might come over; if he came over to the hotel, I was in big trouble. And I had certainly felt he and his wife were definitely a solid couple, so I was totally stunned by what seemed to be this sort of declaration of affection. About twenty minutes later, the phone rang again. And—it was the strangest experience—he said, ‘Hel-lo. . . . This is Ken . . . Millar . . . speaking.’ And he repeated exactly the same words as before, so slowly and deliberately. I don’t know if he was reading them, but—‘I just. . . want to tell you . . . how much I enjoyed . . . our day.’ Again I tried to say the same thing right back to him, although by this time my chipper Mary Tyler Moore voice was sort of fading on me. It was quite bizarre. But I went into the dining room, and he didn’t come over. The next day they both arrived before I left for the airport, and nothing was said about those calls; it was as if they had never happened.”
Millar’s awkward social manner could be disquieting at the best of times, and it added to the sense of his being ill at ease and out of place. (Clifford Ridley, of the National Observer, wrote, “In a gray suit, a gray tie, and a white Stetson, nearly the size of a beach umbrella, he suggested an actor who had just auditioned for two roles at once. Neither of them current at the Coral Casino.”) After thirty years in southern California, Millar seemed to many visitors and residents to be still unsure of himself and his place in the sunshine.
It was a perception he seemed to share. Richard Moore, who made a 1977 educational-TV film about Macdonald, said, “I had a feeling he was somehow astonished at finding himself in such surroundings, given his beginnings, and that he felt it was likely to evaporate at any moment.”
Despite what he’d achieved, Millar still didn’t feel he belonged in this beautiful city. Canada was bred in the bone; he stayed an uneasy exile in California, waiting for the other snowshoe to drop. “Canada seems to hang like a glacier slowly moving down on me from its notch,” he wrote. “I expect it to overtake me before I die, reminding me with
its chill and weight that I belong to the north after all.”
Much of Millar’s manner and mental weather—his love of silence, his modesty, his “cheerful sadness,” his lack of interest in creature comforts, his cautious pessimism (“We’ll see”), his dry humor (more Leacock finally than Chandler)—becomes more understandable when he’s seen as a Canadian: something he more and more saw himself as. Canada (said Canadians) thrived on self-effacement, insecurity, and anxiety.
“How did Canada get that way?” asked Don Pearce, Millar’s Ontario contemporary. “We talked about that once, Ken and I. He was praising to me all the virtues of the United States when we were graduate students in Ann Arbor. He was on a high, having rediscovered his native land, America, and become emancipated from the land of his imprisonment, Canada. Ken was explaining to me that there were men like Lincoln in the United States, and he named others, who walked around as public figures knowing that they were going to be shot at any moment of any day: walked around, conducted their affairs, and carried themselves with pride. And he said, ‘That has irradiated the sense of life and the sense of heroism and purpose in this country. Things can be done here, because a few men showed people how to do them!’ He said, ‘Nobody ever did that for Canada. Nobody ever put their arm in the fire for that nation, or for any cause or purpose of public importance there. And that’s why it’ll never be a nation, but only a country of clerks.’