As Ken encouraged Eudora’s autobiographical impulse, which would come to a full flowering in her memoir One Writer’s Beginnings (1984), so she urged him to commit childhood memories to paper, which he did—in several essays and prefaces written in the 1970s, and in his last chapters of attempted fiction.
The letters concerning Ken’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease are perhaps the most emotionally charged in this collection, and Eudora’s fragmentary manuscript “Henry” addresses this ordeal. We are honored to include excerpts from “Henry” at the close of this book.
In 1952, long before she met Kenneth Millar, Eudora Welty had written a story that in some ways seems to prefigure their relationship. In “No Place for You, My Love,” she describes a married man from New York and a single woman from Toledo who meet by chance in Galatoire’s Restaurant in New Orleans. They then spend the day together, traveling south of South, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Alone together, far from home, they are nevertheless reticent. The suffering that love has brought to both these individuals leaves them in quest of “imperviousness”; they want to avoid exposing their situations to each other. The man will not discuss his wife with the woman from Toledo, and the woman resents his intuitive recognition of her plight: “How did it leave us—the old, safe, slow way people used to know of learning how one another feels,” she wonders. But as much as they may desire to shield themselves, a relationship springs up between them. When they finally reach land’s end, they go into a local bar and dance to music from a jukebox. At that moment, they know that “even those immune from the world, for the time being, need the touch of one another, or all is lost.”9
Both Eudora and Ken did need the touch of one another; Margaret Millar was essentially a loner; she often seemed to value separateness over connection except when her own health failed and she depended on her husband’s reassurance and assistance. That was not true for Ken and Eudora; they cherished relationships, shared acts of imagination, whether they engaged others in the pages of books, in their hometowns, in far-flung locales, or in intimate personal encounters. Barred from fulfillment in marriage, they found connections of the imagination and spirit by sending letters to each other, with Eudora continuing to write even when Ken was no longer able to put pen to paper. “Your spirit lives in my mind, and watches my life,” Ken told Eudora in 1978, and later that same year, she assured him that, despite the distance between Mississippi and California, “our spirits have traveled very near to each other and I believe sustained each other—This will go on, dear Ken.”10
The letters Eudora and Ken exchanged might well have been lost. Ken hid Eudora’s to him, perhaps fearful that his wife would resent his treasuring of them. Happily, his friend Ralph Sipper, a rare-book dealer, who purchased Ken’s library and papers from his widow, found the letters in the pool house of the Millar home and returned them to a grateful Eudora. Now in possession of both sides of this extensive correspondence, Eudora considered destroying it. She consulted Reynolds Price, who helped convince her to save the letters and leave them in her will to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.11 That decision has made this book possible.
Meanwhile There Are Letters is organized chronologically and can be read as a narrative, with each chapter receiving a brief introduction and with commentary appearing as needed for context and clarity. The headings for each letter identify the letter writer, the recipient, and the date of composition, but typically do not identify the location from which the letter was sent. Both Eudora Welty and Kenneth Millar wrote most of their letters at home (1119 Pinehurst Street, Jackson, Mississippi, for Eudora and 4420 Via Esperanza, Santa Barbara, California, for Ken). When either wrote from different locales, those places are identified in the letter heading. Endnotes provide information about the people, places, books, and historical events mentioned in the letters.
Neither Eudora nor Ken gave letters the meticulous revising and proofing that their writing for publication entailed and that computers now facilitate. Instead, they wrote by hand, or in Eudora’s case, often at the typewriter, with a sense of urgency, of eagerness to put letters in the post, to be in touch. We have transcribed the letters as written, complete with inconsistencies and oddities of punctuation and spelling, though we have silently corrected obviously unintentional typographical errors and have replaced underlining with italics for the sake of readability. We have not supplied italics when underlining was omitted—in Eudora’s typed letters (nearly a fourth of those she sent), underlining would have been a laborious process, one she frequently chose not to undertake. When Eudora and Ken added marginal comments to their letters, we have inserted them into the text as postscripts or at indicated points. Ellipses, clarifying information, or dates we have supplied are in square brackets. We hope our editorial decisions help to create a reading experience akin to the one Eudora and Ken found so crucial to their lives.
Our separate biographies of Eudora Welty and Kenneth Millar led us to work together editing their letters, and doing so has been an enriching and rewarding experience. We (Suzanne in Jackson, Mississippi, and Tom, in Glendale, California) have discovered the many virtues of editing correspondence via correspondence, even if our own letters were sent electronically as emails. We have also come to appreciate how much more intensely Eudora and Ken responded to the very personal, eloquent, and often ardent letters sent to each other via the sometimes frustratingly slow and sometimes incredibly prompt US Mail. Their letters, it seems to us, constitute a triumph over time and distance. “Meanwhile there are letters,” as Ken wrote when he and Eudora parted after their first meeting, is not only a statement regretting separation; it is also one celebrating the written word and the enduring connection it would provide.
CHAPTER ONE
“I love and need and learn from my friends, they are the continuity of my life.”
1970–1971
IN 1970 Eudora Welty finally published a long novel she had been working on since 1955. The story of a family reunion in 1930s hill country Mississippi, Losing Battles was a cause for celebration at home—Welty’s friends threw a party featuring all the food mentioned in the novel, including fried chicken necks—and a cause for celebration nationally. The New York Times Book Review dispatched Walter Clemons to interview Welty, and the two got on famously, talking not only about her new novel but also about her love of mysteries, especially those by Ross Macdonald: “Oh yes! I’ve read all his books, I think. I once wrote Ross Macdonald a fan letter, but I never mailed it. I was afraid he’d think it—icky.”1 The newspaper account of that never-mailed fan letter called forth one from Kenneth Millar, a.k.a. Ross Macdonald, one that would be both mailed and received.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, May 3, 1970
Dear Miss Welty:
This is my first fan letter. If you write another book like Losing Battles, it will not be my last. I read that wonderful secular comedy with enjoyment and delight, and in the course of reading it discovered a fact about language that had never been quite clear to me before: There is a recognizable North American language which speaks to all of us in the accents of home; and you have invested and preserved it at its truest. (My uncles and aunts in Canada used essentially the same language—words, imagery, jokes—as your Banner people.) This will of course come as no surprise to you.
I have other reasons to be grateful to you. You spoke of me most generously to the NY Times reviewer. No compliment has ever pleased me more. You may live to regret it, for I’m getting off to you a large heavy collection of my novels called “Archer at Large,” just out.
Yours faithfully,
Kenneth Millar
(Ross Macdonald)
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, May 10, 19702
Dear Mr. Millar,
That was a fine surprise you gave me, and what pleasure—Thank you for your letter. It was bread coming back before it had been cast upon the waters, after I hadn’t sent you mine.
I’m so pleased you liked my book! What
you say about a recognizable North American language that speaks to us all is a new thought to me—I had no way of learning about it, and if you think I’ve got at some of that essence, I’m more pleased than I can tell you. It also takes some of the load off my mind about the impertinence of thrusting so much Southern dialogue at readers from far away—But I believe in the risk too, because it seems to me only the local and only the particular do speak, that only what is true at home makes the sticks to build the fire with whatever imagination. It is lovely to know that an unknown Canada and an always known Mississippi have no trouble talking to each other.
Your book hasn’t come yet so I am still looking forward. Thank you for such generosity. I’ve been reading your books as they came out since away back when you were John Ross Macdonald, and it’s not only the first reading but returning to them that gives me a great deal of pleasure. Isn’t The Chill in the new collection? I love that one in particular. What fascinates me is reading with the sense of the one who has invented the characters and the one, himself a character, who is in progress of finding out their secrets down to the last, identifying them for good, moving them one by one into their right places & locking them into the whole to make the pattern—these two making one, the same “I” telling the story. It’s so right. It must be what happens with all fiction writers in their own ways. It’s in the writing that I learn what is the real case with my characters—People come first, then knowing about them, listening back. But in the form you use, the method is pure, the scrupulous search or strategy is the same thing as the truth it’s uncovering—And this is not only compelling but moving. It’s the real beauty of the novels’ construction, to me. But all the details as you go are so fine too—I really enjoy your work sentence by sentence, so it’s a treat to be getting Archer at Large—Thank you again. And please give my regards to your wife, who also has my admiration.
Yours sincerely,
Eudora Welty
Millar was as familiar with Welty’s work as she was with his, having followed it since her stories had appeared in the 1930s in the Southern Review. He told his publisher, Alfred Knopf, that receiving this letter from Welty seemed the nicest thing that had happened to him since Knopf had taken him on as an author in 1947.3 Other happy letters would follow in 1970, but the next extant one reported a tragedy.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, December 14, 1970
Dear Miss Welty:
I haven’t been able to answer your beautiful letter, which filled me with joy and made me cry, but will let the quotation opposite allude to it. I must also thank you for the gift of your book, mutatis mutandis. I’ll reciprocate soon. You didn’t know my daughter Linda but you have suffered grievous losses in recent years and would perhaps wish to be told that Linda died last month, very suddenly, aged 31, of a stroke in her sleep. She left her husband Joe and their son, who have become central in our lives. But I am willing now to grow old and die, after a while. Our very best wishes, seasonal and personal,
Kenneth Millar
[Millar’s moving letter is written on a card reprinting the Navajo “Prayer, Mountaintop Way”:
Restore all for me in beauty,
Make beautiful all that is before me,
Make beautiful all that is behind me,
Make beautiful my words.
It is done in beauty.
It is done in beauty.
It is done in beauty.
It is done in beauty.]
The brief life of Linda Jane Millar had been marked by emotional pain, mental illness, and public trauma. A bright teen but a social misfit in her Santa Barbara high school, Linda drank alcohol in secret and was involved in a 1956 hit-and-run accident in which a thirteen-year-old boy was killed. Three years later, still on probation from that disastrous event, while at college in Davis, California, Linda disappeared for eight days, during which Ken Millar took part in a much-publicized, three-city search for “the mystery writer’s missing daughter”—who was found, with the help of private detectives, in Reno, Nevada. Linda married a computer engineer in 1961 and had a son in 1963. The three were living in Inglewood, California, in November 1970, and had just spent a fine afternoon with Linda’s parents in Santa Barbara. “Life is so very good on certain days,” Millar wrote his Knopf editor in its immediate afterglow, “that one almost lives in fear of having to pay for it in full.”4 Four nights later, Linda died in her sleep.
Welty too had, as Millar noted in his letter, “suffered grievous losses in recent years.” In 1959, her brother Walter had died as the result of complications from a crippling form of arthritis, and then in 1966, her mother and her brother Edward died within days of each other, her mother from a stroke, Edward from a brain infection that struck while he was hospitalized for a broken neck. Twenty-five years earlier, Welty had witnessed her father’s death during a blood transfusion. She well understood the pain Ken Millar and his wife were enduring.
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, December 19, 1970
Dear Mr. Millar,
Thank you for writing to me—I’ve only just got home after two weeks away and found your card—the grief of what has happened to you, its beautiful prayer. I am sorry—I believe you feel as I do. I don’t think myself that numbness is really merciful—not for long. Do you remember what Forster said in The Longest Journey—“They’ll come saying, ‘Bear up—trust to time. No, no, they’re wrong. Mind it. In God’s name, mind such a thing.’” It’s good that the little boy is seven—that gives him a good strong memory, and the memory will be the right one, unharmed—It will be like the Prayer, Mountaintop Way somehow, maybe. You saw this—I hope it will be for you.
There was also a telegram under my door from the NY Times asking if I could review your new book—which I’d so much like the chance to do—but the telegram was days old, & I’m afraid they couldn’t have waited on my late reply. I’m glad to know about the book.
This is a frivolous little Christmas card, but I’m sending it anyway because it’s about a bit of wildlife—The man who wanted to do it, a young NYC book dealer, had never seen a guinea and neither had his artist—I guess they don’t streak across 5th Avenue very often—So these were copied out of the dictionary—Anyway, it might amuse you.5 Many wishes to you both,
Eudora Welty
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, January 15, 197[1]
Dear Mr. Millar,
The Underground Man is extraordinary, and I did get to review it after all for the Times. If you’d feel like looking it over, I made you a carbon, and if I did you wrong somewhere there’d be time to cut, at least—they’ll be cutting, themselves, most likely, because although I know better than send more than they ask for, that’s just what I did. It’s a beautiful book. You can see I thought so.
Many good wishes to you and I hope things go a little easier these days.
Sincerely yours,
Eudora Welty
It had seemed before to Ken Millar that he often experienced the extremes of bad and good fortune at the same time. Now, in the wake of Linda’s death, came the remarkable news that his latest novel would be reviewed—celebrated—by perhaps the most admired writer in America, in the country’s most influential book-paper.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, January 19, 1971. Telegram.
MY DEEPEST THANKS FOR YOUR MAGNIFICENT REVIEW BLUSHING I FIND NOTHING I WISH CHANGED REGARDS KENNETH MILLAR.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, January 19, 1971
Dear Miss Welty:
How generous you are, and how fortunate I am that the Times sent you my book after all, and that you were willing to review it. As you know a writer and his work don’t really exist until they’ve been read. You have given me the fullest and most explicit reading I’ve ever had, or that I ever expected. I exist as a writer more completely thanks to you.
It’s particularly gratifying that you should like my boy. Ronny is a fairly exact portrait of my dear grandson Jimmie, now seven going on eight (and the line about “Calling Space
Control” is Jimmie’s own). By the kind of irony and recompense that Archer and you are familiar with, Jimmie has come more into our care in recent months. He and his daddy spend their weekends with us, which is a lucky thing for Margaret and me. We’re doing all right, except sometimes when one wakes up at three o’clock in the morning when, to revise Fitzgerald’s line, it’s always the dark night of the soul. But that overstates the case and may give you the impression that we are in trouble. Perhaps we are but not greatly more so than most people manage to endure and survive.
Your review filled me with joy, as your earlier letter did. I have been able to encourage other writers, but never until now have the tables been turned so blessedly on me. To you I can confess that I left the academic world to write popular fiction in the hope of coming back by underground tunnels and devious ways into the light again, dripping with darkness. You encourage me to think that there was some strange merit in this romantic plan.
Margaret sends her love with mine. If you haven’t seen her excellent last year’s book, Beyond This Point Are Monsters, we’d like to send you a copy.
Sincerely yours,
Kenneth Millar
P.S.—It was particularly thoughtful of you to send me a carbon of your review. I assume you received the wire I sent you last night but, service being what it is, perhaps I should reiterate, blushingly, that there is nothing in it I’d like to cut. I did make one change in the proofs of the book which should probably be put into your quote on the last line of the final page, 11: “and jailbirded him” becomes “jailbirding him,” preceded by a comma.
K.M.
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, January 24, 1971
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