Dear Mr. Millar,
Your telegram came early next morning, while I was having my coffee, and made me feel happy all day. Then your letter—relief in full, and I am so pleased you found the review did convey what I meant it to and didn’t wrong the book along the way. The easy part was saying what I thought, but you know it was that part about the fairy and romance where you might have wished I hadn’t felt called on to say so much. And the hard part was trying to give a good notion of the nature and power of that plot without doing any harm to its secrets. It was a great pleasure to write it but I had to watch out the whole way not to indulge in the piece I would really like to do, where it would be all right to follow all those things through and say what you’d really done in the light of the whole. You could tell how I’d had to cut at it with the scissors, and where, in what I did get down. So thank you for your understanding. I counted on it, on its being all right to ask you (though in general I suppose it would be a nutty thing—a fairly good thing, too—for reviewers to consult the authors), feeling we would have wanted the same kind of rightness in the review. What you said made me proud.
As you know, they think the world of you at The Times, and it was such a plum for them to give me this—the galleys were just about worn out before they ever quit passing them around among the staff. Walter Clemons said they’d try not to cut much of the too-long review (he says they like it), he would be the one and he loves the book—when he sends a proof I’ll fix it about the jailbirding. Those Snows!—One of the things I hated most to leave out in my piece was that interview—chillier than The Chill, the end of The Chill, that last line—but sustained the whole way, absolutely hair-raising and at the same time so hair-raisingly funny, with the mother following every line of the son’s “confession” with a correction of his grammar.
I’m glad that’s your little boy. I sort of felt the “Calling Space Control” line was real—nobody could have made up that seat-belt buckle. He was lovely all the way.
Yes indeed I’ve read Beyond This Point Are Monsters and like it enormously. It’s so nice of her and you to offer to send me a copy—I did own one, but someone I lent it to has run off with it and I would delight in having it back on my shelves. I’ve read you both since the beginning, which means I read Margaret Millar first, the books as they came out—so that goes back a good long time. So many years of pleasure to thank you for—and being able to say it to two writers in the same house—it’s fine, I can say it twice—thank you. I wish I had something new to send—I haven’t, but I might send something old—it’s in the same spirit.
The clipping’s from the local paper the other day—how these little tatters and remnants of those things go drifting about the world. And I doubt if the man has any idea of who he’s named after—his mother just thought the sound was right, somehow. I must stop. I can’t tell you how pleased I was to hear from you, so quickly. As for coming up into the light, I see you do it in every book, and “dripping with darkness” you make it a pretty splendid way to show something forth. Whatever it is you may ever wish to do, my best wishes to it—as we all must wish for one another.
Yours sincerely,
Eudora Welty
Welty’s review of The Underground Man, which would appear in the February 14, 1971, New York Times Book Review, treated Millar’s novel as a work of serious fiction deserving the close attention of Times readers: “The Underground Man is written so close to the nerve of today as to expose most of the apprehensions we live with,” Welty declared, as she expressed admiration for Macdonald’s craftsmanship. “It is the character of Archer,” she noted, “whose first-person narrative forms all Mr. Macdonald’s novels that makes it matter to us. [. . .] As a detective and as a man he takes the human situation with full seriousness. He cares. And good and evil both are real to him.” This character, she further contended, comes to us in a prose style of “delicacy and tension, very tightly made, with a spring in it. It doesn’t allow a static sentence or one without pertinence.”6
Before this review appeared, Welty wrote to Ken’s wife. Margaret Millar had sent her most recent book to Eudora, and now Eudora responded, sending thanks along with a copy of an out-of-print Welty story collection. Then worry about the Millars’ safety displaced Welty’s focus on fiction: an earthquake had rocked southern California. Ken immediately sent reassurance and told her that, in the midst of the earthquake turmoil, he’d been interviewed by Newsweek for a cover story. By separate mail, he sent an inscribed copy of his new book: “For Eudora Welty, whose sympathetic imagination has enhanced the life of this book and the life of its author.” Welty told him she had “never read an inscription as beautiful as this.”7
The Underground Man would not be the first Ross Macdonald title to enter the New York Times Book Review’s bestseller list; it was preceded onto that chart, in 1969, by The Goodbye Look—which had also been reviewed on the Book Review’s front page by William Goldman. But Welty’s memorable appreciation of The Underground Man, so well-expressed and by such a significant author, helped Lew Archer’s sixteenth novel become an enormous national hit: “the first runaway mystery in many years,” according to the New York Post.8
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, April 3, 1971
Dear Mr. Millar,
The Underground Man’s up where he belongs, riding high, and it does make me rejoice to see him go and watch the excitement your book is causing—and just now in the library I saw they’d snatched it for a movie. The Newsweek piece [March 22, 1971] seemed careful and serious and good—did you think—?—and it was nice to see the magazine reward itself with a salute like that for seeing the light. I wish your issue of Newsweek were still in effect so that in the post office and the library and the supermarket and everywhere there’s a newsstand from here to yonder, everybody would still be walking around with the gaze of Archer’s eye on them. That was enjoyable. I mean, for all your readers. It was good to see the Saturday Review’s comment and especially Walter Clemons’s review in the Daily Times—as I know, he longed to say much more, and next time will get to, I hope.9—Anyway, what this book is bringing about must give a lot of people high spirits—I just wanted to add my note of joy.
Love and wishes to you both,
Eudora Welty
I am trying to review Arthur Mizener’s biography of Ford Madox Ford—I’m not sure I can stand Arthur Mizener on Ford, anyway. (I found you like Fitzgerald (so do I), and wonder if M. really could have done well by him.) I’ve been reading all the Ford I can, to get a little balance.10
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, April 6, 1971
Dear Miss Welty:
Your letters always bring a note of joy. I must admit that I got an enormous kick out of the Newsweek cover, particularly since it came three weeks delayed, and never guaranteed. When I walked into the Thrifty drug store and saw my own face peering at me a la Holmes, it was a strange moment but one I’m glad I lived to experience. Don Freeman saw the Face on a Paris newsstand and sketched the scene for me, with only the Newsweek cover in color.11 And I had a card from a friend in Capetown, S.A. At the moment I’m working my way back into my private self. I think for once that having a pseudonym can be an advantage: let him (or Archer) stand out there in the unaccustomed glare while I get on with the always fragile privacies.
I’ve been doing a couple of unaccustomed reviews, too. You make it look so easy; but it isn’t. It’s interesting to me that you should be reviewing Mizener on Ford, and you are right in supposing that Fitzgerald, whom I have venerated since my college days, was not done right Arthur, in my opinion. Mizener’s book on Fitz was the first of that sort, which accounts for its success, as well as its failure. Mizener is not a very good writer, and would naturally have little real feeling for either Fitz or Ford.
I’ve seen a part of Mizener’s Ford biography and was struck by what seemed to me its rather dull antipathy toward its subject. It’s not as dead and ugly as Mark Schorer’s life of Lewis, but it veers in that direction. Biogr
aphers should write about figures they love, or at least warmly hate. Perhaps I’m saying too much on the basis of what I’ve seen of Mizener’s Ford, and I have to admit that Ford is another writer to whose defense I automatically spring. One would have thought that his services to literature, not to mention his direct contributions, would have earned the tolerance of other writers for his foibles. But he’s the most maligned good writer I can think of, and I’m afraid that Mizener has gone pussy-footing along with it.
Another friend of mine, Richard W. Lid, has been reviewing this same book, which is how I happen to have seen a part of it. (Through Dick, I also met Ford’s daughter Julie, a good and nice person somewhat lost in the world, in Pasadena). Dick wrote his own book on Ford—an analysis of the major novels which I think is the best thing done on him so far. Could be I’m prejudiced: I worked on it with Dick—this in confidence—and in fact he dedicated it to me. So when you told me you were involved with Ford, it closed another circle, dear Miss Welty, with a tinkle. But it’s no coincidence, is it? All writers admire Parade’s End and love The Good Soldier, and hate to see them fall into fumbling hands, unimaginative hands.
Would you like me to try and get hold of a copy of Dick’s book (R.W. Lid, Ford Madox Ford: The Essence of His Art, U. of Calif. Press, 1964) and/or his review of Mizener, and send it on? Neither would tell you anything you don’t know, but they might please you.
It was delightful to get your note, and Margaret concurs, with love,
As always,
Kenneth Millar
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, April 10, 1971
Dear Mr. Millar,
That you helped work on a book on Ford was a glad surprise that at the same time seems only the most natural thing in the world. I can see how congenial that would be—and your copy of Mr. Lid’s book came safely in the same mail with your letter. It was so wholly generous of you to let me read your own copy, and dedicated to you as it is, and at this very point, when Mizener in his jovial disparagement was about to get me down. It’s what I needed. I’m glad you found him lacking too. (I’d started off with something like your remark about who should write a biography.) That’s restoring.
It seems to me I can see your mark on the chapters I read at the first moment—having turned at once to “The Good Soldier”—in the awareness of what Ford is doing in that marvelous book plus the (your) working writer’s special knowledge of pure technique and the deep-lying reasons for all its steps. It’s completely absorbing and I want to go right on, but I wanted to thank you for such thoughtfulness and to let you know the book’s safe and a real help and certain standby. I don’t need to tell you I undertook the review not for love of Mizener but for love of Ford.
I wouldn’t wish this Mizener on you for review—at the same time I’d like to read what you’d say. Are the reviews you’re doing for the Times where I can look for them?
More later. I heard the tinkle all right, and how could it be coincidence?
A nice Easter to you both, and love,
Eudora Welty
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, April 12, 1971
Dear Miss Welty:
I now have a copy of Dick Lid’s review of Arthur Mizener’s book, and send it herewith. You needn’t return it. I think it’s quite good, don’t you, though Dick himself feels that he was (for professional reasons no doubt, Dick being chairman of the English Dept. at San Fernando Valley State College in Northridge) over-kind.
In haste, as always,
Ken Millar
P.S.—I still don’t know who he wrote this review for—one of the academic journals, though.
K.
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, [April 18, 1971]
Dear Mr. Millar,
With many thanks I’ll be sending your book back to you in the morning, and I hope it gets there all right. You helped me more than you knew, and I needed it more than I knew. Well, the more I read of Mizener the more insensitive and wrong-headed he appeared to me. There was never any question about what I felt about Ford—his power, and the greatness of him—but there were such big holes in my knowledge (when I read him I would always gravitate back to “The Good Soldier,” and lately I’d seen the selected autobiographies and impressions about to come out, edited by Michael Killigrew, sent along by the Times) that I needed all I could learn—I had to be as fair as I could, or what I wrote wouldn’t count. You went to so much trouble for me. The Lid book is fascinating and the writing so good—precise and meaningful and calling up so much—you must know how coming in the wake of the Mizener prose it refreshed my mind. (This isn’t to ask, but I do think you must have done more than a little for that book.) It was good to know from his review—but I confess I didn’t dare read it till after I’d written mine—that a Ford scholar spoke for the unfairness of method and inferiority of vision that I felt so strongly myself in Mizener’s book. I can’t agree, though, with that “sympathetic” in his opening sentence—which may just speak for my failing in getting too mad.
There was a personal complication. Ford, who helped all those other young writers, helped me too—he tried to interest a publisher in my stories. He couldn’t—it must have been one of the last things he busied himself on, it was the last year of his life—but I have about four little notes he sent to me, out of the clear sky, in that handwriting Mizener found so hard to read.
So you see—and I wish I could have done a better piece. All of a sudden I learned (they called me) the deadline was that very day (Thursday), two weeks earlier than I’d understood over the phone, so I had to write it overnight and wire it to them. They’ll have to cut it, but you can see it the way I wrote it, if you’d like to. (I’ll put it in with your book) Best wishes to you both. Gratefully, with love,
Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, April 20, 1971
Dear Miss Welty:
That was no tinkle, that was a gong. You need have no concern about not having written an adequate review. Your piece recurs like the sea—that same sea which you glimpsed between the tunnels, that [Frank] and [Fordie] see12—and breaks on Mizener’s miserable head in waves of salve indignatis. If, to come back to my original image, if you had hardened your prose any longer in the smithies of your wrath, you might have destroyed him completely with its vibration. As it is I’d say that you have succeeded in destroying the effect of his lousy book, and that that is what needed doing. It may be possible now for another life of Ford to be written eventually. (It should fall into the hands of someone like Peter Green who did so well, I thought, with a much smaller subject, Kenneth Grahame.) Given Mizener’s standing in the academic world, where style and moral discernment are at best grace-notes, and where the good doctors hesitate to mention the sponges and towels that their fellow surgeons have lost, the job you have done almost had to be accomplished by an independent imaginative writer. You did it nobly, and that adverb is exactly the one I want.
It was a privilege to give you an assist—more of a privilege than you realize unless I tell you more. Which of course I am going to do. I live in literary history, as I once told Alfred Knopf when he began to fail and I volunteered to help him with his memoirs. (He proudly refused.) I live in literary history, held close and wide in its recurring circles. For much of my youth I had nowhere else to live, and I fell into the habit, which persists, of relating my only moderately interesting self to writers everywhere. I gather that this is generally true of writers, as we make our fantasies real, build them into the sloping side of the culture, digging down through the layers of the past and up through the present into the light again.
When I got your letter today, something went through me like a vibration of light, as if I had had a responsive echo from a distant star. As if a half-imagined relationship to the great past had come real in my life before my life ended. It came down to me through you, through your defense of the tradition of humane letters, but I think above all through the fact that Ford had done you a service, or tried to, and you had done me
one—that personal connection with history is what tripped the gong—and I had done Ford a service, though not a personal one, by helping Dick with his book. I sometimes think, don’t you, that these musical and moral recurrences are almost the whole meaning of life and art, or at least the grounds of their meaning.
Dick will be delighted when I tell him that you found his book useful, and something more than useful. There is a fact about it and Mizener’s book which explains the sullen acquiescence which spoils the beginning of Dick’s review. Mizener used Dick’s book and neglected to acknowledge his rather considerable debt, even to name Dick’s book. But Dick is not in a position professionally to challenge Mizener openly, or thought he wasn’t. Let me explain further that Dick was let go by the University of California on the stated grounds that his Ford book was not acceptable as proof of critical or scholastic competence. I know that sounds incredible, but it is literally true. The book was being published by the press of that same university, and was formally reviewed by TLS. Wrenched loose and “demoted” to the state college system, Dick rose in seven years to the headship of his department. I suppose my point is that there is a human story behind every book, or even every review. I wonder what Mizener’s is.
But your review is more than a placing of Mizener. It’s a praise of Ford—your turning prism is perfect—and a statement of gratitude and fealty to the great past. I’m so glad that someone, and particularly you, had the heart and eloquence to write it. Margaret was crazy about it, too.
I’m sending on your generous gift of the picture, to Julie via Dick, who keeps in touch with her and her husband and their son, who is in his early twenties.13
As always,
Ken
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, April 23, 1971
Dear Mr. Millar,
With it all told it is a perfect thing. When your earlier letter came, and I saw the pattern begin to come out, I knew it would matter to you, as it did to me, but when your letter this morning told me in what way—all I can say after reading it is that I took it to my heart and that I feel glad that I ever happened along when I did, and the way I did, to be part of it—glad for my own sake, my own beliefs too—I believe it was bound to happen for you somehow. But thank you for telling me this, which has made me a part of some perfect occurrence. Nothing ever gave me that feeling before, and I doubt if anything ever will again. And it takes recognizing, all around. The perfection of such a thing itself, I believe in, just as if it were familiar, not rare, and the extraordinary is really the least surprising by the nature of it—I believe in it, and I trust it too and treasure it above everything, the personal, the personal, the personal! I put my faith in it not only as the source, the grounds of meaning in art, in life, but as the meaning itself.
Meanwhile There Are Letters Page 3