Meanwhile There Are Letters
Page 5
But the best ceremony I participated in, and the one I will remember longer and in greatest detail, was our conversation as we dawdled across town the other night, and in the morning. Yesterday, an hour or two after I got your letter, I got a really good idea for a book. Hope to send it to you in a couple of years. Travel safely home. Love, Ken
P.S.—Don’t miss last Sunday’s Times Book Review. There are complimentary words about you both in Wilfred Sheed’s opening column and Walter Clemons’ closing one. Clemons did a smashing job on the Pulitzer Prize. You’re going to have to subscribe to his weekly!
K.
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, June 16, 1971
Dear Ken,
I was so glad to get your letter, which came the morning after I got back home. What you tell me about the new book delights me—I look forward to the day when I see it, and all in between is the pleasure of knowing you’re writing. When I got my mail being held at the postoffice, I found the covered bridge from Ontario, and the book had come safely too. So thank you for all. I’ve started Mr. Bruccoli—liked his approach and design immediately, and will be writing you later when I’ve finished it. So good to have the chance to read it.
Just last night I managed to get hold of that Book Review you alerted me to, only without telling me what was on the inside pages, and there we both were, in some shadowy sort of way or other, you three times and me twice, like shadows of our visit left behind. I wonder what you thought of the parody. I didn’t think it was too worthy—it didn’t seem in very accurate tune to me, but I may not be a good parody judge.19 Parody’s the highest salute to eminence, and my feeling is it ought to be perfect or nothing. That’s hard. He did touch on some key points. I think Walter Clemons might have done a good one—he’s a student of the form, I believe. Yes, that was a grand whack he took at the Pulitzer—that line-up was really awful, wasn’t it, and followed by Walter’s nice orderly conclusions. I am subscribing—to the Book Review alone—the Sunday Times in the bulk sometimes takes 10 days to pull in to Jackson, and who wants it?
The visit back to Kitchener sounds filled with fine things. The old friends, the country still beautiful, still wild, and the springtime. And at the other end of it, they must have felt very much rewarded too, to have you there—the teacher must have been so deeply pleased.
The Weltys came over about the same time as your German ancestors, from the German part of Switzerland, and went to Pennsylvania and on to Southern Ohio. Farmers, teachers, and preachers—some of them were Amish (I think—anyway they were pacifists) and the tale is that my father’s ancestor decided to join up in the Revolution and jumped on his horse and rode away to fight the Red-Coats, and was thrown out of the church for it. They were turned into Methodists. In my case, it’s my mother with the Scots and Irish ancestors, by way of the Carolinas and Va.
My trip was nice at the end too. At both places, friends I hadn’t seen in a long time. The occasions were so different—at Denison, they had graduation in the stadium, the speaker was the Commissioner of Education from HEW, making a direct and, it seemed to me, thoughtful effort to reach from one generation to the other (his daughter was a student), and a dog came along to the platform in the line when they got their diplomas—a nice dog—came more than once, I think he got four degrees, one in music. At Sewanee, we had it in the chapel—rose window, banners hanging, organ music, vivid procession, and medieval to the point where the valedictorian delivered his address in Latin. I had to kneel at the Bishop’s throne and place my folded hands in his lap, and he held them while he and the Vice-Chancellor spoke back and forth over my head, all in Latin—I don’t know what they really made me. I stayed with the Vice-Chancellor and his wife (she’s Canadian) (he’s Mississippian) and there were a lot of doings up there on the mountain, but I especially enjoyed a long morning’s talk with Allen Tate—he’s built a house up there, where he lives with his young wife and two radiant little boys, just toddlers. Allen said, “It’s foolish, I’ll never see those boys grow up.” But they will have had him for a father.20
When I got home I sent you that book about the seals—maybe a seal is waiting to give it to you in the water. This is my convergence story—not three roads—one road, but the strands I was bringing together are not wholly unfamiliar ones to you. One of my earliest stories, and in the romantic pessimism of my youth—and, I guess, to finish the story—I thought the bird would have to be killed. But of course it doesn’t.
Love,
Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, June 22, 1971
Dear Eudora:
It was thoughtful of you to send me the seal book, and in a way peculiarly fitting. I love seals and swim with them and play tag, sometimes close enough to reach out and touch, but I don’t touch. Seals—I’m actually talking about sea lions here—have terribly powerful jaws, have to eat raw fish. But I’ve never heard of one attacking a human being in the water. In fact it appears, doesn’t it, that most of the tales we hear of ravening beasts like wolves and mountain lions have been invented by us to excuse our own bloodthirstiness.
Your beautifully imagined story, “A Still Moment,” deserves a better response than I am able to give it. The death of the heron is superfluous, as you say, but then, given Audubon and his habits, the death would have occurred. Birds are still being killed by their closest students, and at the moment the California Condor is in danger of being studied to death, its nests invaded by the men who are paid to protect it. So there is an unexpected angry truth in your story which continues to carry a long way.
Your name has magical effects. When I mentioned to Matt Bruccoli that I’d sent his book to you, he immediately offered to send me another, so that you can keep that one.21 I hope you like it well enough to want to keep it. He misses things but there is nothing made up in his account. Matt just phoned from Los Angeles today, announcing that he would be here later in the week for a Mexican lunch. He is in process of publishing under his own imprint (with Gale Research of Detroit) a checklist of my printed writings, including the most embarrassing of juvenilia. I feel somewhat asinine being made the subject of such a study, complete with pictures, but nevertheless I cast no insurmountable obstacles in the path of my friend who wanted to do it, indeed gave him all the help I could, and feel quite good (though asinine) about the whole thing. The truth is I’m enjoying the attention that is being given my work, while secretly doubting that it’s worth that much attention. But I’m impressed by some of the people who find it interesting.—I thought the parody in the Times was funny but not entirely accurate. Prose parody requires at least as much skill as its subject.
I’m glad you came through your doctorates unscathed, though it was a near thing at Sewanee where you might have been beatified, in Latin, unbeknownst; but fittingly. A tendency to saintliness is your only fault. Your story “A Still Moment” is so beautiful and wise that it utterly baffles me.
Love,
Ken
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, July 1, 1971
Dear Ken,
What a fine thing, to have Mr. Bruccoli’s book to keep. I’d just finished it, and was about to write you how much I liked it. That was nice of him, but especially generous of you to let me keep your own copy that he’d inscribed to you and to Archer—no wonder! I value it very much. It must have been the most fascinating thing to do—even the amount of it was fascinating, I should guess, as long as it didn’t kill him. He sorted out and interpreted and tracked down and assembled into order all that mass of evidence in a very strict way and to its full conclusion, in very much the way an author works with his own novel, I think. He gives things their true weight and clear light and identity, he sets the chronology faultlessly in line, and he cares for every word, as Fitzgerald cared. Mr. B. knows the seriousness of the word. (I was sorry to read that about Malcolm Cowley—all those silent emendations.) I trust Mr. Bruccoli. He goes to the heart of the novel, in a steadfast and undeflected way. And to the man too, my feeling was. He’s
so good about the magazine writing, for instance, making clear how it came out of F’s lack of knowing how to manage money and not a lack of dedication. And about the whole relation between the work and the life of the man—the strange way the novel seemed to be running ahead and life coming a stage behind, to catch up and show him [by] tragedy what it was he’d been writing about, teaching himself, and now enabling him to recognize and know. He—Mr. B—so carefully keeps in clear, in his reconstructions, what is central to the novel and was permanently so from the first—how the novel was only deepening and accumulating its strength through all the changes, and finally cohering. It’s thrilling to watch the novel move into focus through this other way too—though a different experience from reading it, following all those lists and graphs. It seems almost incredible that anyone else should ever be able to find his way in another man’s working papers—I felt strange following him, into that strange but oddly familiar country where most of us have wandered by ourselves—all those name changes, like the answering calls of birds, those transpositions and peregrinations, those recurring but indelible little pictures on the mind, those private ways to number pages and scenes. But when he’d finished, the feeling it left me with was a sense of victory more than heartbreak—it was such a beautiful novel, and it got written. And published, in spite of the poor printing it had and the bad treatment it got, in spite of everything. The fact that a scrupulously-edited edition is still needed does point a finger at Mr. Bruccoli himself, and his list of the emendations he would make is right there—but it’s true, he’s done the main thing, and what a job it must have been. I can’t think of any writer who deserved it more. It was needed, and it was a real way of paying respects. All the way through the study you couldn’t miss knowing the passionate love he has for Tender is the Night itself. Oh, and one of the best things he did, I thought, was showing over and over again what a good critic F. was of his own work, come hell or high water. I’m so glad that through you I got acquainted with this study. Thank you for it. I wish Mr. B. could have won at that auction—who did, something like the U. of Texas? Did he get to set eyes on the galley?
I’m glad to know about the check list—a very good thing, with plenty of space left under “Forthcoming.”22 I’m glad for his sake you’re clearing his path for him this time. You could make it twice as hard for somebody, probably, in other circumstances. I do share your feeling about juvenilia. Does it have to be in? A poem I wrote to the twilight in the St. Nicholas League was published in an anthology of the magazine and I wanted to kill myself.
I’m so glad you liked the seal book. I thought you must have been close to seals, because of a character you had with sea-lion eyes, but I didn’t know it was that close—to swim with them and play tag, but another thing, I liked all the oral tradition in it, the stories told in those little rooms, the company listening and helping, or hindering, and the sense of the life of another element so near as that, sometimes tragic, sometimes funny, sometimes comforting.
That little story I popped in my letter you read with kindness and I feel contrite because I didn’t think to tell you what it was all to do with—you wouldn’t normally know all about the Natchez Trace in the early 1800’s and who was on it, to start with? The Trace was alive then with every kind of traveller there was—running as it did as the only path through the unrelieved wilderness, 300 miles from Natchez up to the Tennessee River. There were merchants going home with their gold (no way to get back up-river) and robbers and murderers and Indians and soul savers and fugitives and conspirators with worldwide schemes—and Audubon—all the seekers and bringers and takers and learners and believers—passionate times. I read their journals and records—everybody wrote things down, not only Audubon. So far as I know, Audubon and Lorenzo Dow and the outlaw never did meet, but they were visionaries all. I forgot to tell you that the outlaw was haunted by a vision that he saw of a white horse standing across his path that he believed to be Christ (he says in his diary). So I supposed what if they did meet, and their separate and conflicting visions of the world (and eternity) could converge in the given moment there in the heart of the wilderness, might they not all see the same thing? Just a bird coming down—it was too frail a thing, no dramatic force. But to me it had potency because of the rest of what I felt—that some kind of wonder or divinity is really there at such a moment—clear outside the figuring of our minds or the demands of our emotions or any greed to carry it off—is innocently nourishing itself, following its own course, is living and beautiful, like the heron. The story of course failed but it’s oddly close to me still. You must have sensed there was a lot of my feeling in it, which made you forbearing. I still feel it. I’ve tried to teach myself better ways to write, to guide my characters so they talk it out and act it out, but I think they may be still saying and acting out the same thing. There are revealing moments possible in any sort of circumstances—maybe fleeting, but indelible—and they have an integrity of their own, a life. Some original wonder is still there, buried however deep under whatever human destructiveness. Don’t you think?
Well, I have to get on to my latest story now, which is supposed to come out as a book by itself next spring and I want to revise it. The title of it is (or was) “The Optimist’s Daughter.” —And I was looking in Ring Lardner, in What Of It?—the Wilmerding rooters’ song is in “Taxidea Americana,” I noted—and the wonderful Cinderella story told in the vernacular has this, which I’d forgotten if I ever caught on at all: “Her name was Zelda, but they called her Cinderella on account of how the ashes and clinkers clang to her when she got up noons,” and “‘Listen, Scott,’ they says, for that was the Prince’s name: ‘we have found the gal!’”23
Bless all their memories.
Love, and I hope the attention goes on and on growing and that you feel good and happy about it. This is the way it ought to be—don’t feel guilty at praise! Dear Ken, you have been good for a long time now. Let other people have the guilty feelings, for not having paid the right heed. Just you feel proud.
Love,
Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, July 2, 1971
Dear Eudora:
I had some wonderful news the other night. Herb Harker phoned from Calgary to tell me—But let me sketch out a setting for this news: Fifteen or sixteen years ago a young Canadian Mormon, about thirty, turned up in my Adult Education writing class here and wrote a series of wildly farcical stories about American hillbillies—people with whom he had nothing to do, really. Over the years Herb and I became friends and I learned that he was a high school graduate from Cardston, Alberta, who had served in the Canadian army, studied painting briefly, then got married and made a living for his wife and four sons by working as an oil-company draftsman here and in Calgary. As a former Albertan, I tried to turn him back [toward] his roots—and he went back to Canada for a while, then reappeared here. About five years ago, under the influence of a new intellectual movement in the Mormon Church, he began to write serious fiction about the life of Mormons and, writing in the morning before work, produced a longish novel about the Saints which I thought should be published, but wasn’t. Last year he finished another novel, Goldenrod, about a broken-down rodeo rider and his two sons. This is the book that’s been looking for a home, and last week as Herb phoned to tell me, it was taken by Random House, I think he said by Charlotte Meyerson. Herb has been writing unpublished for twenty years; and now he’ll be part of the Canadian Renascence.
Not in the same category of important events, but important to me nevertheless, is the fact that I’ve sort of started a book, sooner than I expected to. It’s pure self-indulgence: I feel so much more natural when I’m working. Coincidentally I’ve decided to go to England for the publication of Underground Man in October. The publisher is urging me, and I really need no urging. I love England, and haven’t seen it since the Fall of 1936. Margaret is thinking seriously of going along. We’re not getting any younger, as they say, and M. has never been off this c
ontinent. A friend of ours at Antioch College, Nolan Miller, is opening a “European branch” in England this Fall, and he will provide another landing point. I used to thrive on loneliness but now I depend on friends.
Matt Bruccoli was here for a couple of hours the other day, and we had lunch. He said he drank champagne with you and Robert Penn Warren on the occasion of the latter’s wedding. (I now have the other copy of Composition of Tender.)
Your “convergence” story keeps haunting me. It baffles me, as I said, perhaps because though the three men are influenced and go their ways, essentially the death of the heron leads only out of this world, in two senses. I don’t believe the story of the Cairo convergence that you wrote to me about has been written yet. Could you write it from now about this? Or are the involutions of your thought beyond the reach of such a simple suggestion?
I hope you weren’t offended by my joke about your beatification and your saintliness. It’s no joke, really. I adore your virtue.
Ken
By July Eudora had finished proofing the introduction and captions for a book of her photographs (One Time, One Place), and she was able to work on expanding her New Yorker story “The Optimist’s Daughter” for book publication. Ken’s suggestion that she write about her response to seeing the convergence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers at Cairo, Illinois, she would eventually take as part of this expansion. But some time would pass before she informed Ken that she had done so.