Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, July 8, 1971
Dear Ken,
We’ll never have a chance to catch up, because our letters cross every time—but that’s all right.
I’m excited about your book going strong—I don’t ask you about it because I don’t like to be asked about something not finished, myself—Superstitious, I guess. But I cross my fingers—(This doesn’t mean I don’t know it will be a good book.) I too feel absolutely the best when I’m working. Glad you are. And that’s wonderful about the visit to England up ahead—I hope everything works out for you both to go—Might you even be going on a boat? Let me know about it—
No, you made me laugh, of course, at what you said about whatever it was the Bishop of Middle Tennessee did to me at Sewanee—The rest of what you said came out of a sweetness and charity that has to be yours, not mine—Ken—I thank you for it—Only I feel better to think of you seeing me as I am, no better, (and no worse, I hope!) always—As I’ll try to do by you. I think we’d agree that if both of us were fine saints, we’d reliably intercede for each other, wouldn’t we? (Is that what saints do?)
“Zelda” came the Saturday before the 4th of July and I was so pleased to see it—24 Thanks for your thoughtfulness in lending it to me—I’ve only looked at the index & the pictures (heartbreaking) so far—and read the Santa Barbara paper, to see if maybe there was something I was supposed to catch? I missed it. It (Zelda) is waiting for the coming weekend to which I look forward greatly. I’m glad you have your own copy again of The Composition of Tender. I won’t let it shatter my faith in his work, but Mr. Bruccoli is mistaken about drinking champagne with me at Red Warren’s wedding—I wasn’t there.25 Who could it have been, I wonder? I’ll keep my eye out for your young Mormon, and what good news indeed. It must have made you feel terribly good—and rewarded. He’s had a lot of fortitude. (People who don’t really love to write don’t understand how much fortitude a writer is willing to live with, and live by.) It’s good he had the support you gave him, all through.
I think what your instinct is about my story is probably exactly right. I see—It would be the only real way to take hold of it. But I could do it better all new—and maybe some day I will.
This is just a little one, to atone for last time. I’m listening to my this year’s best mocking-bird—new this year, and a virtuoso—he’s more pearly in the breast, & plumper, than the usual, too—like an opera star. Sings on the wing—and half the night too.
Love,
Eudora
P.S. The young son of a friend I told you about that was missing is all right. He is living another life and is not ready yet to get in touch, but voluntarily called up a friend on the phone. The relief—! Though so much is still a question.26
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, July 12, 1971
Dear Eudora:
For once our letters didn’t cross, though I’ve been wanting to answer your fine letter about Bruccoli’s book—what a pity that he should make a mistake in life after producing such a careful work of scholarship, but then surely all of us are better in the work than in the life—but I’ve been wholly used up this past week or so by my work and another project. I used to think of an idea over the weekend and start the book on Monday, but now it takes me endless time and trouble to get one underway. I’m not complaining, having no reason to. Like you, I’m superstitious about talking about a book in progress; also I wouldn’t know what to say. Plot stories, like mine, are like a cake, useless until thoroughly baked and done. Or a page from a newspaper such as I sent you, without the essential clue to hang it on. (I wonder if the detective and thriller forms weren’t strongly influenced by newspaper format, as McLuhan says Symbolist poetry was). But I included that newspaper with Zelda just because it was handy and thought you might like to see it, not read it.
The other project has been reading again the news of yet another friend who has placed a book. For over two years my closest friend Robert Easton has been writing a rather definitive history—technical, social, political—of the Santa Barbara oil spill. Last week Delacorte took it and proposes to put it out in both hard and soft covers, and push it. This is an important event not only for Bob Easton, whose magnum opus this is, but for Santa Barbara, which is still fighting the oil companies in the channel and gradually making progress. Bob wrote a beautiful book in his twenties—The Happy Man (Viking), about the California ranching west—but was set back hard by the war, and now after years of effort as a writer has come back rather strong. His isn’t a wonderful fairy tale like Herb Harker’s—Bob went to Stanford and Harvard, and married Max Brand’s daughter—but it’s a happy consummation all the same. Today, by way of celebration, Bob walked into the back country and caught some rainbow trout.
Our plans for Europe—you notice that England has now expanded into Europe—our plans progress, and we are now thinking seriously about going to Switzerland before London, and to Russia after. Does Russia sound far out? It isn’t, really, since as I may have told you the Canadian Ambassador in Moscow is my oldest friend, and recently invited us to come and stay with him. All of a sudden it begins to seem possible. Bob Ford is a poet and very close to some contemporary Russian poets (whom he translates), and he is also close to the modern Russian painters.27 But the main thing is that I haven’t seen him for over fifteen years, and I begin to realize that I won’t live forever. Russia has always fascinated me, most recently as I read Solzhenitsyn and now Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope (which I strongly recommend if you haven’t seen it.) No, we shan’t be going by boat—we can’t stay away that long—and the transpolar planes go direct from Los Angeles to London in 12 hours. Margaret may not make it to Russia, but I expect I shall. Two days ago she bought a mink coat with Russian autumn in mind, but today she took it back, as being wrong for her: the weight of the skins of dead animals. She was right, of course, we’re not too happy with possessions. Free-flying birds, yes! Our best to your mocker, and love to you, as always. Ken
P.S. I already knew about the Natchez Trace—I wonder how?—Glad your friend’s son called in. There are thousands of him, aren’t there?
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, August 1, 1971
Dear Ken,
Did you hear them just say on the Moon: “Boy, that view is unearthly!”?28 Isn’t that wonderful? After all these centuries, the word turns into the plain literal. (Just looked it up—1611. 1. rising above what is characteristic of earth; . . . heavenly. 2. not belonging to the earth (1802).) And 1971, it’s Boy, this view. (By the way, what do you think meaning 4 of Moon is: “an appearance in the sky resembling a moon”?—that’s the OE meaning.)
I was so glad to get your letter, and what wonderful news about the trip. Having London in between will bring out everything strange and new in the other two. By now, of course you may have expanded to Paris and Peking. That was lovely about Margaret (may I call her?) and the mink coat. I think I understand her feeling, though I was never put to the test. (After I got home from the U. of Wisconsin, I remember, I gave my fur coat to the cook, but it was only possum! and I’d already worn it for two years, and don’t believe I could have lived without it, either.) People may turn around and point at her on the streets of Moscow, of course, for being furless. It will be the complement of that time when one of the Russian greats—Turgenev—?—got stared at, to his puzzlement, on the streets of Paris—he was wearing his tall fur hat.
Robert Easton’s big book on the Santa Barbara oil spill being now about to happen and come out in a way respectful of its importance must fill you both with a great good feeling. If it will do what it should be expected to, it will reward a lot of hard work on your own parts, I imagine, and the whole community must be rejoicing about it.
And now this much lesser and only temporary nuisance of that rail strike, getting your lettuces and our chickens. And the sleeping sickness. I’m glad you’re getting out of the country—into who knows what, but they will probably have lettuces and chickens and clean mosqu
itoes.
That was a splendid long time you had on the best seller lists, and if it’s over for now here, it will just be beginning in England and so on, I hope. Wasn’t it tiresome the way Time, after all those months, never did learn the way to spell Macdonald? Correcting themselves never was their long suit.
I hope the new book goes well. I agree, like a cake—like making jelly, I once wrote in a lecture on writing a short story. I’m working all day every day too, and at night at the moment reading 95 applications for grants in the humanities to be given by the U.S. Gov’t. They aren’t any of them alike so far. I don’t mind anything but having to go to Washington to weed out the finalists. Not weed out—anyway. (Weed in?) It’s interesting to know the Government can give out some of its money as well as take it in. Late, late, I read Zelda. Absorbing—I’m not certain I want her to do it, Miss Milford slowly pressing and pushing her way like an earth-mover into the old exhausted battlefields that might better be left quiet and grown over. And she writes like a witness, but she wasn’t. Scott broke Zelda’s vase. Zelda screamed at him. Scott hit her in the face. Scott’s cousin was there for the weekend, so Miss Milford writes down the plays according to her, all fifty years old and maybe what they really meant was lost on the cousin in the first place. It may be wonderfully factual, but it may still not be true—I feel it’s not. And it makes you want to warn people everywhere to burn their letters. The kind of thing Mr. Bruccoli wrote is entirely the opposite and altogether worth doing, and I so much prefer that. And of course for myself I am so much for Scott and so very partial that I expect I’m not reading it fair.
Mr. Bruccoli wrote a nice letter to me asking if I had something for his press—but I haven’t just now—I would have been pleased—anything on hand that hasn’t been printed already. And I had a letter from Julia Ford, also coming from the long way round through you. Mr. Lid gave her the picture, which she says she had never seen, “and I now have it stuck in the frame of a portrait of him painted by Ford Madox Brown when he was a young boy, where it makes a rather pleasant closing of the circle.” So it made a message for you too.
When you wrote that the old friend you’ll be visiting in Moscow is a poet and knows the poets there, I thought at once of a friend of my own who was there within the last few years, who is a poet too, and knows the poets, and has translated Vosnesensky [Voznesensky].29 His name is William Jay Smith. We’ve known each other since 1950 (in Florence)—he dedicated a book of his poems to me once. They might have met in Moscow and walked down the Nevsky Prospect together, talking away about everything—wouldn’t it have been easy?30
Take care—I hope all the plans go wonderfully well—book plans, trip plans, and all.
Love,
Eudora
(didn’t know this was going to be so long—)
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, August 14, 1971
Dear Eudora:
I loved what Ford’s daughter Julie said about the picture you sent her, and the fact of it stuck in the corner of his grandfather’s portrait of him. These chiming recurrences are really what Ford’s best novels rest on and reenact, and they confirm his novels. Again, what you say about your friend William Jay Smith whom you knew in Florence sets up a new set. Bob Easton spent a year in Florence around 1950, but that isn’t the coincidence I’m most struck by. For my other Bob, Bob Ford, the friend in Moscow, is a close friend of Voznesensky’s and has translated a number of his poems. V. even consults him about his work in progress! All this I know by hearsay at a distance, and from the evidence of Bob’s poems, which include a number of translations from the Russian. For seven years Bob and I didn’t correspond. Then our letters crossed, as I told you. I heard from him once more, and answered accepting his invitation, but then for about six weeks—these last weeks—I’ve been living in suspense, imagining that in some way my letter had struck the wrong note, or gone astray. I wrote several more times, without response, and had just about given up—not without attempting to phone Moscow, but when my call went through it was 4 a.m. Moscow time, and I had to cancel it—when the day before yesterday I got the long-awaited letter from Bob explaining that he had been on leave for five weeks in Paris, and urging me to get started on a visa, which I have now got started on. But the suspense is only partly over. Because I’m to be the private guest of a non-Russian official in Moscow, my request for a visa will have to go all the way to Moscow and be supported by Bob there. Well, it’s an interesting kind of suspense, and better than the kind which just ended, when I sometimes imagined—as I am prone to do; this is one of the scars of childhood poverty—that my old friend had snubbed me.
He never has, in all the years of our friendship going back to 1935 when we were sophomores in English and History at the University of Western Ontario. His father was the editor of the local paper (and later became chancellor of the University) and my father was dead. What equalized Bob and me was a common interest in literature, and history, which transcended everything else—in our senior year we were joint editors of the literary annual, and wrote most of it—and we were equalized further by a physical illness he had which was more devastating than anything that had happened to me. Bob was a basketball player until his sixteenth year, when some form of muscular dystrophy crippled him. He can walk, but he has difficulty getting out of a chair. When he falls down, as he once did in Trafalgar Square, he can’t get up again. The worst of it was the doctors’ prognosis that he would surely die before he was thirty. Well, he’s 56, and going strong. The effect of his illness was to make him extraordinarily adventurous, both intellectually and physically. He went down to Cornell to study history under Carl Becker, took a course in Russian for the fun of it, and shortly became the only Russian-speaking member of the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs. He has been to Samarkand, and the headwaters of the Amazon. In December he plans to take a trip to China.
Our youthful friendship was very close. I used to support him on the icy Canadian streets, and he always treated me well. He was my daughter’s godfather. Our friendship persisted without words after we gave up writing to each other. When I visited him in Ottawa fifteen years ago—after not seeing him for a dozen years before that—he said we continued our youthful conversation as if we had just stepped from one room into another. Or did I say that? No matter. So you can see that my trip to Russia, if it comes off, will be one of the large closing movements of my life; closing the circles, I mean, not closing my life, though I suppose that shadow-moving is also deeply involved here. Bob of course has his eye on further horizons. He and his wife Thereza (onetime Brazilian delegate to the United Nations) are planning their trip to China in December, with Lillian Hellman!
I trust I don’t bore you with tales of my friends. They are what interest me and are, I suppose, my means of writing about my life, to you. Matt Bruccoli isn’t an old friend but let me say a word about him. He wrote me a detailed account of a situation which didn’t occur at R.P. Warren’s wedding—Matt wasn’t there—but involved a kind of jollification in a classroom, with champagne-drinking—and Matt believes you were there. If you weren’t, I’m not going to tell him, he’s simply mistaken. I know your memory couldn’t be mistaken.
Good luck with your writing, and your other work. You work yourself hard, Eudora, but you seem to thrive on it. What could be happier than a working writer? My hardworking minkless wife Maggie would say the same, and join me in sending you our love, as always,
Ken
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, September 1, 1971
Dear Ken,
As I always am, I was glad to get your letter. By now I hope the suspense of the visa is over, that Moscow answered Yes, with your friend’s help, and everything now is set. That’s a wonderful thing in store—the reunion—everything coming round, and coming right.
I do like reading what you tell me about your friends, and do get a feeling of what they have meant and do mean. My own play the same large part in my life. I take it as a compliment when you write of th
em to me. I love and need and learn from my friends, they are the continuity of my life.
Thank you so much for letting me read Zelda, and I hope my keeping it so long didn’t keep somebody else waiting. I’m glad I read it, had never dreamed there was all that to Zelda. How can she be both so monstrous and so touching[?] Those naked letters, and every line of them you had to read with her writing them and with Scott reading them. Miss M. [biographer Nancy Milford] did a thorough job, Lord knows, painstaking and exhaustive. I never did get over my basic mistrust of the whole job, though. She could have used less stuff and discriminated more. The thing she did leave out was Scott’s mind—to me. The creative mind. His intelligence comes out here in his letters, and his tragic awareness, his enormous and honorable courage and killing work. But what turned his life into his fiction is not just an equals sign, is it—I think she equates them, in her biographical way, because of resemblance. A small thing—she should have known about the salamander. It was something we used to do here, look for the salamander in the fire, just as we looked for faces in the clouds. Did you? It was one of the most moving and terrible and prophetic things Zelda said—that she’d thought she was the salamander, but she wasn’t.31 I’m glad Scott died first. The deliberate acts of strength it took him to live and to give—that was made clear as a document.
Your friend Dr. Lid sent me a good Fitzgerald paper, which he said you suggested he do. It was a good thing to read right then, at the end of Zelda, as I expect you thought it would be. I liked it fine. That was so thoughtful of you—and I’ll write Dr. Lid and thank him soon. I just read The Last Tycoon again the other night.—By the way, the book I sent along with Z. is one Walter Clemons had passed to me, he’s reviewing it for the Times on Sept. 14 (?). I thought you might be interested in it. [A Sort of Life by Graham Greene, reviewed in the September 12, 1971, New York Times Book Review.] Did you know that Walter is going to leave the Times and go to Newsweek? I think it was hard for him to decide—I hope it will work out well for him. He’ll get to review a lot, and as he likes, and work a lot at home. And those clippings I put in for cushion duty you might like to look at—and of course throw away. I love trials, and the naïve reporting thereof—the crazy verbatim remarks that find their own way into print that way in small town papers. (I apologize for the bad boy’s being named Kenny.)
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