Speaking of Moscow, I slept in a house in Washington, since I wrote you last, that used to belong to Donald Maclean.32 A nice house on a quiet street near the embassies. When the present family moved in, they found 12 telephone lines (not extensions) to the house, phone jacks in every room, and there was a pretty big switch board in the basement. One phone jack in the closet, in the room I slept in. It belonged to my friend’s mother—the very room for a lady who would name her daughter Guinevere[.] Philby had undoubtedly been in that closet—or phoned in. (Nothing rang while I was there in the house—I listened.)
Thanks for your good wishes for my work. It is going pretty well—at least I have that feeling of hoping I won’t get run over before I finish it. I think that’s a good sign, don’t you? I send everything going on in your house my best too.
A young Englishman I knew from my summer in Cambridge—he was the young student who did all the dirty work when they entertained our Conference—called me from New Orleans the other night and said he’d like to come up and spend the day. He brought a young American friend—lives in St. Louis now. They had just come down the Mississippi on a barge line from St. Louis to New Orleans—a pilot ship pushing 14 barges. They told me everything—and I love a world-in-itself of any kind, don’t you? They had of course been in the confluence of the waters at Cairo. They went under the bridge by daylight, around the point and up into the Ohio, where they held, for two hours—taking on cargo. Then, when it was done, they just let the current carry them around and down into the Mississippi—they said it was the most graceful thing you could imagine. Of course I knew there is steady traffic in that place all the time, but these were the first people I’d ever seen who had ever, or just come out of being in it, in the confluence arrived at my house with the story to tell. I hadn’t seen Michael for 6 years, and this was what he came for.
Good luck with all. Love to you both,
Eudora
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, September 12, 1971
Dear Ken,
I just saw that piece of Wilfred Sheed’s—in the Sept. 5th Times. I must say I think that was pretty bad of him. It wasn’t a good piece anyway, it was condescending and illogical, even a little perverse. But do you think his saying all your good reviews could be a blight could make them a blight? I don’t think so, do you? Who is he trying to scare off? But it’s troubling, the fact that he wrote that.33
I don’t understand the motive of it—I don’t see how it could be critical. If it does appear to him that good writers outside the fields he accepts as interesting are infringing on others’ exclusive rights by their very virtues, he’s lost in the woods. Instead of being glad to find out about these good writers, he is sorry. He wishes we hadn’t told him. His whole vocabulary and his whole tone struck me as intended to offend. I don’t see at first sight how anything in it could really touch you or do you harm, but I don’t know enough about it not to be troubled. I would so badly hate to think that rightful praise being dubbed over-praise could turn it into that frost and blight he tried to predict. I wanted to reply to him, but of course the one who could not do that, among others, is me. He also appeared to me to have a lot of nerve to say what he did on the basis of reading two of your novels, wide-apart ones, and not the new one at all, the one whose review provoked him to his remarks. That’s just unprofessional, to start with. And he went so out of his way to sound knowledgable—he couldn’t be, and he didn’t apprehend the lovely form and working out of “The Zebra-Striped Hearse” a bit, from what he said. That he suddenly discovered you knew what you were doing he thought was your new discovery. He’d like you to stop right there!
Your own work is the living answer to anything he could say,—I just hate his having said it. I was interested mildly in Sheed, read two of his novels and some of his criticism, and I know he’s bright, but his dark side rather scared me in the novels, and he’s cruel somehow. But this little exercise, that turns into a sort of little threat, does make me unhappy. I wonder what John Leonard thought as the editor when that came in. He scrupulously had to let him say it, I guess.
Love,
Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, September 13, 1971
Dear Eudora:
It’s good of you to have thought about me, with such delicacy of feeling, as always, when you read the article by Wilfred Sheed. I didn’t like it much, but I think I’m safe in saying that I’m not really upset by it, nor do I expect it to damage me. If he had wanted to damage me, he would have had to do a much cleverer and better informed piece (which indeed he is capable of). You can’t really attack a writer intelligently without reading him, and Sheed’s enormous contempt for the detective story shielded me: he didn’t really think it was worth his while.—There is an irony here. I’ve been following Sheed ever since he was drama critic for Commonweal (which I subscribed to for years because my daughter married a Roman Catholic, our dear son-in-law Joe) and have read a great deal of his criticism and I think all of his novels. His most recent novel, about a critic like himself, disturbed and disappointed me, but I won’t go further into that. The point is that he has been one of the brilliant comers in my book. But he has forced me to choose between my good opinion of him and my good opinion of myself. Don’t you be upset, Eudora. We’re really not. I think I’d rather be mentioned controversially than not mentioned at all; and there may be an interesting letter or two come out of it. But I can’t write one of them, any more than you can.
We had good news today. Margaret’s Birds and the Beasts Were There is finally back in print after several years out. It’s her favorite book, and I forget whether you’ve ever seen it. All about our early days breaking into the birdwatching business at the same time, by the way, that I was writing Zebra. If you don’t have it I’ll send you a copy. I haven’t thanked you for Graham Greene’s autobiography, which I have read with interest and passed on to Henri Coulette, my friend from Pasadena who teaches at Cal State L.A. and spends the summers here. Henri, in case I haven’t told you before, is a poet, and his second volume has just been published by Scribners. I read it through last night for the third or fourth time and it seemed awfully good to me. The Goldschmitt Family. I’d send it to you but at the moment mine is the only copy in Santa Barbara (Henri having returned to Pasadena yesterday.)
Which brings me back to Bob Ford (I don’t feel safe unless I’m in touch with a poet) who unfortunately for me has been recalled to Ottawa for the Kosygin visit to Canada and will be absent from Moscow throughout the period that I was to visit him there.34 I’m not terribly disappointed—since I’ll see Bob one way or another in the next year or two—but it deprives my trip of the air of high adventure that it had, and prevents me from closing a kind of personal circle: the last time I went to Europe I spent two months in Nazi Germany. In response to my question and yours, Bob answers that he does indeed know William Jay Smith and greatly admires his poetry. Of his translations from the Russian of Voznesensky, though, Bob points out with a certain Canadian rigor that they are based on renderings into English by Russian scholars, not on the Russian originals. (This won’t make your day, any more than it did mine.)
Having ruled out Russia, alas, we’ve got our trip squeezed down into a fairly manageable 3 ½ weeks—four days in Paris, where L’homme clandestin is being published October 5, the day of our arrival; three in Geneva; three in Edinburgh, where some of both our ancestors came from, roughly; three in Yorkshire, on account of the Brontes, living friends, and York Minster; and ten in London beginning October 18, publication date. I’m particularly keen about the London part, having stayed there for a month in a youth hostel when I was twenty, and so is M., who has never been off this continent before. We’ve both shied away from European adventures, partly on account of the Fitzgeralds’ example: they’re the most important couple in our lives that we’ve never known: and our very strong feeling that North American lives have to be lived out in North American terms. Properly, Dr. Diver’s life was just beginnin
g when he started to practice in Upper New York State. No confluences in Europe!35
It was wonderful to hear from you today. The year is changing. I can hardly wait now to really get into my book come November. Love, Ken
P.S.—I’m sorry your generosity to me should have involved you in any way in this Sheed business. He really struck out quite carelessly at several people.
Another subject. Concerning M’s Birds and Beasts, I have a feeling that I’ve written to you before. It’s been much on my mind—a pleasant burden—as we’ve been trying to get it back into print this past year. M’s editor, Lee Wright, is the one who really swung it.
K.
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, September 30, 1971
Dear Ken,
I’m thinking you’re about to take off—and what a really fine trip it sounds, every phase you’ve mentioned—I hope you’re both going to have a wonderful time.
Thank you for writing me right back about old Wilfred Sheed. I was certain you would have what he wrote sized up for what it was and what it could and could not do—and I felt convinced you were accurate and also pretty wonderful about it. Most readers of the Times are bound to be of the same opinion about a critic who would write good or bad words about a writer without ever reading him. I’m looking for some letters about it. Yes, there’s an irony there—and one here, of a less personal kind—I’m on a reading committee for grants, and I voted Sheed a couple thousand dollars to write his criticism, saw him get it last May. I do think he has talent and I was strong for him. Though “Max Jamison” [title character in a novel by Sheed] did something to me that lowered my best hopes in a rather sinister way—all that castigation in him may all be self-castigation? Well, he may get a dose he deserves to get now from the readers. No, I couldn’t mislike him more—
That’s good news about The Birds and the Beasts Were There being back in print. You did tell me a little about the writing of it. I’d like ever so much to see it, and I’d love you to send me a copy when you think about it—I’ll send you something of mine in return, that ought to be in print by the time you get back [One Time, One Place]. I don’t know if it would interest you—some of it’s pictures. There are a few pages in front about a little period of my life—I think the only time I ever wrote about myself directly. What about all those French, English, Scots, and Swiss birds? Did anything ever sing to Emily and Charlotte on the moors above Haworth? You will hear—
(In Italy I once took a horse & cab and told the driver to take me where I could hear a nightingale—now I forget the Italian, which I learned for the occasion—and he most enthusiastically did. And the nightingale did.) La rossignole! Or is that the French nightingale?
How lovely to know all the time you’re seeing everything you have a book to come back to. Have a wonderful time—My wishes & love to you both and to The Underground Man on its day in London and to L’homme clandestine (I love that!) in Paris on October 5—
Bon voyage and come safe home.
Eudora
I’m working so hard now. This may sound scatterbrained.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, October 1, 1971
Dear Eudora:
I was so delighted to get your letter—you may be scatterbrained with work, and more power to your writing arm, but your brains when scattered are better than other people’s in full focus, and are decidedly not with their internal lightnings blind. I won’t attempt to answer you properly except to assure you that the affaire Sheed (as we soon-to-be Parisians call it) has blown over as far as I’m concerned, and didn’t really hurt much at the time. After all he merely used up a good part of the second page to question my right to be on the first page (oddly enough, I did the first page Cain review that he mentioned, too.) Yes, I’d vote him a grant.
I enclose a note from Robert Ford in Moscow (please return eventually) because I think you might be interested, in him and the situation. Certainly I’m bound to get to Russia one way or another, and have promised to go in two years. If the currently planned trip works out maybe M. will come to Russia, too.—M sent you today, via the local ARK book store, a copy of the new printing of her bird book. We look forward to the book of yours you promised, with its rare personal remarks. I find myself moved toward autobiography of late, but will postpone it indefinitely, perhaps forever. Good luck with your work, with everything. We’re off Monday. Love,
Ken
P.S.—I slept in the fields one night in England and was wakened in the morning by a skylark, but never had a nightingale. Mockingbirds, yes! K.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, October 31, 1971
Dear Eudora:
Your volume of photos came, and we really loved them. Whatever you may think about the printing process—I didn’t notice anything that got in the way—it must give you great satisfaction to have these tangible mementoes, so much clearer and more permanent than mere memory. I know the satisfaction we have in them, and they aren’t even our memories, but as we look at the pictures we seem to see the people through your eyes—respectful, even loving, but quite illusionless. And I felt a certain envy of you for having had the wit and skill to record all that, and wished I’d been able to do the same for the Canadian countryside of my youth. Margaret’s bird book, which she traded you for your book, arouses some of the same envy in me, and of course much deeper emotions in me as well, because it was about that happy middle period of our lives, between the pains of youth and the partings of age, when experience came rushing like a river in spate, and Margaret caught it. Her book has become so poignant for me I can hardly bear to read it, but of course I do. I hope some of this personal quality in it carries over to you. My favorite pages are quite near the end, about the small creatures in Rattlesnake Canyon threatened by the fire.
London was quite a pleasant place to be, but three weeks away from home were enough. Before we even got there, in Switzerland Margaret and I took a cable car to the 12,000-foot level of Mont Blanc and M. caught cold, which somewhat damped her feelings about England. But the cold got better instead of worse, and we were able to see quite a bit of London, and the countryside one day as far as Oxford. My publisher Collins gave a party for booksellers and the press, which ought to help my book if books are helpable by that sort of thing. I gave a number of interviews, trying not to repeat myself but gradually running down. Well, it had to be done, that once, to fill out my idea of my life, but I’m glad to be home with my revivified wife and my dogs who hardly seem to have missed us at all; and with grandson Jimmie, who did, and who grew an inch.
I hope we can restore hope in the world. A great deal has to do with the United States’ finding itself again. This idea isn’t out of place in a letter which began with thanking you for your pictures. We’ll treasure them, Eudora, as we do all of your manifestations and traces, which are all of a piece.
Love,
Ken
P.S.—Your introduction seems to reveal an autobiographical urge which you should give its head at much greater length, may I say?
K.
Eudora’s introduction to One Time, One Place was in part an autobiographical account of her 1930s work as a photographer. The Optimist’s Daughter, an expanded New Yorker story on which she had been hard at work for some time, was also autobiographical in nature, but it drew, often obliquely, upon personal and family history, both recent and distant, rather than her professional life. This translation of life into fiction, now in its second incarnation, had proved difficult. Earlier in the fall, when Eudora sent the manuscript to her Random House editor, Albert Erskine, his evaluation was very positive. But when she sent it to Reynolds Price, he expressed some reservations, and she undertook another set of revisions based on his reaction. Still, by November 6, the revision process had largely ended. The book that would win the Pulitzer Prize had almost reached its final form, as Eudora reported to Ken.
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, November 7, 1971
Dear Ken,
It was good to get both your letter
s, the one before you left for Europe and the one after you got back—and I was glad to know how it all went off and that you were home and happy to be there. It sounded as if the trip had its pleasures, though it’s too bad about Margaret’s catching a cold going up Mt. Blanc (she needed that fur coat after all) and about your not getting to Moscow this time—but you can do that later. Maybe when Far Side of the Dollar and Black Money are going around in Russian, you could be going around there too. Anyway, how lovely to be in London, turned loose in the streets, and when evening’s coming on. I’ve seen few capitals, but it’s the one I love best. If the Observer prints one of their good interviews about you, do please let me know—I don’t see it any more. Meanwhile, I hope you’re back into your new book and that every bit goes well and all to please you.
Of course I read Margaret’s book with the deepest pleasure. Not only because of all it said about the birds, and so beautifully, but because of what it conveyed about your lives there and your house, all of that, for which I cherish it too. (To have put that fire into the fiction of The Underground Man—that was a deed, just like pouring water on the roof.)36 I want to write her a long letter which is in my head. It is really a radiant book.
Meanwhile There Are Letters Page 7