You were generous about my picture book—I hoped of course you would look at it as you did. I don’t have much wish or ability to write anything autobiographical for its own sake though—it was only in this book as a due explanation. In fact, I can’t deal directly with my own life. I’ve just finished revising a long story—or short novel, I believe they wish to call it—which is nearer the nerve than anything else I ever tried. It will be out in the spring. “The Optimist’s Daughter” is the name of it—I will send. All Sept. & Oct. on this job I got so impatient with myself because something was wrong with my right hand—seems I’ve just worn it out writing, isn’t that the limit—dr. says two bones scrape together. Don’t worry, this doesn’t hurt, because I can type left-handed and with the other forefinger—and every day I practice writing left-handed—I suppose if we had to, we could all write with our noses or with a pencil in our teeth.
Thank you for letting me see Robert Ford’s letter—highly interesting. So glad he and my friend Bill Smith really did meet—it seemed they would have just had to. Bill was poetry consultant at Library of Congress that year—and when Vosneshensky [Voznesensky] came over here to read, Bill traveled some with him and introduced him on the platform and such like, and I think that’s the origin of his translations, which weren’t as you know actually translations from the Russian language but approximations made with help—which he could read to audiences in parallel to V’s readings.
I have to go to New York in a week, to work on a committee again, and I’ll remember how lovely it was the other time, when we got to meet. The days have just gotten cool here, no rain at all though—I see a number of warblers in the trees—some tufted titmice, kinglets, Carolina chickadees. For the last 2 years, some evening grossbeaks have been coming to Jackson—not supposed to ever go s. of Virginia, the book says—I went to look today, but they aren’t here yet—such a lovely poetic name they have, and what manners!
Love to you, and to Margaret, and your birds and beasts. Good luck in all, Eudora
A week after writing to Ken, Eudora was indeed in New York, where she filled her days visiting friends, seeing Follies with Jackson arts reporter Frank Hains, attending a National Institute of Arts and Letters dinner, celebrating her agent Diarmuid Russell’s birthday, and working on The Optimist’s Daughter with Albert Erskine. Then she headed to Washington, DC, where old chums John and Catherine Prince were her hosts for Thanksgiving dinner.
Back in Jackson, Eudora began to answer letters that had accumulated and to send notes of gratitude. First she wanted to thank Margaret more fully for The Birds and the Beasts Were There than she had in a letter of October 28, 1971.
Eudora Welty to Margaret Millar, December 5, 1971
Dear Margaret,
I’ve never stopped wanting to write to you again about “The Birds and the Beasts Were There”—the special quality the book has in abundance for me has stayed with me, and I’ve thought about it many times. The feeling of life alive—the burst of knowledge and finding out—not only that, which is the radiance of the book and goes all through it, but the other half of the matter, the seeing it precisely and in full response, the pleasure of it—But the words of Keats you end with really contain all I was fumbling to say,—the gift of being a part of what you see, that’s what I loved in your book. I felt this was where all the exuberance and the spirit came from, as well as the exactness, like what the bushtit knew—under which leaf the white fly had laid her eggs and where the spider had hidden his dinner fly and all of that—being nothing compared to where the doughnuts were—this example just at random. And of course the feeling in it comes through everything, and the Coyote fire made me cry not only because of the fire but because of the telling of it. And Lord, the many, many funny things—Melanie—the note to Ken to go very slowly past this window or crawl so you won’t disturb them—the mourning-dove in the bird feeder—I was with you everywhere but with the rats. Not with Richard—in addition to everything else, not even sober. I loved the story of the baby spotted owls—well, I could make a list of favorite parts of the book, but I believe most of all I liked the way it came to you—the onset of that whole world, out there alive and to be learned whole, just waiting. That was beautiful. Also it makes a measure of how happy you must have been when you had written this book. Which is nice to think of.
Although before I read your book I was pretty ignorant about birds, I ought to have had a little background—if I’d had the wits, but I hadn’t—because the one and only state authority on them lived in our house for 25 years, Miss Fannye Cook of Crystal Springs. In the Depression, my mother rented her a little apartment in our house. She was a lot like Miss Beals. When I read “Beals,” I thought “Cook,” like a password exchanged. She’d put herself through study at the Smithsonian and educated herself to the one single purpose of bird study. Never married—next to birds, she liked turtles. She began and ran the Wildlife Museum, just about on her own. She used to keep an annual appointment in the Gulf of Mexico with the birds returning from South America—she’d go out in a boat past the farthest bit of island, so she herself—an old maid sitting up in a row boat not missing a thing—would be the first landing spot the birds would see, and they’d light all over her and be too tired to know her from a post—she gave them water and banded many, and had them come back again and again to her hands. Her surroundings were nothing to her except for bird connotations. One Sunday morning she invited me to go with her to see some birds, and we went “across the river”—the bootleg part of Jackson (Miss. being dry)—then a nice, tree-hung river, now a drainage ditch, the Pearl—and pulled up in the yard of a night-spot called, appropriately, First Place, and parked. Miss Cook said we were likely to see both red-eyed and white-eyed vireos. Well, sitting on that bench outside First Place were what I would call red-eyed and white-eyed vireos, left-overs from Saturday night, but Miss Cook didn’t waste any time noticing them. She was stopped once by a road-block on the Natchez Trace where they were chasing an outlaw in the swamps, just where she was headed, and she told the fellows she had no intention of interfering with either them or the outlaws, and she would thank them not to interfere with her, she was looking for some birds, and she went right on (She called all men “fellows.”) I used to find baby hawks in the bathtub and once an owl in the refrigerator. I helped her hunt for a baby bat in the window curtains, and found it. She asked for a little warm milk, fed the baby bat from a medicine dropper, and then I saw a baby bat belch. It was not quite as long as her thumb, and looked like something out of Hell—I’m glad it’s not a bird. Miss Cook herself was very elegant and stern, strict, matter-of-fact, rather impatient with human beings, and once, in the West, she was climbing a mountain and as she got level with the top she saw a rattlesnake looking right into her eyes. She just looked right back. She knew all about him.
I read a lot of “The Life of Birds” after I got onto him in your book—partly because his name is Welty—and was fascinated, though isn’t his scientific language sometimes hilarious—“The magnetism of a suitable nesting site was attested by the construction by a Rufous Ovenbird of its globular mud nest on the axle of a wind-mill.” And the marvelous photographs—I love best the Long-tailed Tit photographed beside his nest (His mate may have made it?), of cobwebs, moss, and hair, covered with lichens, and warmly lined inside with as many as 2,000 feathers, it’s just such a wonderful picture and a wonderful creature and wonderful achievement. I love the nest of the Fairy Tern subsp. candida, that lays its egg in the angle between 2 leaflets of a frond of the coconut palm, and the natives betting on whether the young will hatch before the leaf falls. I like Cousin J. C. (I’m going to claim him) better than most other writers in the 598 D shelf of the library I’ve been looking into, even if he is a bit humorless and sees nothing funny in painting mustaches on female flickers—in a man named Noble painting mustaches on female flickers. But those extraordinary facts, when recounted perfectly plainly, sound like allegories, don’t they, sometimes—I thought so often in the c
hapter about the nests.
I’ve got off on other people’s birds when it was your birds I loved reading about. And the book brought something back to me I’d lost the feel of, in a way—the family feeling of the rush to learn, the immediate looking it up in a book, the whole-hearted plunge into the new experience—my house was like that, too, and it was lovely to be taken back into that world, a while, through the world of your book. Thank you again for sending it to me.
Please give my love to Ken too and I hope all goes well with you both. Will you be going out on the Christmas Count this year?
Love,
Eudora
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, [December 5, 1971]
Dear Ken,
Just a little line in with my letter to Margaret to say I hope all goes well with you and that you’re getting good work done. In New York I heard your name spoken, by John Leonard in the Times office and by Walter Clemons in the Algonquin where we were having coffee. In Westport when I brought [a] copy of my photo book out to Albert Erskine’s, he remarked that a copy had been in the house but Matthew Bruccoli had been over for an evening and had taken it away with him he thought. I said good, I owed it to him. I had the feeling we might have just missed.
It’s a quiet Sunday evening, a gentle rain has stopped, a camellia named Bernice Bodey has opened a flower, and a white-throated sparrow is singing, just now and then. I haven’t been working because of a bad right hand—over-use and arthritis, it seems—but it’s being helped and I hope to begin some stories—would love to write right through Christmas. More next time.
Love,
Eudora
Sensing a breach of decorum when Eudora’s second thank-you letter arrived before his wife had answered the first, Ken responded on Margaret’s behalf. For the only time in a letter to Eudora, he expressed reservations about the state of his marriage.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, December 6, 1971
Dear Eudora:
You’ll doubtless be hearing from Margaret eventually—she’s a much worse correspondent than I am, and that makes her poor indeed—but I do want to thank you right away for your wonderful letter in response to her book. It isn’t my book, of course, but it’s about the life we shared, and your letter imaginatively recreated it for me. Those were our best years, on Chelham Way. The present is good enough, with more of the same, but we’ve lost a good deal of our unconscious glee. Of course the book is about loss, too—the valuing of what is inevitably lost. I don’t mean to sound sad—it has to be lost or losable before you can value it right, and there is more of the same. Yesterday, about 200 yds. out at sea—Miss Cook without a rowboat—I saw two parasitic jaegers chasing a tern and stealing the fish he had caught. They were swifter than swifts, and I never saw one for sure before, though they appear from time to time on our coast. I yelled to Margaret, who was close to shore: “Jaegers!” She thought I said danger, but saw none, so paid no attention. Yes, we’ll be taking part in the annual Bird Count on December 19, covering the area around our house (about 2,000 acres, and 500 houses, with a mile of ocean front). I’ll be doing the beach and the water, which are easy compared with the island birds—I’m far from an expert, as M’s book makes clear. But I learn a little, from other people not books, every year. And I have the joy of feeding our birds every day. I guess the quail are my favorites.
I’m sorry about your hand, and I hope your letter to us didn’t cost you too much pain. Arthritis and allied ailments can be a dreadful nuisance, but may I urge you not to give up on it but continue to seek expert advice. Nearly twenty years ago, in 1952, I was so badly crippled by gout that I was housebound in a wheelchair for months; wrote a whole book, a not very good book (Meet Me at the Morgue) with a not very good title, when all I could move was my fingers. Then pharmacology caught up with gout, and now I’m virtually free of symptoms, haven’t been on crutches this year! My point is simply that you shouldn’t give up on your hand, though I realize arthritis hasn’t been mastered as gout has.
It was good to have word, through you, of John Leonard and Walter Clemons, whom I’m following now in Newsweek. I noticed there that Walter Clemons picked “Revelation” as his favorite Flannery O’Connor story. I have preferred “Everything That Rises . . .” but will settle for “Revelation.” Would you?—Speaking of John Leonard and Walter Clemons reminds me that my French clippings have come in, and my favorite sentences among them are from magazine littéraire (Nov 71): “On voit ce qui, dans cette histoire de crime [répercutée?] sur plusieurs générations, a pu séduire une romancière sudiste telle qu’ Eudora Welty. The underground man s’est en effet vu accorder le privilège, sans précedent pour un rom[a]n policier, d’un article en première page du New York Times Book Review, signé de Miss Welty, dont les interventions publique[s] sont pourtant fort rares.” (!)37
Both our loves, Ken
And happy writing Christmas, dear Eudora. Am reading PERMANENT ERRORS—fine!38
P.S.—Herb Harker’s first novel Goldenrod has now been optioned for a movie. But he’s still working as a draftsman in a Calgary oil office. K.
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, December 17, 1971
Dear Ken,
That was the nicest thing, to get a letter back from you—thank you for it. And don’t let Margaret think for a minute I expected any reply at all to my letter—I was the thanker—and after all, I know from her book how busy she keeps. The fact is, I’m the worst correspondent I know, if you go by the cartons standing around in my room full of unanswered mail—some letters 2 years old—and my conscience won’t let me throw them away, though by now the writers have certainly given me up. Now & then I dust them a little, with a Kleenex, like Archer.
How fine to be getting in reviews from the French edition—and to be able to read them. It delighted me to read what that one said, what I thought he said, making you une romancier sudiste—and there’s truth in it, don’t you agree? The same things matter, the same problems absorb and enchant us all—and that is the real kinship, isn’t it? But I did not comprehend that word “interventions”—which my little dictionary says means just “interventions.”
We must talk about Flannery O’Connor some time. Isn’t she wonderful? She can strike like a bolt of lightning (thunder?). I would settle for “Revelation” too, I think, though there are all those rivals—for the boldness and power and hair-raising wonder of the revelation itself that she makes happen before our eyes. I loved it on another count for the way she made Mrs. Turpin not only outraged that this assault [. . .] had been made upon her, but disappointed and hurt that it hadn’t been made on those others, the white-trash, right there and ready-made for it, deserving it.
No, it doesn’t hurt to type, as I ought to have told you, I just unlearned the touch system and went back to hunt-&-peck—found where the keys are again. What got me, I think, was just where it hit me—my right hand—where I really live, my psyche or something, but learning about anything with the other hand is a way of talking back to it. And I’m lucky—it’s not the bad kind. It saddened me to know about the gout. I admire what you did and I even know what you did, in a close at hand way and dating from that same year, and the courage it took, because of my brother Walter. He had a virulent strain of rheumatoid arthritis—of which he died, in 1959, at 43—he never stopped trying, either. The wife and two little girls he left are my family now—the little girls now grown, one just had her first baby this year, the other just got married last month. I know I am blessed, Ken. We’ll all have Christmas dinner together—and I hope you will have a lovely one too—your little grandson must be a wonderful age for Christmas. And I hope never the crutches again. Fine swims in the ocean every day instead, and a new bird every day—or an old bird friend.
Reynolds would be so pleased to know you are reading his book with sympathy—I’d like to tell him. It’s good about “Goldenrod”—I hope the movie happens.
Good luck on the bird count this Sunday, on land and on sea—good luck on everything, a
nd Christmas wishes to you both, and hopes and love,
Eudora
CHAPTER TWO
“We haven’t known each other terribly long, but we know each other well.”
1972
IN 1972 Eudora and Ken were not able to continue their friendship “viva voce and in the flesh,” but, as Ken had hoped when they parted in 1971, there were letters. There were also books: On the heels of One Time, One Place came an Archer mystery in manuscript, then typescript form and a new Welty novel published to rave notices by distinguished reviewers. Paul Theroux, writing in the Washington Post, found The Optimist’s Daughter to be “a superb affirmation of life and of healing.” And Howard Moss in a front-page New York Times Book Review called Eudora’s novel “a miracle of compression, the kind of book, small in scope but profound in its implications, that rewards a lifetime of work.”1
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, January 1, 197[2]
Dear Eudora:
We were so delighted to see the reception of your book of photographs in the New Yorker. It’s a permanent record of everything including you, though you are no more visible than the sun which also made the pictures possible. Now all of us are your fans, even grandson Jimmie who of course can’t read your books—Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is more his speed (and, you know, it’s a pretty good book)—but he can read your pictures, and did last night. The dear boy seems to be full of beans, is doing well in school and everything and has well survived a bad year.
I’m rather glad that 1971 is over. Alternations of good and bad fortune are always wrenching even when [illegible word]. May I say that your friendship and understanding both spoken and unspoken lightened the year as nothing else did. We speak of you often, and think of you oftener.
We started the new year by taking our bikes out to the University and wheeling around the campus, still empty for the holidays, until we’d clocked eight or nine miles. It was clear and bright. Those adjectives apply to Reynolds Price whose book [Permanent Errors] dedicated to you I finished the other week, with some of the excitement I read Joyce with when I was twenty. The same ruthless courage, moral and linguistic, yet highly original. I imagine you take just pleasure in that dedication. You know, I opened the book expecting to find your name there, and am reminded now that Reynolds Price was involved, by long-distance telephone, in the Algonquin magic. If I remember more such pleasant things, I’ll have to revise my judgment on 1971. Even our Christmas bird count was the best ever in Santa Barbara: 201 species if the black-chinned hummingbird is allowed. Our important, i.e. unique, contribution was a pair of white throated sparrows who feed here every day, and did that day.
Meanwhile There Are Letters Page 8