Meanwhile There Are Letters
Page 9
My agent Dorothy Olding is in town—M.’s agent, too, in fact she was M’s agent before she was mine—after an unusual trip from New York via Nassau, [. . .], the Panama Canal, and San Francisco, in company with Ngaio Marsh who is on her way home to New Zealand.2 We have lunch with Dorothy tomorrow, but before that I hope to get a stint done on my book. I’m off to a reasonably good start but the holidays have wreaked havoc on my schedule, which I suppose is what holidays are for.
We’re looking forward to The Optimist’s Daughter, keenly.
Our love, as always,
Ken
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, January 14, 1972
Dear Ken,
I value so much what you told me—if my friendship helped, I am glad. You were speaking out of the deep kindness and perception of your own when you told me. 1972 will be a good year, I hope—everything in it, and evenly so, all the way through. Thank you for the lovely account of New Year’s Day, when it was clear & bright and you and Margaret had been wheeling all around the University (making circles around the University) and the well-started novel was waiting for you up ahead. (I hope that makes circles around it too, and goes everywhere you like.)
I was delighted about the Christmas bird count, to see the unique contribution was the pair of white-throated sparrows, the ones you didn’t have to go a step to see but came to you, the same as every day. A couple of their cousins live in my yard—six inches worth of Assyrian Kings, with those beards—
Jimmie looked at my pictured book? —I’m pleased. Also that you think of it as you do. —And thanks for sharing in my pleasure at what Brendan Gill said in the New Yorker—I was unprepared for the magazine to notice it at all, and then so generously and imaginatively.3
I thought, I’ll send Jimmie my children’s book [The Shoe Bird]. But I read it again, just to see (it’s 1964) and it wasn’t good enough. It was the best I could do at the time, and parts are all right, but it’s not good enough for Jimmie. Not to mention that one of you would have to read it to him, and most of the characters are birds. I’m sending him a book of Bill Smith’s poems that he wrote for his own little boys—they were younger than Jimmie is now, but I don’t think poems have anything to do with age, do you? I like them.
It’s good to know you think so well and highly of Reynolds Price. It will please him so to know it—and I feel he’s at an important point in his life just now. He is both good and smart as a person, and as a writer he has, to me, a remarkable amount of control over a strong force of feeling, and though the control can be icy, the feeling is human & warm. And I feel he has a lot of substance—and a lot of work yet to come. He read “The Galton Case” at my house & then everything of yours he could find—he felt some affinity there about family feeling, family mystery—he could tell you better for himself—maybe will. I was terribly pleased & proud at that dedication. Yes, he was part of it—he called up & was reading “The Far Side of the Dollar,” open beside him. I’d timed my trip so as to see him get a prize. And all the time you were headed there to get a prize, and that’s how I was there to meet you.
I will indeed send you and Margaret “The Optimist’s Daughter”—there are supposed to be copies in the spring. It will be valuable to me to know your opinion, even more than it would be ordinarily, because you never saw it in its earlier version and would come to it cold & clear. I changed it some—then I changed it back some—It is so close to me that I have held onto it for two years, uncertain about publishing it alone as a book. It’s about sad things—about a few of those things one can’t ever change but must try through fiction to make something with. The question is, did I make it? And without doing hurt to lives I cared about? I worked & hoped—There is one paragraph in it, key, that never existed in the first version at all, and it wouldn’t be there now if it hadn’t been for our writing each other some letters. You will know. It came nearly at the end, where and when it came to me—came back to me.
Good luck in everything and love to you both, to you all,
Eudora
Despite the fear that her children’s book was not good enough for Ken’s grandson, Eudora put it in the post anyway.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, February 3, 1972
Dear Eudora:
It was so thoughtful of you to send Jimmie your Shoe Bird after all, as well as William Jay Smith’s Boy Blue. He was here over last weekend, and enjoyed them both. So did I. We both love wacky humor, which is the very essence of your Shoe Bird, though it has its strange beauty, too. I’ve not yet finished with Smith’s adult poems, but will return them soon. I heard from Bob Ford the other day, by the way: for setting up the Kosygin trip to Ottawa and shepherding him around Canada (the most Bob has seen of his native land in many years) he’s been given the Order of Canada, he writes, and is now, by virtue of seniority, the chief of the foreign diplomatic corps in Moscow.—Yet it seems less likely to me as time goes on that I’ll ever go to Russia, or perhaps even back to Europe. Perhaps to Italy, which I’ve never seen. Yet the Old World is weary and wearying to me. I love the New World and value every minute here, even of pain, where I never know what is going to happen next. I don’t mean this to be a Know-Nothing reaction. Bob and I “started” in the same place, with the same education. He will end his days in Paris, where he has bought an apartment, I in California on my hill, or in some adjacent valley. God knows this continent is difficult enough, but at least it is our own. Yet perhaps it could be said that Bob and I are almost equally remote from our starting place—which for the sake of the argument I take to be Ontario, though I was born here and didn’t reach Ontario until I was nearly four—and that California and Moscow are both capitals of the new New World, they with Solzhenitzyen, we with the Shuttle? (You know, precisely because California has a foot in the future, it’s taken a lead in saving the physical past, though.)
I suppose Jimmie is a boy of the future. His father is a computer engineer who helped to design equipment for Apollo (not the god) and he and his son seem to live in natural ease in Los Angeles. J. watches much television and patterns much of his behavior on what he sees (while aware that he is “acting” or, much of the time, joking); indeed, he may become an actor, a fate I once thought worse than death, having done some college acting myself; but for Jimmie it might be an interesting way to live. Really, I have no conception of what he may become. He’s a fine boy with a great regard for other people, notably for his father. What more could you ask of a boy?
I’m working hard at my book and making some progress. Margaret has turned away from writing, at least for the present, and is concentrating on getting herself in shape. Last month she rode 250 miles on her bike. This month (Feb. 5) she is 57. She will meet age head-on, and refuse to grow old without a struggle. I am likely to grow old without knowing it. How well you keep the girl alive in yourself, dear Eudora, which is one of the reasons I loved your book about the Shoe Bird.
Love,
Ken
P.S. The New World: true speech, unfiltered light, few monuments; nostalgic, perhaps, but not for Europe.
K.
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, February 26, 1972
Dear Ken,
Thank you for the good letter you wrote me, especially when you were—are—carrying around that novel in your head. (I like thinking of something of order and coherence and without one blessed fault being made there, some each day.) I was so pleased to know you and Jimmie both got some laughs out of “The Shoe Bird.” It was good to know the nonsense travelled—sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t—and to be let off for trespassing in bird country. It delighted me to be told a little more about Jimmie, who sounds one to be proud of and to watch out for, to wait and see things happen for. Think of growing up taking the Apollo connection for granted—right in the family. Like a pony.
I’ve had a nice piece of news I wanted to tell you—the Institute of Arts & Letters is giving me their gold medal for fiction this year. It was decided by ballot among the members, so
I was pleased about that. You are always glad for the good luck of your friends, so I wanted you to know.
I’ve just been out west!—well, from here it was. From there, it would be just a little bit less east—San Antonio. Two friends who live in Santa Fe came there for a week—one’s a painter and she was opening a new wing in a museum with an exhibition, a big moment, and I went out to be in on it.4 Do you know San Antonio? I’d never been there—I must say I’d never expected to shed tears in the Alamo, but the sense of history and real human beings is very strong in there. Positive, and personal. The living Texans we met were 40-to-sit-down-to-dinner kind (i.e. the museum benefactors), dining room tables on two floors, and Monets on the wall—there was a little line of beautiful Mary Cassatts going up the staircase wall, that you couldn’t really look at, for being too close and for having to go on upstairs—the only way you could have seen them any less well would be by sliding down the banisters. Anyway, I had a week to observe Texans in, surrounded by Texas. Had to spend the night in New Orleans coming home (I go by train) and there in Doubleday’s I saw the Bantam edition of The Underground Man, and got me one and read it again that night. It seemed to me I saw still other new things in it this time, it yields so very much. It pleases me to have the little paperback with the bits of Walter Clemons and me, among the rest, bound in with it. By the way, Reynolds Price says in a letter—you didn’t mind if I told him what you said about Permanent Errors?—that your words “gave me a real shock of pleasure, coming from that head, from behind those eyes. I’ll cherish them, and hope some day to be able to thank him in person and return my own great admiration. I want to read The Galton Case again—it’s been in my mind ever since I began my novel to read it: the father-son theme, the search.”
I had a lot of other things to tell you, it seems to me—I may write you again soon—just little things, but I don’t expect you to answer while you’re working.
Love,
Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, February 29, 1972
Dear Eudora:
It’s always wonderful to hear from you, and the news in your latest letter—that your fellow writers had voted you the gold medal for fiction—made it particularly wonderful. It must make you happy to have your work so valued, after the huge delicate rigorous labor of doing it. It makes your friends happy, too. If ever a woman cast her bread on the waters, it’s you. It seems to me that you remember all the things that are worthy of being remembered and then, in the gaps of existence, you invent more worthy things. It is not only for you that your life has been fortunate.
We enjoyed your quick sketch of San Antonio. We don’t really know the town but have changed planes there on our way to Corpus Christi for the birds. Now we really must stop over in S.A. We’d been thinking of going to Texas this year but it would interfere with my book to go there in March or April for the migrations, and we may decide on British Columbia, later. It was there I first came to consciousness (surrounded by Japanese children!) and that province still has some of the awe of the first place seen.
I’m glad you passed on my words of admiration to Reynolds Price—such a talent needs and deserves all the encouragement to be had—but I never expected such a response from him. It makes me wish I were younger, almost. Not really. It makes me glad that Reynolds Price is young, with great achievement behind him and greater ahead.
Some of Jimmie’s manly and direct and interested quality seems to have filtered through my lines to you. He’s one of those young people who are so good that you wish them never to change—as we used to say, a credit to his father and mother. There’s only one thing Jimmie does that after a while we have to tell him to stop, and that’s play the piano. He only knows one tune—“Silent Night”—and he massacres it loud night after loud night.
Margaret’s in good shape, the more so that she just sold the ten-speed bike on which she’s been wearing out her knees, but she still has left a less abrasive three-speed. Spring is coming on apace, with hardly any winter (and almost no rain) to justify it. I’ve taken a long weekend and really enjoyed it, swimming in the ocean for the first time in a month. Yellow acacia dust is everywhere. Your letter came as part of this general spring feeling. It gives me an occasion to tell you how much I loved Losing Battles and love its author. Margaret concurs.
As always,
Ken
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, March 26, 1972
Dear Ken,
Your beautiful letter I didn’t deserve—it made me wish I did, or could some way even this late. Thank you for it. I was pleased about the medal—and now Katherine Anne Porter has told me she’s the one who’s going to present it to me, my old friend—since 1938—and at age 84, “wearing a beautiful white pants suit of Italian silk, darling, I’m having it made.” (I went by to see her, a week ago, to thank her—she lives outside Washington and I had to go to NY for a few days—she cooked lunch, we drank champagne, talked 6 hours—Carpe diem, I know it more every diem.)5 It snowed and snowed in NY, and the wind just howled in off the East River—but now I’m home, I can write you from my spring to yours. The stage we’re having now is when the pear trees are still half in blossom and at the same time coming out in small thin bronze colored leaves, each with a silky white line around it, and the size of little ears. Every shade of gold and green and amber and pale yellow in the trees along the streets—wisteria, dogwood, the last of the azaleas, and climbing roses in the yards. When the iris come out, that will be high spring. Does the ocean change with spring too—the color or the wind or the kinds of birds you see? I hope you have been fine—swimming closer by if not in the ocean for the month you missed. And writing. Your word about Margaret and her bicycle—bicycles—leaves me in awe. I’m glad she’s in shape, but how many miles does it take, and on a ten-speed bicycle? (I didn’t know there was one.) Anyway, let me say a selfish wish that she’s ready now to write another book. —The other night, I was looking through my sister-in-law’s books for something and came upon “The Iron Gates,” which I remembered having sent my brother Walter when he was in the Pacific—I’d never known he’d brought it through the war and brought it home with him, and there was his name where he’d written it in.6 (Saw a Publishers Weekly with a Random House ad over several pages including my book and your friend Herbert Harker’s Goldenrod.)
It was nice to see John Leonard for a minute at the Times—we always speak of you—and to see Walter Clemons at dinner. (ditto) He’s due to write a sort of wrap-up piece on the McGraw Hill-Irving-Red Fox ring-around-the-rosy, after an interview at McG.H.7 I thought Newsweek on Time was the best reading in the whole thing, didn’t you enjoy that?
I hope you will get to pay a return visit to British Columbia, when your book is all finished. It sounds as if you should, from what you said of it. Were you the teacher? (Of the Japanese children). Once I saw the shore of B.C. only, and once only, from the deck of a Seattle-Victoria ferry, and it looked like a silver country lying up there in the morning.
I wanted to ask you if you had the two-volume edition of the OED.8 I got sent it, for a wonderful present, the other day, and it wouldn’t have seemed possible the day before that such a thing could ever be owned or in the house, just by a person. (I felt the same way about a pencil sharpener, the kind you grind with a handle, a thing I supposed only schools and offices could have—then one day realized I could too.) Now I see the dictionary right here in front of my eyes on my own table—and I hope you’ll tell me it’s on yours too, and you knew you could have it & I can think of you and Margaret as looking up, reading, never stopping, to your hearts’ content, like me. On looking up “gratitude,” trying to see how to thank my friend, I found it once meant “an expression of thankfulness, now rare” with the example: “A thrush broke forth into a gratitude of song.”
With love to you and to Margaret—Jimmie too,
Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, April 16, 1972
Dear Eudora:
Thank
you for your marvellous letter about spring in Mississippi—it’s spring in California, too, and to the delight of the hummingbirds the bottlebrush in our garden is exploding in red blossoms, and, yes, you can see the spring on its way when you look out over the sea, literally on its way, with schools of whales and flights of scoters and Bonaparte gulls and other birds all heading north (toward the silver shores of British Columbia). That’s a wonderful image of Katherine Anne Porter—she’ll be wearing white pyjamas when she comes—and when you tell me you had lunch with her it’s as if you had had lunch with Pallas Athene. I’ll never forget the impact Pale Horse had on me when it came out, in my first year of teaching and of marriage, I think.—Yes, 1939—I looked it up.
Leaping from great things to smaller, Herb Harker, whose book you were kind enough to notice in the PW ad, has now had a rousing good review from Barbara Basson (and will be getting another from me in NYTBR) which makes me think the book Goldenrod should do quite well. (I’ve asked Herb, by the way, to send you a copy of it because you might rather enjoy it). I think it’s since I last wrote you that early one evening as I was leaving the beach on a Sunday several weeks ago, I looked up and there was Herb with his two younger boys (he has four boys, two of them through college and employed in Calgary); they had just driven straight down here from Calgary and the dust of the journey was still on them. Since then Herb has taken a furnished apartment and got back to work on his second book, after a two-year interval of anguish and delay during his wife’s fatal illness. I’m very fond of Herb and his boys and think it’s rather a miracle that in his mid-forties he should bring forth a fresh and lively first novel. His youngest son, Brian, is the same age as Jimmie, by the way—nine—and within twenty minutes of this meeting they were exchanging confidences about their lost mothers. Jimmie has recovered from the trauma, for a reason that can be easily stated, and was, by him, today: “I don’t want to go away to college because I wouldn’t want to leave my dad”; but Brian, much more recently bereaved, is angry and sad, while his father still doesn’t quite know what hit him. Margaret and I, let me add, appear to be over the worst of our daughter’s death. We find ourselves becoming interested again in the external world and even responding to it, Jimmie being our representative there. He’s a good boy, and gives every sign of staying that way.