Meanwhile There Are Letters
Page 10
My book such as it is is moving along towards the end of the first draft. I can’t vouch for its quality but am simply grateful that I was able to get it written—rewriting is less impossible. Between drafts we’ll head north with the Bonaparte gulls, for a week or two, perhaps as far as British Columbia which I woke from infancy into in 1918, but perhaps not that far.
Love,
Ken
(and from “Iron Gates” Millar)
P.S. I wasn’t a teacher of the Japanese children, I was just another child. K.
P.P.S—Am enjoying, and will soon return, Wm. Jay Smith’s poems. K.
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, April 17, 1972
Dear Ken,
I’m sending you my new book [The Optimist’s Daughter] today, and want you to be sure it’s coming without any pressure to read it soon or write to me what you think about it—I just wanted to send it while it’s new. In fact it’s so new they haven’t even sent me my copies—then darn it, I found them in a store—I had to bring home a few for my friends—they’re the first, after all.
I hope your own book’s going exactly as you want it, and that all’s well with you both—Good luck on everything.
I’m all right—needing to get back to work—a story that had me licked for a while.9 The spring’s so beautiful. Yesterday my young niece & her new husband took me up the river (the Pearl) in their boat. This inland town now has a reservoir & you can get away up this feeding river, where you could never go before. It’s all serpentine & brown.—Big cypresses & forest oaks—untracked sandbars—red-winged blackbirds, woodpeckers, & an owl & probably countless other birds you or Margaret would have seen but I didn’t—I love the sign that I guess is in all marinas? “Leave No Wake”—You can’t imagine how odd a boat is in Jackson.
I think of you & send love with my book. When you do sometime write me about it I’ll be so glad to know but think of me as patient meantime—
Love,
Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, April 24, 1972
Dear Eudora:
The Optimist’s Daughter came, and I read it over the weekend. It’s a marvellous piece of writing, with so much in so little space—whole families of characters, whole ranges of experience. It seemed to me that towards the end particularly, you got into quite new territory, even for you. The whole business of the mother and the “other place,” under the threat of the trapped bird, and then the confluences opening out, filled me with joy. I felt as though I had been allowed somehow to leave a fingerprint in your enduring clay. That’s too static an image. To see you flying like an entrapped bird through a house of symbols * and a community of voices. You really do fly in this one.
* A symbol is always a part of that which it symbolizes.—S. T. Coleridge
My own book, the only similarity between which and yours is that the daughter figure is named Laurel, is getting close to the end of the first draft and at least I’m past the stage where I know I can’t finish it. The white-crowned sparrows are leaving. The great horned owl, the large female, flew by just after dark, which we think is good luck. Margaret is in fine shape, working slowly and bicycling a good deal. We feel again lucky to be alive.
Love, Ken
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, April 30, 1972
Dear Ken,
Your letter brought me joy—The Optimist’s Daughter is closer to me by far than anything I ever before tried to write, and I expect it is different—All the part about West Virginia is true fact—That’s my mother and her mother and father, brothers, the place, all, and Laurel in West Virginia is me, just coming to, at the age of you in British Columbia, perhaps. Baltimore is true. The dedication is to my mother. So I am glad that the story you came to put your touch on was this one—It was part of the confluence, wasn’t it? And isn’t it? You had called it up and so gave me the key image, the symbol that was a part of its own meaning. It was right—you know it was right, but the stronger thing was it was only after time had passed—three months, or four—that I recognized this as also a part of my story. The story already existed, had been printed a year ago (New Yorker) and I was revisiting it for the book, when I saw it belonged and saw where—It was like the gong, you know, giving another reverberation. So I’ve wanted so much for you to read it to know what you thought of the story—while knowing you were at work on a first draft and just bringing it to an end, which is hard at the best of times, and hesitating more because I didn’t want the subject of it, coming now, to give you pain, or Margaret pain. But of course I know that comes out of life itself, not the story—Thank you for your understanding in reading it right away as you did, and for your letter, which I cherish. And for the Coleridge—The fingerprint is of course unlike that of anyone else—ever. As for the clay, who can say about what may last and what will be ephemeral in stories we write, but the feeling that made them, if it travels at all, has a life of its own for a while before it’s gone, don’t you think? Long or short doesn’t matter so much as if it lives at all.
It didn’t really surprise me to know about your Laurel—I hope the draft is finished now and you can feel good about it—I’m glad Margaret is feeling again like working too. The great horned owl comes in the right hour every evening, I hope, bringing good luck to the house—Will you get your trip any time soon? My best to Margaret—I’m really so happy to know you think as you do about my book. No matter what happens to it now out in the world, I will feel it’s all right and safe—
Love,
Eudora
The “key image, the symbol” credited to Ken had surfaced in Eudora’s memory almost a year earlier when she wrote to him, and he had subsequently asked her to use this very memory in fiction. Now she had. As The Optimist’s Daughter draws toward its close, protagonist Laurel Hand dreams of the train journey she and her late husband, Philip, had shared from Chicago to Mississippi en route to their wedding. In this dream Laurel recalls the moment on a high railroad bridge when she and Phil “were looking down from a great elevation” and could see the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers “moving into one” even as the trees along the shore seemed to converge on the horizon and the birds above flew in a V-shape:
All they could see was sky, water, birds, light, and confluence. It was the whole morning world.
And they themselves were a part of the confluence.10
For Laurel, this dream embodies the continuity wrought by love, the living nature of memory itself, and the confluence of lives that her husband’s death has not ended, a confluence as powerful to her as that of two mighty rivers. For Eudora, creating this passage, as Ken had suggested she should, also marked the ongoing confluence of her life with his.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, May 31, 1972
Dear Eudora:
It’s time I acknowledged your lovely letter, which I’ve had for nearly a month. The month has gone by like a dream while I got my ms ready for the typist and started feeding it to her, madly rewriting as we go. I haven’t the faintest notion how it might look to someone else, but at least it’s getting finished. In the evenings Margaret and I have taken up bicycling regularly, up and down the hills of Hope Ranch where we live; at least I’ve taken it up, she’s been doing it for years. We seem to have turned a corner in our lives, away from the past to the future, or is it the present? The present is probably best—it’s the time of the world of nature whose outskirts we live on. There are quail all over the place these days, vociferously organizing, hawks in the air, and vultures—five vultures at once yesterday, circling tipsily over the house—a good omen in my book.
Jim and his father have been coming every weekend, and they’ve taken great steps together in the past year. “My dad” is the phrase most often on Jim’s lips; he is determined to be an all-round boy, and indeed it seems to come easily to him. Important as our friendships and other relationships are—perhaps I should except the relationship of love—these family comings-together seem to be the essential ones in life. As your new book says, I
think. It’s been interesting to watch the reactions of other minds to The Optimist’s Daughter. Your book is being read with understanding. Of course it’s done with exquisite clarity. But its subject—one of its subjects—the pain and the possibility of growth—is not too common in American letters. Pain is so much regarded as merely terminal. It was sweet of you to be afraid that your book might hurt us, as if anything originating with you could. We have learned to live with the fact of death. What other way is there to live? I’m so glad that the Other Place actually was your mother’s, and can imagine the shivering delight you took in feeling your way back through time almost to the verge of consciousness, and then in a way beyond it into your mother’s childhood world.
We didn’t take our trip after all. I wanted to stay with the book—my motto is “if you stay with the work it will stay with you”—and the biking evenings have been a perfect substitute. Maybe later in the year. Meanwhile we travel a good deal in Hope Ranch. (Did you know that our Santa Barbara Christmas bird count was second in the country to Freeport, Texas?)
This is a year of great fulfillment for you—enjoy it, dear Eudora. (We enjoy it with you.)
Love,
Ken
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, June 10, 1972
Dear Ken,
Your novel’s with the typist—hooray! I’ve been gone three weeks and my mail came out in a sack, and when I untied it and reached in to pull out the first letter, it was yours, with this good news. I hope when you see it all typed out it will seem in every way good to your eyes, or just ready to be, while you’ve got your pencil. I don’t see how it could be other than pure excellence. Of course I want to read it so soon as I ever get a chance. Walter Clemons and I were both outdone at that interviewer from Esquire who had the nerve to come to see you after having read only three of your books.11 “And not even The Underground Man—can you imagine?” Walter said. “He ought to be consigned to Infamy where he belongs.” It was nice to read things you’d said, nevertheless, even though it must have been like talking into a vacuum, with a man who couldn’t follow up anything you’d said or go on to any connecting point. It was nice to see the picture—and to see that Jimmy looks so exactly what he sounded like from your letters, a beautiful and manly little boy, and if ever there was a picture of a boy growing tall while you’re looking at him, this is it.—I know Walter was thinking how good an interview you and he could have had together. (I wish Newsweek could do it twice, then Walter would get his turn.) (He will manage it some day.)
Thank you for watching out for my reviews, and for being happy for me at the good ones. It always seems such a miracle to find your book has met with understanding after all, and well I know I am blessed, with reviewers who have the rare qualities of Walter and Howard Moss and—do you see The New Republic?—James Boatwright.12 It makes me wish, not for the first time, that you could have had through all these years and books the same understanding. You haven’t had at all, and still can be glad when it comes the way of others.
New York was lovely—a number of my old friends were there at the same time, and I felt in the middle of my favorite people the day I went to get my medal. I thought of you when the grey-eyed goddess appeared in her white silk pants suit—just as you said. It was gallant and wonderful of her to come, and she was having the time of her life then at the party. With that white pants suit she wears quite a good deal of emeralds. In glory, really.
June 14—This didn’t get finished, and I’m glad because I get to add onto it after your second letter came today—with Jim Boatwright’s review in it, the very one I wanted you to see! Thank you for such kind thoughts about my book—you are right, of course, and I feel how wonderfully they have each contributed some vital thing to what has been said about it—It’s astonishing.
As it happened, I just met Jim Boatwright—who is just as nice a man as he could be—I came home by way of Virginia, and he & Reynolds Price and I had a weekend in the Blue Ridge around Lexington—A heavenly part of the world, but having just come out of those mountains I am staggered by your account of those bicycle rides up & down yours. One more feat you can do probably better than anybody else, except I hear Margaret’s bell ringing merrily along beside yours. How does the typed job look? Tell me some day. How soon before we get to read it? Luck and love from Eudora
P.S. Goldenrod is here—I want to read it soon—
P.P.S. I’m so glad you like Henry G.! The Concluding passage I love most is about the starlings at evening (the night of the dance).
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, July 22, 1972
Dear Eudora:
It was wonderfully generous and thoughtful of you to send me Reynolds Price’s volume of essays [Things Themselves (1972)]—which I am enjoying—and a double stroke of friendship to send it to me via Price himself. He enclosed a moving letter which quite astonished me. All three of us seem to live very much in feeling—the only way to live. The Optimist’s Daughter has sent me back again to your early stories. I love them all but this time was particularly struck by “Death of a Travelling Salesman.” Daughter is not your first deeply dreamed meditation on death. The enclosed piece by Alan Pryce-Jones from TLS, by the way, doesn’t say very much but what it does may be of interest to you.13
I seem to be approaching the end of the rewriting of my new book (Sleeping Beauty?), having never worked harder in my life, I’m happy to say. I think it has turned out okay, at least it’s a little different; will be eager to know what you think of it. It’s rather fun to come up out of a book and look around and see the world again. It looks pretty good. M. and I have taken to bicycling in the evenings between dinner and sundown, a fine way to end the day, and we know all the dogs and most of the birds within five miles of here. From the hills we climb, on a clear evening, we can see the channel islands twenty-five miles offshore gleaming in the late sunlight like a legendary country. For the first time in years I feel like visiting the islands again. I had a chance to go to Africa with a group next week, but turned it down. My typist is going, though (“And as for living, our servants will do that for us”) which is one reason I’ve had to get the book rapidly under control: nobody else but Alice can read my writing, or so they tell me.
I should explain that Alice is not a “servant”—I just couldn’t resist the quotation—but a friend of long standing who does this typing primarily because she wants to. And how can she afford to go to Africa? Well, one of her daughters inherited a small fortune from an aunt, Alice’s sister, and later the daughter married a wealthy young man. She thereupon gave her mother $100,000! This will come in handy not only for trips to Africa, since Alice and her husband George are approaching the age of retirement.
I thought a year or two ago that I might be approaching that age myself, but things have changed—you being one of the powerful changers both by precept and example (your recent book was a notable action as well as a notable book, and has been widely recognized in that light); and now I think my life will go on in full spate until it stops.
I wish the same for you. I wish you renewal again, and am sure it will come.
Love,
Ken
P.S.—Got more Henry Green from England—Party Going and Living!
Do you like Ivy Compton-Burnett? K
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, August 6, 1972
Dear Ken,
Thank you for that letter—everything was such good news. It’s so cheering to know you feel really fine again—for keeps, too, is the feeling I get from your letter. I’m admiring and glad and believe very much in all that lies ahead for you—as I’m sure you know. It’s grand news about the book being really done and those few quiet things you’ve remarked about it, when put together, make me even more anxious to see it than I would have been anyway. Now I’ve been told the title—with a ?—so I’ve possibly read two words of it. “Sleeping Beauty” sounds full of good omen—Many wishes for it, clear through—
It did please me to know you had received Reyno
lds’ new book and were reading it with such interest—You wrote him a wonderful letter—he told me how happy & excited it made him. There are certain ways of feeling that join us all, I think you’re right, and certain themes, too. I don’t always agree with Reynolds, which is immaterial, but I am so for him in this book as in all of his. But my understanding of a writer still comes to me best through the stories he writes—comes fullest.
The Xerox* I made you is out of an old Paris Review I tracked down—I thought you might be interested or amused by some things in it. And also I find I have two copies of Caught so I’m giving you one, in case you have a wish to read it—it’s the war. So is Back, but Caught is the Fire Service one.
Did I tell you I know Henry a little? Back in the 50’s in London, I met him at a party—well, it was a party for his book that was out that day—Nothing—so that would be the year. Then I saw him after that a little and like him so much. I’m telling you so I can explain how I know one more thing connects up: he loved more than anything, he told me at length, coming upon the person, the family conversation, the story, that is a link—that fills in the long connection with the past that’s missing (personal past always, I believe I’m right)—He wanted really to touch the person who’d touched the person who’d touched—who’d spoken & listened & knew. “The only thing is,” he said, “when you find that person, they don’t remember the right thing, do they ever? The very thing you’ve waited panting to ask”—Well, that’s the fate of life, often but not always, that books can improve on. Yours in particular.