Meanwhile There Are Letters

by Suzanne Marrs

  Thank you for the TLS article, which I never would have seen—It was nice to have the notice in an English paper, and maybe it’s the very thing that helped decide a publisher over there to take on Optimist—I used to be always published over there but nobody wanted Losing Battles.

  “Death of a Travelling Salesman” was my first story—I’m pleased to know it stands up for you—I wrote it when I heard a travelling salesman tell about “borrowing fire”—it was what it took to make me see the whole thing, and when I think of the story now it’s in those words.

  —The loudest whirr—I wondered if some helicopter was trying to land in my yard—It was a cicada (? A “locust” is what we say here) caught by a cardinal, and making that noise non-stop, like a stuck car horn—The cardinal had him on the ground while his mate looked on from a branch right overhead. The locust as big as a mouse! But the cardinal got away with him, (solo—didn’t give any away) though he must have finished up deaf, as well as fat.

  Some other things I wanted to say but now they have to wait till next time—I’m deaf!

  That was a lovely story about your typist.

  Thank you for all in your letter and the wishes for me. Mine to you. My best to Margaret too, and love,

  Eudora

  I kept thinking how you hated that fire up north of you.

  *Couldn’t find an envelope—I’ll mail tomorrow. It’s an interview with Henry Green.

  I got Bill Smith’s books back safely—I meant to tell you—Thanks—

  Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, August 8, 1972

  Dear Eudora:

  I can’t think of anything I’d rather have than, at your hands, a copy of a Henry Green novel I haven’t read. I haven’t read Caught.—I’ve had the enclosed book here for several months waiting to be sent to you but I wanted Hank Coulette to write in it and he has been in Europe, in Paris where his father was born and graduated from the Conservatory before he (père) emigrated to the States, and in Warsaw and Krakow where he (Henri) read at the universities under the sponsorship of Zbigniew Herbert, who is quoted on the back of the jacket. Donald Justice, who is quoted on the inside flap, says there are three writers whose books he watches for in the bookshops—I’m not making this up!—Agatha Christie, Eudora Welty, and me. I’m naturally pleased that The Optimist’s Daughter is being published in England, but rather shocked that Losing Battles wasn’t, or hasn’t yet been. I think it’s a wonderful book, and so would a lot of Englishmen—a book I expect to reread and reread. I’m so glad you intend to go on writing—you have to as long as you keep improving. You give the impression of being able to glide effortlessly at this level until you’re a hundred. Which I hope you do.

  Two days ago a prof. of math named Paco Lagerstrom rushed up to me on the beach and announced that he had seen a condor circling high over the Biltmore Hotel, where he was staying (the man not the bird.) Well, it turned out to be a Magnificent Frigate Bird, actually rarer than a condor on this coast though common enough, as you know, on the Gulf. It was the second Frigate Bird seen here in recent years. I missed this one. But yesterday a Caspian tern went by.

  Maggie and I are doing a lot of biking in the evenings, did I tell you?—close to a thousand miles in the last three months, between dinner and dark. We both feel good. The days float by very quickly now that I’m not working, just catching up with my friends. Tomorrow I have lunch with William Eastlake and W.H. Ferry, who have been active in the anti-war movement. Today Hank Coulette was in town, and I asked him if the poem on page 43 was not the origination poem of the Goldschmitt volume, and he said it was, with those that follow. I hope you like them. If you do, I’ll send you his long poem about Paris during the war.

  Thank you so much for your dear letter. Love, Ken

  Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, September 15, 1972

  Dear Ken,

  I was delighted when the copy of The Family Goldschmitt arrived from you, and autographed too by Henri Coulette, and since then I’ve read the poems two or three times around—with increasing pleasure. They are new to me, though Mr. Coulette’s name I’ve known through you and others, and I find them full of refreshment and funny a lot of the time, while certainly giving pause. Vigor & wit branching out all over. I may not understand them all rightly, or yet, but I am not through reading them yet. I feel very much pleased to have a chance at meeting a poet and friend whom you think so much of. The little incidental things that amuse me—one is the poem about the concierge at the Hotel des [Saints] Pères. In addition I admired it for a personal reason—I know it’s the same Madame who was the galvanizing presence when I stayed there for a couple of months [in 1949] introducing myself to Paris, same way. —I felt a pretty sharp summons from her out of that poem. Her eyes were like ice cubes, real life came back, like her following glance clear out of the poem. It was a sense of the inscrutability & defiance in all taken-for granted things, like our own skins, our left hands, doors—that pleased me most. Thank you for sending it to me—I treasure it. Thank Henri Coulette for signing it, too.

  I’m afraid this sounds inadequate because I’m writing in a house full of banging and footsteps on the ceiling & stairs, and in a sifting of plaster dust and just dust—getting the whole house sheetrocked. How do you best the cracks that must appear out of earthquakes? We live on shifting clay right on top of a salt dome, so I’ve read—anyway, we slowly crack—it takes about 3 years not 3 seconds. (I’m talking about houses, not people!) So finally I’m getting this done in the hope it’ll stave off some of it—Anyway, I hole in, in this room or that, leading a very odd displaced life, & reading in the daytime, which to me seems dissolute. Have you read Julian Huxley’s From an Antique Land?14 I never had before—it’s got wonderful things in it. When a strange bird comes out, I think of the Millars. For instance, in the Colonnade of Palmyra, out came a covey of sandgrouse. He describes how they adapt to the desert—“The adults gather each evening to drink at the nearest oasis maybe many miles from the nest; after satisfying their own thirst, they wet their breasts thoroughly and fly back to let their young suck the moisture from the damp feathers.” He heard a Great Tit in Petra.

  Are you still cycling every evening, & far & farther? When is the book? I feel so anxious to see it—& wish all the good things for it. Early in the fall?

  Mr. Bruccoli’s book finally got here—I ordered it a long time ago—it was your name that jumped out of the page (as did the lines from The Galton Case at the head of a chapter in Hoax), in the quote you gave it.15 Shall read soon. And I missed your review of Goldenrod, I don’t always receive my Book Review—which I’d like to find. I did enjoy the novel—from that belt-buckle the size of a postcard, I began to see his virtues. The children were the best things in it, to me. I sometimes wished his hero could think better—(I know I speak as an author pretty prone to nitwit heroes.) But strength and a feeling of & for the physical world were there, & unfailing. Central. Are they making the movie? And what of the movie of The Underground Man? Are you content about it?

  (Big bang.)

  The long dry spell we’ve had for two months just never lets up—I keep the sprinklers going and this is nice because of all the tiny birds I might not see otherwise—I’ve seen—I think, but I just have a book to go by—parula warblers—& I know the kinglets & chickadees & gnatcatchers—In the magic early hours before the workmen get here, I sit by the window drinking my coffee & watch them play in the water.

  About that condor you were hearing of—do you remember?

  A condor who couldn’t call quits

  Was giving the bird-watchers fits—

  Simply besotted

  With being spotted,

  He booked himself in at the Ritz.

  (I had to change his reservation from the Biltmore, couldn’t rhyme it.)

  Forgive the poor letter that comes late to answer your fine ones. I’ll write when all is straight in the house again. But it’s nice to learn the terms of these sheet-rockers—“I’ve just got to float out a
few little seams”—

  Happy coming-out to your Sleeping Beauty, and love,

  Eudora

  Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, September 18, 1972

  Dear Eudora:

  A condor who started to tilt more

  And more said: “I can’t stand this guilt more.

  (This weird existential guilt more.)

  I’m retiring from soaring

  And, though it is boring,

  Shall live out my days at the Biltmore.”

  But as I think I may have mentioned, it turned out to be a Magnificent Frigate Bird. (We didn’t see it, but once saw one on Padre Island—a truly magnificent bird said to be over seven feet in wingspread which is almost comparable with the wingspread of the condor. A condor was seen in town a few days later, soaring over the Old Mission, so we feel ever so slightly in touch with the primitive still. We’re in the habit of calling him our canary in the mine.) We haven’t really begun the season’s birding, which comes to a climax in the Christmas Count in which last year S.B. placed second in the U.S.A. in the number of species sighted. I don’t mean to boast—sometimes I think bird-watching is this city’s major activity, and there are over 750 members in the local Audubon Society. And a lot more birds than that—I think some 340 or 350 species year-round.

  Your response to Henri Coulette’s book of poems was wonderfully generous, and Hank will be just as pleased with it as I am, and with the fact that you and he apparently had the same concierge in Paris. Hank has a difficult life preserving his sensibility and humor while teaching under the somewhat regimented conditions of a giant education factory which is, however, his own alma mater. After his father’s death he went to work as a printer’s devil in his early teens, missed high school entirely (claiming to be the only Ph.D. in the U.S.A. who never went to high school) but wangled his way into Cal State L.A. and took his doctorate at Iowa with a volume of poems. I’ll send you his first volume, which contains one of the best longer poems written in this country since (and about) the war. Hank comes here for the summer, which is how I happen to know him well.

  I’m glad you thought reasonably well of Herb Harker’s book. Herb suffered the even greater deprivation of never getting to college. He turned up in his early thirties, some fifteen years ago, at my adult education writing class and while I can take small credit for his achievement—he’s a natural—I’m very happy about it. His book is doing well enough to support him while he writes his next (he wrote Goldenrod while supporting himself as a draftsman) and there are movie offers, though none nailed down. After growing up in a society—Alberta, which I know—where literary arts are not valued, now his whole life has changed.

  I’ve been meaning for some time to ask you a question, and your warm interest in Sleeping Beauty has encouraged me to come to the point. I’d like to dedicate the book to you. Would you object? We haven’t known each other terribly long, but we know each other well, do we not, and if I have to wait to a later book my writing may fall off in the meantime. I hope it hasn’t already. Being in touch with you this past year or so has been an inspiration to me. I hope you will take the risk of letting me put your name on the dedication page.

  The book won’t be out until April or May of next year. I just sent in my corrections last week or so. My editor, Ashbel Green, recently sent me your Washington Post interview which I thought was absolutely splendid, moving and true.16 I hope you were pleased with it. I’m also very glad to learn that you are bringing out your Lectures. A man who lives down the road from me, former professor of U. of Minnesota who retired to write—his name is Ted Clymer—Ted Clymer told me he heard you lecture at the annual meeting one year of the National Council of Teachers of English, and you held the vast audience spellbound.

  Caught is terribly good, so good that I’m saving it to read all at once like a poem. Love, Ken

  P.S.—Liked Hoax, too. Have you seen The Santa Claus Bank Robbery? (1920’s Texas)17

  Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, October 2, 1972

  Dear Ken,

  Your letter has made me happy, proud, elated, and so moved by your generous act of friendship—I feel you must know it, but I was so late with telling you! You did get my wire, I hope—I’d had to go to Washington to a meeting, then I stole a few extra days in New York (I cast a careful look around the lobby & dining room of the Algonquin, thinking, then, it might be time for you to come in about your book) and had got back just at dark to my house torn up by the workmen who’re doing a month’s job on it—no lights in the front part, and wires and telephone cords and drop cloths in the hall, just a path between sheeted furniture—then back in the breakfast room there was a light that went on and under it on the table a little heap of mail with your letter, and after the excitement of reading it I saw it was ten days old—you must have wondered why in the world I hadn’t answered. So I made my way out again & went downtown & sent the wire, though they wouldn’t accept it for delivery that night. On the way home I remembered the other time I got in from N.Y. to find a days-old telegram under the door from John Leonard asking if I’d review The Underground Man, and how I’d gone out again that night too to send him a wire, and so afraid I’d be too late and he’d let somebody else have it. I wish I could tell you how much I value and cherish the dedication of your novel. You would have to already know and I trust my feeling that you do. And I am so anxious to get a look at the book. You will manage me a chance for that when you can, won’t you? The one thing I know about it, aside from the name, is that it’s good. You do know you can’t write any other way. Never can.

  I saw Walter Clemons in N.Y.—he’s bought himself a nice old brownstone directly across the East River from his office, in Long Island City, and fixed it up with a vacant lot behind it transformed into a garden & patio, and is as happy as can be. The only thing still to come is his piano—did you know that Walter is a first rate jazz pianist and once made his living in a nightclub?

  I loved your Biltmore lines—I’ll write you again and answer the rest of yours before long—If this has sounded not too coherent, it was from my joy about Sleeping Beauty. But that will go on.

  Love and gratitude,

  Eudora

  Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, October 2, 1972

  Dear Eudora:

  I was so happy to get your wire—it was good of you to wire—and am greatly looking forward to ornamenting my book, such as it is, with your name. Everything you do is done with such generosity of feeling, the value of occasions is doubled and redoubled. For me this is a great occasion. I wish I could provide a great book to go with it. But we do what we can.

  It’s just been raining lightly for an hour or so, the first real rain we’ve had in the last eight months, and though it’s stopped now I hope it’s an earnest of what’s to come. Our drought has been the worst here in a hundred years, and we’ve had to overdraw on our water supplies. There’s only one possible advantage in this, that it may slow down the influx of population which has been the ruination of so much of California. I hope I’m not anti-human but I’d rather look at a flock of birds than a flock of people. This has been a great season for terns, by the way, with five or six species fishing in the channel for the past month. And have I mentioned that the pelicans are reinstating themselves here after near-extinction—flying in from Baja California? I see them every day when I go down to the beach. They’ve hatched a few young here, too, since the DDT ban.—I’ve been reading Hawthorne chronologically, with respect bordering on awe; it’s like watching the (or a) American soul being created before one’s eyes, taking us from the frontiers to the brink of Henry James. Love, Ken

  Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, October 10, 1972

  Dear Eudora:

  I dreamt of you last night and this morning on the wings of the dream I went down to the P.O. and got off to you a typescript of Sleeping Beauty. It’s actually a Xerox of the original typescript before it was fully corrected and I included with it some carbons of later corrections which you can
disregard or not as you choose. I don’t know what you will think of the book but it has honest work in it, and some of the things that concern me. I’ve been creeping up for some time on that avgas spill, which actually occurred on the ship I was on off Okinawa, and I still don’t know for sure how it happened or who was responsible.

  My sleeping dream was happier than my waking dream. I dreamt that I was visiting you in your house which seemed to be undergoing renovative construction as indeed you told me it had been. A good deal of bicycling also went on. There was a social gathering, and you fed us with the help of a black mammy. (I’d been looking at your photographs recently.) The only dialogue I recall was from me to you. I said: “You make me happy.” I say it waking, too. Love, Ken

  Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, October 12, 1972

  Dear Ken,

  To let you know the manuscript came, safely, and it’s just wonderful of you to have sent me this early look—an answer to a wish is what it is. I am so happy about it, and now with it, right here on my table. I’ll be in it, happily and on the instant—I just wanted you to know it was here, and I’ll take care of it and get it back to you—you really were doing an angelic thing when you did this, more than you know, with a timing that makes a great difference—I’ll write you after I’ve had the joy of reading—Thank you—Love to Margaret and the Santa Barbara birds too. And thank you for your letter—Love,