Meanwhile There Are Letters
Page 12
Eudora
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, October 15, 1972
Dear Ken,
You’ve made something unique, and all so quietly—I wish I could tell you how much I love and admire it—You said it was different, and it is, but it seems to me more of a continuation, in the natural logic of your writing, a pushing further of what you always knew how to do. This has been a wider fling of the net—you’ve caught together (& shown they belong together) not only families but powers—which are a family too—and that felt pattern—felt already on page 35—it’s extraordinary work—is going to make all one, every component part, connected as only you know how to do, but this time the connections will bring together & relate not only human beings, but those stronger, older giants—greed & fire & waste & hurt & killing—all kin. And your story, with its delicate sure threads, holds the double thing together, holds idea & act & meaning in one—with mystery kept central, at the heart, where it belongs—the urgent meaning of a human life or a death, that needs to be found out—“It’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?” Lampson says. You could say it’s another part of the forest, but your same vision, so unmistakably your own, is turned on it wide & clear & full—That’s what matters, what makes it. The novel has so much authority and force from your long thought and feeling—there isn’t anything in it that doesn’t speak its meaning. It’s very beautiful. I felt constantly moved by it. I read it straight through, twice, on two days. The admiration I feel for the making of it is more, even, than I’ve felt for all the other novels you’ve done. I’m glad you sent it in the manuscript form, those pages brought what you were doing even closer to another worker. I have always thought so much of the carefulness, caringness, of your writing, its particularity and evocation (I can’t think of a word now that ought to say it better) and this time it made new ways for work, I felt. The way the scenes are lit is just wonderful—the lonely scenes & the crowded ones—the shadows so there with those walking. There’s the sense of the world as a world—a planet—and of the cliff-edge of the world—and the end of the world—and the campfires & caves & shelters & way-station along the edge of it—people only waiting—All the fires—each isolated seemingly at first, but all one, another family—and the violence breaking out in sparks like the fires again, only banked up in time. All black & white, the color going to ash. It’s all this set against human vulnerability—in the helplessness and beauty of the girl Laurel. And not the least of the book’s real daring is your keeping her from view, and always in the mind, in her danger, until the very last page—a page so moving, and so like magic—with the fall onto those black rocks at last, & the smoke coming swirling, and the kiss and the sleeping beauty found alive, beginning to stir—and all brought about through, not magic after all, but Archer’s knowing—work & faith, in the end. Archer is the best he’s ever been, in this one.
It seems to me that in writing directly of themes that engage you, have engaged you, so closely, you’ve found material of quite marvelous possibilities, in your hands—in which your story’s particular realities and its images & symbols are all but identical—you made them so—the spills, the fires, the endless city, the lights—And the birds—The birds moving through it are very beautiful and not for decoration but to express what’s important to you, to the novel—Just by being, they’re the advocates of the other side. One source of the novel’s fascination is the constant sense of opposites you keep up—the opposite of all the dreadful things happening in the living and fleeting presence of beauty—the birds. It makes us always aware of the vulnerable heart still alive in the world and in danger—which is what your book is about. They were marvelously entered into the shooting scene. And there’s that sentence, “As if to preserve some kind of natural balance which required live things to be in the air at all times—” It brings tears to my eyes again just to repeat it. Nobody else at all could ever have written that. Sentence by sentence, all of it, the story’s intertwining situations, seem to reflect the overarching truth of what we’re doing to life in the world, & what we’re failing to do for one another. The characters are shadow-casters, there at their fires—
It’s a deeply moral book, and you’ve made every aspect of that visible, dramatic, and haunting. Sometimes I was put in mind of the passionate & mysterious lithographs of Goya, made out of his time. Handling these personally meaningful things could not have been easy. (So terrible about Okinawa—) But you’ve been able to make them parts, rightly related parts, of a piece of work that has goodness—a beautiful piece of work, unique, and signifying a great deal.
I was glad to hear about that dream. The dialogue turned things around a little—you’re giving happiness, Ken. I was happy to have the book come on the strength of the dream. I think it was on the strength of knowledge, too—that I couldn’t have waited till spring to read Sleeping Beauty. I am so filled with joy and pride to have my name on that page—
And how lovely to come on those names and things I knew—not only Laurel, which you’d told me about—Permanent Errors!—
If you and Margaret had headed this way when you started riding in the evenings, & just kept coming, you could have been here by now—I’d thought of that. When the house is fixed, come really.
Love and wishes, and all good things to you—& to your beautiful book—Eudora
I’ll send back the ms. soon—it was so generous of you to send it.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, October 23, 1972
Dear Eudora:
What a wonderfully generous response you made to me and my book. I abandoned myself to indulgence and simply sat and read your letter over several times with tears in my eyes. It was one of the great moments of my life. Thank you particularly for mentioning Goya, whose work I so love—just to be mentioned with him, however undeservedly, is thrilling. But apart from matters of relative excellence—and of course I know I don’t belong at Goya’s end of the scale—it’s so very satisfying to have a dear friend and good artist discover some validity in my attempt to make something striking and true out of the popular art and common tragedies of this time. And without ever mentioning Vietnam, the book is somewhat about it. Our destruction of Okinawa, while militarily necessary, I suppose, was the prelude and preparation for Vietnam. I must add, by the way, that while our carrier had a gasoline spill during that battle, the ship did not blow up, so I wasn’t writing directly about personal suffering. The present suffering, by which I am physically unthreatened, is (morally) worse. And it had its roots in the loss of virtue which gradually occurred among our fighting men, and society, during the long last war—the transition from a tradition of service to one of bureaucratic careerism out of touch with humane standards, the application of a business ethic to matters of life and death. I hope some of these things cast a shadow across my book.
About the title, “Sleeping Beauty,” I have a young reader currently in France—he’s the son of the poet Donald Davie—who writes that it’s “not your style” (Patrick Davie is only 13 or 14) but it was validated for me by Henry Green’s use of the phrase on p. 198 of Party Giving: “. . . as though it was her part she had to play to evoke good times, alone, on top of this ivory tower with his dreaming world beneath, sleeping beauty, all of them folded so she imagined into their thoughts of him.” I mean the use of the phrase as a generalized abstract noun. Well, the beauty is sleeping indeed but your sweet and penetrating thoughts, Eudora, awaken her continually, indeed become her.
This past week I made copy-editing corrections, and people keep coming from the east and/or the past, tomorrow the daughter of an old Ann Arbor friend, Allegra Branson, daughter of H.C. Branson whose John Bent detective stories you undoubtedly remember; Hank later did a Civil War novel, Salisbury Plain, which is impressive in its Stendhalian way, but I prefer his detective stories, especially The Leaden Bubble.18 I hope to see the elder Bransons in a few weeks when I go to Ann Arbor to receive what they call a “distinguished achievement award” from the university—these are aw
ards voted annually by the various faculties, did I tell you? I don’t much look forward to the public occasion but can’t duck it, either—I suppose we have to accept the circularity of our lives, when the spirit ascends and also when it descends. Hank Branson was well-known before I had written a book, and was, after Margaret, the first mystery writer I knew in the flesh. He came to our house one night, he and M. having simultaneously published books, and knocked on the door and announced himself. We were also friends for several years, but I haven’t seen him at all in nearly twenty. There’s a lot to be said for living in one place as you have.
Yes, I would like to visit you at home some day, as my dream undoubtedly said—I was probably envious of your Washington Post interview: what a lovely interview that was. It’s very difficult for Margaret and me to make travel plans, since we don’t travel easily, separately or together, but I’m sure some day I’ll get within distance of Jackson. I’ve got to see that new sheeting on your home. May it protect you from all harm.
Love,
Ken
P.S.—Glad you liked the Permanent Errors mention.—The ms got back safely, very fast. Thank you.
K.
Clearly, Ken’s novel Sleeping Beauty was a tribute to Eudora that extended beyond its dedication. His character Laurel, so patently based upon his daughter Linda, had by coincidence or confluence the very name Eudora had given the title character in The Optimist’s Daughter. In Sleeping Beauty, Lew Archer searches the room of Laurel, who has gone missing: “The only personal thing I found,” he records, “was a letter folded into a book of stories entitled Permanent Errors.” Permanent Errors, the book Reynolds Price had dedicated to Eudora, now appeared in the book Ken had dedicated to her.
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, November 19, 1972
Dear Ken,
I’ve been carrying your letter around in my purse, thinking I could answer it in my car, but it didn’t do—but now the painters are out of my house after 6 weeks! And privacy is back, and I can get to my typewriter. As I’ve thought about your book, it’s seemed to me the whole of it might rest on the one image—Archer’s wish that he could throw the gun and send it cartwheeling over all their heads and over the edge of the world (forgive me if I don’t say it right). And just as surely as the oil surges in on the tide and up onto the beaches, and just as surely as all the fires in the story are brought into relationship, the filth and the fires of all war are implied and say Vietnam, though you leave it unspoken. The intensity of the scenes has a moral source, and a moral strength. (This was what made me think of Goya.) I think all this time you’ve been taking a popular form and making it something entirely of your own, and in Sleeping Beauty to the highest degree yet. It’s not new country for you because it’s been there all the time (or so it seems to me) but is more openly revealed around us—and explored for us as Archer detects. I may be speaking clumsily of something that’s been so delicately achieved. “The dangerous lair of the past” is there, as in the other novels, but this time the danger shows itself in its high blaze and its long shadows as never before, and you’ve given it its full implications. The title as looked back on after the story ends is responsive to all that too, and I think from the first we know it to be as you meant it, an abstract noun.—I was delighted to be told that one of the threads of your book led back to Henry Green—there are many threads in it leading back to things I cherish but most of all I cherish the book itself. My gratitude and pride in the dedication are things I think of every day.
I hope the unusual rains you spoke of haven’t made threats on Santa Barbara the way they’ve done—carried out—on Big Sur. And I hope your trip to Ann Arbor to get honored didn’t happen right in the middle of their bad weather. Good for them to vote you the distinguished achievement award—they ought to do it every year. Only I suppose you would have to make a speech every year then.
My brother Walter, by the way, was at the U. of Michigan getting his M.A. probably when you were there (he was born the same year as you, if your book jacket knows, 6 years younger than me), and he was at Okinawa when you were too—communications officer on a mine sweeper. I was glad to know the carrier you were on did not blow up—as it might have so easily.
You looked on the Washington Post piece very kindly, and I’m glad you thought I passed—to me it was like being given an exam, any interview is, but an exam in a nightmare when you have to answer true-and-false and multiple-choice questions on a subject you have forgotten to bone up on—sounds absurd, I won’t try to say more. Henry Mitchell, though, is an engaging and congenial soul, comes from Memphis, where he used to work on the Commercial Appeal as TV critic on weekdays and garden page editor on Sundays, and I’d already met him once. He has a good wild streak, and we talked about everything in the world, and he didn’t take any notes—I was glad—so I think maybe some of the things he put in Henry said. I talked about you but that wasn’t in there. I mailed you a copy of the Southern Review the other day, which has an interview with me in it too—this was a sober schoolteacher with a tape recorder, and if I didn’t flunk that one it was because I corrected the paper myself. I don’t know what may have come through. Faulkner’s thing in the Meriwether article is quite moving, don’t you think?19
We’re having our first cold days now, and it’s frantic behavior out there at the bird feeder. The white-throated sparrow sings these days. The trees are still in leaf and this year we have some bright color (hickory sweet-gum dogwood maple oak)—often we don’t have, it’s more like a faded tapestry. I would eat lunch in my car near a beautiful ginko tree that was so bright even its shadow on a white wall looked radiant. By the way, did I tell you that Jackson has a zebra-striped Volkswagon camper? I see it every day on the way to the grocery—property of some young people who have moved into a house that was lived in for years by a Professor Pitard, old French violin teacher and leader of the 3-pc. Orchestra that played in silent movie days. (I can imagine how they would accompany the tearing about of that zebra.) They must have copied your book.20
The house will be steadier now, I hope, with the sheetrock in, and now if 7 maids with 7 mops sweep it for half a year (me), do you suppose—? But I rather like to clear away and clean up. When I come to “Party Going,” somewhere in those stacks in the middle of the living room floor, I want to look up your page. I’d better start to work now.
Love,
Eudora
Have a fine Thanksgiving. If and when you do go on one of your birding excursions to Texas or the like as you’ve done in the past, I hope you’ll let me know. I’d better give you my phone number now while I think to, not in the book—601-353-7762. I could meet you & Margaret in New Orleans or somewhere, in between, even if you couldn’t get to Jackson. But of course I would love to see you here.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, December 4, 1972
Dear Eudora:
I’ve been on not one trip but two since my last letter, and yours, and I think your peripatetic habits must be catching—you make moving about the world sound so interesting. And indeed I found it to be, though I’m glad to be home again. The first trip, to Ann Arbor and Canada, took a week. Ann Arbor turned out to be more fun than I expected: my last time there was overshadowed by the old doctoral drive—I wrote Ivory Grin and finished my dissertation on Coleridge in the same seven-month period—but this time all I had to do was talk to people, mostly informally, though I met one class in American studies and made one speech about the intention of popular art, which is to express a society to itself in terms it can understand. Talk to people, and go to the Michigan-Purdue football game, the first Michigan game I ever attended (I used to write a newspaper column on Saturday afternoons.) I did have a chance to look up my dear old friends Henry Branson and his wife Anna, who were so close to us when we lived in Ann Arbor. Hank wrote some marvellous mystery novels, as you doubtless know—you perhaps remember The Leaden Bubble and if you don’t please give it a try,—but then matriculated into the historical novel, to his present reg
ret, and was lost to us. American writers have a hard time going on as they get older. Only a few, like you, keep on getting better. I’m glad you’re planning more stories, an intelligence I owe to your Southern Review interview, which I thank you for sending me. It made a lot of sense and sounded exactly like you. I love Phoenix Jackson, too, and it sent me back to her story.21
From Ann Arbor I went on to Kitchener, Ontario, where I had a couple of good sessions with my father-in-law Henry Sturm. He is almost blind and almost deaf and almost 89, but he loves to talk and retains great mental incisiveness, remembering everything. His source of information is daylong radio. He is physically hale. Henry was a great hockey coach and sent more players into the National Hockey League than any other man. He was mayor of the city and 36 years on the council. He left school in the fourth grade and went to work aged eleven; he is partly responsible for the fact that Kitchener has the best small-city library I’ve ever seen: I almost lived there as a boy. But poor Kitchener has been bitten by the growth bug and is losing its fine beloved ethos. Its energy is frightening. Skyscrapers are sprouting like toadstools. The streets were jammed with traffic, foot and car, at 6:30 in the morning when I left for the Toronto airport, a day or two ahead of schedule. I was so glad to get home that I could even tolerate the sight of the oil platform as we flew in over the sea.
My second trip, taken with Margaret just this last weekend, was in a wholly different direction, into the interior (Calif.) valley which is the one place outside of Texas where sandhill cranes [may] be found in any number. We were lucky. When we arrived on the Carrizo Plain, traveling by chartered bus with 30 other local Audubon people, 3,000 cranes were standing in the water of Soda Lake. A thousand took to the air as we were watching, flew over us in long lines bending unbroken like lines of music, then burst into actual music, a gleeful melodious grumbling and celebration as they came down into the harvested fields to feed. I think it was the greatest natural sight I ever witnessed.