The word “celebration” reminds me of you and what you said about yourself, that it is in your nature to celebrate the things you write about. Fortunate are those your pen touches. I’m one of the fortunate ones, and am still warm from your goodwill toward this latest book. Perhaps now those glorious cranes will lead me around the corner, or the bend, toward another. As I saw them I remembered your remark about my remark about “live things in the air at all times,” and both remarks gathered meaning. Perhaps I shall yet become a celebrant, too.
I’m glad you thought well of Herb Harker’s book. His son Rand came through last week on his way to Mexico, with his first novel, and waited while I read it. It needs rewriting, as I told him, but he has a talent which, if it is allowed to grow, will perhaps surpass his father’s who started so late.
Thank you for the word about your brother Walter.
Love,
Ken
P.S.—Had a first today: Blue City was published in Russia, serialized in two parts in what appears to be a literary magazine. K.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, December 25, 1972
Dear Eudora:
When your package arrived the day before yesterday, I couldn’t imagine what was in it. But it was marked “Perishable,” so I knew it couldn’t be anything you’d written. It was a work of art in its own way, though, so beautifully ornamented with pecans (from your own tree?) and full of them, and utterly delicious. Margaret pronounced it “the best Christmas cake I’ve ever eaten,” and I concur. It was so thoughtful of you to send it to us—the kind of loving gesture that you make so often and so well, and that the blessed recipients will never forget.
We had a pleasant Christmas, and tonight are enjoying the quiet aftermath of it, Jimmie having left this afternoon for his other grandfather’s house fifty miles down the coast. Last night we went to an adult’s-and-children’s party at a neighbor’s—Ted Clymer’s house—and we all sang carols with Margaret at the piano. The children loved it, but for us older ones the carols didn’t quite shut out the din of the world. I wish I could have heard you on television, but Channel 28 (NET) isn’t available in our area. But I understand your interview will be repeated, and maybe I’ll have a second chance.22
The sea was rough today, with two sets of waves contending from two directions, southeast (approximately) and northwest—our shoreline rings almost east and west—and the water offshore was white and foaming like a milkshake. I lasted almost ten minutes and finished off in the pool, swimming sedately back and forth with M. It was a warm sunny day, and even now at night it isn’t cold. I’m a little chilly, though, a little scared, because I don’t quite know what is happening to the country, or has already happened. A friend, formerly in the government, writes from Washington about “the coming constitutional crisis,” as he calls it. I believe the country has gone through a moral crisis and failed to recognize it. We proceed cheerfully on our desperate way like a man with a bad doctor and a fatal illness.
But I don’t mean to end on a note of despair. I believe we’ll turn back from our own violence, and see what we have done as something that we can never do again. What other meaning could this present violence have?
Meanwhile I eat your Christmas cake and think that with the help of your books I can reconstruct from its sweet dense subtle mass (as Proust reconstructed France) the whole blessed unknown south.
Love,
Ken
CHAPTER THREE
“Love—& connections”
1973
WITHOUT a doubt, Eudora and Ken were kindred souls. Yet much separated them—half a continent, to begin with. More to the point, there was his marriage: that thirty-five-year partnership, through thin and thick, health and sickness, with the mother of their deceased and only child.
From the day in 1938 that the Millars exchanged wedding vows, Ken and Margaret had often been at cross-purposes. They loved each other but found marriage stressful; yet they had worked hard over the years—Ken perhaps harder than Margaret—to keep their union intact, encouraging each other in common pursuits, from the writing of books to the playing of Scrabble, from swimming to bicycling to bird-watching. Thus they could take pride in what many might call the success of their marriage—though Margaret used instead the odd word “prolongation.” But their daughter’s sudden death in late 1970 had saddened and maybe somewhat separated Ken and Margaret. As Ken had written a year earlier to Eudora about himself and Maggie: “We have lost a good deal of our unconscious glee.”
Maggie was often irritable with Ken in public. During these years she was unable to write (and even unwilling to read), while his career and reputation soared. Ken Millar nevertheless was firmly committed to a marriage that over the years had become more platonic than passionate.
For her part, Eudora Welty had many male friends who were married, and she thought of their wives as friends. She typically, for instance, sent letters to both William Maxwell, her New Yorker editor, and his wife, Emmy, not to just one of them; they seemed an inseparable pair to her. Eudora and Margaret Millar, on the other hand, did not yet know each other, and Eudora felt more than affection for Margaret’s husband. Still Eudora’s sense of honor and respect for the institution of marriage were a match for her new friend Ken’s.
So there was a guarded quality to the letters they exchanged. Eudora was careful to inquire about Margaret, though at times as a seeming afterthought; Ken made a frequent point of mentioning Maggie, though often just near sign-off. And neither Millar nor Welty yet declared in open fashion the fonder feelings that seemed to flow beneath the surface of their prose.
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, January 12, 1973
Dear Ken,
I’ve just been breaking the ice on the birdbath here too. But not going swimming here! Happy New Year, and Happy Birthday wishes back into December and Sagittarius, for many happy and happier returns of the day.
I had the same kind of Christmas as you, with my family, and, I think, the same feeling about the awful things we were perpetrating upon that midnight clear [in Vietnam]. I hope and hope, while knowing there’s damage that can never be undone and something lost we can never get back. Just hope for the end of the killing—I think it has to come soon, don’t you? And I believe it will happen as you said in your letter, that we will see what we have done as something we can never do again.
Tell me what happened this year about the Christmas Bird Count.1 I hope Santa Barbara kept up its grand record, and that you saw the same pair of white-throated sparrows on the right day as last year. If you could have counted those thousands of sandhill cranes you saw—but then, they belong in a count of your own. I can’t forget the picture you gave me of their long lines of flight that went over, bending unbroken, and going into song.
That’s a fascinating thought that you’re coming out in Russian now. Can you get somebody who can translate it back for you, just to see what they make of Blue City? And will they now go through the whole list of your books? (Am I right, in thinking Blue City was the first written or not? I now wait for it to appear along with your other early ones newly in paperback—have enjoyed reading The Doomsters, The Dark Tunnel, and Trouble Follows Me, all for the first time—seeing things from their beginnings. The pre-Archer ones seem to be looking for Archer, far-flung and extravagant (talent-to-burn) searches for Archer, though of course entirely themselves too. But I guess it could be impossible to read them without knowing now what’s to come. So my feeling may have been that I was looking for Archer.
Your trip to Ann Arbor and Canada sounded like a pleasure, in spite of the work attached. I’d like to have heard your speech about the intention of popular art and wonder if you are going to publish it somewhere—don’t you think you should? Or did you have it written down? Let me know if it’s in print. (I see the NYT Book Review, where it might well should be.) Never have I come upon The Leaden Bubble, though I’ve heard of it for years, but I will one of these days.
You were kind to have gone to the
trouble of watching that Buckley program—I hated to think of your doing so.2 It was something I couldn’t get out of doing, because of being grateful to the local ETV station which has been good to my work, but I am not at home in the Buckley element. I felt strung-up and not very smart. Halfway through, I realized that Mr. B. wasn’t really too informed on the subjects he’d started—too late to go back and get first things straight. It was a strange experience—he entered a minute before the program was to start, and exited the minute it was over, brought his own director and staff, and wore make-up on the backs of his hands—all of this may be standard. I wish Walker Percy had been on with him alone—he could have accomplished a lot more.—How strange to think you watched the program in the house of a neighbor who had once long ago been in my house. She wrote me a letter—which I must ans. after I investigate what happened to her friend.
I’ve been reading too the Quentin Bell biography of Virginia Woolf. I hadn’t somehow hoped for too much from it, but it is a good piece of work. It defines its limits, stays within them, and from there gives a clear-headed, deeply informed—rather, uniquely informed—calmly understanding picture—it’s set in perspective and surrounded with the people and events and ideas that had the vital connections with Virginia. He tells it with restraint, and much of it is terrible—have you read it? Virginia Woolf was the first writer—modern—whose work burst upon my imagination like fireworks—when I read “To the Lighthouse” I felt I couldn’t contain my joy and excitement. I’d read all the Bloomsbury memoirs, etc., of recent years, and yet almost quailed before this one because the reviews had put me off. I thought it was something quite different. For one thing, Q.B. writes so well.—What a hero Leonard [Woolf] was!
If you know anything to do about grackles, I wish you’d tell me. Against them, not for. Here the temp. is 23 this morning, and they’ve decided to occupy my bird feeder—the new one, the plexiglass tube supposed to “discourage” the big birds. Of course they can’t get their beaks in the holes, but they swoop down on it and cover it and swing on it, and the little birds can’t get to it all day. This morning—I’ve been flapping a dishcloth at them from the kitchen window—as they scattered, a blue jay came on signal and hung upside down on the feeder and tried to hammer a hole in the plexiglass with his beak. He must have a pretty good headache still. Life seemed to be easier when the only feeding stand was a free-for-all. Now I’ve got demonstrators and protesters.
It was sympathetic of you to say not long ago that you thought a book of my essays might be a good thing. It is a problem to me to know just what to do. The pieces were all written as needed for the lecturing and so on I was doing, ’50’s & ’60’s, and were the best I could do, and I think are respectable pieces of work—but what puzzles me is whether or not they will mean anything to readers now. To the young, what meaning would a paper on “Place in Fiction” have? That was the subject of the one I worked on the hardest. Nobody really cares about many of the things I feel most passionately about—and I am not for a minute saying that I consider the beliefs dated or the subjects, rather, dated or unimportant. They matter more than ever—to me. Another consideration that stops me is that a book of these pieces might seem to be saying I thought of myself as a critic, with some systematic theory about literature—of course none of that is so. I love books—that’s about it. All the pieces were written about what I like, more than a little for my own pleasure. This would probably be my criterion when I chose what to include. Somehow I can’t start in—I would risk my neck on a story without this kind of hesitation. I can be professional about stories, that’s the reason, I suppose, and as any sort of essay writer I’m an amateur, and feel vulnerable altogether. So I mull it over.
I’ve gone on for too long, but it had been too long a time since I wrote—Is everything all right with you and Margaret, & Jimmie? I had a sort of flu but all right now, and hope all of you are well. Many wishes, and love,
Eudora
Ken was quick to respond to Eudora’s letter, point by point. He certainly wanted to ease the dissatisfaction she felt about her national public television appearance with Walker Percy on William F. Buckley Jr.’s program, Firing Line. Buckley, who had come to Jackson for the December 12, 1972, interview, which aired on December 24, sought to challenge the two southern writers about their decisions to remain in the South during the struggle for civil rights. He seemed not to recognize “the moral and political resource,” to use historian David Chappell’s words, that white southerners who were “sickened by segregation” yet remained at home, provided the civil rights movement.3
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, January 22, 1973
Dear Eudora:
You and we seem to have acquired one of the new tube feeders at the same time—I gave M. one for Christmas—and to be having the same kind of problems with them, if multiplicity of birds can be considered a problem. You have too many grackles and we have too many bandtailed pigeons, but I trust the larger birds will tend to get discouraged after a while. The beauty of the new feeder is that the pigeons can’t deplete it so readily as ordinary feeders. Yesterday, by the way, an acorn woodpecker, a medium-sized bird, was hanging upside down from the bottom rung of ours, and reaching up.—We had a fairly successful Christmas count this year, 197 species as compared with 202 last year, but there was just enough slippage in our pelagic count to take us out of national contention. Some of our group staged a second count in condor country, sighting ten condors and ten golden eagles as well as a host of other birds. But the main thing, after all, was the human activity. The comings and goings of the birds don’t really depend on us, and the true measure of a bird count is the number of people involved and the quality of their interest. Ten years ago a little local bird count with about thirty members became the S.B. Audubon Society. Now we are over 800, and we are a force!
The friend who once visited you in Mississippi, lucky woman, and who wrote you recently—Carnie Clark—is interested in birds, though not yet an ardent watcher. And birds are interested in Carnie: the other day a sharp-shinned hawk broke her study window and died of the collision on the floor. Carnie is a retired teacher and a very useful person in civic, mainly liberal, organizations. Several of her close relations have died (and lived) tragically—lives that I won’t go into, but I take a certain somber amusement from being told by Carnie’s bright and aged mother that my books are opening her eyes to the harsher side of life. She is, by the way, a Boston Brahmin who was a close friend of John P. Marquand and is very proud of the fact.
I agree with your feeling that the Buckley show didn’t work too well, but you are wrong if you think there was any inadequacy in your performance. You simply weren’t given a chance to speak freely about things that are important to you. I felt that Buckley was very much on the attack—a strategy of ignorance—and that both you and Percy were silenced by hospitality, B. being on your ground. Well, Buckley got his comeuppance very shortly when his show was cancelled. He was in Santa Barbara the other day, house guest of an old friend of mine, Hugh Kenner—a friendship that began to lose its virtue about the time that Hugh became literary godfather of the National Review, and has now eroded—but a friendship that I regret. In the late forties and early fifties Hugh and I taught each other a good deal, he more than I.4 Who is our most brilliant literary scholar? Alas, it is Hugh Kenner.—This summer he leaves Santa Barbara for Johns Hopkins.
ORDER OF PUBLn
DARK TUNNEL 1944
TROUBLE FOLLOWS ME 1946
BLUE CITY 1947
THREE ROADS 1948
MOVING TARGET 1949
It’s kind of you to give those early books the credit of looking for Archer. Heaven knows they all needed a person at the center, and his absence may have been what they were about. I’d just made the shift from Canada to the U.S., in 1941, and sort of exploded outward into the vacuous freedom of American air (though my most influential teacher at Ann Arbor—on me, I mean—was the Englishman W.H. Auden who incidentally when he
was a young man used to review mystery novels for the London papers, and whose example helped to teach me not to be ashamed of my trade; or Margaret of hers.)
The speech I gave in Ann Arbor this time around was just a short one, and extempore, so that I don’t know what I said nor does it matter. But a good many years ago, in Ann Arbor then too, I gave a more formal address on detective fiction (at a Popular Arts festival where W.C. Handy played his trumpet!) and later published it as an essay in Show Magazine, which promptly, with that issue, expired.5 But I should think that old essay is hardly worth raking up. Your essays, if I may judge by the wonderfully eloquent one on Green, matching the eloquence and supple suavity of that master himself, your essays are a different kettle of fish and I feel strongly should be collected. “Place in Fiction,” as we lose it, is precisely the sort of thing that should be seized and held. Whatever is valid, you know, finds or even creates its own public. Also you have become, though you may not quite realize it, a national spokesman for everything to do with art and knowledge, and your record should be made complete. (Margaret considers you the leading creative woman in the United States; and she doesn’t get any argument from me.)
I’ve finished the final corrections on Sleeping Beauty and committed it to the printers; hope to send you a copy in late March. I’ll be interested in your reaction to the cover design. Now don’t maltreat your grackles. Love, Ken
P.S.—I’ll probably have to go to Russia, to my old(est) friend Bob Ford the Canadian Ambassador, to get my Russian translations translated back (though that sounds like rather thin fun.) The title of Blue City, Bob tells me, was translated into “In My Home Town.” Which isn’t bad. That book was dedicated to Bob, by the way, and I imagine he had something to do with getting it serialized in Russia. I’ve written to you about him before, and will again, especially if I do make that Moscow hegira.
Meanwhile There Are Letters Page 13