Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, January 31, 1973
Dear Eudora:
Just a note to thank you for your “Three Papers on Fiction” and to report that I read them these last two evenings with delight.6 I think they are beautiful, wonderfully poised on the knife-edge of pure truth. Perhaps what makes you uncertain about them is precisely their most valuable quality: they were written by an artist in your own figurative language, cut from the same piece of imaginative cloth as your stories. They are not written in the language of the schools, into which even most artists tend to shift when they write criticism. And partly for that reason they manage to get and stay closer to the meanings and workings of fiction than almost anything I can remember. You yourself are there in the prose, close up to and involved with the things you love, and I think it would be a mistake to hold these papers back from further publication. They are beautifully clear, succinct and to the point, done with great art; and I loved all your examples. What you do with Faulkner, for instance, is astonishing and will send me back to him now for the dozenth time. Thank you very much for the book.
It may be, as you suggest, that some of your other essays and lectures are more uneven or of less central value. But I honestly can’t conceive of you ever having written anything in this line that shouldn’t be retained for the use of future readers. So though you haven’t really asked my overall opinion, sight unseen, I’ll give it anyway. I think you should collect your pieces fugitive and otherwise (“I was a fugitive from Eudora Welty”) with a foreword saying what you choose about their origins, and turn the book loose into the stream of history. It won’t sink, and it won’t embarrass you. After all, you are a teacher and a lecturer and a critic; these pieces are a proud part of the record, and your main work will be better understood through them. Coming back to the “Papers on Fiction” which I have just read, they give what seems to me a uniquely clear account of the relationship between the writer and the techniques of his work.
Are you watching the ten-episode documentary being shown Thursday nights on Educational TV about “An American Family”? They’re a Santa Barbara family, and the producer Craig Gilbert has publicly credited me with bringing him to Santa Barbara.7 Indeed I spent some hours with him here, but had nothing to do with his ultimate choice of a family. Their story is beautifully done, painfully engrossing, and perhaps the best thing ever shown on television.
I am personally involved, or have agreed to become so, in another television venture. Canadian Broadcasting Corp. is going to do a ten- or twelve-part dramatization of Edwin Drood, and several mystery writers have been asked to invent possible endings, all of which will be given on TV.8 So I’m about to reread the book and see what I can find there.
I gather from your mysterious and modest hints that Jackson is going to honor you, as it should, and that M. and I may be invited to attend the occasion. If the timing permits, we’d love to have a reason to visit you in your home town, and your suggestion of it is most pleasing and moving to both of us.
Love,
Ken
P.S.—My bird expert M. doesn’t think the grackles will give up of their own accord, and says you may have to feed smaller birds in restricted spaces available only to them. K.
Eudora Welty, Washington, DC, to Kenneth Millar, February 8, 1973
Dear Ken,
Your letter was intuitive—you put your finger right on my causes of worry, and I’m heartened by what you say—not only because of your understanding and generous spirit about them, but because of your being able to give them a fresh as well as an experienced eye. (This sounds as if you have one fresh eye & one experienced eye.) It is true that I could have written them no other way, but when you report they won’t sink (I was scared they’d sink right away) I do take heart and hope you’re right. I’m getting them together, and the fugitive from E. W. at this writing is one called “How I Write”—I bet I never catch up with that one!9 Done on request, I remember, & given that impudent title, which the editor left in—
The date of that invitation is May 2. Can you & Margaret possibly make it? I didn’t mean to make a mystery of what it was, but was trying to warn you about something I thought already on the way—The Miss. Arts Festival this year is going to have a (or an?) Eudora Welty day, and the invitations are for a party and a play and the rest I’m not sure of—I think I have to do a reading at some point. They wanted me to give them a list of friends from out-of-town they could invite ahead of time, and an alert now, “written by girls with pretty handwriting”—they may still be looking for them. What will be going on in the Arts Festival I haven’t heard yet. Of course I was pleased about their dreaming this up, but I do live far away from many of my good friends, and farthest of all from you, probably—And I know what a sort of nerve it is to think people could pick up & take off for Jackson, to a welcome however warm. It would be just lovely if you could come. You both have so many fans here that want me to tell you they want you to come, too. Maybe I will have some different birds here by that time. Or you could plan a real bird trip that would let you come by to visit me (I’m a real bird)—Avery Island? This may exactly coincide with when you’re going to Russia—on a real hegira—
That’s delightful news about Edwin Drood—Or it sounds so to one who would like to see the dramatizations with their various endings. I think I’ll read it again myself & get ready—though will we get to see it, eventually, in the U.S.? Our Miss. ETV isn’t showing “An American Family”—but that doesn’t mean it won’t be scheduled later, and I do hope to get a look at it. I’d read about it and had learned it was a Santa Barbara family, but did not know you had brought its producer there and spent time helping him—It has a strange overtone of the story overtaking the real, from accounts. Do you remember that wonderful movie “Dead of Night” with Michael Redgrave about the ventriloquist whose dummy starts getting the upper hand? 10
This is Thursday, and I’m in Washington D.C. where I see the program will be shown. But I won’t be where I can watch it. I’m here on a Nat’l Council on the Arts meeting11—Of what use I can be I am still waiting to find out, but I’ve been to 3 meetings and don’t think I’ve helped. Depressing atmosphere in a way—but I hope. It seems so much easier to help people in the other arts—you can give painters galleries and exhibition assistance, and composers and musicians concerts & audiences & tours, and play people & dancers all sorts of opportunities, but writers don’t come in bunches or need anywhere to perform, just privacy and time. Difficult to fit in with all this grandiose machinery. To get a good lecturer such as W. H. Auden to some of our poor little (poor financially) colleges down here, now—in the South. I’m glad you got his message in that early day—Speaking of Mr. A. He was the first poet I ever heard—(and I couldn’t always hear.)
I’m running up to N.Y. for a few days after this Washington weekend is over—just for a little refreshment. I’m reading all of Willa Cather again—Read “The Song of the Lark” on the train coming. I love trains, and my early memories of trains are so vivid, and the trains in “The Song of the Lark” are so wonderful, & so important. It was lovely to read this one riding in the night. Do you like her? What vitality—I think she’s magnificent—True and ardent and wide-expanding, her view is—I like to read all of somebody chronologically as you did Hawthorne.
I’ll promise (again) to write a better letter next time. Yours are always beautiful and do me so much good, Ken—I’m ashamed to be as poor as I am in reply. But with many wishes, & thanks, & love all the same,
Eudora
I do feel so good that you responded to those 3 pieces as you did. Thank you. It must be vanity, but I would feel desolated with them in print to think they no longer connected with life—It would just mean I didn’t write them well enough—I want to do things well!
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, February 24, 1973
Dear Ken,
Your swimming pool has splashed again, from what I read—I hope no harm came—are you all right?12
It’s like spring here, but it’s sure to be cold again before spring’s here reliably (is it ever?). Mockingbirds dancing on the grass—they aren’t reliable either—and birds singing but I’m not reliable on their names. In N.Y. the temperature was a round zero—up in the country, where I spent 2 days, it was snowing and besides the titmice & chickadees at my friends’ feeder were some cross-bills, which I’d never seen before. This was at the home of my old and dear friend Diarmuid Russell—he is also my agent, and I was his first client 1941—He is ill and I had not been sure I’d get to see him, but he was well enough and it was a happy and good visit. He is one of your longtime readers, and he is the first person I’m going to make a present of the new book to—He was so delighted to know about the dedication. He’s asked me about you, saying “Obviously he knows Yeats and so on” which interested him in you long ago (he is AE’s son), and so by now I know a little I could tell him—and none of it surprised him.13 As a little boy in Dublin it used to be his duty to bring his father a new detective story every day—begged, borrowed, or somehow, and of course D. read them for himself—I think he began with Buchan14—your man. He (D) put me onto him (B) too, in time.
I have just lost a good friend in the death of Elizabeth Bowen15—I loved her, and such was her vitality and zest and tireless absorption in life—care for life, hers & others, deeply both—it never occurred to me that I might not be going to see her again—
She was one of your most devoted readers, and I remember years ago when she first came to my house, her telling me that wherever she went in the U.S. (She was on a long lecture tour) kind hosts put out some cosy English murder in a vicarage for her “when of course what I wanted was Ross Macdonald”—I’m not sure she didn’t say “beloved Ross Macdonald”—(Henry Green was always “beloved” to her too.) In the last few years Elizabeth had got to be very good friends with Agatha Christie, by the way, in London, and told me how she’d come to revere her as “an older friend”—which sounded right because you didn’t think of Elizabeth as being in any way old too,—though she herself thought of herself right along, accurately, as being “as old as the century”—we took lots of little excursions in each other’s company, in her car in Ireland and in my car in Mississippi—She saw everything—felt places almost hypnotically—She said she never saw so huge a moon in her life as came up over St. Francisville, La., as we rode out the ferry—and in Natchez I think we both saw a ghost (a first for me)—I was showing her that wild octagonal house there, never finished, the hammer thrown down at the start of the Civil War—called “Nutt’s Folly” (after its builder Dr. Nutt), and a man came out of the woods, presently, and showed us over the whole 3 empty floors, offered us a drink (at 10 in the morning) and took a dollar tip, but there wasn’t any such person, so we learned later.16—I’d been waiting to see her again to tell her that I had come to know you—I wish she had! Yet she knew so many things intuitively about writers. I wish she could have read Sleeping Beauty. I’m hoping to see a copy, with jacket, before too long now. (Do you like the jacket?) I saw Walter Clemons in N.Y. and he was eagerly waiting to get hold of it.
Love—& connections—
Eudora
“Only connect”—so urged E. M. Forster, an author Welty and Millar both admired (and whom Welty had met in 1954 when invited to his rooms at King’s College, Cambridge).
Eudora and Ken began with avidity to collect instances of their mutual professional and personal connections: threads, which drew them closer in a tapestry of shared acquaintances, mutual passions, common experience—a real-life enactment of their fiction-visions in which multiple individuals are joined by ties seen and unseen and in which the present is inextricably bound up with the past.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, February 26, 1973
Dear Eudora:
It’s good to hear that you are safely home again from the cold east, and good to hear word of your friend and agent Diarmuid Russell of whom of course I have heard (being your agent must have made him famous.) Indeed his father was an important figure in my life when I was a boy in my teens. For some reason it was AE who carried first and furthest, of all the Irish Revival men, to the Canadian wilds, perhaps because he was the most assimilable by a provincial society which loved its poets to be bards (though its leading writer was Stephen Leacock), and I started out being a bard myself, a beardless bard. For deeper reasons—both were in some sense oppressed provinces of the empire, as the Canadian Hugh Kenner pointed out in his book on Joyce long ago—the Irish Revival and Rebellion were enormously interesting to Canadians, suggesting a way to feel if not to act—original feeling being the most difficult thing for provincials to come by. And by the time I was twenty Ireland was so much on my mind and in my conversation that Margaret, whom I was sort of courting then, was of the belief that I was an Irishman. I almost was. I got hold of a smuggled copy of Ulysses when I was twenty, sat up all night reading it, and within half a year I was in Dublin. I quickly found that Dublin was not what I wanted, and that what I wanted was portable. So I went back to Canada and married Margaret and together we conspired to escape to the United States, which was what we both wanted; but it took several years. Please tell Diarmuid Russell what a splendid and benign figure his father presented to our minds when he was young, and he remains so, really the height of Dublin civilization though it had greater depths than his, and he found himself surrounded by several of the greatest writers in English. Just thinking about the Irish Revival stirs me now. I escaped from Canada by way of Ireland.—Poor Ireland now.
I’m sorry you lost your friend Elizabeth Bowen. No wonder we grow more thoughtful as we grow older. I loved some of her stories—do you remember her wartime stories? was the title Ivy Gripped the Steps?—and think it remarkable that she enjoyed mine. These connections made through you however distantly are important to me. I’ve spent my life living by and for such connections, tuning in on relayed signals from the far side of the world, a pioneer of the McLuhan village in a way, but the connections are personal. (I seem to have been invaded by, or you bring out in me, an autobiographical demon. It’s my response to your sympathetic interest, which certainly deserves a better response.)
These connections are so important because, for one thing, it seems to have become rather difficult for the two of us to travel. I’ve put off replying to your invitation to visit Jackson in May in the hope that we could. But at the moment Margaret is waiting to learn whether she must have an operation to remove a skin cancer from her face. Not a serious operation—she’s had one before, and so have I.
—————————— I’m continuing this a day later ——— Margaret did indeed have her operation but it wasn’t extensive and should be healed up in a month, so we’re keeping open the hope that we can visit you. And Avery Island. Is that the place you mentioned? Is it a bird sanctuary?
I’ve struck it lucky after all these months and been able to order from a book dealer in San Francisco a copy of Henri Coulette’s first book of poems—The War of the Secret Agents—which I’ll be sending you soon. I believe the long title poem may interest you as it did me.
You ask me whether I like the jacket of Sleeping Beauty. I think I do, though it’s kind of pretty in an Aubrey Beardsley sort of way. But it’s precise. I didn’t see it in its final colors. Copies are promised within the next month. I hope you will like its appearance.
Love,
Ken
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, March 17, 1973
Dear Ken,
I was glad to get your good letter, and to know that all was going the way it should with Margaret and she’ll be fine again soon. And it was a delight to have the present from you of your friend Henri Coulette’s first book—a happy thought and a happy inscription, and thank you, for tracking it down (a 1966 book, particularly a 1966 book of poems, must have been hard, these days) and for sending it to me. I’ve been reading the poems with a great deal of pleasure. First the title poem, which you spoke of, a
nd then in order the whole bookfull as they came, and through to the notes and down to the last words, “Ross Macdonald.”17 A highly entertaining poet as well as a good one, isn’t he? The quality that most delights me is a swiftness on the order of legerdemain—I feel I’m being let in on a spell, or almost let in, maybe not quite—in the act of reading, moving from image to image, or line to line—I always love magicians. I guess I should have said put under a spell. The range and diversity of his powers, of thought and feeling, are so wide—all in these brief, compact, & orderly poems—(not really few, as I was about to write, for the number’s generous—) Their form is lovely to me, and there are some that are evocative (in their form) of the loveliest in the language and that goes especially for “The Wandering Scholar” and the early Yeats—the “Song of the Wandering Aengus”—But of course Henri Coulette’s are his own, individual above everything, and in the wit and the spirited, spontaneous life they have I feel this most—“The War of the Secret Agents” has it in essence—I find it above all else so hilarious—It has a dark underside to go with it, and that wonderful cast—It’s not just every poem that’s got T. S. Eliot in it—in person, that is—along with Jean Gabin and every other ingredient that ever went into a spy story or movie, it’s packed.18 If you think I may be on the wrong track, Ken, about this poem, I want you to clue me in—It’s so allusive and so high-speed—I’d hate not to know all. The Fuller novel he has the note about, Double Webs, is unknown to me.19 (I’m not well up on any spy novels much except E. Ambler & G. Greene) It was lovely to come upon your line! I’m not near through reading these poems over again, I’m thanking you out of the middle of them, just in a burst of pleasure.
It was so nice of you to write me when I was sad about Elizabeth Bowen—and about Diarmuid—to whom I wrote and told much of what you’d told me about Ireland and his father—was that all right? I knew it would give him pleasure & interest him. It interested me, of course. I believe you and I must have fallen in love with the same country at about the same time in our lives. I was 18, a junior transfer to the University of Wisconsin, reading all those Irish poets where I opened the books, standing up in the stacks, and though it took me longer than you, I was at last in Dublin too, & knowing nobody, but that part didn’t last, owing to luck. It was so amazing to be in the country in summertime and see that “the white roads” were really white, and know how Yeats & AE and all of them could really have walked all night long and seen all the world in the moonlight—There was only the draw of their poetry and the reason of their poetry that made me go, but I think all the same Ireland set me free of something too—
Meanwhile There Are Letters Page 14