The forces of your society haven’t gotten beyond human control, as we sometimes feel they have here.
It was a most pleasant privilege to see you (and your friends) every day for several days. It made me wish the United States was much smaller, perhaps a city state where one could live within walking distance of you. And it made me sad to leave you. I hope I’ll see you before too long.
Meanwhile I know exactly where and approximately how you live, and I know you, approximately and exactly, and take great pleasure in the various knowledge. Thank you again.
Love,
Ken
P.S.—The enclosed clipping, complete with typos, is from the Santa Barbara News-Press. Congratulations again. No one has ever deserved that prize more.
K.
The postscript to Ken’s letter congratulated Eudora on the Pulitzer Prize, which had just been awarded to her novel The Optimist’s Daughter. More important to her than the Pulitzer was the impact that Ken had on her life. She ultimately stored the prize with assorted memorabilia in a cardboard box in a closet; Ken’s letters were upstairs, carefully labeled and filed, in her study/bedroom where a rare picture of Ken and Eudora together would eventually join photos of cherished friends—William and Emily Maxwell, Reynolds Price, Katherine Anne Porter, Mary Lou Aswell, and Elizabeth Bowen—atop a bookcase overlooking her writing desk.
Eudora Welty, “Friday, on the train,” to Kenneth Millar, [May 11, 1973]
Dear Ken,
Before I leave Mississippi, which I am rapidly doing (for a train traveler) I want to tell you how much it meant and means to me that you came here—It was wholly generous and good and kind of you to make the long trip—I was glad to think you knew the happiness your being here would give to me. And you must have seen how much pleasure it was for so many others to get to meet you. Diarmuid in particular. He said to me he took most to you of anybody—“a man with a great deal of tenderness in him, it seems to me.” And Reynolds got to talk to you surely—that was in the cards. And all my friends, and it was nice for me to know of my town that it is thoroughly packed with your admirers (The whole staff of the Jackson Mississippi Library came for you—to name one group.), with the ones who’d wanted to speak to you most the most tongue-tied, they’ve told me. But to me—it was so lovely to have you in my house. I went to your party in New York when we first met and now you’ve come to my party—Naturally, but like a dream too.
The thing was of course like nothing I’ve ever had happen to me, & wonderful for being that—it was all the presences of those I care for and all around me—Only private conversation couldn’t happen very well, the most wished-for part—But you can’t see people all together and one by one too—you can just clearly know they’re in the room, each one singly, & indelibly, and dear. And it wasn’t really necessary to do the introductions I’d wanted to, was it? Or to point out things—not to the best eyes and ears I know. That night you and I had dinner in New York, I asked you—it was so on my mind—about the chances of a vanished young man’s being found, knowing your sympathy for the young and knowledge of them, and you said you’d imagine the boy would make himself known if and when he got ready—Well, that was Mary Lou Aswell’s son, your diagnosis was correct, and that night I saw you and Mary Lou sitting side by side in my house and I think she was telling you about Duncan—Another circle—Did you know? (I hadn’t named him to you.)29
Will you tell Margaret for me that I still hope to meet her, and some day it will be easy, don’t you think? Whenever it’s the best time for her and you. And you’ll know to tell her that my house & my life really are quiet and we could talk and play records. The things I like best too. And walk in the open.
Thank you for your telegram. I was delighted at what you said and by hearing from you & Margaret (so I knew the plane got there). The Pulitzer news was out of the blue and wonderful. Nothing was so meaningful though as the presence of my friends here a few days before—That was the real prize and the real treasure—
We’re in Alabama now, winding up a shaggy old mountain—The blackberry bushes are in flower along the track.
I want to give Sleeping Beauty to everybody, and soon it will be publication day, won’t it—while I’m in New York this coming week? I will find a way to observe it. My feelings of pride and deep joy for my name being on that page are with me every day. When I read the novel again on the printed page, it was to see again the qualities that put it among your very best. (I think you have more than one “best”—they aren’t competing.) But Sleeping Beauty has in a specially beautiful way given dramatic form to our darkest & most serious moral problems of today, and this time, more than ever before, it seems to me, in your marvelously constructed & marvelously connected story, they become in action the dark & the fiery forces they are, and the relationships are in place in every possible respect, and the proportions are kept, and the writing is all as ever precise and immaculate, and the feeling in it is like home base to me—If that sentence didn’t come out exactly clear, we just went through a tunnel. You know I love this book. Its dark & deep & brooding colors I can see in my mind on this inland and lovely green landscape going by my roomette window—It’s a valuable book, Ken, & not only to me. But it is so very much to me. Thank you for it, for coming, for all—
Love,
Eudora
Eudora’s high opinion of Sleeping Beauty notwithstanding, a number of prominent reviews proved harshly dismissive of the novel. Millar was enough of a scholar to know that critical blame often followed great praise; and he’d been expecting a public backlash against the acclaim awarded Macdonald’s previous book by reviewers like Walter Clemons, Ray Sokolov, and Eudora Welty. But the sardonic, even vituperative critiques of Sleeping Beauty shocked him—as did their being used as a forum to insult Ross and Eudora both. Crawford Woods in the New York Times Book Review indicated that Sleeping Beauty was written with an inflated “self-regard” that rendered the novel’s prose “nearly inedible.” Anatole Broyard, in the daily Times, found it “difficult to see—as so many others apparently do—what sets Macdonald apart.” An anonymous New Republic scribe mocked the way “no less a figure than Eudora Welty” had made “deepthroated music” about Macdonald on the front page of the New York Times Book Review.30
There were many positive and celebratory reviews, too—in Newsweek, for instance, and in the Los Angeles Times, the National Observer, and the Chicago Tribune. And Millar would have the satisfaction of seeing his novel climb high on the bestseller charts of the very journals which had knocked it most: # 9 in the New York Times, # 7 in Publishers Weekly, # 3 in Time. But the bad notices rankled, especially Crawford Woods’s—and most especially the ones that mocked Eudora’s generous judgment. Ken brought the matter to her attention, gently and almost in passing. Eudora was already aware of the situation, though, and would respond in a forceful, tough-minded fashion.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, May 23, 1973
Dear Eudora:
I’ve been warming my hands all week at your marvelous lyric letter. It’s not only in fiction, but in the living world itself, that your imagination creates around you an illuminated world very much like a lighted room where everything is known and loved and in its place—very much like your living room in Jackson except that it’s portable, existing close around you even when you leave Mississippi (I loved your feeling that you wanted to write before you left Mississippi: it gave me a feeling of how deep your home feelings are) and wind “up a shaggy old mountain” in Alabama, and following you even on the streets of New York and up in the rickety old Algonquin elevator at the doors of which I first saw you in the flesh.
I’m so delighted that the new book continues to please you. I know it can’t be as good as you think it is, that your responsive imagination invests it with brightness and depths not its own, but I’m content not to quarrel with your feelings about it. It might never have been written without your support. It’s started well, with good reviews from a number of differe
nt journals, including one in the middle west which caught the idea of “sleeping beauty” as a dormant quality of the people in the book. And a couple of rather schizoid reviews which you unfortunately will probably see, in Time and NYTBR, and which put a rather queer spin on my dedication to you, as if it were a means of coming up in the world. But you are a veteran of such games, and won’t be unduly bothered. I’m writing to Ashbel Green, my editor at Knopf, that the NYTBR reviewer did a great job of reviewing the dedication but not so well reviewing the book. In fact he misquoted me twice, and surrounded his quotations with distorting contexts. Still I’m content. It’s such a relief to be out of the Crime Corner which I used to share with six or seven other crime writers jammed together like prisoners in a tank.
Margaret is well—will see the doctor tomorrow to confirm it—and shares your desire to get together. Our family news of the month is that my son-in-law has moved with grandson Jimmie into a new apartment, near UC Irvine, in Fountain Valley. This is the first move that they’ve made since our daughter Linda died, and it means a step into freedom and futurity for Jim, and his father, too. They’ll be within walking distance of a good school and of Joe’s work at the Casson Calculating Co. Joe is something of a saint, if you can imagine an engineer saint, and he has brought Jim up to be a fine and happy boy.
Our whole family—the four of us, that is—took a boat trip to the islands the other Sunday. The Channel Islands lie only 25 miles offshore but a voyage to them takes you deep into the past. Mastodons used to roam there, and there are hundreds of sea lions on the stony beaches and the ledges of the cliffs. The cliffs look like old stone walls after a siege. And there are birds to be seen, black and American oystercatchers, and one sub-species, the Santa Cruz Island Jay, which exists only on that island—too heavy to fly to the mainland. In fact it’s a somewhat closed environment, like Darwin’s Galapagos. Jimmie had a whale of a time. It was too late in the summer to see any whales, by the way, but we did see one porpoise.—I remembered during the voyage what you had said about To the Lighthouse, which struck me with similar force many years ago.
Love, Ken
P.S. Please remember me to Mrs. Gillespie and if you see them Mr. and Mrs. Turner. K.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, June 4, 1973
Dear Eudora:
Not having heard from you for two or three weeks (probably you’re still away from home) I’ve been reading over the wonderful undeserved letter you sent me in response to Sleeping Beauty, treating my hopes for the book as though they were achieved and encouraging me to go on hoping that perhaps they have been, partly. As you must know, your response has been the most important one to me, and I hope to respond in turn with another wild mystical book. (Those adjectives were applied to it by another good friend and reader Peter Wolfe.) As I noted in my last letter, there has been some critical reaction, in which I apologize for your name being involved, but it didn’t come from any source that one has to pay strict attention to. In fact I think that sort of thing may help to liberate a writer; of course it costs some pain.
We’ve had a good month in spite of these distractions. I swim in the cool gray ocean in the mornings and bike with Margaret in the cool gray evening air, mostly around Hope Ranch—a hilly 2,000-acre ranch by the ocean which about half-a-century ago was transformed into a “development” which holds now about 600 houses and will eventually take 1,000. It’s a fine place to live—our house is almost in the middle of it—partly because it’s sparsely settled with people and partly because it’s thickly planted with trees—the developers planted 50,000 of them, eucalyptus, cypress, pine, oak (but most of the oaks are native and old). There is a golf course and in the middle of the golf course a 30-acre lake, mostly natural, and on the lake gulls and ducks and herons and sometimes migrating birds like Canada geese. This is not a typical golf-course suburb, though; just up the street, for example, lives Dean Wooldridge who with Simon Ramo et al. invented the modern technological factory which is one of the essential differentiae of California and has made the state more productive than the whole of Britain. Wooldridge retired before he was fifty to write books. I’ve never met him. Just down the street in the other direction lives Jack Northrup, the aircraft inventor who was a leader in the previous generation of technical revolution. Apart from Clifton Fadiman and some other scholarly sorts, there aren’t too many writers in Hope Ranch but the surrounding woods are full of them—more than 300 in the Santa Barbara area according to a count by the local library. Some of us meet for lunch every two weeks in a local restaurant—William Campbell Gault, Michael Collins, my best friend Robert Easton who wrote a factual book about the oil spill. But mostly I stay at home or out in nature.
This account is a poor substitute for such a visit as I had in Jackson, but I felt like writing it. I loved Miss Balakian’s piece about your Day, your week, in the NYTBR. She spoke with lovely feeling and for all of us, Love, Ken
P.S. Please convey my respects to Diarmuid, that noble soul. K.
Eudora Welty, New York City, to Kenneth Millar, May 18, 1973.
Despite its date of composition, the following letter was not mailed until June. Eudora enclosed it with part of a June 4, 1973, letter from Reynolds Price to her and with her own June 7, 1973, letter to Ken.
Dear Ken,
The review of Sleeping Beauty in the coming Sunday NYTBR is a shameful piece of work, not really a review at all of course and not worth being a cause of pain to you, but how could it help but be. Does the reviewer’s name mean anything to you? It doesn’t to me—but he was clearly wanting to take you down because your books have been too well received in the past for his comfort, and whatever your new book had been like (and he never found out, starting with the title which he didn’t read either) he wanted to say these stupid and derogatory things about it—or rather about you. His deliberate attack was so obviously what it was that no reader could miss the motive behind the words, and even if a reader didn’t know your work for himself, as being none of the things this man says, he’d know to take this review as the opposite of the truth. My impulse was to reply but I realize it would be unbecoming in the dedicatee (a word?) and besides would draw attention to something best ignored. If it is any comfort to you in companionship, I have had the exact same charge made against me, of trying to do something out of my bent, because of a dedication, which was to Elizabeth Bowen—It was a book of stories laid in Ireland, Italy, etc., and I was advised to keep to something I know and not try to be so pretentious as to write about anything outside Miss. and Elizabeth’s name was used against me, just as mine was against you, and just as without reason. I was also, just the other month, attacked in the London Observer for even trying to foist a novel (Optimist’s D.) on the public, with my impossible female name and my appalling part of the country—So I know something of your feeling now, but I hope, knowing, as you certainly must of the steady admiration from all over everywhere that you’ve long since had and will have, you’ll just let this man go to hell & forget about him—Of course I hate it and just wanted to let loose for a minute. More later—
On June 4, 1973, Reynolds Price wrote to Eudora expressing similar sentiments, and in her next letter to Ken, Eudora enclosed Reynolds’s comments on the subject: “I hope Ken Millar isn’t depressed by the two or three ratty notices I’ve seen of Sleeping Beauty—Sunday Times and New Republic. I really don’t think it was responsible of the Times to have run the one they did; it all smacks so much of ‘He got a little too big for his britches (sez we) so we’ll whittle him down.’ I say it’s wicked, and seriously so. I admired the book very much—one of the best three or four of his novels, I think—and as soon as I’ve given it a slow second reading, I’m going to write him and say so.”31
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, June 7, 1973
Dear Ken,
It was lovely to find your letters here when I got home, and I want to answer them with a real letter and not a scrap—soon too. Meanwhile here’s a piece of one I wrote you in N
ew York, expecting to add to—that was the day I went over to the Book Review office to say hello and got the advance copy with that stupid review of Sleeping Beauty in it. And here’s the last page of a letter from Reynolds which is about Sleeping Beauty—(you can let me have it back some time if you think of it). And separately I’m sending you my copy of Diarmuid’s Irish Reader, to read at leisure, just some day let me have it back if you will—I tried all one morning in the second-hand shops down on 10th and 11th Sts. and B’way and 4th Ave to find a copy to give you, and couldn’t.32 Would you mind signing a Sleeping Beauty for Diarmuid—I’m sending it to you—he’d so much like to have it. He read it while here as he must have told you and liked it so much, and Rosie was reading it and said she would like to borrow mine to finish on the plane going home but I said No, and Diarmuid said “Quite right. You shouldn’t let that copy leave the home.” Jackson just got its copies in yesterday, for some reason, so now I can give presents—just gave one to Elizabeth my niece, who came in while I was writing this.
I’m glad Margaret’s feeling fine again. I loved hearing about the sail to the Islands. I’ll write soon. A lot of duties came down on me to do, and sometimes I do them and sometimes I just listen to the Watergate—if it comes on there at 7 AM I doubt if it’s as galvanizing to the Millars. A whole new, bad vocabulary.
Meanwhile There Are Letters Page 16