Meanwhile There Are Letters

by Suzanne Marrs

  New Stage is putting on “John Brown’s Body” now, and imported a guest star, Inga Swenson, who it turns out is your constant reader. A lovely young woman.

  Love,

  Eudora

  Later—I’m so happy to have just received your letter that tells me about your house and all that’s surrounding—Thank you for just what I would have wished to know—

  Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, June 10, 1973

  Dear Ken,

  Yes, I felt very glad of all your letter told me about where and how you live in Santa Barbara. I felt I could see it clearly, and understand a little how rewarding that life must be for you—not lonely, because you’re reflective. The imagination needs all that room and peace—it’s so thronging. And how beautiful, all that surround. It’s no wonder I always feel the physical world, the landscape and weather, so near & real when I read your books. At the same time they’re all happening in a landscape of the mind, their own place, as all stories do—(the two) Seen together—no, working together. I put with what you told me the wrong house, the one in Margaret’s “The Birds and the Beasts Were There,” which I know is not the same as the one you live in now, but I can’t help it, that’s the one I see. Also I put with it remembered (I hope correctly) things of my own—the smell of pepper trees & eucalyptus and the sea, the sense of the edge of a continent—to which your own books speak. So now I have some things put together.

  The new oil spill made me feel bad for you, & Margaret. After the first news of it, I never heard anything more. Even any definitely assigned cause for it. Is it being helped any?

  It’s Sunday, I’ve been reading all day (Willa Cather—“The Professor’s House”). After I got home from NY, where I stayed less than a week—mainly to attend a little gathering of old friends & clients for Diarmuid on the occasion of his retirement, given by Tim Seldes, who’s taken over the agency—& whom Diarmuid has all confidence in. I came home by way of Charlotte, N.C. (a little girls’ college there gave me an hon. Degree, and everything took 3 days) then flew home, which I am not good at, and found I was tired for the first time.33 All those things that had never happened to me before, and all had really overwhelmed me. I found the name of Ross Macdonald in the newspaper I was reading on the plane, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s what kept it (the plane) coming and didn’t let it fall. Here’s the review, I tore it out for you, you’ve surely seen it—It has some perceptions, don’t you think? I’m trying to track down some other reviews in our rather sparsely provided library. I saw Newsweek—Walter Clemons sadly said P.S.P. carried off the book which came while he was out—Wish I could review it (The Underground Man review I did is going in my non-fiction book that I’m about to tackle now.).34

  Are you really onto a new book? Say no more if you feel it’s not good luck. But I hope it is a fact—that would be at dazzling speed—wonderful news though, whenever it comes.

  This is as you see the book I would be so happy if you’d sign for Diarmuid—and then next time you go to the P.O. drop it in. I didn’t feel you would mind—and I do thank you—

  Forgive me for letting a young woman who has just opened her own bookstore here have your address—She wants to ask you to sign her book, but it’s not just an idle request—she has really been so crazy about your novels for a long time and has never asked an author for an autograph before. (I don’t count, I live here & know her mother.) I won’t do this again though. The Irish Reader is coming too and no hurry a bit about reading it or letting me have it back—I hope you like it!

  Thank you again for writing to me about Hope Ranch. Love to you,

  Eudora

  Now you’ve been in the Jackson paper & I’ve been in the Santa B. one. I’m glad you liked Nona Balakian’s piece—it was lovely of her to write it—I cherish it.

  Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, June 11, 1973

  Dear Eudora:

  You are a helpful person, and most generous, too, as always, in telling me about your own contretemps with the kind of people who chose to make an issue out of a dedication offered in a quite different spirit from that suggested. Your understanding is so complete that it clarifies mine and gives me a different reflection of the event: I see past it to you. And Reynolds’ opinion, which you passed on, is worth a good deal to me, too, as is his friendship.

  Still I may decide to answer Mr. Woods. His documentation is quite faulty, including two misquotations of my text and three obvious distortions of my context. In a word, I didn’t say what he says I said; and my editor Ash Green seems to feel that perhaps the NYTBR and its readers should be informed of this. Apart from the New York backlash the book has been doing well throughout the country. It is seventh on the current PW list, and most reviewers seem to agree with Reynolds that it’s among my best books. I’m grateful particularly because I dedicated it to you in that hope, and in the knowledge that I might never write another one as good. But now I feel I will. I’ve turned that corner, too. I see past it not only to you but to what you see, and feel greatly blessed by your moral companionship.

  One of the things I liked best in Mississippi was the chance to look through your professional memorabilia, over which I spent a happy couple of hours—not just because they were yours but because the whole thing added up (not that the final addition has been made) to a joyful statement of how to live, wait, work, endure; all gracefully. It was with that exhibition in mind that I took the liberty of advising you to let your letters stand for the future. They have an absoluteness and delicacy of moral line which the future will need even if it doesn’t desire.

  You’re right, Watergate doesn’t jerk me out of my bed at seven a.m. but we usually catch some of it later, and then would willingly let it go again. A “new bad vocabulary,” as you say, anatomizing the new bad structure of our society. Still the anatomy lesson has to be taught. (Goya recurs to the mind.)

  Tomorrow we’re off to be witnesses at the trial of a bulldozer-operator who is up on a charge of battery for trying to run down a group of protestors against an oceanfront apartment building near here.35 I’ll tell you how it turns out.

  Love, Ken

  Reynolds’ page enclosed. Many thanks. K.

  P.P.S. (June 12)—I have got off to Diarmuid the copy of Sleeping Beauty you sent me, inscribed: —

  “To Diarmuid Russell, a lovely man, on the occasion of his retirement and in respect for his excellent career.”

  I’m very glad I had a chance to meet him and come to know him, and can imagine how important he is and has been in your life. A lovely man indeed.

  ————————

  We lost our court case. It was twisted into a contest between old and young, short hair and long hair, property and passion, and property won. But within the same twenty-four hours the environmental lawyer Mark MacGivens whom M. and I help to support, won a stay order against the same oceanfront apartment building in the Los Angeles appellate court. The world is changing, I hope fast enough to keep itself from being destroyed.

  K.

  Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, June 22, 1973

  Dear Ken,

  You know what my feelings are about your work and about Sleeping Beauty—and how I think your fine gifts have never been under more sensitive and sure control, and that they are being brought to bear more and more on the subjects that count most for you. You speak of turning a corner, and you would know, though it seems more to me like just going straight forward on your way, the way an arrow flies. The important thing is that it flies, and that’s the surest thing there is about whatever direction you want your next book to take. Thank you so much for writing in Diarmuid’s book—he was so pleased, and I’m glad you told me what you’d said because he thought I’d seen it (and, I guess, had sent the book from here), and it pleased me so that you felt this. I felt happy about your getting to meet each other—it was one of the things about that occasion that seemed most happy and most right. You and Diarmuid have in common one of the rarest things in the world, which
surely you recognized in each other—you mean exactly what you say.—What you said about letters seemed to apply to something Diarmuid told me in New York when I saw him last, that he had all the letters I’d written during the 32 years he’d been my agent, and asked what he should do with them. I might have said on first impulse (in my sorrow for him now) to just get rid of them, but the thing is, I have all the other half of that correspondence, and it is really the whole factual story of my working life, and so to me it would matter to have it—I just never would have thought of it objectively that way. I don’t suppose there’s a word in any of the letters from either of us that isn’t just exactly how it was.—But would other people care, or should they care, that’s something else and something I shy off from too much to think about. Of course the letters are also the letters of close friendship. I can tell you the exact truth, if it had not been for Diarmuid I doubt if any of my work would ever have reached any general publication. From the start, when he and Henry began the agency, they never took on a client whose work they did not like and believe in—regardless of how well or how little they might be known. I was the prime example, completely unknown, and the first client. Diarmuid spent two thankless years trying to get me into the Atlantic Monthly, and I remember his writing me once “If Ted Weeks doesn’t take this one, he ought to be horse-whipped.” Enough to make me write another story overnight! He has guided me toward, and protected me from, more than I knew, and never once pressed me. All the years I didn’t publish anything, before I got Losing Battles done, he never once was anything but compassionate. He never had to say much about a story I’d send, he never did say many words, but “It’s good” would be pure gold to me. He knew—he told me that a story I sent in was really chapter two of a novel. It was, too (Delta Wedding, my first novel). It is sweet of you to be interested in the letters and what happens to them. It’s just a jump-shift in my thinking to imagine any eyes reading them but those they were meant for, and the understanding they were meant for. I rely so heavily on the other end.

  I’d held back from mailing my letter to you about that lowlife Woods, as you may have noticed, in worrying that I might have taken his review for more than it was worth and that this would just add to your pain about it. Also, I can’t remember if I told you, I wrote to Woods myself but finally didn’t send the letter because such a one as he would see in my words only the fact of the dedication which was the matter with him in the first place. It was the unfairness of the review that stung. Those inaccuracies must have been only deliberate. I can understand that you would want to answer him, it would be hard not to, and maybe not right not to. I have a deep skepticism, all the same, about answering a reviewer’s ever doing any good. You would do it so well, hitting the nail right on the head, that I would really be gratified to see it, though. And it must gratify you to see how well the book’s doing all over the place—I look in the NYT Book Review and Time for their best seller list every week, and am pleased to hear about the one in PW. I think it must be pretty well established all over the country what a good book we’ve got on our hands. (Jackson is selling a lot of copies! So the bookstores tell me. Also as you no doubt know, speaking of the Archives, Sleeping Beauty has been purchased to go in the Welty papers, for the dedication.)

  I had a lot of letters to write, so I guess I’d better stop. Thank you again for signing the book for Diarmuid (the letter inside was for you, I guess you found it). Love,

  Eudora

  Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, June 28, 1973

  Dear Eudora:

  You have enlarged my life in several ways. Your letter has added an extra dimension to it, and now I am hearing from your friends. John Prince sent me the Lew Archer–cum Martha Mitchell parody from the Washington Star-News, which I thought was funny enough to send along to you (please return).36 I had a delightful note from Mary Lou, who hasn’t forgiven me for not enjoying my one night in Santa Fe and wants me to return and report. I’ve heard from Nona, having written her how much I liked her report in the NYTBR and how true a picture it managed to give of your day, your week. And now I’ve had a sweet and gentle greeting from Diarmuid, almost in the same mail with your exceedingly interesting letter about your long friendship and professional relationship with him. (I did find your letter, of course; and I’m greatly pleased that Beauty is sneaking its way into the Welty papers via the dedication.) In the light of what you say about that career-long relationship I can’t help foreseeing a time when the letters that record it will be of the very first literary and historical importance, more valuable I should think than the Fitzgerald-Ober correspondence which my friend Matt Bruccoli did recently. It’s an important book, basic in its new field, but the Fitz-Ober relationship wasn’t really imaginative or creative. My own feeling is that it led Fitzgerald away from his best self, if only by providing opportunities to evade it. And I might add that the Ober relationship—I knew Harold Ober, but dealt primarily with Ivan von Auw—wasn’t a particularly happy one for me. It’s happier now that Ivan has retired. But what you say of your working life with Diarmuid sounds just perfect, exactly what you and your work needed and deserved. It’s sad that it is ending. But the work remains, and so do the letters.37—Do I sound like a monomaniac? I’m merely a scholar, a rather wandering scholar. (But I think the mystery novel is a rather scholastic discipline, don’t you?)

  Beauty is doing quite well, in its fifth week on the Times best seller list, and probably its last. The competition is very stiff this month.38 But Knopf has shipped close to 40,000 and will probably, after remaindering, have sold thirty or so. All of which gives me what I value most: freedom to write what I like next time around, the same freedom I’ve always had really. As for the book itself, apart from the politics of the game, I feel pretty good about it and am so glad you do, too. It would be terrible to dedicate a book to you and have it turn out to be a flop.

  Love,

  Ken

  Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, July 18, 1973

  Dear Eudora:

  Here is a copy of the letter I wrote in answer to Crawford Woods’ review in the NYTBR. I’ve sent typed copies to the editor and also to Nona Balakian, who expressed regret about the review. It isn’t what I would call an eloquent letter—I found myself unwilling to argue the literary issues with a wholly hostile critic, and confined myself to showing the weakness of the scholarship on which his critical judgments were based—but I hope it will teach him to be more careful in his handling of other writers’ words and sentences. Do you think the mistakes have been further compounded by the writing of this letter? I do regret having had to write it, but in the end I felt compelled to. One consequence is that the great millstone in one’s head which turns only when the stream runs has turned in me, and I have had some dreams approaching nightmares from which however I seem to have awakened refreshed. Aggression comes hard to me, as I know it does to you. I do hope you won’t feel that my sending you this copy of the letter means, or is intended to mean, that you should in any way become involved in the issue, but I thought you might like to see it after the event. (That last sentence may betray the fact that I have been reading fairly late Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, which until I got a stronger pair of glasses had been a closed book to me, at least in the paperback edition which I own. It’s a terribly poignant novel, but at this point I’m not quite sure of it. I started it once years ago, but didn’t get through it, though I love James. This time is different: it holds me in more kinds of suspense than one.)

  The summer is proceeding at bicycle pace, a coolish summer with quite a lot of fog which I have learned to regard as a blessing, for one reason because our old dogs breathe so much more easily. We’ve started going in the ocean again, together I mean, since I never really quit. There’s still some oil floating in the water, but nothing serious.

  Herb Harker and his wife just this month, as I write, blew in from Calgary in a rented truck with all their furniture (hers from Pocatello where she taught in the state college
) and are setting up housekeeping here in a house which they are buying. Herb’s making it back here is a great satisfaction to us, not to mention to him. (He spent the last several years in Calgary.) We lose so many friends to distance. Which reminds me to ask you to please remember me to Reynolds, whom I wish I could see more of (though I read him with excitement in Esquire) and to Mary Lou, whom I owe a letter to—I hope all is well with you, Eudora—I know this is a hard period for you.

  Love, Ken

  Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, Sunday morning [July 22, 1973]

  Dear Ken,

  Thank you for your good and warming letter—I’ve been thinking of you but have not written because my best friend in Jackson suddenly died—was found dead [on July 14]—and I’ve been feeling bad about her. Rosa Farrar Wells, called Dolly—She’d have been at that big party one of a crowd to you, but was an admirer—She and I were friends here from schooldays, then she went to New York and worked in publishing (Harper’s) for years, got tired of all that, & came back home (3 blocks from me)—We normally saw each other two or three times a week, had a drink & watched the news at the end of a day. She lived alone, and dying alone was the sad part. I guess the good part is that a heart attack is quick. I miss her not only for herself but because of my friends here she was almost the only one who liked to read, & the only one who knew the same friends I knew in New York and here too, and we also had shared a trip in Europe—we both loved boats the best thing in the world, and had been planning a possible trip in the fall if we both could manage it. She liked picnics the way I do and we’ve been on many of the same good crazy ones a small crowd of us (we began it in the penniless, jobless days of the Depression) always had this time of year on the spur of the moment—So many falling stars is how I set the time of them, the ones that fall all through late July & August—Perseides?—Of that little crowd, three have now died. It’s the time of life I’ve now reached, I know—But your feelings don’t change—