Meanwhile There Are Letters

by Suzanne Marrs

  I did copy out this page or 2 of Uncle Vanya for you, in place of a letter, wondering if you’d read it again lately enough to remember its beautiful and extraordinarily apt speeches about conservation—I hadn’t read the play in ages, but the book of Chekhov’s letters sent me back to it—Have you read those lately? I love him above all the short story writers ever born—do you?

  Thank you for sharing the clipping the Princes sent—it’s pretty good, I agree, so much more amusing than the last one I read that missed every point about Lew Archer—A parodist should realize that work is just as precise & succinct and concentrated and difficult as what he’s parodying,—as I think you earlier said to me!—Of course this isn’t a real case of parody—Buchwald had a funny column on slightly the same subject of the wild complications of Watergate, only he used the Forsyte Saga instead of Lew Archer, did you come across it?39

  The news of how the book’s doing is welcome & good & not surprising, and I hope it continues that way which is the way it deserves. (I’m pretty sure this review from the Jackson paper last Sunday, which I cut out for you, must be a syndicated one, but I send it just the same since it’s ours & since it’s pretty well done, don’t you think?)

  My own love to the book & my own knowledge of how good the work is—you know you have that, and my thanks that go right on. You must feel the kinship it has with the bit of Uncle Vanya.

  Love,

  Eudora

  Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, July 23, 1973

  Dear Ken,

  I just got your letter and the copy of the one you sent to the Book Review. I’m glad you let me see it, and I hope it will appear soon. What you said was said well, of course—with restraint which meant a good deal to accomplish I know—and with nothing but the facts to speak for you, which were all that were needed to show that man up. The quotes from your book in their proper form and context—and the quotes of him—the combination was very eloquent. And how could you argue a literary issue with a man who’d written those things about you? What makes me so sorry is that anything came along to take away any of the pleasure in the book for you—and that it’s bothered you and even troubled your dreams. Please do begin to feel that since there was nothing of truth or value in what this Crawford Woods said, and since you have set the factual correction to this down on paper, you can leave it behind you now—Don’t mind if I say this, since the book is close to me too. My mother had a saying when she wanted you to dismiss some offender like that, “He’s not worth an inch of your little finger,” and indeed, Ken, he’s not. So I hope what you’re doing is getting the feel and the joy of a new book in you, that’s the best change in the world, don’t you believe? And that you won’t let this stupid man take away your rightful good feeling about Sleeping Beauty, to the least degree—You know that wouldn’t be right, to let him get away with his attack, which is so clearly one of ignorance, envy and malice. I feel sure it didn’t come easily to you to write that letter—you could have done it more easily on behalf of somebody else—Do you want me to return you the copy? I’ll watch for it in the paper. Just tear up his rotten review—I hope all goes well with everything, and how good that your old friend Herb Harker has come to live close by—Do you think I should try The Wings of the Dove? I gave up the first time too—

  Love,

  Eudora

  Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, July 24, 1973

  Dear Eudora:

  Not having heard from you for a while I had begun to wonder if all was well and now you tell me that it isn’t. I am so sorry you lost your dear friend Dolly Wells, and grateful to you for telling me something of your lives together in Jackson and elsewhere. It’s a hard thing to be moving as you are, and I close behind you, into the time of loss. No wonder as we grow older we like to live in the more populous past. My father-in-law Henry Sturm, who is in his ninetieth year, almost blind but full of memories, has almost no coevals left. But he has one good niece (about your age) who keeps in steady touch with him, and makes him happy, if that word can be used for a man who is almost blind and almost ninety. Henry would have made a character in Losing Battles: he left school in the fourth grade and went to work in the (Ontario) fields, to such good effect that he became mayor of the city of Kitchener, a city not wholly unlike Jackson though its core population is German and Pennsylvania Dutch. I’m impressed by the strength and courage that makes such a man as Henry dare to grow very old, outliving [my] wife Margaret’s mother by forty years. I wish you strength and courage, but not such lonely longevity as that, though you have your nieces, too, and so many friends.

  I hadn’t looked at Uncle Vanya since I was in graduate school and even then I hadn’t come far enough along to recognize Chekhov’s complete relevance to our concerns. I do now, though, and the passage you so kindly typed out for me points it up. And the answer to your question do I love Chekhov best of all story writers is yes. I’ll never forget the first time I read The Black Monk and now I learn from his letters—yes, I’ve just bought his letters, too—the Karlinsky and Heim selection, not the Yarmolinsky—I learn from his letters that if he hadn’t become a writer he would have become a psychiatrist. (So might I.) I think his life was exemplary as well, noble and sweet and above all intelligent for everyone but himself.

  Yes, I saw Buchwald—the Watergate Sage. I’d also seen the review from the Jackson paper which you so kindly sent me. I don’t use a clipping service but I have a friend in Florida named W.T. Bresson, a true-crime writer who for reasons of his profession buys dozens of papers from all over the country, and when he sees a friend named he lets us know—a wonderfully generous man.

  S.B. is still being shipped, at the rate of about 800 a week. I enclose the June wrapup from PW so that you can see where it stood, though it no longer does of course.

  Margaret sends her love, with mine. Our thoughts are very much with you. Thank you for writing. As ever, Ken

  Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, July 29, 1973

  Dear Eudora:

  I’m grateful for your warm and strong support in the matter of the Crawford Woods review, which now that it is answered, and in your opinion properly so, I can forget and almost already have. Jimmie and his dad were up for the weekend and we had a fine time in and out of the ocean and at the dog show. One of the lifeguards took Jim for a ride in his dory—used for rescue—and J was in seventh watery heaven, and I recalled my own first experiences with the Pacific, on English Bay in Stanley Park in Vancouver. I think that blue oceanic dream (you have it, too, being crazy about boats) is a good one to have through life. As for the dog show, our favorite part was the obedience trials, with the deep and subtle and differing relationships between the dogs and their masters. My favorite dogs in that event, and usually the winners (though I once saw a Welsh Corgi take the first ribbon) are the German Shepherds like my own old dog Brandy who was also obedience-trained, up to a point. I think the most fun Margaret and I ever had was when Brandy was young and the three of us would go swimming in the ocean. Brandy is too arthritic to go in the surf any more, but we’re not.

  Joe, Jim’s devoted father, is looking himself again for the first time in the nearly three years since his wife and our daughter Linda died. For the first time he looked at the light as if it didn’t dismay him. At the same time he’s always been perfect with his son—I’ve never seen such complete understanding and respect between a boy and his father. In fact we all get along very well, and fly high on bicycles.

  Having diligently read my way through The Wings of the Dove I think I can report that it is safe for you to give it a skip. Line by line it’s marvellously wrought but somehow overcharged with electricity that fails to flow from scene to scene, and by emotion which is elaborately known but not quite felt, like a model of the circulatory system without any heart attached to it. Or, to name what it is, a novel of seduction told in purely cerebral terms. James avoided his subject in more ways than this. Milly Theale is a portrait of the artist as a dying young woman, but we never get t
o know what really killed her, or what killed or attenuated James’ immense talent. I think I can guess, though. Between The Ambassadors and Dove the American tie which held his imagination in place was somehow cut. He ascended like a balloon.

  I’m sending you a book, a very thin book published by an old friend and former student, in which a couple of essays about detective fiction which you may not have seen are reprinted.40 It’s dedicated to Donald Davie because we were close, literally and fig’ly, the winter I wrote The Galton Case.

  Love,

  Ken

  Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, August 7, 1973

  Dear Eudora:

  I found when I opened my New York Times Book Review that a remarkable thing had happened which I must share with you. My letter had been printed, but as I started to read it the language didn’t seem entirely familiar. In fact it had been improved. It struck me as I went on that someone at the Book Review had edited and revised my letter, strengthening it and putting teeth in it. And it seemed to me that John Leonard himself must have done the deed, or at the least authorized it. Whatever, I took it as a strong direct personal message which pleased and encouraged me, and has had the effect of putting the whole unfortunate matter behind me. (If you should wish to compare the two letters, you have a copy of my original, I believe.)41 Life continues full of surprises. Another was a very late hatching of quail, long after we had given up on them for this season, so that there are ten “walking walnuts”, as M. calls them, spending a good deal of time in our back yard. We’re doing a good deal of hiking and swimming these days against the day coming on when I have to stay home and get to work—which I’m starting to look forward to now.

  Love,

  Ken

  Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, Sunday morning [August 12, 1973]

  Dear Ken,

  It was a comfort to get your letter about the losing of my friend—but I know I’d been self-indulgent when I sent my letter to you—you were so kind and so quick to write to me. Thank you for your wishes. I’ve been owing you more than one letter, and have wanted to say how very much I prize the book you sent me with your two pieces on writing. I’ve never seen the first, “The Writer as Detective Hero,” and had seen the second, on writing The Galton Case, in the volume called Afterwords, which Reynolds Price sent me some time back, because both you and he were in it. (I read it in your new little book and in the Afterwords collection too, together, seeing that you had left it without changing a word—and why would you have, in its excellence?) And I went back and read your Introduction to Archer at Large, which you gave me, which even before I’d met you I found so personally moving, just to see them together. It’s good to have the real thing being said about a writer’s work, and working, by the writer—when he can do it, which not all writers can at all. To me what you say about plot in the first piece is the best I know. Those four clear probing sentences, in their concentration of knowledge and wisdom—I rejoiced when I read them. Of course the essay itself is full of imaginative and sane and just comparisons and distinctions that you’re the exact right one to make in your account of Poe and Doyle and Hammett and Chandler and you, and your detectives—(I say “just” not because I think I know more than I do, but because I know it can’t help but be just.) It is good to have, and the two pieces together ought to always be available to readers—though of course it’s a great pleasure to have them in this handsome form—thank you for the present of the book, and for the inscription in it, which I shall be taking good care of. I thought at several points in reading it how well it would have served me in my year or two with my writing class at Millsaps College here—I did use the detective story in my efforts to illustrate the vital elements of plot which could be learned there, in its strictest form. The piece you’ve written is now a help to me. I’ve been trying to get a short piece written on time in fiction,—the kind of thing that I can learn a little from in trying to put down. So it was timely, your book, as well as welcome.

  Yes, I’d seen the altering of the first paragraph of your letter to the Times B-R, and I wondered who. You are probably right that it could only be John Leonard. I hope it was. It had seemed rather a poor thing to do on his part to let that review be published—although of course I realize an editor does stand behind his reviewer (he’s done that for me), still he owed you the much greater debt, to have your book honestly and fairly reviewed—and his admiration of you and your work is certainly long since proven and known. Maybe all the while he’s hoped you’d write and give him some little chance to say he’s sorry. Anyway, the letter read fine, and it’s on record now. I’ve been meaning to return your draft of it to you, it was good of you to let me see it.

  Things sound so nice there—the peaceful days and the excursions in the cool evenings on the bicycle. I’m glad to know you feel as you do about Jimmie and his father. And of course glad it is so for Jimmie. He is doubly fortunate, he has you—and I think of how what was your own right as a child being taken from you has only made you so giving. (My mother used to use that word. She would say you were “very giving.”) To more than your family, to your friends too, and your students—as Mr. Noel Young says. Don’t mind my saying it, I’ve often thought it.

  By the way, did you safely get the little Irish Reader that I sent off to you a while back—things get so lost in the mail. It’s not that I’m anxious to have it back any time soon. But now, the book man I know in NY has succeeded in finding me a copy second hand that I’ll send you to keep—though my original wish had been to get Diarmuid to inscribe it for you, and I don’t know about this now—he’s in Maine, with Rosie, till after Labor Day, all going well, but says he does get these spells of tiredness—his word. I want to go up to see him in September, if he feels like it. Anyway, I thought you might like to have a copy to keep. One of my favorite things in it is the letter from Connemarra by Maria Edgeworth—isn’t that wonderfully wild?

  I’ve written too long a letter and let the beans burn dry, I bet—

  Please give my love to Margaret too, and thank her for her message. Nice news about the quails. I believe you told me once they were your favorite bird. I saw a hummingbird early in the morning today, away up high in my oak tree. What was he drinking—the dew?

  Love,

  Eudora

  Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, August 12, 1973

  Dear Eudora:

  I’ve been approached to put together a mystery and suspense anthology, a fairly thick one comprising novels, novellas, and short stories. The emphasis, my editor Ash Green says, is to be on suspense. If any nominations spring to mind, I’d be glad to have your help. The book as I see it will be divided between English and American work. At the moment I’m re-reading Graham Greene’s “The Basement Room” which seems a likely candidate—I don’t think familiarity is an objection in a book not aimed at aficionados. I’ll tell you more about this assignment as it proceeds, if you are interested.

  The enclosed review, written for the S.F. Chronicle about 15 years ago, turned up in my files and I send it on to you because it ends up with Chekhov. Nona Balakian (speaking of reviews) wrote me a warm friendly letter on her return from her vacation, enclosing a clipping of my letter to the Book Review and saying I should have put it even stronger. It’s almost worth having a review like that, to have one’s friends old and new rally round.

  We have ten brand-new quail in the yard as I wrote you—or is it twelve, or are they two separate families? We can’t tell yet. Love, Ken

  P.S.—Immediately after writing this note I went to an unfrequented bookshelf and picked out a book apparently at random and then saw it was edited by Mary Lou Aswell—The World Within, a psychoanalytically oriented literary anthology which includes not only “Why I Live at the P.O.” but Chekhov’s “The Black Monk,” and which I have been recurring to for years but not recently. This seems to be a kind of coming-together time. So now I must write to Mary Lou. K.

  [also includes Detroit Sunday News review, May 27, 1973, of S
leeping Beauty, written by Peter Wolfe]

  Thought you might be interested in this, too. Somehow it just reached me. I don’t vouch for all of it. K.

  Peter and his two young sons are visiting here next week.

  Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, [August 1973]

  Dear Ken,

  I’m sending you my first thought [Patrick O’Brian’s “The Walker”]42 though it might not be any good to you as a possible candidate—Do you know it? What a pleasure to think of your doing such an Anthology—

  “The Basement Room,” which I too like makes me think of Ralph Richardson in the movie of it, remember “Fallen Idol,” who makes me think of Chekhov—the best Vershinin that could ever have been—

  I want you to have back your draft of your letter to the Times too—have been waiting to come by an envelope. Letter next time.

  Love to the quails too,

  Eudora

  Thank you for letting me off The Wings of the Dove

  Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, August 24, 1973

  Dear Eudora:

  I did receive the Irish Reader you sent me, long since, but while I wrote to Diarmuid about my enjoyment of it I evidently failed to mention it to you. I’m sorry. It’s a very good collection: I’m glad to have been told about it and would be very happy to have a copy to keep, since you are so generous, with or without Diarmuid’s signature, as it falls. If you do see him next month, please remember me to him. I never saw a more pure or direct light in a man, and it was a great privilege to meet him, a privilege now perpetuated by his book, which I’ll return to you soon.

  You probably make too much of my very small book, but I’m so glad you like it! In allowing it to be made I was carried away by the purely personal (as Noel Young was in his introduction)—the idea of a hometown product put out by two old friends, one of whom is a rather elegant printer. Noel has since acquired a kind of fame with his book “Hot Tubs” about communal bathing in the Santa Barbara hills, which you may have seen written up in Newsweek. It seems to be an innocent sport but I prefer the solitary ocean, and bicycle twosomes. Though it’s getting a little warm here—nothing like Jackson, but we had a hot dry Santa Ana wind last night—but M. and I are still getting out on wheels every evening, coming home just as night falls, with the last of the birds (except the owls, who stay out later than we do—barn, screech and great horned owls, the latter contemptuously imperturbable in the presence of human beings.) I asked Margaret, by the way, if hummingbirds do drink dew. She thinks they do, but get most of their liquid needs in the nectar they drink. A nice life, humming around and drinking nectar. But my favorite birds at the moment, as I may have mentioned, are the various kinds of terns—Caspian, Elegant, Forster’s—that are fishing these days in our channel. They have such beautiful lines and such a deep emphatic wing-beat, as if they were leading an orchestra. Our greatest find, though—not ours personally, though we got in on it—our best find this summer was a couple of roseate spoonbills who turned up in our local slough, a first sighting for S.B. but not for California. Yesterday my brother-in-law snuck up within seventy-five feet of them and took their pictures 24 times. The last spoonbills I saw were off Corpus Christie, flocking in such number that the island they were sitting on looked like a pink island.