It was good of you to take the trouble to send me “The Walker.” It’s a terribly powerful story—one of those stories that stays with you forever, I suspect, like a terribly bad dream—and I hope to use it. The deal for the anthology isn’t quite set yet, I’m told; I’ll be content, whichever way it goes. Meanwhile I’m enjoying the reading, rediscovering Ambler, Christie, Greene, Stanley Ellison.
Tomorrow, camp having ended, Jimmie comes to us for ten days, and it’ll be a threesome on the bike trails. Love, Ken
P.S. I look forward to your piece on time. K
P.P.S.—I didn’t think your letter about the death of your friend was in the least self-indulgent, and I was glad you felt able to speak to me about it. Like the trees in your yard we lose limbs but still put out new leaves. K.
Late in 1973 Eudora and Ken both sought the convergence of their professional lives; if they were not to be together in person, they could be together in their work. In September Eudora asked for Ken’s reaction to her essay “Some Notes on Time in Fiction,” and in October she sent him her essay “The House of Willa Cather.” He responded with admiration and appreciation for both, and both would ultimately appear in the collection of nonfiction pieces Ken was urging her to compile, a volume that she would dedicate to him. Eudora certainly thought of Ken as a serious novelist, not just the talented genre writer whom some reviewers wanted to keep in a ghetto. In fact, she saw “mystery” itself not as a separate genre but as lying at the heart of fiction. “Relationship,” fiction’s primary subject, Eudora contended, “is a pervading and changing mystery; it is not words that make it so in life, but words have to make it so in a story. Brutal or lovely, the mystery waits for people wherever they go, whatever extreme they run to.”43 Just as she saw mystery as part of Literature, with a capital L, she recognized Ken as a serious student of literature; widely read though she was, he had the graduate training in literature, she did not. Her graduate studies had been in business in deference to her father’s belief that she needed something practical to fall back on.
For his part, Ken asked Eudora both to suggest texts he might collect in an anthology of suspense writing and to respond to titles he already had under consideration. Eudora was delighted that Ken wanted her advice and was eager to comply. Collaboration and consultation provided one way of transcending the 2,000 miles that separated them.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, September 17, 1973
Dear Eudora:
Your “notes on time in fiction” are superb, and I’m grateful to you for going to the trouble of making me a carbon, not to mention writing the piece in the first place. It’s a long time since I’ve read any essay in criticism which ranged so far and wide and deep, expressed itself so eloquently and justly, and made so many absolutely final statements. It’s virtually a philosophy of writing. And it ends powerfully with your tribute to Faulkner, who of all American novelists came closest to wrestling our beloved enemy to a draw. I do congratulate you on this wonderful piece of writing, which I hope will be widely seen. It deserves to end up in Familiar Quotations e.g. “It can expand a single moment like the skin of a balloon or bite off a life like a thread.” “In the sense of our own transience may lie the one irreducible urgency telling us to do, to understand, to love.” “Distortion of time is a deeply conscious part of any novel’s conception . . . it matters continuously, and increasingly, and exactly as the author gives it to us.” Which has never quite been said explicitly before.
I hope your trip was pleasant and satisfying; and that all is well with you. We’re having a cool September, which we both like. I’m nibbling at the edges of a book but haven’t taken a big bite yet—a book I’ve had in mind, and in my notebooks, for almost twenty years (and have probably already written at least once, but no matter). Have also been reading along through Diarmuid’s splendid anthology, with a consciousness of being in direct contact with his fine and various mind. The love that goes into such a book is stronger than death, too. In contact with you, as well, through that book with its green wrapper so well worn. But it’s time I returned it to you.
Love,
Ken
P.S.—Working on the anthology, too, if you can call reading work. That story you sent me, “The Walker,” is just about the most frightening thing I’ve ever read, the more so that its ending has a dreadful subjective quality, the reader having been gradually betrayed into complicity.
K.
Eudora Welty, on the train, to Kenneth Millar, September 25, 1973
Dear Ken,
This is on the train, in the Georgia hills headed for Birmingham. I’ve been in N.Y. a week and spent Saturday & Sunday with Diarmuid & Rose in the country. Unalterable in mind and spirit, but so frail and very tired now. I’m glad he felt like having me come. I took greetings to him from friends—and yours brought him a smile of pleasure. I’m glad that you and Diarmuid got to meet each other, at no matter what point. I didn’t ask him to sign your book, though, after I saw him, knowing it would be just as good either way, and will mail it on one day soon. He would be made to feel cheered, I think, if the last wildflower volume would come out soon—it is due to. Did I tell you (or did he? but he would have been too modest about his part in it, which was to start the whole thing, and attend to all the publishing details—just out of love and thinking a copy of the book would be nice to have) about the magnificent undertaking of the Wildflowers of the United States published by the N. Y. Botanical Garden & edited by that Mr. Rickett who knows everything about flowers, absolutely authentic & complete & every flower with its own color photograph—before it’s bulldozed out of the earth for good—Each section of the U.S. has its own one or two volumes—and Texas has 2 all to itself—just as with the birds, I believe you told me, things live there that aren’t found anywhere else44—Anyway Diarmuid knows & loves wildflowers the way you and Margaret love birds. He has a gift for getting them to grow for him too.
Nona & Joan & Olivia Kahn, too, send greetings, and so do John & Catherine Prince, whom I saw in Washington after the meeting I went to was over.45 Oh, God! I had to meet Pres. Nixon! We (the Council on the Arts) were all taken over to the Oval Office (in the rain) & made to go in a line to shake hands with him. I felt a bad hypocrite to touch him. (I who had never missed a session of Watergate.) He had a soft handshake & very feverish looking brown eyes. Make-up, I thought (& we all had to be photographed with him, our hands being clasped, “a copy will be sent to your hometown paper”). He seemed unreal as a man and poor as an actor—very jerky-jovial. All the same, while I resented being asked to look on this man as a fellow human being, who must in fact be suffering, we don’t know how much, this was the case—I hated the whole thing. We were given souvenirs from trays as we went out—pens, Nixon’s signature on same, & a pin with presidential seal on it, & cuff-links, with seal. They’ve been loading down my suitcase. In the Oval Office there was a perfectly smooth bare desk, and on a little table beside it a tape recorder. Yes there was! Nobody was offered that souvenir.
I haven’t properly told you how much I liked your piece that had such telling things to say about Mann. I will stop this though because I can’t ask you to read the terrible writing. How is the anthology coming along?46 All the thoughts I had were really no good to you because my favorite & most admired examples are detective stories & not suspense (I’m not quite sure how you divide them, since they overlap, don’t they?) Yes I think too that little story “The Walker” is powerful & terrible—It has stayed with me for years. (Somehow I haven’t thought of it as much since passing it along to you!—Not really so, of course). More later on—
Love,
Eudora
At the head of the letter’s first page on Algonquin stationery, Eudora has written: Every morning early & every night late, a large spotted common cat with short hair comes out into the only clear space in the Algonquin lobby & washes itself from head to foot making everybody go around it. Nobody minds.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, Se
ptember 29, 1973
Dear Eudora:
Thank you for the news of your trip, the good and the bad. I know how difficult it is to see an old friend dying, especially a man as splendid as Diarmuid. I think of him often, too. His face is in my mind, and of course I have no need of his signature but will be most pleased to have his book from you. I hope Diarmuid lives to see the last of the wildflower volumes, and then goes quickly. He has such heartbreaking grace.
President Nixon, I gather, does not. The penalty of fame, which you paid when you touched his hand, is stiffer under this administration. But I think I prefer him punchy and diminished—he is more likely to seek and take good advice, and we never had a president who needed it more.
I’m sorry (for my own sake) if I gave the impression that my anthology will exclude detective stories. On the contrary, it will probably start out with a Christie (what do you think of Miss Marple? I like her, and as of now propose to use What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw, which moves beautifully.) and, if I can get away with it, include a Margaret Millar. I’d be most grateful for any nominations you might have, English or American, long or short.
It was so good to have your letter. I don’t count the days but am acutely conscious of the time that passes between your letters. That same time which you wrote about so eloquently in your essay. All seems well here. Jimmie is enjoying school, and I am enjoying being out of it. The Fall bird season is starting. I must have told you about the roseate spoonbills that appeared here this last month, a first Santa Barbara sighting. And swimming in the ocean I saw a Xantus’s murrelet, very rare so near shore, probably sick, probably from the underwater oil which continues to run.47—Incidentally, when Nixon flew here to inspect the oil damage in 1969, a crew was sent ahead of him to clean up the beach. Gogol, thou shouldst be living at this hour.
Which reminds me that some time ago I read in the paper about the death of a man who had travelled with circuses and carnivals as the Petrified Man.48 I believe he died in Texas, which isn’t so very far from Mississippi.
Thank you for the greetings from your friends. You have friends here, too, who love to know that someone in Santa Barbara (me) is in touch with you.
Love,
Ken
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, September 30, 1973
Dear Ken,
Thank you for reading my paper with so much warm understanding—I was proud of your good opinion of it, and I hope you would have told me any misgivings you had, too. You know a lot more about time than most people I can think of, including me—it’s just that I’m so interested in it, from a writing point of view—and reading—and had tried hard on the paper, so I wanted you to look at it. I’m especially glad you thought the part about Faulkner didn’t do anything too outrageous. This was boiled down from a long piece I tried to do on time and The Sound and the Fury, which has never ceased to fascinate me. No, I don’t suppose many people will see it in print, as I did it for The Mississippi Journal, put out by Miss. State U., an edition supposed to be about some of my work, I understand, edited by Lewis Simpson from The Southern Review, do you remember meeting him here? I wanted to thank them in some way. You and these editors are the only ones I showed it to (I’m a very nervous writer about any new piece). They have accepted it.49 Now working on a lecture I must give on Willa Cather next month in Nebraska—it was a joy to read her all straight through. Your friends the Knopfs will be at the thing—it’s a centennial—a nice note came from her, saying they’d had lunch with you and Margaret (recently?) in Santa Barbara. He is to speak of his reminiscences about W.C. Leon Edel is to lecture.50 I’m the only non-academic, I take it, and my lecture will be in keeping—Don’t you like this, from My Antonia, remember it: “More than anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping . . .”
It’s good to know you’re nibbling around the edges of a new book—and I won’t ask you any at all how you get along because of my feeling that it might be bad luck (this just applies to fiction!) but I hope you have good luck. We all write the same things over again, I guess—If I can find it, here’s another thing Willa Cather said. It’s from O Pioneers—“Isn’t it queer, there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.” And “the old story writing itself over . . . It is we who write it, with the best we have.”
Thank you for sending back the Irish Reader, which came safely, and I have meant to put the copy for you to keep in the mail before this—I am glad you like it as you do. It was comforting what you said about Diarmuid.
Love,
Eudora
What you say about “The Walker” & the reader’s being trapped with complicity expresses or explains the awful hold it has, which I could not have put my finger on, or never had.
It rained a little—Mockingbirds singing in a renewed burst.
I hope all goes well with you both and all you do—
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, October 14, 1973
Dear Ken,
I was so glad of your letter, and thank you for it as I do for all your letters. When I’m slow answering, that’s because it’s the way I am—you might not believe what a horrible reputation I have as a letter writer. The thing is, I want to write, and don’t manage the right way. Forgive when I’m late, knowing I think of you and things I want to remark on, or ask you, or tell you.
Did you see the Xantu murrelet again? (Mental picture of that is as amazing as I can make it. In the house I don’t have a shore bird or western bird book, but I now and then see one in the library—I’d better correct my vision. I did see the roseate spoonbill’s portrait.) It must be lovely to see this whole world of birds stream through in the fall of the year—and you must be the one they (not the birds, the bird people) depend on most to report the rare and far-from-shore ones that they themselves would miss. The hummingbird never came back to my tree for more dew, it must not have been Grade-A. But I’ve seen some passers-through here in this not-too-quiet yard, even, especially while the sprinkler is on, and heard warblers etc.
How is your anthology? I’ve been reading over people I like, without seeming to hit upon the very book I like—I forget all books’ titles. Julian Symons’s “The Plain Man” I just read and started “The Belting Inheritance” again—it wasn’t “The Color of Murder”—I wonder what it was. Yes I do like “What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw,” that’s the train one, isn’t it—also I like “Mrs. McGinty’s Dead”—do you remember that’s Poirot and Mrs. Ariadne Oliver—Christie is endlessly diverting to me. I haven’t tried her again but did you ever think anything of Elizabeth Daly? I like “The Book of the Lion”—well, all of hers. I re-read a dreadful Ngaio Marsh—whom I enjoy mostly—which was maybe the first one, where Alleyn goes home each night from his case in the family Daimler sent by his mother, Lady Alleyn, and sits on her bed and lets her guess what’s happened and pronounce on who couldn’t possibly be the murderer, while they drink sherry and call each other “Darling.” He is just meeting Troy in time—I’ve already forgotten the name of the book.51 I read some favorite John Collier stories, but I suppose they cross the border into fantasy, and I read some Sheridan LeFanu again, whom I relish, but of course they’re long, long—“Uncle Silas” and “Green Tea”—I love that Irish Victorian. (Do you remember Elizabeth Bowen’s brilliant preface to an edition of “Uncle Silas”?) Another Victorian with suspense is Algernon Blackwood, do you agree, and there they all are on my shelf but I haven’t re-read—I did try Saki and thought NO—and what about Bradbury, and Roald Dahl, and William Samson, for short stories—don’t know how they’d stand up to test. Some others I’ve had in mind—I’ve just tried to think of the ones not in your own field, but what delight for you to be reading all those with t
he new purpose and perspective. Of course Margaret Millar’s got to come in! Do you know which one?
My time before going to Nebraska to read a paper is getting short, and I’ve been working hard—and slowly. I have to finish this week. Mary Lou came through and spent from 4:18 PM one day till 1:25 PM the next day here—it was lovely to have her. She was on her way to visit her children, one in Atlanta and one in Oswego, N.Y. She was fine and in high spirits. We spoke of you. ML said you might come to Santa Fe some time and she would ask me too. That’s a nice idea.
We celebrated Gershwin’s birthday here with a fine show down at that little converted church, New Stage, where you were—5 young people singing & dancing the songs and one more at the piano—the young people loved that music (which is in my very nerves) & did it just right—“Nice Work,” “My Man,” “Of Thee I Sing, Baby,” “Someone to Watch Over Me,”—all of the good ones with “Rhapsody in Blue” for while they were getting their breath. I hope all goes well with you, in all ways,
Meanwhile There Are Letters Page 19