Love,
Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, October 21, 1973
Dear Eudora:
Your letter was most welcome, as always, and I was glad to be reminded of Elizabeth Daly, though I haven’t found any of her books yet. Glad, too, that you should mention Margaret whom I’d like to include simply on her merits—perhaps Beast in View, which I’ve just recently read and consider very strong. Also read, and was impressed by, The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing, a poet who wrote only two mystery novels. To give you some idea of the variety of my reading, yesterday I read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (which still has power to scare, and reminds me of a more elegant but smaller Dickens; it interests me, by the way, that Dr. Jekyll, Jack the Ripper, and the first Sherlock Holmes stories, occurred within five years of each other, in a London which was a terrible city in those late Victorian days) and today, speaking of terrible cities, I’m reading W.R. Burnett’s The Asphalt Jungle—not a good book but a very powerful one, and the source of the movie in which Marilyn Monroe had her first featured role, as the old lawyer’s (Louis Calhern’s) girl. Margaret knew Burnett when he was writing Jungle—they were both employed at Warner Brothers in 1945–1946, Burnett at $1500 per week, but with three wives to support, two exes and the current wife, so he had to work all the time. Writers do strange things to themselves, especially in Hollywood, which M. left quickly and I have stayed away from. (But there are a couple of movies on the way—a TV movie based on The Ferguson Affair which I sold years ago, and one based on The Drowning Pool which I sold this year. The Underground Man movie seems to be bogged down but may eventually come to life.)
I did see the Xantus’s murrelet several times, but then it disappeared. Its place has since been taken by half-a-dozen western grebes (before the oil spill we had many more) and in the air by one or more Pomarine Jaegers, a rare bird like a kind of hawkish seagull whose unpleasant habit it is to chase the terns and steal the fish they have caught right out of their mouths. Why are predators in so many ways highest in the order of nature, swiftest and strongest? Is nature Nixonian, is its history Agnews? But then I think of the swift and strong and rather benign cetaceans, or among the birds of the condor which flies, did you know, thousands of feet high, and preys only on the dead. The beach these days is alive with smaller shore birds moving en masse as if the sand and stones had grown small invisible feet, and blessed winter, as we laughingly call it, begins to be in the air. But the sea is still warm enough to swim in, and tarry enough to get well blackened in.
I’m glad to hear of the celebration of Gershwin. He and Cole Porter and Ellington were great celebrators and deserve to be celebrated. The other night, for the first time in three years (since Linda died) I got out some Ellington records and played them. Linda’s boy, our Jimmie, is flourishing, reading like a streak and swimming like one too. We’d be sad indeed if it weren’t for him.
Did I mention that Diarmuid’s Irish Reader arrived in good shape?—a book I’ll treasure both for your sake and his, and its own sake.
Love,
Ken
P.S.—When I wrote you some time ago that I wished Diarmuid a death not too long drawn out, it may have sounded inhuman but it wasn’t meant that way. I’ve sat through the last days of old friends dying of cancer, and wished them Godspeed and still do. One of the dearest and one of the first gone was M. M. Musselman the humorist who wrote the Ritz Brothers movies and was Hemingway’s best friend at Oak Park High School in Chicago. Mussy spent his last years here in Santa Barbara and in the last months of the last year I saw him every day. That was twenty years ago.
I’m glad you mentioned Julian Symons, by the way. He and I are good friends and have visited each other, quite a feat. I haven’t found any one book in which his great talent shows itself fully, though I enjoy everything he writes—the most recent one as much as any.
Speaking of visiting friends, I’m glad you had a quick visit from Mary Lou and I do hope to see her again. We have a hard time getting anywhere, for various reasons. For example, a couple of weeks ago we were all set to go to Yosemite and Mammoth. Then Brandy had to have a tumor removed from his belly. He’s fine now. I don’t complain. A good dog is worth all the mountain scenery in the world. Did you ever read The Day the Mountain Fell? K.
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, October 24, 1973
Dear Ken,
I seem to be in a sort of habit of sending you what I’m doing—this is my Willa Cather paper, which, for better or worse, I’ll be delivering out in Nebraska on Friday night. (I leave early in the morning on a plane.) It would be good to know what it seems like to you—I don’t know whether or not you care for Willa Cather, but you have read so widely and thoroughly in American literature that I’d like to know just fine if you thought I had fitted her in in the right place and with the right feeling. No hurry though to read this—I know you’re busy with reading of your own. Of course I finished typing it in haste and expect I’ll give it some more work. I’m looking at a table full of stuff I left out—
Do things go well with you? I hope so. Maybe the season is really changing there, as it is here, without much of a sign—we have a long slow gentle fall—cool morning & evening air, warm sun, hardly any wind, gently falling leaves, and a wonderful sky after sunset, broad rose and blue halves of the western sky, and the moon comes up HUGE!
My news: Mary Alice, my niece the schoolteacher, whom you met here, had her first child last Friday night, a son. All went well, and they’re home from the hospital now. His name is Donald Alexander White, like his father, and he’s being called Alex. So relieved I was still here.
I read a mystery every time with thoughts of what you’re looking for, as I imagine that to be, in view—I have a lifetime habit of reading them, and am really re-reading. But with the fondest memories of a book—such as Andrew Garve’s “The Cookoo Line Affair”—I come to the conclusion none of them are good enough to mention to you. These are the books I’ve kept on my shelves as the best—I can only think I’ve been too easy to please. Learned from yours!
Love to you,
Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, October 28, 1973
Dear Eudora:
It was thoughtful and generous of you to send me your essay on Willa Cather. From the very first page it opened her up for me as she never had been before. She opened you up, too, into a further breadth and eloquence of statement, which should set to rest forever any doubts you have expressed about your right to speak out strongly on these matters. Your own profoundly faithful practice of the art of fiction has given you an eye for its largenesses and depths which couldn’t have been acquired in any school. I was overjoyed by the clarity and reach and strength of your statement.—You know, Alfred Knopf considered Miss Cather his greatest native author, and I believe he would love to see this tribute to her work. Indeed, I think a lot of people would.
Turning from great things to lesser, I have to admit that I share your disappointment in rereading some of the mystery fiction I used to consider first-rate. Helen Eustis’ The Horizontal Man, for instance, turned out to be quite a disappointment. Chandler stands up less well than Hammett. But Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock still has power to interest and excite. And an unambitious police-procedural like Hillary Waugh’s Last Seen Wearing seems to have more meat on its bones than Charlotte Armstrong’s novels, say.
I do appreciate your re-reading some of your books on my behalf, and hope you won’t hesitate to mention any possibilities. Fortunately the enterprise isn’t tied to the field of detective stories, but can range through the various branches of suspense. I’m enjoying the reading, but am beginning to look forward to some real work.
That’s great news about Donald Alexander White II, who must come as a splendid fruition to you as well as his parents.52 Congratulations to all three of you, and to Donald for being born into such a loving family. (There’s something about aunts, may I say? I’d have perished long ago without my aunts pickin
g up where my poor parents had to leave off.) And you will have the same grateful pleasure in watching him grow and learn to walk and talk and become a boy, that we have taken in Jimmie. All goes well with Jimmie and with us. He’s such a good boy that it sometimes brings tears to my eyes—a goodness based on his love and respect for his father. Some relationships are so valuable that one hesitates to look too closely at them, or describe them, and their love is one of these. “I wouldn’t want to go away to college—I wouldn’t want to leave my dad.” But of course I hope he will, and he probably will.
We’re having a late summer, bright and warm. Yesterday there were four red-shafted flickers on one of our palm trees. The ocean is 62°. I trust all is well with you. And thank you again for your Cather, some of which made my hair stand on end.
Love, Ken
Eudora Welty, New York City, to Kenneth Millar, November 17, 1973
Dear Ken,
Your generous and warm feeling about my W. Cather paper did me much good. I’d of course worked hard & long, and had hoped I’d managed to get down what had emerged as central for me in her work—What I know so little about is the generality of American literature, which I’ve read spottily and not chronologically and entirely to please myself—I’ve missed a lot, and missed the background knowledge that I felt I owed to this. I know you have only recently been reading systematically the whole stretch of American novelists and this makes me still more pleased that you saw worth in my paper. I gave it in Nebraska, and you’ll be interested, after what you said, to know that Alfred Knopf was in Nebraska too, for the same celebration—he and Helen—and I got to see quite a bit of them53—They asked me to go along in their private car on the day’s trip to Red Cloud, W.C.’s childhood home—which I will tell you about some time, when I have a typewriter, or when I see you. Anyway, Alfred was feeling fine in Nebraska, attending everything (he said of some of the speeches “BOSH,” and he did say he liked mine, so I came out all right with him) and at a luncheon in his honor he rose from the table and gave a 30- or 40-minute talk, from a few memos in hand, about his publishing life with Willa Cather from 1918 on—you can imagine how succinct and pertinent and how valuable all he said was—nobody else could have known or said it. I was most moved to be present. I’m sorry I’ve been so long in thanking you for your letters, but I haven’t written any letters, owing to Nebraska, then the U. of Chicago where I gave a reading, then the flu—in bed (at home) for over a week, from which I got up to come to New York where I had been asked to give a talk at the Museum of Modern Art (imagine!) on my little photograph book—a slide lecture, no less. I got through with it OK, in spite of the current strike going on in the Museum—the picketers were yelling “Eudora Welty is a liar!” “Eudora Welty, read your book, and you have betrayed us.”54 They had threatened over the phone that they would do this unless I withdrew my lecture from the Museum and delivered it to the strikers in another place. I was not informed on the issues, and thought it was only right to keep to my engagement, made months ago. It gave me a trip up here so I can go out to see Diarmuid, as I’ll be doing tomorrow, if he feels like it. What you said about his going quickly is what I fervently feel too, and what he has said himself about his friends in these same circumstances. Diarmuid had to watch his partner, Henry Volkening, die of lung cancer, and learned of his own right after.
I read again 8 or 10 of the mysteries in the house that I’ve cherished as “best” while I was down with flu and none seemed good enough for you. I would have thought too that Horizontal Man would stand up (!) It’s good The Big Clock does—As I recall Kenneth Fearing’s other mystery was a disappointment when it came out, wasn’t it?55 I made a little packet of 3 Elizabeth Dalys to send you but didn’t get to mail—but not that I think they’re strong enough to be candidates, probably, but because she’s a nice writer and I like her work—Only I can’t send you the one I think may be her very best one because I no longer have it, & can’t find another copy. The Book of the Lion—Joan Kahn gave me Julian Symons’ new one yesterday which I’m anxious to get into—56
I’ve had a nice few days here, & seen some of our mutual friends—Joan, Nona, Walter Clemons, Dick & Tessa Ader, & I hope I’ll be seeing Diarmuid & Rosie tomorrow57—Then home for Thanksgiving, with the girls & their families—the new baby—and thank you for your good wishes for Donald Alexander—I hope you have a fine Thanksgiving with Jimmie and his father coming to be with Margaret and you. He sounds so very fine.
Love and thanks to you, from Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, November 19, 1973
Dear Eudora:
I was so happy to get your letter today—had assumed that you were moving around quite a bit, and indeed you have been. The trip to Nebraska sounds like fun. I know how much you must have put into the preparation for your paper on Willa Cather, and it’s so good that Alfred got to hear it. Indeed you got to hear each other.
Margaret and I had a bit of a shock last week. I hasten to add that it was nothing really serious. Our fine old dog Brandy was supposed to die long ago, but hung on well with the help of cortisone and butazolidin and other drugs. But last week he got into a dog fight, was chewed up by a couple of black Labrador retrievers and, though his wounds weren’t terribly serious, he died two days later, here with us at home. He was completely fearless and probably died perfectly happy in the thought, or in the assurance that he had defended his territory one last time. We miss Brandy like hell, though we still have our little old spaniel, apxt. 13 ½, and are looking for another German shepherd pup; in fact we’re going to look at a litter tomorrow. But Brandy’s rather irreplaceable. We were never separated, except for the few times when I had to go out of town.
One of those times is coming up in December. I forget whether I told you that the Popular Culture Association—I think I did tell you—is going to give me a “merit award,” their first, at the MLA meeting in Chicago on December 27. The idea pleases me abstractly but I’m not looking forward much to the actual event. Four scholars are going to address me and I am supposed to respond. From here it sounds almost ludicrously strange and difficult but it can’t be any worse than my doctoral orals, when people kept asking me questions about things I hadn’t read. At least this time I’m familiar with the material. But it bores me.
I don’t know where you got the impression that I have been systematically reading my way through American Lit. (Can K.M. be as E.W. is reputed to be, in N.Y. artistic circles, a liar?) Perhaps I impressed you by getting through The Wings of the Dove. But apart from that noble effort, I’m the least systematic reader around, and the gaps are immense. I don’t really care, either, having so many good things to look forward to. Mostly novels, with enough criticism to keep me semi-alert. Right now I’m still reading crime stories, in the hope of finding something new and good, but not too new to be reprinted, and not too good to be usable. It does look, by the way, as if I’m going to get away with using a very long fine story by Patrick White, “A Glass of Tea,” from The Burnt Ones. Most of my short selections are not detective stories or even crime stories in the routine sense. John Collier and John Cheever instead of Ellery Queen and that sort of thing. The four novels, as of now, are the Christie I mentioned—yes, the “train” one, as you remembered, and one of Dick Francis’ thrillers, Bonecrack, or possibly Le Carre; but the thing about Francis is that he is in every respect quite fresh, and his mature style now is clean and strong. With The Big Clock, on the U.S. side, goes probably either M’s Beast in View, which I am pushing, or The Far Side of the Dollar which my publishers say they want. Am I repeating myself? Anyway, I’ll soon know how it turns out. The main virtue of the collection is that it won’t reprint too many over-familiar crime stories, but ranges outside the fence a little. Fortunately I was asked for a suspense anthology not a detective one. Probable title: “Suspense and Surprise.” Though I didn’t peek until I’d made up my list, I find I have one overlap with Joan’s [Joan Kahn’s] Trial and Terror—Flannery O’Connor’s �
��The Comforts of Home.” But it can stand the exposure and I’m leaving it in, of course. The rather broad range of choice, aimed at variety rather than fitting a definition, makes the introduction rather hard to do, I find, so I’m falling back on a kind of historical introduction telling the reader about what preceded the material I’ve collected. This introduction will have the advantage of making the stories which follow more interesting by comparison. I must thank you again for that explosive story “The Walker”—probably the most original and least known.
It rained half-an-inch yesterday and today was really chilly. I love to feel the winter, as we call it, coming on. Happy Thanksgiving, dear Eudora, and my best to Donald Alexander and the other good people of Jackson. I hope you were able to see Diarmuid.
Love, Ken
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, December 9, 1973
Dear Eudora:
Just a note to let you know that all is well. Fortunately just before the energy squeeze was officially announced (environmentalists have been predicting it for years) we bought a small German car, a BMW, which is supposed to do 22 m.p.g. I’m hoping the various freezes will bring this country out of the wild last-days-of-the-Roman-Empire spree in which it’s been indulging these last years. But it’s going to be tough now to save the Santa Barbara Channel from the oil lords.
The great old ghost of Brandy still haunts our house, but scampering in its shadow is a new German Shepherd pup, very lively and full of nuisance value, named Macduff Macdonald, Duffy for short. Yesterday he weighed 34 lbs, tomorrow he’ll weigh 35. We love him. So once again we renew our somewhat tattered youth.
Meanwhile There Are Letters Page 20