Hope Underground Man doesn’t disappoint you. It’s only a TV movie, you know, with a 22-day shooting schedule instead of 80 or 90 days. But the cast is very good. Celeste Holm plays Mrs. Broadhurst senior, by the way. The movie has not been taken as the basis for a series, and that suits me just as well. It would have been a distraction from real work; indeed, even this much has been—I mean the movie.
I still don’t know whether I’ll make it to Canada. There’s a wildcat airline strike up that way, on top of the postal strike which has prevented me from sending or getting any Canadian mail. But I trust it will be resolved by the end of next week.
I’m sending this c/o Mary Lou in the hope that it will catch you, and the assurance that she’ll mail it on if it doesn’t. M. and I are well and happy, and Duffy is developing into a superdog. At just over seven months he weighs ninety pounds (and is noticeably thin) and already is too large to be shown. Which is fine with me. He’s a wonderfully gentle and affectionate dog, and anything I throw he will retrieve. I’m gradually throwing the sticks and tennis balls further and further into the surf, and one of these days he’ll find himself swimming. The weather is bright and brisk these days, and our walks on the beach are heavenly. Yesterday we met one other walker and two runners, in three miles. Quite a few godwits and sanderlings and willets, though, which only enhanced the blessed solitude, just down the road from home—a combination that enchants me.
Love,
Ken
P.S.—I’ll be thinking about you under the clock of the Algonquin elevator. Hope to see Joan in N.Y. K.
Eudora Welty, Santa Fe, to Kenneth Millar, New York City, [April 29, 1974]
Dear Ken,
We stopped at the mailbox on our way into the compound where Mary Lou lives—they’d met me at the airport in Albuquerque—and there was your letter. It was so thoughtful of you to send a message in place of you, the next best thing, but we all wish it had been possible for you to be sitting around the piñon fire at night having supper & talking—and you could have had Agnes’s 5 dogs introduced to you, 2 of which are Ibiza (?) hounds, those lean longheaded pointed eared fast brown & white dogs that come down from the sacred Egyptian dogs that the Phoenicians carried to the coasts of Europe—Agi [Agnes Sims] says they still expect to be waited on hand & foot, as when they were sacred. What would Duffy think of them? Agi uses them as models in some of her paintings based on myths & tapestries etc.
This is just to say I hope the Mystery Writers of America do you proud and celebrate you the way they ought to on May 2. I hope you have a splendid time in N.Y. and will indeed see Joan—and the others that would like the chance, like Walter Clemons?—I’ll be seeing John Leonard in San Antonio at that meeting, May 2, I gather from the list—And I hope you don’t have to give up the Canadian part of the trip. Good luck on it all—
It’s cheering to be told there might be another chance for me to come to Santa Barbara—Actually I was just invited to come for a semester to the U. of Cal. at Santa Barbara (by Mr. Frost whom you probably know10) but it’s the kind of invitation I can’t ever accept—a full-time job is what it would amount to with me, who takes such things hard, so I couldn’t do my own work—But I was honored to be asked, and it gave me another twinge to say no to Santa Barbara. It was surely no more than your due that you were made a part of Mr. Starr’s talk—or of anybody’s talk on that subject that was at all serious. Give my regards to the place where you are now—I’ll be home just in time to see The Underground Man—I hope you see it—and like it—
Love,
Eudora
Again Millar went alone to New York and was pleased to find a letter from Eudora awaiting him at the Algonquin Hotel. “We live out our lives in terms of a very few people,” he later wrote her, “(you more than others, I less) and it was good to feel the touch of your mind as I entered the Cretan labyrinth of that weekend.”11 He managed to negotiate the “Cretan labyrinth” and showed up at the Essex House the evening of Friday, May 3, for the Mystery Writers of America dinner where he’d receive the MWA’s Grand Master Award. But he managed to avoid doing any interviews, even hiding behind a curtain at one point in order to duck the press.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, May 8, 1974
Dear Eudora:
Your letter was waiting for me when I checked in at the Algonquin and made me feel much less far from home. Then within an hour or two I was having dinner at Dorothy Olding’s house with Joan Kahn, and further good memories were renewed. My only regret was missing the Santa Fe part: Mary Lou and Agi and the Ibiza hounds and you. Life is full of different choices and near misses: I hope it will give me another chance at Santa Fe. You I know I will see again. My recent trips have turned out so well—Jackson, Chicago, New York—that I’m beginning to lose some of my disinclination to travel. Good as this last trip was, though, I have to admit that I got home exhausted. Though I greatly enjoyed the press of people at the dinner, and the honor they did me and the kindness they showed in the process, I feel more at home en plain air with few people around, or none, and a dog quite near. But then life would be duller without the exclamatory punctuation of those occasional public events. The whole affair was well-handled and I think well-covered. One incidental dividend was having lunch with Kurt Vonnegut whose girl-friend Jill Krementz asked me over to take my picture for a magazine: they were both exceedingly pleasant, I thought; and I’ve always heard this of Vonnegut.12
The Canadian part of my trip was cut short by external circumstances. Two hours before midnight Sunday night, having just driven back from Kitchener to Toronto, I got a tip that the Toronto airport would be shut down at midnight by a strike. There being no other way out but bus, and I unwilling to be trapped in Canada, as I was for too many years, I grabbed the last seat on an eleven o’clock plane back to New York. Then flew out here the next day. It made me realize dramatically how I felt about Canada, a place whose air is slightly difficult to breathe—bracing but untempered by gentleness or real civility (such as I was surrounded by in Jackson, where even the dear lady who Stole the Lunch did it with good manners). Canada, in short, remains the place that M. and I had to get out of. Her father, in his ninetieth year, remains a remarkable man and his daughter’s father. Dim sight but perfect memory and mind: he told me how he left school, never to return, at age 12 to work in a furniture factory, a fifty-nine-hour week at two dollars a week, and, as I’ve told you before (and he me) rose to be mayor, and president of the Ontario Municipal Association. He told me many things, without self-pity.
I’m glad to hear that Santa Barbara isn’t letting you alone—I do know Professor Frost and he is a decent man, active for many years in the NAACP before this became popular among whites, but his campus is not a very happy one: the administration lost its morale during the riots and never regained it—and particularly that we’ll perhaps be able to entice you to the Writers Conference next year. It will be fun. Meanwhile you have Europe coming up. My regards to it and the Princes, and my love to you, As always, Ken
P.S.—I told the MWA that my Edgar would solve a problem we’d been having in recent years with Margaret’s Edgar, who had been crying with loneliness
K.
P.P.S.—Review of TV movie enclosed. I thought it was terribly obscure, but I may be prejudiced—print-prejudiced.
K.
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, May 25, 1974
Dear Ken,
I was so glad to get your letters, both—yes you did write me soon after you got home from your eventful trip. It’s no wonder you were tired. What a lot of pleasure you must have given, at the same time. I hope you didn’t suffer in your health though, or in writing your new book, for even a little time.
It’s the way I feel too when I get home from a trip. I believe I may be more understanding about that than you know. By necessity I had to learn to cope with lecturing at colleges and all that goes with it, and I would collapse afterward when I got home, it’s so hard for me. This may show you, a remark
I don’t believe I ever repeated to anybody because they wouldn’t know what was so hilarious about it—a young man in a strange city at a party: “You’re the only low-key wallflower-type celebrity that’s ever visited here.” (The word celebrity is what makes it the funniest of all, of course.) But I’m not by nature the social being you saw here last May—that was something I had to be keyed up to, which indeed I was, by happiness. But I like one-time things, and special and extraordinary happenings—don’t you? Those are worth it.
All the time I was watching and trying to figure out what they thought they were doing to The Underground Man, I was wishing you could just get it back from the screen. They did you wrong in a whole lot of departments, which is bound to have upset you some in spite of your warning feeling that it might not be very good, had been made in such a brief time. Was all that confusing build-up, before the title even came along, something they were doing in aid of selling the pilot? And I thought they could have made a good movie out of it—and the way to do that was all in your book. They had only to use your characters play your scenes. That would have kept a clear, tight, intact, good movie. But they threw every chance away, it seemed to me. (I don’t feel in agreement at all with that Times reviewer whose piece you let me see.) I was especially impatient with them for not holding to & following the main drive of the story—Archer’s care for the fate of the little boy—who was made just an infant and then mostly forgotten about. What I did was go straight to the novel and read it again that same night—which settled my feathers. I agree, that’s where novels ought to be, on the page—
Did Jill get some nice pictures? I too have met them and think they are unusually sweet people. I’m glad you got out of Canada (again) all right and in the nick of time. But so good that you went and got to talk again and listen again to Margaret’s father. He sounds magnificent.
There’s a mocking bird in my yard that I believe can do arithmetic. This is the way he sings—each * is a phrase:
***
***
****** (he can add)
****
***
* (he can subtract)
******
**
*** (he can do short division)
then something like this, approximate only:
******
****
************************!
It may be multiplication, but there he loses me.
I’ve been putting my non-fiction book together—a lot of work and what it will amount to I feel uncertain about—I’m better at knowing whether or not stories are good. I take off on Thursday (flying) for NY and will probably finish the book up in the Algonquin, leaving the next Wed., June 5. I’ll write you a letter on the boat.
Greetings to Margaret—also to Duffy & to the new Edgar—With love to you, Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, New York City, May 30, 1974
Dear Eudora:
It was such a delight to get your letter, as always so kind and understanding. I’m afraid I’ve been spoiled by these writing years in the fastnesses of California, so that while I’m a low-key type like you by preference, I get terribly keyed up in the big city, find it hard to sleep or even stop moving. The best thing is to stay away. But the trouble is, I enjoy it. But better for me are the long slow seaside days with the sound of the waves instead of the sounds of traffic, and birds around. I spent a happy quarter-of-an hour today watching a couple of surf scoters foraging underwater in the surge around the pilings of a pier, and another half-hour or so walking my dear old 8 ½-month-old Duffy, who is getting quite enormous but is as mild as a kitten. He’s already as tall and long as Brandy was, but is narrow in the beam and, under his fur, quite lean. He still has his sweet puppy smell. His intended companion, another small dog from the same kennels, was born last week and we’ll be bringing him home early in July. Our hands will be full for a while, which is the way hands should be.
With all my bucolic intentions and resolutions, New York has reached its skinny arm out to here and offered me once again its dubious embrace. A reporter for People magazine, Brad Darrach, has been following me around this week, asking questions and getting answers, aimed at some kind of article for the magazine. Fortunately Darrach is both bright and honest, so that the process is painless, but still enervating. The funniest thing is that Jill Krementz, after taking all those pictures in N.Y., is flying out here tomorrow to take some more. I really don’t complain. Publicity is one of the things a writer can use, and I am willing to be struck while the iron is hot, but it will be nice to crawl back into my book.—The comparative mess that was made of Underground Man didn’t really bother me, in fact I had some good laughs in the course of it. My feeling is that such enterprises don’t really touch the books, and that all a writer has any right to expect is, if he’s very lucky, one good movie based on his work in a lifetime. I’d probably feel much worse if they had made a TV series and I had to sit and watch it every week. Books, novels, belong as you say on the page, and these fantastic interruptions only send us back rejoicing to the quiet writing life which is interrupted only by the scratching of the pen and the trilling of mathematical mockingbirds. I loved your demonstration and am prepared to accept it absolutely. Nature taught us to count.
Barnaby Conrad and I were filled with joy by your saying in effect: ask me again. It will be lovely for all of us, and I hope for you too, if you can come to our Writers Conference in 1975. Barney asked me to tell you that he greatly appreciated your note and that it was the sweetest rejection he ever got. This year’s conference, by the way, is now filled up, with as many students as Cate School can house and handle. I enclose a program for your amusement.
Margaret is very well, and so am I. We hope you have a fun time in Europe with your dear good friends. Please do write me on the boat. I’ve written many letters on boats but never received one.
Love, Ken
Eudora Welty, New York City, to Kenneth Millar, June 4, 1974
Dear Ken,
Thank you for your letter, which I was so happy to be handed here, and cheered to read. I was glad to hear all your news & to see the prospectus of the coming Writer’s Conference. I’ll hope for that later next year—
Watch out for a photo of me that Jill Krementz is sending you—She picked out her choice, and sent it over by messenger to be inscribed—It’s one she took at 7:30 AM when she rushed upstairs without warning into my bedroom—I could have picked you out something a bit tidier.13
My boat sails tomorrow and I’m still finishing up errands that ought to have been done in Jackson—Excuse this awful writing—it’s being done on my knee in the lobby—
Good luck with everything, including the new puppy when he comes.
Love,
Eudora
Eudora Welty, at sea, to Kenneth Millar, June 14, 1974
Dear Ken,
This is our ninth and last day of the crossing—with smooth seas for the most part, the days some sunny, some overcast—but to me all good, for being on a moving deck with the Atlantic rolling by, & just reading or just breathing the good air—The Raffaello itself—herself, I guess—is the most casual & confused ship in the running—For example, I had to change my cabin 3 times the first night out—getting thrown out of one & guided to another one, no reason known. This is tourist class, but some acquaintances upstairs tell me it was the same there. Slightly comic opera, but I just go on reading Lord Byron’s Letters and the autobiography of the Emperor of China, and on—an old friend from home who now lives in Italy is meeting the boat in Genoa & I’ll go home with him & friend for the weekend, near Pisa—Then John & Catherine Prince & I will connect—they’re heading toward Italy from Greece—It ought to be the nicest, easiest trip—back roads & good food—they’ve already cased the way—We’ll postcard you.
I hope your work goes well—That everything goes well. There’s a beautiful German Shepherd who made a safe trip over—I saw him embark in N.Y., & heard his voice at night from my cabin, &
saw him disembark at Naples yesterday—Entering that Bay & sailing out of it! It’s as hypnotic & lovely as ever—
This may be mailed in either Genoa or France—I’m told any letter mailed in Italy can take a month. My letter to my friend near Pisa took over a month to reach him, air mail. I read a mystery by Alan Hunter, new to me, that I liked—“Innocents” was in the title. (I can never remember the title of any book, just the contents) I’m wondering if you approve of him? Love from the Mediterranean,
Eudora
Eudora mailed this letter to Ken from Riparbella in Tuscany near the home of her old friend and flame, John Robinson. She and Robinson had been involved in a long and complicated romantic relationship between 1937 and 1952. The relationship had ended when Robinson either told Eudora or she realized that he was in love with a young Italian named Enzo Rocchigiani; the two men would be together until Robinson’s death in 1989. For a time in the 1950s, Eudora and Robinson were alienated, but their friendship ultimately endured, as their romance did not. In her letters to Ken, Eudora never mentions this part of her history with an “old friend from home.”
Meanwhile, in Santa Barbara, People’s Brad Darrach witnessed the bleak tension often apparent in Ken and Margaret Millar’s union. “I had the feeling he was manacled to his wife,” Darrach would recall much later, “and maybe she to him. I was aware of the ravine in their marriage: something very fundamental had happened between them, and I felt it had reached the point where there was barely civility [. . .] And it all centered around the daughter, I’m sure.”14
Meanwhile There Are Letters Page 24