In August and into the fall of 1974, writer’s block became of concern to both Ken and Eudora. She had published no fiction since The Optimist’s Daughter (1972) and he was struggling in the wake of Sleeping Beauty, which had appeared early in 1973. Ken hoped that Eudora’s 1974 trip to Europe might prompt her to return to fiction in the same way that her 1949–1950 trip to Europe had inspired some of the stories in her book The Bride of the Innisfallen (1955). And for his part, Ken sought inspiration by traveling to the San Francisco Bay area, where he and his family had lived from 1956–1958 while sixteen-year-old Linda was on probation for driving a hit-and-run car that left one young man dead. Guilt-ridden and grief-stricken, Ken had during these years in Menlo Park undergone intensive psychoanalysis. Now he looked back at that difficult time as a possible source of new fiction. It seems that Eudora, instead of turning to her recent travels, hoped to discover ideas for new work in uncompleted stories she had abandoned in the more distant past.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, August 5, 1974
Dear Eudora:
I enjoyed your bulletins from Italy and France, and envied you not only your experiences there but the blithe spirit in which you enjoyed them, but I got a particular kick out of your most recent letter announcing that you were once more on native soil and heading back to even more native soil. You’ll be counting over your experiences and perceptions for many months, and the familiar stimuli of home will be absorbed into the game as you play it hour by hour and minute by minute. Everything will be refreshed for you, and perhaps there will be a collocation of images that will strike sparks and start a new story. I wish it for you, though it isn’t necessary to you. I’m really just indulging myself in the thought of your beautiful mind in flight again and stooping like a falcon—a benign falcon which doesn’t hurt its prey, at least not so very terribly.
I, on the other hand, am the victim of my books, and have recently spent several days in San Francisco and Palo Alto, revisiting some of the more painful scenes of my life, in the hope that mad California will hurt me into prose again. She will. I have a rather grim story in the planning stage, and my trip will help to flesh it out. San Francisco was rather fun, though it’s becoming overbuilt and has more skyscrapers sticking out of its poor bones than a chicken has feathers. I enjoyed the Bay scenes, though, and the crowds where you could see any kind of persons and feel a certain fraternity with them. It’s important to me to be reminded of the urban poor, and I took long bus rides with them. Altogether it was a good experience. Perhaps next year, when I get my book done, I’ll hie my way back to Europe. I spent most of a year there when I was twenty and twenty-one, and would like to repeat the experience, though not for so long. Of course I have more responsibilities now. My wife, my grandson, my two young dogs. Margaret is physically well but unable to write for several years now. She doesn’t need it, but she used to enjoy it and depend on it. Now she has people. Grandson Jim is one of the people, and a good sort, strong and bright and in key with the difficult times which he handles with humor. He is a good student and, at eleven, thinks nothing of biking twenty-five miles in a day to swim in the ocean, at Huntington Beach. He’s been in the house tonight, went to bed laughing. I wish my very young pup would go to bed and stay there, but at ten weeks he can’t hold his water for more than a few hours, so I get up in the middle of the night—sometimes, quite often, too late—but there are worse things than puppy pee on the floor. This pup is the best one I ever had, doing by instinct already everything that a dog should do, and more. At ten weeks he weighs twenty-six pounds, is black and red, very beautiful, very friendly, very assertive, very rugged, “holding his own” with his hundred-pound ten-months brother MacDuff. His name is Skye and his father was the best German shepherd in the U.S.A. a couple of years ago. So we have made it into the aristocracy and as for living, our dogs will do that for us. I am looking forward to seeing you, on one coast or the other, surely within the new year. My love, as always, Ken
P.S. Speaking of Skye, Macdonald country, thanks for the mysterious clipping about Ross.15 K.
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, September 2, 1974
Dear Ken,
I hope you are fine, and everything going well. I got your letter safely, right after I got back to Jackson, and was glad to know your news, and have been thinking about you going about and working on your new book. I hope you haven’t given up ever getting a letter from me and would readily guess the reason for the snag—the pile-up of things that overwhelms you when you’ve been away from home. (The pile-up of the things you went away in order to get out from under in the first place. —I was just speaking of myself) I’ve felt unable to write a letter to a friend or do a lick of my own work—what bad management. I expect you would never be guilty of such a thing, and guilty is the right word for the way I feel. And unhappy, not to be doing the two things that give me the most pleasure. Enough of that. Maybe today will break the spell, for the weather’s changing. I’ve been looking out the window to see if I can spot any new birds in my tree.
Have you finished the moving about your book has been asking for, so that you’ve been able to settle back into your good working life at home, with its walks? And two dogs now. The puppy sounds unbeatable. Very beautiful too, and with a beautiful name, Skye. The two of them running together must make quite a thunder in the house. (Coming out of the Skye, I didn’t realize.)
I too look forward to coming out there next summer—is it June? It seems to me a lovely prospect. I don’t want it to interfere in any way with your book, which is clearly an important one to you and one long in the making—but I trust it won’t. June is a long way off.
If I may, I’ll wish for Margaret that she will have found her own good way back into writing again.
Sometimes only the doing makes me believe I can do it at all, even a line. I do know what it is to be unable and to miss it.—Have you read Midnight Oil, by V.S. Pritchett? (One of my favorite writers.) A marvelous autobiographical book.16
With love,
Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, September 7, 1974
Dear Eudora:
I’m so happy that you’ve mastered the world of things again and settled down at peace with the realities of home and are waiting to be struck by benign lightning. Happy too—and so will many of us be—that you remain fixed in your intention to come to Santa Barbara next June. (Barnaby Conrad will be writing you later about times and arrangements.) I really enjoyed this year’s conference, particularly Ray Bradbury and Joan Didion. There were 62 full-time students, not including dozens who came out from town for the lectures. I think you’ll love Cate School, where the conference is held. Santa Barbara in the summer is very heaven. And we’ll be so glad to see you.
Margaret may or may not write again. She ran into a severe block after Linda’s death, and sat for months in her room trying to get past, sentence by sentence, the middle of a tragic book. Finally she couldn’t write at all. She needs writing to complete her life, but it is still a rather full life, full of talk and friends and several interests. I regret her silence. But as you imply, we all write on the verge of silence. When the words come, they’re pure good luck, like rain. My own words have been coming slow this year, but I haven’t run out of them yet.
Yes, I’ve read Midnight Oil and like V.S. Pritchett very much, admire his short stories. Also his previous volume of autobiography, A (Hansom?) Cab at the Gate [actually, A Cab at the Door] or some such title, which interested me particularly because so many of the members of my family, though they started out as Mennonites and Presbyterians and whatever, ended up as Christian Scientists. My mother was a Christian Scientist, and I had almost as hard a time as Pritchett breaking away from that unreal world. Fortunately Mother became reconciled to my apostasy before the end of her life (in 1936, aged 58) and was content to see me go my own way, out of churches altogether.
If Christian Science could do what it claims, I’d be calling on it now. My seventy-year-
old brother-in-law Clarence Schlagel, husband of Margaret’s sister Dorothy, is in the final stages of a four-year contest with cancer. He lost his larynx years ago, and now is losing his life. But he is going not unhappily. Dorothy is a devoted wife, nearly twenty years his junior, and she also happens to be a very good nurse, and she’s taken leave of her job (head of the X-ray dept. in a local clinic) to nurse Clarence through his final illness. She can’t save him, not for too long, but she can ease his passage. The very close careful direct physical attention ruled by both science and love that she is giving her husband is beautiful to watch, more beautiful than any ballet. She goes home exhausted at eleven and comes back fresh, or fresher, in the morning. I can’t express my admiration for the courage and devotion of such women as Dorothy. Night after night she battles with the Fiend himself and licks him. My mother, who was also a nurse, Winnipeg General class of 1900, nursed my father in that way in his last days, and temporarily said to hell with Christian Science.
Love, Ken
P.S.—Eudora, I hope I thanked you properly for signing Jill’s picture of you. K.
P.S.—I gave my friend Brad Darrach the journalist your address so that he could send you his book about Bobby Fischer in Iceland in the thought you might find it amusing or instructive or both.17 It’s a kind of comic saga done mostly in dialogue and monologue. K.
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, [October 8, 1974]
Dear Ken,
I hope you are fine, and the book going steadily on, and all keeping well with you. As you’ve found out, I’m the worst correspondent that could ever be wanting badly to write and failing to, with the attendant feelings of guilt—the last thing I see when I turn out my light at night is all my unanswered letters on my desk—cherished and unanswered. I truly cannot seem able to get past the stupid (to me) daily demands of things I don’t care about at all, to the real things of my real life, like my writing, like my friends. This sounds as if I’m in a bad way, and maybe I am, but I’ll still lick the problem, I hope. People
[The handwritten letter breaks off at this point, and Eudora begins anew on the same page, using her typewriter.]
Dear Ken,
I’ll try again. I wanted to ask you about the new oil slick—when the news came one morning that it had happened during the night, I felt distressed for you, and Margaret, and of course Santa Barbara and once more your birds, and then I never heard a single follow-up report. Oil slicks don’t just go away, do they, any more than other troubles? Somehow I felt this would be the worst time one could happen, because isn’t it a migratory season? But I will hope—maybe this isn’t a bad one?
Thank you for your letters, and for telling me more about your family—And I think I do know about the long experience, almost impossible to conceive of until you are given it yourself, of nursing the long illness of someone you love, and I feel able even from away off as I am to send sympathy.
It was interesting to get the book about Bobby Fischer, and thank you for asking your friend Brad Darrach to send it to me—he also sent a very nice letter, which I must reply to, in which he told me he was the one who had interviewed you for the magazine People.18 This I missed because I was away, and our library doesn’t get it. Would it be asking too much if you would send me a copy to read—I’d send it back. Ordinarily I shy away from reading interviews of my friends because they seem superficial and full of error (not Christian Scientist, just the plain kind) by their very nature. But you and he must have achieved something better, and I would also like to see the pictures Jill took. You must have been rather a change from Bobby Fischer! What a character—how unbelievable he’d be in a book of fiction. I agree with you that this young journalist did his job well, and that must have been a harder job than the job itself.
I did enjoy the New Statesman parodies—was delighted you sent me the page. The Wasted Land was a prize one. I also like the one on Amis and Betjeman, didn’t you? (I ought to be ashamed to send you the note I’d started, on the other side, but will write on the back of it feeling better.) I have a clipping somewhere for you, too.
Mary Lou has been here lately, and stayed a week which was grand. The local ETV station is giving a prize for the best documentary and the best fictional film entered from around the country, and asked me to get a jury here and be a judge with them. Originally 40 entries—they had 7 left to judge. We got a good one, I think—called “Glen Rose, Texas.” When it’s shown (I suppose it will be) on PBS I will let you know, I think you would find it worthy. What they showed was good, and then they made something with it, in filming, recording talk—the real thing—and selecting. A work of art, really. The judge representing TV was Curtis Davis (unknown to me), of NY, who I thought might have met you—but he hadn’t—since he had produced that program about the Louds (I never saw it). He hadn’t been the one who’d gone to see you, hadn’t gone to Santa Barbara. But he was a nice man, anyway. After the ETV things, Mary Lou stayed for a little visit, and I enjoyed her so much. She asked about you—and she said what if I could stop off in Santa Fe when I went to Santa Barbara.
Before this, the State Council on the Arts had the National Council on the Arts people—Nancy Hanks & Co.—to Jackson, and I had to help, wanted to of course—I had to make a speech, and after they left I felt so bone tired from nervousness. Crowds of people—I was not built for doing my civic duties, and maybe I ought to quit trying. I feel you understand these things.
For the last two days I’ve been trying to write a story, pick it up where I left off a month ago. This is the way to get back on the track, for me. Please forgive such a rotten letter. I do hope all is well with you.
Love,
Eudora
(over)
I thought you could enjoy this: My niece Liz has just entered her daughter Leslie, age 3, in nursery school. She came home yesterday & said, “I was the leader for today.”—“What does the leader get to do?”—“Push.”
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, October 10, 1974
Dear Eudora:
I greatly enjoyed and have read over and over the letter which you unaccountably consider “rotten”—if one of your letters could be rotten there’d be nothing sound left in heaven or on earth, regions which you seem to take turns inhabiting: weekends in heaven, weekdays on earth. But of course your feeling of distress is not really unaccountable: you are a writer, and too many duties and occasions have been getting in the way of your writing. I wish you some clear space to work in, and a renewal of the selfish dedication that used to be our armor. I include myself, because I’ve been suffering from the same dissipation of my energies. We are not lotus eaters, but we are duty eaters, and we must return to what my friends in college used to call the higher selfishness. I am willing to cooperate to the extent of sacrificing one of my greatest pleasures and suggesting that you not answer this letter at all.
These past months have been not unhappy but rather broken up, so that while I have been able to do a great deal of planning and note-making towards my new book, I haven’t actually written any final copy. But as the fall comes on, I’m beginning to feel something stir, like Frankenstein’s monster. Brad Darrach, who for ten years was movie reviewer for Time magazine, has recently been doing a profile of Mel Brooks, and tells me that Brooks’ new Frankenstein movie, starring Cloris Leachman, is one of the funniest things he’s ever seen. I hope you didn’t mind hearing from Brad, and seeing his book. We spent a solid week together and became good friends. He is the only glossy-journalist I ever met who struck me as a truly simple and virtuous man. But he isn’t young, as I too supposed he was when we first met—I spoke of “his generation” and “mine,” and he announced that he was 53. But his attitudes are youthful, and the Bobby Fischer book is his first. I admired the way he told his story almost entirely in accurately overheard language. I am sending you his piece for People magazine, which is also generally accurate, except in the matter of earnings. Jill’s pictures are good, don’t you think?
A friend of Jill�
�s, Susan Sheehan of the New Yorker, was here earlier this week to interview me (and Judith Anderson) in preparation for her biography of Alfred Knopf. Apparently I was the only author so far who came out unreservedly on Alfred’s side as a man and as a publisher. I did not of course become involved in the Alfred-Blanche controversy. I knew Blanche slightly, and respected her; and respect her more since I learned—this in confidence—that she had left behind a written tragic cri de coeur among her papers, explaining and lamenting. Suddenly, for me at least, the dreariness of that life and broken marriage fell away and revealed a flash of Racinean splendor which redeems all. Miss Sheehan expressed such a warm and intelligent and friendly interest in you that I suggested she give you a ring next time you both are in New York. If I am too free with such suggestions, stop me, please. But I believe you’d like her, as I did. She does a good deal of “Talk of the Town,” she told me, though she lives with her husband in Washington.
The oil slick which was given such publicity was not a serious one, just one of the many that occur off these shores, in no way comparable with the big spill of 1969. But we like the publicity, and it is an index of how seriously people here, and now even the authorities, are beginning to take this problem. A little late, of course, but we’ll slow ’em down. Knopf has just published Supership which is about the really great threat of the future: the mishandling of oil tankers in the world ocean. The author’s conclusion is that if present practices continue, the world oil pool will be depleted and the world ocean will be dead. Which means that life on earth will become virtually impossible—that is the price for fifty years of oil. It’s a frightening book. But now you don’t have to read it. I’m glad that by sheer happenstance—living in the right place—I got in early on what is now the central world issue, I suppose. I don’t mean to brag, but do you know half my books, starting with Moving Target, deal with the oil dynasties of California and Texas—without, in the early books, any very conscious propagandistic intent. Well, there’s no oil in the new book coming up, but there does seem to be a giant copper mine blighting its landscape. (My father worked in the silver mines at one time.)
Meanwhile There Are Letters Page 25