Dear young Jim joined the Scouts last week and came home carrying his Scout Manual. “I love this book,” he said. He fills me with joy as your grandnieces do you. I wish you more joy in Jackson, and so does Margaret, who is back among the birds full tilt. Our love, as always, Ken
P.S.—It will be great if you can do Santa Fe and Santa Barbara in a single swath next summer. K.
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, Thursday [October 17, 1974]
Dear Ken,
Thank you for your letter—all kindness. You couldn’t be hard on your friends, I suspect, or on anybody (unless it’s yourself). But I just don’t manage right when I can’t reply to letters better than I do—the letters I really want to reply to. Not the professor who wrote me today asking what reason I had to give him for not having any diabolism in my stories. (Is he the Devil, I wonder? He sounded provoked.) It’s good to know that all your interruptions haven’t done any harm to your book—you probably carried it all in your head right straight through those people’s interviews and all. By this time I hope you’ve got down all you were waiting to get on paper—I mean begun to get it down, with a good clear road ahead. You have indeed made the strongest dramatic use of what the oil dynasties are doing to your country and all the life in it—and not because of happenstance, living in the right place, as you put it—you were knowing in the place where you happened to live—and seeing, and because of that you had a subject for your talent to work with. I look forward to seeing what comes out of your copper mine.
Yes, I read about Supership—frightening it must be—I expect you were about the first one Alfred K. sent it to—
Your words about him to the woman who came about the biography are bound to give him a lot of pleasure, in reading her book. He was telling me himself about the book’s being written (and so was Helen K., about the lady’s being underfoot!) when I happened to see him at a party in N.Y. in May. He seemed to have much confidence in her, and you when you saw her liked her. I hope it is a worthy book—he’s an extraordinary man, isn’t he, and undoubtedly the last living great publisher—a man who knows and loves and publishes the best, and would not have done otherwise. Of course I don’t know him personally very well, yet I feel so much his kind interest in regarding me as a friend, in being a friend as I am of yours and of Elizabeth Bowen, and when we were together in Nebraska for the Willa Cather thing, we really did get the chance to talk a little. So I, too, want to see him done justice by, as a friend. It is touching, what you were told about Blanche. Touching and strange—How warm and good Helen is now—wonderful to see them together. She told me about what he said when after days & days of lying unconscious after his stroke he opened his eyes & saw her sitting beside him—“Never underestimate the power of love.”
Sure, I’d be pleased if Susan Sheehan wants to call me—that was nice of you since you liked her.
Thank you for letting me have a look at the interview in People. It was an unqualified delight to see the pictures—they are good. I do think Jill’s photography is more sensitive than Brad Darrach’s reporting, in the case of you! He likes you, clearly, but I just wanted him to say everything better—about your work—and I felt in some respects he had too much brashness—in place of perception. But the pictures said what the writing wasn’t able to—Or this was how it struck me—carper that I am? No I’m not!—And of course you were so nice to him—I’m returning it separately—putting with it a little item I did by request for a mag. starting up at Chicago—(the offprint is how they paid me).19
Jim sounds finer & finer all the time—“I love this book”—What a joy he must be.
Thank you for your good wishes for my work. I need them and feel better for having them. It’s that good fall feeling here too—Beautiful, clear, cool air, warm sun—sweet smells—Both some thrashers & some mockingbirds are courting again, maybe they know what they’re doing but it’s nearly November. Got a new bird book out of the library, opened it to Barn Owls, & read: “They may be frequently encountered in castle ruins’’—Oh?—Then some finches were said to go as far as Siberia—Of course it was a Czechoslovakian bird book!
Love,
Eudora
Donald Alexander White will be one year old tomorrow.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, October 21, 1974
Dear Eudora:
It was most thoughtful of you to send me your beautiful short piece about “A Worn Path.” It matches the beauty and simplicity of the story itself, yet seems large enough to stand as a credo. I’m so glad you wrote it.
There is a book I believe you would enjoy—I am in the middle of it now—Iris Murdoch’s The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. I have not always greatly liked her novels, but this one is extraordinary even for her, succeeding in translating her philosophy into binding plot and very interesting people. It makes me green with envy.
Brad Darrach called, and I was able to pass on your pleasant words about his Bobby Fischer book. It is being quite well reviewed. Though this is his first book, and he is young in heart, Brad isn’t really young—early fifties. He was Time’s movie critic for ten years, in those great days when the modern masters were showing their hands. Brad once did a cover story on Bergman.
I am struggling with my plot which as you remind me means: struggling with my meaning. I think it is that a very strange and difficult and even terrible life can feed an art. But where can the emotion derive from? I hope “the poetry is in the pity.”
I was glad to be told of your visit from Mary Lou—such a delightful woman. A young girl student and budding writer, aged twenty—first sale at age sixteen!—named Lorna Clymer visited us yesterday. Lorna is the daughter of our neighbors who are educational writers, and a student at St. John’s College at Santa Fe. I gave her Mary Lou’s book “The World Within” with a double purpose, to introduce her to some good, old writers, or reintroduce her, and possibly to introduce her to Mary Lou, with whom I suggested she get in touch. I hope Mary Lou isn’t upset if Lorna turns up on her doorstep. She loves animals and is almost preternaturally well behaved, so much so that I fear for her spontaneity, a faculty with which Mary Lou has no problem. I hope her son is well and reasonably happy.
Our new young pup, aged five months old and weighing sixty pounds, is an absolute darling, ready to lick his weight in wildcats but he couldn’t catch them. He’s a deep dense black, except for red-and-tan paws and underparts. I think he will be our personality champion, his elder Duffy being our sweetness king. The two German shepherds love each other and are in constant physical contact, even when sleeping.
We are both well, and hope you are the same.
Love, Ken
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, November 16, 1974
Dear Eudora:
That was a most interesting piece you sent me of Miss Jacobsen’s, about the transmigrations of a poetic line.20 I don’t have anything comparable to riposte with. So far Knopf have sent me only one copy of the suspense anthology and I was wheedled into giving it to a friend who is about to leave on a Mediterranean cruise. The book is very large and heavy for such purposes, but quite handsome. I’ll send you a copy when I get some more. Not much in it will be new to you. I do enclose a clipping about Katherine Anne Porter which you may possibly not have seen. What courage she has, always had.
Tomorrow, displaying some courage of my own, I am flying off in the teeth of the winter gales to New York, to try and do the anthology some good. I leave behind about a quarter of a draft of a book which I’m glad to get away from for a few days but can hardly wait to get back to: “Portrait of the Artist as a Dead Man.” It’s a bit different from the others, perhaps lighter, though they never seem to turn out that way.
Margaret is well. She bought herself a fur coat then bought an imitation fur coat so she won’t wear out the real one. Do you like Brian Keith? He’s going to play Archer on TV beginning January. We’ll see how it goes. Love, Ken
Eudora Welty, New York City, to Kenneth Millar, November 21, 1974
I’m here again, for just a few days—having come by way of Sewanee, Tenn., where I attended a celebration of Allen Tate’s 75th birthday, and going home by way of Washington over the weekend, a Council on the Arts meeting. The time at Sewanee was very whole-hearted in praise & affection for Allen—I enjoyed the conversations more than the papers read, though they were substantial & scholarly, I know. Still leaves on the trees in the Valley, & snow powdering the mountain that we were on top of. Poems were written & sent by old friends of Allen like Robert Penn Warren—and poets present read their poems at a banquet. William Jay Smith thought all this up. It was moving and poignant too—Allen is in very frail health—but responded to the occasion with his old wit—I was so glad I got to be on hand—(I had breakfast before leaving with a big fan of yours, a member of the English Dept. named [William T.] Cocke.)
N.Y.’s blowing with an icy wind. Today I saw your old friend & mine Joan Kahn. She was telling me about the World Congress of Crime Writers in London next fall & said she bets she could get me in on it some way—She said some will be going as crime writers and others as nothing, and I could go as a nothing. What a fine idea even if impossible. Do you plan to go? I love the idea of a cocktail party at the Old Bailey! Joan is fine. I had lunch with Walter Clemons, who is fine too.
Is it about time for your anthology to appear? On the chance it was, I looked for it in Brentanos but didn’t see it yet. All goes well with the new novel, I hope. And with all of you. I just wanted to say hello from here. Love, Eudora
Happy Thanksgiving!
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, [December 1974]
Dear Ken,
We arrived in New York on the same day! When I got home & found your letter I felt awfully disheartened. If you checked in to the Algonquin, and were anywhere near to room 900 between Sunday & Friday morning, I’ll feel worse. I wrote you to California while you might have been next door reading the paper.
Did you have a good trip? I hope so—and I look forward to a sight of the Anthology—And I can give copies for Christmas, too. Good news about Archer if you approve, & if you like the man. My nieces know what he looks like, I don’t—They said the way they thought of Archer was a man who looked like you—We all had a good Thanksgiving—I hope you did too & came home to find all well and the new novel (I think your title is wonderful) safely waiting. (I’m always worried that a ms. isn’t safe if I’m out of the house—But of course you’ve got a fine guardian who could swim out of a flood with it in her teeth or get it back from a raven who tried to carry it away, like the car keys that time.21 This is silly sounding because I feel unhappy to have missed you. Isn’t it absurd!
Love,
Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, December 3, 1974
Dear Eudora:
I am wreathed by irony and regret and feel that it is absurd indeed that you and I should have been lodged on nearby floors (9 and 12) of the Algonquin week before last, and never know it. It was stupid of me not to check for you at the desk, but it never occurred to me that you might be there. Accidents balance out in life, and probably this is the price I have had to pay for the most happy accident of meeting you, for the first time, in the Algonquin lobby. I did have a pleasant time in New York, part work part play, but do wish I had seen you. The best of the play part was hearing Marian McPartland play the piano, which I’d never heard before. At the end of the week, Friday, I went up to Canada for a couple of days and saw my father-in-law, who was recovering from pneumonia and feeling, at ninety, the first real desolation and chill of old age—the hospital did it to him; his first illness since his appendectomy in 1919—but he still has a few years left in him. I greatly enjoyed your account of Allen Tate’s seventy-fifth birthday, having long been an admirer of his, prose and poetry, and the man himself. There are common feelings that draw together southerners and Canadians, I think, feelings for tradition and for the land, so that Tate meant quite a lot to me when I was young, in his anti-megalo-American way. Which reminds me that flying home, over Lake Michigan, the lady beside me, a Quebec educator, announced that her ancestor Nicolet was the first white to explore that lake. She was also proud that Nicolet had married an Indian.
I came home to find Margaret in good shape and my dogs somewhat gentler than when I left. The six-month pup is black and red and low and wide and strong, and will possibly be beautiful. He has a fine nature. His name is Skye. My grandson Jim, who is eleven now, is developing a fine nature, too, his face shadowed for the first time this fall by a hint of adolescence. He is both serious and cheerful, like all the most fortunate people. Nor can I think of anyone who is more serious or more cheerful than you.
I appreciate your continued interest in the anthology and wish to send you a copy but so far have not been sent any. I must shake up my editor. Had lunch with Alfred and Helen, with some feeling that it might be, for Alfred and me, a farewell lunch. He’s well enough, but not strong; he’s grown almost sweet-natured in his age and his fortunate marriage.
Love, Ken
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, December 21, 1974. Note card reproducing Mary Cassatt’s “Feeding the Ducks.”
Dear Ken—
Many wishes to you and Margaret for Christmas, and a lucky and benevolent and busy and productive New Year—that’ll take in the new novel.
It was fine to see the Anthology listed as a Book-of-the-Month Alternate Choice, and I alternated to them by return mail. And your editor has just sent me a copy. So I’m bountifully fixed for Christmas, and am delighted to have the good reading ahead. I’ve only had time to read the good & provocative preface you wrote, and one story—Margaret’s, which I had not seen before—most rewarding—A lot of them I do know but I want to read them again plus the new. A handsome book indeed—
I’ll write a letter I owe you, soon, and I’m away behind with everything because my furnace went Boom the day I got home from NY and had to be dismantled & hauled out and a new one put in—it’s taken all this while—I’ve felt hamstrung & unwarm & can’t talk about anything but plumbing. One of the funny circs. is that there had to be 2 new furnaces (to take care of all those old vents) and they have fans (they use gas), and so they’ve been fanning each other’s pilot out! Anyway, as of Friday, all seems to be well, and warm now.
Next time I go into the Algonquin, I’m going to look. Happy New Year to you both—and to Jim—and to McDuff & Skye too—& the book. Love, Eudora
CHAPTER FIVE
“Simple but infinitely complex expressions of love and courtesy”
1975
AS Ken worked in 1975 on what would prove to be the last Lew Archer novel, his private-eye character was brought to small-screen life in a short-lived television series. An earlier work by Eudora received a more satisfying adaptation when The Robber Bridegroom became the basis for a musical in the repertoire of John Houseman’s City Center Acting Company. Eudora labored sporadically on a story and eventually had high hopes for a new one. But the non-writing highlight of 1975, for both Eudora and Ken, was her visit to Santa Barbara for its now annual writers conference and for a week in the company of Ken Millar, his wife, and his closest friends there. It was the first time Ken and Eudora had seen one another since Eudora Welty Day in 1973—and the first time Eudora had met Ken’s wife. Margaret Millar felt that having Eudora in Santa Barbara was a “special privilege” and urged her to return. Ken did the same. The occasion enhanced the closeness he and Eudora had established in their letters and provided opportunities for the extended private conversations they had missed when Ken came to Jackson.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, January 12, 1975
Dear Eudora:
I’m getting into that point in my book where it’s starting to get seriously interesting (to me)—I’m so glad you approve of my title, you being the only one I’ve trusted with it, and I’m depending on it to prop the book up—but must come up for air and a chance to tell you how greatly I enjoyed your account of El
izabeth Bowen’s last book. There is nothing better in life than to see a good writer take up and handle carefully the work of another good writer. Yes, there are two better things in life. One is to be the one writer who is spoken of—and I have been that, thanks to you—and the other is to be the writer speaking. Anyway, I love these simple but infinitely complex expressions of love and courtesy. You continue to give so much. You gave the same measure of tenderness and justice to the ladies in the bird pageant which of course I remember from your book of photographs but am so glad to have the words now, rescued from that ancient New Republic (which I started reading a year or two later, I think, and still subscribe to.)1
I was reminded of you in another context, when the Carol Burnett Show did a parody the other week on that television series, The Waltons. At the end of the scene, all the Waltons got into bed together, innocently enough, and their parents said goodnight to them: — “Goodnight, John Girl,” “Goodnight, Eudora Boy.” I hope you don’t mind that your name was taken in vain. Speaking of television series, I believe I’ve already told you that “Archer” is going to replace “Ironsides” on January 30, and I hope it turns out better than the Peter Graves version of Underground Man. I’m going down to Beverly Hills for a news conference next Saturday. But my heart will remain behind in Santa Barbara, with the books. Writing books on whatever level is a lucky way to make a living, isn’t it?
Meanwhile There Are Letters Page 26