My love to you, and to Reynolds, too. I’m eager to see his book published.
Ever, Ken
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, Monday [April 14, 1975]
Dear Ken,
—A lapis lazuli finch? It sounds like a bird that flew in out of Yeats, or fairyland. I wonder if they caught it? Should we wish they did or hope they didn’t? Maybe it got away to that lovely island out in the Channel.
That’s wonderful news that The Three Roads is to be a film and in such good hands, —Peter Glenville, and with the plan to give it such evident serious attention. I’m delighted for you, and can imagine the fresh and stimulating impact it could very likely make on you when you see what comes of transposing the story from California to Quebec—all kinds of forces joining. I hope the script is heartening to read. And that you’ll be happy with what they do. I read The Three Roads again when I got your letter, and of course the novel is as far as I can imagine—Canada being a place I don’t know, just to start with. Good luck with these people. They do sound like a promising and exciting group to trust your story to. I must say after all that messing around the Underground Man and Archer productions did with your work, you deserve double all the good things they can bring about with this new film.
And meanwhile, I hope the new book is being brought to a fine flourishing close.
It’s been a while since I wrote, I know, because I’m just now coming up for air after a three-week film project here with three Californians—all from around San Francisco, Richard Moore, Philip Greene, and helpers doing a PBS thing on my work. It was really a pleasure working with them, even though it was night and day without a stop, because they’re so interesting and expert, and showing them around and responding to their questions etc. gave me all sorts of new things to learn and see—I don’t know what the end product will be like—all this work will have to be edited to something half an hour long—we shall see.9
It won’t be long before I’ll be coming out to Santa Barbara, which I look forward to so much. I have to be gone some in May, but if Mr. Conrad gets worried at not finding me home or something, tell him I am not forgetting. One trip is to Seattle, May 1—so I’ll be on your side of the country but I guess not close enough to wave my handkerchief—a Council on Arts meeting—
By the way, Mr. Houseman sent an itinerary of the City Center Acting Company’s current tour and it will play Santa Barbara, at the University of Cal., April 22-24—next week!—doing one of their shows, Marlowe or Shakespeare or Chekhov or Becket or Saroyan or Goldsmith. I want to talk to you about Reynolds’s book—but just send this line now, hoping all’s fine with you and Margaret and all, and how is the little new dog and the great big ones that are playing with her so gently?
Love,
Eudora
Eudora Welty, aboard an airplane, to Kenneth Millar, May 5, 1975. Mailed from Jackson and written on Washington Plaza Hotel stationery, which sports an image of the Seattle hotel’s circular tower. Beside the image, Eudora has written “(Some day they may have to change its name to the Washington Pisa.)”
Dear Ken,
This is on board a Northwest Airlines 747 to Chicago, where I change for the flight home. I’ve been up the curve of the coast from you since Thursday, on an Arts Council meeting. John Leonard was on hand part of the time, & when we spoke of you, he said he’d seen you not long ago in N.Y. on your way to Canada. Perhaps you went up to see about your film? I hope your news about that—and about everything else too—is good. Can you attend to your novel?
I know the Cascades are under me—and I saw them in splendor, coming out—but this morning there’s just one limitless ocean of white cloud below, and just one bossy & white-whiskered seal head poking out of it—Mount Ranier. I can see why it was you brought an alarm clock to Jackson—I’m only two hours out of my home-time, the other way, and I faithfully wake up at quarter to five in the morning and feel that it’s three o’clock the next morning when I’m getting to bed. I needed an un-alarm clock. I love the world on this side of the Great Divide, and am glad I’ve been here before on the surface of it—years ago by train—From my hotel room I could see Puget Sound and the western & southern quarters of the city & the ring of the mountains. I wanted to take the boats! Though we had to sit in meetings & so on, & be inside from 8:45 AM till sometimes late at night, there was early in the morning & sometimes late in the afternoon to see all this, in the long slow changes of the light. Here it was very northern in feel. I look forward so much to seeing and being in your country, your South.
Mr. Conrad sent me a tentative schedule where I see I’m on the first evening and you’re on the last, and I hope it will be OK if I stay for this finale, which will be one of the things I’d come for. Later news for the Conference will probably follow. In between now & then I am supposed to bat around the country like a loose balloon—it has a vulgar sound to say it, but I’m to be given 3 honorary degrees in 3 days—Really I am proud & excited to be given them, and in confidence the 3rd one is from Yale. Also, I am going to be in the Algonquin Hotel May 20-27 or 28—not to run the risk there of ever missing you again. Then home until time for Santa Barbara.
All this is just about me, and I hope for news of you. And the word that it is properly good and is making you happy. Though extra busy I expect. Still clouds below. I’ll mail this as I explore my way through O’Hare. (A mailbox is something they have on the ground—isn’t it? Like North Dakota.)
With love,
Eudora
Writing, the thing Ken most liked to do, had become much harder. Coming up with the introduction for that suspense anthology had taken him six weeks. When he’d begun just making notes for this new novel, his blood pressure had soared. Once into the manuscript, he’d had a lot more difficulty than usual pulling its elements together. Still, the pages and chapters accumulated, though he sometimes drank a modest amount of alcohol to stimulate their flow.
But he indulged more in distractions that took him away from work. He and Margaret went to Toronto in April, for the purpose of Ken publicizing the film to be made there of his 1948 novel The Three Roads. After visiting relatives in Ontario, Ken went on to New York for a few days, while Margaret (no fan of Manhattan) returned to Santa Barbara.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, May 7, 1975
Dear Eudora:
Having spent the second half of April in the east—I think my longest sojourn away from home since I left Ann Arbor for the last time in the summer of 1951—and the last week in getting back into my book, I’m slow in answering your letter of mid-April. In accordance with your cheerful wishes, the Toronto people did turn out to be extremely pleasant and also well-endowed with intelligence—the young writer who did the script is particularly talented, I think—Tom Hedley—and Margaret and I had a fine time and stirred up some publicity, too. An example of the hospitality we were offered: the producer Jerry Simon insisted on lending us his own car for the drive to Kitchener to see Margaret’s father—a visit that turned out most happily, by the way. As for the film, one never knows until it’s made, but I particularly like the completing of that circle in Toronto where I did my first published writing, for Toronto Saturday Night, and where M. studied the classics at the University of T. She prowled the campus for four days and went home on the fifth. I went back to New York where I had the extreme pleasure of presenting an MWA Grand Master’s award to Eric Ambler, who is thin and grey and witty and arthritic and delightful.10 The previous week, by a lucky chance, I was present at Alfred’s ante-penultimate farewell to publishing.—We’re looking forward keenly to seeing you here next month. Remember to tell me what plane.
Love, Ken
P.S.—The new pup, Misty (short for Mistinguette) is now the mistress of the household.
K.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, May 17, 1975
Dear Eudora:
Your letter written enroute from Seattle and the Washington Plaza (which I have seen but never dared to enter) was one of the most de
lightful I’ve ever received, even from you. This won’t be a proper reply, partly because most of my writing energies these days are going into an effort to get a draft of my book finished before June 13. I think I can see the end of it now, but I can also see that I’m in for some rewriting; the sin of complexity is growing on me.
Not only I am delighted at the imminence of your visit here. Your name and the memory of your work arouses the warmest responses in people—this will be hardly news to you by now. I’m so glad you are thinking of being able to stay a week. What comes at the end of the week (moi) will hardly justify it, but I trust the week itself will, among friends both old and new, here at the start of the fresh summer season. It will be such a pleasure to show you Santa Barbara.
The Conference this year, its third, promises to be such a success as it has never been before. In fact the limit (100 students, I think) has long since been reached. Of course people are invited to come out from town for individual lectures, or talks, or whatever. I make a practice of giving a short prepared talk and then answering questions, which I enjoy. But everybody has his own approach. I’ve been asked to introduce you. I’ll probably say: I love Eudora Welty in spite of the vulgarity of receiving three honorary degrees in three days: on the fourth day she rested. Did you, by the way, see the mention of you as a photographer in a recent New Yorker review of Wright Morris’ “About Fiction,” by John Updike.11 It sent me back to your photographs, and I never saw such a steady moral eye. (See enclosure).
Alas, I had my days at the Algonquin in late April, the occasion being Mystery Writers of America’s annual gathering. (I had the pleasure of handing a Grand Master award to Eric Ambler, who is modest and witty and urbane and very nice.) But Santa Barbara, I hope you’ll agree, is better.
Love,
Ken
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, [May 17, 1975]. Written on a newspaper clipping showing a picture of Canada geese “silhouetted against a full moon as the birds wing northward over Baraboo, Wis.” Mailed in a letterhead envelope of the Monteleone Hotel, New Orleans.
Dear Ken, did your paper carry this marvelous sight of your Canadian geese?
Love,
Eudora
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, [June 2, 1975]
Dear Ken,
I was happy to find your letter when I reached home—and it was more than kind of you to write it when you were right at that point with your novel. Luck and love to it, all smooth days and no interruptions—I hope it goes where it’s safely headed just like a bird.
This isn’t to interrupt either, but only a line to say how glad I am to be coming so soon. Mr. Conrad sent me the ticket itself, which is very generous of them—it says I’m to arrive on Friday the 13 at 4:35 PM on United 864. Of course it would be lovely to see you there but not unless you get your novel to where you planned, this is understood. I’ll see you soon, at any rate. It’s so strengthening to know you are going to introduce me—thank you for that one more act of kindness. I’m so delighted at the prospect of all I’ll see and hear and take in about Santa Barbara—nothing like it has ever come my way, as you know.
Thank you for the copy of John Updike’s review, which I had not seen—I’ll read it tonight but I wanted to send a line on to you now. My best to “Portrait”—and to all going well.
With love,
Eudora
Eudora arrived for the Santa Barbara Writers Conference on June 13. Ross Macdonald and Eudora Welty were conference headliners and introduced each other to the participants. In the course of her comments, Eudora described Ross Macdonald as “a supremely moral writer” who “cares about the welfare of each human soul in his novels.” Ken delivered the following introduction of Eudora:
I have never been given a more pleasant task than that of introducing Miss Eudora Welty to a Santa Barbara audience. She is a woman who illuminates her surroundings, and she does so in a quiet way, without fireworks. Her being is as quiet and shy as the moon. Only afterwards do you realize that the light has changed.
For Miss Welty is one of the most completely articulate women who has ever practiced the art of letters in the United States. Her range of expression is remarkable, unique, extending from broad humor through tragic emotion. The underpinning and undersong of all her imaginative work seems to me to be her respect for, her fealty towards, our common humanity. She is one of those aristocrats of the arts who has never turned her back on common men and women. There is a profound equalitarian and religious quality which informs all her work and sets it apart. Miss Welty celebrates human life in all its conditions.
This was evident in her earliest stories of Southern life which she began to publish in the thirties. I believe she was the first Southern writer, perhaps the first white American writer, who was able to give her unreserved imaginative love and care to blacks. The incorruptibility of her eye and thought is evident in her photographs of poor Mississippi people—photographs which have recently been compared with those of Walker Evans in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Miss Welty took those photographs with a plain box camera and no other paraphernalia whatever—just the light of day and the light of her mind.
There is no need to dwell on the long list of her accomplishments, the long list of Universities including Cambridge U. where she has taught, and the long list of public honors she has won. Miss Welty is modest to a fault. She did admit to me that on three successive days this spring she was given honorary degrees at three universities, but she would have considered it vulgar to name those universities. Still she cannot conceal the fact that her most recent and most brilliant novel, The Optimist’s Daughter, won the Pulitzer Prize, and incidentally conferred new prestige on that award. She is an active member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and was given its Gold Medal in 1972.
The important thing is not the honors, but the work. Her stories are among the best and saddest and funniest and [most] humane in the whole range of American literature. They will never go away. She is a first-rate playwright and novelist.12 Her body of criticism is brilliant and still growing, in size and depth, recent additions to it being her essays on Willa Cather and Elizabeth Bowen in NYTBR.
I don’t want to burden Miss Welty with the appellation of our best living writer. But I do suspect that, line by line, word by word, that may be what she is. She has taken possession of the language as if it were her own invention, and given it back to us refreshed, clean, brand new, with a kind of half-heard musical accompaniment, and joyous laughter in the wings.
Miss Welty stands unassumingly at the peak of one of the great careers in American letters. It seems to me a kind of miracle that she should have come from Jackson, Mississippi, to converse with us. I can think of only two comparably miraculous visitations on this Miramar shore. One was Scott Fitzgerald. The other was Ty Cobb.13
After this introduction, Eudora delivered remarks drawn from her essay “Words into Fiction” and answered questions from the audience.14
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, June 22, 1975
Dear Ken,
I got home last night, about 9:30 our time, but I go on thinking of Santa Barbara—and of being there. I treasure my visit and what it meant to me to see you again, & meet Margaret, and your dear grandson, & his father,—and Margaret’s sister, and the close friends about whom you had spoken in your letters—and to be in your house & with your dogs, & see the garden, and your view the circle round—The rides and the walks you took me on were beautiful and I was seeing the sea and the mountains as you showed them to me not as a sightseer but as a friend who had learned & was learning more each day of what they had meant to you—I felt so happy being shown what was important to you and your life—It was not just the compliment to me, though it was a great one, but it made me feel how well you knew me and my wishes, and I was glad of that. It was the truest welcome I can think of.
And when I was close enough to it I could see too a little of what you and Margaret are doing for Santa Barbara, working to keep alive
what is so beautiful and valuable and humane there—What you mean to it.
When I think of the pleasures, the cabaña & the Coral Casino, the Botanical Gardens, the Museum of Natural History, the mountain roads and the waterfront, the gliding kite-man & the seismograph, the Courthouse and its goings-on & its rooftop—the books for every night, the trees over the road to the beach, the other houses (I do have a sea shell picked up on your beach)—How can I say just one thank you. And I’m glad I came home with your introduction of me to the Conference—So much joy & pride I have in it. I wish I also had a copy of what you said on Thursday night—But one day I can see & read it in print, I feel sure—It was very fine to hear it, & your answers.
And oh yes, the Conference itself, to which I owe my chance to get there—I thank you for that too. You couldn’t have made it happen in a pleasanter, more agreeable way, to enable a friend to get from Jackson to Santa Barbara. And, as I think you did too, I enjoyed the young people & the good discussions—
The first thing I should have thanked you for, I guess, was the first thing—meeting me! And late as I was, but I was happier than I was late. And I should say last too I was grateful for being seen off, and I was—only sad to go. I hope we all see each other again not too far away from now.
The Sausalito part of the return trip did not impinge on the entity of my memory of Santa Barbara at all. It was all the daylight time inside a closed projection room. Interesting to see how the men worked, and the only finished job—that on Janet Flanner—was splendid, very sensitive, it caught an essence, I felt. What a strong minded soul came across! There’s been no editing done on mine, it was just sequences of landscape & other sequences of readings, etc. At night, a party at Muir Beach—It looked wonderful, sea & the Midsummer Night’s Eve full moon, but cold—& we had the picnic inside—They’re fine people, both, though, & their wives nice—one is Italian.15
Meanwhile There Are Letters Page 28