The thought and understanding you brought Reynolds’ book moved me—You are as understanding and good to a book as you are to a friend. I wouldn’t expect you to be any other way—but I felt the force of your insight and belief in him in your words about his treatment of that theme you have here in common—You know that he felt he had learned from you. He did. He would be made very happy to know the book made you feel so strongly aware of his deepest intentions and of their carrying out—When you have finished reading it. But you know he would. I haven’t written to Reynolds for too long—but I guess he is back at teaching this semester—
You asked me recently if I could come up with any ideas about a Southern writer as subject for Mr. Bruccoli to write about next, but so far I haven’t been able—I’ve read the reviews of his O’Hara book, all finding it good but the NYTBR which sounded somehow as if the reviewer didn’t want to like it because he’d liked this other man’s, Farr’s—(contrary to the prevailing opinions)—I’ll be interested to read Mr. B’s book myself—I’ve had such respect for him since that astonishing feat he did on the Fitzgerald mss for Tender Is the Night (I have your copy, do you remember?) I was glad to see your quote for it.
It’s lovely & soft, the day here, November though it is—I have to leave everything, including my story, to fly up to Mt. Holyoke College this weekend, but am coming right back Monday—(Almost embarrassed to tell you, it’s another hon. Degree—I will have to do some work, though, so it will seem more orderly & more according to how I was brought up, not to take the diploma just wantonly.)
I’ve been reading The Instant Enemy again, in lieu of the new novel not printed yet, and I am now positive that it was this of your books that I wrote you the fan letter I never mailed you. (before we ever communicated) As I read that chapter of going to the Krug Ranch, I knew. It is superb—on every count. I thought again, all through this novel, but here most, that the tension of action and feeling in one, really one, that comes precisely of its structure and building and motion and compression & its long beautiful curve as its goes, and all very purely out of its inception & dramatic necessity made it as far as I could see and feel a quite perfect thing. (Do you think I’m repeating my fan letter? I don’t remember my words, just what caused them.) The whole book has an intensity of dark—tragic—feeling about it that stirs feeling, all the way. It is also, in its visual landscapes, beautiful. Archer seems very close to the nerve of all your books when he says “Everything matters.”
Many birds now—I heard the white throated sparrow sing for the first time this fall last evening after the rain stopped—My best to Margaret too—and Love,
Eudora
I went to the toy store, & what did I see—a sign in the window:
CALIFORNIA SKATE BOARDS
ARE
HERE!
I hope your Jim has come to like his surf board better—
Thank you for sending those Robber reviews!
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, [November 1975]
Dear Eudora:
It was so kind and good of you, on the eve of my attempt to make something for film out of The Instant Enemy, to remind me of the sense you got of its feeling and its shape. I sometimes think other people may see our stories better and more clearly than we do ourselves. Certainly, in your case, more generously. But with your help—and how happy it makes me that you should like it, still—I can in some way like it, too. I tried to get into it some of the disorder and early sorrow of my childhood. The aging man in the Mission District hotel room who once mined silver in Nevada represents my father (who once mined silver in Nevada). Part of the new book is about the people who run a copper mine in Arizona. I sometimes think fiction is the smoke that reveals, and conceals, the fire. But not much really gets concealed in the long run, and that suits me.
I’m afraid Matt Bruccoli got some pretty unfriendly reviews on his O’Hara book. I still consider it highly interesting and done with honesty and strict scholarship—in many ways a model of what a first biography should be. I was accidentally sent an extra copy, by the way, and will send it to you. Correct me if I’m wrong: I’m always glad to have an opportunity to praise a friend. There’s one thing in Matt’s book that gives me particular pleasure, I hardly know why: his report of O’Hara’s attending a luncheon in Princeton in the Lambert (LISTERINE) house,24 which Margaret and I rented in the summer of 1944 while I was going to Princeton as an officer in training. It made me feel like a retroactive Gatsby I think. Which reminds me that the third movie Gatsby is going to appear on TV in a few minutes. Warner Baxter was the first! Alan Ladd the second. I’m afraid Robert Redford may have been the worst of the three, but there were many things I liked about this third production when I saw it last year in a theatre e.g. the Daisy, the jazz scenes, the L.I. settings, the middle, the endings.25
Yes, Jim has pretty well turned his back on skateboarding and he is becoming—a process that takes years—a dedicated surfer. I think time spent in the surf is well-spent, not only in building the body but the spirit and its relationship with the world. We get from it the nearest thing to a live response that inanimate nature affords us. Which reminds me that I published the other day, in a short note on “Sense of Place” in South Dakota Review, the following: “This ocean, with its great spatial and temporal continuities, its currents and recurrences, its destructions and renewals, represents a changing constant in my life and fiction. It is the nearest thing in my fiction to an inescapable and memorable place.” You know, Eudora, a friendly black lifeguard in Vancouver rolled me into the surf when I was three, and I sort of never came out.
This is a scattershot letter but it represents the condition of my mind. I’m relaxing down after just completing a little over a week ago my final revisions on The Blue Hammer. It took me thirteen years in the planning and eighteen months in the writing—in all that time I should have been able to produce something bigger and better—but still I hope you like it and find it fit to be read as a sequel to Enemy. I’ll send you a copy when I can, at present have only the one to keep track of corrections in. Thank you for your lovely letter. All well here.
Love, Ken
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, December 9, 1975
Dear Ken,
Your letter went on two trips with me—to Hartford, Conn. & back, & to Washington & back—Having it by me—it was such a fine one—wasn’t the same as answering it, I know. Thank you for it—
I didn’t know till you told me in it that you were about to make something for film out of The Instant Enemy—I’m glad it’s you that’s doing it. Are you working on it now? I would love to see what you come out with. What others make of your books seems all wrong, consistently so (I have to differ with your friend Mr. Chamblin (?) on the L.A. Times who liked The Drowning Pool movie—I thought it lacked absolutely everything the book called for, the first thing being even a suggestion of the quality of the original. I really hated what they did to it.) But The Instant Enemy is something else as a novel and I hope you find translating it (or is it re-seeing it all?) into film an interesting experience—To me the two closest cousins are fiction & film—I hope to try a film myself one day—Don’t you think they are alike in many ways—not least in ways of technique?—I was glad to know what you told me about the background of The Instant Enemy—some of which I had surmised when I read it this time—I agree about the smoke & the fire—
Thank you for copying out for me what you wrote for the South Dakota Review about the ocean and its meaning to you in your life and fiction—This can be felt—You couldn’t help making others feel what you feel so deeply. An ex-writing class student of mine is in the English Department of the U. of North Dakota, just wrote to ask me to do some little thing for him and I wrote him then to please send me the North Dakota Review with your piece in it—the wrong Dakota. If he’s any good he’ll think that’s just what I did, & get me the right one. There’s a quote I want to send you but I ought to type it—
Thank you so much for
sending Mr. Bruccoli’s O’Hara—I’ll read it with pleasure, I know from what you say about it & from that good note in the New Yorker—You asked once if I’d met him—no, just almost. I walked into Albert Erskine’s house in Westport and was asking if he had a certain book and he said “I had, but Matt Bruccoli has just left the house with it under his arm.”
All the chores I had to do before the end of the year are just about done—the kind of thing you’ve agreed to do away back and finally the reckoning comes—The only one left is being one of the fiction judges for the Pulitzer—Books have been arriving box after box, and I unpack them in rows on top of the piano & under the tables—I’ve got one going in almost every room of the house—I’d got way behind—and have far to go. The good ones seem ever so far between to me. Then I read those slowly and hate to give them up. If they’re bad enough, I can read as many as 3 a day & depressed as I can be.
Alfred Knopf sent me his book of photographs which pleases me deeply.26 It was kind of him—He knew, I think, what would make me happy to have it, that I had my own friends in it. It holds three dear friends. Elizabeth Bowen, Bill Maxwell, and yourself. I cherish it. The one of you is eloquent! I like it more than any of you I’ve ever seen—
It’s good to know The Blue Hammer is all really done—after thirteen years of planning and eighteen months in the writing. You aren’t feeling bereft without it, I hope—Dear Ken—Happy Birthday on the 13th—I remember it because I’m another 13th—With love—and give my love to Margaret. I’ll write better next time—
Love,
Eudora
P.S. Reynolds came up to Washington to see me one evening while I was there for an Arts Council meeting. We had a fine long evening of talk—We spoke of you—He seems very well—A good reunion.
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, December 12, 1975
Dear Ken,
The quote I was thinking of when I wrote you I’d have to copy it out on the typewriter wasn’t long at all! I’d remembered it as very long,—you can see why. Anyway, it’s something Dostoyevsky said, quoted by a writer of a book on sea birds (Louis J. Halle, The Storm Petrel and the Owl of Athena).
“Everything, like the ocean, flows and comes into contact with everything else: touch it in one place and it reverberates at the other end of the world.”
(And a strange thing to say itself out of the middle of Russia, isn’t it? Proving itself.)
You probably remember Charlotte Capers, a good friend of mine in Jackson—She just got out a little book or booklet (by me), through the Miss. Historical Society, and I sent you and Margaret one to be a Christmas card to you—It’s very local, but we count you in, here. The tear-sheets are a little piece I did for Esquire—not thinking you’d likely see it I wanted you to have it simply because it’s true—27
Beautiful clear bright days here—
Love,
Eudora
There’re some other things in that issue of Esquire (December) you’d like to see too—I ought to’ve sent it all.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, December 15, 1975
Dear Eudora:
I subscribe to Esquire, which has turned out over the years to be just about our best general magazine now, don’t you think, and so I had the pleasure of reading your memory piece several days ago. Still I’m glad to have another copy which I can pass on to a friend, and it was thoughtful of you to send it to me. Too bad you were restricted, by your conscience, to the exact truth, because I’d dearly love to know what happened to the proprietor of the store, and only you could tell us. It seems to me that in the days of our childhood, our lives were full of such mysteries and disappearances. I’m still trying to figure out some of them. Others I would rather not know the solution of, but do. I know what happened to my father, for example—a Dostoyevskian fate.
His son—I’m still his son, though I celebrated my sixtieth birthday two days ago (which is more than he lived to do)—has embarked on a very new and very brief career by writing, or starting to write, a movie treatment which seems to be going well but probably isn’t. It couldn’t be that easy. But it seems one can throw overboard the burden of style—excess baggage. The style belongs to the man behind the camera. As I think I’ve mentioned, I intend to get my feet wet but not go overboard myself. My producer is a very bright young businessman from Chicago named Burt Weissbourd whose father is a noted builder and whose wife has just taken her doctorate in psychology with a dissertation on Henry James Sr. and his son William—a dissertation that will eventually become a book, I’m sure. Her master appears to be Erik Erikson, that most Dostoyevskean of psychiatrists. Thank you for the wonderful quote from Dostoyevsky—about the endless oceanic reverberations of life. I know I have to spend some of my remaining years reading and rereading him, and have been working back in that direction by way of Chekhov. Have you seen the English movie of Three Sisters? it sticks unusually close to the play.28
Today in the mail I received two envelopes which looked at first, from the handwriting, as if they had been addressed by the same person. You were the author of one of them but you’d never guess who wrote the other. You may know him. Certainly you know his books: Julian Symons. I enclose the two envelopes to prove my point. Isn’t it remarkable that a Mississippi lady and a London man should write so very much alike? The London man, as the postmark of his card will tell you, is at Amherst this year, teaching writing at the college. Julian and his wife spent their first few days in Emily Dickinson’s house—a lucky thing for another poet if not for poor great luckless Emily. Apart from a couple of recognized saints, who present unfair competition, I think Julian is the best man I know. How often has an autodidact turned into a novelist and critic and poet?
Last week some fifty of his friends here celebrated the birthday of W.H. Ferry, his 65th, by [drinking] and contributing money towards a coin-operated laundry for a laundryless southwestern village—the money paid for laundry to belong to the village. I think it was Ferry’s own idea, it’s typical of him.
Have a good Xmas, dear Eudora.
Love, Ken
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, [December 1975]
Dear Eudora:
This is a combination of a Christmas greeting and a miniature version of the letter I owe you, it seems, for some time now. I emerged from the new book only to plunge backwards into the old one (The Instant Enemy) from which I am now trying to wrest a screen treatment—not bad fun, but I won’t vouch for the outcome. The best parts of these days are the late afternoon hours in which I walk my two bigger dogs on the beach. It seems to me we’ve had an extraordinarily clement fall, with the mountains more persistently clear than I’ve ever seen them. Between those mountains and this sea I can lose myself in nature, but then quickly find myself again. I never get far from the sound of a human voice, or a bird voice for that matter. Our most striking out-of-town visitors among the birds this fall were three white pelicans on our local lake: they’re normally found no nearer than a hundred miles south of here.
I must have told you the happy news that Margaret is well past the middle of her book, and going strong (ASK FOR ME TOMORROW (Mercutio) is the title). We wish the same for you, and trust that your Christmas will be a happy one and that, with luck, we may see you in the new year.
Love, Ken
CHAPTER SIX
“I dreamed I was sending you the dream I was dreaming.”
1976
THE imminent publication of Ross Macdonald’s eighteenth Lew Archer novel, The Blue Hammer, had already been trumpeted in trade-paper ads by the house of Knopf, but Ken Millar was still hesitant to sign off on it. When the book’s proofs arrived for correction early in 1976, he asked longtime Santa Barbara colleague Bill Gault (The Bloody Bokhara, Million Dollar Tramp, Thunder Road) to read and critique it. “I thought, ‘Well, what do I know about this intellectual prose?’” Gault would say later. “So I took it home and read it, and some of the things—I just couldn’t get the connection.[. . .] Certain things I didn’t und
erstand. Well, he didn’t say anything. But when the book came out, the stuff I’d suggested he take out was sorta taken out.”1 Millar dedicated The Blue Hammer to William Campbell Gault.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, January 9, 1976
Dear Eudora:
Please forgive my silence, which this note will barely break. I’ve been doing income tax, writing my Instant Enemy treatment, seeing it and M’s new book (“Ask For Me Tomorrow”) through the typist, etc. I think you’ll like M’s book: the plotting and the dialog are brilliant: and I’m so glad to have a book of hers after six silent years.2 It changes the whole atmosphere. Indeed it appears that I have nothing at all to complain of, so I won’t.
My neighbor Ted Clymer came across the enclosed mention of you in PW, p. 14. It reminded me, though I don’t need reminding, how lucky I am to know you. Santa Barbara misses you!
I’ll try to say more in my next. This is just to remind you that I’m in the land of the living.
Love,
Ken
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, January 12, 1976
Dear Ken,
Wasn’t the mail service wonderful in Victorian days? I’ve been reading The Woman in White. You go downstairs and drop your letter in the post bag, and even allowing time for Count Fosco to open and copy it, it gets to London and the answer is back by next afternoon—by gig from the station, if it’s urgent.
I’m glad you quietly continue to use your airmail envelopes, and believe they may do some good—How long does it take a letter from NY to reach you in Santa Barbara? To Jackson it’s about 6 days—for a book, a month.
I was thinking of you through the holidays and hoping they were good with you—they must have been busy, with both of you in the midst of work. Along with wishing you and Margaret a happy New Year I was sending you my thanks again with a feeling I’ll never lose for the happy visit there in the year just over—I was working here—on the reading committee for the Pulitzer in fiction, and I’d got desperately behind. Now that the 3 of us have gotten together (on the day after Xmas) we still don’t know what the ultimate judges at Columbia will decide—Well, it caused me to read books I’d never have chosen to read for myself, so I guess that was good for me—There were some bright spots, and, to be fair, a number of abysmal ones (to me)—All 500 pages long.3
Meanwhile There Are Letters Page 31