Meanwhile There Are Letters

by Suzanne Marrs

  A nice family time here, anyway—Christmas dinner with my family—4 babies now! (happy & good). One of my oldest & best friends, John Robinson, was here on a visit from Italy—a country he fell in love with when fighting there in World War II and now lives in with full commitment. A novel I wrote that long time ago (Delta Wedding) I wrote & sent him in installments—the Delta was his home. But I may tell you his story some time.

  Just now I heard on the news that Agatha Christie had died. Was she a friend? I remember hearing from Elizabeth Bowen, who came to know her well, what a marvelous person she was. She really was an era all in herself, wasn’t she? Her life sounded very contented and benign for her—I hope it was so.

  To go back to “A Woman in White,” it was the perfect antidote for some of my Pulitzer chores—the form & shape of it, the control, the delicious sensation of seeing the way he unfolds his plot—the suspense of it, which is perfect, is somehow kin to the solidity of it—& all the minutiae counting—Well, I care about such things and they make me happy—It was like the peace of an ocean voyage to go off on such an excursion—I think Julian Symons’s foreword (I always prefer to read forewords as afterwords) was just and interesting and certainly it told me things I didn’t know that really got me, such as the fact that Collins & Dickens, to provide installments for “All the Year Round,” thus furnished “A Tale of Two Cities” and “The Woman in White”! That last scene concerning Fosco, with mobs of the curious crowding the morgue to view his body, has the impact of some archetypical crowd-performance of Victorian life—don’t you feel?

  And I wonder if you happened to read a modern novel about the days of the Empire, “The Siege of Krishnapur” by J. G. Ferrell (Harcourt ’73). You’d think well of it, as I did, I think—(If you want me to I’ll send.)

  Oh, Julian Symons’ handwriting! Indeed it is similar to mine, which isn’t too good a thing for it to be, and as far as I can tell not very similar to other “English” handwriting—? Since he’s somebody I’ve long admired, it pleased me to see it, and you’re probably the only person in the world who’d have noticed it.

  How is the film treatment going? They’d better let you have it your way. Is there a better eye to see it for us than the one that saw it for us to begin with? I like the novel such a lot and don’t want them to mess it up. I guess I find it hard to trust them. More power to you, my feeling is.

  I had the announcement from the Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference with a line saying they would like me to be there again, and I was pleased to think that might be. If you are free of the film and whatever else you’ll be doing after that and if Margaret has her novel all done, it would be joyous to me to see you, you know, and I could see how the idea works out. I’ve turned down a number of other things sort of in the hope I could make it there if conditions allowed—We can see—

  It’s been cold there and here, I guess. I hope what the news said about the Riverside oranges doesn’t apply to the flowering trees & shrubs in your garden. It went down to 15° here—from 75°—& stayed very cold for several days, which isn’t the normal pattern. I found 2 birds frozen—a white throated sparrow in the front yard and a little towhee in the back.

  Jan. 13

  Before I got to finish & send this, your letter came (dated the 9th) which had fine news in it of work getting done & through the typist—It’s good to know. I’m delighted to have the prospect of reading “Ask for Me Tomorrow” before long—a lot of people are going to be glad about that, and I’m glad for Margaret’s sake & can imagine how happy it makes you—

  Thanks for the clip from PW, which I hadn’t seen, & to Ted Clymer too—(a little mystifying, the clip.)

  Lots of wishes about the work, works, and love to you both, and thanks for your letter, out of the midst of all you are doing—

  Yours,

  Eudora

  Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, January 25, 1976

  Dear Eudora:

  I am slow in answering your lovely letter, having knocked myself out on the Instant Enemy treatment then taken a week off just ended. Tomorrow I start a rewrite. The work is easy compared with fiction—or perhaps I don’t know enough about it to make it hard—and my young producer seems to like what I’m doing. The main task is to simplify, and cut the number of chapters to about half, while keeping the feeling of the book so far as I can. It’s a bit like translating, not into one’s own language—The season has been brightened for me, for us, by M’s finishing her new detective novel Ask for Me Tomorrow, and getting it in to Dorothy Olding in New York this past week, with a favorable response coming right back. M., who never does anything by halves (including her six-year retirement), is now at work on her second book this year! It’s going to center in the Coral Casino, she says.4

  We’re both so pleased and happy that you will come back to Santa Barbara next summer. Our time together last summer wasn’t nearly long enough, and I speak not only for us but for everyone I know. (Don’t worry about your visit interfering with work—I won’t be working, and M. gets up early and finishes her stint in the morning.) Don’t worry, either, about preparing a formal statement for the conference unless you want to. Your presence alone will give it a tremendous lift as it did last year. This is really fine news.

  So is your liking The Woman in White so well.5 I think it’s the class of the field, showing all of us right at the start what a suspense novel could become. No, I never knew Agatha Christie except through her books. I think she wrote well, don’t you? People I know who have known her have nothing but praise for her courtesy and goodwill. She was even modest. Her early life, by the way, was marked by what was for her a tragedy. Her first husband left her for another woman, and she was so hard hit that she was unconscious for a week. Then she came to and (not long after, as I remember) began to write her detective stories.6—You know, one nice thing about us detective-story writers is that there are so many different kinds of us, and we don’t envy each other, though we compete.

  We were both sorry to hear about the cold spell which killed some of your birds. Our current problem is the opposite, an unseasonably warm winter made worse by a total lack of rain this season. In spite of that our Xmas bird count was 202, which last year was the number that came in first, but not for us. Our nearest competitor this year at 201 was the Point Reyes bird sanctuary above San Francisco. All this is assuming that none of our birds are disallowed.

  Everyone here is well, including Jim and his dad who are part-time (weekend) residents these happy days. Jim will be a teenager in two months and acts it (this is a compliment—I can’t fault him). Still reading books on World War II on which he is becoming an expert: I’ve ordered him a book on King Tut in the hope it’ll change his track.

  Love,

  Ken

  Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, February 23, 1976

  Dear Ken,

  It’s been so long since I wrote, I feel, and I just must send a line however brief to say I’ll send a better one soon. It’s just work, the reason. But I’ve thought of you with such a good feeling because your last several letters sound so happy and full of good spirits. I’m so glad.

  And though I haven’t written you, I’ve read you—Mr. Green sent me the galleys of your new book [The Blue Hammer], which was so kind. I read it with admiration as I always read your work, but this time of a special kind, because I was watching how you were allowing yourself a little freer rein, more ease of the old strictness but still keeping the tension, and nobody knows better than you do how much that matters in plot and all its branchings—and more scope, and more length. I applauded it all. It was an interesting subject and I thought you made the painting story and family story and murder story astonishingly believable in their multiple connectings and connections—I said astonishingly not because I was astonished at your doing that, but meaning the result of it on the reader. It must have been hard using a painting, though—an object, not a live human being—as the original object of search. Of course it didn’t stay not
a human for long. I’ve read the book twice and know the scene I think most powerful—it’s when Gerard Johnson shouts in the street. It’s marvelous.

  When I was in Washington the other week at one of those meetings I wished very strongly for you one night—we were taken to the Hirschorn [Hirshhorn] Museum and the director took us backstage to the working parts, to the “storage room.” Temperature control, white, antiseptic, bare. He reached down and pulled a handle out of a rank of them in the wall and out came a long drawer. You know what I thought of. And rising from it was a 10- or 12-foot high screen on which paintings were hung, on both sides. The work of a painter’s life was hung up there in a drawer in a cold room and could be rolled out for inspection and rolled back. At the time, I hadn’t read your novel, but I thought I was looking at an image of it from what you’d told me was its first title, Portrait of the Artist as a Dead Man.

  Is the film treatment going well in the rewrite, or have you finished it? I hope it pleases you, and I hope to see it.

  It’s lovely here now—daffodils in flower, crabapple tree too, pear tree too, and the camellias still heavily blooming. Birds singing with all their might. About a million (I counted as many as 24) robins are at present abiding in my yard. A little kinglet is just now flitting through the still bare oak tree outside my window, feeding on something no doubt an elixir to him but invisible to the human eye.

  I’ve been working on a story [“The Shadow Club”], begun some time ago and interrupted—it’s going all right, well, I think, but is maybe going to turn into something longer. I too have a Mildred, also a Ralph, and a Gerard (as a last name), and I too have a greenhouse, in which the major critical event took place and in the past, though it wasn’t a murder exactly. A sort of murder. This won’t surprise you.

  Did you know that the Chairman of the literary panel of the Endowment for the Arts is mailing out copies of the South Dakota Review, the issue on Place, which carries your article? You sent me a sentence or two from it, which I loved, and I was so glad the whole piece came to me. And to the young writers to whom the issue was being mailed. (I got it because of being on the Council.)

  I work so hard (I don’t stop till end of the day usually) that I’m absentminded and if I have to go out on errands forget to shift gears. A good thing I don’t operate on your Freeway, in second gear—I can just imagine how I’d get whanged from behind, probably by Margaret Millar! Tell her how glad I am about her two, repeat TWO, new books. And I’m glad about yours.

  With love,

  Eudora

  Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, [Early March 1976]

  Dear Eudora:

  You sat down to write me a note and ended up sending me a full beautiful letter which I only wish I could match. But then I don’t have to. The sympathetic vibrations of your letter spoke for me as well as to me. It’s not a new thing but I still marvel at your ability to work all day on your own story—and I gather you are working wonderfully hard—then take up mine into your thought as if it were your own. You are a profoundly generous woman.

  And I’m so glad you liked the shouting, and felt for Gerard. He is not I, but he is not unlike me in putting together a working life out of unlikely components. I started drawing when I was three. A number of my first cousins are artists. My maternal Uncle Stanley managed to combine schizophrenia and painting and had a one-man show in Mexico City when he was over seventy. But I really haven’t done Stanley’s story justice in anything I’ve written so far. One beauty of this mystery-series method is that you are permitted to go over and over the same material until you get it right, or even wrong. I am beginning to hope, to have to hope, that this may be a way to write a novel, on the curve of its possible manifestations. Laurel, for example, whoever she is, keeps cropping up. I think she may be, partly, a combination of my excellent Aunt Laura who died at 95 last year, and of the laurel that we all seek. Well, your letter was my laurel, all I need, more than I deserve.

  I have another reason to feel relieved. Having completed the treatment (first draft) of the Instant Enemy and been asked to write the second draft i.e. first-draft screenplay, and the final-draft screenplay, I saw clearly that it was not for me and bowed out. I don’t know whether my treatment will turn eventually into a movie, let alone a good movie—a good screenplay is one out of which a successful movie has been made—but I don’t really care. I’m out. It doesn’t suit me to work with anybody else at all. And money should not be too easily earned. I sound like a tyro just learning the rules. Well, I am. This was my first movie effort. I’ll show it to you sometime if you wish, but not right now. It isn’t The Instant Enemy; there simply wasn’t room in a movie for the long curve on which the book depended; and it was necessary to make the detective more central to the story, make it in part his story.—In the course of my researches I did have a chance to read a brilliant script—KLUTE—which was turned into a very good movie with Jane Fonda, but not as good as the original script. I hope the reverse for mine.

  Nona Balakian, as secretary of the book reviewers’ association [National Book Critics Circle], has invited me to join a panel on reviewing in New York April 20. I’m glad to be asked, and intend to go; have done enough writing for the immediate present. I’m glad you’re at work, dear Eudora, and envy your great surges of creation. May they be oceanic, like your generosity. But don’t work too hard! The Two-Book Kid sends her love along with mine. Ever, Ken

  Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, [April 15, 1976]

  Dear Ken,

  I’m glad I’ll be seeing you before too long now—I hope?—so as to catch up in talk, because I’ve been such a bad correspondent all spring. Thank you for your fine letter, with all it told me about, and around, Gerard. (I just read in something Robert Penn Warren wrote, “A man doesn’t find himself, he creates himself.”) And about deciding not to write another line of a screenplay for the movie of The Instant Enemy—which sounds so absolutely wise and utterly reasonable a decision. I agree with your attitude and also rejected an offer to me for the same reason, since last I wrote you. I can’t work with anybody else at any stage of the doing, so even if I wanted to try a screenplay I couldn’t. What I hope is the results of your first draft will show up in the end enough to make the difference—but how could it be The Instant Enemy, which is a novel. Getting out of it must be a lovely send-off to you starting on a trip to NY—have a fine time there. Nona and many others will be made happy by your coming.

  I’ve been working too hard, I think, and fighting off distractions too hard, because I’m tired and realize the work is showing it. I began dreaming in manuscript form, revising, and writing in the margins as I went—ruining the dream. Yesterday I took off and went to hear some music—the Mozart Requiem being sung in a church—wanting not only the music but the washing away of words, but they handed out the texts to us and I couldn’t take my eyes off it—in Latin, so I had to work on it besides. The marvelous hour and a half of the music won over everything though, of course. It’s beautiful here now, and it’s beautiful there always—I look forward to filling up my eyes with it—Maybe what I need is a good long breath of that Pacific Ocean air—

  This isn’t to say I’ve done nothing but write—there was a weekend in Oxford, and there were visitors coming through Jackson—my dear friend Robert Penn Warren among them—And I’m happy writing, as you are too—I just don’t want to ruin anything—

  Maybe your book will come out while you’re in New York? All my very best to it—Also to our mutual friends. Ken, I will write better soon—My love for now to you & Margaret.

  Eudora

  Kenneth Millar, New York City, to Eudora Welty, [Late April 1976]. Written on Algonquin Hotel stationery.

  Dear Eudora:

  Margaret told me on the phone the happy news that you will be coming again to Santa Barbara this summer. I’m so glad, and it seems appropriate that I should be telling you so on Algonquin stationery. I’ve been here in New York ostensibly to do a couple of chores at Columbia—stil
l another connection with you, and indeed I met your friend the poet Smith there the other day—but also to promote my new book which I’ll be sending you soon. At present I’m having a marathon interview (third day, and three or four to go) with a rock music critic named Paul Nelson who writes for Rolling Stone. He wears dark glasses and never takes off his flat cloth cap even in a dining room but seems remarkably bright and comes from a place in Minnesota just over the line from Winnipeg. I love these temporal and geographical reverberations.

  SEE YOU! MUCH LOVE, AS EVER, Ken

  Though Ken was in New York promoting his new book, Eudora had no new book to promote. She worked hard at writing but brought no fiction to a conclusion. The 1973 death of Diarmuid Russell, her most trusted advisor, surely contributed to the difficulty she found in “hewing to the line” of a story.7 Perhaps Diarmiud’s advice over a thirty-two year span had come to seem indispensible. And in 1976 Eudora faced the prospect of writing without the counsel of the two editors upon whom she most relied.

  Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, May 5, 1976

  Dear Ken,

  I was delighted to get your letter from the Algonquin, and it sounded to me as if you were having a very busy good time. Fill me in with more of the details when I see you. Maybe you can connect up with Julian Symonds if he’s still in that part of the world? Did you get to catch your friend Don Freeman’s show, down in the Village? (I’d love to have seen it too.) Nona remarked in a note to me what an asset to her panel you were, “saying more in his quiet way than others who made more noise.”8 I wish I could’ve been in the critics’ audience. And you went to the Plaza. Did the Rolling Stone man roll everywhere you went, even into (who knows?) the fountain at the Plaza and still with his cloth cap on? I hope the interview comes out while I’m in NY, where indeed I’ll be this time next week. I’ve found myself at the point where my Random House editor, Albert Erskine, & my New Yorker editor, Bill Maxwell, are both now retiring (Bill’s already done it, & gone to Egypt & back with his wife to celebrate it). These are both old and dear friends, and we need to talk a lot over—I’m taking some work too but may not get to it—anyway, shall be back in Jax on the 20th, and the next thing I know I’ll be flying to Santa Barbara—& on the right plane, too. I’m so glad you and Margaret think it won’t interrupt work, I hope this is still so. You mustn’t “do” for me, just let’s be together the easiest way when we can. Can we ride some more to the same places? I can see them when I try, in my mind.