As you can see, this was written at different times over a couple of days, and it got too long before I knew it. It’s the Fourth of July! & the tall ships are moving up the River—Lord, so beautiful! I miss you and send love—And love to Margaret, to whom I am writing too—
Yours,
Eudora
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, July 28, 1976
Dear Ken,
You are all right and things go well there, I trust. Today I was thinking how much you would like the Constable Exhibition Catalogue—I remember your feeling for his work, which would probably increase, like mine, with the sight of these sketches from his notebooks—reproduced by the scores—Pocket-sized, some of them—2 ⅝ by 3 ⅜!—and a sketch that might be scribbled over by one of his children—London from Hampstead, in a view from “our little drawing room”—& that would include the dome of St. Paul’s—Did you know that when the Houses of Parliament were burning, both Turner & Constable were watching in the crowd? I once saw, & you might have too, in the big Turner Exhibition, his sketchbook of the Fire, one after the other, fast as fast, keeping up with it—But Constable had brought his two little boys, so his hands would have both been held.17 This Tate catalogue is wonderfully informative about his life & his family & his travels & letters & the contemporary scene—he was a very complex man with such volatile spirits, and such a need for his landscapes to be populated—as we can see—he was so lonesome & homesick in Wordsworth’s Lake country, but he stuck it out. His only years of real serenity & stability were those in the lifetime of his wife. One of the things that struck home with me was that he painted Willy Lott’s house (one he saw every day) simply all his life—and that Willy Lott was living in it when Constable was born & still living in it when Constable died—And the same ferryman turned up in many a painting, poling his way. Our subjects remain the same. The anecdote I like best is that in the Academy on varnishing day, a rival named Chantrey (indeed) told Constable his foreground was too cold, & right in front of Constable picked up a brush and put “a strong glazing of asphartum” all over that part of the picture, and Constable said, “There goes all my dew.”18
It’s really hot here now—I’ve been working on a story that I hoped would be good. I tried writing some things I’d been feeling for the last year into a new scene that I introduced into it but hard as I’d worked I knew it honestly didn’t belong and so I’ve just taken it out. It’s hard to keep things hewing to the line in a short story—or it proves so for me.
The paper this morning said that just prior to the big earthquake in China, all the dogs barked. Is this a known phenomenon?
I hope everything’s fine there and everybody well. I have to fly to Washington Friday to an Arts Council meeting but will fly home again Sunday. When you have time, a letter would bring me cheer. Take care.
With much love to all,
Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, August 1, 1976
Dear Eudora:
The world has been too much with me recently. But now it seems to be receding a bit and letting me live in the past, not my own but the timeless past which you reminded me of with your comments on Constable (and Turner). Your reminder was an act of wise friendship. I must be after all a Romantic writer, with piped-in English weather in my head, and it was no accident that I spent those years of my life on Coleridge, searching for the source of my fantasy, learning to identify my own with a general past.
These past few weeks have been occupied with a new form of that enterprise. A young man named Paul Nelson—have I mentioned him before?—has been sitting with me through the afternoons and trying to reconstruct with me a story of my life which will make sense to his editor at Rolling Stone and its readers. The best thing about it for me is the opportunity to learn a younger man in the same depth that he is learning me. Paul is a music critic by trade—a rock music critic—and he put me in touch with a couple of rock composers.19 I find I like them and feel safe enough though a long way from home. (Home is Ellington.) Paul attended the U. of Minnesota, wears a cap at all times, and tinted glasses, and is a highly (as well as lowly) literate book collector.
Though I write about some of the complexities, the simplest things in general seem best to me. Swims in the ocean followed by a good lunch with friends or relatives, preferably both as today. Or Jim who today was the missing relative at lunch, Jim staggering in a few minutes ago at ten o’clock at night after a day spent a hundred miles away at a swimming meet at which he won no medals but improved his time in the hundred—now 71 seconds, which means more when you recall that Johnny Weissmuller’s world record time a generation ago was just under a minute (now it’s just under 50 seconds). Jim staggered in, drank a lot of milk, and went to bed happy, still wearing his swimming shorts. Happy as I am for and with Jim, I don’t live through him at all so far as I can tell. To the extent that a boy should be at 13 he is on his own, and he has a father of his own, who loves him.
My life is going through a change which I am slow and unwilling to define because definition would tend to determine it. I am more at peace with the world but less with myself. I’d like to take a further step but perhaps have taken not enough previous ones. I am woefully ignorant but not sufficiently concerned about it to educate myself. Still I love to work and am waiting to be able to, in my fashion.
It was wonderful to see you here again. We love you, dear Eudora.
As ever,
Ken
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, August 14, 1976
Dear Ken,
I was so glad to have a letter come from you—to tell the truth I had been feeling a little uneasy. When I was with you I had had the sense of that not-being-at-peace you speak of—and hadn’t had the wits or the right trust in my instincts to let you know my awareness if it would have made a difference. In some ways I am a very shy person—and I revere the privacies—But reading your letter, so sweet and kind as ever, I feel the uneasiness still and I hope whatever you do think now of doing, taking a fresh turn, will be good and restoring and go positively to make things the way they ought to be for you—If this hope sounds vague, it is really strong and even precise. You must use my wishes whenever they fit and as you will—but this may make you smile: I dreamed I was sending you the dream I was dreaming (not a letter dream, the dream itself) and that as I dreamed it you got it. Part of the dream. When I woke up I felt happy—I couldn’t remember my dream because it was wholly gone from me and you knew everything.
It’s been terribly hot, with violent electrical storms in the afternoons—I have signed myself up for some jobs, the kind I have been declining to do for the past 8 or 10 years, because I find I have to put a new roof on the house & other such like, and need a good way (surer than my fiction) to pay for it, so I decided to take the next lecture offers that came along—I’ll be writing lectures & going to give them or do other stints at Cornell & Smith & Denison U. & Agnes Scott—because if you possibly remember the roof on the long slope, of my house, I have an acre of shingles! I like the subjects I’m doing, the greatest of which is Chekhov. Barney Conrad asked me if I might do a workshop for him next summer, but I watched Herb Harker do his for a week and I know I have not got the stamina. (And will have used up what little I have in “panel” work already by the time he was ready to start.) I told Barney I could do as before if wanted, but can’t do workshops. I also lack some other prerequisites Herb has got—He is fine. (I must go back over & write him on his good novel.) In addition to lecturing I of course hope to finish my real work of the stories I’m wrestling with—which I still do, through the thunderstorms.
It’s good to be able to do this real work, isn’t it? I hope yours, whatever it will be, goes well—whether it’s about Canada or California or Xanadu or where—I send it love, and you—I am trusting in outcomes. As ever—Eudora
When you can, do let me hear again. Take care.
At last Ken revealed to Eudora what he’d not shared with any other correspondent: the laps
es he’d been experiencing with his memory, a problem made all the more clear to him during his long talks with interviewer Paul Nelson.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, August 15, 1976
Dear Eudora:
I was rather depressed when I last wrote you, and indeed for some weeks before that, but now that I feel some relief I hasten to assure you that all is comparatively well here. I was suffering from a failure of the memory function which is probably within the normal limits at my age but which, because I had usually had a nearly perfect memory, scared and depressed me. I got a psychologist to give me a series of tests, got through with colors if not flying ones, and with a combination of luck and cunning persuaded myself to accept the change and did. The sharing of the pressure with a professional really helped, and so did my return to work, if you can call revising a screenplay work. I refer to the “Instant Enemy” screenplay, which is now in process of being passed around to directors. The first one who has seen it, Alan Pakula, was interested enough to come up and talk about it—very intelligently—and he has not yet made up his mind whether to do it or not. If he does, I’ll revise it under his direction but in the meantime I’m going ahead by myself. It’s so good to be able to work, isn’t it?
We’ve had a pleasantly eventful summer, much of the action being supplied by Jim and his swimming-team-mates. It was sort of climaxed today when Jim’s father (and therefore Jim) joined the Coral Casino as out-of-town members. They plan, as the summer ends, to spend a couple of weeks in canyon country—Grand, Oak Creek, etc. Our plans, as you know, are even more ambitious—London and Zurich. I’m looking forward to the change, and so is Margaret. We’ll go by way of Canada and visit her father on the way. He lives near Toronto. I find as I grow older that more and more of my thinking and remembering recurs to Canada. It would be a pity not to put some of my strange early life on record, of course as fiction—I can never tell a straight story.
But I love to read one, and it seems to me that William Maxwell’s Ancestors hews so close to the truth as memory and research can come. What a good book it is, so full of humane feeling and understanding. So many of us are remiss in our duty to our lares and penates. I know you are not remiss, either there or in other places. You give us all our due, and more than our due, in your generosity of mind; as I am reminded whenever I hear from someone we both know. Just tonight as I was talking to Barny Conrad on the phone he mentioned your generous praise of Herb Harker’s conduct of his writing class. I’m so glad you feel as I do about Herb, who has come a long way and is going further yet.
The ocean has been violent this weekend. It overturned and destroyed the diving raft, but then after a time it grew reasonably quiet again. So have my unquiet spirits. I hope and trust my silence didn’t alarm you. I prefer to mention problems when they are on their way to being understood or at least controlled. And, you know, my life has been fortunate, and so continues.
Love,
Ken
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, August 18, [1976]
Dear Ken, this is letter 2—I’m glad you are feeling some relief—I hope by now more—but you’ve been in torment—I’m sorrier than I can tell you for what you must have been going through. Heroically. It’s good that the psychologist helped by taking some of the pressure off— Of course I know that what the memory means to you of all people is what made this hurt most, and made it hardest on you to deal with. (That you showed no bitterness about this made me want to cry.) And you’re dealing with it in every good good strong way you know, of course—
I hope you will not mind if I try to say the only thing about it I know enough to—it’s from knowing you. You have had such a long, deep, searching, truth-seeking, truth-learning relationship with the function of memory, full of recognitions & discoveries & encounters with its mysteries (and maybe this is, in its course, another one) and you solved them—you solved them—You are so versed in them, its mysteries have aided and abetted you. And why not again? This is what I feel, that you are going to positively come out all right again because of the deep nature of memory and of you—And the strength in both—
I won’t say any more now except, how good a journey I’m wishing you and Margaret—and soon now. The change, new scenes, sound full of refreshment to the spirits and what a beautiful time of year to be flying over the Alps, & walking in England—love to you both—Thank you for letting me know how you are. There is no friend for whose welfare, past, present, & future I care more—For whose dear life—Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, [August 1976]
Dear Eudora:
I wouldn’t have written you about my memory problem if I hadn’t known that you would in any case notice the difference with words and concern. But I’m glad I did write you. Part of the problem is a sense of isolation (cause or result?)—a sense which simply evaporates when I am in contact with you. Your letter, your letters, were so beautiful in their feeling and understanding—and your dream about dreaming a dream for me so supernaturally right—that I think there is no end to your loving intelligence, your intelligent love. I think the memory is not a separate faculty but something which the mind is meant to do, a variation in warmth which sustains a movement like the Gulf Stream’s in its ocean. There is more warmth there now than there was, thanks to you, and less anxiety now that I have spoken not only to you but the psychologist who tested me and found me mentally normal in most respects, and my loss of memory within the normal range.
I’m not really grieving, you know, nor have I any intention of not working. In fact I have been working, though not yet on finished writing. I count my blessings, too. When my father was sixty he could neither talk nor work. But he could still write, a little, and did, in the manner of Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott. His father came from Dumfries to Ontario and formed a small-town newspaper there, so that he was a writer, too. The paper still survives after more than a century.
I’m so glad you came to know Herb Harker well, and liked his book. I’ve never known a better man, or one with greater capacity for growth. As is true of all of us, I imagine, the source of his virtue is also the source of some of his writing problems. I mean Mormonism. But a good novel, such as I now believe him to be bringing off, will solve these and other problems, and also make him an intellectual leader in a Church which needs more of the life of the imagination.
I wish you good luck with your speaking or reading engagements. Don’t worry about me, dear Eudora. My life, particularly in its second half, has been exceedingly fortunate on the whole. I’ve been allowed to do a full stint of work and am not finished with it yet. Your professionally intelligent concern, as accurate as a shadow, suffuses my mind with heat and light.
We’re off to Europe via Canada on September 9—Canada because Margaret’s father is still surviving there in his ninety-first year, but not in particularly good shape. From Canada to London, thence to Zurich. We have books coming out in both those cities this fall, and our trip will be partly a working one. We’ll be back in under three weeks, which is as long as Margaret can survive outside Santa Barbara.
Jim’s summer with us has been most pleasant for all of us. Yesterday the swimming, and his sailing lessons particularly, came to a head when he took a small sailboat out to sea in a wind, came back into the harbor, then turned around and headed out again. “So mean I.”
Love,
Ken
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, [September 2, 1976]
Dear Ken,
I’m glad you found you could write to me about it—it’s so understandable that the sense of isolation would come with the memory problem and—cause or result—would have been the worst of it. Your letters both moved me so. I wanted to help—as I always would—and your beautiful letter made me feel today that I had—you’d put yourself in my place, even in your trouble, and knew this would comfort me too. It was a letter full of such giving—of belief and trust in the feeling out of which I’d written to you—you made me feel I had made something
easier—The thing is that you do feel better now—
And of course you’re working—How could you not be writing? The next book, when you come to that, is a good challenge, (I like one, don’t you?) since it will follow the long and different and long-in-the-evolving Blue Hammer— And best wishes by the way to the British Blue Hammer and the German—And to Margaret’s new one too—
What you said about the memory, that it is something the mind is moved to do, sustained by a variation in warmth of a Gulf Stream moving through the ocean of the mind, I felt to my fingertips must be a truth—It could only have been reached out of your troubles—but or maybe thus it is like a vision—I shouldn’t say “like,” I think it is a vision.
As you well know, and have shown, in the memory nothing is really lost—It’s there, somewhere—And that’s so in just the common memory—not yours, which is not in any way at all common. As time gives it its chance and your writing does what your writing can do, I believe your whole memory in all its phases will light up for you when you wish it, as bright & endless as that other stream, the Milky Way (we are in that too). But nearer than that, I am taking both your hands to tell you, never feel isolated any more—
I hope the trip is all you’d like it to be—I hope they get a rain in England before you come—For the sake of the birds too that you’ll want to see—The best of good luck—The possibilities sound lovely—Just walking in London sounds lovely to me—
Meanwhile There Are Letters Page 34