Your letter took a whole week to come after its postmark! But it came—Thank you—
& Love,
Eudora
I can hardly tell you how much your writing it meant to me.
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, October 15, 1976
Dear Ken,
I’m home again from a work-play trip up East, and I’m wondering if you’re home again from your much longer one—I hope it all went as planned and you had a fine time and the good refreshment of a change.
My trip was to two colleges—Smith and Bryn Mawr—where I’d worked before, and so it was being among friends—and the countryside was so beautiful! I love seasons—and in New England, in October, you’re conscious at all times of the season’s happening, can smell it, in the air, and walking through the leaves, and see it in the light. In between the 2 visits, I spent a few days at the Algonquin. The musical made from my story “The Robber Bridegroom” was finally, after 3 years in the workshop, opening on Broadway, and I wanted to see it.20 A high-spirited, young, energetic affair, moving with great speed—lots of music—I liked the young people a lot. There’d been a change from my book, by necessity—it’s now sort of Blue Grass and hoe-down. But it has its own existence as it is—The leading man, Barry Bostwick, had a rope to break with him in rehearsal, just before the play was to open, pitching him 12 feet to the floor—The poor man broke his arm in two places—But he went on, with his arm in a big leather sling that managed to look like part of his robber disguise.
My sister-in-law Mittie came up for it—wasn’t that sweet of her? Reynolds came, too, on his way to Oregon—but couldn’t stay for the show when it got postponed after the accident—He was in his usual high spirits—Nona was, too, she was at the show. Rosie Russell was with me, so was William Jay Smith, he & his wife, down from Vermont to see it. So I had people to clap. Here’s the Times review, if you’d like to see it—I cut it out for you.
The other clipping, about more amazing things—the Monarch butterflies & where they go—the Maxwells gave me & I thought you would like it. I’m so glad you like his Ancestors.
I had a nice letter from your friend Ralph Sipper, with a review he’d written of The Blue Hammer, which I was glad to see and thought sensitive and good—He’s been so nice and very quick about finding some books for me.
I did a review of Virginia Woolf’s Letters, Volume II, for the Times.21 And turned in my collection of non-fiction to Random House—and so now, I hope & trust, I can work on stories. Only I have to go to Ohio first & earn a little more time by a lecture.
This is all my news—
I so hope all things go well with you and all belonging to you—They must.
Love,
Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, October 17, 1976
Dear Eudora:
I got back from Europe over two weeks ago, and it’s time I gave you some account of my trip and of myself. One thing seems evident, and that is that I’ve made some recovery from the tiredness that has dogged me for quite a few months; which is just as well, because I’m slated to do a revision of the Instant Enemy script in the next couple of months. The first producer-writer who saw the earlier version, Alan Pakula, decided to make the movie, whether as producer or director he has not yet decided. As you can see, I’m not exactly carried away by the prospect of movie work but I’d like to write one movie and see it made, and this may well be it. Fortunately I feel myself beginning to stir in other directions, too, for instance the direction of Winnipeg in 1929, where and when I think I became aware of evil in the world. But it begins to appear, even to me, that these lines have some of the flaccid self-centeredness of someone who is recovering from an illness, or an uncertainty, and I had better change the subject, or come to it.
The trip to Europe was a good idea, and on the whole it sits well in my memory. But the first week overseas, the week in London, started with a disaster—not my disaster exactly, but partly mine. My dear friend Julian Symons’ twenty-year-old daughter, who had been seriously ill for much of the preceding year, committed suicide the day before I arrived in London and for reasons that you will understand it set me back on my heels. Since Julian was the one person in London I really wanted to see, and he wasn’t really seeable, I spent most of the week by myself walking the London streets and trying to come to terms with Julian’s loss and the memory of Linda’s death seven years ago. Perhaps one never does come to terms with these matters. But as I walked the London streets I kept remembering a walk I had taken the previous week through the streets of Kitchener, Ontario, where Margaret was born and Linda spent her first two years, and where the past rose around me not threateningly but lending some support, as water supports a swimmer. I spent most of a sunny day walking those old familiar streets, to the hospital where my father spent much of his last years, to the high school where I was a student and then a teacher, to the old stone rooming house where I spent a happy week or so in my seventh year with my father. There and then, and later in London (where I had spent the best month of my twentieth year) the difficult past sustained the difficult present and I even found a name for both when I walked down the short ugly red-brick street which was and is named Strange Street—this in Kitchener.
From London I went to Zurich and didn’t much like it at first. The people I’d come to see were, most of them, at the Frankfurt Book Fair. For once in my life I did something unexpected and took the surprisingly short flight from Zurich to Venice. I’d never been in Italy, let alone in Venice, and I found the place exhilarating, to put it mildly. Back in Zurich, I found my German publisher Daniel Keel of Diogenes a man of wit and learning and dedication, surrounded by young people like himself and by some older people of the same sort—notably Ruth Liepman our German agent. She lives with her office staff, young people some of whom are married to each other, in a large oldish mountainside house which also serves as their offices, and do their business through a nearby branch post office, though they don’t live there.22 From Zurich I went to Amsterdam, where my room overlooked a canal, and so home after a three-week absence, my longest in many years.
I think on the whole I did well to go: the world is realer and larger than it was. But Margaret did well to stay.23 Travel gives her no pleasure, except for the kind that Thoreau did in Concord. At the present time she has a touch of flu which does not, however, interfere with her pleasure in the reception her new book is being given (her first book in six years.)—I have more to tell you but have rambled on enough for tonight. We trust all is well with you. Love, as ever, Ken
P.S.—Your letter, somewhat cheerfuller than mine but I’m getting cheerfuller by the minute, especially since your letter came—your letter, as has happened before, crossed mine in the mails or would have if I’d mailed mine yesterday when I wrote it. That’s fine news about “Bridegroom,” and an excellent notice from Clive Barnes. It must give you great satisfaction not only on your own behalf but for all the good people who put the play on. It must be thrilling to have worked for and with such a fine group of people.
Margaret, who sends her love and congratulations with mine, has herself recently had kind words from the N.Y. Times—from Anatole Broyard who the other day gave her new book one of his very rare rave reviews. I enclose a copy. And a souvenir of the Tate.24 K.
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, [November 3, 1976]
Dear Ken,
I was so glad to hear from you after you got back—First, I’m so glad you went, for the refreshment and rest that a change can bring. But that was a hard thing to happen, when you arrived in London to the news about Julian Symons’s young daughter. And not to have been able to give or take comfort, there in the same place with your dear friend. I’d imagined you walking in the London streets, but in the pleasure of being back there, not from grief. I hope the rest of the journey brought something else, when it opened out with the sight of Venice—and a new sea for you—What a wonderful idea, to go there.
What I think of when I th
ink of Venice is the sea—washed stones in the floor of San Marco, the real and actual belonging-in-one of the city & the sea. And the light there. Also the feeling that the night & its moving lights there give you. I was there in a summer season, but it must have been the same feeling of being surrounded with the story—history—fantasy—dream—maze—of the place, while it’s real all the time, carrying on in a big Byzantine racket—Was there a smell of roasting chestnuts, among the others? I wonder if you got on a boat and rode out to sea & to Torcello? A bell older than Venice rings there. That big sheet of gold mosaic on the wall of the old bare country church.25
What was it like for you?
It was fine to see the excellent review of Margaret’s new book, and to know the rest of the reviews have been just as glowing. It must have made her feel very good indeed and you too. Broyard as we know is an unmitigated rat but that doesn’t keep his review, in that slot, in that paper, from doing a lot of good, or of course keep the review from being right, and it sounds very right. I’ll be reading the book for myself soon. Congratulations to Margaret—
Thanks for your good wishes about my musical—though I had nothing to do with its writing, it just took off from my book as it liked, which was what it should have done. I think you have much fortitude doing the revisions of the film script of your Instant Enemy for them—But I hope it’s interesting enough to reward you for it. I too think writing a movie would be much worth doing—what seems so difficult to me is writing a movie of something you wrote in the beginning as a story on paper. Good luck on it—On everything—
I’m just back from Ohio.26 It was 20° there & snowing—But in that pleasant small college town (Granville) the trees were still bright with fall colors—maples mostly—and inside the house, fires were burning, and after a long hard day’s work with classes etc., there was that fire to sit around in small pleasant company (I’d worked there 3 times before) including a young Sheltie pup named Bonny, who thought the fire was her enemy & ours, and having a drink (the humans) & talking about Fats Waller. Now I can get back to writing a story—
I am so happy to have one of Constable’s Dedham Mills—Thank you for thinking of how I love him in the Tate—I put it on my mantle.
Love,
Eudora
Eudora Welty, Washington, DC, to Kenneth Millar, November 18, [1976]
Dear Ken,
I think of you as writing hard on your film treatment. I hope revising it goes smoothly, and that everything else does too.
A glowing review Margaret’s new book got in the New Yorker! Leading off in the Sunday Times, too—So satisfying on all sides—
This is in Washington—I’m here for the Arts Council meeting, and so is Reynolds—We both got in this afternoon (before work starts tomorrow), and tonight we’re going to dinner with John & Catherine Prince in their house in Georgetown—like a little reunion of that May evening in Jackson, and I wish you could be here.
I’ve been working hard myself. A long story that’s tantalized me is slowly finding its shape, I believe—and my hope is that when I get back home (Sunday night) I can bring it off, then. It’s a hard one, but the hard parts are all new, so I very much want to solve them as well as I’m allowed.
The birds at home are full of energy, the cold bright days—The feeder I have hanging in a crabapple tree is innocent of all seeds by the end of the day. Many winter transients & visitors—And that long, high, living path of birds endlessly going to roost at sunset each evening.
There was a long shining jet track in the sky, like the bar the Blessed Damosel leans out from—27
My love to you,
Eudora
The long story that had “tantalized” Eudora was one she called “The Shadow Club.” Begun a year earlier, it focuses upon two crimes but not on detection. Instead it deals with concealment. As a young girl, the middle-aged schoolteacher protagonist has been asked by her mother’s lover to conceal the murder-suicide of her parents. And now as the victim of rape, she chooses again to conceal rather than report a crime. Then she learns from an elderly neighbor with dementia that her mother’s lover was also very probably her father. The crimes, the past haunting the present, the present repeating the past—these concerns were not new to Eudora’s fiction, but whether by confluence or influence, their appearance now linked her work to Ken’s ever more strongly.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, November 25, 1976
Eudora:
What a lovely letter you wrote me the other day from Washington—the writing of a woman whose spirit seemed tuned and ready. I can’t make quite the same claim but I’m gradually working myself back into shape, doing little writing jobs. The most fun has been revising (somewhat) the short talk I gave in Chicago in 1973 to the Popular Culture Assn—revising it for Dan Halpern’s Antaeus—I was very glad to be asked.28 The least fun was trying to write out for a nice but journalistically inexperienced lady professor from Indiana State who interviewed me early this year for Writers’ Digest (which I haven’t seen for years )—write out the reasons why I write detective fiction. The fact is I don’t think I know why I write detective fiction, and that is the reason it’s detective fiction. No doubt another reason is that I refused to be bettered, or worsened, by my education and chose not to rise very far away from my origins, just far enough to breathe. But you can’t say things like that to Writers’ Digest.
I envy your seeing Reynolds, whom I often think of, in such terms as that if there were princes in America he would naturally be one of them. I have been reading his latest book (Surface of Earth) with great interest and attention, and it seems to me profound in feeling and in detail, too. I wish I could write such a book. My father’s life in all its strangeness, all his strangeness, all life’s strangeness, deserves a book and it may not be too late for a short book. It takes a lifetime to learn to love what we have been hurt by.
Contrary to my expectation I am not yet working on the final version of the Instant Enemy screenplay, but am still waiting for the deal (director + producer) etc. to be consummated. My secret hope is that it never will be. I have scarcely as much desire to write screenplays as to become a chiropractor. So how did I get involved with this one? Well, I wrote a treatment and it interested a director whom I admire (Pakula) and I was drawn by a combination of faith, hope and vanity into the film web. But really not very far, I tell myself—six or seven weeks at most. And as for waiting, it’s really rather refreshing to think about possible books and not have to start one.
We’ve had quite a lovely fall, warm and bright with one lifesaving rain of several inches. A new bird, a Harris’s sparrow, came to one of our feeders the other day. Which reminds me that Margaret is in fine shape, the best in years, having at long last (six years) written another book and had it well received, as you noted, by the New Yorker etc. It’s gone into a second printing and M. is writing a second book!
I’m looking forward to seeing in print the story you are working on—the process of which you so beautifully described or evoked, in your letter, in all its difficulty and necessity and newness, with the élan and strength to put together a new shape.
Love,
Ken
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, November 29, 1976
Dear Ken,
Thank you for your letter—and I’m glad to know you’re working again—Good wishes to all of these pieces—
I hate it that those hurts have come to you—You have so resolutely and honorably worked to learn and understand from them, and you have learned and understood, even come to love where most people couldn’t—but I wish they could give you a little rest, release—you have earned much more than rest. We somehow do learn to write our stories out of us, however disguised and given other players who can move and act where possibly we can’t—and all, but in the end, if the hurt still stays, that’s wrong—It’s been a good deal on my mind, but when your letter came today I wanted to ask you now if there is any way you know of that I could be any help? Of course you
have written around and about it—your father’s (I know no word—his doing)—and into it and out of it, while you yourself have made a whole life that is good and truly good, aware and unhurting and understanding of others, a shining way to have dealt with what was done to you—But it hasn’t seemed to have been enough for you, to bring you real peace of mind. Would it be any use to you to write about this to me? Trying a new way if it came to you? You have written about it to me in letters, you know. The time I first thought of asking you this was when I read your letter about walking in Kitchener—that you wrote when you came back from your trip to London. The old stone rooming house where there was a happy week or so in your seventh year, with your father—I know you’ve thought and thought, so much and so long, about putting it down—and have worked it out in many circuitous ways. Maybe there are endless circuitous ways. I know I may be out of my depth. You will understand, though, what makes me try—I would try to be a reader of understanding and imagination and safety.
When we were little we were so very far away, but now we are growing old (not in feeling, I hope) but are close—perhaps both are reasons, when taken together, why you might some day try this, if the spirit moves you. It would help that we share a sense of continuity in life, and that there’s a continuity that we have between us of caring and concern.
It’s been terribly cold here—sleet, snow, and the thermometer down in the teens—I had enough birdfeed, though—I haven’t been able to back my car out of the garage. Today is fair & bright & up to 24°—The poor camellias were showing color in their buds.
That earthquake—seaquake?—you had there didn’t come near Santa Barbara, I hope—And I hope the rare Harris Sparrow does come near—nice & regular.
Love,
Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, December 9, 1976
Dear Eudora:
I’m really not in bad shape and you mustn’t worry about me. I believe I’m a little spoiled by, among other things, the ease with which I wrote the middle books. In any case I’m getting back into the work again and beginning to enjoy it; and trust in a year or so I’ll have something to show you. Margaret is working hard and with great zest. The weather is cold and clear. The night is quiet except when my dogs move. Tomorrow I go to a lunch on the Riviera (S.B.) signalizing my sixty-first birthday. When do I grow up, dear Eudora?
Meanwhile There Are Letters Page 35