Love, Ken
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, December 20, 1976
Dear Eudora:
I’ve been reading over your recent letters and really should regret the tremor I caused in your strings, except that the sound it made was so beautiful. I am grateful for your love and caring. I wasn’t in such bad shape as I may have seemed to be, and certainly am not now, with memory improving and urge to work returning. Also I think I’ve traced the cause of my malaise, or one of the causes, to that movie work I did early in the year, and then the long wait to finish it. Much to my relief, as I may have told you, the deal I was waiting on fell through and released me into my own life. I hereby vow never to get involved with movies again. It seems sinful to me, to let anyone interfere in any way with what I write, or to wait on anyone’s approval. I don’t mean editing; I mean a forced or even a borrowed vision. This has to do simply with me: robuster imaginations can bull it through. But offhand I can’t think of any writer for print who benefited by writing for the movies. And I can’t tell you what relief I experienced when United Artists told Alan Pakula that they didn’t want him to make “The Instant Enemy.”
This is a terribly self-centered letter, with ‘I’ in every sentence, it seems. Let me report that Margaret is happy and well, except that she has itchy eyelids and wonders if something is biting her. I suspect it’s an allergic reaction. In any case it doesn’t seem to interfere with the work on her new book, which like the one before is about Tom Aragon. I haven’t read any part of it, and won’t until she’s finished with the book.
I’m in the middle of Borowitz’ Innocence and Arsenic which Joan Kahn sent me (and perhaps you?) and think it’s extraordinarily well written, simply loaded with carefully shaped historical insights which would seem to me to qualify it as a university textbook; and intellectually witty. Another thing I’ve been enjoying is Donald Davie’s Clark Lectures on Dissent which have been (partly) printed in some recent TLS’s. With these lectures, and his Pound book, and his own recent poems, Davie has become a central figure in English intellectual life, and done so by becoming simply (and complicatedly) himself, and personifying that whole great England which was excluded from the centre and its controls, until now. But England has lost Davie. He’ll be back at Stanford, evidently to stay, next month—in the poetry chair which he inherited from Yvor Winters.29
No, I don’t have much nostalgia for the halls of ivy, preferring at least in these later years just to do the one main thing with all the energy I have left. No politics.
Thank you so much for your recent letters, indeed for all of them. Is it too late to wish you a happy Christmas?
Love, Ken
(M. sends her love, too. K)
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, December 29, 1976
Dear Ken,
Thank you for your sweet letter—it came Christmas Eve—and how forbearing it was, when I realize what a mistaken way I must have put something. I wrote from a feeling that you were—not in bad shape at all, far from it—but perhaps casting about for a new form for a piece of work, and I was wondering if I might possibly do for you what someone had done for me. When I was working on my novel Losing Battles, which was a new form for me, and life at home grew very difficult—my mother’s long illness, and my brother’s—I needed for this novel to stay real and grow the way it needed to for me in spite of no time or way to work, and my dear friend William Maxwell suggested I send along what I could and his secretary could type this up for me. (I have to work with a typewriter, for objectivity and for the ways I revise). My mother could not bear the sound of the typewriter if I began working late at night, she thought I had forgotten her. Bill Maxwell never offered a word about what I sent, though I invited him to read it if he felt like it, he just provided me with a confirmation at a distance of what I was doing, if that expresses it at all, an objective guarantee that it was alive. I had never shown anyone work in progress and never have since, and perhaps it was only the angelic sensitivity of Bill that made this possible. He read it and didn’t say anything, and I took a great deal of comfort from it. You of course don’t need this, as I needed it, but I guess something came over me, what if I could do for you what was done for me, but I would never have had the impertinent idea of “criticising”—I’m sure you were horrified, as I am, to think of it. I love your work, and wasn’t offering to do any more. But I can do that when it’s in print.
We all had a nice Christmas here, as I hope you did there. I got up early! to see the little ones come downstairs to see their Santa Claus—little Andy, my niece Mary Alice’s 18-month old, spotted the red motorcycle that he knew was for him, it spoke to him straight, and he pushed through all the rest, mounted it in his pajamas, and rode it right out from under the tree and through the house, never letting a word fall. I got some kind of flu the next day but feel all right again now. I’ll write a better letter next time, but just didn’t want you to think bad things from what must’ve been a confused letter.
With love and lots of New Year’s wishes to you & Margaret,
Eudora
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Sometimes your insight is so dazzling that I have to shut my eyes.”
1977
AS 1977 began, the musical version of Eudora’s novella The Robber Bridegroom was still enjoying a Broadway run, and during the year she would take her own show on the road. Colleges and universities were eager to bring her to their campuses. She made thirteen trips over the course of eight months in the year and received three honorary degrees, one from Harvard. Both happiness about the play and her reason for making these appearances were at least in part financial. Her income had waned while household maintenance expenses had waxed. Bill Maxwell offered to help with her expenses; Ken would offer as well. But perhaps Eudora’s peripatetic existence was also motivated by her inability to complete a story and by her sense of time’s urgency. That sense of urgency sent her on a long trip— first to see Ken in Santa Barbara and from there to see Mary Lou Aswell in Santa Fe, the second time in two years she had taken this route. The death of her lifelong friend Frank Lyell shortly after she returned from the West surely confirmed the wisdom of such travels.“More and more I prize the present,” Eudora had declared as the year began, “and if you look at the strange device on the banner I’m carrying ’mid snow and ice, it’s CARPE DIEM.”1
Ken though was less and less able to seize the day. He became Margaret’s support and caretaker when she had surgery for lung cancer in the spring, and he sought help from a psychologist when his memory problems intensified in the fall. Through all of this trouble, however, he drew comfort from his correspondence with Eudora.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, January 2, 1977
Dear Eudora:
Today was a fine grey day and not too cold for us but cold enough. M. and I celebrated by taking a swim and eating a hearty lunch, you know where, with Ted and Lois Clymer, whom you will remember. They are in the process of arranging a divorce and for some reason it, or the prospect of it, has enabled them to become good friends again, and convinced me of what I didn’t use to believe, that divorce could be a suitable end to a marriage.2
I should have answered sooner your kind offer to let me write out to you what I remember of my own early family life. But I’ve been thinking about it and decided I’d better not. It will have to be done in fiction. Which, like all my fiction, will be aware of you as the most responsive imagination I write to. That sounds sort of boastful but is really meant to be thankful. Seem to be coming to life again.
Have I mentioned Donald Davie’s Clark lectures, partly printed in several recent issues of TLS? I think they’re strikingly important and will give England a fine forward shove, and show us ourselves in the bargain, all us dissenters.
Love and a happy new year, dearest Eudora, ever, Ken
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, January 7, 1977
Dear Eudora:
Sometimes your insight is so dazzling that I have to shut my ey
es. But you must not feel that it has ever hurt me to be touched by it. Your rays are wholly benign and leave no mark. The fact is—if I may step to one side and comment simply as an innocent bystander—the power of your empathy is so great that it fills me with glee on behalf of the whole human race. I’m sure you understand me, you always do. Too well indeed except that your perceptions are always benign and never harmful. And if there is some unease in my letters from time to time, you are never the source of it, merely a witness. And always, dear Eudora, a witness for the defense.
I’m moving from position to position on my internal map, trying to get a fix, or a series of fixes, on my early life which is the so far unstated source of all my fiction. For some years now I’ve been thinking about Winnipeg in 1929 and may do it next. I’d better hurry. A professor at the U. of Manitoba recently semi-predicted in The Nation that Canada was going to break up into two or more parts. At any rate the west will be freed from the destiny of the South.
Well, things are evoking. I can’t tell you what a joy it was to feel that I live in your world, as you live constantly in mine.
Love,
Ken
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, [January 27, 1977]
Dear Ken,
Thank you for that letter you last wrote me, with its feeling so deeply kind and delicately understanding. And I was, am, so glad to hear that the work was going so well—That’s exciting—
I’ve been working too but the kind of thing with a deadline—have done a couple of reviews for the Times lately (both books of letters, Virginia Woolf’s and now Faulkner’s3) and need to finish now as soon as possible the remaining essay for my book of non-fiction, which I agree to have ready by February 29. This is a piece on Chekhov—I’d rather read him than anybody, but what I could come up with about him that’s the least bit fresh or new, as from the point of view of a short story writer—my assignment, from Cornell—I can’t think. I’ve promised, though. How long has it been since you read “The Duel”? It’s miraculous—
We’ve had our share of the nation’s winter, which only California can cock a snook at—It was 6° the other morning—We’ve had both a snow storm, and an ice storm—Everything just stopped. Children sledded down the middle of Pinehurst Street on cafeteria trays from the schoolhouse—I don’t really mind being holed in, as long as it’s just for a few days. The only good thing about cold waves in the South is that they don’t last long—Today, instead of 6°, it’s 60°—and camellias coming back into bloom—They warn us, “Not for long!” about the mild weather, now.
I had a fine time with Margaret’s book, tell her, which I’d been trying to get hold of. The true expert, and fine handler of the sinister scene, the splendid dialogue writer that she always is, I thought this novel just about her best. It was interesting to see how she was making Mexico, at least partly, out of bits of Santa Barbara,—wasn’t she? Tops—Congratulations to her again—
Did you happen to see Reynolds’s piece in Time about Plains, Ga.? In the issue with Carter as Man of the Year [January 3, 1977]—Anyway I tore it out for you in case you missed it—I think it’s fine—
I’ll write when I’m out from under—For you I hope every thing is going wonderfully well—Thank you for your letter—your letters—
With love, always
Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, [January 28, 1977]
Dear Eudora:
I don’t want to alarm you but it would be pointless to write you without mentioning what is most on my mind. Margaret has been coughing and breathing with some difficulty for weeks now. Of course she’s been going to doctors but they haven’t given her a thorough examination until today; and they found a spot on her lung. We’re naturally concerned, since M. was a heavy smoker for many years, and keeping our fingers crossed while further tests are being made. Please cross your fingers, too.
We’ve both been working, M. more advanced than I, as usual, until the last couple of days. I’m trying to invent something out of my childhood, and she is writing a sequel to TOMORROW.4 It’s been cold here, even here, but not by more eastern standards. Rather than use too much gas, we bought a half-cord of wood, seasonal oak, and have been enjoying fires in the fireplace.
In renewing my subscription to ANTAEUS I had a chance to write your name down for a free subscription and did so. If you already get it, pass it on to someone else. For the current issue, on popular fiction, I cleaned up the speech I gave in response to the Popular Culture award several years ago.
I hope and trust all is well with you, dear Eudora. You are more in my thoughts than any other absent person. Love, Ken
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, Monday morning [January 31, 1977]
Dear Ken,
My fingers are crossed and you know I’m sending my love and hopes—I’m so sorry this trouble has come down on Margaret and you—and I hope the next news you get will ease it and the worry in some way. It’s good to know you’re there where there must be wonderfully able and wise doctors helping.
That fire going sounds nice—I’ll think of you with it burning steady & long and smelling good and cheering the whole house, with the dogs to lie about it too—up on the raised hearth, if that is not too hot for German Shepherds, or for Misty either.
That’s just what I wanted to find, Antaeus with your piece in it—you’d mentioned letting them have it. I used to take the magazine but my subscription had run out so I’m pleased to have it renewed for me—Thank you—
Like you and Margaret I’ve been busy working—Doing a piece on Chekhov, which is absorbing as well as hard—but yesterday, the story I’ve been writing but had to interrupt for this, made an appearance again in my mind like a fish leaping in the river when I thought it was quiet and I wrote on it again for about an hour. Anyway I took it as a sign the thing was still alive. And I hope yours is the same—
Dear Ken, I think of you and send my love to you & Margaret—I’m going to walk up the street & put this in the mailbox—we’re all under a new fall of snow here—when people can’t drive. It’s beautiful—it was beautiful falling all night. I hope to hear soon—
Much love,
Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, February 1, 1977
Dear Eudora:
Thank you for your letter and the enclosure which I had missed. Reynolds, by dwelling on the simple and not so simple facts, has expressed better than anyone what Carter and the Carters may mean to us. Last night on national television we saw a vision which also made us think of you—a vision of Jackson blanketed with snow. I’m ashamed to say that we’re having an embarrassingly sunny winter, so mild that we’ve been able to do without our furnace entirely. Wood fires in the evening, though.
Margaret is in somewhat better shape, both physically and emotionally, than she was when I wrote you the other night. The cell tests she has taken show no sign of malignancy and that is relieving. She’ll be going back for further tests next week, but her doctors don’t seem alarmed.
All my life I’ve kept coming back to Chekhov and I remember the initial impact of The Duel when I was a very young man. But I must confess I haven’t read it lately—made a search for it tonight but couldn’t find it. Robert Payne omits it, no doubt purposely as not a short story, from his “forty stories” of Chekhov. I quite agree that nobody has ever written so well as C., not even you in the full white heat of your powers.
Love, Ken
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, [February 7, 1977]
Dear Eudora:
Today I was lucky enough to hear from you twice: once in your public voice and once in your private voice, in your review of Faulkner’s letters and in your letter to me. These two voices are not very different, and what rings out in both of them is the generosity of your support to other human beings. Your statement on Faulkner is strong and simple and built to last, like the first story of a large building. As for your letter, your dear letter, it’s a great comfort as always to have one’s feeli
ngs corroborated and supported by yours. There is a definite improvement in the way Margaret feels. Next week, as I mentioned before, she’ll have repeated and additional tests, about which I’ll let you know. M. isn’t letting this interfere with her pleasure in life which rests as you suppose on such things as burning logs and yearning dogs (yearning to go for a walk), and she’s looking forward to her imminent sixty-second birthday. (She’s ten months older than I am.)
I’d been reading Strindberg’s one-act plays (to the translation of which Shaw donated his Nobel Prize money, wisely) but your special current interest in Chekhov derailed me back into nineteenth century Russian literature and I’ve been rereading Pushkin to see over again how that miracle came about. There’s so much to be grateful for, is there not?
Love and gratitude,
Ken
P.S.—I had a talk with Barnaby Conrad the other day, about next summer’s local writers’ conference. He is eager to have you come again if you can, as we all are, but the growing expenses of the conference (the hotel has increased its rates considerably, etc) would make it difficult for him to pay your fare. I know that you have had some unexpected expenses this year and it would make me happy indeed if—as a matter strictly between you and me—you’d let me help with the fare. You needn’t answer the suggestion right away, but please in the end say yes. You and Santa Barbara need each other. She’s growing more nearly civilized every year, but will never make it without your continued help. Nor I!
P.P.S.—Bob Easton shared my feeling that Reynolds on Carter was the deepest statement yet. K.
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, February 16, 1977
Meanwhile There Are Letters Page 36