Meanwhile There Are Letters

by Suzanne Marrs

  This is going to be my reward and restoration after a hard month’s work—I’ve truly enjoyed the college visits—have met some fine people, students and faculty—but I’m spent, for the moment—One person I just have to tell you about now—the chairman of the English Department at Kent State is the first son of a family that for 9 generations has not been the Court Magician of the royal Court of the Netherlands! Hereditary since the 16th century. Isn’t that absolutely wonderful? His name is Dr. Robert Bamberg—and he has a Magician’s smile.

  With love—and looking forward to the 18th,—I hope all is really fine—

  Eudora

  Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, June 9, 1977

  Dear Eudora:

  It was good to have your letter with its assurance that you can make the Santa Barbara trip. Nothing at this end should give you pause. Margaret is quite strong again and looking forward to seeing you, as we all are. I can feel a holiday mood (unearned) descending on me already, with a noise resembling the sound of the 4:30 plane from L.A. Which I’m looking forward to meeting on the eighteenth.

  The weather is fine here, not too hot, with a kind of misty rain in the last twenty-four hours. In spite of the mounting water shortage, this place has never looked better. A good deal of water has passed under the bridge since I’ve seen you, and we have a lot to talk about. Come safe and soon.

  Love,

  Ken

  P.S.—Jim comes for the summer the same day!

  Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, June 27, 1977

  Dear Eudora:

  This will reach you when you’ll have had, I know, a good visit with Mary Louise and, I hope, an easier trip home than you had coming. It was generous of you to come. As the chief beneficiary of your visit I thank you on behalf of all the others. Though you may have felt outnumbered by the kinds of writer you would hate to be, you outnumbered them. And you are the one that the student writers will remember, as I do, sitting forever at your feet.

  I was bowled over by the excellence of your “Chekhov,” which I return herewith reluctantly. It was wonderful to be shown his moral landscape in the light of your mind and to see expressed once and for all the moral purity and knowledge at the center of his art. Your writing in this piece is as clear as a freshly washed window, as clear as his and as uncompromising. It should stand as a definition of his work.

  Margaret is feeling somewhat better and is back at work, as I am. I haven’t determined what story to tell but it’s fun getting ready to make a choice. Jim just came in from his first day in the Junior Lifeguard training program, and seems enthusiastic. Altogether the auspices are good.

  See you,

  Love,

  Ken

  Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, July 3, 1977

  Dear Ken,

  I was so glad we got that visit in—How good it was to see you first thing waving to me when I stepped out of the plane. And I was glad of all the times—you were generous and thoughtful all that while, and I cherish the rides and the sight again of the lovely mountains and the sea and the winding roads. Margaret’s gaining strength, and her pleasure in going back to the new book she’s writing,—and how well she looks—all augur so well for the good—It was warming to think that the bad painful days are getting left further and further behind with every good new day. Thank you and Margaret for having me out those lovely times for lunch, with the Pacific to go with it.

  I hope you’re easing into your own new book, one that will give you all kinds of good challenges and dares. I suppose you may have seen the note on “The Blue Hammer” in the latest Times list, but here it is.

  I’m so glad you thought as you did about my Chekhov piece—You were more than generous but I was glad, for it was generosity on the lines I cared most to make my response to him felt. I know there could of course be nothing new I could say about the stories, it was a matter of trying to set down a response as exactly as I could. I did mean for you to keep the copy (my name & address were on the envelope because I was scared I’d leave it somewhere travelling so far) but you can have the printed one. This was the last piece to finish to go in my new book, the non-fiction collection. Ken, I wonder if I may dedicate the book to you? It would please me so deeply. It hasn’t any title yet, but it’s a collection—selection of all my pieces on writing and writers, & reviews (“The Underground Man” is here of course), plus a few personal pieces. I guess it goes back to 1947, it’s really everything I’ve ever done in non-fiction that I’ve finally decided was worth keeping—Of course I wish it could be better, but I worked hard—these pieces were often harder for me than stories to write. All because I was asked to. (I never was asked to write stories!) And I may never have another book of stories, though I hope to. I’ll send you a list of the pieces in it. I hope you’ll let me give you my book as you gave me yours. (It would be another circle.)

  Santa Fe was fine—Only Mary Lou, splendid and vivacious and full of people & plans as ever, isn’t really very well. She’d had two heart attacks. They happened earlier in May while I thought she was travelling in Europe—She hadn’t gone after all, owing to this—though she didn’t get sent to the hospital, just cautioned to stay home—She hadn’t told me, she said, for fear I wouldn’t come. I wouldn’t have. But she is taking care, as well as a person of her nature can—she was given a swimming tank by her friends there—one of those things on top of the ground—& swims around a little every day when the water’s warmed up a little—you know Santa Fe’s 9000 feet up in the mountains! She has so many friends looking after her, and her family—especially the son who ran away and found himself again, now living in Atlanta—are all coming out frequently. She enjoys life just as ever—She’s 75—She asked about you of course. I left her your Laidlaw which I’d liked so much, & she seized it.9 Another friend of mine now living in Santa Fe, who had just come back from France where she & her husband had been over selling their house, said she’d been reading Margaret’s books in French to her pleasure. Her name is Mary Mian, a good writer too.

  One day on a picnic away up high in a State Park we saw 2 pairs of eagles! I was told they were very likely golden eagles. I was delighted to believe it. They were entirely majestic.

  I must get to work—It was lovely being back there—seeing you, and seeing your good friends that I like to think of being there near. And seeing the mountains & the sea that are always near too—

  Love,

  Eudora

  Of course you were right about the smoking mountain I saw from the westbound plane. It was the Los Alamos fire—In Santa Fe the smoke was still discernable, and they said the horses had been very much disturbed—10

  Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, July 10, 1977

  Dear Eudora:

  The gift you propose to offer me is the kind of thing that might happen once in a lifetime if a man is lucky—like being knighted by a queen, not with a sword though, with a human hand—and cause him, every time he thinks of it, to laugh with pleasure. Love and friendship are surely the best things in life and may, it seems to me now, persist beyond life, as we want them to, like the light from a star so immeasurably distant that it can’t be dated and questions of past and future are irrelevant. The source of the starlight might as well be thought to be inside us, and we take credit for the forces that sustain us, as being loved makes us feel loveable. If I may compound my image, staying within the elastic bounds of astronomy, or astrology, it’s as if you had stopped time and handed me a glass which admits the future to our present vision, and the past too, joining present and future times, as if we had lived beyond life, as indeed we are going to do now to some extent, together. You make me very happy. You often have. And I await your book with gratitude and anticipation. I expect I’ll never have awaited a book so intensely as I will this one.

  It’s very good to have news of Mary Lou. The news is not all good but the message is. I love to think of her swimming around in her high swimming pool, and also to learn that her errant son comes to visit her as he
should (just as perhaps he should first have gone away.) And I’m glad you gave her Laidlaw, her recompense for including The Black Monk in her psychological anthology, and widening my knowledge of Chekhov. There is nobody like him, is there, or ever will be. But sometimes you come close. I wish you further stories, dear Eudora, nor need you sit pinned down by the excellence of what you have already done. You can write as you live out of a persistent joy which everyone recognizes in you. We can learn that from Chekhov, too, as you know better than I do.

  Thank you so much for coming here this summer. Here or elsewhere we’ll meet again before too long. Meanwhile, dear, take care, and don’t be concerned for me. I’ve never despaired, least of all in these late good years.

  Love,

  K

  Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, July 17, 1977

  Dear Ken,

  Thank you for your letter—so full of the generosity and tenderness of your understanding—I’m so glad you feel happy about this book. And now so do I—After the long task of searching out all the pieces for it and choosing & putting them together, now the whole is something, something more, because your letter is like a blessing to it. It is a blessing to it. Your letter is so like you, because you understand dedications—you who are such a giver—and you know the boundlessness of wishes. I wish this book, which is really modest and needs to be, were at the same time some way able to be all you would like it to be—every bit of it—without a shadow. Dear Ken, I’m sending you the list of the pieces in it, so you will know what my effort came to. And of course the contents themselves as soon as they are pages & Random sends them. The name of the book is to be “The Eye of the Story”—That’s the title of the essay on Katherine Anne Porter—do you think much of it as a title?11 I guess there’s a page or two of introduction still to write.

  I hope everything is moving along there as it should—in work, and in days, in all as it comes. It’s nice to know Jim is there, too, & enjoying his Life Guard classes—I’m thinking right along that yes, things will and must go well—

  With love,

  Eudora

  Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, July 26, 1977

  Dear Eudora:

  It feels like the hottest day of the year, though not by Mississippi standards. Still it feels as if it had rained, I don’t know where—in Jackson maybe—but there is a sound of water in the courses. I think its central spring is the table of contents you sent me, which measured out explicitly, though that was not your intention, the dimensions of your gift, to me and everyone. You have given me a gentle powerful thrust, the more powerful by being undeserved. Perhaps good fortune always is. You should know, you’ve given it to so many people.

  “The Eye of the Story” is a perfect title: it says so much in a few words about the kind of fiction you are concerned with, both its humanity and its art, its deadly reach and its gentle vulnerability, the telescope and the microscope in one. How extraordinary that you should make me the gift of such a book. I can’t get over it, I never will.

  I hadn’t read “The Duel” after all—I must have got it confused with another story—but I have now and am so glad you mentioned it. I doubt I’ve ever gone through in such short compass such a powerfully realized and controlled imaginative experience. Nor is it the kind of excellence that silences another writer even when it puts him in the shade. It’s a powerful giving, like your own steady giving in both life and art.

  All well here. Margaret gets stronger and Jimmy more grown-up every day. There are stirrings in me, too, dear Eudora, perhaps climacterial in both its senses.

  Love,

  Ken

  P.S.—I enclose a letter which surprised me from a man I don’t know but perhaps will. K.

  Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, [July 28, 1977]

  Dear Ken,

  Are you all right—all of you and the house? And Jim safely with you? I hate it for you so—I know Hope Ranch is at the other end of the city—isn’t it? and the map reassures me of that much—But those lovely mountains—Sycamore Canyon—I feel that they all belong to you too—

  At 7 AM I almost didn’t turn on the TV for the Today Show news as usual because I had a book review deadline to meet, and then I had to (“Turn that on”) and saw Montecito burning at 4 AM, what you must have been seeing, if, I was sorry to think, your household had been waked up—

  Take care—I’ve thought about it all day of course—I pray they can contain it soon—I would like to telephone you but I feel it might disturb you—you’d be trying to get some rest if you had both been up all night.

  Now they say the fire is under control—This is next morning. I’m glad of this much. I so hope everything is safe there with you.

  I grieve for what happened to places dear to you but I hope you are all right.

  Love,

  Eudora

  Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, Saturday [August 6, 1977]

  Dear Ken,

  I was so glad to hear you say you were all right there and your house not endangered. Thank you for calling me—it was very thoughtful of you, because even if I thought you must have been safe in Hope Ranch, how can anybody at a distance really be sure about a fire? It must have been an emotional experience to see the other house gone, and no sign of those huge oaks, the pepper tree, and the lovely unspoiled slope down to the creek where you’ve kept your lot. It’s so hard to imagine something being gone—it would seem less difficult to imagine it back. Is it a true fact that fire in the end does promote nature to restore itself?12

  I should have asked you, but didn’t think in time when we were talking, if the houses of your friends in Santa Barbara were all right—I’d been thinking of course of the Freemans and the Eastons and the young Sippers—Ralph’s bookstore—The downtown was not touched, was it? And the Botanical Gardens—?

  I’m happy to know you’re writing something new. All my best wishes to it & what it will be.

  The last letter you wrote me I think must’ve been the night just before the fire—you said how hot it was. It was a beautiful letter, and I would have written to thank you before now, but I have been shocked and saddened by the death of an old friend here. One of that inner circle of closest friends. You never met him—Frank Lyell—he taught English at the University of Texas and was here only for Christmas and summer vacations. We went to Columbia Graduate School in the same year which was 1930–31. I typed his thesis for him. (On John Galt—do you know that Scottish writer?)13 Our little group that’s still friends here went through the Depression together here—you know that’s binding—I guess I was his closest friend here. He came home from a European trip and something got the matter with his heart on the flight home. But he made it home.

  I know I’m at an age when the loss of friends is not considered surprising, and I have lost my three dearest in Jackson (I was counting Diarmuid, though he wasn’t exactly of Jackson.) But I am not going to learn to accept it for being not surprising, I’m going to hate it & protest it straight ahead—I’m indignant for their sakes—up to my last breath—I testify to their absence—

  I’ve been warmed to have your recent letters by me—I’m so glad you’re well and safe and working. And I’m happy that you like the title of the book—

  What you said about Chekhov never silencing another writer by his own works being so far beyond in excellence I believe too, and I also believe Chekhov would have never dreamed of being less than an encourager, do you? Isn’t “The Duel” a marvelous story—I had a feeling you’d think that—The storm scene!

  Here it’s hot with thundershowers every afternoon. I wish I could send you the rain you need. Love—Eudora

  Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, August 9, 1977

  Dear Eudora:

  I think the phrase “the sympathetic imagination” must have been invented in expectation of you. You feel for others better than we can feel for ourselves. But I’m happy to be able to report that the general mood of this city is better than you could expect, considering the damag
e that was meted out. The saving grace of the situation is that there were no deaths and, I believe, no terribly serious injuries.

  Here are the latest figures: 280 dwellings involved in the fire—216 levelled and 64 damaged. 141 of those completely destroyed were in the city limits. 77 percent. of all the houses touched by the fire burned to the ground. The overall cost, including the cost of firefighting, was about 30 million.

  You’ll be glad to know that Ralph Sipper’s house was not damaged, though it was closely threatened by the fire. He sent his family away and stayed behind with his house, watering down the roof etc. That physical experience, with the warm, indeed hot, feelings of his neighbors, has changed his life to a visible extent. I suggested when he was here the other night that he was no longer a transplanted New Yorker and he agreed. His eyes have lost their defensive look—strange outcome for a fire to have. But I suppose it’s such events that mold a community into a historic place, anyway home.

  The others you ask about, the Freemans and the Eastons, were not troubled by the fire though it came close to Bob’s place, just over the hill from it. His house was much more closely threatened by the last big blaze. But Bob and Jane won’t move.

  I’m sorry to hear of the death of your old friend Frank Lyell whose thesis you typed. John Galt is not unknown to me, though I haven’t read much of him. But would you believe that my S.B. colleague Bill Gault is a member of the same family? And the city of Galt, near Kitchener in Ontario, is named after John who was a colonizer as well as a moralist. According to Bill, there were other writers in the family, too.

  I share your feelings for both vertical and horizontal men. The loved dead soar forever like birds or the shadows of birds in a world of memory which keeps them alive in thought, sometimes more clearly visible than when they were alive; and not really lost. We can spend afternoons in their presence.

  Which reminds me that tomorrow Margaret is going to take her first sailing lesson. You can judge of her morale by that. We are both working. Love, Ken

  Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, August 31, 1977