Meanwhile There Are Letters

by Suzanne Marrs

  Dear Eudora:

  That was a powerful statement you wrote about the Sacco-Vanzetti case and your dear friend’s part in it.14 Your paragraph excoriating bias freezes the attention and burns the conscience; it stands up off the page like something in the Inferno, and in its way says everything that needs to be said. Only the pure in heart can write like that, but you have to be a darn good writer too!

  Speaking of writers, we’re both at work, me slowly, Margaret swiftly, but she took five years off! It’s six months since her operation now, and her X-ray last week showed no lesions in the lungs at all. We’re deeply relieved and much encouraged. Our summer has been enlivened by grandson Jim who’s been developing into a fair sailor and just this week came into possession of his own boat, a light, fast fiberglass sailboat called the Laser. One more week and then we lose him back to school, but that’s as it should be.

  Whether you are writing like Dante or not, I often think of you in association with places we passed through or by together. I hope you are well and happy. Love, Ken

  P.S.—This is hush-hush, but a new baby condor was sighted this week on the far side of the mountains. K.

  Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, [September 1977]

  Dear Ken,

  I’m so glad to know the reassuring news from Margaret’s check-up. That’s wonderful—and it’s bound to do a lot for her morale, and give a lift to everything. Life—and the two books underway—and all. The good report’s a nice present for Jim too, as he leaves to go back to school. As his new sailboat is too. What a fair sight it must be to see him go by with his sails filled.

  Thank you for your generous words for what I wrote on KAP. (That’s the review I was doing on the day of the Santa Barbara fire.) The book she’d brought out at 87 had moved me not only for itself, for herself, but for the reason that its ever being a book had hung in the balance—KAP has had several strokes, and she feels different ways about people at different times—you know. She’d had a secretary, a very intelligent and kind—devoted—young man named Bill Wilkins (I don’t know him, but he’s been kind enough to let me have word now and then) and as her right arm is paralyzed & she can’t write for herself, he has managed to physically take and make the book out of KAP’s old notes and old versions, etc., showing her the results & talking it over as they went—She was happy to have this done, and put his name on the dedication page, and then, the way these things are, she turned against him. And then was so ill that he wrote me she might not be aware when the book came out. But she was! You can imagine my feelings when I received a letter from her. She was aware—“This was a day for me.” She was pleased by my piece which she said “simply breaks my heart with love and remembrances.” She said “I have been sick a long time in a bad place.” It nearly broke my heart too. It was written on an unused Christmas card that I could imagine coming out of a box of stuff she kept by her in bed—and dictated of course, but I recognized the hand of this same Bill Wilkins. So she has taken him back too—Since you felt for what the review said of her, I wanted to tell you what life has been doing to her but how she keeps coming back and coming back. She is valiant.

  And I felt another valiant coming back in your letter—the new baby condor. Now after the fire from over the mountain.

  I’ve been a long time writing—it’s just work mostly, and an Arts Council meeting in Washington—I never catch up, and find myself too tired to make sense just when I’ve looked forward to it. (To making sense, yes—to writing a line at the end of a day.) You do know you are not out of my mind. I wanted to write your friends in Santa Barbara who were so nice to me, you will be ashamed for me, I’m so ashamed for myself, I have yet to thank them—Ralph and Carol, not only to thank them but to express my relief on your news that their house didn’t burn—And I could imagine what saving it meant, from your having done the same thing that other time—that other house. Ralph let me have the rare copy of Henry Green’s “Blindness” at a low cost, before I left town—I’m so elated to have it, to have read it, a remarkable book—you know H. G. wrote it while he was still at Eton!—If you find you have the time & the wish to read it, I’ll let it go back to Santa Barbara.

  Reynolds has been here—he acted as a judge with me & 1 other of an ETV contest—You know what good company he is—We spoke of you a good deal. Reynolds eats a lot! But this time I said aha, because he’s always accused me of feeding him nothing but ham, and this time I fed him a salmon mousse. (Served 8. Says Reynolds, “That means me and one other.”)

  This reminds me of that letter you let me see that Mr. Robert Densmore wrote you which I’ll enclose. I can understand exactly his wanting to give you his recipe for tamale pie, seeing it as a gift of thanks—(though I can’t as easily imagine you as cooking it up. Doesn’t it take a full day?) But what a genuine, grateful letter it is—a recipe is a nice language. Maybe you have since seen him and talked.

  It’s been hot and stormy—we always get funnels overhead after hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, and trees blew down, etc., nobody was injured. I had a book review to fail to arrive (in NY) because of the weather and they had me give it to them over the phone—which was also being affected by the weather—I think it took an hour and a half! I had to spell nearly everything—It was poor E. B. White being treated that way. (His essays.) That’s a good sign to me to stop reviewing for a while now. It’s hard for me even in nice weather—E. B. White is lovely though.15

  I’ve been reading “Brideshead Revisited,” which I’d never read—wonderful, the part on shipboard during the long storm at sea which isolated the lovers, do you remember it? And I plunge sometimes into Borges—the stories that I have the feeling you remember—I’ll write better next time. I’m so glad, dear Ken, your news is good—It’s the greatest cheer—

  Love,

  Eudora

  Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, September 13, 1977

  Dear Eudora:

  I was so glad to hear from you today. When I haven’t for a certain stretch of time I begin to feel a tug on my nerves, of course for no good reason, and to wonder if all is well. But of course all is well, you’re simply navigating the depths and shoals and channels of your life. You’re in such profound and constant touch with your life’s meaning (I don’t mean to make this your responsibility, but you do without having to intend to) holding the whole thing together with your mind and hands. And life keeps responding to your care for it. You bring good luck to your friends. I can imagine the pleasure you took in being able to respond to Miss Porter again and at such a depth in her life, and in such a central way, speaking at the same time for the past and to the future, above all simply to her, on behalf of all of us. She’s such a fine stylist that she became a novelist in spite of herself, or am I wrong?

  In no dutiful spirit but simply because I wanted to see them again, I’ve been rereading some of your early stories. Perhaps you have been educating me, I don’t mean by intention but by your steady presence in my mind, because I read them so much better than I used to. They’re willing to tell me more, and as they grow older the stories lend me their wisdom. “The Hitch-Hikers,” for example, which reached out of its own time into the here and now, and then beyond.

  We’ve had a most pleasant summer watching Jim and his friends taking a long step towards growing up, and perhaps doing some growing up ourselves. It was the kind of summer that makes you think there can never be another summer like it. But there was. A few years ago when I was visiting Kitchener, Ontario, a boyhood friend of mine showed me a camp picture of a boy who resembled Jim. Then I realized that it was a picture of me. Jim is far ahead of that me in many ways, both physical and moral. He treats the world kindly, and it responds. I don’t know who he’ll become but then it doesn’t matter—he’ll become what he wishes, and is well on his way.

  Margaret continues to grow stronger and cheerfuller. I’m in good shape as usual. A small group of us are putting together an environmental program based on the willing labors of about twenty young uni
versity people, scientists and lawyers, here in Santa Barbara. So we fight fire with fire.

  In spite of what I said at the beginning, please don’t feel obliged to answer this or any particular letter. I know how much writing of all sorts you must do, and you are a woman who gives until she drops. Remember I can always read your stories.

  And do, with love,

  Ken

  Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, September 16, [1977]

  Dear Ken,

  I feel like thanking you for another of your lovely rides—It was a dream, and when I woke up I felt refreshed and restored just the way it was there—I’d been tired out, but now it still seems that something so wide-ranging and beautiful and free was just a moment ago to be seen on all sides—

  There’s been a change in the air here—This is first thing in the morning, and it’s cooler, with a dew, like fall—The sun has hit the sweet-olive—so I can smell that fall scent—The birds are singing fall songs again, the way they start over again at summer’s end—but there’ve been migratory birds, warblers, flitting through the oak tree’s leaves for some weeks now—I hope Santa Barbara’s baby condor is making himself visible now & then straight along and that he thrives up there—

  This isn’t a real letter, just to tell you about the good dream—it still seems not very far away.

  With love,

  Eudora

  Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, September 19, [1977]

  Dear Ken,

  Your letter came right after I’d mailed that little note to you—I’m sorry to have caused you any uneasiness—If you’d missed hearing, I’d equally missed writing. But you know you are in my thoughts, closer than what’s going on here to keep me ever from writing. There have been a lot of things like that lately—my own fault, of course. If I were in trouble of some kind, I would tell you. So don’t be uneasy—

  You are altogether understanding of my need to write as I did about Katherine Anne, and I’m glad you felt I was speaking for all of us. Someone should have (spoken for us all) indeed, and I more than most should have been the one to do my best—She did much for me, when I was beginning, and often. She wrote me a letter when my early stories appeared and said she liked them—This stunned me—When the voice from the outside world is Katherine Anne Porter’s, it’s more than encouragement, it’s a sort of charge to do right—do right by our craft—She became a personal friend, of course, after that, and was always one to me. She was tempestuous in her relationships a lot of the time, and broke with many who loved her or whom she’d loved, and was a difficult person, enchanting and demanding and vain as a child, but absolutely, unyieldingly pure as an artist, never sparing herself. With depths of feeling she didn’t as an artist hesitate to plumb—I mean depths as dark as night. She took them on. I don’t know if you’re right or not in saying she became a novelist in spite of herself. That is, I was not able to like her novel. I thought she was sort of betrayed by her own creation—but I know I am wholly partial to her short stories. “Noon Wine” is her real novel, to me. Do you find that as powerful, & chilling, as I do? Should I go back and read “Ship of Fools”? I thought a monster had hold of her sometimes in that. Still, she did it, she finished it. About 30 years it was weighing her down—

  It’s good to learn of the environmentalist program you’ve started putting together—I know you’ve always worked toward such ends, you and Margaret. This time, with those young scientists & lawyers stirred up too, & the fire still so present in the Santa Barbara mind, the impetus is powerful enough for great results, I hope.

  And the books go well at home, I hope. It’s so good too that the summer has come out rewardingly all around. It needed to—

  Your saying you were reading some of my early stories again made me go back and read them too. (Except the few I read aloud to earn my living, I never do.) I think you are meeting me in them pretty much as I was, as a young girl—though I’d had little idea they were so revealing. There are many flaws. The feelings do come through, though, in “The Hitch-Hikers”—don’t they, & others? The little one called “The Winds” is a fairly accurate portrait of my father, mother, brother Edward, & me in our house in Jackson where I was born—and of a summer in our childhood and a tornado, and the ardency (is this a word?) of beginning to be alive. Anyway, I’m so glad they are able to speak to you from over the years—and they should, really, because when we know & care for people it is their whole lives that are in the present of knowing. If only it (this unity) could be told in stories—Maybe this is what is.

  Take care—Thank you for your letter, bringing me understanding and happiness as your letters always do. I hope everything goes well in every way with all of you. This is every day.

  Love,

  Eudora

  Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, October 5, 1977

  Dear Eudora:

  I am slow in responding to your wonderful letters. There has been a small but significant change in my life. When our daughter Linda and indeed our whole family were in trouble I regularly saw a Santa Barbara psychiatrist named Richard Lambert. Dick had already been a friend, and has never ceased to be. A few weeks ago I started seeing him regularly again, with the idea of clearing my poor memory, and while my memory hasn’t improved much yet—I don’t expect sudden miracles—my spirits have. It seems that I have been isolating myself in a quiet unconscious way, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me. But just to name the problem is a step towards solving it, and you mustn’t and needn’t worry on my account.

  Right now, at noon on a warm overcast day in an empty house, I’m waiting for Herb Harker to come by with an important manuscript for me to read. It’s a statement of hope and intent by a Mormon writer (Herb) which he’s going to deliver at a conference in Salt Lake City. I think it will make him a leader in the church’s rather narrow intellectual branch, if he isn’t already. You can share my pride in Herb’s growth, which you had an important part in developing, though perhaps neither you nor I had intended to influence the intellectual life of the Mormon Church!

  All is well here. Jim is keen about high school, including Latin, which pleases my classical wife, also me. Love, Ken

  P.S.—Herb read his speech, and I think it’s eloquent. I hope he’ll send it to you. Even of Mormonism he makes poetic sense.

  K.

  Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, October 12, 1977

  Dear Eudora:

  It has rather slowly occurred to me that my note of the other day might have given you a shock, which wasn’t my intention. I wanted you to know that the memory problems of which I’d spoken to you were being worked on, and by a doctor who is at the same time a dear old friend. Dick Lambert was Linda’s doctor when she first had trouble, and he was kind and compassionate then and remains so. Also bright. We’ve had several sessions now, relating my loss of memory to other circumstances of my life into which I won’t go. Some day we may wish to talk about it, or forget it, as we like. But all is basically well, and will improve, already has.

  Remember “Zack,” Fred Zackel, the San Francisco taxi driver who blossomed into a writer at the last-but-one Santa Barbara Writers’ Conference? Zack has written a hundred-thousand-word mystery novel and sent it on to me. I think it’s good, though it needs some cutting and some further attention to style. One of the most impressive hardboiled novels I’ve seen in a decade. I hope I’m right. Fred is broke and living on a houseboat without electricity. The book is at Knopf now. I hope it has a double happy ending.16 Why am I telling you? Because your wish may be more effective than mine.

  Love, Ken

  The “other circumstances of my life,” which had come to the fore in Ken’s sessions with Dick Lambert, and through the dream-notebook the analyst prompted him to keep, included Ken’s oft-fraught relationship with Maggie. It seemed more and more to him that his wife’s idea of a successful marriage was for her to control his actions. He recorded a horrific dream in which he was frightened of Margaret, and in which she threw insects at hi
s eyes.17

  Eudora Welty, Bryn Mawr, PA, to Kenneth Millar, October 14, 1977

  Dear Ken,

  I’m leaving here today after a short trip up to Yale (work) and NYC (work & play) and here (play). It was possible while in New Haven to see the Paul Mellon Collection of English Art of the 18th Century—in spite of a strike which had closed the museum—and all those Constables! In somebody’s office (besides all the ones in the show) a whole wall above the desk was hung with small framed cloud studies in watercolor. In NY I had an hour (not enough) at the big crowded Cezanne show at the Museum of Mod. Art. Nona and Joan Kahn each send you warm greetings—I spent a day & night at Rosie Russell’s in the country and she too spoke so happily of their having met you in Jackson. She is well & busy & cheerful.

  The leaves turned, it seemed, overnight while I was in Conn. and now it’s got sharply cold—Beautiful old beeches & maples & sycamores on this campus all burning color. Last night it was so cold & still & clear, the sky had a pink flush all over the North, and a friend with me said it looked very promising for an Aurora Borealis. Have you often seen this, in your Northern years? I never have, and it didn’t happen last night to my knowledge, though I kept getting up to look from the windows, in case.

  I hope all’s going fine with you and Margaret and the two books underway—with everything. How is the Environmental Committee getting along with the plans you’ve been working on?

  Love to you,

  Eudora

  Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, Monday [October 17, 1977]

  Dear Ken,

  I’m so glad your spirits are lifted, and by now I hope are lifted much—Your understanding doctor who is the friend of years—and your own wisdom—give you something good to trust—I am sorry you have been troubled this way. By now I’ve known you, and read you, long enough to know what a really extraordinary memory is there (and to know how important it is)—This makes me trust it (I mean all the more) to come back, or be summoned back, in its power and fullness of strength—when I was last there, I could tell, I thought, how much better it was than the summer before—So I hope things will be easier and better all along now—