Your earlier letter I didn’t get till I returned from my trip, which came in Saturday’s accumulated mail, and your other one came just now while I was writing to you—I’m glad you did write again, not because I’d had any feeling of shock from what you’d written me (forget such a thing), but because I could see from the two letters together that things had grown better for you between times—I always want to know how you are—
Sure, I remember Zeke [Zack]—What an amazing amount of words. I do wish him well, but he already has the best thing going for him that he could possibly have, your word that it’s good. I hope the book will come to a good end and that he will come into some warmth & comfort—I visited some kids living on a houseboat in the Seine, 2 [actually 3] years ago in Paris, and how cold a life that is, nothing alight but candles, no matter how gay (& romantic it might have been once). He isn’t eligible for one of the NEA grants, do you think? He might write to Leonard Randolph, Chairman, Literature Division, Nat’l Endowment for the Arts, Washington, D.C. 20506, for an application. (I’m not on the application-reading end of it, myself, and it would do him harm to write direct to me, but maybe I could alert somebody who does judge the applications.) But personally I bet on the book.
Herb Harker’s statement he wrote to deliver to the Conference of Mormons in Salt Lake City I should like to see, especially in the light of what you say about it. I like him and like his work, indeed, but you know how much all you have done for him, and been, have caused the best things to happen for him—I’m glad—not only for him. More next time—-My love, hopes, & wishes for all to go well there—As ever—
Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, October 19, 1977
Dear Eudora:
Your beautiful cheering letter led me trippingly through a number of northern milieus, then out under a possible aurora borealis. I do remember those softly bright shimmering skies. Still I was and remain willing to trade them for a sea that I can swim in most of the winter. One of the keenest pleasures I know is walking into cold water (which suggests that my tastes were set in Canada after all). An almost equally keen pleasure, though, is climbing out of it.
I envy you those Constables and Cézannes but I envy you even more the people you have been seeing, Nona and Joan for instance. Speaking of Joan reminds me of Fred Zackel whom you may remember as the San Francisco taxi driver who year before last brought part of a detective novel to the Santa Barbara Writers’ Conference. The part of his novel has now grown into a whole. I think it’s good, though it’s rough even by my standards. It’s powerful and frightening, remarkable for such a young man. I’m trying to help Fred to get it placed and he may send it to Joan if Knopf don’t take it. May already have.
This seems to be my month for receiving manuscripts from far places. This second example came heralded in a peculiar way. About ten days ago I found myself, for some reason, getting interested in the Antipodes. By the end of a week my interest had narrowed down to Tasmania, so I looked it up on the map. The following morning I received a letter from Tasmania sent by a friend I hadn’t heard from since he set sail from Santa Barbara for New Zealand some years ago. His name is Norman Sanders, and of course he’s writing a novel and the dear man wants me to read it. Of course I will—he’s not only a friend but he writes well—but I did suggest that sending it to me is a rather roundabout approach. The fact is, though, that I like to see unpublished work and help it along when I can. Fred is the one who needs help, and deserves it, most. There is blood and sweat on his pages, and he is a born writer who will settle for nothing less. My main concern for people like Fred has to do with sheer survival.
Speaking of survivors, I am doing all right in spite of some mild depression. This treatment, an hour’s talking once a week, is conducted by Dick Lambert who has been a good friend for over twenty years, ever since our family first ran into trouble. Let me assure you that the trouble we have now is not deep and is being alleviated. I mention it mainly because you would in any case have noticed a change in my letter. Thank you for yours—Eudora’s Tour of the East. Much love, Ken
P.S.—I’ve asked Otto Penzler to send you a copy of Lew Archer, Private Investigator.18 Not that it amounts to much—all the stories are old—but I’d like you to have them.
K.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, November 1, 1977
Dear Eudora:
You know that feeling of impossibility changing into possibility, you know it so well it seems to dwell at the center of your books and stories. It’s the consciousness of life itself rising in the mind like the sun in the morning—the master passion that fathers all the others. Well, the depression that lay on my mind like a low cloud cover is lifting, and I can look over my shoulder and see most of the shapes of the remembered past. (About proper news, in the present, I’m still uncertain, but, when I think of it, I nearly always was.)
My friend and doctor Dick Lambert has got me writing about my thoughts and dreams, and that in time has awakened an autobiographical urge which may outlast this emergency. I’m wondering if it would be possible to do an autobiographical story embodying or at least using the themes of one’s fiction. It would be fun to try a story moving in and out of the mind, through fiction and dreams and back into solid reality; which is not solid, which is not reality. Reality is in the relationship between the tenses. You know so well what I mean, you are a master of those who find meaning everywhere, which is one among several reasons why I am so grateful for your letters.
Margaret is well. All is well. I really welcome change, though I don’t accomplish it easily. My love, as always, Ken
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, [November 8, 1977]
Dear Ken,
I came home from a trip and found a letter from you—I was so glad to hear. I’d been hoping you would say that that low cloud of the depression that had lain on your mind was lifting more & more, and this was good to know. Your doctor’s understanding and your own understanding must work together productively and well—that’s a comfort and a good sign, isn’t it? And as you write about your thoughts and dreams, who knows what might come out of it in the way of a story or novel, as you were wondering. It’s where all our stories and novels come from—that relationship between what is our eyes’ evidence and what is our mind’s image—that reality you spoke of as the relationship between the tenses—My feeling is that the image in the mind which experience produces for us could be also in the form of a plot, a novel’s plot—it (whether abstract or literal image) couldn’t be any more complicated than the experience itself, heaven knows—I may not be writing this clearly enough. All I was trying to say was how much I agree with you that it would be fun to try a story moving in & out of the mind, through fiction and dreams and back to—what they arose from—The pattern wouldn’t be exactly a new one for your special gifts of approach or for all your instincts and well proven strengths and your passion for getting at the spring, the truth—and it would at the same time tax them well and use them, maybe in ways you never imagined—not so far. The story of a search that is itself a search. Forgive me if I put it all badly—I’m almost too tired to make sense, maybe—just home from Vanderbilt & U. of Alabama in Huntsville—flew home through amazing wild towering clouds & sunset lights, like illustrations for “The Ancient Mariner” by A. Dore. It wasn’t a bad flight though. Tonight Reynolds is flying here & we are driving up to Oxford, Miss., to some kind of symposium—I’ll report on the event when we get back.19
In the respect of image & work, or reality and fiction, and all, I wonder if you’d find anything of the same sort in a small exhibition of my stuff a museum thought up here & put on, to which I’ll send you the catalogue—It’s not something I myself would have ever thought of—had not really known of such matching elements in pictures I snapped & in stories I wrote—They both came to or from me, and it seems they went back & forth between each other, too. I was about to send you the catalogue anyway—but now with your remarks also in mind.20
Thank you for writing. My love, as ever, and I know Reynolds would add his if he were here yet—which reminds me to get back to the kitchen!
Take good care—
Yours,
Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, November 12, 1977
Dear Eudora:
I had word of you from New York—Joan Kahn reported that you were “flourishing”—and now I’m glad to hear from you that you are safely home, however briefly. It was good of you to write me in your short time then, and I am grateful for your thoughts, the more so that they seem to chime with mine. I mean our joint idea that I might use my kind of structure to mix approaches to reality—approaches ranging from external through psychological realism into the more dreaming part of our experience, and out again. Certainly the best thing for a writer to do with a trouble of any kind is to find a personal narrative or artistic use for it. I’d been making a few more notes along these lines, and your letter parallels and strengthens them. I won’t attempt to write about them now; the point is that a door has opened, or opened wider. The meaningful juxtaposition of different orders of reality is one of the things you’ve been doing all your life, so I hardly need to explain it to you! I’m eager to see the account of your museum exhibitions in the light of what you’ve written.
(Which reminds me that I haven’t sent you my book of stories yet. I have no great opinion of it, and neither will you have, but I hope it will amuse you. Otto Penzler gave it a handsome binding, I think, and that is about the best I can say for it. Glad you liked the introduction, though.)
I think we all aim at telling the truth about our own lives, or at least our own experiences; aiming at leaving a kind of thumb print-mark on the material. But what about a mind-print?—Speaking of my mind, as I almost too often do these days, I can report that it continues to improve and I’m back in the normal range, I should think. My spirits are better, too, though they never sank out of sight. I’m fortunate in having Dick Lambert to reach out to when I needed him, and in the fact that psychiatry has improved remarkably since I saw Dick last, more than twenty years ago, and so has he. I look forward to our sessions, and always learn something relevant to my need, so that my life is improving. What I have learned—really re-learned—is that if we fail to change voluntarily we’ll change involuntarily.
But enough of that. It’s just a step or two on the way to the book I hope to write, which will come close to the bone. It would be interesting to write an autobiography as a commentary on the fiction, at least going into the fiction at crucial points; and to write of it as a commentary on the life. A biography illustrated with the pictures of imaginary people.—At any rate it’s fun to translate a problem into a game, and learn its rules if I can.
All my love, as ever,
Ken
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, Thanksgiving Day [November 24, 1977]
Dear Ken,
It was good to have your letter—I’m so glad you let me know that things are growing brighter and that a door has opened, or opened wider. I think along with you and out of my own life that the best thing for a writer to do with a trouble is to translate it into his work, find and make a use for it through the expression of that work. You have never been in better command of your gift—This would be a challenge you have never set it, before—Whatever happens, you will have truly gained, will have found what the work itself has brought you. I myself hope and believe that when you do make the narrative and arrive at the structure, the whole that you surmise, it will not only be a fine and original thing in itself but will act as a blessing to you—
This is a warm, cloudy day—still many leaves on the trees, still brighter after a rain—I hear the white-throated sparrow singing—you have him too. I go out to Mittie’s, my sister-in-law’s, for Thanksgiving dinner with the young—I hope your day is a good one—
Thank you for the book of early Archer stories and for what you wrote in it—I am so glad to have it. I’ve read them anew, remembering some of them well from Ellery Queen—and of course what interested me most were the flashes of what was to come later, like distant lightning. “Past his narrow cormorant skull I could see the sky and the sea, wide and candid, flecked with the white purity of sails. I spent too much of my time trying to question liars in rented rooms.” What a good looking book they made—And I have a second copy, for the editor Mr. Penzler sent me one too. Is there anybody you would specially like me to give it to? The Introduction is the good, brilliant, best thing about it. I’m glad you wrote it and framed the stories in it.
I am resolving that when my commitments for lectures & campus visits are over (sometime in spring) I’ll never do any more. It is interesting work, and I like young people and I like travelling, but this has taken quite a lot out of me—and while I’ve succeeded in earning some money to buy more time to write in, if I’m too tired to be any good, it was the wrong way to do it—In December I have my last go this year, up to our friend Joe Blotner at your old university at Ann Arbor—I wonder if you would tell Herb Harker for me that I much appreciate his sending me his paper that he read at Salt Lake City—isn’t it a powerful and moving piece of work? I do mean to write and thank him properly, and for his book as well, which he sent me & which I warmly (he knows it) admire—I am hopelessly behind in the letters I want to write—And to Ralph Sipper—I’m ashamed. It’s not that I have forgotten them. I’m going to dinner now—I was thankful for your letter—My love to you and good hopes, dear Ken—
Eudora
Ken was concerned enough about Eudora’s financial needs, and the way she’d found to alleviate them, to write his friend Ping Ferry, who often raised funds for worthy causes, and ask if something might be done to assist Welty, “who at seventy or so is having a rather tight time making a living. For the past several months she’s been going from campus to campus, teaching and lecturing and reading, all of which she does superbly well.
“She doesn’t complain or if she does, her only real complaint is the interference with the work she finds she should be doing.
“It occurs to me that you [. . .] may be willing and able to help her [. . .] to get some clear uninterrupted writing time. [. . .] I think if Eudora could stay at home in her house in Jackson through next year we might all be further enriched.”
After hearing again from Eudora, Ken told Ferry, “she has recovered from the sadness and is getting over the weariness, indeed she sounds downright happy. [. . .] I over-react sometimes [. . .].”22 But he wanted to make sure he himself was not adding to Welty’s emotional burdens by sharing with her his own travails.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, November 28, 1977
Dear Eudora:
I was glad to hear from you as of Thanksgiving Day, with the wonderfully kind concern for the problems I’ve been having. Dear Eudora, cross me off your Worry List, I’m coming back to life, memory and all, and really beginning to enjoy life again. And I intend and expect to make something out of this experience, this reversal of contact with the inner self. Which strangely, not so strangely, is preserved by contact with other people.—I think you and I suffer from opposite excesses, one of us from a world that is too much with her, and the other of us (me) from not enough. Your excess is better than mine, of course, as speech is better than silence, but I dearly hope that you will be able to get back to your own most private work next year, and stay with it as you wish to, and deserve. I have, by the way, passed on your greetings to Herb and also Ralph Sipper, who was most happy to hear from you and perfectly understood that your schedule has been pressing.
I was struck by your statement that these last weeks have “taken quite a lot out of you”; it certa
inly does suggest that you should spend some time pleasing yourself alone. That is what I wish for you. And I think your concern for me has been a drain on you. I’m sorry—I wish to be a source of strength to you. Certainly you can stop being concerned about me. Don’t stop thinking about me, though, I live in the consciousness of your thought as all your blessed friends do. But my spirit is breathing again under its own power, and the life-support facilities can be removed. Partly on account of you, I never saw any reason to be afraid and was not. I only hope I didn’t use too much of your strength.
Ever, with love and gratitude,
Ken
“Ever, with love and gratitude,” Ken’s late 1977 expression of love for Eudora, was but one of many in 1977. Threatened by the loss of his memory, he took comfort in the constancy of Eudora’s commitment to him and of his own for her. He had begun the year by telling her, “I can’t tell you what a joy it was to feel that I live in your world, as you live constantly in mine.” In July, after Eudora had asked to dedicate a book to him, he had told her that their connection was as powerful “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 now he finished the year by saying, “I live in the consciousness of your thought.” Eudora responded in kind.
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, [December 7, 1977]
Dear Ken,
I was so glad to get your letter and know both from what you said and how it sounded that you are feeling so much better—Your spirits sounded good again—From now on I hope spirits, work, play, everything will keep right on lifting—the book you think of will bring a good thing out of it—I wish it all you hope it will be—
I do want to tell you, you mustn’t think the tiredness I was feeling (better now) has anything to do with my concern for you—Thinking of you adds to my capabilities instead of taking them away—Of course I ached to help somehow—But what I believe is that as we are needed to understand more we do understand more, in our friends, or we try and hope and continue.
Meanwhile There Are Letters Page 40