We’re both working, M. at her nearly finished comic mystery novel, and I at the more or less final version of the screenplay. Please don’t look for anything remarkable about the latter. This is my first screenplay, and I took on a complete script from another writer—a script which I’ve been methodically tearing apart. I find I’m rather enjoying the work of demolition, but I don’t intend to stay with it beyond this single piece. It’s comparatively light work and should make a fair transition back to the books I have waiting for me. My mental energy seems to be improving day by day, and I’m enjoying every day.
But I am disappointed not to be able to come and see you this spring, and to miss Reynolds as well. We had a great rain over the past several weeks—as much as an average year’s rainfall—and the brown hills have turned green, and once again our water supply problem has been solved at the last minute. We have had huge tides, too, so rough that I haven’t been in the ocean for over a week, and our beaches are denuded and stony. But the sand will sift back and the water will calm down a bit and we’ll have a green soft spring.
I feel as you do that you and I are close, and count it one of the great blessings of my life. If our understanding flickered for a moment that’s only in the nature of human affairs, and no loss. You know what pleasure and pride your friendship brings me, and what understanding, and what absolute pure thought in which I dwell content.
All my love, Ken
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, February 12, 1978
Dear Ken,
Thank you for two letters—one with the warming news of the doctor’s good report on Margaret—I’m so glad. And a lift to have it come just as she’s ready to wind up her new book, too. I’m glad for you as well. With the days getting longer and spring getting surer, good signs and good hopes.
The news about Don saddens me, and for you and everybody that knew him. I sent Lydia a little line, hoping she’d let me say how much I value the times we’d all been together there. It was one of those lovely things that came to me through you, getting to know them a little. All that vitality and the joy he took in being a part of this world—in his big wide orbit, friends, countries, books, music—children—always joy in the doing—His name always seemed so right to me—I’m glad and grateful for the chance I had to know him. Do you remember that nice snapshot that was taken at the Club Casino the first time I came, with you & Don & myself all with smiles, around the table? I prize that—there were good times ahead of us all.
The piece I was writing for Matthew Bruccoli got finished and mailed in—He says he likes it and adds, “Let me know if I can ever do anything for you. There is a special link between us: Ken Millar has dedicated a novel to each of us.” (I knew that!) When this book comes out, The Great Big Doorstep by E. P. O’Donnell (which another friend is another link in, Ralph Sipper, who located the book for me, which I submitted to Mr. Bruccoli for his Lost Fiction Series) I’ll send you a copy. I believe you’ll find it entertaining, and also of interest to you in your belief in the North American Language. (It’s Cajun.)
Your work goes to please you, I hope. It sounds such an enjoyable, as well as useful, thing to take on for this time in between, and before you get back to the books you want to write. My own interlude of giving lectures has filled its purpose, too—I needed to catch up on money so as to buy time for the writing I hope to do next—but it has made me tireder than I thought it would, and I still have more to go. I’m OK, though. Spring will be good, won’t it? I hope your heavy rains aren’t proving too heavy there—(I keep up on the National Weather News.)
Of course I want you to come any time you might wish and see a chance to. I do understand how it is. I wouldn’t want pain to come from my invitation either. It was the thought you were going to Ohio later that made Jackson for a moment seem not impossible. It will be just as lovely another time.
I’d better get back to work—It’s a soft day—gray and somehow springlike. It’s been cold—I’ll go out & mail this & get a breath of spring air—My love always—
Eudora
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, February 28, 1978
Dear Ken,
I hope things go well with you—Are you nearing the finish of the screenplay?
The other day Dick Moore called up and mentioned that the “Writer in America” series we both did a stint for is about to start showing on PBS, which maybe you’d already heard and he said yours was to be April 20 (as on WNET in NY) and that you’d written a wonderful letter to him after you’d seen it—that you like it very much. I look forward to my chance to see it—Mine is due May 11 (NY). It’s good that finally all the work Dick & Phil did on that series will get its showing—They are so fine, didn’t you think? (He didn’t mention [Ruth]—)
This little item (no, it’s coming separately) is just a curiosity of a kind—a magazine in France, at the University of Montpelier, for some reason of their own (the students’ own) is devoted entirely to Southern writers in the U.S.A.—it’s named Delta. My turn came up, and they asked for this little story by name, which an English editor had at some time seen in the local Archives (!)—written in my earliest beginnings & never accepted in the rounds I sent it on. Now, about 40 years later, it appears, surrounded by a cloud of French criticism of my work which I am not able to read. I saw a copy of the magazine but have not been sent one, but they sent me a handful of offprints of the story. I wanted you to have it anyway—2
Reynolds came, and we had a nice visit—The weather, which had been severe (16°) for here, and cold for weeks on end for the most part, brightened and warmed—it seemed almost Californian. I gave Reynolds the second copy I had of Lew Archer, Private Investigator, which he was delighted to get. (I had just got it back from a young man from here who’s been working with film in L.A.—he knew your other work already, and was anxious to borrow this, so I risked it. He wrote how much he admired the stories, which didn’t surprise me of course, but I was surprised that he really did return it. He said the Introduction helped him in his own ideas.)
I’m still working as well as I can in between trips. Next is North Dakota—I dread that a bit—recently, the weatherman on some news program mentioned that Grand Forks had something below zero with a chill factor of 69° below! I need a muff.
There’s a later date I have (in April) in Lubbock, Texas, and that looks on the map to be not too far from Santa Barbara—(More than halfway.) Do you think if I were able to come on to Santa Barbara and it were easy for you we could have a day to meet and catch up on everything? Closer to the time we could see.
How is Lydia Freeman? I was happy to see in the gallery listings in the New Yorker that a memorial exhibition of Don’s work would be held all next month—I wish I could be there to pay homage and take pleasure in all I saw—
My love to you always
Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, March 8, 1978
Dear Eudora:
I loved your story about the acrobats and can’t understand why a story of such originality and imaginative purity (which is your hallmark) should have had to wait so long for first publication, in France yet. Not that France is a bad place for it to be published: the original home of that kind of art, which I won’t try to name. A greater event awaits me, though, which I’m looking forward to with intense pleasure: the publication of your collected criticism with my name on the flyleaf—wholly undeservedly but there. No one has ever made me such a gift as that, and that you should have is the best gift of all. Archer may fall by the wayside but Eudora will take me down the centuries and future scholars will be asking each other: who he?3
I would dearly love to see you but hate to think of you taking the long trip out here for just a day or two. I have to go to the International Mystery Congress in New York—my publishers made quite a point of it—and I realize when I look at the calendar that that will be quite soon now. I’ll be in New York Wednesday, Thursday and Friday—April [actually March] 15–17—coming Tuesday evening, leaving Sat
urday morning—and I mention this not in the expectation but simply the remote possibility that you might be coming that way. Please excuse this hurried letter: suddenly it was later than I’d thought.
With love, ever,
Ken
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, [March 23, 1978]
Dear Ken,
It’s delighted me to think of you in NY—I want to hear all about it—So many of your old friends must have been on hand there, all gathered in one place. How could they have had the meeting without you? I read you quoted in Newsweek and the day Tom Brokaw interviewed 3 of the crime writers on Today I was disappointed he couldn’t have you but your name was in fact spoken more times on the program than that of anybody there. And Brokaw said that John Chancellor was always alert for the publication of a new Ross Macdonald. So vicariously you were on Today. I wish I could have been in NY too. I was preparing for a long flight myself, to North Dakota—from which I am just back—
You might be interested to hear I was working there with Ring Lardner, Jr. I kept having the feeling you might know him, though I don’t know what led me to think so. Anyway, if you don’t know him, he is one of the best, nicest people to meet you can imagine—exactly like the idea you get of all the Lardners as a family.4 Reserved, strongly intelligent, patient with other people—He read a paper on his experience as one of the Hollywood Ten, a plain, lucid, un-self-pitying, un-self-defensive, straightforward account that is classic & should remain classic of its kind—He said the Op. Ed page in the Times recently ran a brief excerpt, but the whole ought to be in the public print. He shows in his face signs of the sufferings his family has gone through. I felt so much goodness in him, and wasn’t a bit surprised, considering who he is & who he is the son of—
He also swims every day. And there was a swimming pool in the lobby of our motel—With real potted palm trees around it—an oasis in the snow.
North Dakota, which I admit I’d been dreading, because of the time of the year, was a pleasant surprise—Ice & snow piled everywhere, of course, but the temp. had warmed up—20°s at night & 30°s by day, so my non-fur clothes were warm enough and the air was delicious to breathe. Once more I was disappointed in not having the luck to see the Northern Lights. But the flight was beautiful—Strange as a desert, empty and hill-less, white, grey, black—black dirt in sparse patterns & squares before we left it behind for all white—Endless visibility, a clarity that looked very northern—very far up on the map—and the Red River flowing north—Nice young people attending the university, mostly from farms in N.D. & Canada. But late yesterday afternoon, flying back down, it was lovely to see the land below take on tints of pale green & pink and brown, & the Mississippi unfrozen winding down under us, & then to get off in Jackson with the trees in earliest leaf and the daffodils in people’s yards (mine included) and hear the birds at it without a stop—It’s balm! I’m out on my porch writing this—
You’ll get the first copy of my book when they send it to me—some day soon, I guess. I hope you will like it when you read it. That life had the possibility in it that we could write books and dedicate them to each other like this seems to me such a felicitous thing—
Have more trips to go, and tired just at the moment, but with spring here I’ll catch up on energy—Will write when I know more about what I have to do in Lubbock, Tex.—I hope I might get to say hello to you before too long. I hope you found all well at home and the good spring time ocean ready for you—And Spring.
My love,
Eudora
The Second International Congress of Crime Writers brought nearly three hundred authors from various countries to New York City at the end of March. Ross Macdonald, as a, or the, star of the occasion, was interviewed by many media outlets, from Newsweek to BBC-TV. At a Ross Macdonald Lun-cheon sponsored by his publishers, though, Millar seemed to old friends to be uncharacteristically vague.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, April 2, 1978
Dear Eudora:
I am slow in answering your letter, though it made me happy to get it, as your letters always do. Got home from New York only to plunge into a long-deferred bout with income tax (which for me seems to mean getting the year’s accounting attended to at one fell swoop.) I don’t really enjoy that part of our work but I don’t feel like complaining about it, either—the whole enterprise becomes so less interesting as we go along. And I enjoyed meeting with the writers in New York, though not quite as much as I’d have enjoyed being with you (and Lardner) in North Dakota. Your account of the weather there reminded me of my school days in Winnipeg which isn’t so far from where you were, as the crow flies. You got there long past the real winter which can descend to forty below zero.
I in my turn ran into a confusion of weather in New York, some of it good, though I rather enjoyed a fall of heavy wet Dickensian snowflakes one day. Fortunately, the Crime Congress coincided with what was for me a more important event, the memorial service for Don Freeman in the Church for the United Nations. Lydia was there, and half-a-dozen of us spoke, notably the gallery owner who spoke at length of his art. I spoke of his secondary art, the trumpet which he blew in a kind of secular worship, and would go on blowing until Lydia told him to stop. It was a privilege to say goodbye to Don in that place, in driving rain by the river.
This note is a poor response to your letters but I won’t apologize. Our friendship rests by now on deeper-driven pilings even than letters, or even than our dedications which mean so much to both of us. Your spirit lives in my mind, and watches my life, as I watch yours.
Love,
Ken
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, April 13, 1978
Dear Eudora:
It’s been a long winter, not in any physical sense, though we have had such roaring tides and denuded beaches, cut away to the underlying rock, as I can’t remember seeing here before. But that’s all exhilarating. And when I face the matter honestly, head on, I have to recognize that the quiet internal wars against shadowy fears, for oneself or for someone else, also have their slow triumphs, and continual life is the fundamental blessing. You in person and you in your stories and your letters have taught me to perceive and value the things they touch, and put them together in a single rhyming scheme, in which I can hear the slightly hesitant rhythms of your voice. My favorite of all your rhythms and rhymes, and mine, is the one in which we were able to dedicate books to each other, as you say a fortunate chance, in a fortunate season. The more so because our interests flourished and crossed in these books, your lifelong dedication to the written truth, my feeling that it could all be lost but will not be. Nothing of yours will be lost, dear Eudora.
Love,
Ken
“That life had the possibility in it that we could write books and dedicate them to each other seems to me such a felicitous thing.”
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, April 13, [1978]
Dear Ken,
It made me so deeply happy to read what you said at the close of your letter about our friendship—you were speaking, as you knew you were, for both of us—You live in my mind in the same way as I do in yours.
What a good thing that you went to New York—It sounds rewarding in a number of ways and I was glad you told me about the memorial service for Don Freeman—A service like that one must have meant a great deal to Lydia, to all of you—and what you contributed, about the wonderful wild free dedicated way he played his trumpet was something none of the others—except Lydia herself—could very likely have told about—not as you could. I felt glad once more that I’d been given the chance to be one of his company & to hear him play that horn into the Santa Barbara night. He was a lovely man—I got to know him long enough to know that—and to have it to remember.
It’s high spring around here now—dogwood, iris, azaleas—A sweet-smelling bush, really a tree by now, magnolia fuscata, with thimble sized banana-like flowers, blooming under my window. My niece Mary Alice had a baby, too—her third child, first girl—to whom she�
�s given the family names of Elizabeth Eudora—All has gone well in the way of spring—
I’ve been to Tenn., Ala., and Ohio lecturing since I got back from N. Dakota, and still have two more to go—I’d hoped to pluck out a few days on the way to West Texas to come by and see you if the time was okay there, but it won’t work out this time—the Harvard U. Press has just sent me a bundle to read & judge—their short novel publishing project, which I’m strongly for and had agreed to work for—and by Texas time I might even be too tired to make sense, to you. When I did this lecture thing before, 13 years ago, I didn’t get as tired, and besides the trips I was nursing my mother and seeing to things at home, between times. What I hadn’t taken into account was the 13 years—But I know we will meet somewhere, before too long—Like letters, it isn’t what our friendship depends on, but meetings really are blessings, added on—and your letters are very close to my heart.
Love,
Eudora
April 13 (my birthday)
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, April 23, 1978
Dear Eudora:
Congratulations on the birth of your niece who will carry on, I trust, with the complex and gleeful heritage of her middle name. Gleeful is a word that also connects itself with that free and lovely picture in the New Republic the other day.5 I’m so glad to witness the response that your new book is arousing, and to have a small but special share in it, myself. It’s a lovely book. How could I be so lucky?
Over against the death of Don Freeman, who leaves a permanent gap in our midst, is the story of Willard Temple, another longtime member of our group. He’d been suffering from heart trouble for years, forced into a sedentary life which he thought might end any day. Just a few weeks ago he went to Stanford Hospital to have a heart valve of his replaced by that of a pig. Last week he played eighteen holes of golf. This week he’s coming downtown to lunch. And so am I.
I haven’t finished my first and last screenplay yet but am getting closer, a week or two from the end of the draft, then must decide if I should do the final. I’m tempted to. Whatever comes of this script, it seems to have been a good idea for me. It brought the movie project back to life, and gave me a change of pace which has been refreshing. I like the idea of being back down in the world with the long slope of the next book ahead of me, not downhill. I’ve been reading Matt Bruccoli’s Scott and Ernest, a book so rough in parts that you may not wish to read it, but with some truth in it; and it made me feel grateful to have been spared the sweats and bleedings of the main literary marketplaces. I never came across a writer I wanted to compete with—wouldn’t know how. Well, it’s been a good winter and spring (with Margaret getting stronger week by week) and will be a better summer.
Meanwhile There Are Letters Page 42