I loved your last letter, about Don Freeman—what a pleasure to have lived in the same world with Don, close by, near enough to be touched by his goodness, a manlier odor than the odor of sanctity. Don gave me his pencil sketch of you, though it didn’t quite do you justice, either of you. LOVE,
Ken
Eudora Welty, Santa Rosa Island, FL, to Kenneth Millar, May 1, 1978
Dear Ken,
You probably saw this about Don’s books, but here it is anyhow—It’s a nice piece, isn’t it?6
Here I am in Florida, on a beach-house-party—4 other Jackson ladies plus Reynolds, a friend to all!7 It’s on the strip of Florida nearest to Miss., the northern part—an island called Santa Rosa—quiet & unspoiled, right on the Gulf pounding in—Along here the water often takes on a turquoise color—lots of white caps this morning. We have 3 kites up, one like a long silver eel-like fish, flashing & turning, up there, just like a swimmer—
We drove down yesterday—Reynolds flew—and I was taken by surprise by the sunset—I looked for it to happen over the Gulf, as if the sun were going down over the Pacific, and it was not setting over the water at all—the sun was west, the water was south—I was thinking so strongly of Santa Barbara—Well, they’re all part of Ocean, the Oceans of the old maps, that lapped all around the perimeter of the known world—
Last night we ate fine fresh fish—and while we were sitting around the driftwood fire in our house the most astonishing wind came up—very loud & strong without a break, tremendous, & yet the sky was perfectly clear overhead, brilliant with stars—The wind went on all night—I thought of that ghost story, do you know it—by M. R. James—“O Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Love”—the ancient Saxon ring that when turned on the finger (I think) called up the wind.8
Reynolds is fresh from NY where his play “Early Dark” has been enjoying a nice run with an Off-Broadway production he is crazy about—The reviews are good, the limited run has been extended for another week, and he has hopes of a movie or TV production—He’s very much excited of course, so we’re all sitting around the dinner table listening—He goes back at the end of next week for the last performance—
I’m glad to have news of your movie script—If you go ahead with the final—and it might be hard to part with it at this point, turn it over to another—it will prove that much more interesting to you, I hope, & I can imagine. Let me know what happens.
I’m so glad that Margaret gets stronger all the time—Is her new novel at finishing point too? It all makes the summer sound good ahead.
My last lecture visit (till October, which will be the positive last) is May 9–11 in Virginia. Then I’ll be able to go to NY 16th-24th. It’s been a long time since I was there except to pass through—I wish we might have coincided. It will keep on seeming possible since the first time—
I’m glad you are seeing what the reviews (of my book) are like with me. Wasn’t that a fine one Ralph Sipper did for the Chronicle?9 He sent me a copy. Since I was trying a kind of book new for me I’ve been more anxious than I have about any other—My real concern & care is for the opinion of the few dear friends I write for—you & a few. I do want it to give all the pleasure it can to you, which doesn’t need saying—
Thank you for your letter—and for the one just before, written the same day I wrote to you, companion letters. I’ll write when I get home—This is a restoring little interlude—I feel peaceful & the air is sweet & fresh—Reynolds sends love, & I send all mine—
Yours,
Eudora
I love the sandpipers.
We have some binoculars for sea birds, and (they promise me) dolphins to come
Reviews of the book dedicated to Ken had indeed been good, and on May 7, the New York Times Book Review added Victoria Glendinning’s voice to the chorus of praise: The Eye of the Story, she declared, “should be prescribed reading for all literary critics.”10
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, May 29, 1978
Dear Ken,
After three weeks of moving around in Virginia and the N.E. I’m back in Mississippi, got in yesterday evening. It was part work, but the work wound up almost a year of it, so I was glad. The New York part was refreshing for being long missed—the sight of old friends, and the sight of the Monet show at the Metropolitan, & a few theatre evenings, and just the whizz of life to move around in—The countryside was all in spring flower, too—
I saw some of our mutual friends in the City, Joan Kahn, Nona, Walter Clemons—All thriving—Nona has a new book out, Critical Encounters—She may have sent you a copy—if not, I will. People were giving parties for her and it, and she sweetly included me among her guests—She was feeling very happy about it. It’s such a good book, a collection of articles, and essays she’s published in periodicals over the years—She has a big, loving Armenian family, nearly all of them scholars, old & young, and they all were beaming on her—
Walter took me to Ain’t Misbehavin’, the musical about Fats Waller’s music—a wonderful show—a new young company of black entertainers who’d come to Fats’s music as whole-heartedly and rapturously as if they’d grown up with it. Some of the numbers were too heavy-handed, maybe—“Your Feet’s Too Big” was too heavy-handed—It should have been fastidious in the wonderful Waller style—but mostly it (the above) was quite wonderful—I could go right back & see it again tonight. It had just opened, so you couldn’t have seen it, but I wonder if you happened to see “Death Trap” 11 and if you did did you like it? I thought Act I was entertaining, but the play might have been better if it had ended there—Act II got progressively weaker and cuter—But I won’t say more, in case you still might see it for the first time.
Is your film script going to please you, or is it perhaps even finished? I hope it was fun to see what came of the work—I never feel that any sort of new or different work is lost, do you—it shows you things—but I hope Instant Enemy was a fine triumph and lucky excursion to have set out on—I’d be glad for Instant Enemy’s sake if it gets made the way its own author intended it to be—
Tomorrow I’ll be delivered 3 weeks of mail and if there’s news from you I hope it’s all good. My best wishes for Margaret too, and Jim—It’s deep summer here and it’s nice to be back in my own climate and about to go quietly back to writing again.
Much love,
Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, [May or June 1978]
Dear Eudora:
That was a gleeful letter I had from you in Florida. You’d disburdened yourself of your cares and responsibilities and were simply enjoying the hours as they came. Florida sounds spectacular, a fitting climax to your recent trends. And I’m particularly grateful for the clipping from NYTBR about Don Freeman, which for some reason I’d missed. I never took more pleasure in the contemplation of another man’s life, I don’t mean just as it ended but in the lucky thirty years that I knew him, a large man in every way, who handled himself gracefully without affectation. He was capable of anger in good causes; the rest of the time he was sunny; he loved his work, friends, children, animals, and hated fraud. I’m glad you came to know him.
Margaret and I have decided to do a little traveling next month, and show Jim a little bit of Canada, the country around Toronto in Southern Ontario. Apart from his seven-month’s sojourn in Japan, beyond the verge of memory, Jim has never been out of California. Toronto the Good, which is comparatively crimeless, should interest him; and of course we’ll spend some time in Kitchener the Industrial City, where M. grew up and where I once taught high school. We still have friends there, though their numbers are dwindling. And I want to show Jim the farm where I worked for a winter and several summers—Oxbow Farm, in a deep bend of the Grand River which I used to have to wade when I came home late at night. Oxbow Farm was bought and preserved by the Ontario government as a permanent wild life reserve—last time I visited Canada a pileated woodpecker had been seen there in the maple sugar bush. It was a difficult life then in the depression
, without enough hope but there was love and goodness in the people and I was reading philosophy at night. I wonder if any of this can be conveyed to a California boy. But of course it can. The people speak in their actions and their forebearance. I’m thinking of the Mennonites in particular, but this applies to Canadians in general. Their great virtue is patience. They can wait. Which reminds me that my oldest and dearest friend Robert Ford is retiring this year as Canadian ambassador to Moscow, and may take a post in Washington, which is more visitable. I’d hoped to get to Moscow while he was there, but shan’t make it. Well, I haven’t been to Washington, either. And Ford has never been to California and says he intends to visit here.
Margaret is feeling stronger as you’ll have guessed from our Canadian plans. She hopes to have finished her book, and I my screenplay, before we leave. And Jim his first year of high school, where he is the fastest man on the swimming team—faster, literally, than Johnny Weissmuller in his slower day. Slower than who? Slower than you, I think.
EUDORA WELTY PLAYED HIDE AND SEEK
AND NOWHERE DID ABIDE
SOFTLY SHE WENT UP THE CREEK
AND REYNOLDS PRICE BESIDE
LOVE,
Ken
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, [June 18, 1978]
Dear Ken,
Are you North, or South? I’ve been imagining you & Margaret & Jim in Canada, though my imagination very likely didn’t get any of it right—for one thing, I’ve only crossed that border once, at Niagara Falls. But I think of what you’ve told me about your early life there—Jim must have had a pretty wonderful new experience? It’s good to know that before taking off the work was to all be got behind you—Margaret’s novel and your screenplay. What a good summer!
I’m slow to write, having come home tired, and right after I sent you a line last time, an onslaught of mail fell on me and a review’s deadline was pushed up—instead of 3 weeks I had 3 days. I did the review but not the review I’d wanted to do—on one of my heroes of the short story, V. S. Pritchett—Do you admire him a lot too? His compactness & concentration in telling his story, the intensification of meaning in quick, brief sequences, & his feeling for people in their predicaments I suspect might appeal to you too—12
By the way (I’ve been going back now & re-reading his early books) Pritchett uses the phrase “the goodbye look” himself—in a wonderful, strange, early comic story called “It May Never Happen”—It fitted his story & purpose too.13
Anyway, in the onslaught of mail there was a fine, welcome letter from you—thank you for it—and when you get out from under your onslaught on returning from Canada I’d love a new line on everything. I still haven’t answered the mail, part of which was from people telling me they were coming here, & they came—Strangers, mostly, but nice—I feel I may never catch up. Can you throw this feeling off? I just have to catch up, or I never get rid of the guilt. (Writing to friends is a different thing altogether—as you know)
Did you see any of Dick Moore’s & Phil’s programs? I didn’t get to, being somewhere else, or travelling, and I hated missing yours. A lot of people told me they thought the series was fine—From the Janet Flanner one and the one on myself that they showed me back in Sausalito, I believe it. They are professional and sensitive people and stick to the point of showing what matters & pertains to a writer’s work—
I’ve just been to a young nephew’s 3rd birthday party and took him Don Freeman’s Corduroy—He already has Dandelion, or his older brother has—my whole flock of small kin love his books—I know the whole Conference will miss him this month.
And I miss being there—being there—
Have you seen the new character in “Peanuts” named Eudora? I’m crazy about her—and pretend she’s my namesake—Here are some examples if you’ve missed them.14
Next time I may make more sense, but I’m sending this without worrying about a poor letter, but with much love as always,
Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, [June 21, 1978]
Dear Eudora:
My day was filled with memories of you. It was my annual day to go to the S.B. Writers’ Conference and answer questions. If I can judge by the questions and the voices in which they were posed, the students were a cut above previous years, as a whole, but there was the usual lack of focused seriousness, without which teaching time is mostly wasted. And I must say that there was something missing, a lift and rectitude, like a bird’s joyousness in flight, which you always brought to our meetings. Like the moon rising. Now our moon has set. But you were right to turn away from a scene that could only deteriorate, and interfere with the loving action of your thought.
I can confess that the past month has been difficult for us, now that it is ending. Margaret came down with a case of the shingles and was in great pain for several weeks—gradually ameliorated by some nerve-block treatments with needles in her back, somewhat like acupuncture. It, or something, worked; and M. announced two days ago that she was over it. Not that she’d let it interfere with what she was doing. She finished a book in the middle of the attack, a wild tragi-farce which is also a mystery novel that solves itself in the last sentence, indeed I think in the last or second-last word of the last sentence. I can hardly wait to send you a copy, to know what you think of it, but that won’t be for a while.
I’m continuing work on my movie script and gradually getting it into shape. It seems to be more a technical than an artistic piece of work but it has its laws and as I get to know them I can obey them. One thing, I have learned, it isn’t easy work, since the words and directions that we put down are so remote from the finished product. The writing part is technical rather than creative or even imitative art. Still the thing seems to be inspiring as I hammer at it, or try other ways to outwit it. My conditions of work are unusually pleasant (for movie work!)—my young producer drives up from Los Angeles once a week or so, and I give him what I’ve done and we discuss what’s next to be done. Then he has a swim and disappears for another week. So I have the benefit of both his presence and his absence. His name is Burt Weissbourd, he just celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday, his father is the great Chicago builder (and liberal) and his wife just finished her doctoral thesis on the James family. All of which prevents this from seeming like an ordinary sort of job, and makes it more fun.
Speaking of jobs, Jimmy, having passed the age of fifteen, went out and got himself a full-time job cleaning buildings—I think as a kind of declaration of manhood. (I started working, in a grocery store and then on a farm, when I was fifteen.) (Writing long before that, about ten or eleven. When did you start writing? I’d love to know.)
Love, as ever,
Ken
P.S. I saw Nona in New York but she failed, modestly, to mention her book. I’d like very much to see it. K.
PPS—Saw Charles Schultz who confessed borrowing your name.15 K
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, [July 8, 1978]
Dear Ken,
It was good to have your letter—though I was sorry to hear what a bad time this last month has given you there—instead of a good time in Canada—I hope everything is fully all right now though—all health good, all work victorious—including Jim’s very first venture as a young man—
I can sympathize with Margaret in her siege of the shingles, since I have been through it too, and can applaud her with feeling for having finished her novel in the middle of it. What you say of that makes me want to read it “soonest”—that word people want to hear back from you at (I doubt if I could ever fix that sentence.). Congratulations to her—
You’ve surmounted your own project in the middle of it too—It does sound as if it has its pleasant and instructive aspects, the technical problems—I’m sure you licked them, which would make the pleasure—And your young producer sounds nice to work with interesting and intelligent, and intermittent—But I know you must be looking forward to getting back to what’s all your own. Some time when I see you, I would love to be allow
ed to read your film play through. You are always able to make something of value out of the given thing.
I’ve been working here, without a stop—it’s at a good point now—it’s a long story, and it’s where everything begins to fit together, the edges of the different parts, and you can almost hear it clicking into shape—But I’d better not say more. It’s been hard but it makes you feel tired a good way—16
It’s hot and we are about to have our afternoon thunder & lightning—it just won’t rain for us!
I’ve been thinking of you and sending love, and do now—
Yours ever—don’t say “our moon has set”! You were so good to go back and give your work & thought and time to the Conference again—I remember how you felt about that—All the same, if one young person writing gets any good out of what we can do, it’s all right then—Some sent me letters that touched me—
I’ve been saving the essay by Donald Davie for you if you hadn’t seen it—remembering your friendship—I liked it, and his mind—Love, Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, July 22, 1978
Dear Eudora:
A beautiful moon tonight, riding clear of a bank of fog above the sea—one of those beautiful night summer skies. I just came in wet from the pool. These warm summer nights remind me of Canada when I was a boy and fill me not exactly with nostalgia but with a willingness to have been that boy which I didn’t quite feel at the time. Which reminds me of V.S. Pritchett and of your asking me if I admire him. Very much. I used to teach some of his stories thirty-odd years ago, and it was gradually borne in upon my slow mind that our lives had certain things in common, notably Christian Science. For such a hopeful (it would seem) religion it leaves remarkably long trails of melancholy and uncertainty, which Pritchett grappled with all his life, successfully. But the struggle made him more matter-of-fact in his fiction than he need have been, I think. Possibly I am talking about myself. Most writers usually seem to be. But I wonder whether this is true of you?
Meanwhile There Are Letters Page 43