Yours,
Eudora
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, October 18, 1978
Dear Ken,
Nona’s book trickled in from the publisher at long last—now it’s trickling its way to you—
It’s cool and sparkling here this morning—a lot of birds. I’ve been hard at work trying to get some typing done and other chores, but it feels so lovely outside I had to come out where I sit now on the steps.
Ahead of me:
Sunday the next college date comes up—Connecticut College—then the University of Southern Maine—which is celebrating its Centennial by holding a festival (or something of southern Southern writers—a whole bunch of us, getting our woolies together to go up! In between the 2 weekends I’ll have a few days in New York. There aren’t many more college dates in the year—I’ll be glad when they’re done. Last weekend was New Orleans, and for the first time I arrived there by air and saw a wonderful sight—white ibises going about like chickens in the grassy reaches along between the runways, unaffected by the big planes that ran along beside their own flocks, taking off and landing—This must surely have been where their own marshes were once? They could have been preserved by the ingenuity of their own innocence—but that sounds odd? One of those things you think of in the night.—But they were beautiful and strange—no words necessary for ibises.
I’ll write you from the other ocean—Love to you, Eudora
I’m hoping all goes well with you.
But all did not go well: Margaret was having eye trouble, though it seemed treatable. It was new cause for worry, however, and made less time for anything else. More and more it seemed Ken’s letters to and from Eudora were perhaps the strongest saving grace in his life.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, [October 30, 1978]
Dear Eudora:
I was much taken with your account of the ibises whose takeoffs and landings run parallel to human activity and were apparently helped by it. Why shouldn’t the same prevailing winds help different sorts of fliers? It’s a lovely image, and I’m grateful to have it to dwell on.
Our news is good. The damaged retina of Margaret’s right eye which seemed for a while to threaten its sight (but not the left eye) has had two laser treatments and begun to respond to them, so well that the treatment for which she flew up to the Peninsula this week didn’t have to be given, but will be in another two weeks. Dr. Guy who gives the treatments is the junior partner of the man who invented the use of laser (now deceased) and is number one in the world. So we’re much cheered by his hopeful opinion.—Cheered not only by doctors. Our new pup, our fourth and final dog at least for the present is turning out to be a lovely fellow. He’s a wholly black Newfoundland who gains twelve ounces a day week in and week out and eats accordingly. He’s extraordinarily intelligent, already expert in the strategies of place and precedence but, like a child genius, as innocent as your ibises in his ingenuity. He simply knows geometry in his bones. I’ve never even met such a smart-natured dog, let alone lived with one. And the other three dogs enjoy him, wonderingly, as human beings do geniuses.
Dear Eudora, come home safely from all your journeys. Your letters gave me wings. All my love, as always, Ken
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, [November 25, 1978]
Dear Ken,
It was nice to come home and find a letter with good news in it from you—that Margaret’s eye is responding well to the treatment from the fine—the best—doctor, Dr. Guy. I trust things go well right along now. It sounded as if the trouble must be a torn retina—I can comprehend the scare it must have been and the relief when something could be done to mend it—and laser must be really something.
I’ve been on three college trips in a row and am still exhausted, but want to send you a line however poor. It’s Thanksgiving, and I hope you had a very good one. I did, here, with my family of nieces and their husbands and five little ones. The youngest among us, by name Elizabeth Eudora, is 8 months old and can stand alone, but she still hasn’t got any teeth—it seems strangely unsafe.
Your new young genius pup sounds a joyful presence. I love their broad foreheads—Labradors—your Labrador’s forehead must be extra broad. Or tall, to hold that mathematical brain. You know, I think a letter you wrote me before this one must have been lost—I could tell you thought I knew about Margaret’s eye, and about the puppy. I hate to miss a letter. Anyway, I’m glad the one I got had this good news.
I wish you might have had your trip to Maine, because I thought the place was wonderful. A bunch of us (the program, of the Southern Conference invited to the University of Southeastern Maine) met in Boston and drove up, so we could see some of it. I saw the sea! Most of the time, once the work started, was wholly inside the walls of the Holliday Inn, morning till midnight. But one day we (the program again) played hookey from lunch and drove up to Freeport to L. L. Bean’s wonderful store, and ate some chowder too. And then one night very late I looked out my window on the 16th floor over the harbour and saw a celestial looking white ship, all lights, slowly put forth and out to sea. I found out she was going to Halifax. Some day I would like to be sailing with her—it was nice to be given at least a view of the sea, and the night sky, and the early northern mornings. Altogether different light from home. But this is very likely the light you grew up with in Canada? The roads in Maine have wonderful road-signs. “CHOICE: Left, Route 96. Right, Route 101,” (or some number). They put it to you: if you go wrong, the choice was yours. Paralyzing Yankee sternness.
I mailed you a bound galley of a novel coming out by James McConkey, from Dutton [The Tree House Confessions]—which I had a special feeling for. It seemed to me you might like it. Love to you, and good luck. I go to NY next Wednesday for about a week—Let me hear how things go.
Love—
Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, December 3, 1978
Dear Eudora:
It was so good to have your letter on your return from your journeys, and to know that you were met on your return by Elizabeth Eudora—a doubly queenly name. And I’m glad to be able to report that things seem to be going better here. Margaret is learning to handle quite well the knowledge that her right eye has recovered as much of its sight as it will. She is far from blind, and has been able to read proof on her book. Our life is pulling over the hump and moving into less frightening channels. And I think her book is a good one.
We were amused by something that happened yesterday. A couple of Monets worth a million or so had been stolen from the local museum and were returned under mysterious circumstances which are still not understood. But the secretary of the museum director turned up at my house inquiring for a copy of one of my stories (“The Bearded Lady” in The Name Is Archer)—she had somehow formed the theory that the actual theft was planned in imitation of my story. I don’t know why that made me happy. Perhaps art is not content unless life imitates it. But the actual theft remains something of a mystery. The Monets have been returned, slightly damaged, but nobody has been publicly accused of the theft. This is a very modern mystery, don’t you think? I’ll have to solve it again, perhaps.
The central Canadian light is not the same as the Maritime light, which draws on the surprisingly nearby Arctic. When I took the northern route out of Montreal and across the ocean by way of Newfoundland and (nearly) Iceland, the sun went down late in the evening and came up again almost right away. And once, under that same sun, I counted fifteen icebergs in view at once. They give a special sheen to the light. And I should take my giant pup and go back there for a renewal of the light. As you have been doing so happily this year, but of course in my own fashion. I got off the ship at Liverpool, paid a visit to the art museum which seemed to me to specialize in pre-Raphaelites, then walked across the city before night fell and spent the night sleeping in a field with a bull which I didn’t see until morning. He didn’t attack. I was twenty.
Well, that is not a solution but memory can lead the way to one, lead on
e into gratitude for life, and into more interesting responses; including another step on the long road to maturity, perhaps reaching it finally just as it fades out into something else, which perhaps I should be seeking.
I’ll be 63 shortly, but somehow for good or ill seem to have held onto my adolescence, waiting for the midnight sun to tan me. I’ll keep you posted on S.B.’s criminal and literary life.
Love,
Ken
P.S. Saw Lydia the other evening, and she looked well.
K.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, December 16, 1978
Dear Eudora:
No solution on the stolen Monet case, but I gather it had to do with the faking and substitution of the painting hanging in the gallery. Everything will come out at the trial, no doubt. The close-mouthed gallery sent me my story back without comment. That’s a trial I won’t miss: a courtroom really is a place of truth where everything tends to come out. I’ve sat through several dozen trials, and learned my trade in the courtroom, I suppose. The most remarkable statement I ever heard in a courtroom was offered some thirty years ago by a young attorney who is now the senior Superior judge here, and a good friend of ours: indeed, he helped M. with the legal background of her new book. But thirty years ago in his candid youth he made the monumental goof of saying, about his client, a defendant in a murder case: “I’m sorry, your honor, I can’t remember my client’s name.” He is now perhaps the best courtroom judge in California. His client, to finish the account, spent a year in San Quentin and was then released for error and then given a second trial, which set him free. He went to L.A. and became a private detective. Eventually he retired here at home in the manse in which his reverend father raised him. But I can’t write his story, if I really wanted to, as long as he is alive. He might murder me! Seriously.
I believe it was you who brought my thoughts back to murder, when I reread your review of “Sleeping Beauty” in The Eye of the Story.19 It had the effect of making me reread the book in toto, the first time I can remember doing that with any book of mine, and I must say I was surprised by its intricacy and force. But somehow those two qualities don’t quite mesh, the images at times imperfectly fuse. But that use of imagery was worth trying, even if in the end it didn’t quite jell.
As has happened before, your letter reached me in the midst of this letter to you. I was so glad to have it in the midst of the coming together, the often painful coming together that this season can bring—to have assurance that not all the meteors have fallen into the sea, sizzling. I had two other letters in the same mail that lifted my spirits. One was from my cousin Mary Carr, a retired school teacher who had lived close all her life to her school-inspector father, a cold man. But Mary was never cold, or ceased to be before I knew her. She treated me well during the year (age 13–14) I spent with her parents in Medicine Hat. And even now she is keeping in her father’s house on the edge of the prairie a boy named Sedenthe, from India, and educating him. The other letter I mentioned came from Jeff Ring who has been writing me since he was a boy in New England. He is now a man in the Philippines, son of an army officer who seems devoted to the attention of his father’s world-view. The family Jeff lives with have ten children and, Jeff wrote, “they are all so sweet.” So is the world to have such people in it, and you.
Love,
Ken
Merry Xmas! And thank you for good wishes
from our friends in the east.
K.
CHAPTER NINE
“What we need is one another.”
1979
IN 1979, Ken Millar had more trouble writing than ever. In the absence of a new Macdonald novel, his publishers scheduled for release another omnibus volume of three earlier books, Archer in Jeopardy. Millar labored hard on its brief introduction, and on the preface for a small-press collection of some of his book reviews. Even the physical act of writing was difficult: his hand didn’t seem to move in the right ways.
Margaret’s eye troubles worsened in 1979, and she much needed his care.
Through it all, Ken kept in touch with Eudora—not as often, perhaps, but with just as much feeling. And she responded in kind.
Whether as a result of worry or not, Eudora continued to turn away from sustained work and embrace sustained travel. In 1979, she made trips to Santa Fe, Boston, Montreal, Champaign-Urbana, Princeton, Florida, Kentucky, Ohio, and England, in addition to visiting New York City three times. When Eudora did seize scattered opportunities to revise “The Shadow Club,” a story begun years earlier, she may well have added material that drew upon her relationship with Ken. The backstory of Justine and Henry certainly seems to do so and to date from this time. The affinities that Ken and Eudora shared, the separate lives they maintained, and the regret attendant on separation are to some extent reflected in these characters: “Justine had told him her whole life. [. . .] He had kissed her for letting him hear all she wanted to tell him. [. . .] Yes, they had loved each other, and they loved each other now.” This is love at a distance, however, because of Justine’s (or Carrie’s, as she is also called) caution. “My chance to get away from myself is gone. My chance to move into arms that reached for me I gave back to the giver. I ran away home.”1 In these lines, a fictional schoolteacher, caught up in circumstances quite distinct from those Ken and Eudora faced, may have provided the sort of cri de coeur each had longed to give voice.
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, January 2, [1979]
Dear Ken,
As the New Year was coming in—not undramatically, as the tornado warning siren was blowing right along with the whistles and fireworks—I was wishing your year would be a happy and good and productive one—as different from the last as today is from the night the siren blew (The tornado didn’t touch down but went over “aloft”)—It’s bright & clear & cold with a warm sun—this is the 2nd, after a dark rainy 1st—beautiful, & sparkling—I’ve been out to the airport to welcome Mary Lou, who’s coming from Atlanta (her son’s home) to stay a few days—Then I’m flying home with her, to spend a few days in Santa Fe—Then back after this refreshment to the joy of getting back to my typewriter—A long year of hard work in another pasture done with—
I’m hoping you too will be finding yourself at the start of a new book—& I wish so much to read it! I’m sending best wishes for books—health—dear peace of mind—to you both—Long lasting wishes, not just little whistles—
Mary Lou will want me to send her love too—And I’m sending a snapshot that Reynolds would want his best wishes to come with as well as mine—for a Happy New Year—Still another friend of us both took the picture, Dick Moore—I will write you more soon.
My love to you,
Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, January 26, 1979
Dear Eudora:
As often happens in our correspondence, the answer to your question about the Monet case arrived today at just about the same time as your question. The Santa Barbara News-Press reported that the young Museum guard (aged 26) who took the Monets pleaded guilty to the crime and was given a one-year jail sentence, to be served here, with a four-year state prison term suspended. The young man, [M________], may be put on a work furlough program which will mean that he can spend his working days, if not his nights and weekends, outside. There may have been a feeling in the court that he did what he did as a kind of game—replacing pictures with copies (made by himself, or his father!) in the frames. The frames he destroyed, for some reason, and he must pay for. Strange.2
I was sorry, very sorry, to hear of your flu attack after years of unbroken health. Eleven thousand people, and that chilling wind! I trust it has blown over quickly and that you can continue to feel your usual unconcern about the weather, both inner and outer. I think you are an intrepid woman, testing yourself against the chilly east, as I do against the western ocean, most days. We’re having a better winter than we expected. Once a month we go to Palo Alto to visit the Retinal Clinic and on our last visit, a couple
of weeks ago, Margaret was told for the first time that this time the retina of her left eye showed some slight improvement instead of the expected deterioration. We took a cab to San Francisco and celebrated over food and beer until our plane took off, and have been sort of celebrating ever since. I feel as if the tide is turning now, in our favor. I never doubt that it does and will for you. Take care, dear Eudora.
With all my love, Ken
Eudora’s response to Ken is missing. In it, as Ken’s next letter makes clear, Eudora reported on her plans to travel with a Millsaps College group to Oxford University in the summer of 1979.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, March 20, 1979
Dear Eudora:
I was thinking of you off and on throughout the day, and when your letter appeared in the mailbox it seemed to chime in concord with my thoughts, though of course it had been written some days before. Not all of my thoughts had been cheerful but there was a steady movement in me now towards the light. I don’t know what caused my depression, or why it lasted, or why it lifted, but I am content to have rejoined the movements of the tide, its going out, its hesitations, its coming in. If I tried to escape those movements, I didn’t succeed, thank heaven. I am back in a welter of papers among friends, wondering why I turned my face to the wall. Clearly I’m not through with that question, but I’ve been given a shove, a small shift in my balance which changes my entire posture.
Besides your letter, the mailman brought the first copy Margaret had seen of her book—The Murder of Miranda—and Random House had done a nice job with it, given it what I would think special care. For these and other reasons, it’s been a special day. I was so glad to hear of your trip to Oxford coming up. There’s still a clarity of light in England, in spite of all her troubles, a brightness that falls from the air like the thoughts of great men, and I wish you joy of it.
Meanwhile There Are Letters Page 45