Again Ken and Eudora spoke by telephone.
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, [September 8, 1979]
Dear Ken,
I am so glad we talked—and that voices brought us so near. Since reaching home & reading your letter I’d been so concerned to know about Jim and his leaving school, to think of its troubling effect on you & Margaret—as well as its meaning for Jim of course—I think of how you are the best understander of the young I know of, and their champion, but also their protector from threats of harm which you understand better than they do, and this is not just the young, but Jim. Yet, Ken, he knows this too and knows you and Margaret are there. He’s got that trust, and going with him it is its own kind of protection, don’t you think? A boy that bright and adept is bright & adept at going forth very young maybe—did you feel the same? But I hope it’s soon he realizes his other potential—that he comes back to learning in school and doing exceedingly well again at his studies—I’m afraid everything I put down must read like a platitude—You know that however ignorant I am about this, I feel for the way I know it has made you feel. Going with Jim besides trust, there’s mutual admiration and respect, and there’s love. Nothing can change that companionship for a venture, if you’re a child or if you’re long-travelled in experience—I feel less & less that our years tell us all that much, just by rolling over us—what we need is one another.
These are long, hot days here, but it’s good to be back—I’m working, like you, on some side issues—Some promised book reviews coming up, and a little autobiographical thing about my first published story. I’ll send that along for you to read if it turns out (it isn’t now) to be any good. Meantime I tend to spend too much time on chores I’m asked to do by nice civic groups I’d like to assist, only—there goes another day. The summer in Oxford was wonderfully interesting but too much for me in numbers of people always, a little class on Tues. & Thurs. afternoons, and so alluring to see & hear and go back to, the whole world of the University—and yet all that medieval got me down in a way—Every morning, before the ringing of the bell and breakfast in Hall, I’d walk out the gate and see the whizzing buses & bicycles & taxis go by in the High Street—present life! Then to a lecture by some Oxford eminence—I went to 2 a day mostly & never came out of the Renaissance till time for a beer in the garden before lunch—the heavenly gardens—I walked a lot, of course, so much to see and go back to see again—My own part would come late in the afternoon, well, it was called “Tea with Miss Welty,” when I’d talk back & forth with students, 20 at a blow. I liked the students. They made me one of them, which I guess may be the reason I’m so tired! On weekends I went to the country several times, to visit friends of the last time I was in England, about 20 years ago, who were so dear as to remember me and give me a wonderful welcome. And in London I met Mr. Pritchett, as I told you. He had written to me several notes & letters over the years, which I saw to be like him—he spontaneously enjoys getting in touch with other writers, especially the short story lovers—and had asked me to let him know if I were ever in England, so I did—how could I have forgiven myself if I’d been too shy to? He and his wife Dorothy asked me to lunch at their house and had just ourselves so we could talk, and we sat talking away the whole afternoon—They’re both the liveliest, kindest, most open-hearted, open-minded people—you know from his writing just what he is, he’s so generous there too—I loved every minute, shall never forget this. He rejoiced me. He is the brightest-eyed 79-year-old you could ever hope to see. After lunch he walked me through his neighborhood to where I could catch a bus—I elected to ride home that way so as to see more—and stood and waved me out of sight. That was the best of my summer, my year.
I’m glad you enjoyed the Labrador retriever in the audience at “Lady Windermere’s Fan.” I thought of you such a number of times—On top of the tower in Bristol where you look into the Camera Obscura—have you ever seen it, or any camera obscura? I hadn’t. But away up there—you climb & climb—they put you in the dark & then gradually, on a large, slowly spinning plate-like reflector you look down on, you see everything in the surrounding landscape appear. The Avon Gorge, the Suspension bridge, the traffic in the roads, the river bank, pedestrians, picnickers, lovers, solitary bird-watchers, playing children—the whole 365 degrees (it is 365?). As the man in charge said to my friend & me, “It’s like a good oil painting: with movement.” Isn’t that wonderful? You see the whole world but it doesn’t see you—you might witness anything!
I’m writing this at my window where there’s a nice early-morning breeze, though me and my world are mutually visible—& where you can easily imagine me,—and sending you my love and my good hopes—
Yours as always,
Eudora
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, September 20, 1979
Dear Ken,
I’m hoping you’ve had reason by this time to feel easier about young Jim—and that things are going better in every way—There’s a change in the air, here—seasonal, I mean—Its skies a higher, deeper color, with many birds on the move—a coolness at night, and the smell of fresh-fallen pinestraw. I’ve been working hard at 2 foolishly promised simultaneous deadlines, with papers all around me, and just plain wanted to write to you instead, though there isn’t much news.
One thing, Knopf still hasn’t sent along your big-3 book—you said to let you know if it didn’t come—I do want to have it—I’d like very much to read your introduction.
On Oct. 8, too, I have to fly to N.Y. (to a meeting at the Acad. of Arts & Letters) and will be there till the 12th—If there is any message or errand I could carry out for you, let me know. I’ll be seeing Joan Kahn, & Nona, I feel sure—
By the way I had a dream in your handwriting. (My dreams sometimes come in words.) It was a little less than a page long, written in very dark ink or with a soft black pencil, on lined paper—you wrote down my dream!—Or I dreamed you wrote my dream. Where do these things come from, then? If only I could remember after waking what it said—But you see it’s left traces.
Much love, take care—
Eudora
Ken struggled to write not dreams but fiction. He would not abandon hope. “[W]hile I can’t certainly predict the future,” he told his Knopf editor with poignant optimism, “it will surely allow me further writing.”5
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, Friday [October 5, 1979]
Dear Ken,
Here’s a piece I just finished doing for the Georgia Review, that they asked for in connection with republishing my first story—I don’t really know why.6 I xeroxed it for you, poor typing and all, feeling you would read it congenially sometime—and also I keep meaning to send you a copy of this bird man’s bulletin that I’ve been getting all year—I find it very amusing. He’s a man in his 60s with family and a tree business, a businessman, who just took it into his head to see more birds than anybody else within a given time. Expense as you can see is no object, miles don’t matter, and it’s all so innocent, and he gets these bulletins out in the friendly expectation that the whole world’s going to share it with him—I share it. He saw your condor but from far away.
It’s lovely, sunny and cool here. Monday I must fly to NY, but will be back again by Friday. I think of you and send my love,
Eudora
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, October 7, 1979
Dear Eudora:
Your wonderful letter with the Constable watercolor in it matching your prose has waited unconscionably long for an answer, and even now I can’t write you a proper one. Fine though I feel in general, I’ve come down with another of life’s minor but temporarily disabling tribulations—an abdominal hernia which had to be repaired and now has been. I got up the first day and now can do almost anything I normally do except swim. This was followed by a speed trip to San Francisco where Margaret was due for an eye examination, and there the results were the best she has had yet: for the first time since the inception of her eye trouble, Margaret’s bad eye improved instea
d of deteriorating. You can imagine the relief we felt, and the gratitude.
In general all goes well now, but one gets set for emergencies and finds it hard to climb down from that reactive level. The wind is blowing hard tonight, and it may storm before morning. I hope you’re safe and well, dear Eudora, and that you will forgive me for my sporadic notes with not much in them, except that all is well. But I think of you often and lean on the thought.
With all my love,
Ken
P.S.—I still have only one copy of Archer in Jeopardy but will see that you get a copy from Ash Green. K.
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, Sunday [October 21, 1979]
Dear Ken,
I was very thankful to know how things are with you, and more than thankful for the good news your letter brought about your own good & speedy recovery from the operation you’d had, and about Margaret’s wonderful regaining of what she had been losing in the vision of her eye. It’s so good to know, and I hope the tide for the good keeps rolling in—I believe it will. But I’m awfully sorry you had to go through with a time in a hospital—Now that it’s behind you, having gone so well, I like to imagine you’ll soon be swimming again.
When you were having your high wind and stormy night, New York received something too—high wind, fog, cold, rain, a waterspout in the harbor, and a snow fall. Also we had Castro, and the dissatisfied author who came to town in a plane & buzzed Harcourt Brace Jovanovich for 3 or 4 hours.7 I went out when I had to but it was right nice to stay in my Algonquin cubbyhole and read. I read The Far Side of the Dollar again, which I’d brought from home. What a beauty it is, every reading—I read it and watch it (the writing and the way it charges the novel).
Since coming back I had a few deadlines to meet and met them, and on next Wednesday I go for almost the last work-trip this year—to U. of Kentucky at Lexington and Denison U. in Ohio—with friends in both places so they can rescue me from merciless academics. But of course I have only myself to blame for foolishly agreeing to too many things just because they were all far off, then. Kentucky ought to be beautiful just now—I love the Bluegrass. I’ll send you a postcard—the chances are about 99 to 1 it will be one of Man-O’-War. They always take you to his grave.
I’m writing by the window in my upstairs room where the oak tree just outside is filled with kinglets & some kind of olive-green tiny birds (warblers?) all busy feeding. It’s a long dry spell here, I’ve been moving the sprinkler about all day trying to keep the camellias & azaleas going, they’re all in bud. The other day I went with an old friend [ John Robinson] now living in Italy to where we used to go on picnics—down by an area of the river, where the flood had come in so high—It was lovely—(we took another picnic)—the sweet-gums were starting to turn scarlet, the oak leaves were falling & covered the ground where the Pearl River had clawed and peeled it clean, and the water itself was just full of fish!—leaping up & popping up & splashing all over—Birds singing—the flood had obviously been enjoyed by all that called the place home.
Dear Ken, thank you again for writing—when some times are not as easy as others to write, though, you know as I do what is the same as ever, that we think of each other and that you are close to me. Don’t worry about not writing—Just when it’s a good time for you. My wishes and my love always,
Eudora
Eudora Welty, Lexington/Versailles, KY, and in a plane, to Kenneth Millar, [Late October 1979]. Written on picture postcards of Man O’War statue, two Kentucky thoroughbreds, and portrait of Daniel Boone.
Dear Ken,
Things continue to go well there, I hope. Just before I took off from Jackson, your big book came—I’m so glad to have it—wanted to take it right along but knew this work trip would leave me no free time to enjoy it. But it’ll be waiting when I get back. Thank you very much—it’s a handsome volume, too—and I saw it again here in Lexington turned full-face front on the bookstore shelf—8
Fall leaves at glorious height in this pretty town. Once the work sessions (3 days) are over, I get to go to the house of a friend who lives in a little country town, Versailles (pro. Ver-sales) where I’ve never been (I knew her when she taught at Vassar.) There 3 old friends will re-unite & see the countryside—
Versailles is pure peace—calm pure windless bright days—riding to a curve of the Kentucky River around high rocky banks with old forest trees—horse farms. We went into a big country barn & through hay fields. At night, around a woodfire with some Jack Daniels and a bowl of shelled walnuts (I should hope shelled, did you ever try to crack them?) and grand ham for dinner. All the tiredness of the work at the college has gone away, and it’s good sleeping in a big high bed under old soft quilts, with nothing outside but trees—and the whistle of a train comes sometimes. I like being in a place where the seasons are so distinct—It makes you want to hold onto their beauty more than ever. I wish now I’d brought your book, to read it in Versailles—you have 2 other admirers in this house.
________
I’ve now finished the other half of this work trip—5 days at Denison Univ. in Granville, Ohio—hardest & longest, or I guess just the most incessant of the year. I try to remember how it drains everything out of you, regardless of how much you like & respect the students, so I don’t do it too much again. Just one more trip, overnight to Princeton then blessed work. This isn’t a complaint, just how I feel. I’ll be writing a real letter next.
Thank you again for the book, & Ralph S. for sending it—My love to you, as everywhere. (Now in the air over Knoxville).
Yours, Eudora
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, November 8, 1979
Dear Ken,
Your beautiful Collection of Reviews was here waiting for me when I got home tonight—I brought it upstairs & began reading the Foreword, and then on without stopping to the last page—How very much I cherish it.9 It was good to be in your company past and present—and in the present seeing back into the past, as in the Foreword—the most touching of autobiographical writing I’ve seen of yours. And there was the pleasure of receiving all those flashes your reading brought forth from your mind, so many books and writers I’ve never had the chance before to know your thinking or feeling about. I want to go back now and read these again. I was glad to see the one I’d read before in the N.Y.T. Book Review when you let Jacques Barzun know just where (and in what antique time) he belonged. As it happened, I’ve just been in a spot on earth that at some time or other was the home of many of these authors you write of, or mention—Princeton—Mann & Eliot (I saw the shop where he used to buy his long red union suits) and of course Fitzgerald—weren’t there more?
The book itself is so beautiful. And how giving you are to have each of them come with the printed line of ownership in that friend’s own name—I treasure mine and love all that is in it—I like to think how you must have written them for the best of reasons—because you wanted to—
I’ll write you more later, —but I was interested in what you wrote about Stephen Leacock, whose name I hadn’t heard since I was young and his books were in our house and much read and admired by my father—And I wasn’t in tune with them then, but I’m going to hunt them up—He used to give them to my mother for presents.10
I loved the connection that you tell of, running from Conrad to Alfred Knopf—But I’ll be writing you more—I wanted to thank you right away, for all.
I hope things are going as they should—I hope you’re swimming again—
With my love as always,
Yours, Eudora
I’m home now to stay.
Kenneth Millar to Eudora Welty, November 19, 1979
Dear Eudora:
I’m so glad you liked my reviews. When the little project was first suggested to me, I couldn’t see much merit in it. But after I got into it, and especially now that you have written out your feelings about it, it gave me nothing but pleasure. Much of which came from the knowledge that I could pass it on to you. And now I have your beautiful response.<
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Our life is improving again, in spite of some further illness in the family. Margaret, who has suffered so much in these last few difficult years, has learned over the last several weeks that her sight is threatened by damage to her retinas which is apparently irreversible. But there is a kind of miracle in this. Margaret has been able to look at blindness and face it down. She is busy getting ready for whatever may come, and she has been able to accept my help in this, and future help, so that we are closer than we were. And there is quite a bit of music in the house.
Well, our lives change unexpectedly, irreversibly as I said, but not necessarily towards the darkness.
Love,
Ken
Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, Thanksgiving [November 22, 1979]
Dear Ken,
It’s wonderful that the new news of Margaret’s eye is robbed of its worst because you have brought a kind of victory out of it between you. I was so glad to read comfort in your letter—to know there’s been an easing in your life—and music in the house—I so hope the vision holds its own. But whatever comes there are two magnificent determinations ready to meet it together.
I’ve been to Thanksgiving dinner with my sister-in-law & nieces and their families—5 little children now. It’s raining, so they were super-charged, racing through the house,—one appearance in hats they’d pulled out of a trunk. The baby, a little girl not 2 yet, had on a broad planter’s straw, bigger around than she is, swinging her arms in mighty circles—living up to the hat.
I treasure your book. And I’m so glad you found the doing brought pleasure as you want. It’s no wonder, I think—I believe writing wakes its pleasure up whatever the hour. That’s never lost, do you believe? I must thank you for two copies of Archer in Jeopardy—from West and East: The extra from Knopf I’m pleased to have on hand for others to read.11 Last night I finished The Zebra-Striped Hearse again and all my admiration for it was reinforced, but more than that—There were moments—the hawk, rising—the baby sleeping—many observing, revealing moments, when without having forgotten them I felt their surprise and beauty as sharply as new. Everywhere, all through a novel, very particularly, you take the way that puts human insight into the strong terms of urgency—which belong to it. Delicate insight—bold terms. The mastery of dialogue, structure, movement, timing, of the encounters that reveal, & the connecting that is brought to bear, and to come true—from its starting up to its conclusion, it’s what urgency turns into—and a crucial part of its drama is moral, of course—Archer being in absolute focus is everything—He is the focus, but we see him & see with him because he’s a feeling man, as you’ve made him. Of course I’ve felt these things before but this time in a special way which may have come from reading Zebra right after The Doomsters—it took on the import of its sequence. The Doomsters was to me remarkable for its last couple of pages where before a reader’s eye the world of your fiction seems to be going through a change—like the first prescience on its far horizon of a ship soon to be in sight, just under the curve. It was, too—it was The Galton Case, the book next to come. Zebra is another of the tall ships in the whole remarkable fleet that’s kept coming ever since. It’s strange, isn’t it, that novels have a power to move our imaginations in the same way that ships on the water do? But not really strange, either. They’re impelled by human dreams, and come from the hand of hopeful human beings, and reach destinations we pray will be human, like us.
Meanwhile There Are Letters Page 47