Meanwhile There Are Letters

by Suzanne Marrs

  12 Perhaps Frank MacShane, who had written an earlier biography of Ford, and Ford himself, who was known to friends as “Fordie.”

  13 Welty had evidently purchased or been given a photograph of Ford Madox Ford, which she in turn gave to Millar and he to Ford’s daughter.

  14 “Henry Green: A Novelist of the Imagination,” Texas Quarterly, 4 (Autumn 1961): 246–56. This essay was later collected in The Eye of the Story.

  15 This letter is not part of the Eudora Welty Collection at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History but is owned by Dr. Lucius Lampton, a publisher of the literary journal China Grove. An image of the letter was printed in 2013 in the first issue of the journal as was an image of the inscribed cover of a Doubleday, Doran pamphlet featuring “The Key.”

  16 Eudora had known Albert Erskine (1911–1993) from his days at the Southern Review. Erskine became an editor at Random House in 1947 and by 1959 was a vice president and editorial director there.

  17 May Sarton (1912–1995) was an American poet, memoirist, and novelist.

  18 Millar to Alfred and Helen Knopf, May 28, 1971, Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin; Eudora Welty, interview with Tom Nolan, Ross Macdonald: A Biography (New York: Scribner, 1999), 311.

  19 Richard Lingeman, “The Underground Bye-Bye,” New York Times Book Review, June 6, 1971, 6.

  20 Poet and critic Allen Tate (1899–1979) was one of the original Nashville Agrarians and served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1943 to 1944. He was a longtime friend of Eudora’s. Previously married to writers Caroline Gordon and Isabella Gardner, Tate was now married to Helen Heinz, the mother of his two sons.

  21 The book was The Composition of Tender Is the Night: A Study of the Manuscripts (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963).

  22 Matthew Bruccoli’s Kenneth Millar/Ross Macdonald. A Checklist with an introduction by Kenneth Millar was published by Gale Research Company in 1971.

  23 Ring Lardner (1885–1933) was an American satirist who wrote sports columns, short stories, and plays. What of It? was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1925.

  24 A biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife by Nancy Milford was titled Zelda: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).

  25 American poet, novelist, and critic Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) and Eudora had long been friends; in the 1930s, even before they met, Warren as editor of the Southern Review had accepted a number of Eudora’s stories on behalf of the magazine.

  26 Duncan Aswell, the son of Eudora’s close friend Mary Lou Aswell, had abandoned his position as a professor at Haverford College and then disappeared. His mother was frantic with worry, but eventually he sent word via a friend that he was all right and would be in touch. Eudora had earlier told Mary Lou about meeting Ken and had reported: “I had the strangest feeling that it ought to be possible to ask him personally to find D. and that he could do it—but even so I felt it was a sign” (Eudora Welty to Mary Lou Aswell, [June 11, 1971], Eudora Welty Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History).

  27 The ambassador R. A. D. Ford (1915–1998), with whom Ken attended the University of Western Ontario in 1937–38, was also a distinguished poet, winner of the Governor General’s Award in 1956. He was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1971.

  28 The Apollo 14 mission during which Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell walked on the moon.

  29 Andrei Andreyevich Voznesensky (1933–2010) was a Soviet and Russian poet of international renown. He would eventually tell Bob Ford of his great enjoyment in reading the fiction of Ross Macdonald, both in English and in Russian translation.

  30 William Jay Smith (1918–) is an American poet, who from 1968–1970 served as the nineteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Smith and his first wife, the poet Barbara Howes, were living in Florence in 1950 when Eudora spent some time there. A common friend, John Robinson, introduced them.

  31 In her biography of Zelda, Nancy Milford quoted a line Zelda had written to her psychiatrist and added a note: “I believed I was a Salamander [Zelda may have been referring to the mythical salamander, which was able to live in fire and endure it without harm.—N.M.] and it seems that I am nothing but an impediment” (176). Eudora felt that Milford was oblivious to a common southern practice of looking for the salamander in a fire. And Eudora further suggests that Zelda’s statement is hauntingly prophetic of her eventual death in a fire at Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina.

  32 Donald Duart Maclean (1913–1983) was an English diplomat, one of the so-called “Cambridge Five” who became spies for the Soviet Union; he was stationed in Washington from 1944 to 1948 and defected to Moscow in 1951. Kim Philby (1912–1988), another of the Cambridge Five, fled to the USSR in 1963.

  33 Novelist and critic Wilfrid Sheed (1930–2011) attacked the detective story genre in an essay “The Good Word: It All Depends on Your Genre” (New York Times Book Review, September 5, 1971, 2). He began his piece by writing: “In movies, they’re called genre writers; in real life they’re called hacks. [. . .] Occasionally some ingenious rogue tries to smuggle a genre-hack into literature. In recent months, P. G. Wodehouse, Ross Macdonald, James Cain and others have all turned up on the front page of the Book Review with prodigious references. [. . .] Each of these writers has, in fact, some interesting claims: yet they have it in common that when they are approached as major writers they lose all their strength, and don’t even seem as good as they are.”

  34 Alexei Kosygin (1904-1980) was premier of the Soviet Union from 1964-1980.

  35 Dick Diver, a psychiatrist character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night, attains psychological and professional maturity (in Ken’s interpretation) only toward the end of the book, when he leaves Europe and moves back to his native America.

  36 Margaret’s book described Ken standing on the roof during a forest fire and watering down their house with a garden hose.

  37 This statement may be translated as saying: “One sees what, in this history of crime passed on through many generations, can seduce a southern novelist like Eudora Welty. The Underground Man has in effect seen itself accorded the privilege, without precedent for a detective novel, of an article on the first page of the New York Times Book Review, signed by Miss Welty, whose public interventions are, however, extremely rare.”

  38 Permanent Errors, a collection of stories by Reynolds Price, was published in 1970 and is dedicated to Eudora Welty.

  Chapter Two

  1 Paul Theroux, “The Details of Death,” Washington Post Book World, May 14, 1972, 35; Howard Moss, “Eudora Welty’s New Novel about Death and Class,” New York Times Book Review, May 21, 1972, 1.

  2 Dame Ngaio Marsh (1895–1982), a native and resident of New Zealand, was a mystery writer whose novels featured Detective Roderick Alleyn and were primarily set in England. In 1966, she was named a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

  3 Brendan Gill’s review of One Time, One Place appeared in the December 25, 1971, issue of the New Yorker.

  4 Eudora’s friends were Mary Lou Aswell (1902–1984) and the painter Agnes Sims (1910–1990).

  5 The distinguished American writer Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) championed Eudora Welty’s fiction and wrote the introduction for Eudora’s first book of stories.

  6 The Iron Gates (1945), Margaret Millar’s sixth novel, and her third for Random House, was a critical and commercial hit and was bought for filming by Warner Bros. (though no movie was made). Its success enabled her to buy the Millars’ first house in Santa Barbara.

  7 Clifford Irving’s purported interviews with Howard Hughes were revealed to be fakes, and The Memoirs of Chief Red Fox were discovered to contain plagiarized materials. McGraw Hill was and was to be the publisher of each book.

  8 In 1971 the Compact Oxford English Dictionary was first published in two volumes. Because of reduced print size, it included every word f
rom the thirteen-volume set. The two-volume edition came with its own magnifying glass.

  9 This never-published story may be one that exists in draft form under the titles “Nicotiana” and “The Last of the Figs.” It is part of the Eudora Welty Collection at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

  10 Eudora Welty, The Optimist’s Daughter (New York: Random House, 1972), 159–160. See Eudora’s letter of May 11, 1971, and Ken’s of July 2, 1971.

  11 Jon Carroll, “Ross Macdonald in Raw California,” Esquire, June 1972, 148–149, 188.

  12 Walter Clemons reviewed The Optimist’s Daughter in the May 22, 1972, issue of Newsweek. Howard Moss, poetry editor of the New Yorker and a poet himself, reviewed the book for the New York Times Book Review (May 21, 1972). And James Boatwright, editor of the literary review Shenandoah, reviewed The Optimist’s Daughter in the June 10, 1972, issue of The New Republic.

  13 Alan Pryce-Jones reviewed The Optimist’s Daughter in the July 14, 1972, Times Literary Supplement.

  14 British biologist Julian Huxley (1887–1975) was the author of a Middle East travelogue titled From an Antique Land first published in 1954.

  15 Stephen Fay, Lewis Chester, and Magnus Linklater, HOAX: The Inside Story of the Howard Hughes–Clifford Irving Affair (New York: Viking, 1972; Bantam, 1972).

  16 Henry Mitchell’s interview with Eudora appeared in the August 13, 1972, Washington Post and is reprinted in Peggy Prenshaw’s Conversations with Eudora Welty (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984).

  17 The Santa Claus Bank Robbery (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972) by A. C. Greene was based on an actual 1927 robbery in Cisco, Texas.

  18 Mystery writer H. C. Branson (1904–1981) published The Leaden Bubble in 1949 (Simon and Schuster).

  19 James Meriwether, “An Introduction to The Sound and the Fury,” Southern Review 8 (Autumn 1972): 705–10.

  20 Eudora refers to Ken’s novel The Zebra-Striped Hearse (1962).

  21 Charles Bunting’s interview with Eudora appeared in the Southern Review, 8 (October 1972) and is reprinted in Prenshaw’s Conversations with Eudora Welty.

  22 On December 12, 1972, Eudora Welty and Walker Percy were interviewed in Jackson, Mississippi, by William F. Buckley Jr. for his public television program Firing Line. The taped interview aired on PBS on December 24, 1972. A transcript appears in Prenshaw, Conversations with Eudora Welty.

  Chapter Three

  1 The Christmas Bird Count, sponsored by the Audubon Society, is an annual census of birds in the Western Hemisphere, undertaken by volunteers. In any given area, the census may occur on a day from December 14 to January 5.

  2 Evidently, in a missing letter or a phone call, Ken told Eudora of seeing the program, which in his last letter of 1972 he reported having missed.

  3 David L. Chappell, Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), xxv.

  4 Hugh Kenner describes the lessons in narrative given him by Ken Millar in the essay “Learning,” written for the anthology Inward Journey, edited by Ralph B. Sipper in 1984.

  5 Ken was mistaken. His 1965 Show piece, “The Writer as Detective Hero,” became the lead essay of a 1973 Capra Press “chapbook” (On Crime Writing) Millar later this year sent Welty, and would still later be included in Self-Portrait: Ceaselessly Into the Past (1981), edited by Ralph B. Sipper (with a foreword by Eudora Welty). Ken’s 1953 Ann Arbor lecture, “The Scene of the Crime,” would be printed in the anthology Inward Journey.

  6 Ken refers to the three essays that Smith College published in 1962 under the title Three Papers on Fiction. Included were Eudora’s essays “Place in Fiction,” “Words into Fiction,” and “The Short Story.”

  7 Producer-director Craig Gilbert told the Los Angeles Times (January 11, 1973): “The American culture is fashioned on California. [. . .] I read Ross Macdonald’s ‘The Underground Man’ and he described with absolute accuracy the kind of family I was looking for. I found he lived in Santa Barbara and called him up. He invited me out. He had a lot of newspaper people over from the Santa Barbara News-Press and we talked [. . .] [S]omeone [. . .] from the staff of the paper [. . .] told me about the Louds,” eventual subjects of An American Family.

  8 This production did not materialize.

  9 Eudora did indeed catch up with this essay; it had been published in the Virginia Quarterly Review in the spring of 1955. The editor was Charlotte Kohler.

  10 This British film from Ealing Studios was first screened in 1945.

  11 Eudora was named to the National Council on the Arts by President Nixon and served on the Council from 1972 to 1978.

  12 On February 21, 1973, Southern California experienced an earthquake centered in Point Mugu. This quake came two years to the month after the 1971 Sylmar temblor, which caused the water in the Millars’ Santa Barbara swimming pool, 90 miles to the north, to overflow.

  13 Æ was the pseudonym of the writer George William Russell (1867–1935), an Irish nationalist, poet, mystic, and theosophist.

  14 John Buchan (1875–1940), a Scot and the first Baron Tweedsmuir, served as the Governor General of Canada from 1935 till his death. He was also a novelist; his spy thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps is perhaps his most well-known book. Millar heard him give a high school commencement address in 1938, and this would prove a spark to his career.

  15 Eudora first met Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) in 1950 when she was invited to Bowen’s Court, Bowen’s home in Ireland; the two writers became fast friends, who visited each other in the United States and the British Isles.

  16 The formal name of this Natchez, Mississippi, house is Longwood.

  17 Henri “Hank” Coulette, who lived and taught in Los Angeles, became friends with Millar in 1965 and used a line from Ross Macdonald’s The Ferguson Affair in his poem “The Blue-Eyed Precinct Worker.” Ken later took Hank’s poetic phrase describing the pulse-beat for the title of his final novel, The Blue Hammer.

  18 Jean Gabin (1904–1976) was a French film star and the winner of the Legion d’Honneur.

  19 British writer Jean Overton Fuller’s book Double Webs, published by Putnam and Co. in 1958, details her investigation into the betrayal of British secret agent Noor Inayat Khan, an Indian woman who was the first female radio operator sent into occupied France during World War II.

  20 This seems to be the second time Ken has sent the TLS review; “Eudora Welty, The Art of Fiction No. 47,” Paris Review 55 (Fall 1972): 72–97—Linda Kuehl conducted the interview in May 1970 in New York.

  21 The dedication page of Sleeping Beauty reads simply “To Eudora Welty,” but in Eudora’s copy Ken has written under these words, “my good angel/with gratitude and love/Ken.”

  22 Herb Caen (1916–1997) was a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. In 1996 he received a special Pulitzer Prize.

  23 Anthony Boucher was the pseudonym of William Anthony Parker White. Boucher (1911–1968) was a science fiction editor, author of mystery novels, and reviewer of mystery fiction. He highly admired Ross Macdonald. The photographer was Hal Boucher, who was the house photographer for the Biltmore Hotel in Santa Barbara.

  24 To interviewer Sam Weller, Bradbury would later say he was especially struck by Welty’s “remarkable ability to give you atmosphere, character, and motion in a single line.” “Ray Bradbury, The Art of Fiction No. 203,” Paris Review 192 (Spring 2010), http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6012/the-art-of-fiction-no-203-ray-bradbury.

  25 Millar to Green, May 7, 1973, University of California, Irvine, Special Collections and Archives.

  26 Nona Balakian (1919–1991) was a reviewer and editor for the New York Times Book Review. She and Eudora first met in 1944 when Eudora worked at the Book Review for several months. Balakian came to Jackson for Eudora Welty Day, and her article about the festivities, titled “A Day of One’s Own: The Last Word,” was published on page 23 in the May 27, 1973, New York Times Book Review. Kenneth Mill
ar to Julian Symons, May 7, 1973, courtesy of Julian Symons.

  27 Eudora Welty, Losing Battles (New York: Random House, 1970), 362.

  28 Millar to Symons, May 7, 1973; Welty, interview with Nolan, 340.

  29 Mary Lou Aswell had been a fiction editor for Harper’s Bazaar, but had since moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Eudora had earlier discussed the disappearance of Mary Lou’s son, Duncan, with Ken without mentioning their names. See note 26, Chapter One.

  30 Crawford Woods, “The [sic] Sleeping Beauty, Another Case for Lew Archer,” New York Times Book Review, May 20, 1973, 55; Anatole Broyard, “The Case of the Quick Read,” New York Times, May 21, 1973; the New Republic review appeared on page 29 of the June 2, 1973, issue.

  31 Reynolds Price to Eudora Welty, June 4, 1973, Eudora Welty Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

  32 The Portable Irish Reader, edited by Diarmuid Russell, was published by Viking in 1946.

  33 Eudora had received an honorary degree from Queens College (now Queens University of Charlotte).

  34 Peter S. Prescott (1935–2004) was the senior book reviewer at Newsweek.

  35 Ken himself had been one of the protestors so chased.

  36 John Prince and his wife Catherine were good friends of Eudora’s. Prince dealt in real estate in Washington, DC, and had been introduced to Eudora by his distant cousin, the writer Caroline Gordon. Martha Mitchell was the hard-drinking, flamboyant, press-phoning wife of former attorney general and 1972 Nixon campaign director John Mitchell, who would eventually be convicted for his part in the Watergate scandal.

  37 Eudora did accept and preserve her correspondence with Diarmuid, ultimately giving it to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. The letters are the subject of Michael Kreyling’s book Author and Agent (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991).