Meanwhile There Are Letters

by Suzanne Marrs

  38 Among the bestsellers jousting with Macdonald’s this season were Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, Jacqueline Susann’s Once Is Not Enough, and Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

  39 Art Buchwald (1925–2007) was a political satirist for the Washington Post and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes. During the Watergate hearings in a column critical of President Nixon, he parodied the popular television series based on John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga.

  40 Ken sent Eudora his book On Crime Writing (Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1973). The friend he mentions is Noel Young (1922–2002), who founded Capra Press.

  41 Ken’s letter appeared in the August 5, 1973, New York Times Book Review.

  42 Patrick O’Brian (1914–2000) is best known for writing the Aubrey/Maturin novels set on British ships during the Napoleonic Wars.

  43 Eudora Welty, “Writing and Analyzing a Story,” in The Eye of the Story, 114.

  44 The Wildflowers of the United States by Harold William Rickett, in six volumes with fourteen parts, was published between 1966 and 1973 and was completed before Russell’s death.

  45 All were friends of Eudora, and all had attended Eudora Welty Day in Jackson. Joan Kahn edited mystery novels, primarily at Harper & Row; Joan’s sister Olivia was an artist.

  46 Great Stories of Suspense, selected by Ross Macdonald, was published by Knopf in 1974.

  47 The xantu murrelet is one of the rarest seabirds in the world.

  48 Ken here alludes to Eudora’s short story “Petrified Man,” which was collected in her first book of stories, A Curtain of Green (1941).

  49 “Some Notes on Time in Fiction” was published in Mississippi Quarterly, 26 (Fall 1973); Eudora later collected it in the book Ken was urging her to prepare, The Eye of the Story.

  50 The distinguished scholar Leon Edel (1907–1997), who received a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for his work on Henry James, also wrote a biography of Willa Cather.

  51 Marsh’s protagonist Roderick Alleyn meets his future wife, Agatha Troy, a painter, in Artists in Crime (1938).

  52 Donald Alexander White Jr. was the first child born to Eudora’s niece Mary Alice and her husband Donny White.

  53 The Willa Cather Centennial Festival was held at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, Nebraska.

  54 Professional and administrative workers at the museum had begun this strike in October 1973, asking that the minimum starting wage be raised, that rights for union membership be expanded, and that workers have a voice in setting museum policy. The strike ended on November 29.

  55 Helen Eustis’s The Horizontal Man and Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock were both published in 1946. Fearing published several other novels; perhaps the disappointing novel to which Eudora refers is Loneliest Girl in the World, published in 1951.

  56 Symons’s The Plot Against Roger Rider was published in 1973.

  57 Richard Ader, the lawyer who handled Eudora’s investments, and his wife Tessa had attended Eudora Welty Day.

  58 No story by Patrick White appeared in the anthology.

  59 O’Brian’s H.M.S. Surprise, the third novel in the Aubrey/Maturin series, was briefly reviewed in the December 9, 1973, New York Times Book Review.

  60 Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 104.

  61 Reynolds Price, interview with Nolan, 340, and with Suzanne Marrs, Eudora Welty, A Biography (New York: Harcourt, 2005), 387.

  Chapter Four

  1 Frank MacShane (1927–1999), a member of the Columbia University faculty, was a literary scholar who took detective fiction quite seriously, refusing to ghettoize it. His biography The Life of Raymond Chandler was published to critical acclaim in 1976.

  2 Eudora seems to have sent Ken a recording of Sweet Emma and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band in concert at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis (1964). Sweet Emma Barrett (1897–1983) was a jazz pianist who ultimately played with the Preservation Hall ensemble; Alcide “Slow Drag” Pavageau was a jazz guitarist and bass player who ended his career playing at Preservation Hall. Brothers Willie Humphrey (clarinet) and Percy Humphrey (trumpet) were also mainstays at the same venue. Tommy Sancton is the son of journalist/novelist Tom Sancton and his wife Seta, who was Eudora’s lifelong friend from Jackson. Tom Scranton Jr. was the Paris Bureau chief for Time magazine from 1992–2001. His book Songs for My Fathers details his early experiences among the jazz greats of New Orleans.

  3 Eudora’s remarks at the Willa Cather Centennial were reprinted in part in the New York Times Book Review, January 27, 1974; Eudora would include the entire essay in her collection of nonfiction, The Eye of the Story, under the title “The House of Willa Cather.” William Koshland was the president of the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house.

  4 The records were ones included in the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz (1973).

  5 At Hollins College, Eudora had been honored with a two-day “Celebration for Eudora Welty” organized by Bill Smith, who was on the faculty there. Bill, Reynolds, and a number of scholars paid tribute to Eudora’s work, and Eudora responded with a reading from Losing Battles. None of this did she report to Ken. Her letters focused more on the personal than the professional.

  6 Stanley Gordon Moyer (1887–1968), Ken’s maternal uncle, was a painter and also a writer who published stories (and artwork) in Canadian magazines. Millar credited his Uncle Stanley with teaching him as a youth to see “with a painter’s eye.”

  7 Walter Clemons reviewed Joseph Blotner’s Faulkner: A Biography in the March 25, 1974, issue of Newsweek; Eudora reviewed Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in the March 24, 1974, New York Times Book Review.

  8 Ken refers to Joseph Blotner (1923–2012), whose massive, two-volume biography of Faulkner (1897–1962) had been criticized as heavy on detail and lacking in analysis.

  9 Barnaby Conrad (1922–2013), author of the best-selling 1952 novel Matador and several other works of fiction and nonfiction, had also fought bulls in Spain (where he’d been an American Vice Consul), served as secretary to Sinclair Lewis, and owned a night club in San Francisco. He met the Millars in Santa Barbara in the late 1940s. In 1973 he founded the Santa Barbara Writers Conference.

  10 William Frost (1917–1988) taught in the English Department at UC Santa Barbara from 1951 until his death.

  11 Millar to Welty, May 20, 1974, Eudora Welty Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

  12 Novelist Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) was at the time still married to his first wife; he and photographer Jill Krementz (1940–) would marry in 1979. Krementz is best known for her photographs of writers. She had previously photographed Eudora and in 1972 photographed Eudora and Reynolds Price together.

  13 When Millar received the inscribed photo of Welty from Krementz, he wrote the photographer of the qualities he saw reflected in it: “Pathos, gentleness, courage, feminine fluorescence and iron discipline, the blessed light at the windows. Your picture goes to the heart, as its subject does, and I am going to have to hang it on my wall” (June 11, 1974; typed copy, University of California, Irvine, Special Collections and Archives).

  14 Brad Darrach, interview with Nolan, 350–351.

  15 Eudora had sent Ken an article about Charles E. Wiggins, who was a Republican congressman from California. In the summer of 1974 he led the defense of President Richard Nixon as the Watergate Hearings began. The New York Times called him ‘’a silky Southern Californian who would feel at home in the pages of a Ross Macdonald detective novel” (R. W. Apple, “Wiggins, Sandman, Dennis: For Nixon, Outnumbered; Benign Explanations Three-Level Battle,” New York Times, July 30, 1974.).

  16 Eudora loved all the work by British writer V. S. Pritchett (1900–1997) and would be delighted to meet him when she visited England in 1979. They would become great friends.

  17 This book about the American who became world chess champion was called Bobby Fischer vs. the Re
st of the World (1974).

  18 Darrach’s interview of Ken appeared in the July 8, 1974, issue of People.

  19 Eudora’s essay “Is Phoenix Jackson’s Grandson Really Dead?” appeared in Critical Inquiry 1 (September 1974). In this essay, she dealt with a question readers of her short story “A Worn Path” had often put to her. She would later include the essay in The Eye of the Story.

  20 Eudora has sent Ken a short piece, which seems to be by Josephine Jacobsen (1908–2003), poet and short story writer, who served as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress between 1971 and 1973.

  21 Eudora is referring to Margaret and to incidents related in her book The Birds and the Beasts Were There. “Guardian” is an interesting word choice, especially when not followed by “angel.”

  Chapter Five

  1 Eudora’s review of Bowen’s Pictures and Conversations appeared in the January 5, 1974, New York Times Book Review. Her 1943 essay “A Pageant of Birds,” along with photographs Eudora had taken of African American cast members at the Farish Street Baptist Church, had received separate publication by Albondocani Press in 1974. Both pieces can be found in The Eye of the Story.

  2 Eudora is anticipating an invitation to the Santa Barbara Writers Conference from Barnaby Conrad, its director.

  3 The film Chinatown (1974) starred Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, and John Huston; it was directed by Roman Polanski. Robert Towne won an Oscar for its screenplay.

  4 Eudora reviewed Patrick White’s novel The Cockatoos in the January 19, 1975, New York Times Book Review and subsequently put this essay in The Eye of the Story. White (1912–1990) was born in England, but lived in Australia from the age of six months; he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, the first Australian to do so.

  5 The Drowning Pool was directed by Stuart Rosenberg and starred Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Its lead character was called Lew Harper rather than Lew Archer. Newman had made a 1967 movie called Harper, which was directed by Jack Smight and based on Ken’s novel The Moving Target.

  6 The 1934 mystery by Agatha Christie (1890–1976) was a 1974 movie with an all-star cast, including Albert Finney, Sean Connery, Lauren Bacall, and Ingrid Bergman, who won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress.

  7 Ring Lardner penned this couplet as one of a series in a take-off on Cole Porter’s song “Night and Day.” It appeared in a 1936 New Yorker column.

  8 The musical version of Eudora’s The Robber Bridegroom, with book by Alfred Uhry (1936–) and music by Robert Waldman (1936–), opened in Saratoga with Kevin Kline and Patti LuPone in the starring roles.

  9 The film about Eudora aired on PBS as one of an eight-part series called The Writer in America. Another of the episodes would be devoted to Ross Macdonald.

  10 The English writer Eric Ambler (1909–1998) was one of the most significant authors of espionage fiction in the twentieth century. Among his best-known works are A Coffin for Dimitrios, Journey into Fear, and Passage of Arms.

  11 Updike’s review appeared in the April 14, 1975, New Yorker. Wright Morris (1910–1998) was an American novelist, photographer, and essayist. Novelist John Updike (1932–2009) was a frequent reviewer for the New Yorker.

  12 Eudora’s novellas The Ponder Heart and The Robber Bridegroom became Broadway plays, but she did not write the scripts.

  13 Eudora’s notes for introducing Ken are held at the University of California, Irvine. Ken’s introduction of her is part of the Welty Collection at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. A somewhat abbreviated version of his text is included in Self Portrait: Ceaselessly into the Past.

  14 Mary Conrad, who along with her husband Barnaby directed the conference, kept a scrapbook with clippings that document the 1975 date of this presentation. Herbert Harker identifies it as 1976 (“Excavating Myself,” Dialogue 11 [Summer 1978]: 62), but seems to be mistaken.

  15 The PBS series The Writer in America was produced by Richard O. Moore and Phil Greene.

  16 Margaret Millar to Eudora Welty, June 30, 1975, Eudora Welty Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

  17 John Leonard, “I Care Who Killed Roger Ackroyd,” Esquire, August 1975, 60–61, 120.

  18 Eudora’s gratitude for being able to “non-lecture,” perhaps indicates that her formal presentation was short, twenty minutes or so, or perhaps that it was not newly minted. An uncropped “Words into Fiction,” from which her presentation was drawn, had been first published in 1962.

  19 Virginia Kidd, a professor of communications studies at California State University–Sacramento, had attended the Santa Barbara Writers Conference where she took a photo of Ken and Eudora.

  20 Frederick Zackel, “Have You Ever Thought about Doing Something Serious . . . Like Detective Fiction,” January Magazine, April 1999. http://januarymagazine.com/features/zackel.html.

  21 Cliff Finch (1927–1986), whose subsequent administration would be marred by scandal, defeated William Winter (1923–), who would later be elected and become Mississippi’s most progressive governor.

  22 Bruccoli’s The O’Hara Concern: A Biography of John O’Hara was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1975.

  23 Oakley Hall (1920–2008) was a California novelist best known for his books about the American West.

  24 Evidently, a house built for Jordan Lambert (1851–1889), an inventor of Listerine mouthwash, or his son, Gerald B. Lambert (1886–1967), the president of Lambert Pharmaceutical Corporation.

  25 The Great Gatsby was made as a feature film in 1926, 1949, 1974, and again in 2013 (starring Leonardo DiCaprio). It was also made as a movie for television in 2000.

  26 Alfred Knopf published his book Sixty Photographs to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of his publishing business. The included photographs were ones he had taken of notable individuals he had met.

  27 Eudora’s A Fairy Tale of the Natchez Trace, an essay dealing with her book The Robber Bridegroom, was given separate publication by the Mississippi Historical Society in 1975; her essay “The Corner Store” appeared in Esquire’s December 1975 issue. Both pieces are included in The Eye of the Story.

  28 This 1970 film of Chekhov’s play starred Laurence Olivier, Alan Bates, and Joan Plowright; it was directed by Olivier and John Sichel.

  Chapter Six

  1 William Campbell Gault, interview with Nolan, 365.

  2 Precognitively or not, Ask for Me Tomorrow (Random House, 1976) involved, among other things, a wife dealing with a husband whose memory is disintegrating: “What else had he forgotten? A minute here, a week there, or great whole chunks of time? Things were moving inside his head, in directions he could no longer control. Sometimes they met and merged, or they broke off and parts disappeared.”

  3 Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow (1915–2005) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1976.

  4 The Coral Casino was the beach club, across from the Santa Barbara Biltmore, to which the Millars had belonged for over a quarter-century.

  5 This 1860 novel is, along with The Moonstone (1868), one of two masterpieces by Wilkie Collins (1824–1889), a contemporary, friend of, and influence on Charles Dickens.

  6 Ken has garbled the facts of Christie’s biography, which was not nearly as well known in 1976 as it would become through later books and movies, including Richard Hack’s Duchess of Death (Phoenix Books, 2009).

  7 Welty to Millar, July 28, 1976.

  8 Other participants in the National Book Critics Circle panel led by Nona Balakian in which Ken took part, at Columbia’s Low Library, included Hortense Calisher, Wilfrid Sheed, and Anatole Broyard.

  9 Eudora neglects to say that she was going to Chapel Hill to receive an honorary degree from the University of North Carolina.

  10 Rosie Russell was the widow of Eudora’s agent Diarmuid.

  11 British mystery writer Dick Francis (1920–2010), a former jockey, depicts the world of horse racing in his novels.

  12 John Franklin Bardin (1916–1981) was an American mystery writ
er whose reputation rested on novels published in the late 1940s.

  13 Michael Woods reviewed The Blue Hammer in the June 13, 1976, New York Times Book Review. Eudora’s copy had arrived in advance of the publication date.

  14 Eudora Welty to Margaret Millar, [July 1976], Eudora Welty Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History. In this letter Eudora mentions her reading of “Where Is the Voice Coming From?”—a story first published in 1963 in the New Yorker.

  15 Eudora Welty, interview with Nolan, 369–70.

  16 The Blue Dahlia was an original screenplay by Raymond Chandler published in 1976. The 1946 film starred Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake.

  17 The British romantic painters John Constable (1776–1837) and J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) were contemporaries of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), about whom Ken had written his PhD dissertation.

  18 The fictional painter Richard Chantry looms large in Ross Macdonald’s The Blue Hammer.

  19 In New York, Nelson took Millar to a David Forman recording session. In Santa Barbara, Paul introduced Ken to singer-songwriter Warren Zevon, a great Macdonald fan, who later dedicated his 1980 LP Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School to the novelist.

  20 Previews of The Robber Bridegroom began on September 28, 1976, at the Biltmore Theatre on Broadway; the show opened on October 9 and ran until February 13, 1977.

  21 Eudora’s front-page review appeared on November 14, 1976, and was later collected in The Eye of the Story.

  22 As opposed, of course, to the narrator of Eudora’s famous story “Why I Live at the P.O.”

  23 Ken had been to Europe and back—without benefit of Maggie, who at the last moment chose to stay home and continue work on her new novel.

  24 Ken refers to the Tate Gallery in London where so many Turners and Constables were part of the collection.

  25 From October 1949 to June 1950, Eudora traveled about Europe, making an extended stay in Florence, where John Robinson was studying. Her friend Dolly Wells, a Jacksonian who now worked in the New York City publishing world, came for a May and June 1950 tour of Italy, and the two old friends joined William Jay Smith and his wife Barbara Howes, both poets, for a visit to Venice.