Meanwhile There Are Letters Read online

  Compilation, introduction, and commentary copyright © 2015 by Suzanne Marrs and Tom Nolan

  Correspondence copyright © 2015 by Eudora Welty, LLC, and the Margaret Millar Charitable Remainder Unitrust u/a 4/12/82.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Meanwhile there are letters : the correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald / edited and with an introduction by Suzanne Marrs and Tom Nolan.—First edition.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-62872-527-8 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-62872-548-3 (ebook)

  1. Welty, Eudora, 1909-2001—Correspondence. 2. Macdonald, Ross, 1915–1983—Correspondence. 3. Authors, American—20th century—Correspondence. I. Marrs, Suzanne, editor. II. Nolan, Tom, editor.

  PS3545.E6Z48 2015

  813’.52—dc23

  [B] 2015005957

  Cover design by Georgia Morrissey

  Cover photograph of Eudora Welty © by Charles Nicholas, courtesy The Commercial Appeal-Candow Media; cover photograph of Ross Macdonald © by Hal Boucher

  Printed in the United States of America

  To

  Rowan Taylor – SM

  and

  Loretta Weingel-Fidel – TN

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER ONE “I love and need and learn from my friends, they are the continuity of my life.”: 1970–1971

  CHAPTER TWO “We haven’t known each other terribly long, but we know each other well.”: 1972

  CHAPTER THREE “Love—& connections”: 1973

  CHAPTER FOUR “If one of your letters could be rotten there’d be nothing sound left in heaven or on earth.”: 1974

  CHAPTER FIVE “Simple but infinitely complex expressions of love and courtesy”: 1975

  CHAPTER SIX “I dreamed I was sending you the dream I was dreaming.”: 1976

  CHAPTER SEVEN “Sometimes your insight is so dazzling that I have to shut my eyes.”: 1977

  CHAPTER EIGHT “Our friendship blesses my life and I wish life could be longer for it.”: 1978

  CHAPTER NINE “What we need is one another.”: 1979

  CHAPTER TEN “Every day of my life I think of you with love.”: 1980–1982

  APPENDIX “Henry,” an unfinished story by Eudora Welty

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  INDEX

  Introduction

  “You are in my thoughts every day and dear to my heart.”

  —Eudora Welty to Kenneth Millar, October 30, 1981

  “Pathos, gentleness, courage, feminine fluorescence and iron discipline, the blessed light at the windows.”

  —Kenneth Millar, describing Eudora Welty, June 11, 19741

  ON the afternoon of Monday, May 17, 1971, mystery writer Ross Macdonald—alias Kenneth Millar, of Santa Barbara, California—was engaged in a bit of real-life detection in the lobby of New York City’s legendary Algonquin Hotel. Alerted by savvy Manhattan colleagues, he was on a stakeout, hoping to encounter Eudora Welty, the world-famous, award-winning, bestselling author from Jackson, Mississippi, with whom he had been corresponding for a year and who had recently given his novel The Underground Man a rave on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. His stakeout paid off. As Welty approached the hotel elevator, Millar/Macdonald went up to her and introduced himself. Abandoning whatever plans she had had, Welty was thrilled to sit and talk with the man whose written words meant so much to her.

  Millar had begun their correspondence with a 1970 letter praising Welty’s novel Losing Battles, and they had in the past year exchanged messages ranging from the very personal—Millar’s grief at the death of his daughter—to the literary—Welty’s review of Ford Madox Ford’s biography. They had come to believe that, through their separate links to Ford, their lives were powerfully connected. “When I got your letter today,” Millar had written to Welty on April 20, “something went through me like a vibration of light, as if I had had a responsive echo from a distant star.” And she had responded, “Thank you for telling me this, which has made me a part of some perfect occurrence. Nothing ever gave me that feeling before, and I doubt if anything ever will again.”2 Then the “Algonquin magic” of meeting face to face convinced both Eudora and Ken that the perfect occurrence had not ended.

  When Ken set out two days later for his native Canada, he sent a note to Eudora: “I never thought I’d hate to leave New York, but I do. I feel an unaccustomed sorrow not to be able to continue our friendship viva voce, and in the flesh, but these are the chances of life. But there is a deeper and happier chance which will keep us friends till death, don’t you believe? And we’ll walk and talk again. Till then, Ken.” A postscript immediately followed: “Meanwhile there are letters.”

  Indeed there were—enough to prompt an extravagant rhetorical question: Was there an epistolary romance of literary masters in the twentieth century more discreet, intense, heartfelt, and moving than the one between Eudora Welty and Kenneth Millar, who exchanged hundreds of letters between 1970 and 1982? Though a small fraction of their correspondence seems to have been lost, there remain some 345 pieces—more of them by Welty than by Macdonald, whose Alzheimer’s disease stopped him from writing after May 1980, while Welty continued to send him messages until she was convinced, eight months or so before his death in 1983, that he could no longer comprehend them.3 Those letters reveal the loving friendship of two writers, a single woman in Mississippi and a married man in California, whose unique bond at once observed the proprieties and expanded the boundaries of how close two kindred, creative people might become through thought, will, and the written word.

  These two authors command devoted followings both in halls of academe and the territory beyond. Welty, called the “finest fiction writer of our time” by critic Cleanth Brooks and the “greatest short story writer of our time” by novelist Ann Patchett, received awards ranging from the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the French Legion of Honor and continues to inspire much scholarly inquiry.4 Many a critic has attempted to explain the mysteries in her stories while others have recognized that unresolved mystery is the essence of both their genius and their widespread appeal. Macdonald has received more popular but less scholarly attention. Nevertheless, John Leonard, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called Macdonald a “major American novelist,” and Michael Kreyling more recently asserted that Macdonald grafted “the detective novel successfully to the main branches of the American novel.” Welty, the serious writer who deals in mystery and who became a cultural icon, and Macdonald, the detective novelist whose impact transcends generic limitations, made quite a pair—both aesthetically and personally.5

  Early experiences did little to portend the confluences that would envelop the lives of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald.

  Born in 1909 in Jac
kson, Mississippi, Eudora grew up in a sheltered and stable environment. She and her two younger brothers were cherished by doting parents. Christian Welty provided well for his family as he moved up through the ranks of the Lamar Life Insurance Company in Jackson, and Chestina Welty, a former teacher, managed the household. The family was a close-knit one, and rectitude was a given for each family member. The children obtained a good education at the grade school across the street from their home and at the high school a half mile away. Eudora, after graduating from Central High at age sixteen, attended the Mississippi State College for Women for two years, because her parents felt she was too young to venture further afield. Only then did she continue her education at the University of Wisconsin and later at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business, compiling as stellar a record at these institutions as she had at ones closer to home.

  For Ken Millar there was no shelter. Born in 1915 in Los Gatos, California, he would not know a stable home life for many years. His Canadian parents almost immediately moved their family to Vancouver, where his father, John Macdonald Millar, became the pilot of a harbor boat and where his parents quarreled often with each other. Then in 1920 Annie Millar, left by her husband, took her son back to Kitchener, Ontario, where she had grown up. For the next nine years, Kennie would be shuffled from one relative to another, from one rooming house to another, from Kitchener to Wiarton to Winnipeg to Medicine Hat, and back to Kitchener. His sexual initiations, both heterosexual and homosexual, came early, as did his forays into theft and his acquaintance with pimps, prostitutes, and con artists. He was a bright student who did well in class until the fall semester of his senior year in high school, when he lost the will to excel and saw his scholastic standing plummet. Ultimately, he resolved to stop this downward slide and with the help of teachers managed to right his life and his grades. Henceforth, he would adhere to rigid standards of morality and an almost Puritan work ethic. His hopes for a college education were thwarted, though, until his father died, leaving a sum that paid for four years of study at University of Western Ontario. Ultimately, Kenneth would enter the University of Michigan and earn a PhD with a dissertation on Coleridge.

  Though shelter marked Eudora’s early life and its absence marked Ken’s, such divergence did not last nor negate the powerful forces that would unite them. Their careers began within three years of each other—Eudora published her first story in 1936, Ken in 1939; both had their writing delayed by World War II, Ken more than Eudora because he served in the US Navy during these years. Each moved soon afterward into an established career and eventual critical acclaim, Eudora first and more fully. Her many awards, besides the Presidential Medal of Freedom and French Legion of Honor, would include the Gold Medal for Fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, a National Book Award, a Pulitzer Prize, and thirty-eight honorary degrees; her fiction would be taught at colleges and universities around the globe; and she’d be the first living writer published by the Library of America. Ken’s writing career developed more slowly—he received Gold and Silver Dagger Awards from the British Crime Writers Association, a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America, the first Award of Merit bestowed by the Popular Culture Association, and the Los Angeles Times’s Robert Kirsch Award for his distinguished body of work about the West. Thirty-two years after his death, and seventeen years after publishing Welty, the Library of America at last brought out Macdonald’s work, including him in the grand pantheon of American writers.

  Eudora and Ken were both true to their talents, committed to the writing life—Eudora to serious fiction, though she saw such fiction as having mystery at its core; Ken to the writing of mysteries, though he defined complex possibilities for the genre. Each saw writing not as a way of focusing upon self but as a way of expanding experience and understanding of the world beyond. Each loved language, the rhythms, the images, the idioms that constitute an individual sentence. Each saw reading, reading widely, as complementing and enriching the writing life. And each longed to share life with a partner who felt the same way.

  Eudora had thought fellow Mississippian John Robinson might be that partner. She had known him from their high school days together and had traveled with him, his brother, and his sister to Mexico in 1937. When he returned from service in World War II, she helped him type and revise stories, sent his stories to magazines, asked her agent to represent him, and praised his work. In 1947, she made extended stays in San Francisco, where he had moved. Then, in 1950, he followed her to Europe, where she was enjoying a Guggenheim Fellowship. But John ultimately lacked the drive, the commitment to writing that was Eudora’s. And John eventually realized that his strongest commitment would be to a man, not to any woman, not even to Eudora, whom he loved as a friend.

  Ken had met his future wife, Margaret Sturm, while they were both high school students in Kitchener, Ontario, had begun a relationship with her late in his college career, and had married her the day after graduating. A year later their daughter, Linda, was born. Like Ken, Maggie wanted to be a writer, and she became a published mystery author before her husband did. But sharing the writing life did not make for happy family relationships. The Millars early on fought with each other and subjected their child to the conflict. Their marriage, though much more companionable in time, came to be one of almost separate lives beneath one roof. Still, Ken honored the vow “till death do us part” and expected others to do likewise.

  But by 1977 Ken knew Eudora well and surely sensed that they could have managed a truer union of writing lives than he and Margaret had achieved. When a Santa Barbara couple he counted as friends decided to separate, Ken told Eudora that this decision “convinced me of what I didn’t use to believe, that divorce could be a suitable end to a marriage.”6 Yet a divorce of his own was not forthcoming. Margaret was in poor health and needed him, and Ken was already caught in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. He had relished Eudora’s living presence for a few days in New York in 1971 and in Jackson in 1973; the two had shared weeklong summer visits at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference in 1975, 1976, and 1977, with Margaret also in attendance. But they would not meet again until 1982. If Ken briefly nursed a change of heart, it had come too late.

  It was not, however, and had never been, too late for a different order of intimacy to prosper between them. In letters Welty and Macdonald brought their stylistic powers to bear on a wide range of topics. They expressed their admiration for and reliance on each other. They discussed the writing process, the translation of life into fiction, and the nature of the writer’s block each encountered. They looked back at literary history: Eudora reported on reading Middlemarch for the first time while she was in New York, of rushing back to the Algonquin at day’s end with the “delicious” prospect of reading more; Ken praised Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove as “marvellously wrought” but “overcharged with electricity.” And they commented on many other writers that they loved: Ford Madox Ford, Anton Chekhov, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor, Henry Green, Katherine Anne Porter, Elizabeth Bowen, Wilkie Collins, John Buchan, Ring Lardner, Dashiell Hammett, and Margaret Millar among them.

  Their shared interests, of course, extended beyond the world of fiction. They often discussed political leaders and public issues. Eudora described a National Council on the Arts meeting with President Nixon in the Oval Office: “I felt a bad hypocrite to touch him. (I who had never missed a session of Watergate.)”; she and Ken both deplored the Christmas 1972 bombing of Hanoi; and he passionately declared “the really great threat of the future” to be “the mishandling of oil tankers in the world ocean.”7

  Letters about their separate and common friends further marked the confluence of their lives. Ken told Eudora about Herb Harker: his attempts to become a writer, the death of his wife, his devotion to his young sons, and the eventual publication of his novel Goldenrod. He told her about Fred Zackel, a young cab driver and aspiring novelist whom they both ha
d met in Santa Barbara, whom Ken had encouraged to pursue a writing career, and who finally became both a published writer and a professor of writing. Eudora told Ken about the disappearance of Duncan Aswell, the son of her friend Mary Lou, about Duncan’s decision to reestablish contact with his mother, and about the understanding she felt Ken had extended in his novels to unhappy and unsettled young people like Duncan. She told him about Diarmuid Russell, who was her devoted agent and friend, and about Russell’s father Æ, whom Ken and Eudora each acknowledged as an inspiration. And she told him about Reynolds Price, the younger writer she had encouraged. Reynolds and Diarmuid, she reported, were fans of Ross Macdonald.

  Eudora and Ken also shared a love of travel and of visiting new and old places. Though his wife wanted only to remain at home, Ken managed to take trips both with her and alone, and he told Eudora of them: of revisiting the Ontario of his youth, of walking the streets of London, of venturing solo to Venice. And Eudora reported on her travels to New York City, to London to meet V. S. Pritchett, to France on a driving tour with old friends, and across Canada by rail.

  Above all, each valued the unique friendship, consciousness, talent, and existence of the other. They discussed the wonder of the Apollo 14 moon landing, sent each other limericks, cheered the arrival of the two-volume, reduced-type edition of the complete Oxford English Dictionary, and reported on movies like Chinatown, Young Frankenstein, and Woody Allen’s Manhattan. They worried over, celebrated, and consoled one another—dreamt about each other, dreamt of dreaming about each other, sent one another messages in their dreams.

  Of particular significance is the impact each writer had on the other’s work. Eudora credits Ken with suggesting the key scene in her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Optimist’s Daughter (1972), and with encouraging her to publish The Eye of the Story (1978), a collection of critical essays. In fact, she dedicated The Eye of the Story to Kenneth Millar. For his part, Ken felt that his friendship with Eudora had been a key to the development of his novel Sleeping Beauty (1973). As he told her, “Being in touch with you this past year or so has been an inspiration to me. I hope you will take the risk of letting me put your name on the dedication page.”8 She was delighted.