Meanwhile There Are Letters

May 11, 2015
Between 1970 and 1980, Eudora Welty and Kenneth Millar (aka Ross Macdonald) carried on the correspondence of two devoted soulmates, as this scintillating collection attests. The exchanges were inaugurated by Millar upon discovering Welty was a fan; the admiration was mutual. Their letters, rarely separated by more than a few days, are an engrossing catalogue of shared passions: favorite writers (Ford Madox Ford, F. Scott Fitzgerald), birding, the arts, and more. Each was a perceptive reader of the other: Millar assessed Welty’s essays as “cut from the same piece of imaginative cloth as your stories”; Welty praised Millar’s Lew Archer detective novels for their human dimension. And their responses to one another glow with warmth and even love. Jealous that she can’t attend a literary conference where Millar is appearing, Welty writes, “It gives me a pang to think others can see you and I can’t.” Millar maintains a married man’s careful reserve but nevertheless acknowledges “the quiet security of love and friendship” that Welty provides. Editors Marrs and Nolan, Welty and Millar’s respective biographers, explain that Millar’s losing battle with Alzheimer’s cut short his letters after 1980, but Welty continued hers. “Henry,” her unfinished story about an Alzheimer’s sufferer, supplies a moving postscript to this poignant exchange of letters and love. 16 b&w photos. Agent: Kent D. Wolf, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin.

Starred review from April 15, 2015
Tender letters reveal interwoven literary lives. Mystery writer Ross MacDonald, the pen name of Kenneth Millar (1915-1983), first wrote to Eudora Welty (1909-2001) in 1970 about her novel Losing Battles; it was a "fan letter" thanking her both for that book and her mention of his work to a New York Times reviewer. That letter began a 13-year correspondence that lasted until Millar's death from Alzheimer's disease. Edited, helpfully annotated, and sensitively introduced by Welty's biographer Marrs (English/Millsaps Coll.; What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, 2011, etc.) and MacDonald's biographer, Nolan (Artie Shaw, 2011, etc.), the letters offer eloquent testimony to the writers' deep affection. "I'm so grateful that we understand each other and feel alike," Millar wrote. "Your letters are like tokens of goodness and kindness coming to me out of a terrible world," Welty replied. In 1971, the two met for the first time in New York. "I feel that there wouldn't ever have been a time when we wouldn't have been friends," Welty wrote afterward. But they saw each other only rarely: in 1975, both were headliners at a writers conference in Santa Barbara, where Millar lived with his wife. Although Millar wrote about her affectionately, the editors reveal that the Millars' marriage was strained, and Millar apparently had hidden Welty's correspondence, discovered by a friend after his death. Both exulted in nature, especially birds: Millar noted white-crowned sparrows and a horned owl, Welty, warblers, kinglets, and gnatcatchers. The flight of sandhill cranes, Millar wrote, "was the greatest natural sight I ever witnessed." They shared news of writing, reading, triumphs, and loss: Millar's daughter died; Welty's friend was murdered. In the late 1970s, to Welty's dismay, Millar wrote of a "shadow on my memory and therefore on my mind." He soon could not write, even to his beloved friend. An intimate, luminous portrait of a friendship.

COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

June 1, 2015

When Ross Macdonald (aka Kenneth Millar) read an interview in which Eudora Welty revealed that she had written him an unmailed fan letter, he sent her a note, initiating a 12-year correspondence (1970-82) that ended shortly before his death from Alzheimer's disease. Although many letters are unexciting exchanges of support and praise for the other's work, several invite keyhole peeks at each author's circle of friends, composition habits, domestic routines, professional obligations, and social engagements. The attraction between Welty (1909-2001), novelist of the physically and psychically afflicted, and Macdonald (1915-83), creator of the Lew Archer hard-boiled detective novels, can be attributed to a common preoccupation with "outsider" characters of pronounced psychological impairment and a shared abhorrence of the Vietnam conflict and racial discrimination. The accompanying notes suggest a relationship more passionate than professional--they were lovers in letters. Yet this is not overtly displayed in epistles that are often endearing and empathetic but never ardent. Editors Marrs (Eudora Welty: A Biography) and Nolan (Ross Macdonald: A Biography) complement the correspondence with essential contextual information. VERDICT For academic libraries with substantial Welty or Macdonald collections.--Lonnie Weatherby, McGill Univ. Lib., Montreal

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2015
Long-Distance Friends It may come as a surprisea very pleasant one, to be sureto many fiction readers that revered American fiction writer Eudora Welty (190983) was a great friend of the mystery writer Kenneth Millar (191583), who wrote under the name Ross Macdonald. But with Welty ensconced in Jackson, Mississippi, and Millar equally established in Santa Barbara, California, the friendship would seem to be challenged by distance, with face-to-face encounters few and far between. But compensation for their geographically enforced separateness came in the form of frequent letter writing and was offered to them in their deeply personal correspondence, in which their affectionno, actual lovewas mutually shared in warmth-soaked prose. Meanwhile there are letters, as Millar wrote to Welty; indeed, there are letters, 345 of them gathered here by the two writers' biographers. The letters began in 1970, when Millar sent Welty a letter praising her new novel, Losing Battles. A year later, they met for the first time in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel in New York and sat down to enjoy a lengthy conversation on the spot. Their subsequent correspondence, in the words of the two editors, reveals the loving friendship of two writers. The editors posit in their introduction, Was there an epistolary romance of literary masters in the twentieth century more discrete, intense, heartfelt, and moving? It is difficult to imagine one. Writerly concerns, travel experiences, people they knew individually and in common, and the deep appreciation of each for what the other accomplished in their fiction (says Millar to Welty, You (and Faulkner) have made Mississippi home, or homing, territory for all of us ) represent the surface level of what they talked about. But loyalty and intimacy obviously lie beneath the surface of their words. Whether read straight through as a narrative or enjoyed over time in short takes, this is a letter collection to be savored.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)