Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  Millar dubbed Pearce a “golden boy,” said he was “doomed to success.” It was an affectionate tag, but it carried a wisp of envy of the middle-class background that took Pearce to college as a matter of course. Millar worked hard for what he got, and success was never certain.

  But he and Pearce had more in common than not. So it was with the tall, thin, patrician-seeming Robert Ford. All three loved culture and the intellect and one another’s company. They were joined in camaraderie by a fourth student, John Lee, whom Pearce thought “an unbelievably happy man, full of laughter and anecdotes.” Millar prized Lee’s “graceful warmth,” Pearce said. “What mattered to Ken was sincerity, honesty, and uncluttered warmth of person. It seems to me that’s a need that went away way back, to something he wanted and never got maybe as a child.”

  With these friends Millar was at ease, in his eccentric way. “He liked silence between people,” Pearce said. “His silence was not unpleasant, because he always smiled. He was like a Buddha. Something profoundly magnetic about him. But it was unnerving too: that strong, warm, listening, scrutinizing, weighing presence. There was a saintly aspect to his nature. His personality, mind, and character were profoundly ballasted by moral concerns. Nothing offended him more than slippery or unsavory conduct. It shocked him when wrong things occurred. He was always coming into contact with life almost for the first time. In a sense he lived in the Garden of Eden—but a garden that had been visited by all the devils too.

  “In a way he was maybe a very concealed kind of person, with a lot of pain and sadness and strain. He was also the most open and unprogrammed person you could imagine. And yet you felt that when Ken was being normal, he was working at it. It was conscious and deliberate normalcy—which of course makes it abnormal. He was an abnormal man who succeeded in converting his traumas and neuroses into positive forces.”

  Not everyone was comfortable in the presence of such a willed personality. When Pearce praised his new friend to the dean of the university, the dean said, “Yes, yes, brilliant of course—but there’s a screw loose somewhere in that man.”

  Some teachers at Western, intimidated by Millar’s knowledge, actually seemed afraid of him. For his part, Millar couldn’t take seriously any instructor who hadn’t heard of Maxwell Anderson or other figures well known to anyone who read the New Yorker. But the better Western instructors admired and even loved Millar as an outstanding student. One man spoke Millar’s name with undisguised awe, Pearce recalled: “ ‘Ken,’ he would say, and almost roll his eyes.” Millar was treated almost as an equal by some of these men. “Professors held him in great regard and predicted fine things for him,” Pearce said, “though nobody knew just what.”

  Millar himself was unsure what to do with his gifts. He wanted to be a writer, but of what? His botched attempt to complete “Christabel” and his acquaintance with Bob Ford (obviously a real poet) ended his verse pursuit (though he’d write occasional poems all his life). After his exposure to theater in London and (coming back from Europe) New York, the notion of being a playwright seemed impractical: Canada had no theater scene. Becoming a novelist seemed unlikely, after the intimidating example of Lawrence, whose heavy influence he still fought to shake.

  Millar’s English instructors urged that he go to graduate school and there develop his gift for literary analysis; this was what he decided to do. Creative writing could wait until he established himself at a university. He wasn’t going to follow Jack Millar’s aimless footsteps into a life of fruitless scribbling. Millar’s excellent grades almost guaranteed him a fellowship from a good American school. Bob Ford, whose grades were about as good, was applying to Cornell. A department head who was a Harvard grad talked Millar into writing to Harvard, with the implicit understanding that the professor would smooth Millar’s admission with a strong letter of recommendation.

  Pearce arranged for Millar to room during his last Western semesters at Huron College, a nearby Anglican residence house where Pearce had digs. Late in 1937, Ford also moved into Huron, a two-story, English-style, small-college structure full of dim corridors and creaking stairways. Each morning, Ford, Millar, and Pearce walked the mile and a quarter to the Western campus along roads often slippery with ice. Ford, who had a degenerative muscle disease and was afraid of breaking bones, strode behind Millar and held on to the belt of his trench coat; Millar, clutching a bulging briefcase, kept up the aesthetic banter. The two made an arresting sight, thought Pearce, like something straight out of James Joyce. “Ken had a very warm and pleasant and valuable final year at Huron,” Pearce said. “He needed warmth, and he got it there. It made him believe again in the existence of a loving community, so to speak. Because he had a very clear vision too of the way things could or should or ought to be, different from what they often are. This was the happiest year of his life to that point, I’m sure.”

  Not all Western students felt so warmly toward Millar. Some seemed to envy or resent his intelligence. Several considered his (or anyone’s) creative writing unscholarly, even ungentlemanly. Millar and Ford caused a stir when they coedited the university’s year-end literary supplement in December 1937. Judging most of the submissions (except those by Pearce and some others) too pedestrian to publish, the editors, with faculty approval, wrote most of the section themselves, under their own and assumed names (“Kerith Mill” and “George Beale” were Millar’s pseudonyms). When irate undergraduates complained, “Mill” and “Beale” responded jauntily in print.

  Through act and attitude, Millar stood out. Western’s yearbook printed a candid photo of him in three-piece suit and tie, cigarette dangling from a half-clenched fist, glaring intelligently; the taunting caption: “ ’S matter, Ken?”

  One noon two seniors, pets of the poli-sci and economics professors, publicly baited him into a lunchroom debate on the nature of certainty. Millar held the position that certainty couldn’t exist, since all things are subjective. His inquisitors said he was dead wrong: science is certain; the solar system moves in a given way whatever you think about it. Millar couldn’t quote a theory to defend his thesis, and the two pushed him into a philosophical corner. It was the one time at college he’d felt frustrated and humiliated, he confessed to Pearce. Millar went hunting for ammunition and found what he sought in Hume’s work on causality, which said perception of cause and effect is entirely subjective, a preference of our thinking apparatus imposed on the world; there’s no logical reason for previous arrangements to obtain in the present or future—all we can know is that they once did. “Ken was thrilled to find this argument,” Pearce said. “ ‘I knew I was right,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t have the terminology. Had I known this statement, I could haves slaim them.’ ” When you were an underdog like Millar, the chips were always down.

  * * *

  * * *

  * * *

  Sin is despair.

  —Søren Kierkegaard

  There is a force in men like him which causes them to seek out the best and the most difficult; it is the essential human force, at least in the Christian West, and it is both strength and weakness.

  —Kenneth Millar

  As Millar finished his studies at Western, growing “rich on the heritage of the Christian West” as he put it without irony, he began a personal relationship that would last his lifetime and be crucial in shaping him as a man and a writer.

  He encountered Margaret Sturm, his high school crush, in London, Ontario, after returning from Europe in early 1937. Millar had also bumped into Margaret before he left for Europe and quite seriously (“He was always serious,” she said) invited her to go with him to Ireland. This meeting was different, though. Margaret was in a bad way, and soon Ken Millar learned all about it. She’d won a classics scholarship to the University of Toronto, but after her mother’s death had washed out of college, had a “nervous breakdown,” and moved in with a London aunt. She’d enrolled in a business course, dropped out of that, then suffered through an unhappy affair, a mild schizoph
renic episode, and a suicide attempt. Now she was studying psychiatry on her own, trying to understand her problems, and writing stories and poems. Like Ken Millar, Margaret Sturm hoped to become a writer.

  “He knew his fate when he saw it” was how Millar would put it. He began seeing Margaret daily. Within weeks they were lovers. Millar, sensing the relationship’s difficulties and potential, chose to let Margaret become “the greatest of his monumental images”: an inspiration, a challenge, a test of strength, and his own hope for a useful life. He believed in mind and heart that one man plus one woman equaled civilization; choosing Margaret as partner, he thought, was the best and most difficult thing he could do. They shared “a true Kierkegaardian view of a tragic world, fed by ancient tragedy and by modern sensibility”: the Greeks, and Freud. They’d be each other’s salvation, he hoped.

  In the spring of ’38, as Millar’s graduation neared, his and Margaret’s future hinged on Harvard’s response to his fellowship application. Each morning Millar looked on the downstairs table at Huron for an envelope from Massachusetts. At last Harvard’s letter came: Millar had been rejected. He read the bad news without expression (Pearce was watching) and went about his business. But later (Pearce never knew how) Millar got hold of the letter written about him by the professor who’d talked him into applying to Harvard. It enraged him. The man described Millar not as a brilliant student but as a colorful eccentric: “The most impressive thing he said I think,” Pearce recalled, “was that he was a very picturesque figure with his green hat and his flowing scarf, which infuriated Ken as being certain to undo his credit as a scholar. ‘He just pictured me as a Bohemian!’ ” The unfairness shocked him (no one said such things about Ford, who got his Cornell fellowship without a hitch); and his resentment would linger for decades.

  Millar determined to pursue the Ph.D. part-time and arranged to take summer classes at the University of Michigan, across the Canadian border. In a way it was just as well; he was afraid if he left Margaret Sturm on her own while he went off to school, she’d sink into despair and maybe again attempt suicide. Now they could get married right away. After his first summer in Michigan, he said (in a revamp of his plan to support his mother), he’d attend the Toronto teaching college and then get a job as a high school instructor. Margaret was against the idea—she wanted them to become writers right now—but Millar was adamant. It was a “bitter choice,” but he was determined not to fail like his father; he admitted he lacked the courage to try to make it as a writer immediately.

  Practical as it was, his decision required cash. Again, as with his father’s insurance, a sudden inheritance came to his rescue. Millar was willed two thousand dollars by an uncle in Oregon he’d never met. Before receiving the money, though, he got entangled with another uncle he knew all too well: his Aunt Margaret’s husband, Ed, who wrote to say Aunt Margaret had died and he needed Millar’s power of attorney to settle her estate. After sending his power of attorney, Millar learned from other relatives that Uncle Ed claimed he hadn’t been able to contact Kenneth; he said Millar’s inheritance should be sent to him for forwarding. After consulting a Toronto lawyer, Millar wrote Ed a terse note (“Dear Mr. J ________”) rescinding the power of attorney, demanding a personal meeting, and threatening legal action: “So you better snap out of it.” His furtive uncle wrote to arrange a Toronto rendezvous (“Will meet you in the lobby of the Ford Hotel next Wednesday at 8 P.M. Be on time as I am leaving shortly after 9 o’clock”) where he blamed “business connections” in the States (“the boys in St. Louis”) for holding things up. Millar got his money, with fictional interest: twenty years later, Uncle Ed would slither chameleonlike into some of Millar’s best books.

  * * *

  When his Western friends learned of his involvement with Margaret Sturm, they were amazed. Don Pearce had met Margaret years earlier at a Kitchener party and remembered her vividly, he said: “Long hair hanging low, and a smile that completely engulfed her face: I think her eyebrows went up, I think her forehead smiled; her cheeks swelled, her eyes got big and laughing, and her teeth became prominently apparent, uppers and lowers—it was a neon experience of some sort, that smile. She played the piano, not all that well but with a certain abandon. Very slender. Handsome, you know. Big eyes, with impressively clear whites. A prominent and strong nose, which Ken told me she hated. Very social, very outgoing, very witty, very self-confident, with this strong laughter when she was pleased, affectionate laughter that was musical and rich.” After knowing Margaret better, Pearce could add, “She was unforgettably charming when she felt like being, and a totally intolerable neurotic of the worst kind when she wanted to be. Hard to handle.” Pearce said Bob Ford “deplored” the idea of two such egotistical people marrying each other and predicted nothing but strain.

  But Millar’s mind was made up and his course inflexible, as Pearce found when he tried to joke about the impending wedding. “I was as usual showing off in some way or other,” he said, “quoting I think Shelley about the injustices of things like the marriage institution: that it was an intolerable abuse that laws should bind the wanderings of passion, and why should a grown man be constrained by the choices of an immature youth? And Ken said, ‘That is a foolish and confused statement. For one thing I am not an immature youth, I am a mature youth. And I am not making the kinds of mistakes you are referring to. That’s typical of Shelley, he’s not in touch with reality. Maybe he was immature; I am not.’ And stamped off.”

  Only two years after his mother’s death, Millar was about to commit himself to an equally formidable and demanding relationship. How badly he must have craved structure, companionship, and the anchor of duty. When Margaret, the teetotaling sister of alcoholic brothers, insisted he give up liquor, the beer-loving Millar instantly complied.

  An incident one night at Huron College showed Ken Millar’s almost childlike dependence on his fiancée’s approval. Millar, Pearce, Ford, and Lee were in Pearce’s room when the subject of Millar’s wrestling career came up. Millar said with some pride that all the time he’d been on Western’s team no one had gotten a hold on him he’d been unable to break. Lee, a good athlete, asked if he might try. As Pearce and Ford watched, Lee got Millar in a full nelson. A tremendous struggle ensued; with a violent effort, Millar broke Lee’s grip. In doing so he’d strained the capillaries above his neck; his face was bloodshot purple. “Oh my God, I’m seeing Margaret tomorrow!” Millar exclaimed when he looked in the mirror. “What will I tell her? What will she say?”

  * * *

  * * *

  * * *

  If light were dark

  And dark were light,

  Moon a black hole

  In the blaze of night,

  A raven’s wing

  As bright as tin

  Then you, my love,

  Would be darker than sin.

  —Kenneth Millar, Toronto Saturday Night

  Millar barked: “Hey, you! Are you the house dick here or the house cat?”

  —Raymond Chandler, “The King in Yellow,” 1938

  They were too young; he saw that later. But at twenty-two, Millar was eager to embrace his fate. On June 2, 1938, the day after graduating with first-class honors from the University of Western Ontario, Kenneth Millar married Margaret Sturm in London, Ontario, with a Church of England minister from Huron College presiding.

  Things were bumpy from the start. The two honeymooned for eight days at Millar’s dentist’s cabin on a Georgian Bay island filled with bugs and poison ivy. “When the boat came back for us,” Margaret said, “I decided I intended to get a divorce as soon as I hit land.” Divorce was an option Millar’s bride didn’t rule out for years, if ever. “A woman feels funny when she’s married,” she explained later, “especially a very independent type like me. You feel trapped. ‘What have I done with my life?’ ” Early on, offering Millar a second helping of food and meaning to say “Would you like a little more?” Margaret asked, “Would you like a little divorce?”


  Millar was as determined to make a success of his marriage as he was to pursue his studies. Two weeks after their honeymoon, the Millars went to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Kenneth enrolled for three summer classes in the University of Michigan graduate school. They rented rooms in a house near campus. Margaret hated her husband’s student routine and suffered migraines. The newlyweds slept in separate rooms whenever possible, ostensibly because he snored and she was nervous. The Millars slept apart their entire marriage.

  After his summer courses (he earned two A’s and an A-plus), they moved to Toronto (first to Hepbourne Street, then to Spadina Avenue), and in the fall of’38, Millar started a year’s study at the Ontario College of Education. The course was tough, with a lot of drillwork he found distasteful; but Millar stuck with it. His goal was to head his class and obtain one of the few available teaching jobs. He and Maggie lived cheaply, paring his inheritance into a ninety-dollar monthly budget (twenty-five for rent). They couldn’t afford movies. Instead, they listened to the radio and read secondhand books he brought home by the two-dollar armful. In the evening they bought day-old éclairs, three for a nickel. Margaret handrolled their cigarettes.

  The Millars were affectionate between clashes and worked well as a team, pulling together at a moment’s notice. In bed late one Saturday morning, they saw the dean of Millar’s college approaching their door on a social call; by the time he knocked, they’d put up the folding bed, thrown on robes, straightened the room, and were ready to greet him: Why, Dean, come in, would you care for coffee?

  Moments of pressure were more common, though. The pressure increased when Margaret got pregnant. She blamed her poor knowledge of birth control. The Millars hadn’t planned on a child (Margaret wanted a career; Kenneth was afraid of passing on his mother’s emotional problems), and they considered abortion. But a doctor talked them out of that, and the Millars accepted their baby-to-be—Millar more happily than his wife.