Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  Nearly all their cash was gone. Millar topped his class as planned and lined up a teaching job for the fall: at his and Margaret’s old Kitchener high school. But the Millars needed money immediately.

  This June, Millar went to hear a high school commencement address by the governor general of Canada, better known as John Buchan, Scottish author of several thrillers including The Thirty-Nine Steps. Buchan told the familiar fable of the race between tortoise and hare—but in Buchan’s version, the hare won. The race didn’t always go to the slow, Buchan said. Millar took this to heart. He had said he’d make money someday by writing; with a baby due, now it was time to get off the starting block.

  A radio quiz announced it would award an Underwood typewriter to the listener answering the most questions about books and publishing. Millar declared that he’d win that typewriter—and he did.

  In the past his critical faculty had made him self-conscious of his creative writing and impeded his output, but now the need for funds freed him from being hypercritical. Scribbling longhand in pen or pencil on pulp tablets, school notebooks, and any other available scraps of paper, he wrote dozens of stories, sketches, and poems in the next weeks: mock memoir in the Leacock mode, parodies of Ogden Nash and Edgar Lee Masters, a six-thousand-word horror tale, versions of “Little Miss Muffet” in the styles of moderns T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Gertrude Stein. The shortest thing was a four-line poem; the most ambitious was a short story, “The Yellow Dusters,” done under the influence of Toronto author Morley Callaghan, a worthy model to replace D. H. Lawrence. Callaghan’s stories of ordinary Canadians were a bit in the “hard-boiled” Hemingway manner but also akin to Chekhov. “Morley Callaghan was the one that we all most admired and wanted to emulate,” Millar said later of his generation of aspiring Canadian writers. In the powerful “The Yellow Dusters,” an autobiographical vignette of a boy and his mother, Millar showed himself an able Callaghan disciple.

  On June 18, 1939, Margaret gave birth at Toronto’s Women’s College Hospital to a daughter the Millars named Linda Jane. The baby had Millar’s violet-blue eyes: his mother’s eyes. Millar was thrilled by the infant. Margaret, though, was upset. “That’s when you really feel the entrapment,” she said later. “ ‘Here I am—stuck.’ ” She had her worst migraine ever, with nausea. Home from the hospital, she was happy to let her sister or an aunt tend the baby while she went to the Underwood. Millar couldn’t type; Margaret could. In the first six weeks of Linda Jane’s life, Margaret prepared thirty-five Millar manuscripts for submission on spec to American magazines, from the New Yorker and Esquire to Strange Stories.

  No U.S. publication wanted Ken’s stuff, but the half dozen stories he wrote for “the Sunday School papers”—five youth magazines (The Canadian Boy, The Canadian Girl, Onward, Explorer, Jewels) printed in Toronto by the United Church of Canada—were bought by an editor named Archer Wallace. Millar earned over a hundred dollars: enough to pay Margaret’s hospital bill.

  The first piece of his that saw print, though, was a comic verse taken by Saturday Night, a slick Toronto weekly where his uncle Stan Moyer published. Saturday Night took several other things, including “The Yellow Dusters.” Soon Kenneth Millar was a familiar byline on Saturday Night’s popular “Back Page.” He was a pro. “Saturday Night came out on Saturday morning,” he recalled, “and we used to walk up Bloor Street to see if anything of mine had been printed that week. Payment was just a cent a word, but the early joys of authorship were almost as sweet as sex.”

  A buoyant Millar moved with wife and daughter in mid-1939 from the big and impersonal city of Toronto to the small and all-too-familiar town of Kitchener, first to Frederick Street and then to a building on Louisa. In September, his husky bulk buttoned into a three-piece suit and his blue eyes blurred behind clear-glass spectacles from Woolworth’s, Millar became a colleague of the men who’d taught him at KCI not many years before. Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic philosopher Millar was fond of, said you couldn’t step into the same river twice. Millar, though, seemed to have waded upstream into the river of his adolescence. Not for the last time, he felt the odd sensation of the present pulling him into the past.

  He began the job with enthusiasm, loving the tough English and history courses he was given to teach and looking forward to helping teenagers clear some of life’s hurdles, as he had been helped. “He was a born teacher,” Margaret said. “He never really got over it. And he took no nonsense. Because he was big and strong, you know, people didn’t misbehave. Boys didn’t cut up the way they did for some other teachers, because he’d just take and carry them into the hall.”

  But if Millar could make his pupils pay attention, he couldn’t force them to learn. The average student didn’t share Mr. Millar’s keen interest in history; the ordinary boy’s mind was on hockey or girls or what job he’d get after graduation. The prospect of facing 350 bored students each year ate at Millar’s resolve. And he wasn’t popular with the other instructors, who found him aloof and thought he spoke above most students’ level. By rights Millar should have been in graduate school with the brightest minds of his generation; instead he was teaching high school in Kitchener—for the excellent reason it paid $1,450 a year, in a lingering Depression when many workingmen were grateful for five bucks a week.

  Millar didn’t intend to spend the rest of his life as a high school instructor. In the summer of 1940 he was back at Michigan’s grad school (having missed the summer Linda was born). He made one A and two A-pluses this time, while continuing his freelance Saturday Night work. With teaching, studying, and writing, Millar hadn’t much time for his wife and daughter. Margaret, still his typist, accused him of ducking family duties. Part of him thought she might be right. Like his wife, he felt trapped. Both of them were unhappy, and he sensed the baby suffered for it.

  The Millars argued over how to treat Linda. Margaret the self-taught psychologist wanted to raise her daughter “scientifically.” The scientist whose rules she followed (seven years before Dr. Benjamin Spock’s commonsense child-care manual) was behaviorist John Broadus Watson, who said not to kiss or hold children and to ignore their crying. Millar thought these notions were nuts, but Margaret insisted, “Mother knows best.”

  They fought about other things. Margaret wanted him to stop studying and get on with his writing. Millar, haunted by memories of his father in the charity ward, was bound to get that Ph.D. He wanted sex more often. She was cold and remote for long periods. He shouted, pounded walls, broke things. With their child as witness, the Millars formed a twisted hybrid of the fractured families that had produced the two of them.

  His happy college days now seemed far in the past. Proof they were gone forever came late in 1939, when Royal Air Force pilot John Lee, Millar’s friend from Western, died in a training accident, one of the first Canadian casualties of the world war Millar had warned was coming. Ken Millar went to Highgate, Ontario, for John Lee’s funeral: a somber event to begin the new decade.

  Margaret also faced a depressing 1940. Her life as wife and mother felt empty, and she hated being in Kitchener. She wanted to be a writer, but her bid to review movies for a Toronto newspaper was turned down. She found more neurotic means of expression. Don Pearce called on the Millars one night and found them engaged in a weird contest: “Ken was home sick with a flu, and Margaret was developing a serious headache. Each seemed to be struggling to outdo the other. Ken said very wryly and disgruntedly to me, in her presence, ‘We are having a little competitive illness, tonight.’ ”

  Margaret’s ailments escalated. A doctor diagnosed toxic myocarditis—inflammation of the heart muscle (“Probably just nerves,” she conceded later)—and confined her to bed. Millar saw his wife slipping into the role of part-time semi-invalid. To distract her, he brought home library books, thirty or forty at a time, most of them mystery novels.

  He chose wisely. Margaret had loved detective stories since childhood. “I was brought up with mysteries,” she said. “That was becaus
e of my two brothers, six and eight years older. I’d see them bringing home these magazines: Black Mask, Detective Fiction Weekly, Argosy. They used to hide them underneath the mattress. Now for a girl like me, that is a temptation. I never missed a copy.”

  Mystery stories surged in popularity in 1940, a century after Edgar Allan Poe had invented the form. Newspaper and magazine articles scrutinized the craze: Were mysteries a mental challenge or a mindless escape? Did mystery addicts seek sanctuary from harsh reality or moral affirmation in a time of growing evil? Whatever the answers, publishers couldn’t print detective stories fast enough to meet demand. Nearly three hundred mystery novels came out in the United States in 1940. Many major presses had separate detective lines: Simon & Schuster’s Inner Sanctum Mysteries, Dodd, Mead’s Red Badge books, Doubleday Doran’s Crime Club. Ellery Queen, Rex Stout, and Erie Stanley Gardner were among the field’s star writers, but a raft of newcomers made waves in 1940.

  One was Raymond Chandler, whose 1939 book The Big Sleep was followed in 1940 by Farewell, My Lovely. Both featured private detective-narrator Philip Marlowe, a romanticized Los Angeles version of Dashiell Hammett’s San Francisco op Sam Spade; like Hammett, Chandler was published by Alfred A. Knopf. Chandler’s style was vivid and highly entertaining. Margaret urged that Millar read him.

  Few detective novels were as good as Chandler’s, though. There was more dross than gold in the dozens of mysteries Margaret scanned in early 1940. One book was so bad she threw it across the room, shouting: “I could do better than that!”

  Go ahead, her husband urged.

  She’d need a plot, she said.

  He said he’d give her one, and he quickly came up with two. One was a murder mystery with a high school setting. Margaret liked the second one better: a story with a bunch of suspects cooped up in an old house waiting to see who gets knocked off. As her sleuth, Margaret dreamed up a six-foot-five movie-star-handsome psychiatrist, Dr. Paul Prye. She could do this, Margaret thought. Unlike the poems and short stories she’d strained to create, mysteries were something she knew. Once she had her plot and setting, the sentences flowed.

  Working in bed, she wrote sixty thousand words in fifteen days, then rewrote the whole manuscript two or three times. “I had to do something to get out of that bed,” she said later. “To get out of that town.” Millar was essential to her enterprise. In addition to plotting and editing (and perhaps giving Paul Prye his bad habit of quoting William Blake), he looked after Linda and did household chores. If KCI colleagues or students smirked at the sight of Mr. Millar hanging out the laundry, let them. He did everything he could to help his wife reach her goal—their goal.

  The Invisible Worm (a Blake quote) was the title they gave Margaret’s mystery. The book wasn’t half-bad: a fast-moving mix of harum-scarum, psychology, wisecracks, and the screwball humor of the Thin Man movies. They had The Invisible Worm professionally typed and mailed unsolicited copies to two of the top U.S. mystery lines. Margaret’s “heart ailment” vanished.

  Months later Millar was called out of his KCI classroom to take a telephone call. Ajubilant Margaret read him a wire from Isabelle Taylor, mystery editor at Doubleday Doran: MANUSCRIPT ACCEPTED, PUBLICATION CRIME CLUB, CONGRATULATIONS, LETTER FOLLOWS. He was as thrilled as she was, she said: “We both almost had a conniption fit.”

  Doubleday’s letter said they’d pay $250 for this book and an option on another. Margaret immediately began writing a second mystery. She’d have liked to publish the first under her maiden name, but “The Invisible Worm by Margaret Sturm” simply would not do. Reluctantly she accepted “Margaret Millar” as her byline. Though her name alone would be on the book, Doubleday’s contract listed Margaret and Kenneth Millar as coauthors, with royalties to be divided equally.

  She wanted her freedom to be his freedom too; he could stop teaching now and be a full-time writer, she said. Millar was ready to leave KCI, all right, but for a different reason: the English professors at the University of Michigan, dazzled by his A-plus average, had offered him a teaching fellowship for 1941. Here in effect was the opportunity Harvard had denied him. Michigan’s six-hundred-dollar fellowship was a thousand dollars less than KCI was paying him, but with the Doubleday money and his freelance work, Millar thought they could make it. Margaret was against the idea but gave in. They would each get something they wanted, and both would leave Kitchener: scene of too much past and not enough future. As a girl, Margaret’s ideal had been Houdini, who got out of tight places. Millar’s boyhood idol was Pearl White, who leapt clear of disasters. Now, daughter in tow, the Millars imitated their childhood heroes: they escaped.

  * * *

  * * *

  * * *

  Auden . . . is the peculiarly modern man, finding images and implications in the detective story, exploring Dante’s territory in a New York bar.

  —Chad Walsh, Today’s Poets

  I was leaning against the bar in a speakeasy on Fifty-second Street . . .

  —Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man

  If Ross Macdonald was the only American crime writer to receive early ethical training in a Canadian Mennonite Sunday school (as Ken Millar later proposed), he was also the first private-eye novelist to get a friendly shove toward the genre from the greatest English poet of his generation.

  The poet was Auden; the shove began in a class Millar took at Michigan in 1941: Fate and the Individual in European Literature, a daunting course surveying Western writing from Shakespeare to Kafka. Its forty-five-book reading list chased many registrants from the class—but not Millar, of course, and not Donald Pearce, who had also opted to do his graduate studies at Michigan.

  W. H. Auden, internationally famous at thirty-four, cut a strikingly odd figure. Fair-skinned, long-faced, and with unkempt reddish hair, he moved sideways like a skittish colt; his laugh was a whinny. He made no eye contact with students in class, staring out the window while lecturing as if in contact with the dead writers of whom he spoke. Auden played opera records to make literary points, analyzed Shakespeare’s characters from a Jungian point of view, and spoke about people (Rimbaud, Freud, Valéry) largely unknown to American grad students. Millar, Pearce, and others were electrified by his brilliance. Millar dubbed Auden “a young Socrates and an old Ariel rolled into one.” Auden was impressed with Millar too and graded his essays (and Pearce’s) A-plus.

  One paper Millar wrote compared Dante’s The Divine Comedy to Kafka’s The Castle. In lieu of a final, Auden had students memorize any six Dante cantos. Millar’s close study of the Comedy for Auden’s class heightened his appreciation of Dante’s epic. Pearce recalled Millar analyzing the poet’s technique: “Ken would talk about how the imagery in the Inferno was heavy and concrete and specific and dark: ‘so like the place that’s being described.’ Then he said, ‘If you look at the imagery in the Purgatorio, what a change that is: it’s clear, rational, careful, and calculated—exactly what ought to occur in a place where you get cleansed of all your mud and error and sin and guilt. Then see what he does with the Paradiso imagery: it’s all light and high-musical and lyric.’ ”

  Millar later put these stylistic lessons to good use. The Divine Comedy would be a frame of reference for Ross Macdonald’s southern California, whose many-leveled populace evaded or were exposed by or struggled toward a harshly clarifying light. Millar asked Pearce, “Did you ever notice how people in hell engage in conversation all the time?” Dante seemed to be saying hell consists largely of conversation, self-justification, accusation. Macdonald’s Lew Archer would prove an expert Dantesque interrogator, eliciting many testimonies, self-deceptions, lies, and alibis. And Archer, like Millar, would value merciful silence.

  Auden clearly saw Millar’s ability and especially encouraged the twenty-five-year-old. He said Millar should be writing for the New Republic and offered to introduce the young man to the magazine’s editors. Millar attended Auden’s Friday-evening student “at-homes” on Pontiac Trail; Auden, with companion Chester Kallman, c
ame to dinner at the Millars’ rented place at 1020 Hill Street.

  “It was strange,” Margaret recalled. “My daughter took a terrible dislike to his voice, but he was very interested in the raising of children and making sure they went to Sunday school.” (Auden dumbfounded a number of contemporaries by proclaiming himself a Christian before coming to Michigan.) Maggie was put off by Auden’s appearance and manner, but she didn’t fail to hear him compliment her work, a compliment she often repeated. “He read one of my books and he thought it was terrific,” she said. (Margaret had published four books by the time Auden came to dinner.) “He laughed himself sick about this certain scene I’d written,” in which a character uses his trouser cuff as an impromptu ashtray. “I was of course flattered.”

  Auden, one of the world’s great poets, was a compulsive detective-story reader and not ashamed of it, something unusual in a year when most intellectuals sneered at mysteries. (“With so many fine books to read,” Edmund Wilson would famously write, “so much to be studied and known, there is no need to bore ourselves with this rubbish.”) Auden’s first published prose had been crime-fiction reviews for London newspapers. Fellow poet Cecil Day-Lewis (under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake) used Auden as the model for his fictional detective Nigel Strangeways. Auden not only liked mystery fiction (he was a particular fan of Hammett and Chandler) but took it seriously; and while Millar didn’t buy his theories on the genre (after reading Auden’s essay on detective fiction, “The Guilty Vicarage,” Millar told Pearce that Auden simply didn’t know what he was talking about), the poet’s imprimatur on the form was as heartening to Millar as his praise of Millar’s talent. Auden thinking well of Millar allowed Millar to think well of himself; Auden approving of mystery fiction reinforced Millar’s growing belief that it might be a worthwhile thing to write.