Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  Ken Millar would later judge meeting W. H. Auden one of the four or five crucial events in his life. Auden had been “a remarkable kind of saint,” he’d say; and Millar had “really loved him.” Perhaps Auden was one of those surrogate fathers that Millar had a knack for finding, or perhaps a surrogate older brother (one whom Millar would caricature in an early Archer book, and then feel guilt at “betraying”). But in Michigan, Millar (perhaps at his wife’s urging) kept a certain distance from Auden. He didn’t take up the poet’s offer to introduce him around Manhattan, partly because Millar didn’t care to go to New York then, but more because he didn’t think it a good idea to go there under the auspices of a well-known homosexual. No, given Ken Millar’s blue-eyed looks and the boyhood habits he’d abandoned, not a good idea at all.

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  The man in the black shirt and yellow scarf was sneering at me over the New Republic.

  “You ought to lay off that fluff and get your teeth into something solid, like a pulp magazine,” I told him.

  —Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister

  Millar’s Michigan studies (including a doctoral dissertation on Samuel T. Coleridge) and teaching duties (four sections of freshman English) took up nearly all his time. He was anxious to establish himself at the university and drew quick attention by doing spectacularly well on an intelligence and aptitude test taken by all grad students. The dean of the grad school said no one else in the history of the test had scored as high as Millar: no doubt her husband was a genius, he told Margaret. The remarkable thing was that Millar did as well on the math and engineering side as on the verbal, so well that it was suggested he might wish to change his major.

  Millar stayed with English, but his math and engineering aptitude would find expression in the algebraic complexity of the novels he’d write. The rigors of study made him postpone creative work, though. Grad school and creativity seemed pretty antithetical.

  Not that he didn’t have writing chores. He’d assumed the task of cowriting a column of current-event quips for Toronto’s Saturday Night for two and a half dollars a week, a sum that made a difference to the cash-strapped Millars. Though he did most of “The Passing Show,” Millar’s name didn’t appear on the anonymous column; that way (Millar guessed) its coauthor, the magazine’s new literary editor, Robertson Davies, could take credit for its best lines. Millar’s copy was politically sharp and full of witty puns:

  The Australian pilot who successfully landed two planes which had locked together in mid-air simply refused to admit the gravity of the situation.

  Mussolini says that Italy and Germany will march on, side by side, to the end. That’s what we hope.

  It has been rumored that Vichy discharged several “non-Aryan” professors of psychology on Hitler’s orders. But a vegetarian like Adolf should have no objection to French Freuds.

  “The Passing Show” was popular; Millar’s unsigned quips were reprinted in newspapers throughout Canada. He wrote his weekly quota on Saturdays in Angell Hall, when the campus was all but deserted because of the varsity football game.

  Millar’s other writing responsibilities involved his wife’s mystery books. Ken was an active participant in Margaret’s fiction career, so active he sometimes felt like a full collaborator. When her first book was published in June 1941, she’d already finished a second (The Weak-Eyed Bat) and part of a third, as well as a long magazine novelette. The Bat contract again named Margaret and Kenneth Millar as “authors and proprietors” of the work and stipulated all monies be divided evenly between them. A Michigan newspaper piece on Margaret described Millar’s role as “silent partner”:

  He helps to devise plots, and he uses his red pencil as though she were a freshman student and he a stern professor of composition. “Omit or alter,” he scrawls on her portion of her manuscripts. “Sometimes I rebel against that red pencil,” she sighs. “But on The Weak-Eyed Bat, I disregarded two of his orders, and the publisher suggested two alterations in the manuscript. Yes, you guessed it.”

  The Millars’ efforts paid off with good notices from mystery reviewers in the top U.S. journals. The Saturday Review of Literature pronounced The Invisible Worm “commendable,” the New Yorker noted its sound plot, and Will Cuppy in the New York Herald Tribune called Margaret Millar “a mystery find of considerable voltage.” When The Weak-Eyed Bat was printed, Cuppy declared, “Margaret Millar is a humdinger, right up in the top rank of bafflers, including the British.”

  To their contemporaries at Michigan, the Millars seemed a pretty colorful couple: the husband-and-wife mystery writers, very wrapped up in their work. At Margaret’s insistence, Millar stopped wearing his dimestore spectacles, leaving his handsome face open to the world. “Ken was very impressive, both in size and intellect,” said Georgia Haugh, wife of a Michigan grad student. “Well built, very affable. Ken was very smooth: I mean that in a complimentary fashion.” Margaret was a presence too, her long hair parted in the middle and sometimes pulled back in a bun, her shrewd eyes sizing you up. Marianne Meisel, wife of German-born professor James “Hans” Meisel, recalled, “They both at that time spent all their main thought and all their minor thought on what would make a good detective story. He would use one of the old can openers that cut a triangular hole, thoughtfully feel the edge: ‘These things are amazingly sharp!’ And they would both give it this meaningful look: How fast could you kill somebody with that?” To Mrs. Meisel, who wrote a novel published by Scribner’s, Millar seemed quite single-minded, with a clear sense of his potential: “Margaret’s success was showing him the way. She was an impressive person, working with a certain fierceness.” Millar watched people, as if collecting them for future books, and loved when they spoke candidly. After listening to a refugee friend of the Meisels’ talk of a tempestuous love affair, Millar exclaimed, “Oh, Europeans are wonderful, they tell you things!”

  He was the gregarious one, eager to have people over to Hill Street. Margaret tolerated gatherings and took part if she wasn’t writing, but she refused to do any “entertaining,” not even putting out cheese and crackers. Once a hungry grad student asked if there wasn’t something to eat around here, and Millar shushed him, “For God’s sake be quiet, or Margaret will throw you out.” She rescinded her ban on alcohol, though, one sweltering Ann Arbor night. When Maggie suggested a nice cold beer, Millar raced to a liquor store and brought back several bottles before she could change her mind. At twenty-six, Margaret Sturm Millar drank her first alcohol; from then on, beer fueled the Millars’ social life.

  Housing was famously scarce in Ann Arbor. The three Millars lived in a one-floor converted garage, with two tiny bedrooms and a long, enclosed corridor that served as a walk-in closet. Set back from the street and hidden by shrubs, the mock cottage looked like something from one of Margaret’s spooky mysteries. Twenty-five dollars from the Millars’ tight budget went for an old black piano; when guests came Margaret could sometimes be coaxed to play hit-parade tunes or some of her own things such as “Mad at the Moon.” Millar loved Maggie’s playing; he’d grin hugely and twist his body into pretzel-like shapes when she got off a jazzy or bluesy lick. Frequent visitors to Hill Street included Don Pearce, with his new wife, Mary; Chad Walsh, a budding poet and dawning Christian who debated faith and morals with the “agnostic” Millars; and the young African-American poet Robert Hayden, who delighted Millar by bringing over jazz records, including 78s of Billie Holiday with the Teddy Wilson orchestra. Hayden and Walsh, like Millar, were crazy about Auden and benefited from his encouragement. Walsh and Hayden also liked detective fiction.

  Millar was intrigued to learn that another professional mystery writer, H. C. Branson, lived in Ann Arbor. Branson’s first book, I’ll Eat You Last, was published the same week as Maggie’s Invisible Worm, and the two authors were favorably reviewed together in the mystery-roundup columns. Millar got Henry Clay Branson’s number from the directory and invited himself over to visit the Bra
nsons on Catherine Street.

  A round-cheeked man in rimless spectacles, Branson had studied at Princeton and gotten a B.A. at Michigan, then spent time in Paris mingling with expatriate Americans. He knew a lot about American history and classical music. Henry and his wife, Anna, a wonderfully friendly woman, both played the piano; they had two young daughters.

  Millar instantly enjoyed the Bransons’ company, and he greatly admired Branson’s writing: the clarity of his prose and the adult nature of his stories. Branson’s mysteries (The Pricking Thumb came out in 1942) weren’t gimmicky whodunits but realistic tales that addressed the nature of evil, as Millar felt mysteries should. His spare style (which purposely avoided simile and metaphor) was very different from Millar’s, but other Branson characteristics—strong plots, a story that made a circle (some thing Millar knew went as far back as the Greeks), a present-day crime with roots in the past—would become typical of Millar’s books. Branson personally was an inspiration: like Auden, a man of intelligence and education who considered the writing of mystery fiction a worthwhile pursuit.

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  With the Bransons, Millar was often cheerfully physical, Anna Branson said: “If something struck him as funny, he would give a very raucous laugh, and every once in a while he’d sort of cavort about the room.” On one occasion former gymnast Millar picked up a startled Branson and spun him around in the air.

  Another instance of Millar’s antic euphoria took place in Don and Mary Pearce’s third-floor apartment: holding forth on modern man’s inability to demonstrate sheer joy (“For instance, we can’t do this anymore—”), Millar opened a window and flung himself outside to hang by his fingers three stories above the street—then pulled himself back inside, laughing like mad.

  Margaret’s social athleticism was limited to playing charades (“sharahds”). She and Millar were agile conversationalists, though, something that could make for a peculiarly unsettling evening, according to Don Pearce: “You never knew when an innocent remark of yours was going to set off a scoffing response. Ken would be more understanding, but Margaret was really quite like a lighted fuse. When Ken and Margaret were in the room, I’m telling you, it was like walking through a minefield. You felt you had to be careful always of what you said, especially around Margaret, unless it happened to coincide with her range of opinions. She could be a delightful laughing companion for an evening—half an evening, anyway. Other times: nerve-racking.”

  The Millars seemed to Pearce in many ways opposites: “I don’t think she entertained abstractions easily, and she was living with a person who was very comfortable with abstractions. Hers was a very concrete and practical mind, full of passionate and outspoken hates. She was interested in people as a novelist, and she talked a lot along those lines: rapidly constructed theories about how they live and what they live for; a kind of expert gossip that wasn’t lowbrow. Loved to recite her latest clever opening to a chapter. Needed praise; didn’t want competition. For all her strength of mind and rhinocerine will, she had a fragile ego. Someone who was compulsively difficult and never can be cured of that. In other words she was neurotic. She was a problem, for him. And yet, who knows? They certainly hammered out between them a pretty tough and maybe dynamic polar relationship. They were a spectacular pair. Not very many friendships survived that sort of domestic intensity, though.”

  The Millars played an excellent if often unpleasant game of conversational Ping-Pong, Pearce said. Anna Branson long remembered this volley: “One time we were all arguing about something and Maggie turned to Ken and said, ‘You wouldn’t know your ass from a hole in the ground!’ And very quietly he replied, ‘But I’d know your ass from a hole in the ground.’ She topped him though, she said, ‘Oh, now you’re being crude.’ We all howled at that.”

  No one could be around the Millars much without being aware of the tensions built into their relationship. “There was a lot of fighting going on,” said Marianne Meisel. “Both of them were very much there and didn’t let the other one get away with anything. I think they must have had a very difficult time because she told me that she had to be top dog, the center of attention. She said, ‘If there are three people walking down the street, I have to be the one in the middle’—which stayed in my mind, because it seemed very odd to me.”

  Their daughter was a frequent source of friction between the Millars. “Ken was enormously attached to Linda, really truly was, and always took her side,” said Don Pearce. “If ever I saw anybody who was wrapped up in a child, it was Ken when Linda was brand-new; he couldn’t believe this had happened to him. He was the softie in the whole thing. Margaret was always revving Linda’s engine as it were, stepping on the accelerator of her personality, making her do all sorts of things, making her a bit of a show-off. I can remember Linda sitting at the dinner table, no older than three, confronted with a dish she didn’t want, tomato soup or something, and being not exactly hysterical but getting on for it, saying, ‘I can’t eat that, it’s in-ed-ible, it’s in-ed-ible, Mother, I will not touch it!’ I’m not kidding, she was in command of that household, and sounding exactly like Margaret shrunk to about two and a half or three years old; and she would get her way.

  “Another time Margaret was going to demonstrate to me how clever Linda was, how she understood long words, for instance the word nevertheless. ‘She doesn’t like nevertheless,’ Margaret said, ‘because that’s when I get my way, when I say nevertheless.’ So she said to Linda, ‘Well, it’s time for you to go to bed, Linda.’ ‘But I don’t want to go to bed now,’ Linda said. And Margaret said, ‘Nevertheless!’ ‘Oh, not nevertheless,’ Linda cried, ‘not nevertheless, Mummy!’ ‘Nevertheless!’ ‘Mummy, not nevertheless!’ And so on. And Margaret was doing this to show me, you see. I mean, those parents never gave that child a moment’s peace. Not that they tortured her, but with Linda the box was always open, as it were, with people looking in, expecting, commenting, constantly stimulating in ways that somehow or other make for a nervous youngster. I think they were both simply astonished that they had a child.”

  Millar contributed to Linda’s repertoire of routines by teaching her the names of her body parts, then cuing her with finger-pointings in an innocent litany: “What’s this called, Linda?” “Foot.” “What’s this, Linda?” “Knee.” “Linda, what’s this?” “Vulva.” “And what’s this, Linda?” “Elbow.” His favorite times with Linda were on weekday mornings when he wheeled her in a “go-cart buggy” across the mile-long, tree-lined Michigan-campus diagonal to her nursery school. Focused on his daughter’s unblinking gaze, oblivious to anything else, Millar in a big, deep voice sang “King Joe,” Richard Wright’s blues to boxer Joe Louis that Paul Robeson had recorded with the Count Basie band.

  For several Ann Arbor residents, including Anna Branson, the sight of a devoted Ken Millar steering Linda along as he boomed out the slow Joe Louis blues was a high point of the morning. To glimpse Millar then, all wrapped up in his daughter’s wide-eyed presence, you wouldn’t think he had a care in the world.

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  For what is the sensibility of our age? Is there any one sensibility? Do we respond to T. S. Eliot, Dashiell Hammett, Mary Roberts Rinehart, or Tiffany Thayer? The objective answer must be that some of us respond to one and some to another.

  —Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn

  If you come from a fiery-furnace home . . . God, usually pictured as a cosmic policeman, was the invisible guest at every meal; His name was invoked to keep you from doing the things you wanted to do; He seemed the private detective employed by your parents.

  —Chad Walsh, Campus Gods on Trial

  Lighthearted Michigan moments were the exception for Millar, though. He was under increasing pressure on campus and at home. The winter of ’41 was especially tough. With no money for coal, the Millars kept warm by burning packing crates. Millar borrowed fifty dollars from Pearce to buy Christmas presents. When the United States entered the w
orld war after Pearl Harbor, things became even more somber. Many colleagues left school for the armed forces or government jobs. Working on a dissertation about an eighteenth-century poet didn’t seem so important when the fate of the globe was at stake—and Margaret Millar wasn’t shy about saying so.

  Margaret had hated Ann Arbor from the first day. Millar wasn’t crazy about it either, but he had a near-paranoid determination to “make something of himself” and somehow justify his parents’ marriage. His hard work was paying off: A-plus was his usual grade, and he was the rising star of the English department if not the whole humanities division. But he didn’t like what came with the territory: the brutalization of his sensibility, the academic politics, the frivolous attitudes of certain contemporaries.

  The latter was crystallized in a poetry seminar taught by guest lecturer Cleanth Brooks in the summer of ’42. Brooks, coeditor of the influential “little magazine” the Southern Review, was using this seminar to refine theories of the “new criticism” he would expound in The Well Wrought Urn, a 1947 book he’d dedicate to this Michigan class. Unity in a work of art was the main idea: each element in a poem pulling equal weight in balance with the others—a Coleridgean scheme, and something Millar already knew a lot about. Also in the class, at Brooks’s suggestion, were some philosophy students, who were supposed to add an extra dimension to the discussion. Instead, Millar thought, they merely spouted precepts of this or that ism as if philosophy were a game for show-offs. “To me,” an offended Millar told Pearce, “philosophy is the hinge of the world.” It was like the occasion at Western when Millar clashed with those smart-aleck students over the nature of the universe. But this time Millar was prepared. Having read and absorbed an Aristotle work these sophists glibly misquoted, Millar publicly nailed them.