Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  You stated quite bluntly that if you died I’d probably (the probability being underlined by your will . . .) come under the influence of some woman, a blonde, who would force me to steal Linda’s money; also that you evidently preferred the probity of the notorious Bank of America to mine. . . . I realized (for the first time in months if not years) your unfaith in me; hypothetical because all the factors I can think of, hereditary, biological and medical, indicate that you’ll outlive me. I hope you do anyway. I wouldn’t want to go on living without you. Even if you don’t trust me. It’s funny, isn’t it, how men like Dr. Prichard or G.J. Smith (multiple murderers both) can gain the trust of any number of women in a few weeks, while a man who has made a religion of fidelity (myself: that sounds pretentious and egotistic but it’s literally true) can’t get the trust of his wife in nine years. Maybe you see deeper into my nature than I do. If you do, don’t tell me about it. . . . I thought everything between us was on a high lyrical level, and I found out that in your eyes I was just another middleclass American with an incurable money itch and a wandering eye. . . .

  You were fundamentally right in opposing my academic activities, but I had no way out until the Navy, and then your books, gave me a way out. The resulting conflict was insufferable. I went into teaching in the first place to make a living, and economic necessity kept me there. Sure, I could have written. But I had no assurance that it wouldn’t be financially a waste of time. I had seen too many others waste their time and ruin their chances trying to be writers. Sure, I lacked assurance. That’s the weakness I spoke of, the weakness I’m ashamed of. But remember that Steinbeck’s first book sold 1500, Hemingway couldn’t make a living writing for years, Joyce died in abject poverty, and so on. I felt that I had to stick with teaching and scholarship and make a go of them, until the last year, when I gave up for good. You were fundamentally right but I still think impractical. How pleasant now to be able to be both right and practical.

  The money question kept nagging at Millar. In February he wrote Margaret another long letter about it:

  I’ve been trying to reconcile myself to the idea of letting you support me for a year while I write a novel, and I haven’t been able to. What I’ll do is make enough money to support myself, and then write my novel. If it turns out that I can’t make a living writing (it won’t) I’ll make a living teaching, even if it means separation from you (it shouldn’t). The present time does seem a rather peculiar time to start worrying about whether I’ll be a complacent gigolo. . . . Don’t you see that a man whose wife makes more money than he (during the last eight months your income was as much as I could make teaching in fifteen to twenty years at my prewar rate) is in a difficult dilemma? I can’t possibly support you and Linda at your present standard of living, and I am not the one that sets the standard. Yet just because you’ve made a lot of money is no reason why I should strain my life all out of shape to do the same (though I suppose I’ll try). There’s the dilemma, which I have seen with perfect clarity from the beginning. Sympathy, cooperation and love are the way out. You’ll have to not do things that I can’t share in, financially speaking. For example, as I said, I can do without a car. If you can, wait to buy one until I have the money to pay my half. Don’t buy me any more expensive gifts. Don’t spend so much money on Linda that I’m outclassed. Save your money for the long future. Every unnecessary dollar you spend sells you personally into slavery (that’s why writers stay in Hollywood—it’s not really because their husband can’t or won’t support them). And I will write considerable wordage (I don’t have to start now, even if I haven’t written a book for a month). . . . (I love you very much—if I didn’t, I could play you for a sucker, but wouldn’t.)

  Margaret Millar read her husband’s concerns as criticisms (which made her feel like “a failure”) and ultimatums (which she resented). “If we live here we’re going to live nicely,” she wrote from Santa Barbara. “(My soul is not ennobled by floor stains. Nor, I believe, is yours?) Who pays for the niceties I don’t care & don’t think about, & wish you didn’t. Wish it most hard.” She pointedly signed herself “Margaret Millar,” underlining the mispronunciation she’d gotten used to at Warners. She liked this way of differentiating herself from her husband. He was “Miller,” she was Millar. Margaret would insist on Millar for the rest of her life, while he went on being “Miller.”

  They’d cleared the air, sort of; but Millar clung to the notion of paying his own way. Some of his angrier money feelings turned up in the thriller he was finishing in February 1946.

  Trouble Follows Me had as its first-person narrator Ensign Sam Drake, ex-Detroit newspaperman on leave after a year’s battle duty. He learns of an Oahu spy ring leaking classified information out of Pearl Harbor. The death of a woman disc jockey seems connected to the spies. Drake follows his suspicions to Detroit and there investigates a militant Negro organization. After a second killing, he pursues a likely suspect by train to Santa Barbara—to 2124 Bath Street. Information he gets there leads him to San Diego and then Tijuana.

  The book’s final shocks involve the revelation that the spy ring’s ultimate villain is female: an amoral creature whose abnormal ego allows her to kill without conscience. This temptress offers Drake marriage and a chance at a fortune, in a proposition similar in sum to the studio contracts being dangled before Margaret Millar:

  “. . . We could make more money than you’ve ever dreamed of.”

  “How much?”

  “A hundred thousand dollars in six months.” Her eyes glittered like glass, and I saw what her central emotion was. She loved money so passionately that she couldn’t imagine how cold her numbers left me. . . .

  “I’d rather go into business with a hyena and make love to a corpse.”

  Like The Dark Tunnel, Trouble Follows Me was an often awkward blend of graceful passages and bizarre locutions, well-evoked scenes and wild improbabilities. Maybe the most improbable thing was that the book got written at all under such cramped conditions. During his twelve months on the Shipley Bay, Millar also wrote a children’s story (“Seabag,” illustrated by a fellow crew member), four short stories (two of which got published), a lot of poetry, hundreds of letters to his wife, other business and personal correspondence, dozens of plot ideas, and one song lyric (“The Stateside Blues”), all while performing demanding duties as a communications officer. Millar put all the hours he could find toward becoming a professional writer. When his wife said he was wasting his time and talent on mysteries, he retorted, “Better mysteries than nothing at all.” Financial security was essential to his being a freelancer, he told her: “That is because I used to visit my father in the poorhouse.”

  Sex was another contentious issue Millar addressed in letters from the Shipley Bay. He told his wife:

  The main cause of trouble between us (apart from economic pressure) has been this: you’ve wanted to go to bed with me about every two weeks. The rest of the time you’ve found it necessary to keep pretty well away from me, lest I get excited. . . . I’ve never told you how wretched it is for me to be with you and not be able to touch you, to sleep under the same roof with you but always by myself. . . . Is it strange that I should get angry thoughts.

  When physical passion occurred (as it did during a San Francisco leave), Millar celebrated:

  That wild strange marvellous night we had together . . . how perfectly wonderful you were . . . we had a lovemaking as total as any war. I worship you. . . . The way other people believe in God, I believe in you. . . . The sweet and powerful language of your body, your loving movements, your loving looks (your talk, too . . .) is the only language my loneliness can hear. I’m talking now not only of this special loneliness of a sea-voyage, but of all the loneliness I’ve ever felt, and which you alone have freed me from . . . nothing before I met you and we became lovers, ever touched my loneliness. That’s truer than you could ever believe. . . . I feel humble and grateful towards you. I value your love beyond everything else. . . . I cling despera
tely to the thought of you and our future.

  The things he asked were “so simple,” he said, “merely to cohabit with my wife, work my head off at the hardest job I can think of (except playing the piano), and watch my daughter grow up.”

  * * *

  With civilian life in sight (“I’ll be resuming the headship of the family—ha ha—by April Fools’ Day”), newly promoted Lieutenant (junior grade) Kenneth Millar made the most of a March weekend’s leave in New York City, where he stuffed himself with art: seeing paintings at the Met, going to plays on Broadway, and hearing jazz in the Fifty-second Street clubs. Jazz was without doubt his favorite music now, and he saw several of its star players on “Swing Street”: Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins, J. C. Higginbotham, Lionel Hampton, Dizzy Gillespie. “Those hours, Friday & Saturday night, in the 52nd St. dives were as pleasant and stimulating as any I’ve spent not in your company,” he wrote his wife:

  There’s something very austere and single-minded about advanced jazz, I think—almost no erotic element—it’s athletic, technical and imaginative. Some time quite soon you and I must come to New York (in the fall or the spring) and spend two weeks. It takes two weeks to begin to cover the things you want to cover: 12 or 15 plays, 15 or 20 orchestras, ballet, etc.—does it sound exhausting? The air of the Broadway region is as intoxicating as any drink. Nope, I didn’t spend a hell of a lot of money. About 40 bucks, including hotel room, meals, and train fare; also Gertrude Lawrence. Gertie was superb in Pygmalion, Massey excellent. A lovely play. For sheer acting, Anna Lucasta was just as good: a wonderful cast, and all Negro (nearly all the best jazzmen are Negro too, apparently. Did you ever hear of Dizzy Gillespie’s trumpet?) Did I tell you I sat in on a very uninhibited jam session after closing hours in the Onyx Club? Also Benny Field saxophonist of Lionel Hampton’s band sat in with a clarinet and did surrealistic improvised dementia praecox for an hour and a half for the fun of it. Wonderful. But I’m not trying to make you jealous. I want you to come to New York with me.

  Millar returned to Manhattan (“Can’t get enough of jazz”) for a “swell” Eddie Condon concert at Symphony Hall, where pianist Joe Sullivan played especially well: “best I ever heard.” With these exciting sounds fresh in his memory, Millar was discharged from active duty and flew west, to California and into his postwar future.

  * * *

  * * *

  * * *

  Between the mountains and the sea,

  Walled by the rock, fringed by the foam,

  A valley stretches fair and free

  Beneath the blue of heaven’s dome.

  —Francis Fisher Browne, “Santa Barbara”

  When I was a boy, Santa Barbara, like the French Riviera, had a reputation as a sunny place for shady people.

  —Marshall Bond Jr.

  If New York was as intoxicating as a cocktail, Santa Barbara was as calming as a tranquilizer.

  The oceanside city where Millar joined his family in the spring of 1946 smelled like a seaport but at night was as quiet as a prairie village. The town was a fantasy of a Spanish past that never was: Hispanic plazas with fountains, neat streets of stucco buildings and red-tiled roofs, spic-and-span patios; it was all like one big movie set. Apparently there was no middle class in this city of twenty-five thousand: only the rich in their botanically lush estates, and a lower class who served them. And the unchanging climate was eerie: it was disconcerting to have summer weather all year long.

  Millar liked it here, but he didn’t trust it: the seductive heat, the easy pace, and the make-believe architecture that tricked you into not seeing sin, sickness, and death. You risked your reality in southern California. His mother had raised him to think the Golden State was a magical place where the light came from. Now that he lived in that light’s daily glare, it seemed artificial and unsettling. Like a man in a novel he’d soon write, “he couldn’t help thinking of himself as a black-and-grey character who had involuntarily wandered into a Technicolor movie. . . . His ear was permanently cocked for the director’s outraged bellow to the assistant director, to get that man off the Southern California scene, we’re going to start shooting.” Millar felt more Canadian in California than he ever had in Canada.

  The place he lived in by the grace of Maggie was a four-room house on Bath Street in a humble neighborhood near the train tracks. When the Southern Pacific went by on its way to LA, the Millar house rattled like a cold-water flat in a movie comedy. The house was neat and clean, but there was no central heating. On chilly days—fog often made mornings and evenings cold in Santa Barbara—Millar put on his overcoat before he sat down to write.

  He worked in his bedroom, which Margaret had had furnished for him with custom-made pieces bought with Hollywood money: a red-leather armchair and matching ottoman (both piped in ivory leather), a leathertopped table-desk and an ivory-and-red dresser. It was “a very manly room,” as Millar mordantly wrote in one of his books, “the kind of room a hopeful mother might furnish for her son.”

  The Millars weren’t alone in their place on Bath. Margaret’s sister had come to Santa Barbara, gotten a job as an X-ray technician, and moved in temporarily with Maggie and Linda. Millar accepted this arrangement with fairly good grace; he liked Maggie’s sister, and the situation had its advantages: seven-year-old Linda could often be tended by her aunt while the Millars in separate rooms scribbled longhand in spiral-bound notebooks.

  Linda had a hard time grasping what her parents did for a living, and why it took so much time and silence and privacy. She felt out of place in her own house and for a while attached herself to a neighbor’s family. She didn’t fit in well at school either. Her favorite pursuits were solitary: making crayon and watercolor pictures, banging at the piano for hours, swinging on gym rings until her hands were bloody. Her parents, proud of her talents, left Linda mostly to her own devices. They had work to do. As Margaret would say, “No writee, no eatee.”

  Maggie turned down all those Hollywood contracts she and Millar knew would make her unhappy, so it was back to book writing. For her that meant a mainstream novel she’d put aside when Warners hired her. Millar had a “real” novel planned too, but he wouldn’t allow himself to begin before doing some more commercial books. He gave himself a year to see if he had what it took to make a living as a writer; if not, he’d go back to teaching. His first effort was a thriller, Blue City, which he called “a tough mystery in the Hammett tradition.”

  It was set in a corrupt Midwestern town (purposely unnamed, but a wildly exaggerated Kitchener, crossed with the wide-open Jacksonville, Florida). Millar felt the hard-boiled tradition existed to show the underside of society. So too in a way did jazz, a music of and for the people. Jazz grew out of the blues’ folk poetry, and its history paralleled hard-boiled fiction’s. Both told the story of the modern city in the city’s own rhythms.

  Millar was much taken with Really the Blues, a jazz-celebrating 1946 memoir by Mezz Mezzrow (with Bernard Wolfe) published by Random House. Mezzrow, a self-proclaimed “voluntary Negro,” called jazz an expression of the human spirit. That struck a chord with Lieutenant (j.g.) Millar. Listening to jazz records had allowed white officers and black stewards on the Shipley Bay some limited social contact. Millar had been greatly upset by the 1943 Detroit race riots, and he thought jazz could provide a bridge between black and white citizens. He declared of a Chicago jam session he saw where a Caucasian and a Negro player traded phrases joyously for several choruses, “It was the brotherhood of man!”

  Millar learned a good deal about writing and attitudes toward writing from jazz musicians, he’d later guess. The ideal image for an artist was jazz variations, he’d say: the awareness that instead of just one way to express something, there were infinite possibilities; and that differences in style or tone between voices that were profoundly similar—Charlie Parker’s and Lester Young’s, for instance—could be at once minor and of great importance. Painters were as strong an influence on him as jazz musicians. “They really spok
e to me, directly,” he’d recall, “and they taught me things to do in writing that you couldn’t learn from other writers, you had to learn from musicians and painters. At least I did.”

  Millar wanted to do in prose what jazzmen did in music. One way might be to have tones and motifs recur in a book, as chords and phrases would repeat in a jazz piece or solo; he tried to sound “a strong blue note” through Blue City. A grander scheme could be to build a book on one or more earlier works (a Greek myth, a Romantic poem, another man’s novel), as Duke Ellington created new compositions on age-old chord sequences such as “I Got Rhythm” ’s or the blues’s. Nelson Algren’s Never Come Morning and several Hammett stories (Red Harvest, The Glass Key, “Nightmare Town”) were works Millar used as templates in writing Blue City.

  The book was narrated by twenty-two-year-old John Weather Jr., who returns from the service and finds his hometown much changed. His political-boss father has been murdered, the police force is run by thugs, and gambling and prostitution flourish. A wrathful Weather vows to bring the town’s villains to heel. Millar channeled a lot of his own emotions into this tough thriller: his still-raw anger at Kitchener, where he’d felt alone and vulnerable; the strain of trying to adjust to civilian life (new house, new town, new job); the pressure to equal his wife’s achievement. Later he’d say this book and its quick successors were “a substitute for a postwar nervous breakdown.” Writing in a lean, jazz-influenced style, working in cold fury, he finished Blue City in only a month.

  The novel was a tough stew of civics lectures and two-fisted justice. Weather was another “roughneck intellectual” in the Millar mode, spouting an unlikely mix of brilliant prattle and tough-guy banter. Margaret Millar, usually the recipient of her husband’s critical counseling, now gave him some advice. “I loved writing dialogue,” she said. “He could not write dialogue; he liked writing action. In his first two books especially, all the characters talked like Ken! I don’t even know anybody who talks like Ken. And I told him he had to listen. He just had to listen. We went around to a lot of places. We’d go to pawnshops, low bars. And he realized how different people talk.”