Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  Millar and Davie took to meeting out of Margaret’s presence. One day the two sat in the kitchen at Camino de la Luz and spoke of works in progress. Millar was in the early stages of an Archer book, one begun as a mainstream novel, another run at the autobiographical Winter Solstice. At first he’d tried to tell the tale of a Toronto delinquent lured into a scheme to defraud a wealthy California woman. When that story fizzled, he turned it into an Archer and approached it the other way round, with Lew tracing a California heir back to hidden Canadian roots. Questions of personal and cultural identity were central to the book, which was obliquely patterned on Millar’s biography. Davie then talked of his current project: The Forests of Lithuania, a translation of Polish poet Adam MicKiewcz’s Pan Tadéusz, about the search for a lost father. Surprisingly, this epic poem sounded nearly identical to Millar’s detective novel. “What we realized,” Davie said, “was that these two so dissimilar-appearing pieces of work turned upon basically the same plot: the boy who has lost his father and in finding him finds his own and his national identity. From there you get into talking about whether it’s true that there are only eight or eleven or however many archetypal plots in literature, and that the lost father is one of them. This thrilled both Ken and me very much.”

  Millar returned to his wayward-son book with new energy, buoyed by the knowledge that Davie, in another cliffside house two hundred yards east, was busy on his lost-father saga. Engaged in this “shared” labor, pleased that his daughter and wife were well, Millar worked happily through what he knew was the best winter of his life.

  To make extra money and to exercise his urge to teach, Millar moonlighted as a creative-writing instructor for a community college adult-ed course. He took the job with characteristic seriousness, and for at least a few of his nineteen students he’d be a lifelong influence.

  One so affected was Herb Harker, a tall, broadly built former cowboy from Alberta. Millar used both published stories and student work for class discussions, Harker said: “Sometimes he would read aloud a short story such as D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Horse Trader’s Daughter’ and then go over it in detail. For instance, he mentioned there were sexual intonations in the passage where the horse was described; I said, yeah, that’s right! I’d noticed that when I read it, but I didn’t have enough confidence to suppose my impressions were accurate; Ken spelled it out. Another story he read was ‘A Bottle of Milk for Mother,’ by the Chicago writer Algren; that one just breaks your heart. So he picked a few really fine stories and walked us through ’em, showed us what was possible.” Millar analyzed students’ stories in similar fashion. Class member Noel Young (later founder of Capra Press) marveled at Millar’s knack of juxtaposing amateur work with that of great writers in a way that elevated the students’ efforts: “I’ll never know how he achieved that—it must have been in his tone, his astute selection—I think of this as one of his great gifts and contributions. . . . I’ll never forget that class, Ken’s command and the quiet intensity that inspired us all.”

  A story is a circle, Millar told them, drawing blackboard diagrams to prove it. “He taught so much with just a few words here and there,” Harker said. “He was generous in using his time to work on individual manuscripts, and that meant a lot.” Millar’s written commentaries on submissions were often longer than the works themselves. “I liked the way he moved you to do things that needed to be done,” said Harker. “He’d point out problems and maybe suggest ways to approach them, but he left the work up to you. I remember how eagerly I used to watch for his comments. One day he returned a manuscript of mine and at the bottom he’d put, ‘Your talent requires that you become a writer.’ ”

  Millar thought enough of Harker’s potential that he offered to tutor him informally after the school term. “The first time I went to his house I was just floating, that he would give me such a privilege,” Harker said. “He took me to where he had spread books all over the couch; he said, ‘We need to have something to talk about.’ He was giving me suggested reading, primarily. He said, ‘The place to start is with Ibsen; he’s the grandfather of us all.’ ”

  Millar’s night school students mostly didn’t read Ross Macdonald’s books. These serious people only cared about real writing. But no one was more serious about writing than Ken Millar, who saw Ibsen’s relevance to the detective story, at least the kind Millar tried to write: one that moved beyond simplistic formulas. “The hiss-and-boo villain died in the nineteenth century,” Millar said. “You know who killed him? Ibsen blamed everybody.”

  What Millar strove toward, he wrote Anthony Boucher, was “what we both desire, the mystery as a standard and serious novelistic form.” A step in that direction, he thought, was The Doomsters, published in February 1958. Millar read its reviews carefully, attentive as always to the mystery critics who mattered. The verdict on his adventurous effort was mixed. Boucher was firmly supportive, saying The Doomsters exemplified how “the hardboiled private detective story can become literature, as satisfying (and as subtle) as any less violent, more ‘literary’ study of character as revealed in crime.” James Sandoe liked The Doomsters too (“a milieu evoked with singular and precise imagination”). But others were put off by Macdonald’s “snake-pit” subject matter and his efforts to stretch the genre’s conventions. Lenore Glen Offord (a guest at the Millars’ 1957 Menlo Park open house) confessed in the San Francisco Chronicle she was “kind of homesick for the days when detectives such as Lew Archer didn’t search their own consciences as much and murderers weren’t allowed long, case-history autobiographies at the end.” The Saturday Review turned up its nose at the book’s “generally unpleasant personnel” and graded The Doomsters only “medium.”

  Of more concern was the word from Knopf. Bookstores ordered less than four thousand copies of The Doomsters—not much of an improvement over the thirty-two hundred hardcovers shipped of The Barbarous Coast. Knopf wrote Millar, “I am worried and distressed as I always am when we publish a book by you at our failure to put it over as it deserves to be put over.” Knopf’s mysteries, like other publishers’, were priced cheaper than its mainstream fiction; The Doomsters sold for $2.95, not $3.50. This was a boon to genre fans, but it segregated the better mystery writers such as Macdonald and seemed to diminish the value of their work. Knopf people considered pricing the next Macdonald as “a novel” at $3.50, with a corresponding increase in ads; but some wondered if it would make much difference. One Knopf editor (a Macdonald fan) told the boss he thought the answer might be a book without Archer to peg it as a “hard-boiled” item, a book in which the characters didn’t seem sordid: “He writes like an angel but I personally feel that his view of the world as hopeless and degraded is what predicates against a better sale than we get.” Knopf passed these words on to Millar, and the author responded with clarity, courtesy, pride, and panic:

  Dear Alfred:

  I thank you for your letter, though the news that my book has not been doing well is naturally even more distressing to me than it must be to you. While I don’t feel able to solve this problem quite unilaterally—and indeed you have always given of your publishing best to my books—I have been giving serious thought to the idea of changing my pen somewhat, and will continue to. I have no desire to expend my powers on a form which does not seem, for one reason and another, to have attained the status I’d hoped for it; in this country, at least.

  My new book, which is three-fourths done and should be in your hands later this Spring, was planned as a transition out of the “hard-boiled” realm—which I have felt as a limitation for some years—and seems to me to be coming off successfully. It is, however, an Archer novel, and I am naturally concerned whether your letter is to be taken as a rejection of any future Archer novels, including this one. The economic facts of life, let alone this book’s intrinsic merit, if I am any judge, would hardly permit me to scrap it. Perhaps I had better finish and submit it; and then our discussion can proceed from that point.

  May I add tha
t my ambition for these coming years is to write on serious themes, not necessarily lugubrious ones, with a simplicity and speed and perhaps bravura which all of my books have had in some degree. I aim at narrative beauties, which seem to be rather rare these days. So much for my aims. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

  Perhaps the intent of The Doomsters is somewhat at odds with its form. I can’t really regret the book, though. Some people who have called or written about it see it as I tried to write it, otherwise than as an exploration of sordor; rather as a work of tolerance trying to reach beyond tragedy. I am glad you published it.

  Sincerely,

  Ken

  “Don’t, for heaven’s sake, get it into your head that we don’t want to go on publishing you,” Knopf reassured his author. “We most certainly do expect to do the next book, and if Archer is in it, Archer is in it, and we’ll do our best.”

  Millar submitted the book in May 1958 as The Enormous Detour. The same editor who had lamented the “degraded and sordid” nature of earlier works had nothing but praise for this one: “This is a fine Archer. As usual it is exciting, well-paced, interesting and exceptionally well-written. In addition Macdonald has ‘gotten off the doomsday kick’ . . . and made half a dozen or more of his characters exceedingly sympathetic. . . . Another plus to this is that it ends on a high note, i.e. has a happy ending. . . . My general feeling about this is ‘hurray!’ ” Knopf himself, though, thought the book’s ending too ambiguous and its second half weak. He wasn’t demanding a rewrite, Knopf insisted, saying he’d read the manuscript “with great enjoyment.” In any case publisher and author could discuss all this in person: Knopf was coming to the West Coast and planned a lunch with Millar for Monday, July 21, at the Beverly Hills Brown Derby.

  Millar still had mixed feelings about Knopf and only dropped the idea of doing “Kenneth Millar” books for Dodd, Mead after von Auw said it was unlikely Alfred would stand for such a thing. Millar’s main problem was still not being sure Knopf was completely in his corner.

  But their LA meeting went exceedingly well. The two spoke frankly of matters vital to each: of a publisher’s duty to nurture a writer throughout a career (something Knopf had done for Joseph Conrad), of the artist’s debt to his talent. The lunch marked a new phase in Millar’s relationship with Knopf, as if he’d rounded a corner and left his doubts behind. The old man was so gracious and full of friendly encouragement; maybe he’d come to believe more in Millar. The writer found himself agreeing with Knopf’s gently voiced qualms about the new Archer, and he resolved to improve the manuscript. When they left the Derby, the publisher (a longtime amateur photographer) took several pictures of his California detective novelist on Wilshire Boulevard, close to where Knopf had photographed Raymond Chandler in 1940. Crew-cut and beaming, Millar seemed to be looking forward to his future.

  * * *

  Living in Santa Barbara had a lot to do with his newfound contentment. Millar felt different about the place than he had when he’d first moved there. The town had everything other towns did, and a bit more: an ocean with dolphins and whales, the Channel Islands visible from shore, birds in great numbers, a green profusion of plants and trees. It was a civilized place in a gorgeous setting, and there was more cultural activity here than first met the eye. Millar now saw his corner of California not as an outpost cut off from the rest of the country but as a vital center in its own right.

  Santa Barbara seemed especially exciting this summer of 1958, thanks to the presence at UCSB of a number of good guest lecturers invited by the on-sabbatical Kenner. There was Jesuit poet Walter Ong, Shakespeare-festival director Homer Swander, Greek city-planner Constantin Doxiades, and the magnetic Donald Davie (who showed Aldous Huxley around Santa Barbara in 1958). Two new English department members, Don Pearce and Marvin Mudrick, also elevated the atmosphere. The most stimulating summer presence by far though was Herbert Marshall McLuhan, a Toronto academic and cultural critic who in ten years would be world-famous in the global village he’d name. Millar already knew McLuhan’s work well and arranged to audit his summer-school class. “Marshall was at his most brilliant,” said Davie, who also sat in on McLuhan’s course. “He was sort of crazy brilliant, you know? All the things that were subsequently to appear in his books which made him a great guru of the world, he was in fact trying out there in lectures to the Santa Barbara students; they—they—they—turned your head around!”

  Millar was an enthusiastic, note-taking, hand-raising participant in McLuhan’s four-times-a-week class. He and McLuhan struck up a friendship. “They recognized each other’s originality and valued each other a lot,” Pearce said. McLuhan was one of the few academics Margaret Millar could abide; he and wife Corinne were always welcome at the Millars’. “She was madly in love with him,” Maggie said of Corinne. “We got to know him quite well. Marshall was a pretty fascinating guy.” Davie too enjoyed McLuhan’s company: “Marshall was a perfectly human man; I mean he wasn’t just a disembodied mind, a ‘crazy professor’ sort. He was a nice, easy guy that liked to drink beer and go on the beach with his family and my family.”

  Millar gave McLuhan a typescript of his new novel to read, and the professor praised it. “This was not your ordinary whodunit,” Pearce heard him say, “this was a novel. Deserved to be studied on the university curriculum, he thought.” Whether or not McLuhan spoke in hyperbole, The Galton Case (as the novel would be titled) and other Macdonald books would be taught on the college level a dozen years from now. Loren D. Estleman, a fine private-eye novelist of the 1980s, would call The Galton Case Macdonald’s “major contribution to the form.” Millar himself rightfully saw this eighth Archer novel as a turning point in his work.

  * * *

  The seed of The Galton Case was a sentence in one of his notebooks: “Oedipus killed his father because he banished him from the kingdom.” Millar’s contemporary reinvention of the ancient tale dropped clues to its origins through references to Athens, a character named Cassandra, an invocation of the Fates. Also half-hidden were allusions to the theories of Sir Francis Galton, the nineteenth-century father of scientific psychology. First to juxtapose the terms nature and nurture, Galton said eminence ran in families and mental traits were inherited; he began the study of individual differences and introduced fingerprinting. A Galtonesque scrutiny of generational habits runs through The Galton Case, a mystery that turns upon multiple questions of inheritance and identity. Using Oedipus and Galton, Macdonald fashioned a fictional twisting of Ken Millar’s history.

  In it, Archer’s hired by a sleek lawyer named Sable (a smooth fantasy of the Winnipeg uncle who tried to fiddle Millar out of an inheritance) to find what became of the long-lost son of a Santa Teresa matron. Anthony Galton walked away from college and a good social position in 1936 for a proletarian existence as “John Brown,” accompanied by a lower-class wife who gave birth to John Brown Jr. “I’m afraid my son had a nostalgie de la boue—a nostalgia for the gutter,” the Galton matriarch tells Archer. (Millar’s inspiration for Brown was a Western classmate, a “golden boy” who abandoned a life of privilege to go underground as a radical organizer.)

  In the Bay Area where Galton-Brown was last seen, the detective finds a link between past and present in the person of Chad Bolling, a San Francisco poet who once printed some verse by Brown. (The poem offered in evidence, “Luna,” was one of Millar’s own early efforts.) Archer sees Bolling perform at the Listening Ear (similar to a San Francisco club Millar had been to, the Hungry Eye), where the poet recites over jazz played by musicians who “smiled and nodded like space jockeys passing in the night.”

  Chad Bolling was inspired in part by Kenneth Rexroth, a northern California bard Millar saw in performance at the Lobero Theater, where Rexroth chanted poems a bit abashedly to the accompaniment of prerecorded jazz. Rexroth was a father figure to beat poets. Millar, an artistic conservative in matters of craft, was turned off by the beatniks’ sloppy aesthetics and angered by the destructive “philos
ophy” of beat fellow travelers like Norman Mailer. The trouble with the beats, Millar told Don Pearce, was they thought it was more important to have life experiences than to write well about them. He lambasted half a dozen beatnik standard-bearers including Rexroth in a book review (“Passengers on a Cable Car Named Despair”) for the San Francisco Chronicle in the summer of 1958. Through Bolling, one of his most memorable minor characters, Macdonald continued his California satire:

  “ ‘Death Is Tabu,’ ” he said, and began to chant in a hoarse carrying voice that reminded me of a carnival spieler. He said that at the end of the night he sat in wino alley where the angels drink canned heat, and that he heard a beat. It seemed a girl came to the mouth of the alley and asked him what he was doing in death valley. “ ‘Death is the ultimate crutch,’ she said,” he said. She asked him to come home with her to bed.

  He said that sex was the ultimate crutch, but he turned out to be wrong. It seemed he heard a gong. She fled like a ghost, and he was lost, at the end of the end of the night.

  Bolling is one of several semi-impostors Archer encounters in The Galton Case. But Lew also sees things to admire in Bolling: the poet, however compromised, still believes in his art.