by Tom Nolan
Millar was waiting for Maggie to join him in the surf off the Coral Casino at two-thirty on a September Tuesday when a beach-club lifeguard waved him in. Margaret had gotten word there was a fire on Coyote Road, about half a mile from Chelham Way.
Wildfires in the mountains behind Santa Barbara were a constant threat to those who lived in the hills and canyons. The last bad fire had been in 1955. Years of near drought since had left vast brush areas tinder dry. Conditions were especially dangerous on days when the hot Santa Ana winds blew over the mountains from the Mojave. Today was such a day.
The Millars drove home quickly. Several airplanes, including World War II B-17s, were bombarding the neighborhood with fire-retardant chemicals. Hundreds of firemen were pitching camp at Westmont College up the road. Helicopters hovered, monitoring the flames. This Coyote blaze was moving fast. When the Millars looked out their living-room window, they saw homes burning on nearby Mountain Drive.
The winds died down, and by evening the fire seemed under control. But at 9 P.M. the Santa Anas returned, and Coyote roared to life. Flames fifty to a hundred feet high jumped from canyon to canyon. At midnight, Chelham Way residents were told to evacuate. Millar kissed Maggie goodbye and saw her and the dogs off by car to Ping and Jo Ferry’s; he stayed to save the house if he could. After checking by phone on friends like the Lids and the Eastons, who also lived in canyons, he went up on the roof with a garden hose to douse embers that dropped onto the eaves and into the yard. At one point the fire reached the head of Chelham Way, two hundred yards from the Millar place; but at 2:30 A.M. the wind shifted, and Chelham Way was spared.
Margaret returned at noon Wednesday, when Coyote seemed licked. Forty-five-mile-an-hour winds revived it, though, and by evening Chelham Way was again in danger. Once more Margaret and the dogs evacuated. Millar loaded his brother-in-law’s truck with five shelves from the literal ton of books in the house. The floorboards shook with the fire’s force as he picked out volumes to save: the Walden his father had left him, the Beardsley-illustrated Baudelaire bought for two bucks in Toronto, Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, a set of Proust, a well-marked Freud, books by Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Algren, Coleridge, Poe, Davie, Kenner, Dickens, Hammett, Chandler, Dante, Mencken, Welty, Kafka, Plato, Millar, Millar, Macdonald.
He stayed on the roof a second night as the Santa Anas whipped Coyote’s flames as high as two hundred feet. Again the fire roared to the head of the canyon, and again the wind shifted and saved Chelham Way. Others weren’t so lucky. A hundred families (thirty of whom the Millars knew) lost homes to Coyote, which burned eighty thousand acres. The fire wasn’t contained for nine days. Millar wrote von Auw, “I won’t try to describe a forest fire but will save it as background for a novel.”
His rooftop vigil was valiant but not unique; many others did as much or more. Bob Easton and a bunch of his City College students physically fought Coyote when it came within thirty paces of them, Easton said: “We were able to start a tiny backfire that moved up the hill a bit and pretty well stopped the main attack; then, with garden hoses and wet sacks and buckets, and shouting like a bunch of wildmen, we charged the fire! Your blood gets up, and you fight it, just like you fight an active enemy. We kept it from getting into Mission Canyon.” But Millar showed an imperturbability that seemed remarkable. Betty Lid never forgot a brief telephone exchange she and Millar had during her moment of truth with Coyote. Her husband was away from Santa Barbara the night the wildfire rushed the canyon where the Lid house perched. It was early morning when the flames approached. Betty, asleep, was wakened by the light and heat: her room was bright as day, and she was soaked in sweat. All neighbors for two blocks around had fled. She phoned Millar and told him frantically, “Ken, the fire’s coming down the canyon, Dick’s gone, and I’m all alone here!” Millar responded with a calm that chilled her. “Betty,” he said, “you’re always alone.”
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Mail Forwarding Dept.
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
501 Madison Ave.
New York, N.Y.
Dear Sirs:
You’re still sending my mail to: 2136 Cliff Drive, San Barbara, Calif. There is no San Barbara, and I haven’t lived on Cliff Drive since 1956. A friend of ours lives there but is now moving so I appeal once again to you to change my listing, though it does provide my life with a kind of goofy continuity (I’ve moved three times since 1956).
Yours peripatetically,
Kenneth Millar (Ross Macdonald)
Miss Patricia Powell
Harold Ober Associates
40 E. 49th St.
New York 17, N.Y.
Dear Miss Powell:
Thank you so much for your prompt reply to my query, which was prompted more by chronic anxiety than by any unusual delay. When I have nothing else to worry about, my wife claims, I worry about the depletion of shellfish in Chesapeake Bay. If there is something within your awareness that needs worrying about, please let me know and I will worry about it.
Sincerely,
Kenneth Millar
If writing well was the best revenge, as Millar said, he had a double portion in January 1965 with the simultaneous publication of his highly praised novel The Far Side of the Dollar and an essay in Show magazine, “The Writer as Detective Hero,” in which Ross Macdonald (ostensibly surveying the history of crime fiction) convincingly argued the superiority of his own work to Raymond Chandler’s.
He began by giving Chandler his due: “The Chandler-Marlowe prose is a highly charged blend of laconic wit and imagistic poetry set to breakneck rhythms . . . an overheard democratic prose which is one of the most effective narrative instruments in our recent literature.” But compared to Hammett’s realistic Sam Spade, Macdonald said, Chandler’s Marlowe—the lonely knight-errant in the corrupt city—was a middle-aged author’s fantasy, “a backward step in the direction of sentimental romance.”
The author then contrasted his and Chandler’s approach to plot: “Chandler described a good plot as one that made for good scenes, as if the parts were greater than the whole. I see plot as a vehicle of meaning. It should be as complex as contemporary life, but balanced enough to say true things about it. The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure. Which means that the structure must be single, and intended.” Another difference was their use of language, Macdonald said: “Marlowe’s voice is limited by his role as the hardboiled hero. He must speak within his limits as a character, and these limits are quite narrowly conceived. Chandler tried to relax them in The Long Goodbye, but he was old and the language failed to respond. He was trapped like the late Hemingway in an unnecessarily limiting idea of self, hero, and language.”
His Archer, Macdonald made clear, was not Chandleresque: “He is less a doer than a questioner, a consciousness in which the meanings of other lives emerge. This gradually developed conception of the detective hero as the mind of the novel is not wholly new, but it is probably my main contribution to this special branch of fiction. Some such refinement of the conception of the detective hero was needed to bring this kind of novel closer to the purpose and range of the mainstream novel.”
Subtle attack, effective defense, artful polemic: Macdonald’s essay was all of that, plus an effective self-advertisement, for which he was paid six hundred dollars! He’d wanted to get this off his chest since reading Chandler’s letter about The Moving Target. Now he’d more or less evened the score; in a final aside to Olding, he said of his predecessor, “He had a great talent but was, just between you and me, a poseur with a second-rate mind.”
The article was perfectly timed to stir interest in The Far Side of the Dollar, and several reviewers took cues from the essay in crafting raves for the Archer book. “Without in the least abating my admiration for Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler,” wrote Boucher in the New York Times Book Review, “I should like to ventur
e the heretical suggestion that Ross Macdonald is a better novelist than either of them.” Walter O’Hearn of the Montreal Star reviewed Far Side together with a scholarly biographical study of Chandler (Philip Durham’s Down These Mean Streets a Man Must Go) and concluded, “Mr. Macdonald, like Chandler, has a descriptive gift. But he is realer. . . . The surprises are genuine. Mr. Macdonald plays no tricks. He is interested in character and the effect of character and destiny. He is also interested in plot, which Raymond Chandler wasn’t.” The LA Times’s Robert Kirsch elaborated on Macdonald’s notion of Archer as Greek chorus: “Ross Macdonald’s The Far Side of the Dollar has the power and dimension of a Greek tragedy but the reader is not blackjacked into realizing it, which is at once more compatible with modern taste and perhaps the reason that this estimable author does not receive the total recognition to which he is entitled. . . . This may well be the best book which Macdonald has written to date. (I know I always say that about Macdonald. But I can’t very well help it. He is simply one of those rare writers who grows from book to book.)”
Also growing was Macdonald’s recognition by reviewers outside the mystery ghetto, and the realization that Macdonald was more than a master of the crime story or a worthy successor to Chandler. Clifford A. Ridley of the National Observer said Macdonald bore study “by anyone engaged in sculpting the English language. . . . Mr. Macdonald is dealing with nothing less than a literal search for personal identity.” William Hogan told his San Francisco Chronicle readers, “I think that Ross Macdonald is an important American novelist.”
While Macdonald’s MWA colleagues still refused him an Edgar (or even a nomination for The Chill), they did elect him their president for 1965, an honor that filled him “with foolish joy,” he confessed, especially since his wife had received it ten years ago. (Margaret’s The Fiend was nominated for an Edgar.) He told Olding, “Now I have just enough success to experience the small poignant sadness that accompanies it, like post-coital tristesse. I hope in the next ten or fifteen years to accomplish some one notable thing, but have no assurance that I shall. (I will, tho.) Anyway, I got a good agent!”
And from England came word the British Crime Writers Association was giving Macdonald “a runner-up award” (their Silver Dagger) for The Chill. Millar was tempted to fly to London for the CWA’s April dinner but decided he didn’t want to spend the money or take time from an Archer novel he was in the final throes of; the new book needed his attention “more than that old one,” he said.
His wife, much to Millar’s relief, was at work “with enormous gusto” on a new book too—not a mystery but a nonfiction account of the bird-watching life. Margaret had gotten stuck recently on a fiction manuscript; this birding book, which she’d been thinking about for years, was a logjam-breaker for her. Millar took pains, with and without her knowledge, to keep Maggie and her manuscript on track.
Like Margaret, Millar would be fifty this year. With his wife productive, his daughter and family back from a year in Japan, and his own career in satisfying shape, it seemed maybe his life had turned toward good luck. In spite or because of that, he kept his fingers crossed.
He’d earned what he’d gotten by sticking with his genre, perfecting his craft, and improving his style. Millar had outlasted most other private-eye writers of his generation—including William Campbell Gault, who’d given up mysteries for the juvenile fiction market. Gault was a mainstay at the alternate-Wednesday writers’ lunches, where his boisterous manner often bumped against Millar’s less gregarious facade. “Oh, they’d have clashes,” said Bob Easton. “There was one occasion when Ken was holding forth a bit, pontificating on something, and Gault, who could be very abrupt and down-to-earth, said, ‘Oh, for Christ’s sakes, Ken, come off it!’ and just got up and left the table. Ken called him up next day and said he was sorry. ’Sway Ken would do. He was terribly sensitive, and terribly aware of his own real or imagined shortcomings.”
Despite their bristlings, Millar and Gault had much in common. Both were serious-fiction readers (Gault liked Bellow, Beckett, and Fitzgerald), and each in his way was a good writer. That was important to Millar, said Dennis Lynds, who started going to the lunches in 1965: “Ken never forgave bad writers, and that’s the truth.”
A case in point, said Lynds, was Davis Dresser, who, as Brett Halliday, had been churning out books about private-eye Michael Shayne (“that reckless, redheaded Irishman”) since 1939. Dresser, raised in Texas, was another Santa Barbara writers’ lunch fixture. “Ken didn’t like his writing,” Lynds said, “and he didn’t like Dave either particularly. Dave was loud, crass, and too commercial. But you know Dave thought he was Dostoyevsky, and he meant it; he wasn’t kidding. Dave was crusty, assertive, very sure of himself.” Gault’s assessment was pithy: “Dresser was a shit.” Millar kept Dresser at arm’s length with puckish humor. “He said the other day at lunch that he didn’t know how he could write so fast, ‘the words just came to him,’ ” Millar wrote Olding (who’d met and disliked Dresser). “I said they picked on him.” Lynds recalled, “When Dave wrote his fiftieth Mike Shayne book, it was a big deal. The publisher did a gold cover and all, and Dave got testimonial quotes from everybody: he had Gault, he had Easton, I think he got everyone he knew—except Ken. Ken refused. He wouldn’t give him a testimonial, ’cause he couldn’t. And that made Dave pretty mad.” On the other hand, Millar privately tried (and failed) to get the MWA to honor Dresser with a career achievement award.
If Dresser and Gault were the old guard of mystery writers, Lynds was the new wave. Forty-one when he moved to Santa Barbara from New York in 1965, freelance-writer Lynds would soon start publishing mysteries under a number of pseudonyms (mainly Michael Collins); for now he paid the rent with monthly twenty-thousand-word novelettes for Michael Shayne’s Mystery Magazine, stories printed under Brett Halliday’s byline (another reason for Millar not to think much of Dresser). Six foot three, with horn-rimmed glasses and a Dickensian nose, Lynds got Millar’s attention immediately. “We took to each other quite a lot,” Lynds said. “We used to walk up and down State after the lunches and talk. He’d have this big dog with him, Brandy, or the dog would be in the car. Sometimes we’d meet at the Coral Casino, and he’d have Brandy, and we’d walk on the beach. He liked to talk one-on-one I think. Mostly we’d discuss literature: good magazines, writers, stories that we liked; ‘Have you read this one? Have you read that one?’ He would question me a lot; I was the New One, so he’d want to know where I’d published and what I thought about. I went to his house once on Chelham Way, a little street off Sycamore Canyon: the lower-middle-class section of Montecito, if you will. And there was Brandy, this monster dog; you could hardly get out of the car until Ken came and called him off. I don’t like big dogs much—others were bothered by Brandy—so I didn’t visit often. Ken came to my house once when he still drank a bit. My then wife asked if he’d have something, and he said, ‘Half a can of beer.’ She served him the full can, and he drank precisely half; he left the rest. She wasn’t fond of Ken. He’d ignore her, keep her out of the conversation. He was always very polite—but he made it very clear if he wasn’t interested in talking to you.”
Millar liked talking with Jackie Coulette, wife of poet Henri (Hank) Coulette, or at least liked listening to her (he praised her sense of irony); but all the same he made her uncomfortable. “He was a charming man,” she said, “but I find people as quiet as Ken very difficult to be around; I feel I should be up on a tabletop dancing or something to entertain them, to bring them out. One afternoon he came over to the beach house; Hank had gone into town and wasn’t back yet. So here we were in the living room waiting—and he just sat there. And it really got to me. And it lasted about twenty minutes! I was beginning to think, well, what can I do? What can I say? It just bothered me. And I think to some extent it was deliberate, I think part of it was for fun: to see how uncomfortable he could make you!”
Hank Coulette, a Cal State LA instructor who was thirty-eight in 1965, first
got in touch with Millar to offer him that school’s visiting writer professorship, held in the recent past by Christopher Isherwood and Dorothy Parker. Millar reluctantly declined (he’d lose time from a book) but asked Coulette for freeway directions to Cal State: Lew Archer needed to go there. “They talked for a while on the phone,” Jackie Coulette said, “and my husband, who was very shy with people he didn’t know, told him what an admirer he was of his work. And Ken, who was also shy with strangers, said, ‘Well, when you come up to Santa Barbara, look me up, I’d like to meet you.’ We were in Santa Barbara the next summer; Edgar Bowers, a dear friend who’s a professor at UCSB and a poet, has a house in Montecito we’d rent. And it took Hank about two weeks before he got up enough courage to call Ken—with my prodding him every day. Ken invited him to one of the writers’ luncheons, and that’s how they met. One of the things that I think drew the two of them together: Ken was the only person Hank ever met who’d lived in more different houses by the age of eighteen than Hank; I think Hank had lived in thirty-nine places by the time he was eighteen, and Ken beat him. And they really seemed to be on the same wavelength when it came to writing and writers; they admired the same people, like Auden. Ken admired the poet above all other writers; he felt they were the true writers. I think one of the reasons each admired the other was they had both tried the other’s métier. Hank, who was so used to making everything as succinct as possible, packing everything into only a few words, couldn’t understand how anybody could write a novel; and Ken couldn’t see how Hank could put so much into a poem.” Coulette, who’d win a Lamont Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, borrowed a phrase from The Ferguson Affair (“prime rib of unicorn, or breast of phoenix”) for his poem “The Blue-Eyed Precinct Worker.” Ross Macdonald’s final novel would take its title from a Coulette line. “While I have good poets with me,” Millar once wrote to himself, “to hell with the academics.”
