Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  “Jim is a fine boy, with his mother’s eyes,” Millar told Steven Carter, the Ohio graduate student, one of several correspondents for whom Millar (exemplifying those interconnections) was a long-distance surrogate father, “and we are learning through him one of the most profound mysteries: the persistence and continuity of personality from one generation to another; which is something a good deal more certain (and satisfying) than a life after death. But Jim is being raised as a Roman Catholic, like his daddy, and will have the satisfactions of both. Anyway, I’m glad he’s as old as he is—past the age when a boy can’t grow without a mother. All of which doesn’t quite succeed in silencing my mind in the night watches, or lightening my visits to the cemetery.”

  Millar continued the business and habits of life. On November 7, he airmailed corrected proofs of The Underground Man to New York. And he showed up at the first writers’ lunch after Linda’s death. “It shocked people a little bit,” Jerre Lloyd said, “that he could do that.” On November 25, Millar wrote Olding, “Our son-in-law and grandson come up every weekend, and the day before yesterday we went for a bike hike on the waterfront, all four of us—no mean undertaking, and no mean success.” The Millars spent as much time outdoors as possible and by the end of December were starting to feel human again. Jim and his dad came to Hope Ranch for Christmas, and Millar reported to Green, “Well, our little family got through the holiday season in decent shape, I believe.” But he added, “At the end of the worst and best of years, I’ll be content if next year touches neither extreme.” There were undreamt of extremes ahead.

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  As if our fortunes were being carefully meted out to us, so often we get the best and the worst almost on top of each other, and seldom know joy without the taste of sorrow.

  —Ken Millar to Herb Harker

  I had a nice letter from Eudora Welty explaining that she was out of town when the N.Y.T.B.R. asked her, by wire, to review Underground Man, and otherwise she’d have been happy to do it. Too bad—an earlier letter from her is the best account of my intent I’ve ever seen.

  —Ken Millar to Ash Green

  John Leonard, who’d brought Ross Macdonald’s The Goodbye Look so dramatically to the attention of New York Times readers, cooked up an even more spectacular debut for The Underground Man.

  Leonard was editor of the Times Book Review by 1971. He was also on the board of New Hampshire’s MacDowell Colony, an artists’ retreat where he had occasion to lunch with Eudora Welty, another MacDowell member. Welty mentioned having read Leonard’s interview with Macdonald; she said she too was an Archer fan. “I was flabbergasted that she was a reader of Ross Macdonald’s,” Leonard said. He wrote, “That a Southern lady of letters had a crush on a California private eye is the sort of datum editors are paid to memorize.” When the next Macdonald crossed his desk, he sent it to Welty for review.

  The assignment nearly didn’t happen. Welty was out of town when the bid arrived, and it seemed she wouldn’t have time to accept. But she said, “I just had to do that. I remember going to the Western Union office in the dead of night, to try to set things so I could.”

  Welty, of Jackson, Mississippi, was one of the nation’s most admired writers; her long-awaited 1970 novel, Losing Battles, was a best-seller, and in 1971 she’d be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She’d been corresponding with Millar for nine months, since he saw her remark that she’d once nearly sent him a letter. “So then I had a letter from Ken,” she recalled, “saying, ‘This is the first fan letter I’ve ever written to an author about a book, but if you keep writing books like Losing Battles or whatever it was, it won’t be my last.’ He wrote a very interesting letter about what he called the North American Language: he thinks the whole continent speaks a form of the same language, that we’re not so isolated as everybody says. So he wrote all kinds of things, and we began writing letters to each other.” Their correspondence covered the period of Linda’s death. “He wrote to me after a long silence and said, ‘You never knew my daughter Linda, but perhaps you would want to be told’—and so he told me that she had died. And I’m sure that that just was almost the end of everything, for both of them. It seemed like he had everything terrible visited upon him that anybody could have.”

  Welty took pains with her Underground piece, she said: “I cared a lot about it. And it was important to him too, because it was gonna be a frontpage review. I tried to be that responsive to it, ’cause I think it’s so good; and I didn’t want to be content with just saying what an expert he is, and so on, which everybody knows.” Welty (whose past critical subjects included Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and S. J. Perelman) delivered a four-thousand-word review: rather longer than what the Times had asked for. “She dealt with Walter Clemons at the Book Review,” Leonard recalled. “Walter is an old friend of hers. And I handed this essay to him and said, ‘Wal-ter: it’s very, very, very long!’ And they did a bit of taffy-pulling.”

  “I also did something I ought not to,” Welty admitted. “After I wrote it, I was so anxious for it to be right that I sent a copy to Ken before I sent it in to the paper, to pass it by him, because I didn’t want to mess it up. I knew I shouldn’t have done that; it was bad newspaper ethics. But I could not risk making a mess of it. You know, reviewing a mystery is different from reviewing another kind of book. I’ve reviewed books all my life, but I didn’t want to do anything I shouldn’t have done; I just wanted to be sure.” (Millar himself sometimes extended such courtesies.) And Millar’s response? Welty laughed: “He said it was okay.”

  Millar wrote her, “Your review filled me with joy. . . . You have given me the fullest and most explicit reading I’ve ever had, or that I ever expected. I exist, as a writer, more completely, thanks to you.”

  In great excitement, Millar told close associates of Welty’s upcoming piece. “It’s an enormous blockbuster of a review,” he wrote Green, “completely favorable. . . . It strikes me as more important than the 1969 frontpage review of Goodbye Look. . . . Nothing quite like this has happened to any mystery writer before, I doubt.” To Olding: “It’s going to be a great help to the book, as well as to my literary reputation—certainly the most satisfying response I’ve ever had. She’s an enormously generous woman.” To Alfred Knopf: “Heaping blessings on my head, she sent me a carbon of the first draft in case I wanted to make any suggestions for change. I didn’t. Her review . . . is a marvellous act of sympathetic identification with my work, and will certainly be the most important statement that has ever been made about it. I’m overwhelmed by her generosity.” Millar sent copies of Welty’s carbon to Green, Knopf, Olding, and Hollywood agent Lee Rosenberg. Knopf wrote back, “I am absolutely bowled over by Miss Welty’s review. Do you remember the old days when you were anxious to be taken as a serious novelist and we were battling so hard but so vainly to prevent the label of the detective story from being fastened to you? Well, you’ve certainly got what you wished for now.”

  Welty’s essay was published on the front page of the Times Book Review of Sunday, February 14: aptly enough Valentine’s Day (as Bill Hogan noted in the San Francisco Chronicle). Surely few authors ever received a more heartfelt bouquet. Welty wrote in her first paragraph that The Underground Man “comes to stunning achievement.” She conveyed well the book’s drama and urgency:

  “I don’t believe in coincidences,” Archer says, as the investigation leads him into a backward direction, and he sees the case take on a premonitory symmetry. And it is not coincidence indeed, or anything so simple, but a sort of spiral of time that he goes hurtling into, with an answer lying 15 years deep.

  The missing six-year-old child was “the real kernel of the book, its heart and soul,” wrote Welty: “Ronny is the tender embodiment of everything Archer is by nature bound to protect, infinitely worthy of rescue.” As the boy makes the case meaningful to Archer, Welty said, so it’s Archer who makes all Macdonald’s novels matter to
the reader:

  As a detective and as a man he takes the human situation with full seriousness. He cares. And good and evil both are real to him. . . . He is at heart a champion, but a self-questioning, often a self-deriding champion. He is of today, one of ours. The Underground Man is written so close to the nerve of today as to expose most of the apprehensions we live with.

  In our day it is for such a novel as The Underground Man that the detective form exists . . . . What gives me special satisfaction about this novel is that no one but a good writer—this good writer—could have possibly brought it off. The Underground Man is Mr. Macdonald’s best book yet, I think. It is not only exhilaratingly well done; it is also very moving.

  Welty went on to praise Macdonald’s style (“one of delicacy and tension, very tightly made, with a spring in it”), his “spare, controlled” narrative (“an almost unbroken series of sparkling pictures”), and his “beautiful and audacious similes,” which serve both as interpretive descriptions and as running evidence gathered by Archer, as when: “The door of Fritz’s room was ajar. One of his moist eyes appeared at the crack like the eye of a fish in an underwater crevice. His mother, at the other door, was watching him like a shark.”

  This extraordinary tribute, thirty-two hundred words long, caused an enormous stir in the Manhattan book world. Knopf quickly printed another ten thousand copies of Underground for a total of thirty-five thousand prepublication copies (“pretty good going,” thought von Auw) and took a half-page ad in the daily Times headlined with Welty’s proclamation: “THE UNDERGROUND MAN is Ross Macdonald’s best book yet!” Bantam went back to press for fifty thousand more copies each of the several Macdonalds scheduled for imminent reprint, and a major new paperback campaign was planned. “We are expecting a very enthusiastic reception from storekeepers,” Bantam’s Marc Jaffe said.

  Ordinarily Millar took good fortune in stride. With friends he’d make a point of putting things in perspective. “Everything that happened for him was something that had happened before to someone else,” Jerre Lloyd said, “and he could tell you when. He was realistic too. During this period when he was in the ascendancy and at the top, he had no illusion about it; he expected the decline to come rather quickly. He just figured everyone had a time when he was popular or critically acclaimed and then it ebbed away. This was just ‘his time,’ he said, and he wasn’t changed fifty milligrams by all that acclaim.”

  But Welty’s essay was something else again. “The one time I ever saw him really flattered and pleased about anything,” Lloyd said, “was when Eudora Welty wrote that review. That a writer like that would be so turned on by his books and get in and explore them to that degree really excited him. And why not! He was just like a little kid over that; and it wasn’t obnoxious, it was fun to see. I didn’t think he could get excited about anything!”

  The New York Times wasn’t done with Macdonald. On Friday, February 19, Walter Clemons’s review of The Underground Man was printed in the daily Times. Like Welty, Clemons not only reviewed the new book (“Ross Macdonald has never written better”) but commented on the author’s entire oeuvre. He concluded, “Mr. Macdonald’s career is one of the most honorable I know. His later books are better than his early ones, but I haven’t read one that I’d advise against.” Clemons said Underground was “one of Ross Macdonald’s two best books” (the other being The Chill). “Read it. Read The Chill. Read also The Zebra-Striped Hearse and The Far Side of the Dollar. You can find most of these in paperback. Get busy!”

  Millar’s intimates were thrilled by what was happening. “Not only is it a very astute appraisal of your work,” said von Auw of the Clemons column, “but it’s one of the most powerful selling reviews I have ever seen.” Millar told Green he was “quite overwhelmed.” Several other long reviews of The Underground Man were printed in the next few weeks (Judith Rascoe’s in Life, William Hogan’s in the San Francisco Chronicle, Clifford A. Ridley’s in the National Observer), and a significant movie deal seemed almost certain to happen soon for Macdonald. “In the professional line, external department,” a satisfied Millar wrote Olding, “there isn’t much more I could look forward to.”

  But he got more. Newsweek’s Ray Sokolov, Leonard’s original partner in the Macdonald conspiracy, announced he was coming to Santa Barbara to prepare a major feature—possibly, it was implied, a Newsweek cover piece. This was remarkable: such things rarely happened to mystery writers (though scholar Millar remembered that Craig Rice, author of Home Sweet Homicide, had been on Time’s cover in 1946). It would be great publicity for The Underground Man, but it also presented problems. A probing newsmagazine profile, unlike articles so far done on Macdonald, might explore aspects of Millar’s personal life that he’d previously managed to keep out of print. Behind the Millars’ Hope Ranch facade, within reach of any journalist, was the painful story of their only child. It was a subdued and wary Millar who welcomed Ray Sokolov to Santa Barbara.

  Sokolov had first heard of Macdonald’s work in the early sixties from Tim Hunter, later a successful movie director. “I knew Tim in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when he was a budding star of the Harvard film scene,” Sokolov recalled. “He said to me, ‘You know, the best detective novel is by Ross Macdonald’—I think he said it was The Chill. It stuck in my mind, and when I noticed another Macdonald novel was coming out, I read it and really liked it; and I couldn’t figure out why this author was not better known than he was.” It wasn’t until near the end of his five-year stay at Newsweek that the magazine, reassured by the Times’s coverage of The Goodbye Look and The Underground Man, agreed to let Sokolov do a Macdonald story.

  But Millar posed a challenge. “He was hard going, Ken,” said Sokolov. “Very friendly, very forthcoming, but the mental weather there was pretty thick; I mean, he just wasn’t a cheerful, amusing person. Smart. Almost self-effacing in the intellectual area: he’d say things like, ‘Oh, John Leonard is much smarter than I am’—but it was the kind of concession of someone who was clearly quite vain about being bright, you know? He was a very cooled-out person. After a while it was a little nerve-racking. Margaret Millar was really a much easier person to get along with: kind of warmer, livelier, but a little more epigrammatic. She was just sort of lolling around drinking Gatorade, being foxy and amusing. She was extremely spry and intelligent—I mean, she was the light in that house, without a doubt; I really liked her. Isn’t there a Perelman story about them? One works in the morning, one works in the afternoon, therefore they never see each other? That’s exactly what was going on there: essentially they were in the same house, but completely out of contact.”

  Sokolov’s second day in Santa Barbara began with an unforgettable jolt: an earthquake, 6.7 on the Richter scale, centered near Los Angeles but felt sharply enough ninety miles north to shake a New York visitor out of his motel bed. The quake seemed to shake things loose in Millar too: memories of the “seismic disturbances” in his past that he’d only obliquely alluded to in print. When he met Sokolov for their next talk, his cool front melted. “The unrecorded highlight of this interview is that he really broke down in tears when we discussed his daughter,” Sokolov said. “She’d died only a few months before; she’s really the one that all those novels are about. They had had this terrible tragedy, and they were still upset. He did ask me not to mention any of it in the piece; I think it was a condition of his talking about it, that I wouldn’t go into it. What they didn’t want was that this quite sensitive child, the grandchild, should have to read about his mother, because they had kept all that from him.”

  Millar’s nearly eight-year-old grandson was dear to him: a legacy of Linda, a symbol of the future. He taught the boy to swim and wrote proudly to Olding that Jim could now do the fifty-meter length of the Coral Casino pool. He read to Jimmy (Robinson Crusoe, Roald Dahl’s children’s books), and Jimmy read to him. The boy would probably be an engineer, Millar thought, like his dad. “I remember Ken said he had dogs so that he wouldn’t become the overly d
oting grandfather,” Jackie Coulette recalled; but Millar fooled no one. “Ken loved that boy,” said Peter Wolfe, a St. Louis scholar writing a book about Macdonald’s work and who saw Millar with Jim in 1971. The Millars’ grandson spent nearly every weekend in Santa Barbara for many months after his mother’s death. Millar sketched Jimmy into The Underground Man as six-year-old Ronny, the boy Welty said was “the real kernel of the book, its heart and soul . . . good and brave and smart . . . the tender embodiment of everything Archer is by nature bound to protect, infinitely worthy of rescue.” Part of protecting Jimmy was to spare him the knowledge of his mother’s problems.

  Sokolov hadn’t the heart not to help. “I did agree that I wouldn’t discuss the criminal aspect of it, or the mental breakdown,” he said. “It probably was an error, but we just suppressed all that. We played his game, at Newsweek; just about everybody else did too, in not really broadcasting the full details of that family episode. I think we made some kind of compromise; it wasn’t false, but it wasn’t a full account.” (Sokolov’s piece said, “The Millars lead an extremely quiet life, and it has been even quieter since their only child, Linda, died of a cerebral accident at 31, late last year.”)