Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  Other solidly supportive reviews came from Clifford A. Ridley in the National Observer and Robert Kirsch in the LA Times. But it was the New York Times that counted most, and Crawford Woods in that paper’s Sunday book section gave “The [sic] Sleeping Beauty” what Millar called “a preposterously bad review.” It began: “This detective story carries a dedication to Eudora Welty—a gracious and appropriate gesture, but one that suggests, as the book suggests, that the author has fallen prey to the exuberance of his critics and is now writing in the shadow of a self-regard that tends to play his talent false.” It was a tricky case Woods tried to make: that Sleeping Beauty was both “a largely satisfying mystery” that “cracks along vividly enough,” and a work hampered by “bad prose and ponderous philosophizing.” The new novel, he contended, was “a book more built than written, a methodical account framed in language generally too dim to call for much praise.” To support his assertions, Woods quoted Archer saying of an elevator descent that he felt “as if I were going down to the bottom of things” (not mentioning that this particular elevator went to the morgue) and misquoted a line he was offering as an example of “half-chewed California Zen.” At least Woods’s piece was buried on an inner Book Review page. The daily Times also went after Macdonald with a review by notorious put-down artist Anatole Broyard (who also incorrectly called the novel “The Sleeping Beauty”). “Occasionally, the author writes a thoughtful line,” Broyard allowed, “but it doesn’t seem enough to justify the paroxysms of praise that greet his works.” Macdonald’s good moments, he wrote, “are not enough to disguise the fact that there are no people in Mr. Macdonald’s books—only a few types with two cents’ worth of Freudian psychology to set them in motion.”

  The widely reviewed Sleeping Beauty drew other raves (Playboy: “every bit as good as The Underground Man . . . No other mystery writer probes so deeply into the convoluted sources of violence”; the Chicago Tribune: “consummate skill . . . a masterpiece of trompe l’oeil”) and further slams (the New Republic: “One of the stranger mysteries in the chronicle of American letters is the process by which Ross MacDonald [sic]. . . virtually overnight became the nation’s seasonal darling”; the Massachusetts Review: “This novel is a disgrace in every respect”); but it was Woods’s piece that stuck in Millar’s mind. He hadn’t felt so bad about a review since his mixed notices for The Three Roads. He tried to ignore Woods, he told the Times’s Nona Balakian (met in Mississippi), “But the subject wouldn’t leave me alone, and I finally decided that I had an obligation to stand up for my book.” Millar and Balakian coincidentally had talked of what a mistake it was for authors to answer reviewers in print (as Joyce Carol Oates had recently done); but, stinging from Woods’s attack, Millar wrote Ash Green, “There is no reason why carefully composed books should be killed off by irresponsible reviews, at least not in silence.” Macdonald penned a 350-word letter to the New York Times Book Review, taking Woods to task for his “grotesque distortions” and “thimblerigged quotation.” Such author replies were rare in 1973; this one looked like sour grapes when it was printed in August. “It was justified,” Welty said, “but it would have been better if someone else had done it. I told Ken I would have replied to that, but I couldn’t do it—since that book was dedicated to me! I remember getting very upset; I was so infuriated. It was a very stupid review.”

  Sleeping Beauty stayed on the major best-seller lists for six weeks, reaching nine on the New York Times chart and seven on Publishers Weekly’s. The novel sold about forty-five thousand copies: not as good as The Underground Man, Millar admitted to Ping Ferry, “but satisfactory, and I prefer this book.” As Beauty slipped off top-ten lists in July, Millar told Matt Bruccoli: “I’m eager to get into a new one.”

  But not that eager. There were tempting distractions, and Millar succumbed. The Book-of-the-Month Club proposed that Ross Macdonald edit a Knopf-published suspense anthology. Millar took on the task with enthusiasm, enlisting bookseller Ralph Sipper’s aid in obtaining works by likely authors (Maugham, Simenon, John D. MacDonald, Daphne du Maurier) and soliciting suggestions from friends and colleagues like Julian Symons. Another matter occupying him was the Popular Culture Association’s vote to award Ross Macdonald its first Merit Award, which Millar agreed to accept in person at a PCA event in Chicago in December.

  The PCA was affiliated with Ray B. Browne’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture at Bowling Green. Browne and his wife and colleague, Pat, visited Santa Barbara this summer. “Browne is quiet and unassuming and very sharp,” Millar reported to Ferry. “So is his wife.” Browne found Millar “extraordinarily human and humble” during a lunch at the Coral Casino, he said: “He was very very solicitous of our young daughter. She stepped out one time and got reasonably close to the swimming pool, and he was up on his feet and bounding out to be sure she was all right. After lunch he said he had to excuse himself and go out and walk his blind dog that he had in the back of the car. I walked out with him and he put the dog on a leash and walked him around in the park, then came back and reinstituted our conversation. I thought he was an extraordinarily tender, caring kind of person. But he had his other side: he did not always suffer fools, I guess I would say pretentious fools, easily.”

  Browne, acquainted with Millar’s peers in the popular-culture field, was struck by an unexpected ambivalence in this author: “I had the feeling that although he was a man of great accomplishment, he really was not a man of great self-confidence. He volunteered about his little run-in with John D. MacDonald. The two of them were such different personalities; John D. was a big, old commanding macho personality, but really sensitive underneath. I once asked John D. about his run-in with Ross over the use of the name, but he refused to talk about it. Ross on the contrary was a little bit humbled, a little bit frightened by it, and I thought backed off far too quickly. I thought he’d had just as much right to ‘John’ as John D. did, and I said that to Ross; he backed off again. I think Ross never did quite achieve or manifest the security that he ought to have had. I believe he was a little bit intimidated by his wife—I never met Margaret; she was always out watching birds when I was around—maybe intimidated by both of their lives, and I know terribly terribly undercut by the death of their daughter. I thought their grasp of life, which should have been so pure and firm and complete, was really rather tenuous.

  “I think more than any writer I know—this is going to sound a bit condescending—I sorta felt sympathy for him; I felt, ‘We need to understand Ross.’ God knows, he was quite capable of standing on his own feet, you know; but he was so gentle, and kind, and helpful. I believe that he was so thin-skinned that negative reviews—that for people not to understand him was in fact to wound him, to cut him. When we were at the club, all the personnel there knew him—‘Hello, Mr. Millar’—and he glowed in their attention, but it struck me that he was not quite sure he deserved it. I’m back to that ambivalent personality. I may be making too much out of that, but—I know that had he been in the presence of John D. MacDonald, he would have deferred to him. At the same time—When the literary critic of the LA Times, Robert Kirsch, whom I knew from grad school, was there at the writers’ lunch sort of huffing and puffing and being important, Ross did not say, ‘Yes, Bob’—he sort of kept Bob in his place. So I’m back to that ambivalence; an ambivalent character.

  “There was about the man a kind of vulnerability, a sensitive vulnerability, which made everybody warm up to him and sort of protect him. Despite his skill, his thoughts, and his heroic nature, he didn’t really stand tall. I always had the feeling that, dammit, people didn’t give Macdonald all the credit he deserved; he was so nice and gentle and vulnerable that he didn’t demand it. I guess I’m always thinking of him in comparison with John D. If you didn’t respect John D. MacDonald, he’d kick you in the butt. If you didn’t respect Ross Macdonald, he would sorta say, ‘Well, that’s the way it goes; that’s life.’ ”

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  The writers’ lunch Browne v
isited was by now a local institution, held every other Wednesday at noon at Harry’s (later Josie’s) El Cielito. The restaurant’s name meant “little heaven,” Millar liked to point out; and the luncheon was a sort of haven for Millar. “We drank a bit, but not a lot,” said Roger Simon. “My memory is that Ken would have a beer, and he would do it in a way, like, he was with the guys here at lunch, and we should have a drink!”

  Millar assumed responsibility for alerting regulars when it was time to reassemble. “The Sunday night before,” Herb Harker said, “you could know you were gonna get a call from Ken reminding you of the luncheon on Wednesday. He called the whole roster and dropped a reminder so the fellows wouldn’t forget; he was that dedicated to it.” Millar divided these calls over two or three nights, since the luncheon corps was now about fifty. Newsman Bill Downey said, “When Ken called to remind you about the meetings, you could feel the shyness at the other end.” Dennis Lynds said, “You had to do most of the talking, because Ken was very slow-spoken—and very hard to get off the phone, because there’d be long silences! You’d want to say, ‘Ken, are you there?’ In the period between ’68 through ’73, I didn’t go very often. One reason was because you did drink, and if I have three beers for lunch, I can’t work in the afternoon. But Ken would call to remind me anyhow, every other Monday.”

  There was no agenda at the lunch, Lynds said: “Everybody had an individual check; everyone drifted in at different times. Nobody was very self-conscious. You could bring guests, but you’d introduce them only to whoever was sitting nearby. No one had a regular seat; it was catch-as-catch-can, and I liked that. If Ken brought somebody, he’d try to sit with them, but that might not even be possible; by the time he got there, there probably wouldn’t be three seats together. So you’d sit down wherever there was an empty seat, and you talked to whoever was around you. And you got to know people that way.”

  Harker agreed: “You’d sit by one person one time, another person the next; it was wonderful, the most informal thing you can imagine. There was no chairman, no introductions, no anything. It was usually a rowdy occasion. Once in a while there’d be somebody saying something with everyone listening, but mostly you’d have several conversations going on.” They had a great group, Harker thought: “Dennis was there a lot, and Bob Easton. Paul Lazarus, a motion picture producer; he taught a screenwriting course at UCSB. Bill Gault. Larry Pidgeon, who was in charge of the editorial page at the News-Press, a wonderful guy; I can remember some discussions we had about Vietnam: Larry supported our government, and that wasn’t true of everybody at the table; we’d get some fairly warm conversations going. Chet Holcomb, who was also with the newspaper. For a while Jack Schaefer, who wrote Shane, moved here from Santa Fe. Willard Temple, a short-story writer for the Saturday Evening Post; a great fellow. Don Freeman, who wrote children’s books. Clifton Fadiman, an interesting guy. Artie Shaw was there several times; he’s a wonderful storyteller. Ken said one time how much he enjoyed that lunch; he said, ‘This is better than a university course in writing.’ You’d get some terrific conversations going.”

  Bill Gault recalled this exchange: “One day Ken and I were discussing a writer we both admire, F. Scott Fitzgerald. A publisher got into what had been a dialogue by saying, ‘I have never been able to understand why he is so admired; I didn’t like The Great Gatsby.’ Ken gave him his nonconcerned stare and said, ‘Two writers have agreed on the man. It really doesn’t matter what a publisher thinks of the book.’ ”

  During the luncheons’ heyday, Ralph Sipper (who moved to Santa Barbara in the midseventies) wrote, “Though he would deny it, Macdonald is clearly the dominant, if restrained force at the gatherings—‘our leader,’ as local novelist Bill Gault jokingly refers to him.” Sipper said, “Everybody wanted to sit next to Ken.”

  Gault was the liveliest participant, according to Jerre Lloyd: “He was real garrulous and brought everybody out; if somebody wasn’t talking, he’d ask them a question.” But it was Macdonald who drew outsiders to the lunches, Lloyd said: “Dozens of people came through Santa Barbara to see Ken, and he was always accessible. He was sort of a guru of literature, and I can’t help but think that he influenced a lot of people.”

  The lunches filled a need in Millar for the sort of camaraderie he’d experienced years ago with Pearce, Ford, and Lee at the University of Western Ontario. To keep the collegial clubhouse feel, he insisted the lunches be for men only. “Barny Conrad and Paul Lazarus wanted to invite women to join,” Harker recalled, “and Ken was absolutely opposed! He said, ‘That’s fine; if you want to have a group of men and women, that’s fine—but leave this group alone!’ He said, ‘You bring women in, you just change the whole thing.’ He gave an example: One day we went to lunch and here were a couple of women at our table; they said they’d heard about this writers’ lunch and wanted to check it out. Ken said afterwards, ‘You see? What’d I tell you?’ He talked about one of the guys there; he said, ‘He made an absolute fool of himself in front of those women; he talked differently, and it just changed everything!’ So he vetoed that as long as he had anything to do with it, and I think the veto pretty well stuck.”

  There was no shortage of males to fill seats. Ted Clymer, who wrote educational textbooks and lived across the road from the Millars, was a regular; as was Irving Townsend, the Columbia Records executive turned writer. Poets Hank Coulette and Phil Levine attended in summer. William Saroyan and William Eastlake were occasional visitors. “Normally we met in a room over on the right, at a table for maybe thirty,” said Lynds. “But everybody tried to come to the lunch before Christmas, and you’d get a horde then of sixty or sixty-five. Then we went into a big back room where there were two long banquet tables, with probably thirty at each. Enormous. The whole back room of El Cielito would be full of writers: tons of people from the university, the poets, the News-Press guys, and writers from all around town.”

  “Those were fun gatherings,” Lloyd said. “I was a trust officer in a bank, and everyone at the luncheon was interested in that because not too many others worked in the outside world; they were always asking me questions. I said to Ken, ‘Since I’m the only one who has a real job, I’m like a spy at the luncheon.’ He said, ‘If you’re a spy, I’m a double agent.’ ”

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  QUESTIONS

  1. Ross Macdonald’s novels have, in the 1960’s and ’70s, come increasingly to be praised as quality literature. Basing your comments on this section from The Far Side of the Dollar and any other works by Macdonald you may have read, show what aspects of his work might make him superior to other writers of detective fiction. You might refer to George Grella’s discussion of Macdonald’s work (see “Theories” section of this book).

  —Detective Fiction: Crime and Compromise, edited by Dick Allen and

  David Chacko, 1974

  Paul, Joanne to Costar in ‘Pool’

  That attractive study in contrasts, azure-eyed Paul Newman and his avocado-eyed wife, Joanne Woodward, together again in a film? . . . The project is “The Drowning Pool,” Lorenzo Semple’s adaptation of an early mystery by best seller Ross Macdonald (whence “Harper,” earlier). With Paul as the private eye—and wouldn’t you like to have that guy focus his eyes on you?

  —Joyce Haber, Los Angeles Times, July 4, 1974

  “Double agents,” “burglars who secretly wish to be caught,” “shoplifters who see their own furtive images in a scanning mirror”—the guilty metaphors Millar applied to Macdonald and his crime-fiction colleagues were humorously appropriate to the genre, but they were also clues to the lawless life Millar had avoided; like most Macdonald images, they did double duty.

  Millar minted another one like this, saying he was breaking into the academy by the back door or maybe the second story, through being given the left-of-mainstream Popular Culture Association’s Award of Merit. At the ceremony, four scholars would read papers on his work. “This will be embarrassing,
heady, and rather frightening,” Millar wrote Matt Bruccoli, “particularly since I’m expected to respond. Well, it can’t be worse than my orals were.”

  He needn’t have worried. The five to six hundred academics packing Chicago’s Palmer House ballroom the last Friday night in 1973 (two weeks after Millar’s fifty-eighth birthday) were all Macdonald fans. Moderator John Cawelti of the University of Chicago, a pioneer in popular-culture studies, told those assembled, “We conceived of this award about a year ago because we thought that it would be valuable to dramatize the idea that there were writers and other creators working in popular traditions who were we felt achieving very significant and important art; and it was interesting to me that when we had the idea for the award and we thought about who should be the first one to get it, there was absolutely no doubt in anyone’s mind that Ross Macdonald was the appropriate recipient. I don’t think any other candidate came anywhere near in our estimation of the person who most symbolized the qualities that we were trying to dramatize in the award.”