Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  “It’s a nation of strangers, Canada. It’s all a mass of divisions. People are kind of alone and without a self-image that is clear and definite. Add to that the fact that there is this great thing called the North, which expands just like forever up to the Arctic Circle. All Canadians are aware of it. It’s cold in Canada; it’s barren, up there. It has chilled its national culture to the bone. Silence, and space, enter into the Canadian psyche in a way they don’t into any other. And I have a feeling you can find a lot of that in Ken. A lot of that in his writing too: Archer can be very laconic.

  “ ‘Who am I? What am I?’ Canadians are always in quest of the self. And this invades Ken. His work is to a large extent a quest for himself. The author who is holding the pen is in search of the person who is behind the man holding the pen: a ghost. This is entirely Canadian.

  “The other thing that functions in the Canadian psyche is the notion of colonialism: in other words, ‘I am powerless.’ It’s impossible to be a colonial and not have an inferiority complex, a humility, a self-embarrassment of some kind. So, being a Canadian is really a tough job.

  “But out of all these oppositions and strains, you get diversity and range and a great variety; you get multiperspectival types. Marshall McLuhan, say; Northrop Frye, Ken Millar, Glenn Gould, Hugh Kenner—to take just five who come to mind—all in the same generation, all conspicuous for their ability to see things in enormous diversity and to codify them in interesting ways. And to become, all of them, extremely interesting to Americans.

  “The man from the provinces, even though he’s a country bumpkin in some ways, can see what’s going on in the capital better than the people who are in it. So there’s that aspect to Ken. If he read or caught the pulse of American life, it was because he came from outside it. He told me once—he was so happy about a few good reviews of The Ivory Grin or The Doomsters or another of the early good books—he said, ‘I believe that I have taken the pulse of this country,’ after about six books. A provincial can do that.”

  The detour-filled route Millar found to creative expression—from Ontario high school teacher to Michigan grad student to California detective novelist—could be seen as typically Canadian. Having in mind Robertson Davies (educated at Oxford, an actor in London, and a southern Ontario newspaper editor before becoming a significant Canadian novelist), Millar exclaimed to Peter Wolfe, “What infinitely complicated stratagems the heavy suppressive night of the Canadian self-hating culture imposed on those of its sons who wished to write fiction.” Most other would-be Canadian novelists of their generation did what the Millars had: left Canada. Margaret Laurence, after years in Africa, wrote her first Manitoba novels in England, where Mordecai Richler wrote his Montreal books. Mavis Gallant moved to Paris in 1950. Herb Harker came to Santa Barbara to write of Alberta. “Canadians become Canadians by going elsewhere,” Millar wrote poet-ambassador Robert Ford in Moscow (who certainly proved his point).

  “I really think that Lew Archer is a Canadian-American type,” Millar told a surprised CBC radio interviewer in 1975. “I think his psychological and ethical makeup is predominantly Canadian, rather than American. What he sees with his Canadian eyes is American life.” As Macdonald described him in Richard Moore’s 1977 film, Archer was certainly a different figure from the detectives created by Chandler or Hammett: “Archer is a life-size hero. . . . I tried to write about a fairly good man, though. He embodies values and puts them into action. You don’t have to be a hero to do that. Perhaps that’s what we need, though: a democratic kind of hero. A man who doesn’t blow his own horn, but just goes and does his job right and treats other people fairly well.” In other words, a good Canadian.

  Robertson Davies, in a talk given in the States in the spring of 1977, ventured the notion that the ordinary Canadian, unencumbered by strong national identity, was well suited to be a particularly contemporary champion: “a new kind of hero, a hero of conscience and spirit in the great drama of modern man.” Davies proposed such a hero explore not his continent’s wild landscape but the “desperate wilderness behind the eyes” (paraphrasing Canadian poet Douglas LePan, and unknowingly paraphrasing a line from an unpublished 1950s poem by Kenneth Millar to Margaret). Davies said, “The Canadian voyage, I truly believe, is this perilous voyage into the dark interior . . . a voyage in which many are lost forever, and some wander in circles, but it is the heroic voyage of our time”—and one that Archer and Macdonald, cloaked in genre, had been taking for three decades.

  The emergence of Davies and other writers signaled a new stage in Canadian letters. “Canada is coming alive,” Millar wrote Donald Davie in the midseventies. From his Santa Barbara study, Millar the armchair literary detective traced these newcomers’ origins. “Robertson Davies is still writing under the influence of Stephen Leacock,” he told Jerry Tutunjian. “You can make a direct connection, and I’m sure he would, between Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town and Fifth Business.”

  Millar was keenly interested in the new Canadian fiction. He had Knopf (her American publisher) send him works by the critically well-regarded Margaret Laurence. (Unknown to Millar, the interest was mutual. Linwood Barclay met Laurence when she was a writer in residence at Trent University and found that “she was a terrific fan of Ross Macdonald’s. I was regularly feeding his books to her; she thought they were just wonderful.”) Reading Alice Munro’s story “The Beggar Maid” in the New Yorker in June 1977, Millar correctly deduced Munro was once a student at the University of Western Ontario; he wrote her, “I have never before read a story which so piercingly and succinctly examined the terrors and hopes through which the intellectual and emotional life of Canada apparently must still, forty years after my graduation from UWO, find its way. Your story filled me with joy and the kind of hopeful excitement that only the truth, and the promise of further truth, can evoke.”

  As Millar became aware of these new voices, Canadian litterateurs were discovering Ross Macdonald. Published in Canada by Random House since 1962, Macdonald was hardly a best-seller there: the Canadian hardcover of Sleeping Beauty sold a scant fourteen hundred copies. But in the years of heightened national pride and scholarly activity before and after the hundredth anniversary in 1967 of the country’s confederation, Canada claimed Macdonald as one of its own. John Leonard recalled, “I spoke at the MLA in Montreal and went to a bookstore that had all Canadian writers’ books; they wouldn’t allow any U.S. writers on their shelves. But there was Ross Macdonald—and Saul Bellow, because he’d been born in Canada; they counted as Canadians.”

  In Macdonald’s case at least, the claim seemed valid. In two intriguing essays, Russell M. Brown, of Scarborough College, University of Toronto, argued convincingly that Macdonald’s mysteries “have many qualities about them which are demonstrably Canadian, that in fact the very qualities which have distinguished Millar’s novels from other American mysteries turn out to link him with many contemporary Canadian novelists.” Brown thought Macdonald’s use of landscape as “a kind of presence” was typical of Canadian writing; that his “sense of a past which, if understood, would explain the present” was similar to that of novelists such as Laurence, Davies, and Leonard Cohen; that his concern with the topic of individual responsibility could be seen in such writers as Davies and Richler; that his preoccupation with the search for the lost father was also a recurrent motif for Hugh MacLennan and Margaret Atwood; that in “developing complex causal chains leading from past to present,” Macdonald, like other Canadian novelists, “is able to show his readers all the ways in which cause and effect intertwine”: as Davies showed the expanding consequences of a child throwing a snowball in Fifth Business, so Macdonald traced the source of a huge brush fire back to a single dropped cigarillo, the result of a violent crime “with its own sources to be probed,” in The Underground Man. Many of Macdonald’s novels were like Davies’s and Laurence’s in being “investigations of inheritance both literal and symbolic,” Brown said. And the critic thought Macdonald showed another Cana
dian characteristic in his break with the good-and-evil dichotomy of traditional American hard-boiled fiction, “replacing this vision with one of a world not so much of moral ambiguities as a world where a single deed may turn out to be both good and evil and in which guilt and innocence are virtually indistinguishable,” with blame shared by many in a complex web. Brown concluded, “Macdonald has done more than merely reinvigorate the American mystery. He has also Canadianized it.”

  Millar felt himself further Canadianized when a first cousin, Dr. Gordon MacDonald, of Riverside, California, came to visit for the first time in the mid-1970s. Dr. MacDonald had grown up in Nyssa, Oregon, where he’d known Millar’s father’s father, John Millar, who’d died there. His cousin’s surname, variant spelling and all, made Millar feel even more justified in his choice of pseudonym. His old memories jostled, he became “entranced” with Canada and wanted to mine his northern past more explicitly.

  He could imagine an ambitious nonfiction work, a multigenerational memoir telling his family’s story and a good chunk of Canada’s: how his grandfather left Scotland near the time of the American Civil War and founded an Ontario newspaper, how his father crossed the continent and founded a paper in British Columbia, before going to sea; then how John Macdonald Millar’s son fared, in Canada and the States. It could be the book of a lifetime, if Millar brought it off: a Canadian Roots, or a work like Christopher Isherwood’s account of his parents, Kathleen and Frank. He should try to do it, Millar thought. Yet he dreaded exploring his painful history: “all that old sadness,” as he told Julian Symons, “the substance of my mother, the shadow of my father,” the ghost of his daughter.

  At other times, from 1973, he worked at a novel set in and near Winnipeg in the 1920s. “With it,” he wrote Gerald Walker, “I think I want to go further, and further back, into Canada. The ‘natural situation’ ”—the objective correlative of the story, like the fire in The Underground Man and the oil spill in Sleeping Beauty—“will be extreme frigidity, I think. Deep concealing snow.”

  As the seventies unspooled, Millar thought more about Lew Archer in relation to his author’s Canadian past. In 1977 he noted, “Ultimately my novels may be attempts to put together Wiarton again.” Archer’s following threads of consequence back to before things went awry was a way perhaps for Millar to return psychologically to where he’d last felt safe as a child. Russell Brown saw that too in Millar’s books: that “the mid-west and Canada” often represented for Macdonald’s characters “the Eden which exists no more—the place of now-lost innocence and unattainable sanctuary.”

  Millar tried to start another book in 1977, though he had no financial need. Good money was coming in: $45,000 in Drowning Pool percentage payments, between $67,000 and $ 100,000 from Bantam for The Blue Hammer. Toting up assets, Millar figured he and Margaret had over half a million in cash, savings, and real estate.

  Taking him away from his writing briefly was the making of Richard Moore’s half-hour film on Macdonald for a PBS-TV series, The Originals: The Writer in America, whose other subjects included Wright Morris, Janet Flanner, John Gardner, Toni Morrison, and Eudora Welty. Another diversion was the screenplay Millar agreed to write of The Instant Enemy, based on his own treatment from the year before.

  An alarming 1977 distraction was Margaret’s lung-cancer operation. Doctors removed an entire lobe and with it, apparently, all the cancer. “Ken was wonderful through my illness,” Margaret told Canadian journalist Beverly Slopen, “the nurses wanted to know where I found such a man. When I had been home from the hospital for three days, I was lying on the sofa, still totally helpless. . . . Ken said the most touching thing to me. He was there with the dogs, tending to everything, and he said, ‘You know, I’d be happy to end my days this way.’ ” Within two months, Margaret was back to her routine of swimming, biking, and writing—though she didn’t feel up to a trip to Ontario for the funeral of her ninety-two-year-old father.

  With his wife on the mend and his screenplay on automatic pilot, Millar made another try at getting a novel started. Near the end of the year, still stuck “in the planning stage,” he was forced to acknowledge writing came a lot harder now; and nonfiction seemed nearly impossible. Millar puzzled over why he was having such problems. Was he trying to probe areas his subconscious felt it dangerous to enter? Was his mind throwing up obstacles to long-suppressed facts? If so, he had to dismantle those roadblocks; he’d done it before. “A man can’t fight these wars without some help,” he knew from experience. In October he started sessions with a Santa Barbara psychiatrist, the same man who’d helped him and Margaret and Linda through their worst weeks of 1956.

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  Asked for his views on the future of the mystery, Mr. Macdonald, a quiet-spoken, thoughtful man, said that getting into paperback was more difficult for younger writers these days than it had been for him. . . . Still, he had no doubt that the genre has a future—certainly the hardboiled detective story in the Chandler-Hammett-Cain, and now Macdonald, tradition. . . . As for Ross Macdonald’s future, he’s going to keep writing Lew Archers “as long as my hands are able.”

  —Richard R. Lingeman, “Book Ends,”

  New York Times Book Review, April 1978

  It almost seemed an unwritten rule with shy Ken Millar: when going to meet a smart young woman, bring a book. He’d given his first college girlfriend, Gretchen Kalbfleisch, a book (Oil for the Lamps of China) for her eighteenth birthday. Margaret Sturm had been translating a book of Greek history when he saw her in the London, Ontario, library and recognized his fate. Millar displayed Macdonald’s The Blue Hammer to Jane Bakerman. And when Newsweek’s Diane K. Shah met him in the lobby of New York’s Algonquin Hotel in March 1978, he was holding a copy of a work he’d been reading for half a century.

  “It was ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ ” Shah remembered, “not the kind of book you expect to see somebody carrying around; I said, ‘Oh, tell me about that.’ I got the feeling it was a prop, that he had sort of planned this, to have something to open the conversation with.”

  Shah interviewed Macdonald at the Second International Congress of Crime Writers, a high-profile gathering that saw New York mayor Ed Koch declare March 12 through 18 “I Love a Mystery Week.” “When I encountered him,” Shah said, “he seemed very frail, a little shaky. He was quite tall, and pretty shy. But he was terrific, he really was.” Shah, who later wrote several mystery novels, was a Macdonald fan: “I must have read all of his books three times and underlined. He’s just the best.”

  Millar at first thought he wouldn’t go East this year. As he’d explained to Nolan Miller in January, extricating himself from a promise to address Miller’s Antioch students, “The fact is that Margaret, while making a decent physical recovery from her lung operation, has not recovered emotionally and lives in considerable fear. . . . I now see that I can’t leave her alone here with the responsibilities of this house, any time in the next year. The psychic wound, if I had stopped to figure it out . . . would have appeared to me what it is: harder to live down than the physical wound. And Margaret is as vulnerable as a violin.”

  But his wife recouped her spirits enough for Millar to go to New York in March. He was one of 275 American and European authors gathering at the Biltmore Hotel for the heavily promoted congress, which was linked to several tie-in events around the city (a Mystery Writers Stakes race at Aqueduct, tours of police and crime labs, publishing-industry panels and parties, and the MWA’s annual Edgar Awards).

  Ross Macdonald did his part to publicize the goings-on. He was interviewed by Newsweek, the New York Daily News, the New York Times Book Review, National Public Radio, and BBC television; and he wrote material for a special Publishers Weekly issue. “The Mystery Writers were very very pleased to have him there,” said Julian Symons. The congress was Symons’s idea, to promote and celebrate the mystery story. There were surely things worth celebrating. New interest in the genre
had been stirred recently, some thanks to Murder Ink, a popular tribute volume edited by Dilys Winn (awarded a special Edgar this week). Stores devoted exclusively to crime fiction were opening all over the country. Courses in the mystery were offered in many schools here and abroad. Crime and suspense novels now made up about a third of U.S. fiction best-sellers (something Macdonald’s breakthrough helped bring about). The mystery story seemed lots better off than in 1946, when the MWA was founded with the motto “Crime does not pay—enough!”

  But in other ways, the genre was in trouble. Though readership was growing, there still weren’t enough readers to satisfy publishers, several of whom were cutting back on mysteries. As conglomerates gobbled up the independent houses, “bottom-line” thinking replaced traditional practices from the era of Knopf, Cerf, and Scribner. Until recently publishers had been happy with the six or seven thousand copies they could count on selling (mostly to libraries) of a given mystery; but fewer houses now bothered with such modest numbers. “Publishers are getting greedy,” MWA member Harold Q. Masur told a radio interviewer during “I Love a Mystery Week.” “They don’t want to fool around with a bunch of smaller books; they want to publish the big one. The profits are there, the big money is there; it’s less work for them.”