Ross MacDonald

by Tom Nolan

  “He was a very comforting presence; you know, Valium withdrawal involves considerable fear and trembling. Everything he said was informed by a tremendous amount of compassion: like the books, like what we love about his books on that plane. I remember a couple of things he said to me. There was a big book about Stravinsky on my coffee table; I’d known Stravinsky. I said, ‘Here’s a guy that lived to be eighty-eight. Worked up to his last day, never had problems with alcohol or drugs.’ He said one word: ‘Lucky.’ Of course, that word stayed with me all my life—coming from someone who really didn’t have anything to do with the world of rehabilitation or Recovery Nation, but could just say a word: ‘Lucky.’

  “We walked around my backyard, and he was telling me the names of things! I said, ‘Look, you know, I got this great big house, I don’t like it, I don’t know what any of these plants are, this all just makes me uncomfortable, what’s wrong with me?’ He said, ‘How old are you?’ I said, ‘Thirty.’ He said, ‘You feel guilty. Writers are overcompensated, in our culture.’ And I thought that was also profound. Now when journalists ask me aren’t I bitter about I guess presumably not being Bryan Adams, I think, ‘Bitter about not being overcompensated, I guess they mean.’

  “In the context of the same discussion, I said to him, ‘I dunno, I read about Fitzgerald drinkin’ gin, and I figured if you drank gin, maybe you could write like Fitzgerald. I gotta worry now because writing has stopped being fun.’ He said, ‘Fun?’ So I remember that too all the time, when writing’s hard—as we know it’s always hard, and it’s always horrible—‘Fun?’ And that was the last time I saw him.”

  Zevon wrote to thank Millar, saying, “You’re not only the finest novelist but the personification of the noblest qualities of your work.” The record artist dedicated his 1980 album, Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School, “For Ken Millar il migliore fabbro.” Reminded sixteen years after his thank-you letter that he’d quoted The Doomsters to Millar to describe the author’s compassionate visit, Zevon recited the line verbatim: “Was it: ‘It was one of those times when you have to decide between your own inconvenience and the unknown quantity of another man’s troubles’? Well—he meant that stuff. Obviously. He was that guy.”

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  In September 1979, Millar made a concerted effort to write some fiction. The results were not encouraging. “I’ve been back at my desk for a short time, not making very much progress or very much noise,” he reported to Green. “I seem to have been touched by the encroachments of age, which I suppose might naturally enough show themselves in the late months of my sixty-fourth year. The trouble seems to be lifting—even though no doctor could give it a name more searching than high blood pressure and the like—and while I can’t certainly predict the future, it will surely allow me further writing.”

  Macdonald didn’t have to do another book, of course. Millar could afford to retire. (He learned this autumn that Knopf was holding more than $170,000 for him in its coffers, money he hadn’t even known he had coming.) But writing was more or less what Millar lived for, writing and reading. And he yearned to complete the thirty-year Archer saga in some satisfying way.

  An exciting idea occurred to him after he conferred, at his psychiatrist friend’s referral, with a Stanford Center expert on memory organization. Millar penned these spidery lines in a notebook: “Archer discovers his own early—perhaps pre-memory—life in Wiarton. The Wiarton story is prememory, emerging at the end as Archer’s own pre-memory life. Archer goes all the way back and finds himself.”

  Here was an audacious way to combine autobiography and fiction, the present and the past. Lew Archer—a man in but not of California, the lifelong loner obsessed with excavating the causes of others’ trauma—would find the buried roots of his own alienation in Ken Millar’s Canada. The door leading out of the Archery was the door through which it was entered. The end of the story was in its beginning, and the biggest circle of all would close: “It’s all one case.”

  Like Archer nearing the end of a mystery, Millar felt himself in a race with time, and with his own diminishing abilities. He seemed to need something extra to spur him to the finish line. Millar had always been opposed to freelance writers (in whose ranks he proudly included himself) accepting book advances; cash up front made you beholden to publishers, he warned aspiring authors, and you became an employee instead of an artist. But in December 1979 (“almost as a goad to himself,” Green thought), Millar did what he’d never done before in thirty-five years as a novelist: had his agent arrange a contract for a book that wasn’t yet written. The house of Knopf agreed to pay Ross Macdonald an advance of forty thousand dollars (half on signing, half on delivery) for an untitled mystery novel due December 1, 1981.

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  Lew Archer remembers.

  —George Grella

  Archer is a life-size hero. He’s got a better memory than most.

  —Ken Millar to Richard Moore

  Macular degeneration was the cause of Margaret Millar’s eye trouble, and there was no cure. Operations slowed its progress but couldn’t stop it. (Of her four laser surgeries, Maggie said, “I might as well have phoned them in.”) Though left with peripheral vision, Margaret was legally blind. “I don’t know why,” she said later, “but blindness has sort of followed me around all my life. Unless I’m just acutely conscious of it. I had two blind dogs. My father was blind when he died at ninety-three. I wrote a book about blindness. And it just seems to have—Oh, I don’t know, I guess I got a little superstitious about it: almost as if I were asking for it, right? Nope. Not right. I’m not religious.”

  Margaret Millar’s plight troubled her husband greatly, said Bob Easton: “When Margaret’s health deteriorated, first with the cancer operation on her lung, this distressed Ken terribly because he felt so totally responsible for her in a very gallant way. When her eyesight began to go, that really put an extra burden on Ken and just concerned him so much. He was always very caretaking, very thoughtful of her.”

  Maggie’s attitude was good, and she stuck to her routine: swimming, lunching at the club, attending trials with Millar, and even bicycling around Hope Ranch. With the help of magnifying equipment, she resumed writing. “We’ve had some recent trouble in our lives,” Millar wrote Olding stoically, “but . . . I think we can claim we are riding out the storm, and Margaret riding out the storm of blindness.” To keep her informed of local events (“a writer has to know something special,” Margaret emphasized), Millar read her the newspaper daily, as he’d done years ago for his blind professor Mueschke at Ann Arbor. Maggie’s mind was as sharp as ever, and her husband marveled at how much she remembered—Kitchener, for instance: “Margaret has the whole town in her mind, street by street. Her memory is fantastic.”

  Memory was on Millar’s mind a lot. His own had always been remarkable. In college he could recall whole books, including their page numbers. At Michigan, Margaret said, he tested so well in memorization he was urged to switch his major to math: “This was in a memory course, and one of the tests was to multiply a four-figure number by a four-figure number in your head in five minutes, then do it over again with another number. The idea was to test tiredness in relationship to memory: Did you become less proficient, did it take longer, et cetera. I don’t know what the conclusion was, but I do know that he got a big kick out of it: which is my idea of a nonhobby.”

  All his life Millar recited poetry from memory, and he seemed to have total recall of his own prose. Betty Phelps got corrected by him once: “In his book Black Money, there’s a sentence around page twelve that I liked very much, and I told him what it was: ‘A little pale moon hung in a corner of the sky, faint as a thumbprint on a window.’ He said, ‘No: “windowpane.” ’ And of course it has to be windowpane or the rhythm is wrong: ‘A little pale moon hung in a corner of the sky, faint as a thumbprint on a windowpane.’ ”

  His memory served Millar well in engineering plots so intricate they
might have been concocted by a math whiz. Memories were at the core of Lew Archer’s job: they were what he sought, what he recovered. Memory was at least half of fiction-writing, Millar told Jerry Tutunjian: “It’s the interplay of memory and intellect together that make imaginative work.”

  It was triply alarming then when Millar sensed his memory faltering. This began as early as 1971, with occasional mistakes in months and days: writing March for May. Revising Sleeping Beauty in 1972, he confused its chronology by putting Monday for Tuesday, Tuesday for Wednesday, and so on; the error was caught at Knopf before the book went to press. (“It’s great to be backstopped by you people,” he thanked Ash Green.)

  In May of 1972, Millar misquoted his own 1952 line about Dashiell Hammett as “We all came out from under Hammett’s overcoat.” His original quip, a play on Dostoyevsky’s remark that all modern Russian writers came out from under Gogol’s short story “The Overcoat,” was “We all came out from under Hammett’s black mask.”

  By 1974 he was forgetting which of his books were due to be reissued by Bantam. He confessed that year to a correspondent, “I am so prone to getting lost when I go anywhere by car, that I’ve practically given up out-of-town driving. The road seems to change every year or so in Southern California, but the map in my mind remains the same, ten years out of date.” When Julian Symons responded to his confiding that he hoped to bring the Archer cycle to closure, Millar forgot he’d already told Symons that and wrote, “I was struck by your suggestion that I ‘round off the Archer saga,’ because that is precisely what I am working towards.”

  He was repeating himself in letters by 1976. (“Thank you for your interest,” then three sentences later, “Thank you for your interest.” He told Linwood Barclay his fiction manuscript brought “back Canada palpably to me,” then a paragraph later said the work “brought Canada palpably back to me.”)

  The week The Blue Hammer was published, a New York City high school teacher wrote Knopf a letter pointing out two mistakes: Lew Archer having dinner at 8 P.M., then buying a meal around midnight because “I hadn’t eaten since breakfast”; a body “buried” in the desert then later “found” there. Small errors (and unnoticed by Knopf’s proofreader, Millar’s editor, and several others) but unusual for the meticulous Ross Macdonald. (Millar thanked this attentive reader and asked quite seriously if he’d proofread Macdonald’s next book.)

  More significant mistakes were occurring by late 1976. Millar “worked hard” on his introduction to Otto Penzler’s edition of the Archer short stories; nonetheless it contained “a serious inaccuracy” that Penzler called to his attention: “You state that ‘the other stories in this volume, with two exceptions, were written for EQMM.’ As I’m sure you will recall, only two were written for EQMM, but four were written for MANHUNT. I think you will want to rewrite that line.”

  His ability to speak in perfectly shaped paragraphs had impressed people since college, but by 1976, Millar was sometimes finding speech elusive. Jane Bakerman quoted him saying, “A lot of the so-called literary material that young writers produce . . . The sentence finishes itself.” During his 1976 interviews with Paul Nelson, Millar couldn’t recall such familiar names as John O’Hara and Wilkie Collins. In Dick Moore’s 1977 film, he took verbal detours to avoid proper names and titles—referring for instance to “my book about the oil spill” instead of Sleeping Beauty.

  He had trouble signing contracts by early 1978 and was leaving crucial information out of correspondence: bringing a book to someone’s attention by title but neglecting to mention its author; stating the month and weekdays of an upcoming trip but not its dates. He repeated words in handwritten sentences (“Have I mentioned that that your reviews seem to me to grow in amplitude and ease?”) or omitted them (“At the moment we have the pleasant duty of looking after our fifteen-and-a-half grandson James. Or is he looking after us?”). Making a list of those to be sent complimentary copies of Archer in Jeopardy, Millar included Eudora Welty’s name twice and wrote “John Simon,” a New York critic he didn’t know: surely he meant John Leonard? By the end of 1979, Millar was having difficulty reading books, and he wondered, “Can I be slowing down?”

  In this fraying mental state, with his wife’s situation weighing on him, he tried to write a novel. “The less delightful people with whom I consort in fiction are slow to come to my bidding, but they’re coming,” he insisted to Ash Green in early 1980. “I have some tentative ideas, and underlying them some new approaches, I think to the Archer story. You will forgive me if I say no more: my later books have been slow to bring in but I trust worth the carriage.”

  It grieved him that the genre he’d given his life to had changed he thought for the worse, due to the blockbuster mentality in publishing and the trend toward more violently sensational and less realistically serious thrillers. “They ruined the book market in that area,” he told San Francisco Chronicle writer Mickey Friedman. “It used to be a respectable form, but not any more. . . . The form is aimed in the wrong direction and being done in a way that does it no good. . . . Throughout Europe, it’s a highly respected form. It’s respected in every country except this one. That’s a great disappointment to me.”

  Changes in the writing world were sadly evident during Ross Macdonald’s last appearance at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, where the author was confronted not by the idealistic young people of previous summers, who’d seemed willing to make sacrifices in the service of their authorial dreams, but by would-be dealmakers who apparently viewed the writing game chiefly as a vehicle to five-or six-figure incomes. “Ken Millar was a very vulnerable-looking figure in this Day of the Locust-type scene,” said Jim Pepper, a Santa Barbara bookman. “He was bombarded with very invasive questions hurled at him, like ‘How much money do you make?’ ‘How much do you pay your agent?’ ‘What did you get for paperback rights to The Blue Hammer?’ He was hesitant, taking more than his time to respond—but he was responding, carefully, thoughtfully. It was a real Nathanael West-like situation.”

  Millar had more than a deteriorating cultural scene to worry about. He spoke to Friedman of coming to terms with aging: “It’s not just an idle thing. You’re fighting for your life. . . . You begin to realize things you hadn’t thought of before—like, you’re not invulnerable.”

  Foreign editions of Macdonald’s California books were being printed all the time now in such far-off places as Israel, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Russia (Bob Ford alerted Millar to the unauthorized publication of The Far Side of the Dollar, under the translated title Path Leads to El Rancho, in Ogonek, the most popular weekly magazine in the U.S.S.R.). Interviewers wrote or called on Millar (on Margaret too) from all over the country and around the world; in 1980, Macdonald was contacted by writers from Finland, Denmark, Sweden, and Japan. Those journalists who Millar saw in 1980 were saddened and alarmed by the man they encountered.

  John Milton, editor of the South Dakota Review, found Millar friendly but distracted when he met him for lunch at the Coral Casino in May 1980. After they ordered, Millar forgot and started to order a second time. When Milton tried to give him a list of questions to answer by mail, Millar said, “No, I can’t do that.”

  Between spring and fall of 1980, he got worse. In August he could still compose a letter, but his penmanship was erratic. Concerned for Dorothy Olding, whose blood pressure was high, Millar wrote, “I hope you will give yourself steady and serious care. You are a valuable person in my life—in all our lives—and we love you.” A word got snarled in his pen; above its illegible scrawl he printed “VALUABLE.”

  Jane Bernstein, last in touch with Millar in March 1979, wrote and then telephoned in September 1980 to ask for a letter of recommendation supporting her Guggenheim application. “Frank MacShane suggested it,” she said. “I find asking for those things about the hardest thing in the world, but I took a deep breath and called him. And at first he didn’t seem to remember who I was, which was painful. Then he said no, he couldn’t do it, whi
ch was even more painful. And then he told me his wife was sick.”

  Wall Street Journal writer Rich Jaroslovsky was warned in advance, “almost nonchalantly,” of Margaret’s blindness when he telephoned for an interview with Macdonald in late 1980. The journalist expected an awkward scene with the Millars, he wrote: “And yet at lunch, they—and especially she—kept up a lively stream of comments, questions and stories. Their devotion to each other was obvious and touching.” But Jaroslovky’s time with Millar was difficult. “While Mr. Millar didn’t declare his writing career over,” the Journal man later wrote, “he considered his best days to be behind him.” Surprised and depressed, Jaroslovsky spiked his Macdonald story.

  By now Margaret was aware of his problems. As he warned visitors of her blindness, so she tried to prepare people for his behavior.

  “She said several times that he hadn’t been well,” recalled Diana Cooper-Clark, a teacher at Toronto’s York University who arrived in Santa Barbara in December 1980 to interview both Millars for a book of dialogues with mystery writers. “As she put it, his memory wasn’t as good as it once was, and he forgot things, right? But I thought, it’s the way wives talk sometimes; that’s how I took it.” Cooper-Clark had already interviewed such crime-fiction writers as Patricia Highsmith, Julian Symons, Ruth Rendell, and Janwillem van de Wetering; she was especially eager to talk with Ross Macdonald. “There was something about his writing that just grabbed me in the heart. I loved his beautiful sentences and the way he put words together, but also the psychological aspect long before people were really doing that. And he was so gracious in his language and metaphors and all of that; I thought he was wonderful. And the excessive patterns, I loved! And even when he wrote essays or did other interviews, I was so fascinated by everything he said and how he said it: there was always such beauty in his articulation. I read everything by him; he was marvelous.”