{"id":90158,"date":"2015-09-24T13:12:13","date_gmt":"2015-09-24T17:12:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=90158"},"modified":"2015-09-30T11:54:09","modified_gmt":"2015-09-30T15:54:09","slug":"will-they-or-wont-they","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/09\/24\/will-they-or-wont-they\/","title":{"rendered":"Will They or Won\u2019t They?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The not-quite-romance of Eudora Welty and Ross MacDonald.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald.<\/p><\/div>\n

Some friendships hover between romantic and platonic, anchored to the latter by circumstance or fate. It\u2019s\u00a0a sitcom trope: the will-they-or-won\u2019t-they couple, always teetering at the edge of love. But though TV demands a tidy resolution\u2014the answer is almost always that they will, and do\u2014in life such friendships\u00a0often\u00a0remain in limbo indefinitely, stretching on for years, even decades.<\/p>\n

Such was the case for Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald. By the time they became acquainted, in 1970, both were well established in their fields\u2014Welty in\u00a0that nebulous genre called Southern literature, and Macdonald in hard-boiled detective fiction. Welty\u2019s stories and novels captured the voice of small towns in Mississippi; Macdonald, the pen name for Ken Millar, set his novels in Southern California, where he and his wife, Margaret, had settled. His books explored, through his Philip Marlowe\u2013equivalent Lew Archer, the ways in which the dream of suburbia could turn twisted and nightmarish.<\/p>\n

Welty was an avid reader of crime fiction, so much so that the now-defunct Choctaw Books in Jackson used to keep a pile of paperbacks on hand for when she stopped by. Though she went on to win a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, the only award Welty publicly displayed in her house was the Mystery Writers of America\u2019s Raven Award, which she received in 1985 for being the Reader of the Year. She and Millar, by all accounts, had admired each other\u2019s writing from afar for many years, but never connected. Then Welty published her novel Losing Battles<\/em>, and Millar, using his real name, wrote her a brief, appreciative note.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is my first fan letter,\u201d Millar wrote. \u201cIf you write another book like Losing Battles<\/em>, it will not be my last.\u201d Indeed, it wasn\u2019t close to being his last. With the ice broken, Welty and Millar struck up an epistolary friendship that endured until his death in 1983, exchanging some 345 letters. Even after the onset of Alzheimer\u2019s disease left Millar unable to reply, Welty wrote him. To read their correspondence, collected this summer in the excellent Meanwhile There Are Letters<\/em><\/a> by Welty\u2019s biographer Suzanne Marrs and Millar\u2019s biographer Tom Nolan, is to eavesdrop on a long, nuanced conversation about literature, politics\u2014\u201cOh God! I had to meet Pres. Nixon!\u201d Welty wrote\u2014and the victories and frustrations of life as a writer. Both wrote voluminously about birds, exchanging the number of grackles, pigeons, and golden eagles spotted in their gardens. It reads as a long-running private joke, or even a coded language. Millar, to Welty: \u201c3,000 cranes were standing in the water of Soda Lake. A thousand took to the air as we were watching, flew over us in long lines bending unbroken like lines of music then burst into actual music, a gleeful melodious grumbling \u2026 \u201d And from Welty to Millar, a limerick: \u201cA condor who couldn\u2019t call quits\/was giving the bird-watchers fits\u2014simply besotted\/with being spotted\/he booked himself in at the Ritz.\u201d<\/p>\n

They exchanged books, cards, and Christmas cake, often crossing letters in the mail in their eagerness to respond. Millar gave solace to Welty when some close friends of hers died: \u201cLike the trees in your yard,\u201d he wrote, \u201cwe lose limbs but still put out new leaves.\u201d When they were traveling, the pair would sometimes send notes in advance to each other\u2019s destination, thus remaining in touch even away from home.<\/p>\n

Can it come as any surprise, then, that these letters occasionally read like the prelude to a courtship? Though cautious throughout\u2014both Millar and Welty make frequent reference to Millar\u2019s wife, as if reminding themselves not to get too carried away\u2014an unmistakable adulation animates their exchange. Welty, after all, was a prolific correspondent, maintaining epistolary conversations with many of her friends, but the tenor of her writings to Millar is different. \u201cOur friendship blesses my life, and I wish life could be longer for it,\u201d she wrote. After one letter in which Welty had accepted Millar\u2019s request to dedicate a book to her, he wrote that he \u201cabandoned myself to indulgence and simply sat and read your letter over several times with tears in my eyes. It was one of the great moments of my life.\u201d In another, Miller professes that \u201cyour letters came as part of this general spring feelings. It gives me an occasion to tell you how much I loved Losing Battles <\/em>and love its author.\u201d And then, tacked on in the usual guarded way: \u201cAs does Margaret.\u201d<\/p>\n

Millar\u2019s marriage, according to Nolan and Marrs, was rocky, particularly after the death of the couple\u2019s only daughter. Margaret\u2019s voice, of course, is left out of the conversation, so it\u2019s difficult to know what she thought of her husband\u2019s deep relationship with Welty. Early in her correspondence with Millar, Welty attempted to strike up a similar exchange with Margaret, as she had with her editor William Maxwell and his wife, Emily. (Those letters are collected in the equally excellent What There Is to Say We Have Said.<\/em>) But her entreaties didn\u2019t seem to work, for whatever reason, and so Margaret Millar remains, however unfairly, more an obstacle than a character in the story of Welty and Macdonald.<\/p>\n

As for Welty, she was in her midsixties by the time she got Millar\u2019s first letter, and had never married. The love affair of her youth, with an apprentice writer John Robinson, had ended when it came to light that Robinson was living with another man in Italy. (Welty remained friendly with him afterward.) In lieu of having children or settling down, Welty traveled extensively, worked intensely, and maintained a coterie of devoted friends; after the death of her brother, she also cared for her nieces.<\/p>\n

So the sitcom question remains at the heart of these letters: Did they or didn\u2019t they? Welty and Millar met in person only on a handful of occasions. The year after Millar sent his fan note, he waited to meet her in the lobby at the Algonquin Hotel, tipped off by colleagues that Welty was staying there. They spent an evening walking the streets of Manhattan, apparently enraptured with each other\u2019s presence. All told, through writer\u2019s conferences and the occasional visit, Welty and Millar spent fewer than six weeks in each other\u2019s company\u2014not a long while, on one hand, but more than long enough, on the other. Trying to read between the lines of their correspondence can feel strained and a tad gossipy, leading to fervent speculation in the realm of fan fiction.<\/p>\n

Still, the idea of such a literary power couple is irresistible to imagine. Sure, some of it is just pure curiosity, the tabloid detective work we all occasionally engage in with cultural figures. At least for me, it\u2019s also because the idea of a covert cross-country tryst would help shatter the myth of Welty as a Southern spinster, sour and fusty, cooped up with her flowers and her typewriter. Welty, like Flannery O\u2019Connor and Harper Lee, is all too often shunted into that category. When literary men choose to stick to their small town environs, they are regarded as noble and solitary. When women do, they are too often painted as recluses, dried-up and sheltered, passionless.<\/p>\n

At its deepest level, investment in the did-they-or-didn\u2019t-they of the situation reflects the intimacy between these writers and their audience. The letters remove Macdonald and Welty from the realm of abstraction, the stuff of stamps and textbooks, and present them as people you\u2019d like to have at a dinner party: bright, funny, warm, and full of silliness. Reading the correspondence between Millar and Welty, you almost begin thinking of them as your friends\u2014friends who\u00a0should get together, already. And if they did, who knows? The letters may be littered with clues. After all, both writers enjoyed a good mystery.<\/p>\n

Margaret Eby\u2019s <\/em>South Toward Home: Travels in Southern Literature is out now.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The not-quite-romance of Eudora Welty and Ross MacDonald. Some friendships hover between romantic and platonic, anchored to the latter by circumstance or fate. It\u2019s\u00a0a sitcom trope: the will-they-or-won\u2019t-they couple, always teetering at the edge of love. But though TV demands a tidy resolution\u2014the answer is almost always that they will, and do\u2014in life such friendships\u00a0often\u00a0remain […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":230,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[489],"tags":[5733,1903,3339,327,19531,182,2111,19532,19529,19533,10428,19534,19530],"class_list":["post-90158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","tag-correspondence-2","tag-epistolary-exchange","tag-eudora-welty","tag-friendship","tag-ken-millar","tag-letters","tag-love","tag-meanwhile-there-are-letters","tag-ross-macdonald","tag-suzanne-marrs","tag-the-algonquin","tag-tom-nolan","tag-william-maxwell"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Not-Quite-Romance of Eudora Welty and Ross MacDonald<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Margaret Eby on the long, ambiguously romantic correspondence of Welty and MacDonald\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/09\/24\/will-they-or-wont-they\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Will They or Won\u2019t They? by Margaret Eby\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"September 24, 2015 \u2013 The not-quite-romance of Eudora Welty and Ross MacDonald. 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