The Letters of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald

This impressive volume offers myriad insights into the lives of three writers: Eudora Welty of Jackson, Mississippi, and two younger Canadian-Americans settled in Santa Barbara, California, Margaret and Kenneth Millar (a.k.a. Ross Macdonald), who adopted his pen name to separate his mystery novels from those of his wife. Marrs and Nolan—biographers of Welty and Macdonald, respectively—include most of their 345 surviving letters exchanged between 1970 and 1982, as well as letters to or from Margaret, Eudora’s unfinished story “Henry” based on Macdonald’s Alzheimer’s, expert editorial guidance, scholarly notes, and an excellent index. In this volume the biographers capture the convergence of two creative imaginations who were attracted to each other even before the first letter was written or the correspondents met in New York, because they had long loved each other’s stories.

In a review published in the NYTBR on Valentine’s Day, 1971, Eudora observes that Macdonald’s novel The Underground Man “is written so close to the nerve of today as to expose most of the apprehensions we live with.” Two years later she writes that his Sleeping Beauty “has in a specially beautiful way given dramatic form to our darkest & most serious moral problems of today.” Macdonald replies: “Your imagination creates around you an illuminated world very much like a lighted room where everything is known and loved and in place.” On June 11 he declares her letters “have an absoluteness and delicacy of moral line which the future will need even if it doesn’t desire.” By December 20 he finds her “the most irrepressibly joyous person I know,” something one would scarcely say of Margaret during Eudora’s later visits to Santa Barbara. For by November 25, 1976, Macdonald is writing to Eudora things about his past and his incipient memory loss which he felt unable to speak of in an interview for Writers’ Digest. Then, on January 2, 1977, he reports that the amicable divorce of two friends has convinced him of what he “didn’t use to believe, that divorce could be a suitable end to a marriage,” and that in writing up his early family life he will be aware of Eudora “as the most responsive imagination I write to.”

The full nature of the love story revealed by this correspondence will doubtless remain a mystery. It is compatible with mutual physical attraction, but chattily concerned with personal feelings, current events, birds, Eudora’s photography, literary personalities, and morally imaginative fiction—cherished primarily on the page, but also as adapted to stage and screen. The closeness evident in later letters might have been as hurtful to Margaret as adultery, an act I consider unlikely because it would have been incautious, inconvenient, and infrequent in Jackson or Santa Barbara, with even fewer opportunities elsewhere. Eudora wrote on January 27, 1977, after reviewing books of letters by Faulkner and Virginia Woolf and while preparing something on Chekhov, that she had had a “fine time” with Margaret’s latest book: “The true expert, and fine handler of the sinister scene, the splendid dialogue writer that she always is.” What Margaret thought of the developing closeness is not clear; but before becoming incapable of replying in 1980, Macdonald preserved Eudora’s letters privately.

Like Macdonald’s letters, they were worth preserving. Among other things they unfold a familiar triangular plot: a romance in which one of the lovers is already married, as in Katherine Bellamann’s novel The Hayvens of Demaret (1951) and Eudora’s story “No Place for You, My Love” of 1952—the year in which she gave up learning French and gave me her French grammar. I had met Welty about six years earlier, after my return to Jackson from eighth grade in Asheville, North Carolina, where—infatuated with Edgar Allan Poe—I sometimes rested after school on the adjacent graves of O. Henry and Thomas Wolfe. By 1946 Welty was the local...