http://www.latimes.com/news/timesmag/20000618/t000057846.html
Digging for Lew Archer By TOM NOLAN Sunday, June 18, 2000 The
Los Angeles Times
<IMG> The Renaissance of Ross
Macdonald's Mystery
NovelsIs Stirring Interest in the Late
Writer's Muse.
For the Source of His Hard-Boiled Fiction,
Look to
Auden, Hammett, Dante and Dickens.
The roots of private eye Lew Archer are back there, in a
Michigan classroom, between the world wars, long before
anyone had ever heard of the man who would become America's
most intellectual mystery writer. The course was "Fate and
the Individual in European Literature," taught by the young,
already world-famous English poet Wystan Hugh Auden.
One afternoon, Auden asked his class: "How do you define the
difference between a symbol and an allegory?" A hand shot up.
It belonged to Kenneth Millar, a gifted 25-year-old who had
turned to the University of Michigan graduate school as he
struggled to find a creative outlet for his prodigious mind.
"The connection between a symbol and its referent," he said
without pause, "is emotional, and unconscious. That between
an allegory and its referent is rational."
Auden prodded: "Yes, and?"
"And specific," Millar answered.
"Yes," Auden agreed. "Moreover, a symbol will often announce
itself long before you experience it in the text. That's the
case with Moby Dick: You experience it as a giant meaning
before you have any concrete thing to attach it to. This is
not the case with an allegory: The rational and specific and
concrete nature of an allegorical reference, such as 'the
flag,' means nothing until it is encountered. Mr. Millar is
absolutely right."
Auden was impressed, and so was Millar. As the school year
wore on, the brilliant poet, then 34, gave Millar's work
A-pluses, even if the student brashly defied the teacher's
rule forbidding the taking of notes
(essential points, Auden believed, would linger in
memory).
Millar found in Auden an inspired teacher, a genius intellect
and a would-be mentor who offered to introduce him to the
editors of the New Republic. Millar called Auden "a young
Socrates and an old Ariel rolled into one." He began
attending the informal "at-homes" Auden hosted for his
students on Friday nights. Eventually, Millar and his young
wife, Margaret, invited Auden to dinner in their rented
house. It was there that the poet helped sow the seeds of Lew
Archer.
Margaret Millar had by then written four mystery novels, with
editing and plotting help from her husband. Millar enjoyed
the collaboration but had not yet written a book of his own.
His aims were loftier. He aspired to write great
fiction.
But he was troubled. Whatever he did in life, he wanted to be
the best, a high standard that kept him from starting. He'd
dreamed of writing novels -- until he read D. H. Lawrence and
knew he could never surpass him. Millar had a small flair for
poetry but a former classmate, Robert Ford (later recipient
of Canada's Governor-General's Award), showed what a true
poet could already do at their age -- Millar was no match. He
loved modern drama (Ibsen, Strindberg, O'Neill), but after
seeing plays in London and New York, he realized that a
working playwright needed an active theater scene to sustain
him. Millar had loved mystery fiction since childhood, but it
wasn't thought worthy of a serious writer's or reader's time.
Critic Edmund Wilson had dismissed detective stories as
"rubbish."
As Auden dined with the Millars that night, he praised
Margaret's work. The poet had first broken into print by
writing mystery reviews for London newspapers and he still
read detective stories avidly. Auden, it turned out, was no
literary snob. Writing mystery fiction was artistically
legitimate and had social merit, he said. He especially liked
the mystery writers Millar most admired: Raymond Chandler,
whose vivid style was a gust of fresh air through the
academic corridors where Millar worked, and Dashiell Hammett,
who'd first grabbed Millar's attention as a teenager in
Ontario. Auden even paraphrased a Hammett sentence in one of
his best-known poems. With his talent for making startling
and valid connections, Auden helped Millar see the links
between popular culture and the highest art, how from the
lowly Elizabethan revenge play grew "Hamlet: Prince of
Denmark."
Auden thinking well of mysteries, Auden thinking well of
Millar -- the two fused in Millar's mind and induced the
notion that writing mystery fiction could be his way to make
a mark. The more Millar considered it, the more he thought
there was still room for artistic growth in detective
fiction, that even Hammett and Chandler had not done all that
could be done with and within the form, and that being the
world's best mystery writer might be a worthy and plausible
goal. If Millar couldn't match or beat D. H. Lawrence, maybe
he could surpass Raymond Chandler.
Although it would take years for Millar -- writing under the
name Ross Macdonald -- to create the character of California
private eye Lew Archer, Auden had opened the door for books
that a New York Times reviewer in 1969 would call "the finest
series of detective novels ever written by an American."
Later in life, Millar would judge meeting Auden as one of the
four or five most important things that ever happened to him:
"He liberated me into my life."
* * * ROSS MACDONALD SEEMED THE QUINTESSENTIAL Southern
California writer. Living in Santa Barbara, he refined the
California hard-boiled tradition of Hammett and Chandler in a
string of works narrated by Archer. But this standard-bearer
-- whose bestsellers of the 1960s and '70s inspired a
generation of West Coast crime writers from Sue Grafton to
Michael Connelly -- came of age in Canada in the 1920s and
'30s and in the '40s was one of the most brilliant graduate
students at the University of Michigan.
How did an intellectual who wrote a PhD dissertation on the
psychology of Coleridge become the culminating figure of
California hard-boiled fiction? It's as complex a story as
any in a Ross Macdonald novel. And, as often is the case with
Macdonald, the story involves someone changing his name,
moving to another place and assuming a different
identity.
Kenneth Millar was born in Los Gatos, Calif., in 1915. His
parents, Canadians, immediately took him to British Columbia,
where, when he was 4, they separated. Son and mother went to
live with her people in Kitchener, Ontario. They had little
money and his mother was unstable. Millar would remember
begging in the street for food. When he was 8, his mother
filled out papers to place him in an orphanage. At the last
moment, he was rescued by his father's cousin, who took him
into his home for a year.
Young Ken then lived with other relatives in Alberta, and
Manitoba, and Ontario. From an early age, he escaped into
books: everything from Charles Dickens to Edgar Rice
Burroughs to Lord Byron. By 12, he wanted to be a writer,
someone like Dickens, who wrote classics that spoke to all
types of readers.
As a teenager in the Depression years, angry at being poor
and fatherless, he broke laws, fighting violently, getting
drunk, stealing. At the same time, he haunted the library,
studying to be a writer, educating himself about the world.
He consumed all sorts of books with pleasure: pre-Socratic
philosophy, Vienna and Kansas psychology, mysteries by
everyone from Doyle to Dostoevsky. Keats and Shelley showed
him poetic heights. Hammett mirrored the city he saw around
him.
Hammett, in fact, was a special case for Millar, who found
the author's books not in the library but on a rental rack at
the Kitchener pool hall. Why wasn't this essential new writer
in the public library?, Millar wondered. Then he found out.
Hammett actually was in the library, but hidden in a back
room, where he couldn't offend sensitive patrons.
Outraged at being robbed of the chance to read something so
vital to his education, he climbed a fire escape, broke into
the library after hours and made his way to where the banned
books were kept. He read his fill. On his way out, he took an
armful of poorly written new fiction from the open shelves
and, on the way home, dropped it into the Kitchener
sewer.
A few years later, he'd be abashed at what he'd done. But
books were a life-and-death matter for him, and writing well
seemed a sacred act. Teen-aged Kenneth Millar was already
making the sort of firm critical judgments -- about books and
about people -- that would characterize his life and that
soon brought great tension to his years at the University of
Western Ontario.
Millar enrolled in 1934, paying for his four years there with
$2,000 that his father, for years a patient in a charity
hospital, left when he died. On campus, his brilliance was
obvious. He was so smart that it was almost scary. Indeed,
some teachers seemed afraid of him, given that he often knew
more about their subjects than they did and, though polite,
did not defer to their ignorance. His literary efforts,
including stories, poems, and essays published in the UWO
Gazette, made him suspect in the eyes of a large chunk of
Western's student body, which thought creative writing
ungentlemanly.
Millar stood apart even more after his mother died and he
took a semester off for a trip to Europe -- Ireland, England,
France, Nazi Germany. He came back to campus wearing an
English trench coat and green Bavarian fedora with white
cable-cord trim. What had he been up to in Europe, some
wondered warily: espionage? Others found his behavior
off-putting in a different way. "There's a screw loose
somewhere in that man," the dean of the university said. The
college annual mocked Millar's somber mien, captioning a
glaring photo of him: " 'Smatter, Ken?"
The few friends he did make in college were those who could
see beyond his idiosyncrasies to appreciate his intelligence.
Donald Pearce was one. Try as he might to stay clear of
Millar, one day he found himself in rehearsal with him for
Western's production of "Twelfth Night." As the two stood
listening to another student recite a showy first-act speech,
Pearce said: "Isn't that magnificent!" Millar scoffed:
"That's just rhetoric. Elizabethan rhetoric."
Pearce was shocked, but Millar's certitude drew Pearce into a
discussion. Pearce found Millar a person of verbal and mental
strength, someone who without brutality could put a sort of
conversational headlock on you. Talk mattered to the
self-taught Millar. A 30-year friendship began.
Millar was not without champions on the Western faculty, some
so impressed that they treated him like a colleague. But no
one, Millar included, knew quite what he should do with those
gifts. Finally, with his professors' encouragement, he
decided to develop his literary-analytical facility through
graduate study at a U.S. university, perhaps Harvard, after
which maybe he'd make his mark as a critic (as would other
Canadians of his generation, including Northrop Frye and
Marshall McLuhan).
Yet despite his qualifications, Millar failed to win a
postgraduate fellowship. He had applied to Harvard, under the
impression that one of the UWO faculty, a Havard graduate,
would give him a strong recommendation. But the best that
teacher found to say, it seemed, was that Millar had cut a
very "colorful" figure at Western. Millar's hopes were dashed
and it was too late to secure references from other
teachers.
Bitterly disappointed, Millar put his dreams on hold. The day
after graduation, he married his old Kitchener high school
crush, Margaret, who soon became pregnant. Now competing with
his desire to be a man of letters was an equally strong urge
to not ruin things as his father had. Millar chose to do the
responsible thing and become a high school instructor. He
enrolled in a teachers college in Toronto, where in the
spring of 1939 he turned out enough penny-a-word poems,
stories and sketches for Toronto publications to pay his
wife's maternity hospital bill. The Millars and their baby
daughter moved back to Kitchener, where he taught at their
old high school.
He supported the family and helped with household chores,
which allowed Margaret to begin her own writing career. Her
first novel, with ample assistance from her husband, sold in
1941. The timing was good: That same year, Millar was offered
a teaching fellowship at the University of Michigan, where
he'd been attending postgraduate summer courses since 1938.
Margaret's new income made the move possible.
Once there, despite his affinity for Auden and critic Cleanth
Brooks, he found he hated academic politics. Maybe mystery
writing would give him a way out. Working secretly two hours
each night in his office on the deserted campus, he wrote a
spy story, "The Dark Tunnel," in 30 days. Margaret's New York
agent sold the book immediately to Dodd, Mead. Now there were
two novelists in the household -- but one of them was about
to go to sea in World War II.
* * * DESPITE AUDEN'S ENCOURAGEMENT, MILLAR "FOUND" ALTER EGO
Lew Archer as much from personal necessity as from artistic
inspiration, and not until after he'd served two years as a
U.S. Navy officer and written a second spy thriller, "Trouble
Follows Me," between duties at sea.
Back home, Margaret's career was moving fast. Her latest
title, "The Iron Gates," did well and was bought for filming
by Warner Bros., with Maggie to write the screenplay at the
Warner lot in Burbank. With her
"Iron Gates" money, she bought the Millars a house in Santa
Barbara. He learned about it in a letter: a fait accompli.
When he got out of the Navy, his wife said, he wouldn't have
to go job-hunting or back to school -- he could just
write.
Millar didn't think it was that simple. He found it unnatural
for his wife to be the family's chief breadwinner. He felt
"kept." If Millar was going to hold his own in this
household, he'd have to make money, even if he couldn't hope
to match his wife's wages. As often seemed the case in his
life, it was put-up-or-shut-up time.
After returning home, he gave the experiment a year. What
would he write during that self-imposed race with the
calendar? It had to be something he could do well and sell
quickly. That meant crime fiction. With two genre books and
some good reviews under his belt, Millar wasn't going to
jeopardize his momentum. But he wasn't content to repeat
himself. Even within genre confines, he wanted to grow as a
writer; that was part of his experiment, too.
He drew on his angry memories of growing up poor in Kitchener
to write the hard-boiled "Blue City" in less than a month. At
his suggestion, the New York agent submitted the book to one
of the most respected publishers in America, Alfred Knopf,
who bought it. By then Millar was writing a second postwar
suspense novel, "The Three Roads," which Knopf also took.
Having turned out two commercial books in less than a year,
Millar had proved that he could make a modest living. He now
allowed himself to tackle a "real" novel about his troubled
adolescence, the serious book he'd long intended.
But when he put pen to paper, the pages came out wrong.
Millar the trained critic saw the problem. What should be
clean and precise was emotional and sloppy. Where the author
should be detached and objective, he was upset -- still mad
about what had happened. Another writer might have kept
working at the manuscript, but Millar couldn't afford to.
He'd lost the best part of a year on the effort, while
Margaret continued to turn out books, including a comic work
about her own Kitchener childhood which became a minor
bestseller.
To hold his own, he conceived a novel with a new private-eye
hero: Lew Archer. The book, which he wrote and rewrote, was
in the Hammett-Chandler mode but he wanted to extend and
expand those writers' styles, not simply mimic them. Millar
hoped to put his own stamp on the private eye story, and he
looked for ways to reshape the form.
Auden's influence rose again. Millar remembered "The Divine
Comedy," which he'd studied closely for Auden's class, where
he'd gained a great appreciation of Dante's technique. Millar
had pointed out back then to his friend Pearce, who also had
gone on to the University of Michigan, that the imagery in
the Inferno was heavy, concrete, specific, dark: "So like the
place that's being described." But how different was the
Purgatorio imagery, Millar said: "It's clear, rational,
careful and calculated -- exactly what ought to occur in a
place where you get cleansed of all your mud and error and
sin and guilt." Now Millar put such stylistic lessons to use,
making Dante's "Comedy" a frame of reference for Archer's
California, whose citizens evade or become exposed by or
struggle toward a clarifying light.
Millar wrote "The Moving Target" and sent it to his
publisher, who made a decision that unintentionally completed
the evolution of Kenneth Millar into Ross Macdonald.
Knopf unexpectedly balked at buying the book, claiming it was
inferior to the firm's two earlier Millar novels. But the
publisher just as surprisingly agreed to print the work in
1949 provided the author take a pseudonym. Millar chose as
his new ID his father's middle name, Macdonald. As for the
"Ross," it was a common name in Canada then, occurring in
both Ken's and Margaret's families -- and as the middle name
of friend Donald Ross Pearce.
Lew Archer's first case was a success; the book was chosen by
a mystery book club and a paperback house. As the Archer
series continued over the next quarter-century, Millar found
that his mystery fiction could accommodate as much of his
literary knowledge as he cared to put into it. He purposely
constructed Archer books on the frameworks of Greek myths
("The Drowning Pool," "The Way Some People Die," "The Galton
Case"), Romantic odes ("The Chill"), Victorian fiction ("The
Instant Enemy") and 17th century French fable ("Sleeping
Beauty"). He filled them with apt allusions to Sophocles,
Coleridge and Dickens, and he wrote them in a style adapted
from Symbolist and Imagist poets.
Over time, the books revealed more and more of his individual
experience: his troubled youth, his good and bad relatives,
his concerns for his wife and daughter. He came to see that
he needed the mystery form to deal with sensitive material
that he was unable to handle more directly. By the time of
his death in 1983, Ross Macdonald had altered the detective
genre to tell personal stories resonating with classical
echoes -- to write books that moved and had meaning for all
types of readers. The sort of books he'd always wanted to
write.
* * *
Public radio station KCRW (89.9-FM) will present an
unabridged dramatization of Macdonald's "The Zebra-Striped
Hearse" starting at 9 a.m. on July 3.
- - - Tom Nolan Is the Author of "Ross Macdonald: a
Biography," Published Last Year by Scribner. His Last Article
for the Magazine Was a Reminiscence of Musso & Frank
Restaurant in Hollywood
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