I come from a letter writing family, and letters were among my earliest incentives to read and write. Learning cursive, I expected to crack the code of my maternal grandmother’s letters to my mother, but an eight-year old’s painstaking mastery of the cursive alphabet proved no Rosetta stone for my grandmother’s hieroglyphics. Easier to read my paternal grandfather’s occasional typed letters — now I wish we’d been included in the “round robin” letter he and his six siblings exchanged until no one was left capable of carrying on the chain. When I departed for college, long distance phone calls were costly. My mother supplied me with post office issued, stamped postcards — pre-addressed to her. She dashed off almost daily notes to me on her own supply of postcards. A real letter requires time, thought — still with this exchange we were in touch.
Yes, in touch. Snail mail is tangible, a physical link between sender and recipient. Some suspect it as a vector of infection during this pandemic spring, though at this writing research data concludes that risk is low. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the NIAID, told CNN, “Thinking about money and mail … you can … immobilize yourself, which I don’t think is a good idea.”
Staying home, taking all precautions, I am still sending snail mail — more notes and letters than ever, to friends and family both near and far away. For years, my family has suspected that I’m on a mission to keep the postal service afloat. A stationery store closed this winter (pre-pandemic, now how few will remain). My husband gifted me with an assortment of note cards from the close of business sale. I’m running through my stash, this isolated spring. Writing letters is part of my personal campaign to resist emotional distancing though we must be socially distant.
From my study window I can see the mail truck pull up. Postal carriers are among the unsung at-risk front line service providers. Although the volume of mailed packages has increased, first class mail is down. The postal service has been struggling for years and entered this pandemic crisis in vulnerable condition. Thus far it has been denied meaningful and effective emergency stimulus legislation. Mail may be one institution that does not survive as we know it. How ironic, since now more than ever we are reminded of the value of being able to connect to each other when we cannot be together.
Letters, old-fashioned snail mail correspondence, are virtual communication at a thoughtful pace, a way — or an attempt — to express and maintain connection across distance. The exchange of letters has been rare for years now, but offers a deeper rhythm of call and response: consideration, reflection. Effort and caring are required for the deliberate actions of writing, enveloping, stamping, posting. Although phone calls are only invitations to talk, although the ping of an incoming text can be silenced, e-mail left unopened in the inbox, a Zoom meeting invitation ignored, somehow electronic communication carries an intrusive imperative, invading and interrupting in unlike a letter.
If, sadly, writing letters becomes a lost art, at least there will still be letters to read: other people’s letters. My impulse to read other people’s mail may have begun with the allure of my grandmother’s letters to my mother, but it didn’t stop there. I haven’t been tampering with the mail, but I have been reading letters. Finding my late father’s letters to my mother, his then fiancée, written in 1944, provided part of the inspiration for my first novel. And the published, collected correspondence of letters by good writers provides good company. I experienced this first-hand when after years as a psychotherapist — work that requires deep listening and response — I began writing full time instead.
Even for an introvert, comfortable with quiet, eager for solitary blocks of time to write, it required adjustment. Instead of listening to client voices, I listened to the voices in my head (the fiction writer’s benign psychosis, hearing the voices of characters). Despite communicative family, friends, a circle of writing friends, I was sometimes lonely. Almost by instinct, I started reading the letters of writers.
First, I selected the correspondence between poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words on Air (2008). Finished, I craved more and went on to British novelist Penelope Fitzgerald’s collected letters to multiple correspondents, So I Have Thought of You (2009). Her witty letters addressed to many different recipients are wonderful, but I missed the continuous intertwined narrative of a reciprocal exchange between just two correspondents. And, happily, found exactly that in the correspondence between William Maxwell and Eudora Welty, What There is to Say We Have Said (2011).
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I’ve read and re-read much of Maxwell’s work. I was less familiar with Welty though in the spring of 1983 my husband and I experienced her story-telling first hand as members of an audience of hundreds for a lecture that became part of her memoir One Writer’s Beginnings (1984). My copies of Maxwell’s story collection Over By the River (a 1977 gift from my best friend) and my copy of One Writer’s Beginnings (from my husband) rest side by side on my bookshelf.
What There is To Say We Have Said is a chronological selection of letters from more than 50 years of correspondence, beginning in 1942. Editor Suzanne Marrs — Welty scholar, biographer, and friend — provides connective tissue with notes. It seems symmetry that Suzanne Marrs, Welty’s friend, serves as Welty’s editor, for William Maxwell was Welty’s editor at The New Yorker as well as her friend, and over the years Welty served Maxwell as reader and unofficial editor for his own fiction. Although I idealize snail mail as slow conversation on the page, reading about their process of revising and exchanging manuscripts makes me appreciate the instantaneous, technical ease of sharing electronic drafts now. Maxwell hand-cut strips of text; arranged, rearranged, and pasted — actually, rubber-cemented — his drafts; Welty cut and pinned hers. She was impressed by his method, and told him so: “I do see from this how elegant rubber cement is. I’m so used to writing with a pincushion that I don’t know if I can learn […] The Ponder Heart was in straight pins, hat pins, corsage pins, and needles” (9/10/53). Imagine mailing these collages back and forth!
Their early professional relationship deepened, mostly through letters, into friendship. Maxwell, born in 1908, had grown up in small town Illinois. He and his wife, artist Emily Maxwell, and their two daughters, lived in New York City and enjoyed a weekend house in the country. Welty, born in 1909, lived with her mother in her childhood home in Mississippi. The two exchanged reports on their rose gardens, the progress of writing projects, news of family and friends. As Maxwell summed it up, “Well it’s wonderful to be alive. Wonderful to be a writer. Wonderful to grow roses. Wonderful to care. Isn’t it?” (1/6/54).
They cared wonderfully about each other, sustained friendship across time and distance. Welty lived in Jackson almost all her life, except for a brief sojourn in New York City after college. She returned home in 1931 when her father was diagnosed with leukemia. His life and rapid death would, years later, inform her Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Optimist’s Daughter (1972). Welty and her mother lived together in her childhood home until her mother’s death in 1966. Welty’s younger brother Edward also died in 1966, her youngest brother had Walter died in 1959. Although she was close to her nieces and their families, Maxwell wrote:
We both worry about you — about the never quite going away
tiredness. About the way you are plucked at by people all over
the country wanting something. […] There is also the matter
of living alone. If you live with somebody you are saved (often
by petty irritation) from having to confront despair. (1/2/1985)
Perhaps exactly this worrisome matter “of living alone” contributed to her great capacity for friendship — like hers with William Maxwell. They continued to exchange letters almost until his death in July 2000, a week after his beloved wife Emily had died. Welty herself would die exactly one year later.
Elderly and frail, Welty did not eulogize Maxwell. But she had celebrated him years earlier at the 1980 Academy of Arts and Letters award ceremony when she presented Maxwell with the Howells Medal for Fiction for So Long, See You Tomorrow. Afterward she wrote William and Emily Maxwell, enclosing “the scripts” for the speech she had delivered in his honor. Describing his work she had said, “We are face to face with other people’s mystery and with our own. There is nothing between us and the realization that without love and without death we should never have come into the presence of human mystery at all” (5/22/1980).
Maxwell indeed knew the human mystery of love and death. His mother died during the influenza epidemic of 1918 when he was ten, his early novel They Came Like Sparrows (1937) fictionalizes the event. The experience of love and loss, pain and joy, resonates throughout his fiction.
Although Maxwell predeceased Welty, his remarks at the public celebration of her ninetieth birthday in April 1999 serve as a valedictory salute to his friend — crafted in the form of a lyrical letter, almost a prose poem. He includes among the many reasons “we were fortunate to have been born toward the end of the first decade of this century” that there were “shade trees everywhere and their branches met over the street.” Maxwell concludes that the greatest good fortune of all was: “the fact that we knew each other and were friends.”
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You live with the authors while reading a long volume of letters like these; it’s hard to say goodbye. So I didn’t; I added Maxwell and Welty’s American Library anthologies to my book shelf — side by side — and re-read some work, read work new to me. And I sought out another collection of Welty’s letters, the chronicle of another epistolary friendship. Meanwhile There Are Letters, The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross MacDonald is again edited by Suzanne Marrs, this time working with Tom Nolan, MacDonald’s biographer.
Renowned mystery writer Ross MacDonald (the pen-name used by Ken Millar) was unfamiliar to me, though I inherited a taste for mysteries and dozens of paperbacks from my father. Now I’m making up for lost time: my daughter has a collection of vintage MacDonald featuring his tough, poetic private eye Lew Archer. And, yes, I now have MacDonald’s American Library anthology, too. Remembering Welty’s remarks in Maxwell’s honor about love and death and the human mystery, it’s not surprising to learn she loved mystery novels. Interviewed by the New York Times upon publication of Losing Battles (her last novel, and first best-seller, released on April 13, 1970 — her sixty-first birthday), Welty said she especially admired MacDonald’s mysteries, and had once written him a fan letter — but never mailed it. Ken Millar responded with a letter from his Santa Barbara home to hers in Jackson. “Dear Miss Welty: This is my first fan letter. If you write another book like Losing Battles it will not be my last” (5/3/1970). So they met, through letters, on the light-hearted note of mutual fans. But a few months later, Ken and Margaret Millar’s only child died. He wrote:
I haven’t been able to answer your beautiful letter […] You didn’t
know my daughter Linda but you have suffered grievous losses
in recent years and would perhaps wish to be told that Linda died
last month, very suddenly, aged 31, of a stroke in her sleep. She
left her husband Joe and their son, who have become central in
our lives. But I am willing now to grow old and die, after a while. (12/14/70)
Born in 1915, Millar had a difficult early life, abandoned by his father, a rough growing up. He attended college and graduate school in California; met and married Margaret —who also became a successful mystery writer. Their daughter had suffered from depression; Margaret had been somewhat of a recluse even before Linda’s death. Welty’s empathic response to Millar’s loss may have contributed to what rapidly became a profound bond between them, marked by a mutual tone of yearning and affection throughout their correspondence. Here Millar writes after their first in-person meeting:
I never thought I’d hate to leave New York, but I do.
I feel an unaccustomed sorrow not to be able to
continue our friendship viva voce, and in the flesh …
Meanwhile, there are letters. (May 1971)
They met in person only a handful of times over the 12 years before Millar’s death in 1983, never became family friends as Welty and Maxwell had. But they exchanged hundreds of letters, and as Welty says here, “we’re never out of touch. If not one way, then another” (5/24/79).
Never out of touch one way or another, but finally, the correspondence became one-sided as Ken Millar’s dementia progressed. By sad coincidence, just as Eudora Welty had never mailed her first fan letter to Millar, his final note to her — congratulations on her selection by Jimmy Carter for the Presidential Medal of Freedom — was also never mailed.
It’s a barbarously long time since I’ve written but I have been
in a long non-writing state. I think you may understand better
than most, perhaps better than anyone, how hard it can become
to speak after a lapse into silence. But I couldn’t stay quiet
long in the midst of your good news. With all my love, dear Eudora, as ever. (5/4/80)
Throughout his decline, Welty wrote to him, spoke to him on paper. He died in July 1983, and Welty wrote close friends, “I’ve been grieving about Ken Millar … we loved each other …”
There is a certain uneasiness, reading the correspondence of intimates. As Maxwell says in one of his own letters to Welty:
I opened a volume of the Yeats/Maud Gonne
correspondence and read (from her) a short
letter beginning Darling…and thought I
have no business reading this letter and
stopped. (12/1/92)
And there’s a risk in saving letters, knowing private communication may become public. Welty wrote to Millar after reading Nancy Milford’s biography of Zelda Fitzgerald:
She writes like a witness but she wasn’t. It may be wonderfully factual, but it may still not be true … It makes you want to warn people everywhere to burn their letters. (8/1/71)
Nevertheless, the authors did not destroy these letters. Ken Millar did hide Welty’s letters; when a friend and antiquarian bookseller purchased his papers from his widow, he found Welty’s letters and returned them to her. Suzanne Marrs notes that elty considered destroying all of her two-sided correspondences, but accepted her friend novelist Reynolds Price’s suggestion that instead she bequeath her letters to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Maxwell’s and Millar’s estates made similar bequests to other institutions.
Suzanne Marrs describes her intention in What There is to Say We Have Said is to provide an “autobiography” of friendship; she succeeds, and succeeds again with co-editor Tom Nolan in Meanwhile There Are Letters. I hope each of the correspondents would approve these autobiographies-in-letters of their respective friendships. Maxwell and Welty, Millar and Welty, were generous and kind with each other on the page, and — indirectly through these collections — make a generous gift to readers. Welty herself valued the letters of authors she’d never known, and included some in The Norton Book of Friendship (1993, co-edited with her friend Ronald A. Sharp). Her note in the introduction, “Friendship and love are not arbitrarily divided here, any more than they are in life …The solidest friendship is that of friends who love one another,” could be a description of the two different, loving friendships chronicled in What There is To Say We Have Said and Meanwhile There are Letters.
Millar gave Welty a book of poetry by his friend Henri Coulette. After reading, she wrote to Millar: “I feel I’m being let in on a spell … I’ve always loved magic, I guess I should have said put under a spell” (5/17/1973).
If you read What There is to Say We Have Said, if you read Meanwhile There Are Letters, you will be let in on a spell, witness magic, and put under the spell of loving friendship on the page. And you might, in this pandemic spring of social isolation, consider putting pen to paper, writing a real letter, to a real friend. Maxwell lamented he didn’t write like Chekhov; none of us will write letters like these. But we might invite a friend into a slow, sustaining conversation. Posterity won’t be listening to us.
And you can always burn the letters.