An intimate, luminous portrait of a friendship.
Tender letters reveal interwoven literary lives.
Mystery writer Ross MacDonald, the pen name of Kenneth Millar (1915-1983), first wrote to Eudora Welty (1909-2001) in 1970 about her novel Losing Battles; it was a “fan letter” thanking her both for that book and her mention of his work to a New York Times reviewer. That letter began a 13-year correspondence that lasted until Millar’s death from Alzheimer’s disease. Edited, helpfully annotated, and sensitively introduced by Welty’s biographer Marrs (English/Millsaps Coll.; What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell, 2011, etc.) and MacDonald’s biographer, Nolan (Artie Shaw, 2011, etc.), the letters offer eloquent testimony to the writers’ deep affection. “I’m so grateful that we understand each other and feel alike,” Millar wrote. “Your letters are like tokens of goodness and kindness coming to me out of a terrible world,” Welty replied. In 1971, the two met for the first time in New York. “I feel that there wouldn't ever have been a time when we wouldn’t have been friends,” Welty wrote afterward. But they saw each other only rarely: in 1975, both were headliners at a writers conference in Santa Barbara, where Millar lived with his wife. Although Millar wrote about her affectionately, the editors reveal that the Millars’ marriage was strained, and Millar apparently had hidden Welty’s correspondence, discovered by a friend after his death. Both exulted in nature, especially birds: Millar noted white-crowned sparrows and a horned owl, Welty, warblers, kinglets, and gnatcatchers. The flight of sandhill cranes, Millar wrote, “was the greatest natural sight I ever witnessed.” They shared news of writing, reading, triumphs, and loss: Millar’s daughter died; Welty’s friend was murdered. In the late 1970s, to Welty’s dismay, Millar wrote of a “shadow on my memory and therefore on my mind.” He soon could not write, even to his beloved friend.
An intimate, luminous portrait of a friendship.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62872-527-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The world didn't lose a great journalist when Gloria Steinem focused her energies on feminist activism—but because she was a working journalist (and, from 1968, political columnist for first-person-prone New York magazine), the light bulb goes on right here. This first collection of her writings (also, her first book) leads off with autobiographical comments: on the speaking she's done instead of writing, and how difficult ("a major hurdle in my life") and ultimately rewarding it was (kudos on both scores to her black lecture partners); on her earlier writing career, or the frustrations of frivolous, "girl reporter" assignments; on her first stabs at "telling the truth in public" and other outcomes of a "growing consciousness." From the pre-feminist writing, she includes only "I Was a Playboy Bunny"—a 1963 "exposÉ" of the crippling grind, the miserable pay, the sexual harassment (said a co-worker: "If you can type, what the hell do you want to be a Bunny for?")—and the first parts of a section of campaign reports, 1965-72. It's there, in 1968, that the "Feminist Realization" (born of covering women's meetings) hits home—eliciting the kind of protest that would quickly become a groundswell: "Six months ago I would have been honored by McGovern's invitation to a 'serious' (i.e., male and therefore grownup) political meeting, but full of doubt about whether I could contribute in a 'serious' (male) way. . . . I couldn't admit that any power relationship in life is political: therefore politics for women may be who's doing the dishes, or who's getting paid half the wages that a man would get for the same job, or who's expected to take the roles of service and support everywhere, including in political campaigns." A dozen pages later, after the 1972 Democratic Convention (Chisholm for president, Farenthold for V.P.): "Women are never again going to be mindless coffee-makers, or mindless policy-makers. . . ." That sense of being in at the creation is diluted by the non-chronological arrangement of the pieces in the remaining two-thirds of the book—pieces that are essentially feminist polemics whether the subject is food (women's smaller share or "Erotica vs. Pornography," (good) Jackie Kennedy or the (bad) heroine of Sophie's Choice. A partial exception is "Ruth's Song (Because She Could Not Sing It)," Steinem's previously unpublished memoir of her mentally-disturbed mother—whom she regards as a victim but also celebrates as a life-force. Still, her particular talent has been for perceiving the feminist angle, in her own writing and for Ms., and spreading that recognition. If some of the ideas here sound hackneyed, she has honest claim to them.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1983
ISBN: 0452257107
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1983
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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