Ross MacDonald: A Biography
By Tom Nolan
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About this ebook
Now, in the first full-length biography of this extraordinary and influential writer, a much fuller picture emerges of a man to whom hiding things came as second nature. While it was no secret that Ross Macdonald was the pseudonym of Kenneth Millar -- a Santa Barbara man married to another good mystery writer, Margaret Millar -- his official biography was spare. Drawing on unrestricted access to the Kenneth and Margaret Millar Archives, on more than forty years of correspondence, and on hundreds of interviews with those who knew Millar well, author Tom Nolan has done a masterful job of filling in the blanks between the psychologically complex novels and the author's life -- both secret and overt.
Ross Macdonald came to crime-writing honestly. Born in northern California to Canadian parents, Kenneth Millar grew up in Ontario virtually fatherless, poor, and with a mother whose mental stability was very much in question. From the age of twelve, young Millar was fighting, stealing, and breaking social and moral laws; by his own admission, he barely escaped being a criminal. Years later, Millar would come to see himself in his tales' wrongdoers. "I don't have to be violent," he said, "My books are."
How this troubled young man came to be one of the most brilliant graduate students in the history of the University of Michigan and how this writer, who excelled in a genre all too often looked down upon by literary critics, came to have a lifelong friendship with Eudora Welty are all examined in the pages of Tom Nolan's meticulous biography. We come to a sympathetic understanding of the Millars' long, and sometimes rancorous, marriage and of their life in Santa Barbara, California, with their only daughter, Linda, whose legal and emotional traumas lie at the very heart of the story. But we also follow the trajectory of a literary career that began in the pages of Manhunt and ended with the great respect of such fellow writers as Marshall McLuhan, Hugh Kenner, Nelson Algren, and Reynolds Price, and the longtime distinguished publisher Alfred A. Knopf.
As Ross Macdonald: A Biography makes abundantly clear, Ross Macdonald's greatest character -- above and beyond his famous Lew Archer -- was none other than his creator, Kenneth Millar.
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Reviews for Ross MacDonald
11 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This fine in depth study of Kenneth Millar deserves at least five stars. It is a most amazing story of a complex man who worked so hard most of his life to improve every book over the last one. He was acknowledged with increasing admiration by reviewers, readers and authors. As astonishing as it may seem now, year after year his books were published in tiny numbers, but his sales in other countries along with second jobs helped him subsist. He changed the genre from pulp to literature.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A straight forward look at a complex man. Tom Dolan wrote this book when many of the people that knew Ross Macdonald were still alive to provide a strong personal seasoning to what could have been a very dry book. Talented and loving to write, Ken Millar wrote his books for his vision of their place in the creative writing canon. Then spent his whole life supporting his family and creating a niche for his books in the broader context as novels rather than mysteries.
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Ross MacDonald - Tom Nolan
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For my father
INTRODUCTION
by Sue Grafton
The contrast between Ken Millar the man, Ross Macdonald the novelist, and Lew Archer the fictional private detective is one that will doubtless fascinate scholars and psychologists for years to come. What Tom Nolan accomplishes in this meticulous biography is to detail the connections between Ken Millar’s personal odyssey and his professional pursuits. Fair-minded, evenhanded, Tom Nolan’s account of the life of Ken Millar gives depth and dimension to a man who tended to say little about himself. This biography provides the basis for a renewed appreciation of the man and his achievement. Ken Millar’s struggle for success, the pleasure he took in the trajectory of his career, and the complexities of his marriage to mystery writer Margaret Millar are related with a balance and a grace of which Millar himself would have approved.
Nolan has the confidence to let Millar’s life stand without speculation, though the darker aspects of the writer’s history must have provided a powerful temptation. From Millar’s troubled adolescence to his only daughter’s clashes with the law, Nolan locates Millar’s work within the context of his life and allows these events to speak for themselves.
I was privileged to meet Kenneth Millar twice here in Santa Barbara. This was sometime in the late sixties, long before my career as a mystery writer was launched. Introduced by mutual acquaintances, we did no more than shake hands in passing. I was, at that point, a lowly creative-writing student in an adult-education class, and he had already achieved near legendary status. Even as an avid reader of his work, I knew little of the man. I would love to report that he made some cogent comment that shaped my aspirations and gave impetus to my ambition. Alas, he did not, though his unwitting influence on my career was profound. One gathers that Ken Millar wasn’t often given to casual or hasty comment, though he afforded other writers his unfailing support. He was, by all reports, a man of intelligence and reserve, whose observations about writing were neither haplessly assembled nor carelessly disseminated. Quiet, courtly, and unprepossessing, Millar was the quintessential intellectual in a genre formerly reserved for men of more flamboyant style and more inflammatory imagination.
Ken Millar was intrigued by the hard-boiled detective genre. Taking the reins from Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, he handled the form with mounting confidence. Where Hammett and Chandler wrote only a scant few novels each (five in Hammett’s case, seven in Chandler’s), Ross Macdonald’s eighteen Lew Archer novels were written over a span of some twenty-five years, allowing the writer a narrative range and breadth in which to hone his skills. Millar incorporated into the Lew Archer novels his own maturing worldview and thus imbued the series with a melancholy, hard-won wisdom.
More poetic than Hammett, less cynical than Chandler, what Ross Macdonald demonstrated many times over was that the hard-boiled detective novel was no longer the exclusive domain of the whiskey-drinking gumshoe, fists flying, guns blazing, blonde bombshell perched on the edge of his desk. Like his creator, Lew Archer was a man with a finely honed sensibility, whose passion for fairness permeated everything he did.
From Ross Macdonald, we learned to see southern California as we’d never seen it before. From him, we finally understood that the crime novel could be as challenging, as astute, and as rarefied as the sonnet . . . precise, perceptive, and passionate . . . even while its fundamental subject matter remained rooted in crime and violent death. If Dashiell Hammett can be said to have injected the hard-boiled detective novel with its primitive force, and Raymond Chandler gave shape to its prevailing tone, it was Ken Millar, writing as Ross Macdonald, who gave the genre its current respectability, generating a worldwide readership that has paved the way for those of us following in his footsteps.
Sue Grafton
Santa Barbara, California
July 28, 1998
Ten years ago, while nobody was watching—or, rather, while everyone was looking in the wrong direction—a writer of detective stories turned into a major American novelist.
—John Leonard, The New York Times Book Review
. . . the Archer books, the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American.
—William Goldman, The New York Times Book Review
In 1969, when most literate readers thought detective stories beneath consideration and mystery fiction rarely appeared on best-seller lists, a handful of New York journalists conspired to push a California writer of private-eye novels to the front rank of American letters.
The writer was Ross Macdonald, a mystery novelist who didn’t so much transcend the genre as elevate it, showing again (like Hammett, Faulkner, Collins, Dickens, Greene, and many others since Poe) how the crime story can at any time become art.
The conspiracy worked.
Front-page celebrations in the New York Times Book Review and a cover story in Newsweek turned Ross Macdonald’s books about detective Lew Archer into national best-sellers. Movies and a television series were made. Millions of Macdonald’s books were sold. After twenty years in the mystery field, Ross Macdonald was an overnight success.
The world at large discovered a writer already well known to mystery fans. Crime-fiction reviewers had long hailed Macdonald as the hard-boiled successor to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. His influence on a generation of mystery writers was profound. In such classic works as The Doomsters, The Galton Case, The Chill, Black Money, The Goodbye Look, The Underground Man, and Sleeping Beauty, Macdonald opened fresh thematic territory and set a new literary standard for his genre. Vital trends in modern crime fiction drew impetus from Macdonald’s work. Writers as diverse as Sara Paretsky, Jonathan Kellerman, Jerome Charyn, and James Ellroy have called Macdonald an influence. Simply as a bestselling mystery author he broke ground; his success, before a time when genre authors routinely became household names, showed the way for the future Parkers, Graftons, Hillermans, Cornwells, and Mosleys.
Ross Macdonald’s appeal and importance extended beyond the mystery field. He was seen as an important California author, a novelist who evoked his region as tellingly as such mainstream writers as Nathanael West and Joan Didion. Before he died, Macdonald was given the Los Angeles Times’s Robert Kirsch Award for a distinguished body of work about the West. Some critics ranked him among the best American novelists of his generation.
By any standard he was remarkable. His first books, patterned on Hammett and Chandler, were at once vivid chronicles of a postwar California and elaborate retellings of Greek and other classic myths. Gradually he swapped the hard-boiled trappings for more subjective themes: personal identity, the family secret, the family scapegoat, the childhood trauma; how men and women need and battle each other, how the buried past rises like a skeleton to confront the present. He brought the tragic drama of Freud and the psychology of Sophocles to detective stories, and his prose flashed with poetic imagery. By the time of his commercial breakthrough, some of Macdonald’s concerns (the breakdown between generations, the fragility of moral and global ecologies) held special resonance for a country divided by an unpopular war and alarmed for the environment. His vision was strong enough to spill into real life, where a news story or a friend’s revelation could prompt the comment Just like a Ross Macdonald novel.
It was a vision with meaning for all sorts of readers. Macdonald got fan mail from soldiers, professors, teenagers, movie directors, ministers, housewives, poets. He was claimed as a colleague by good writers around the world, including Eudora Welty, Andrey Voznesensky, Elizabeth Bowen, Thomas Berger, Marshall McLuhan, Margaret Laurence, Osvaldo Soriano, Hugh Kenner, Nelson Algren, Donald Davie, and Reynolds Price.
When he died in 1983, Ross Macdonald was the best-known and most highly regarded crime-fiction writer in America. But (despite dozens of articles, two documentary films, and two critical studies) not much was known about the author of the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American.
It was no secret Ross Macdonald was the pseudonym of Kenneth Millar, a Santa Barbara man married to another good mystery writer, Margaret Millar. But his official biography was spare: born in northern California of Canadian parents, raised in Ontario and other provinces, he earned a doctorate at Michigan, served in the U.S. Navy, and moved with wife and daughter to California in 1946. In a handful of autobiographical essays, Millar seemed to conceal as much as he told.
Hiding things came second nature, to protect himself and spare his family. Like the people in his fiction, Millar had secrets, and he persuaded sympathetic journalists to collaborate in keeping them.
Yet he believed in the writing of candid biography and expected to be its subject. He valued works that made connections between a novelist’s life and his fiction. Millar preserved much material that proved helpful in explicating the books of Ross Macdonald, who admitted he was one of those authors who strew their novels with personal clues, like burglars who secretly wish to be caught.
Among the revealing documents Millar left future literary detectives were a candid notebook memoir, an unpublished autobiographical novel, and thirty years’ correspondence.
Now—after the deaths of his widow, their only child, and their only grandchild; after unrestricted examination of the Kenneth and Margaret Millar Papers at the University of California, Irvine, as well as other archives’ material; and after hundreds of interviews with those who knew Millar—a fuller picture emerges of this admired American writer.
* * *
Ross Macdonald came to crime writing honestly. Virtually fatherless and growing up poor, Kenneth Millar broke social and moral laws: having sex from the age of eight, getting drunk at twelve, fighting violently, stealing. I’m amazed at some of the chances I took as a boy,
he admitted. Worse than the things he did were those he imagined. Mad at the world and at his lot in life, he sometimes felt angry enough to kill. As a youngster he read Poe and Hawthorne and Dostoyevsky: writers who wrestled with the good and the bad angels he too was assaulted by. When he wrote his own mystery stories, Millar saw himself in his tales’ wrongdoers. I don’t have to be violent,
he said, my books are.
By his own reckoning, he barely escaped being a criminal. When he stopped breaking laws before starting college, he fashioned a code of conduct for himself (and others) as unyielding as the formal religious creeds he had rejected. Millar put himself in a behavioral box as if his life or mental health depended on it, though his psyche often strained against the box’s walls. He stayed over forty years in an often rancorous marriage, putting its tensions to use as he turned his wife and himself into published authors. He stayed in the box of detective fiction, determined to provide for his family and avoid the failures of his irresponsible father.
The Split Man
was a title Macdonald often played with. Millar himself was a man split along national, cultural, intellectual, professional, and even sexual fault lines. Born in California, raised in Canada, as a young man he thought of moving to England. All his life he felt on the wrong side of whatever border he’d most recently crossed. The roots of Macdonald’s tales of troubled families in a corrupted California lay in Millar’s bleak Ontario childhood with its long conspiracies of silent pain.
The man who created the hard-boiled Lew Archer was one of the most brilliant graduate students in the history of the University of Michigan. While Macdonald’s private-eye stories were being published in Manhunt magazine next to Mickey Spillane’s (which he detested), Millar was writing a Ph.D. dissertation on the psychological criticism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His academic colleagues disparaged or despaired of his detective fiction; his fellow crime writers were puzzled or intimidated by his university work.
In the sunshine of Santa Barbara, California, Kenneth Millar dressed like a Midwesterner and spoke with a Scots-Canadian accent. In the wealthy heart of Nixon and Reagan country, he was a Stevensonian Democrat; even as a beach-club member, he still felt like an underdog.
He was a gentle man with a frightening temper, an intellectual who went to murder trials, a person of great pride and startling humility. Once or twice he nearly broke under his complexities. Like Oedipus (a recurring archetype in Macdonald’s fiction and Millar’s psyche), he seemed to bring about the tragedies he tried to avoid. Determined to be the good parent his own were not, Millar fathered an only child whose life was scarred by emotional and legal trauma. Obsessed with not causing fatal harm, he saw his daughter become entangled in the sort of headline-making events he’d always dreaded, incidents his own stories seemed to eerily foretell. At his daughter’s darkest hours, Millar acted like his books’ hero Lew Archer; then turned her crises into the fiction from which they might have sprung.
In his novels, Millar resolved his contradictions: there he hid and revealed an aching loneliness, a melancholy humor, and a lifetime of anger, fear, and regret. These singular works changed their genre and changed the way readers saw the world. In these stories, ordinary families became the stuff of mystery; and there was always guilt enough to go around. We recognized ourselves as characters in Ross Macdonald’s novels. And the most interesting Macdonald character of all was Kenneth Millar.
The Mariner tells how the ship sailed southward with a good wind and fair weather, till it reached the line.
The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared,
Merrily did we drop
Below the kirk, below the hill,
Below the lighthouse top.
The Sun came up upon the left,
Out of the sea came he!
And he shone bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea.
—S. T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Before Alzheimer’s disease put an end to his writing, Millar recorded his earliest memories: recollections formed in the final months of World War One, in Vancouver, British Columbia. His father was a harbor-boat pilot there, and Millar recalled the unforgettable
occasion when his dad took him to sea: I stood beside him in the offshore light, with his hands and my hand on the wheel.
At the age of sixty-three, he judged this the happiest day of my childhood if not my life.
Millar’s parents separated when he was four, and his mother took him to a harsher province. As a troubled child and an uneasy adult, Ken Millar mourned the loss of that moment of bliss and belonging, of being loved and protected. The fiction he wrote was informed by the painful knowledge of the difference between the way life was supposed to be and the way it was. In his books, people looked obsessively for lost parents and vanished birthrights; children took dangerous paths; a detective tried to discover when and where and why it all went wrong.
Vancouver wasn’t the first paradise he lost. Millar’s birthplace was California, something his parents never let him forget. In his youth that state took on a golden aura: the Great Right Place where he should be but wasn’t. He was born in Los Gatos, near San Francisco, during a heavy rainstorm at three in the morning of Monday, December 13, 1915.
The Bay Area was celebrating that year, with a Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco to mark completion of the Panama Canal and the city’s recovery from the 1906 earthquake and fire. This Millar baby also became news of a sort: his father wrote a poem about him that was printed in the Los Gatos Mail. The poet-father was John Macdonald Jack
Millar, a forty-two-year-old Canadian who’d edited newspapers in British Columbia and Alberta settlements for the past several years. Defying its spelling, the family name was pronounced Miller,
an ambiguous touchstone for a son who’d spend a lifetime pondering questions of identity.
The dad had his own obsession with such matters, having lived with Indians in the Northwest Territories, befriended Japanese fishing families in Vancouver, and for years written poems in the dialect of a Scotland he’d never seen.
John Macdonald Millar’s Scottish connection came through his father, another John Millar, who had emigrated from Galashiels (near Edinburgh) to southern Ontario, Canada, in 1856. The senior John Millar was a solid citizen, serving at different times as reeve (mayor), township clerk, postmaster, police magistrate, and justice of the peace. He and his Scots-Canadian wife had nine children, seven of whom survived; the sixth was Jack Millar, born in 1873. After teaching school and keeping a general store, the senior Millar started the Walkerton Herald, a newspaper that stayed in business for at least a century. Printer’s ink was in the Millar blood, some said: the first successful Scottish printer, around 1506, was a Millar. This fatal predisposition to words
was passed on to Jack—along with a youthful rebellion. Jack Millar adopted his father’s Liberal politics but rejected his Presbyterian faith, becoming an admirer of Robert Green Ingersoll, the Great Agnostic.
Like John Millar, who’d sailed from Scotland as a teenager, the teenaged Jack Millar left the family home early to strike out on his own.
Jack Millar was medium sized but powerfully built, a good wrestler and strong swimmer. He made his way to the western Canadian provinces, then south into the United States, where he mined for silver in Colorado. Back in Canada, he lived for close to a year with Indians around Great Slave Lake. In 1899, the territory-wise Jack Millar joined two Toronto newspapermen, John Innes and J. P. McConnell, on a six-week pack-train journey across Alberta and British Columbia.
Jack was in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1907, when young William Mackenzie King, federal deputy minister of labor, came to investigate anti-Japanese riots there. Millar, friendly with the port’s Japanese fishermen, informally helped the future prime minister in his inquiries.
A year later, in Red Deer, Alberta, the thirty-four-year-old Millar met a tall, attractive, thirty-three-year-old former nurse named Anna Moyer. Jack courted Annie on horseback and read her his Robbie Burns-like poems. Born in Walkerton, the town whose newspaper Jack’s dad had started, Annie had turned down several youthful suitors in order to study and work in Canada and the States. Typhoid fever caught from a hospital patient had ended her nursing. She was ready to accept Jack’s proposal. Before they married, John Macdonald Millar, like his father before him, became a newspaper editor-manager, taking over a monthly in the copper-mining town of Greenwood, British Columbia; then starting his own paper in Granum, Alberta. Jack and Annie were married in Calgary, Alberta, in September 1909.
Millar put out three other papers in his first four years of marriage, trekking with Annie to frontier mining, logging, and shipping towns in British Columbia and Alberta. It was a rough haul. Annie had two stillbirths before she and Jack moved to San Diego, California, in 1913. They hoped the California climate would give them a healthy baby. But in San Diego, in 1913, they buried another infant.
Annie had family living in Escondido, near San Diego, including her married sister Adeline, a Christian Science convert. Adeline told Annie, raised Methodist like her, that if she joined Mary Baker Eddy’s church, she’d have a healthy baby. Annie converted. From San Diego, the Millars went north to Los Gatos, where Annie Millar gave birth to Kenneth. This baby was healthy—twelve and a half pounds—with eyes that were an almost violet blue: his mother’s eyes.
The Millars returned to Canada. After a mild stroke, Jack Millar gave up newspaper work. In Vancouver, he earned sea captain’s papers and, with the First World War on, became pilot of a harbor boat. The family lived in upper-floor rooms of a downtown waterfront hotel, and here Kennie first became aware of the world around him. His mother read him fairy tales and other stories. She took him bathing at English Bay, a busy beach where a huge black lifeguard kept watch like Neptune over hundreds of youngsters.
Jack took his boy to the studio of painter John Innes, one of the Toronto newspapermen he’d helped guide from Alberta to Vancouver in 1899. Innes was now a dramatically whiskered artist, capturing on canvas the already vanishing frontier of his and Jack’s journey. His studio, full of pack saddles, riding boots, and other Western gear, was a haven for old cronies like Millar. Innes at work in his lair made a big impression on Jack’s wide-eyed son.
Kennie showed some artistic ability of his own. Given a slate, he drew chalk pictures, including a pretty good one of Charlie Chaplin, whom he’d seen at the silent pictures. On his slate, Kennie learned numbers and letters. He seemed a bright boy, full of curiosity. At rest, the boy looked serene, with big, wise-seeming eyes and the half-smile of an oriental prince.
But his parents quarreled. After nine years, their differences now eclipsed what they’d had in common. Annie gave thanks to God and to Christian Science for the good things in life; Jack, the freethinking atheist, put his faith in the social theorist Henry George. In love with the West he’d known when young, Jack was glad to spend the day explaining Indian signs or listening to tall tales told by the snow-blind prospector who lived in the hotel basement; Annie was sick of their unsettled life and of her husband’s fruitless hobbies.
In November 1918, the Great War ended. Mobs of celebrants jammed Vancouver’s streets. Returning troops marched in dress uniform on the avenue near the Hudson’s Bay store. The world had made peace—but not Jack and Annie.
Around this time Jack took his boy for that boat ride along the Vancouver coast.
The boy later remembered a less happy incident: when he looked through a hotel balcony grating and saw a body spread-eagled in the alley below. The man wasn’t dead, only dead drunk; but the frightening image stayed in his mind. For the four-year-old, his parents’ separation was as sudden and awful as the sight of that body. Like a child in a fairy tale, he blamed himself. His father’s absence marked him forever. The world, it seemed, was a place that took full payment for an hour of perfect bliss.
I must be the only American crime novelist who got his early ethical training in a Canadian Mennonite Sunday School.
—Ross Macdonald
When the Son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.
—Matthew 25:31-32.
Kitchener, Ontario, half a continent away from any ocean, was where Kenneth and Annie Millar went in 1920. Unlike Vancouver, haven of freethinkers, Kitchener was a practical place, founded by Mennonite farmers and settled by German merchants. Instead of sea salt in the air, here there were fumes from three rubber factories. The city had been called Berlin until the recent war, and over half its twenty-two thousand people still spoke German. Black-clad Mennonites came to town in horse-drawn buggies. Annie Millar grew up a few miles from here with eight sisters and brothers, all living above father Aaron Moyer’s Mildmay general store. The Presbyterian Moyer, married to the Mennonite Veronica Bowman, raised his children Methodist. An ex-schoolteacher, Aaron Moyer encouraged his seven daughters and two sons to sing harmony, play instruments, write letters, and draw pictures.
But Aaron Moyer was dead, buried on the Saskatchewan prairie where he’d gone with his family to homestead at seventy-three. When his widow came back to Ontario, she joined the reformed branch of the Mennonite Church of her youth. No cardplaying or other sinful pursuits were allowed in the two-story, brick bungalow at 32 Brubacher Street where Grandma Moyer lived with Annie’s sister Adeline (who’d wired the money for Annie’s and Ken’s train fares). This was the forbidding house Ken Millar and his mother moved into.
Grandmother Moyer at seventy-four was a strong-willed woman who demanded obedience. She insisted that five-year-old Kennie attend Sunday school at her New Mennonite church. There he learned about Judgment Day, when the sheep would be separated from the goats. The boy sensed his grandmother and her Bowman kin already placed him with the latter. It was as if his brow bore some mark of Jack Millar’s curse. My original sin, so to speak,
he later judged, was to be left by my father.
There was fear and pain now in his blue eyes. His mother changed too. At forty-five, she looked like an old woman. Her and his presence at 32 Brubacher caused problems, and in 1921, Anna and Kennie moved out of Grandma Moyer’s house and into furnished rooms. The boy blamed himself for this, as he’d blamed himself for his father’s having gone away.
Too weak to work, Annie ran out of funds. Sometimes she took Ken into the street and begged for food. Finally she brought the six-year-old to an orphanage and filled out papers to have him admitted. The iron gates of the orphanage were branded in his memory like the gates to the Mennonites’ hell. At the last minute, as in one of the fairy tales his mother read him, he was rescued. Rob Millar, a cousin of Jack’s who lived ninety miles north of Kitchener, said he and his wife, Elizabeth, would take Ken into their home. Life was full of surprises and sudden reversals. Instead of an orphanage, Ken Millar was sent to live in the town of Wiarton, on the idyllic banks of Georgian Bay.
Most of the detective work that accomplishes anything is due to the use of good common sense, and much of the remainder is just luck.
—William A. Pinkerton, quoted in the Canadian Echo, Wiarton, 1922
The Mystery of the Silver Dagger,
by Randall Parrish . . . Here is a double-riveted mystery story as thrilling as anything this great master of mystery, adventure and romantic tales, ever has produced. It is compounded of love, intrigue, a million dollars and mysterious criminals in a most unusual combination . . . Soon to Appear in These Columns. READ IT!
—The Canadian Echo, Wiarton, 1922
Millar was a common name in Wiarton, where Jack Millar once won a two-mile swimming race across Colpoys Bay. Nearby was a bump in the road called Millarton, where many of Jack’s Scots-Canadian cousins had settled. A local legend involved the Jane Millar, a passenger steamer that vanished with nary a trace in 1881.
Kenneth’s uncle
Rob (actually his second cousin) was the town’s electrical engineer. Having lost two daughters to fatal illness, he and his wife, Elizabeth, welcomed six-year-old Kennie like a son into their George Street house. Elizabeth gave Kenneth an uncomplicated love much easier to accept than his own troubled mother’s. Rob became the first of several father substitutes Kennie found throughout and beyond his childhood.
Rob Millar’s skills exposed Kennie to new excitements. Over the radio Rob built, Ken heard songs from the States such as Yes! We Have No Bananas
and There’ll Be Some Changes Made.
On Saturdays, Rob ran the Wonderland moving picture theater, where Ken watched the silent adventures of Robinson Crusoe and the athletic doings of Pearl White, an androgynous heroine young Ken half fell in love with.
In Wiarton he started the lifelong habit of reading the newspaper. Rob and Elizabeth Millar were mentioned often in the weekly Canadian Echo’s local columns. Kenneth’s own name began appearing regularly on the Echo’s front page, in monthly school standings that showed him rising to near the top of his elementary school class.
Through the Echo’s syndicated features and serialized novels, Ken Millar got his first tastes of crime fact and fiction. During 1922 and ’23, the Echo carried interviews with William A. Pinkerton (head of the greatest detective agency in the world
) and detective-story writers Arthur B. Reeve and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Adventure stories printed in the Echo included Randall Parrish’s The Mystery of the Silver Dagger,
Conan Doyle’s The Great Shadow,
and Canadian writer Hesketh Prichard’s November Joe: The Detective of the Woods.
Loved and protected by Rob and Elizabeth, Kenneth Millar found safe haven. But it was tainted by his fear and anger at being parted from his father and mother, and he showed some disturbing behavior. In the schoolyard, Kenneth bullied younger classmates. At his guardians’ home, he initiated frequent sexual play with a mentally retarded teenaged maid. And for the first time, he stole: taking a shiny dime from an Indian basket filled with mementos of Rob and Elizabeth’s dead daughters. With the dime the future crime writer bought a pencil—then deliberately broke the pencil in two.
Despite these acts, he was happier in Wiarton than he’d been since Vancouver. And as in Vancouver, life took payment in full. In October 1923, fifty-one-year-old Elizabeth Millar went to nearby Owen Sound for a gallbladder operation. She died on the surgeon’s table. A grieving Rob Millar said he could no longer look after his nephew.
Like a character in one of the Wonderland Theater’s serials, Kenneth Millar was catapulted again into an uncertain future.
The heart felt sympathy of the community goes out to Mr. Millar . . . and to little Kenneth, in the great loss they have sustained.
—The Canadian Echo, October 31, 1923
Anna Moyer had moved back to her mother’s house at 32 Brubacher. That’s where Kenneth joined her in late 1923, a month before his eighth birthday. Also living in the two-story brick bungalow were his thirty-seven-year-old bachelor uncle Edwin, who worked in a commercial laundry; and his recently widowed aunt Adeline, head of filing at the Mutual Life Assurance in neighboring Waterloo.
Jack Millar too was in Kitchener in 1923, clerking a while for Mutual Life (probably thanks to Adeline), then employed at the Kitchener Gas Works. He and Annie, never divorced, tried twice to reconcile—living together briefly and arguing sometimes violently about money and sex. The reconciliations didn’t take.
Jack lingered in Ontario for a few years, in rented Kitchener rooms or at an uncle’s Caledon East farm. Kennie spent bits of summer with his dad but for the most part was in his mother’s company. Annie and her boy, poor to the bone, moved from one rooming-house address to another: 124 Krug Street, 43 Ellen Street East, 52 Francis Street North. One place they stayed was run by a Mrs. Funk. Sometimes they stopped with relatives, such as Sylvia Vollick, one of Annie’s married sisters, in Mildmay. All the Moyers felt sorry for them, but no one had room or money to spare.
Kenneth went away from both parents some summers, to the farm of another married aunt. When he was eight, two young male cousins there introduced him to homo-sex,
which excited and shamed him. At this same farm, he speared his groin walking a picket fence and had to be taken to the hospital.
Without a father around, he was vulnerable to temptations and dangers. His overemotional mother couldn’t protect him. In cramped rooms in Kitchener, Annie and her son slept in the same bed, long after he felt right about it. He sensed he’d taken his father’s place in his fractured family. The woman once ready to give him to an orphanage was devoted to him in ways that seemed unhealthy. She expected him to do what Jack Millar couldn’t: rescue them from their wretched state. Sometimes Annie was sentimentally loving, other times violently critical. Her son learned to gauge her moods and manipulate them.
She came up with pathetic schemes to earn money—such as going door-to-door selling homemade dusting cloths—that he was afraid his Suddaby classmates would learn of. Ken didn’t speak of his mother unless he had to. Nor did he mention his dad. Few Kitchener people even knew of Jack’s existence. Many took it for granted Annie was a widow. Ken Millar learned early to keep family secrets.
He escaped by reading and could often start a book at dawn and finish it by breakfast. He devoured the adventure serials (Edgar Wallace’s Sanders of the River and The Green Archer) in British boys’ magazines such as Chums. He loved the Tarzan stories. And at ten, he was bowled over by Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, a tale of a workhouse boy fallen among thieves. He read it for so many hours at a time that his mother worried he’d damage his eyes. Ken Millar identified with Oliver, his grinding poverty, the dangers that menaced him. Oliver’s workhouse reminded Kenneth of the orphanage he’d escaped. Dickens wrote of a world the Kitchener boy recognized: violent and frightening, full of rescues and snares, of instant enemies and unknown relatives. Oliver Twist, like the scary Pearl White serial in Wiarton, was something you could put your fears into and feel better for.
In 1927, Kenneth’s life took another Dickensian turn. His father’s sister Margaret, an aunt he’d never met, invited her eleven-year-old nephew to come live with her in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and attend a private school at her expense.
No doubt Jack Millar was behind this (as he’d probably been behind cousin Rob’s bringing Kennie to Wiarton). Annie Millar could hardly refuse this generous offer. Again Kenneth was sent off by himself, this time by train, to another province and a world different from any he’d known.
An education that aims not merely at instruction in sound knowledge, but at the building up of a manly Christian character under religious influence—that is the ideal of St. John’s.
—St. John’s College School, Winnipeg, Class and Honor List, 1928
K. Millar: Who’s the best business man in the world?
Byng: John D. Rockefeller.
Millar: No. A man who can buy from a Jew and sell to a Scotchman at a profit.
—The Black and Gold, St. John’s College School, 1929
St. John’s was an Anglican school, a college prep academy founded in 1820 and modeled on English lines; most of the masters were English. There were playing fields, a skating rink, and a gymnasium. The curriculum here was rigorous: Latin, French, English, geography, math, algebra, geometry, physics; British, Canadian, and general history; religion. Daily chapel and military drill were compulsory. Ken Millar sang in the St. John’s church choir and competed in gym, hockey, and team equestrian events.
The other St. John’s boys were sons of well-to-do merchants and ministers from several provinces and even U.S. cities like Chicago—a much different bunch from the ragtag Five Points gang
Millar played street hockey and run sheep run
with in Kitchener.
During the week, he boarded at school. After dorm bedtime, he’d rig a mirror to reflect hall light on his pillow so he could read into the night. Ken Millar liked stories of heroes who worked outside the law, righting wrongs and making the rich pay: gentleman-thief Jimmie Dale, written by Canadian-American Frank L. Packard; O. Henry’s safecracker Jimmy Valentine; best of all Falcon Swift, the Monocled Manhunter,
who starred in an English boys’ magazine Millar bought on Saturdays at a store on North Main.
Weekends he stayed at his aunt Margaret’s apartment at 109 Devon Court, on Broadway, across from the provincial capitol. His father’s sister was a sophisticated
woman who smoked cigarettes and drove an automobile. Aunt Margaret had worked as a Detroit bookkeeper, then married a Chicago florist who died and left her well-off. In Winnipeg, she apparently supervised a string of beauty parlors and played the stock market. She was married to a Winnipeg man named Ed, with an adopted son (younger than Millar) whose middle name was Ross; this boy too went to St. John’s.
Aunt Margaret gave weekend parties at her apartment, where paintings of nudes hung on the walls and a Pianola cranked out hits of the day like In a Little Spanish Town.
Her party guests were active on the stock and grain exchanges and in Winnipeg politics. Millar, used to damp Kitchener rooming houses where rats sometimes scurried in the walls, got a taste of how the other half lived.
There were odd things about his aunt’s household, though. Uncle Ed kept a heavy handgun in his Packard glove box: an odd accessory for someone listed in the Winnipeg directory sometimes as a dentist and sometimes as a chiropractor. Millar in time concluded that his uncle managed a Winnipeg slot machine racket, one with ties to a Detroit crime syndicate.
Kenneth kept out of Uncle Ed’s way. Aunt Margaret, who smiled like a lioness,
bought Millar school clothes and took him to see touring English plays (The Pirates of Penzance) and his first talking pictures.
One day his father, shy and uncertain, showed up at Devon Court and proposed that his boy come with him out West, where Jack was bound for one last journey. His son didn’t want to leave school and go West. Jack departed Winnipeg alone.
The visit was a painful reminder of Kenneth’s father’s failures, and it made the twelve-year-old ashamed and angry. He got into fistfights with some of his classmates, and homosexual episodes with other boys. He stole. He filched drinks from his aunt’s parties and got drunk.
But he worked hard at St. John’s. He spent his evenings in the gym, practicing on the uneven and horizontal bars and the sawhorse, and earned a drill medal in mid-1928. He also won honors in English, mathematics, and Bible study. "An excellent scholar," his headmaster wrote on his midsummer report. Millar placed second in his class and was given a scholarship.
In Kitchener for the summer, Kenneth saw his father again, returned from the West where Jack had shipped out as a common seaman. Jack Millar had done a brave thing: jumped into icy waters to rescue a comrade fallen overboard. But the act broke what was left of his health. Jack had come back to Ontario to die.
On July 1, 1928, a few weeks shy ofhis fifty-fifth birthday, John Millar of 72 Ontario Street West wrote a two-page letter of advice to his twelve-year-old son: Be kind, industrious and independent. Keep up physical exercises. Practice writing and public speaking. Don’t quarrel with anyone. It is futile. Don’t fight unless you have to—then fight like hell.
Jack appended a reading list: Robert Burns, Luther Burbank, Thomas Paine, Clemenceau, Jefferson, Ingersoll, Henry George, Adam Smith, Karl Marx. Without humanity,
he wrote, all religion is as ‘sounding brass.’ It is the ‘tinkling cymbal’ of the glad-handers and that’s what most religionists and politicians are. (Propagandists.)
Jack told his boy to be considerate of other people’s rights and opinions, and to make the most of his life. ‘Knowledge has power,’ and both money and the pen are mightier than the sword.
He signed himself, Daddy.
Throughout my life,
Millar wrote in late middle age, I remained my father’s son.
* * *
Jack Millar’s testament sent his boy back to St. John’s with new purpose. He applied himself aggressively to his studies, and by Christmas he was at the head of his class.
Millar had decided he wanted to be a writer. For years reading had been his best escape from unpleasant reality, his chief entertainment and source of information. Books were the most important thing to him, except people; writing seemed almost sacred. In stories (as in movies, which he also loved) you could shape things in ways that let you make sense of them, get them under control.
Kenneth wanted to be a writer like Dickens, whose Oliver Twist set his heart and mind racing. Dickens was a writer anyone could appreciate; he wrote classics for common people.
There were writing models on both sides of Millar’s family. His mother’s people expressed themselves well in letters; and his mother’s brother Stanley Moyer, the artist, wrote poems and articles for magazines. Ken’s grandfather had started the Walkerton newspaper. And there was his father, who worked all his life with words, for profit and for pleasure.
During his hours alone at St. John’s, Kenneth labored on poems and stories. One was a ballad of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Scottish Pretender, who fled to France with the help of a woman named Macdonald.
Millar didn’t neglect his studies, though, and was first in his form again at midsummer 1929. A most promising young Scholar,
his headmaster wrote. He will go far if he gets the chance.
But he wouldn’t. When the term ended, he learned he’d be leaving St. John’s. His aunt had lost money in the stock market and couldn’t afford his fees: that’s what he was told. But for all Kenneth knew, he was getting the boot because of something wrong done at school or in the apartment. His life was starting to seem like some mean game of snakes and ladders.
He spent the summer in Kitchener, until another aunt volunteered to take him: his mother’s sister Laura in Medicine Hat, Alberta. Now thirteen, Kenneth again boarded the transcontinental train.
In Alberta, the coldest and most cheerless place he’d seen, he went through tenth grade at Medicine Hat’s Alexandra High School. Ken Millar liked Aunt Laura but never warmed to Uncle Fred, a school inspector and amateur naturalist with a collection of tens of thousands of dead beetles. Millar kept up his grades in Medicine Hat and didn’t steal, but there were homosexual incidents with other boys, and he thought his aunt and uncle learned of one, though they didn’t say so. When spring term ended, though, he was told he’d be leaving Medicine Hat.
Back he went to Kitchener, to his grandmother’s red-brick bungalow. Uncle Edwin with the cleft palate was still there, and hardworking Aunt Adeline, and disapproving Grandma Moyer. Hardest of all for Millar to deal with was his pitiable mother, who was coming apart emotionally, either raging at him or expecting him to restore the family fortunes. He took to hitchhiking, to get away from the house. In Wiarton he looked up Rob Millar, half-hoping for an invitation to come live here again. But Rob Millar was remarried and had a real son. Ken stayed the night and left the next day, rejected again.
He hitched to the Bruce Peninsula to see his father on a run-down farm where Jack was staying with a sick male cousin. Old Jack
was unable to speak after his most recent stroke, but the poet kept writing and still had a spark in his eye.
With no place else to go, Millar enrolled for eleventh grade at the Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate Institute: KCI. To ease the sting of being a poor relation, he got an after-school job as stockboy and handyman in a groceteria.
Working two hours each schoolday and all day Saturday, he earned two and a quarter dollars a week: pretty good wages considering Canada, like the States, was now in the grip of a great financial depression that looked as if it could last forever.
DASHIELL HAMMETT writes a superior mystery novel because for many years he was a Pinkerton detective. He is probably the only bull
who has ever turned his experience into the writing of crime stories. To Hammett, plot is not the main thing in the story. It is the behavior of the detective attacking a problem which intrigues him.
—Dust jacket, The Maltese Falcon, 1930
The ambitious young investigator, Herlock Sholmes, yawned behind his false moustache and poured for himself a cocaine-and-soda.
—Kenneth Millar, The South Sea Soup Co.,
The Grumbler, 1931
In Kitchener, Millar continued to steal and to have sex with other boys, though guilt over both things made him miserable. He also kept making poems and stories, training to be a writer. Wanting encouragement but not trusting the KCI teachers, he showed his poetry to his mother’s cousin Sheldon Brubacher, a Toronto high school instructor with a university degree. Brubacher said Kenneth’s poems reminded him of early work by Byron and Shelley (a flattering exaggeration, Millar much later realized). This praise gave him the confidence to continue.
At KCI, he made friends with half a dozen male students who also wrote. The boys showed their pages to one another and discussed books. Wanting to learn more than what was taught at school, they read and analyzed works by Aristotle and the pre-Socratic philosophers. Millar spent a lot of time at the Kitchener Public Library, where the woman in charge was B. Mabel Dunham, a published author of local-historical novels.
Miss Dunham (a practicing spiritualist who claimed she communed with the deceased she wrote about) had reason to take note of Millar. She knew his artist uncle Stan Moyer, whom Millar sometimes hitchhiked to visit in Toronto. Moyer’s articles were printed in magazines that the library stocked; eventually Stan Moyer painted Mabel Dunham’s portrait.
Millar’s uncle was a gentle-looking man with dry Canadian wit. Uncle Stan stirred memories of Ken Millar’s visits to John Innes’s Vancouver studio, and his work showed Ken how to see with a painter’s eye: a crucial thing for the writer he hoped to become. Stan Moyer was an essential emblem: a member of Millar’s own family who was a real artist. Stan’s sister (Ken’s Aunt Louisa) had married an American architect named Albert Wood; their household, full of artistically gifted kids, was another hopeful beacon to Millar. The novelist-librarian Mabel Dunham was important in a similar way. The achievements of these people Millar knew personally encouraged him to think he too might accomplish such things.
Miss Dunham’s library became Ken Millar’s second home. He checked its recent arrivals
section often, alert for books from New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf, whose well-printed volumes Kenneth thought were always the best. Millar read every Knopf Borzoi Book
he could find. Each Saturday, he also read the new issues of all the English and American magazines. When he discovered the American Mercury, an outstanding U.S. journal edited by H. L. Mencken and with strong ties to Knopf, Kenneth hunted in secondhand-book stores for back issues.
All this was to prepare himself for a writing career. But Millar read for pleasure too: lots of science fiction and (his special favorite) detective stories. Vowing to read every mystery in the library, he went through hundreds of British and American books by such writers as Allingham, Bentley, Chesterton, Christie, Conan Doyle, and S. S. Van Dine. Mabel Dunham saw what he was up to and stocked the mystery section creatively. "I had read all of Crime and Punishment, he later wrote,
before I realized I’d been conned by an expert."
Another KCI student often at the library was Margaret Sturm, the brightest girl at school. Witty, popular, and a good pianist, she was the daughter of alderman Henry Sturm, manager of the Conger-Lehigh Coal Company. Like Ken Millar, Margaret Sturm liked to read mysteries and liked to write stories and poems. She submitted a Maugham-like tale to KCI’s 1931 student annual, the Grumbler, where Millar was literary editor. He accepted it for the issue’s lineup, along with a sketch of his own: a Sherlock Holmes parody in the style of Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock. It was Millar’s first printed story, a small step toward his goal of becoming a professional.
He kept that dream to himself. It wasn’t smart to speak openly at the Brubacher house, in the face of his grandmother’s Pennsylvania Dutch mutterings that he was bound to come to a bad end. His mother on the other hand was sure he was destined for greatness, and her pipe dreams were just as difficult to bear. Anna tried to inspire her boy with stories of their distant Bowman cousin who’d helped found Johns Hopkins, and of Kenneth’s great-grandfather who walked to Canada from Pennsylvania with only a quarter and died a rich man, and of his grandfather the newspaper publisher who’d also been justice of the peace. Often Anna reminded her son he’d been born in California, a golden land she hoped he’d return to.
Millar spent as little time as possible in the Brubacher Street house, whose every inch—the leaded-glass fanlight above the front door, the faded wallpaper, the stains in the sink—seemed depressing. Using his gymnast skills, he shinnied up and down the drainpipe to come and go as he pleased. He’d sneak into movie theaters without paying to see pictures like The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu. Downtown he discovered McCallum’s Cigar Store, a billiard parlor on King Street West.
McCallum’s had a barbershop and a rental library. There were slot machines of the sort found in stores and restaurants all over town. A constant poker game went on upstairs. But the big lure were the smooth green pool tables, lit by overhead lamps and hazed in blue tobacco smoke. The teenaged Millar was accepted in McCallum’s, no questions asked. Playing pool and smoking cigarettes under the pressed-iron ceiling, he felt like a man. The pool hall became as much a haven as the public library.
He was being pulled in two directions. The split within him had grown since he was a kid, when he’d learned to keep facts and feelings to himself. Now he had vices to hide: smoking, drinking, stealing, sex. He was leading a double life: in public he was a well-mannered, soft-spoken, bookish young person; roaming the town on his own, he was a fellow full of shame and envy.
He wanted to make something of himself but wasn’t certain he could. He lived in poverty, went to school in a tattered windbreaker, wore the same sweater all year. He knew he was smart, but he sensed his potential for evil. When he saw a well-fed, well-loved boy somewhere—at the train station, say, fussed over by loving parents—part of him wanted to be that youngster, part of him wanted to smash the kid.
He was always aware of the gulf between haves and have-nots. His father was in a charity ward (the poorhouse
), where Anna went and nursed him at his worst: another painful family secret.
All over Canada, young people were angry about the financial depression that saw families living on pennies. Millar was angrier than most. He was mad at his mother for being ignorant of life, mad at his father for causing their situation, mad at a town that looked down on a fatherless boy, mad at a world that allowed such things. He was angry at himself and his own self-pity. If he’d still believed in God, he’d have been angry with Him.
The teenager turned his discontented attention on the hidden life of the city. What secret deals allowed some people to pay for nice houses and clothing and cars? The slot machines all over town drew his special scrutiny. Mint machines,
they were called, but they paid off in twenty-dollar jackpots. There was a machine in the lunchroom across from school; lots of boys lost money in it, but school authorities never acknowledged its presence. These slots probably took in thousands of dollars, but city fathers ignored this thriving racket in a kind of conspiracy of silence. Maybe police were paid to look the other way. Maybe gangsters from the States were involved.
Other betting went on in Kitchener. The poker room was easy to find, as was the floating dice game. Horse bets were taken in cigar stores and pool halls. Bookmakers did business out of private houses. All these things were open secrets, and it irked Millar that you never encountered this sort of real life in fiction.
But that changed. Browsing the rental library at McCallum’s, he found a novel by a man called Dashiell Hammett. It was fitting he see it here, where money was gambled and deals were made. (Alderman Henry Sturm, Marg Sturm’s father and soon to be the mayor of Kitchener, was a former McCallum’s manager.) This Hammett novel was just the sort of book Millar sought: one that told the truth about how the world worked. It was a mystery novel, supposedly, but unlike any mystery Millar had ever read: set in a tough town, with real-seeming crooks, cops, politicians, and other types tangled together. Hard-boiled was the word for this new kind of crime story. As I stood there absorbing Hammett’s novel,
he later wrote, the slot machines at the back of the shop were clanking and whirring, and in the billiard room upstairs the perpetual poker game was being played. Like iron filings magnetized by the book in my hands, the secret meanings of the city began to organize themselves around me.
This novel confirmed his sense of how things worked, not only in Kitchener but in other cities such as Winnipeg, scene of a violent general strike and home of his scary uncle. He read most of the Hammett book in one standing. It was printed by Alfred A. Knopf, his favorite publisher. But Millar hadn’t seen this important work at the public library, where Knopf books were stocked as a matter of course. Why wasn’t it there?
It was there, he discovered—but along with other new and old titles, it was hidden. Library staff kept certain books out of sight of the public in whose name they’d been purchased. Exploring the library, Millar came upon these restricted books and was outraged at being denied things he thought vital to his education. At night, when the library was closed, Millar climbed its fire escape and entered the building through an unlocked window. He went to the room with the uncirculated books and read his fill of Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, Rabelais, Flaubert, and William Faulkner. When he left, he took revenge, like a literary Falcon Swift, on those who would rob him of such essential writing. He stole an armful of best-selling fiction from the open shelves: the sort of false-to-life stuff he considered trash. On the way back to his bed at 32 Brubacher, Millar dropped this junk down a manhole and into the Kitchener sewer.
It is generally agreed by doctors that a school pupil should sleep at least 10 hours a day. Harvey Bacher is sleeping
up to this fact in 102.
Mr. Archer on the other hand, prefers the policy of Lafontaine’s to let the sleeping dog lie.
—Form News,
The Grumbler, 1931
Visitor: Doctor can you help me? My name is Archer.
Doctor: No, I’m sorry I can’t do a thing for you.
—The Grumbler, 1931
Shoplifting, stealing money from school cloakrooms and YMCA lockers, boosting cars for joyrides, rolling drunks: these were crimes a grown-up Millar ascribed to teen males in autobiographical fiction he drafted. In real life, the teenaged Millar certainly stole. He knew pimps, prostitutes, and other low types from his pool-hall rambles. A scheme for the blue-eyed Millar to work a homosexual badger game, luring adult males into compromising situations, may well have been proposed to him; such a hustle also turned up in later fiction notes. At fifteen, Millar looked handsome but haunted, a boy hovering between sexual orientations, chased by furies of good and evil.
He nursed a crush on Margaret Sturm and secretly followed her home after classes. He loved her sharp humor, her self-assurance (she was nearly a year older), her intelligence, her coltish legs. Someday I’m going to marry that girl,
he told a buddy (echoing a man in Hammett’s The Glass Key who’s smitten with a politician’s daughter). But to Margaret, Kenneth said not a word.
Millar felt insecure in nearly every way and craved knowledge of how to live in the world. He felt himself pulled along dangerous paths. It was as if two sides of his nature were in a race: sometimes the sensitive, studious boy was leading; sometimes the angry, destructive boy dashed ahead. For the first time in his life, Millar did poorly in school. Then he was caught in a crime, something serious enough to warrant calling the police. But police were not called. Whoever nabbed Millar (perhaps a KCI teacher, a store employee, or a YMCA worker) meted out their own punishment—possibly forcing Kenneth to run behind a moving automobile he was tied to, a penalty mentioned in later Millar notebooks. Whatever happened had the desired effect: Ken Millar resolved to stop his downward slide.
Some teachers helped him. One was Cyril Phelp, his debate-team coach, who gave him firm guidance and good counsel. And there was a Mr. Archer, who taught at KCI in 1931. With good father figures encouraging him, Millar did well in his senior year’s finals—but not well enough to cancel a poor early-semester showing. Ken Millar graduated in the middle ranks of a class he’d headed the previous term. There’d be no university scholarship. His change of heart had come too late.
Canada was still frozen in a bad financial depression. Millar couldn’t afford college, and without a degree he’d be scuffling for work with the rest of the unemployed. His aunt Adeline, who’d already done a great deal for the family, got him an interview for an office job at Mutual Life in Waterloo, a position that paid ten dollars a week and that once secured could be his for life. But Ken Millar didn’t want to work in an office forever, or even a year. He wanted to be a writer, and he knew this job would prevent it. He purposely botched the interview. Not long after, Aunt Adeline died.
Millar’s future was as uncertain as his past was unsettled. At sixteen, he counted the number of rooms he’d lived in and got fifty. He’d been frightened, bored, or intellectually insulted by Mennonites, Christian Scientists, Methodists, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians (the Anglicans were okay, he thought), and he turned his back on all of them. But he believed in his potential, and he refused to be a criminal.
He bought himself time by working for room and board on the Snyder family’s Oxbow farm, six miles outside Kitchener. Here he continued his self-education, reading Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard into the night. The Snyders liked Millar and tolerated his late risings. Farm life agreed with him; he put on fifty pounds, bringing his weight to 180. He enjoyed being away from his mother and other relatives. Alone, he could set his own rules and goals. He gave up stealing. An affair with an older girl confirmed his heterosexuality and helped him renounce the homosexual acts that had shamed him since he was eight. He drew a moral code for himself to follow, using Western thought from the Greeks to Freud. Philosophical ideas weren’t mere abstractions to Ken Millar but words to live by. Though he rejected formal religion, the standards he set for himself were as strict as the Mennonites’. Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart,
he later wrote, and you find it by expressing your personality.
Millar dealt with the worst impulses of his own personality—rage, self-pity, the urge to do harm—by suppressing them. He’d keep himself under rigid control. This was as serious to him as life or death, for he knew he had the strength and the anger to kill. Thoughts of succumbing to evil terrified him.
While Ken Millar wrestled with such matters, his father Jack (thanks to Annie Millar’s efforts) was admitted in September 1932 to Toronto’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Incurables, a good facility where he’d get decent care.