Yaddo Saratoga Springs,

Oct. 18 1935.

Dear Mathew;

Squeezed out of Germany without a scratch, saw
Katherine Anne in Paris and have been back about a month. I am
applying for a Guggenheim and need it desperately. Will you go as
a reference? I want it for the third volume of my triology.
I am going to be up here a little while then I don't know. Am
very broke and feel that this is a terribly critical time for me, if
I get some help such as the Guggenheim, everything will be OK.
It will probably be OK anyhow, that's the kind I seem to be, and
having got this far, expect to live to be ninety. Germany was
a horror. United States is a blessed land in comparison. Drop me
a line here will you as I have to get the papers in and cant put
your name on until I hear from you. Best to you and Hannah, hope
to see you soon. Are you going to be in NYC this winter or where?
Dont know where I shall be -- hope not NY but I must finish my book
and traveling does not go with work. More's the pity.

Feb 6,1964

Dear Josie:

I thought the Parched Blue Sky, just obtained and read the other night, was the best memoir I have yet written about the Spanish Civil War, by any who became engage, as from outside. The only thing comparable was by that angry-Christian Frenchman, Georges Bernanos. I always suspected you were one of the ablest writers, and one of the most independent and intelligent, among my contemporaries. I remember all sorts of good pieces you did; but this appealed to me more than the early novels. It successfully and honestly communicated the amalgam of desperate hope and tragedy of that milieu and time. I am all applause *** What I was to write was to be much more limited, as I did not visit the place during the war, but just before, in a time of turmoil too. How much better was your report than Dos P's, good as he is at times? And Hemingway both simplifies and romanticizes in his novel.

Your small masterpiece, like a novella, ought to be reprinted with only a few other sketches of similar quality. (Why must everything be cast as a 300 page novel?) Well I say you're improving with age.

We enjoyed the hurricane visit. Come and blow us down again.

P.S. But I still don't see what choice the Republicans had about crushing out their dissenters. I have always assumed that in a good revolution I would be killed as an innocent bystander--wrote as much about Soviet justice in the New Repub., 26th. 1937. Hugh Thomas saw it that way too in his history.