May 28, 1942.

Professor W.L.Phelps;

Dear Billy,

I am very grateful to you for sending me Wilson's letter as proposed of Miss Rukeyser's biography of Willard Gibbs. Particularly so, since last evening Miss Van Name asked me if I had received it from you, saying that it represented their point of view as well as Wilson's.

As they may have told you, I have been trying to act as a kind of a middle-man (a thankless task) between the VanNames and Miss Rukeyser, in the hope that their specific objections might be presented to one and the other without the necessary emotional conflicts that seem to rise between them. With this in mind, I hope that they will feel, and Wilson also, that the biography is kept from being at least less satisfactory to them than it might otherwise have been. So far Miss R. has been willing to alter more than three-quarters of the passage to which they object, and I hope that as satisfactory a result may come from their comments on chapters VII to XV which I am taking to New York for conference next week. I do not think they will be entirely satisfied, nor do I think all of their objections to Miss R.'s in interpretations are valid. But as a scholar, you will understand all the difficulties attendant on a work of this kind. Think of the Coleridge's family, for example.

The letter represents many of the difficulties which came even at the beginning; a distrust of Miss R.'s ability to perform the task, and a misunderstanding of why a poet should wish to write a biography of a mathematical physicist. I suppose the answer is

in Gibbs' own statement: "Mathematics is a language".

At any rate she is interested in the lan guage of Gibbs' communica-
tions and the degree towhich the reception of this language has
influenced the lives of us all. Gibbs is Yale's greatest graduate,
and America's greatest mind, An d yet he is not even in the Hall
of Fame! He has been voted down every year. Think of it !
The greatest mind since Newton, and not in the Hall of Fame.

That is because the public is unaware often of the men who have
influenced their lives most.

I have been going over the entire manuscript with Miss R.
in an attempt to make it as

Miss R.'s biography will, I think, help to rectify that; and it may
be the crown of your presidency of the Hall that in your term Gibb s
was at last admitted.

I have been going over the entire manuscript with Miss R., in
an attemptto make it as sound a study as possible. I find it very
exciting and stimulating, and I hope you will also feel that way
about it. And you can be surethat I am doing everything I can to
present the objections of the VanNames fairly to her, out of my
own loyalty to Gibbs. The manuscript will h ave to go to press
in a fortnight or so now, and the work is about complete within
the help that has been given. The way of the peacemaker is hard.
But I hope that I have b een at least partially able to do what
few others might have, that is act in my double capacity as a
generation- old NewEnglander and a literary critic, the role of a
peacemaker between what Wilson calls the assured and anchored
"older generation" and the "shell-shocked youngsters".