WELLS COLLEGE

AURORA-ON-CAYUGA, NEW YORK

July 13, 1943

Dear Edmund:

Thanks for the further suggestions; I've got them all chased down except the Froust item, and for this library is inadequate. I shall have some one in Princeton do a little detective work on it. You may be interested to know that the Ordway letter was never published in the Alumni Weekly, which was at that time, as my informant tells me, very much sicklied o'er with the cast of Moses Taylor Pyne. The Prints Anything stuff has not been traced yet; werent those things all anonymous? If I sent the numbers in question to you, could you not probably identify some things? I'll try anyway, if I can get hold of them.

About the MSS material and the Princeton Library; I think there might be something gained if I were to approach Boyd about it. I could simply say that you had let me go through your stuff and I that I had noted down these things with your help and asked you if you would be willing to sell them to the library. Perhaps, too, there might be something to be said for my suggesting the price as coming from me. This would commit no one either way. I gather from the last sentence of your letter that you are willing I should do this, and I will unless I hear from you to the contrary.

About the Price; with your gift for throwing away MSS material, this stuff obviously has a value considerably higher than it would ordinarily have. As you probably know, it is original drafts and longhand material in general which gets the biggest prices. I expect the Russian notebook (#10 on your list) the Mr. More and the Mithraic Bull material (#11), the Wound and the Bow stuff, (#14) and the I thought of Daisy stuff (#7) is the most valuable material here. Frankly, however, I should guess that $300 is a little high for the 'lot'. Nevertheless, it will not hurt to start there, if you are prepared, in order to sell, to go a little lower.

I do not know if you are interested in going beyond the Princeton library for a market. If you are, there are other places this kind of thing can be sold of course. If you are interested, I should be glad to do what I can to help in these other directions after I have tried the Princeton people. I, of course, want to see all these things at Princeton. It would be my guess that you will not be able to much more than $100 for them. You see why I hate to hear of authors' destroying MSS, letters and such. You tell Mary to file all her MSS for future reference.

You will be hearing from Boyd presently about the little piece for the Chronicle of which I spoke. We had a wonderful time at Wellfleet; such visits are air and water to me and are about all that keep my academically depressed morale up from season to season. Best to Mary and Reuel, and I will go ahead with the MSS stuff as outlined above unless I get a stop signal from you.

Yours,

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

July 26, 1949.

Dear Edmund:

I emerge from a fog of paint for this. Rosemary and I have done over four rooms of our new house, not to mention innumerable bookcases and other odds and ends of furniture.

Thanks very much for all the leads: I don't know just what I am going to be able to do with the Baltimore Sun stuff, but I may be able to dig up some one in Baltimore itself who will follow these things up and get us the exact information. They are looking for the Prints Anything in Princeton and may be able to turn up a copy. I will forward it to you if they can.

Meanwhile I have not been wholly idle; I have got the Double-Dealer items, and the matter of the anthology for Mencken, in German, progresses: such a book is mentioned by Mencken's biographer and if necessary, I can get to the old boy directly. The New Yorker list has also come in, though that was hardly my doing.

It is with melancholy satisfaction that I report to you that Princeton is likely to offer you $100 for the MSS. I didn't mean to guess so well, since the figure is so much less than you want, but I gather from my agents (in this case Willard Thorp) that they are planning to write you offering something like this -- Boyd is planning to write, I should say. Would you like me to go any further with this? I can write Jim Babb, who is assistant librarian at Yale and who I suppose is running things since Knollenberg is away. I also know a very honest bookseller in New Haven who deals extensively in modern stuff, if you want to go that far abroad.

I certainly think the note on Vladimir Nabokov ought to go into the bibliography; may I keep it until I can get

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

August 2, 1943.

Dear Edmund:

I have now got, through the offices of PUL, the information on the Mencken book of short stories. Mencken says: "That book of American short stories was prepared for George Mueller, but unfortunately the great inflation struck Germany before he could put it in type, and so it was never published. My original manuscript is now in the Pratt Library, Baltimore."

Do you remember the story you sent him? I can of course write the Pratt Library for a reference, if you do not, but this always takes time and sometimes, in the case of MSS, involves credentials and redtape. If you do happen to remember, it will save us time.

I got the list from the NEW YORKER -- with several mistakes in it, as I discovered when checking it; it was in red pencil, accompanied by the observation "Here you are." The exclamation point still puzzles me. The Wordsworth review in H-T Books was not 1926, as you remembered it, but 1923: I am planning to send the H-T a laundry bill; there's no reason why they shouldnt get out an index and save us all this grubbing.

I notice that the "Man Who Shot Snapping Turtles" in the Atlantic is accompanied by a note saying that it is from a book of short stories to be published by Houghton Mifflin this fall; do you know if they have arrived at the title page stage, or if the book is yet designed? I'd like to get it if possible. The same question about the New Directions book of Fitzgerald things. Title pages will do, in both cases, but of course if I can get binding and pagination, so much the better. Rosemary's sweater arrived from Mary; will you thank her for us. If you will tell me there is hope I will write Houghton Mifflin and New Directions about the books.

Yours,
Arthur

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

August 3, 1943.

Dear Edmund:

I have this minute dispatched a letter to Babb at Yale and we will see what can be done in that quarter; mind, I've got a certain invisible investment in that $100 guess of mine, but I very sincerely hope I'm wrong. Yale, of course, has an ambitious collection of contemporary American stuff and may be specially interested on this occasion for that reason.

As you will see from my note of yesterday, I already have the story in the Atlantic but have not checked the new Mercury: thanks for the lead. I do very much appreciate your offering to check the bibliography and I shall send it to you in typescript as soon as it is set up. I keep hesitating to set it up because I know new things will be coming along, but this kind of hesitation can go on too long, and I must get started.

I'm one of those odd fish who like to paint, so that it is no wonder that I do it when I get the chance: Freudian, no doubt.

This is going to be a damned imposing bibliography; the NR stuff alone runs to some 350 odd items.

Best to Mary and yourself,

August 9, 1943.

Dear Edmund:

In the matter of the story for Mencken, I am thinking of adding a little
section to take care of these things which reached the ambiguous state of half-
publication; that was why I wanted to pin it down exactly. The PUL, which I
think I told you has all of Mencken's papers, sent me the other day a copy of
his letter to you, so I know have all the necessary information. I will go after
the letters and review in The Prince.

I don't know exactly when the bibliography comes out; didn't Boyd mention a date in his letter to you? The fall issue, of *O*urse, but just when the deadline for that is, I do not know. But of *o*urse it will be before Christmas; nonetheless I should very much like to get an entry for the book of stories. At least we can give title and publisher and show we suspect the books immediate birth, even if there cannot be a full entry.

Over the week-end I discovered in Cornell the Scribner's edition of
In Our Time with an introduction by you. I am also having trouble with the
Limited editions Club edition of Erwhon. There is an article on Butler in
NR with a footnote saying that it will presently appear as the introduction to
the Limited Edition Club's issue of Erwhon. But so far as I can discover, the
introduction printed in that book is by Aldous Huxley. This sounds like the
Limited Edition Club, but I thought I'd better check with you to be sure I had the
story straight.

I presume that by now you will have had the letter from Boyd making you
an offer for your MSS. I enclose the reply I got from Yale: the footnote is to
be ignored, as you will see. Did you tell me it was the "Dark Room" which was
published in *Measure*. So I have it in my notes, but the "Dark Room" is not in
*Measure*, according to the reference librarian at Dartmouth (which has one of the
few complete files of the periodical); could it have been some other poem, and she,
taking me literally, not have mentioned it? You may be interested to know that the
English editions of your books consist of the American sheets, shipped to England
and bound up with a new title-page. I have ordered these books, but I doubt if they
will get here in time for me to make transcripts of the t-ps for the bibliography.
This information will have to be printed later on, as 'additions and corrections.'

I should have said above, in re the Yale business, that I told Mary to hold
the letter for Jim Babb, because he is keenest on contemporary stuff as well as
being a bigger boss than Don Wing, and we will probably get a more favorable
attitude from him.

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

August 20, 1943.

Dear Edmund:

No, no; you have the wrong attitude about this; to us whiffiographers,
as Allen calls us ("How fallopian and fertile these whiffiographers be! How
flaturodent their flimsies!"), everything is important enough. I suppose it is
the exaggeration of this attitude to the point where what is most ephemeral
and thus hardest to find becomes the most valuable which gives us such a bad
name. I don't mean this; but I do mean that anything you can think of is worth
knowing about, even if I cannot finally pin it down. I shall spend some time on
the Sunday Tribune around 1924 and see if I can find the Gilman thing. I will
not go to Red Bank, but if I am ever there I will search the Register.

I have had another letter from Mary Wheeler at Yale saying that Jim
Babb's mother has just died and that there will be another delay; I think he is
still worth waiting for, unless you feel any special rush, and I will do noth-
ing unless you say to. Willard Thorp searched the Prince for me in the matter of
"The Fettered College"; he found no letter from you, but read all the editorials
and letters and came away really heartily disgusted with the Prince of those
days: No editor of his time would ever have encouraged such trash; no one spoke
up for the side of the angels except you and W. Wilson's brother-in-law, etc. He
was really quite worked up in retrospect. He is leaving the search for the review
of the Lit in the 20's to me as being a little to vague for him. I expect to be
in Princeton the second week of September and will then also have a try on my
own for the Prints Anything; my agents seem to have let me down there. I have
finally found a friend at Hill who has not gone to war and expect to have the
Snooze material within the week. I have chased down the royalty reports and have
heard from all but two of them: textbook reprints most of them (Morrison's "Five
Kinds of Writing" etc.). All newspaper stuff is now in hand except the F.P.A.
column in The Mail. I had a friendly but useless letter from F.P.A., who -- as
we might have known -- keeps no records; the NY Sun has stored its files for
1916-7. The Baltimore Sun stuff is complete, however, and the Socialist Call, etc.

I have heard again from the Dartmouth people about "The Dark Room"; they
can find nothing of yours in *Measure*, but they are missing number 26; it just
might be there, and I will look in that number when I am in the NY Public. May-
be you published in disguise. Dartmouth insists that it couldn't have been in
*Measure* anyway because it was in the New Republic; which shows, I suppose, that
they haven't been around much. I am glad to have the *Erwhon* business straight;
it was puzzling me. I take the greatest pleasure in having found the Hemingway
preface. I was beginning to think it might be that you never forgot anything,
and that's a disturbing thought; now you show yourself as capable of these little
things as the rest of us, if in an inferior degree.

I had anote from Weber of the Chronicle saying that he wanted to put us
in the November issue, but that he didn't insist and if we wanted to take till
February we could, But I can make November if you and Dean Gauss can.

Yours,
Androt.

August 25, 1943.

Dear Edmund:

This is a great help, to have a fairly narrow range within which to search for the parody of Bennett in F.P.A.'s column; it will save much time. As you say, that makes "The Conjuring Shop" the first thing. "The Dark Room" appeared in NR 81:101 (December 5, 1934); it also appeared in "The Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1935." I am going to check "Leasure" myself when I get to New York.

I shall be glad to do anything you wish about printing, anything, that is, which is also agreeable to the Princeton people. We are expecting the Thorps up here for a visit within the next week or ten days and perhaps I could settle it with Willard at that time.

I have it in the notes I took that first night in Wellfleet that you had something in "The Snooze"; hence my efforts in this quarter. No doubt I misunderstood something you said in passing about "The Snooze"; I was taking notes pretty fast that night, with the assistance of more than one highball.

I really do know better than to write "Erwhon"; I suspect this error is a typing one. The hunt-and-peck style does not make a return to the same letter easy and I frequently miss it. However, I am an exceedingly bad speller when I am not concentrating, and not a very good one when I am -- like so many of my colleagues who quite evidently do not meet your conception of 'academic standing,' and would probably not do very well in one of their own elementary courses. I do mean to sound proud of this fact. Perhaps it is an occupational disease, like detective stories.

September 14, 1943.

Dear Edmund:

I am just back from a week in Princeton doing college boards; on the way down I spent a day in New York looking things up. I found the FFA piece in September 1911 in the Evening Mail; that hunt is over. The Cassanove reprint was in a paper called *Encore*. I also found the Proust reprint in the book you suggested and the New York Public had a copy of the signed edition of NB of N. All in all, it was a killing. I will search *Reader's Digest* in my first spare time.

The Princeton people seem very keen on getting the checklist and your article into the November issue; I wasn't able to put them off till February, though I tried.

I enclose a letter from Jim Babo about the MS stuff; are you going to be at Yale this winter or is he the victim of rumor? I suspect from his tone that his price is going to come out just about where Princeton's did, but if you are not going to be in New Haven this winter, I should follow this letter up. Or perhaps you should, I don't know whether you want my advice about this, but I think if Yale's price does come out about where Princeton's did, you ought nonetheless to sell the stuff to one or the other of them. This isn't sentiment, but the feeling that there isn't enough MS here to ever bring much more. The situation is about this, I think. People are still paying somewhere near manuscript prices for typescript, but they are very rapidly learning that typescripts of contemporary writers are very common things, much commoner than manuscripts, even when they are not originals but copies. My guess is, in other words, that the market for typescripts is going to decline steadily. Though your stuff ought normally to increase in value as time goes on, I suspect this packet won't because it is mainly typescript; the two trends will balance each other. This for what it is worth.

I enclose the Nabokov blurb. I have decided that this kind of thing ought not to be included; the checklist is enormously long as it is, and fascinating as I find this kind of thing, it will only clutter the scene for the average user of such a checklist.

September 22, 1943.

Dear Edmund:

I found the letter from Jim Babb carefully filed with "Poems published in periodicals"; you can make something of this if you will. I hope I remember to enclose it this time as I plan to. It is much better that you should make your own deductions from it than accept mine: I make out from its tone that Jim would rather deal directly with you, or through Gilbert Troxell, then with me anyway.

This is surely a very diabolic scheme that you and the Sibyl have worked out between you. Does it follow that if either Yale or Princeton now offers you more, you will feel that you must go and destroy part of the MSS and raise the price? But all joking apart, I do not understand how a writer of your considerable scholarly achievements can under-rate MSS material as you do. Surely the time has passed when it is a good joke at the unworldly professor's expense that MSS are preserved so lovingly. No one really doubts, does he, the cumulative importance of minutiae for a full knowledge? Of course the mere squirrelish accumulation of material doesn't constitute understanding, but neither is it well, even in the most remote sense, that all be left, as Bacon says, either to the mist of tradition, or the whirl and eddy of argument, or the fluctuations and mazes of chance and of vague and ill-digested experience. Because some scholars devote themselves wholly to accumulation of MSS material and bibliography -- about which Allen complains so vigorously (he's doing bibliographies himself now at the LC) -- it does not follow that accumulation should be done away with.

I don't mean to say that I do not see your problem. You have your good canon-law conviction that a man, even a writer, should have a fair day's wages for a fair day's work; I don't know what the canon law says about destroying your commodities if you do not get that wage. But, dammit, it is the right answer to destroy the MSS. You might just as well take the line that no man has a right to study your work. You can't do that, for better or for worse you are now in the public domain, and one fine day some one is going to want to do the kind of work on you that you have done on others. It is my own conviction that this will be a remarkably profitable job, because of your gift for remaining at the common-sense center of our age's intellectual course; your intellectual career is going to have the same representative quality that Dr. Johnson's had. You may not like this; I don't know whether you will or not. But like it or not, it is surely part of your merely human, to say nothing of scholarly, responsibility, not to make impossible a study of that career which is something more than superficial.

Argal: tuck the MSS away and thumb your nose at Yale and Princeton if that gives you pleasure; strike if you will; but do not destroy the MSS; that's rick-burning of the really bad kind.

Please forgive this if you think it immodest: I have my own sense of duty.

Yours,
Anton

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

October 5, 1943.

Dear Edmund:

Well, I have my answer, and must necessarily be satisfied with it (which means, of course, that I really am not). I cannot resist, however, pointing out that the scholars who devote their time to editing what you call chips and shavings will always find a sufficient quantity of the same about and are probably anyway incapable of doing anything else -- there's no use your saying 'they ought to be occupied with something better'; anything better is beyond them. And I am afraid I am enough of a historian, for my all my disclaiming against people who are nothing more than historians of literature, to believe that nothing is irrelevant to one's understanding of a writer. Well, I must continue into mere rudeness this argument. Don't destroy any more than you think you have to. And by all means let a literary executor handle what doesn't get destroyed if you like that method best; from what I've seen of literary executors I'm convinced that the least business-like writer can do a better job than most of that breed does. Sell them yourself, even, for future resale, to a bookseller. You'll make your better bargain and the end result will be the same so far as the material itself is concerned.

I had a note on my desk to write you about the Mercury piece when your letter arrived; thanks for clearing that matter up. I am going to sit down in a few days -- when there is some time, if there ever is -- to do a recheck of the whole bibliography for unfinished items of business; doubtless I will have to ask for help again then.

As ever,

October 18, 1943.

Dear Edmund:

Thanks for the Reveille, which I enclose. You don't need to be
ironic about its importance, to me; remember, on my principles, it is im-
portant. It's a bore about the Prints anything; as I think I told you, I
was unable to turn up anything at Princeton either. I shall watch the
Atlantic, along with PR and Horizon, for forthcoming stuff.

The Casanova sounds interesting. I don't see why it should not be in-
cluded. If the English edition is the straight Machen edition, then the
parts of the translation which you did will be traceable by comparing the
two editions. This makes the American edition a definite item in your bibli-
graphy, I think; unless, therefore, you have some objection to its being
entered, I shall include it together with a note to the effect that cer-
tain passages in the translation are yours. This is the very kind of thing
we professors love to play around with you know.

Your letter should have been answered more promptly but we have been
celebrating the 75th anniversary of the college offer the week-end with symposia
on liberal education and such and this came on top of a visit from Katherine
Ann Porter during which she charmed the shirts off all and in her southern
belle blue literary malice fashion. I don't mean that to sound harsh, for I
like Katherine Anne; all literally people are by nature malicious, I think.
All this has taken time, in any event.

Let me know presently if you have objections to the inclusion of the
Casanova and if the note suggested above will be strictly accurate.

November 13, 1943.

Dear Edmund:

I'm sorry not to have answered your last two letters more promptly, but for the last week we have had Bibsy in the hospital with virus pneumonia and have been nearly out of our minds with anxiety. She is a little better now, though we still have our fingers crossed, and I am able to recognize the world's existence again.

I had heard -- and seen in *Time* -- that you had the *New Yorker* job offered you. I suppose it will be tough work to do and perhaps not just the work you would pick if you were absolutely free to choose (at least I hope this is the case and that you will get back presently to more Finland Stations and Wound and Bows). Nevertheless, if you are going to do work of this kind there is nothing like having the best job of its kind in the country and it is good for us all to have criticism being recognized this way.

I would of course have liked to see your stuff in the Princeton Library if that had been possible, but certainly not at the expense of your own. The main idea of the whole business was after all to get the stuff into a library before you took one of those notions of yours to throw it out, and to get as high a price for it as possible. Both these ends have been accomplished and I don't see that I have any real right to complain about the minor matter of Yale's getting it instead of Princeton, jealous as I am, personally, of the way Yale is forever getting ahead of Princeton in these matters. It's really appalling how much more money they have than we and how ill-trained Princeton's wealthy alumni are in the habit of giving their college money: most of the library's money comes from alumni like me, whose power to give is obviously never going to set the world afire. I have, for instance, been trying to get Dana Payne to give the library something in memory of his father, who died just a year ago and left Dana a good deal of money: Dana doesn't even answer my letters.

I had had a note from Boyd about your letter informing him you were going to work on the piece for the Chronicle. It won't, you understand, be out actually until February, since there is no issue of the Chronicle till then. I shall hold the bibliography till the last minute, therefore (to wit, January first), in order to get everything in. I noticed, for instance, in the ND catalogue that came the other day that your Fitzgerald book is to be called "Crack-Up." All these little things help.

We shall certainly be around to see you and Mary whenever we get to New York, though lord knows when that will be. You would really be amused to see how visibly my prestige has risen because I know the critic who is taking over the *New Yorker*; the author of Axel's Castle was nothing to this.

Best to Mary,

December 16, 1943.

Dear Edmund:

You will feel that I am running strictly according to form when I start by telling you that I have promptly entered your piece for the CHRONICLE in the bibliography (though just to show you I am human, I read it before doing so).

It's a fine piece, and I for one feel that I am seeing your generation of writers for the first time in the perspective in which it sees itself. I should like some time to argue the matter of the decay of Writing as a profession, in the sense that it was a profession in the imagination of your generation. I do not yield to anyone in my dislike for what Luce has done to promising writers, and there are certainly more Mrs. Rochesters concealed in academic attics than people suspect. But I do believe that neither of these things is the fundamental cause for the failure of talents in the more recent classes to take up the career of general writer. The fundamental cause is that they don't believe in it any more. Except for hackwork, which we leave out of consideration here, writing is not for their imagination a profession any longer in the exciting sense that it used to be. I see a fair number of budding authors, from a fairly narrow social range to be sure, but none of them, even the best, is prepared to see 'being a writer' as a life in itself. I suspect this is partly at least a backfiring of the over-inflated romantic notion of the function of a writer, which still seems to have had a sustaining power for your generation. Of course there are exceptions to this: the most 'dedicated' life I know is that of Delmore Schwartz. I'm sorry; I didn't mean to get started this way.

Anyway, your piece is on the way to Julian and will see the light in due course. Save for some laborious typing, the checklist is now finished; as soon as that typing is done I shall send it on to you. I passed through New York Saturday, but had flu and a temperature of 101 and thought you and Mary would perhaps be just as glad not to see me.

Rosemary joins me in wishing you and Mary and Reula merry Christmas.

Man Ray likes to say; he's a regular squirrel - like librarians. And checklists are not epitaphs.

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

December 20, 1943.

Dear Edmund:

Here is a carbon of the checklist for you to glance over. You will notice that one or two items are incomplete; these are things which are not available to me here at the moment, which Willard Thorp is going to fill in for me when I send him the manuscript, before he hands it on to Boyd.

I expect this will make around 20 pages of THE CHRONICLE, and though you may think some of were better not remembered, it seems to me that -- given its over-all quality -- the quality of it is something to be proud of. A journalist, as you call yourself, is supposed to be able to write well fast; well then. . .