can hardly, in writing about him to anyone but you, perhaps, even praise his work
tout court, in the way we do about a dead writer, and perhaps are glad to do, in
piety to the creative spirit and in forgiveness for the man's faults. It's only,
you see, that I saw something of the man under the manner; and once, one summer
day in 1944, when we met at DeVoto's house when the Wecters were occupying it,
had a flash of something deeper, the pain itself being the deepest part of him
I ever saw, when we were both trying to get out of a curiously awkward situation
with Wecter.

It seems horribly early for Ted Spencer to have gone. For you, particularly
with the other deaths in this period, it must have been quite a wrench. I
thought of this you particularly when I read of his death, and of this.

Alfred Kazin
415 Central Park West
NY 25

Mr. F. O. Matthiessen
87 Pinckney St.
Boston, Mass.