Arlington
Vermont

June 5th 1923

Dear Mrs Canby;

You'd see us and the Ford late in August, if we
were going to be here. But we are planning a year abroad, all the
whole family of us, and are sailing in a few days. Why don't you
come on over to the little shack we have taken on Lake Geneva
for the summer. We're going to take our Ford, too!

Arlington
Vermont

November 16, 1943

Dear Henry:

When your "Walt Whitman" came in, I meant to thank
you that very day (only two or three days ago, at that). But
I incautiously opened it and have been absorbedly reading it
in every spare moment since. It seems to me absolutely first-
rate. You never did anything better --- don't you think so?
I should think you'd be enormously elated about having finished
it, and having made such a fine thing out of it.

The pages (from 31 on for a while) about the influences
of his connection with the Friends particularly interested and
delighted me. To have had a close family connection with
"people who took meditation seriously" really must have been
a vital element in his life. And you've done Whitman's passion
for living "simple, separate persons" with just as free, firm
strokes, I felt, as this quietistic strand in his personality.
I don't refer to other passions of his which it seems to me
you've treated with absolute sureness of touch --- but that's
to be expected from anybody of your experienced intelligence.

The book is a grand one, all around. Congratulations.

DCF: JTW

P.S. I didn't know "The Prayer of Columbus" and thought it
very fine.

P.P.S. William Allen White is, I fear, desperately --- probably
mortally sick. This is not only a personal sorrow for
me, for I inherited from my father the warmest affection
for the dear old fellow. But I think it a pretty serious
matter for the Book-of-the-Month club Committee. Harry's
coming back, I believe, on Monday and will be at the
meeting. We ought to have some discussion of this.

DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER

ARLINGTON, VERMONT

Tuesday August 14 1945

Dear Henry:

I enclose my check for the $25 you mentioned in your fine letter about your committee's needs, which came in yesterday. I wish I could make it more, and I certainly will send more, later, when the third income-tax payment has been made in September, and a little time has gone by, to let some accumulations gather in the bank-account---pretty meagre in these days, like( I suppose) most people's. Your letter was a model of its kind---best I've ever seen, and I've tried my hand at that sort of difficult writing, many's the time, in the last five years. And the work of the committee is immensely appealing, immensely worthwhile. I'm glad to be able to do a little now, and to hope to do more, later on.

I spent a happy evening with your family book, ---how many Americans of our kind will spend happy hours with it! That too is a model, it seems to me. But a model unapproachable to most of us, not only for the urbane perfection of its taste and style but---my goodness! for the quantity of facts in it! I thought I was soaked to the marrow of my bones with family lore, in which the older generations of my family--my families---bathed all of us children. But I don't know nothing and hain't been nowhere compared to you, in your acquaintance with those earlier generations. I'm lost in admiration of your record, and so glad that you somehow found time to get it down in print. As Americana it is unrivalled, precisely because it is in so many ways so typical.

See you tomorrow---happy anticipations.

Arlington
Vermont

November 27th

Dear Lady;

I told Henry yes sure it would be all right to come
up in the spring---suggested maple-sugar time and bringing your
rubber boots along etc. He smiled and looked intelligent, but I
never know whether anybody ever hears anything in those B.O.M
meetings (John says he's perfectly shocked by the way we all talk
at the tops of our voices at the same time) and think it safer
to repeat the message to you. I want to write you anyhow, and this
is an excuse. I want to ask where is Hamden Connecticut where
you seem to be living now, somehow oddly at the same address
as in New Haven, like a lady who has married again but a man with
the same name as her first. I'm going to send this note there,
but without much hope of its finding you. If it does, do let me
know when you're going to be in the city, because I've no intention
of waiting till sugaring-off time before I see you. The next meeting
is the 15th. Are you going to be around that day. And could we have
tea together (got a lunch engagement already) or maybe an early
dinner, near the Grand Central where I take a train north about
seven or thereabouts. I want to see you, yourself, and I want
to hear about the boys---how their new educational arrangements work---
and to hear any new poems you have. I begin to think you are one
of my favorite poets. I want some copies of the ones I've seen.
I keep trying to say them over to myself and get no farther than
a phrase or two that I am sure is right.

More anon when I see you, but always lots of love from

Kingwood Park

Poughkeepsie

New York

September 25th

Dear Mrs Canby

Yes, the Fishers are dying to see you and talk over Europe in retrospect, and to hear everything that happened to you. Especially what happened to the boys. Your letter and Dr. Canby's astonishingly youthful and animated and cheerful aspect at the last meeting of the B.of the M. Committee (I thought he looked ten years younger than the last time I'd seen him!) make it very apparent that you all had a grand time. We want to hear the details.

But oh heavens! when'll there be any time for visiting!

This is our saga since we started in the vacation period--
lots of family, lots of visitors, lots of goings-on, lots of
home-making and fun and tennis and everything, but mighty
little work done. I am under contract for some writing which
ought to have been finished last JUNE. And (this is between
us) it's not even begun yet...or rather has just been begun the
last four days, since we got to Poughkeepsie and the children
got into school and college. I'm frankly in rather a panic
for I never allowed family things to monopolize me so completely
before to the neglect of actually promised work. My mother has
been ailing a good deal and I have found that much more absorbing
a care than my children ever were.

So for the present we are buried, in a cave, marooned, on a
desert island. We telephone to the butcher and grocery but to
nobody else. I may be able to get back into the harness and

really accomplish something sooner than I think. If I do
I shall be so encouraged and so happy I shall feel like taking
a vacation, and the first move of any vacation will be to
see you-all, the Canbys...no the first move will be to
try to write you the little screed about children and their
reading. I just don't dare make the slightest promise on
what, as you can imagine. But I'd like to do it. Let it
rest. Maybe I'll be able to. But goodness know us when.

It's sweet to hear from you, and I am so very very happy
that your adventure abroad turned out so well. How can I
wait to hear all about it! You'll have forgotten all about
it, I fear, in the press of other things. I specially want
to hear the boys' French ( they wouldn't mind me, I'm sure,
Jimmy and me, who forget half the time which language we're
speaking so it really doesn't seem so foolish to speak a
"foreign" language as it usually does with one of your
compatriots. Tell them Jimmy and Sally and I find it vastly
useful to have French as a "scret" language, in which to
pass suggestions and comments to each other without being
understood. It is so handy to be able to say "Run upstairs
and get a clean handkerchief," or "Mother do I have to stay
through this call?" without being overheard, so to speak.)
I wish you lived nearer. I wish the Dodds lived nearer.
Tell Mr. Dodd please, that I meant to write him again, but
we could not remember which legal address Yelping Hill is
near, and its not in no atlas. I was so proud and honored to
think they used any of my remarks about his lovely book, as
part of its publicity.

Affectionate regards from us all,

Arlington
Vermont

December 10

Dearest Lady;

I dragged that letter out of you by telepathy
constraint. I had been coming up nearer and nearer to
the boiling point of doing something desperate about
hearing it from you. I knew well enough what your doctors
must have told "Don't write letters. Don't read them. Don't
use up your energy thinking about other people." And I
was perpetually subsiding from a boil down into a simmer
by encountering that idea. But on the other hand, for
goodness gracious sakes how was I EVER going to find out
something about how you are! When I see Henry we are always
surrounded by clouds of witness of various kinds, all
strictly masculine and rather uninterested in recoveries
from illness, and also in an atmosphere where every minute
counts for business. I snatch something from him---but
such brief bulletins, and they frequently scare me worse than
not knowing. His last was that you were going again to a
doctor in January " to find out how you stood". I thought
it was all settled how you stood---steadily on the up grade.
Maybe that's what he meant. But I could only glare at him
horrified, in silence, because somebody began to ask some
literary question on the other side of the table.

Do you want our news, as a bargain for getting yours. Here's
our bulletin;---Mother's just the same, in bed all of the
time except when her bed's being made, not from illness
but from simple plain old age and weakness. We have one of
these new Orthophonic Victrolas to filling her with music
when she wants it, and radio on the table beside her bed,
(John's so smart about practical matters he can make a radio
run better than anybody I know) and she takes sallies out
into the big world that way, to concerts, lectures, etc,
all with the blissful ability to turn them off with one turn
of her hand when she gets tired of them---as she often does.
Sally will graduate next June from Swarthmore( at least I
hope she will. She's been mighty gay this fall, seems to me
from her letters, dancing, house partying, carrying on socially
till John and I are ready to telegraph her "Do you occasionally
get a few minutes for study?" She did enjoy that lunch party
and seeing that nice French-speaking girl which took Sally
so back to her school-days and school-girl friends in France.
Jimmy will probably graduate from his Quaker prep school
next June too, a year ahead of the time when he expected to.
He suddenly realized that his French (in which he'd never taken
any special interest ) was of some "credit" value in this
country, and has been taking Regents' exams in it, till he
has got credits enough to graduate next June. His reason for
hurrying up is to have an extra year before he goes to college
and to spend that year in really learning German---in Germany.
Hacing learned French in France, he p'intedly hates to
study any language in class here; and knows he'll need German
in college where he is sure he is going to specialize in science
( only the Head-master of his school says "But he's in the
science agenow. Maybe in a few years he'll be literary")

This is fine; we're delighted to have him suddenly sit up

and take an interest in his studies ( which he had treated
with little-boy cavalierness till lately) but how in the
world are we going to manage a year abroad for Jimmy( too
young at just sixteen to leave all alone for a whole year
in a foreign land) and the necessary care of Mother? We can
leave Mother for a short time( a couple of months) with my
brother and his wife; but it's not fair to them to leave her
steadily with them for such a length of time; and anyhow I
wouldn't want to. Well, maybe some way will be provided
except tha rapid ferrying back and forth across the Atlantic
which sea-sick John Fisher groans at the thought of!

And that's all, isn't it---except John and I, who are always
just the same, imperceptibly ( maybe not so darned imperceptibly
at that!) grayer and older every day. My new novel is coming
out in the Woman's Home Companion beginning next spring some
time, and in book form next September or October. How long
it does take to get a move on a book nowadays, with every
body ( magainze and publisher so dated up ahead of time)
And this autumn I am enjoyingly writing some short stories--
oh gracious! how much easier than a long serious novel---
as much easier as doing the inside-edge forward circle on the
ice is than the outside-edge circle backward. Takes no
pounds off my smal frame at all---a novel always leaves me
a skeleton.

Dearest Lady, this is all from us, except a steady affection
for you-all, and a great anxiety about you. I oughtn't to
tell you this because it may put a burden on a conscientious
soul that hates not to give what's wanted. But don't let it.
Henry'll tell me anything that's really important ---and
now I know you're going to be in the city we'll see you
there.

On an impulse, I'm reaching for the last letter from
Sally, just in today, to put in this letter to you. Its all
college foolishness and much of it won't be intelligible
because you won't know who the people are; but maybe some
of its lively high spirits will get through and make you
smileat the sight of young folks cavorting around having a
good time out of nothing. She had been, one day during the
Thanksgiving vacation up to Poughkeepsie to see Jimmy, and
they had gone across the river to an artist colony there,
run ( and mostly populated) by Scandanavian artists and
craftsmen---hence the reference to the "mixture of Valhalla
and Athens." And she had spent the rest of the Thanksgiving
holiday with Eleanor Flexner, daughter of the Doctor
Flexner of whom Sally wrote "Isn't Dr. Flexner the most
adorable little man in the world!" They're the limit, girls
of that age! But such fun!

Oh say, one more thing---you think we're in Poughkeepsie
this year, but we're not. Mother's staying in her room as
she does now, and not wanting( first time in her life) any
lively doings, makes it possible for us to make her comfortable
here, as well as anywhere. And we are rejoicingly staying at
home. Jimmy's as a boarder at the Friends' school where he
has been these last three years.

A heart full of love to you,
from
Dorothy

MRS. JOHN R. FISHER
ARLINGTON
VERMONT

Monday, September

28

Dearest Marion;

A wild letter from Sally comes
back to us by the pilot, saying that she is not
sure that she mailed the review for you. Somehow
in the usual mix-up of last things to be done,
it slipped her mind. But she left a draught
here, and I have hunted it up and copied it off
and send it herewith. If you do get the other
one, ---which was I think, slightly different
in a few details from this one---use whichever
one you like best! Sally was quite interested
by the book, she said, and glad to give it a
good hand.

Now John and I are all alone again—but so
are you and Henry! I mustn't indulge in
any self-pity. Only I do—some.

Where are the rest of those poems? I find they
do the magical stunt of transforming a mood for
me better than most any other, just now. If you
have extra copies, do remember this Vermont er

DOROTHY CANFIELD FISHER

ARLINGTON, VERMONT

Dear Henry:

I laid down "The Age of Confidence" with that glow of complete satisfaction which is---as you know--- a rarer and rarer experience in the life of a professional reader. It's good, it's very good, it's delightful, it's true! And my goodness gracious! what a loss it would have been if you'd never mined it out of your memory!

I'm as lost in admiration of the manner in which you put it down as of the beautiful way in which all that material is ordered, without losing a throb of its living quality. It seems to this member of your own generation a true object-lesson in style, and taste and charm, and an unerring sense of proportion and perspective. Not to speak of the gift for enchantingly right details!

And all this although a great deal in it--- perhaps most of the material in it---is quite different from anything in my own personal experience of the same period. Robert Frost was here yesterday, we were both talking the bokk over, exclaiming in delight about its mellow perfection, when he asked me, But tell me, is that a picture of your youth and its ideas and background?" I said oh no the actual circumstances of my own life were entirely different, since I'd been a child in an impecunious faculty family in impecunious faculty circles, with a family tradition for European study and culture rather than English.