17 Wood End Lane

Bronxville

New York

November 18, 1940.

Edmund Wilson, Esq.,
The New Republic,
40 West 49th Street,
New York, New York.

Dear Bunny Wilson:

I have started a piece which may
be too long for the New Republic. I call it AN
ALP NOW AND THEN.

It starts out with the use of false
detail in novels, using examples only from detective
stories. It then passes on to say that writing is
the same trade in all its different levels and arrives
at Hemingway's book by indirection.

About the Hemingway book, what I
chiefly have to say is of a technical nature -- the
mechanics of the Spanish dialogue etc.

This will be finished in a few days
and I may as well send it on to you although, as I said,
I suspect it is a little too long for the New Republic.

17 Wood End Lane

Bronxville

New York

Jan.15th, 1941.

Dear Bunny Wilson,

Sorry. Your letter of Jan.2 has
just come to light: it was here all the time, buried
under a lot of stuff. And I was the one who tried to
bawl you out for not answering your mail---!

I expect you are quite right, really,
not to join committees. I don't think they do much good
for anything or anybody. The drugs and instruments are
needed badly in China, and this committee may get some
of them over there; and yet, when I come right down to it,
the only reason why I took it on was that I didn't want to
refuse Pearl Buck's request. Not a very legitimate reason.
Now that I have taken it on, however, I've got to keep
trying.

So excuse that rather brash letter of
the other day. And forget it.

Edmund Wilson, Esq.,
The New Yorker,
25 West 43rd St.,
New York, N.Y.

PARK CHAMBERS

68 WEST 58TH STREET

NEW YORK, 19

April 19th 1952

Dear Bunny Wilson,

Long time no see. As a matter of fact you've
probably forgotten that we xx ever knew each other in any way
except through print. However, we did—not particularly well—
in times gone by, through Dos Passos chiefly and Marian
Amen.

I should like to have a talk with you some time
about some of the points you mention in your singularly
evocative piece about Edna. I believe I owe you and all the
rest of Edna's old friends an explanation of how I ever came
to write that Indigo Bunting. It was at Cass Canfield's
insistence. I have since then come to understand that Cass
was making what is called an editorial plan. That is, he was
going to begin with me (hoping that I would do something far
more massive than the little trifle I produced) and then go
on to an edition of Edna's letters, followed by her fragments
and finally by a new collected edition of all her poetry.
There may be more to it than that, but that's what I have so
far understood.

Naturally I protested that I knew Edna too little
and too late for any book-writing on the subject. I declined
any notion of a "biography" or of anything in the slightest
degree pretending to give a definitive view. (I have done
just the same about Sinclair Lewis and have in fact never
written a word about him since he died—perhaps the only
person he ever knew who did not!) I know that I can't give
definitive views about my friends, now or ever. Moreover,
Edna, although one knew her intensely and intensively, was
mostly ~~a~~boringly elusive—one could really only think of aspects,
not of a whole. I protested for weeks but finally gave in on
the proviso that I could do a very slight, small memoir
concerned entirely with her relationship to the birds, and
making everything else trail behind that. Cass was for some
incomprehensible reason absolutely determined on this thing,
so he agreed to all the conditions. Random House then had to
agree to release me for the book, which they did. I started
it on Christmas Day and finished it on Good Friday, so that
in my own private joke it coincided with the Christian Year,
leaving all the rest for paganism.

There is an amusing story I should like to tell
you, about a Mr Berkovitz who found a copy (Harper's copy) of

PARK CHAMBERS

68 WEST 58TH STREET

NEW YORK, 19

2

all but the epilogue of this booklet in the street on Good
Friday. (At 31st Street and 3rd Avenue). He telephoned to
me in Vermont(since my address was on it) to tell me this
at once, and I heard the clink-clank-clonk as he paid coins
into the machine. I asked him to leave the book at Harper's
and he said he would. He said he was telephoning me only
because he was afraid I would be anxious. (There were other
typescripts so it wasn't really so serious as he thought).
This very kind young man took the book to Harper's and
refused to accept any sort of reward. Cass's secretary
asked him for his name and address so that they could send
him a copy of it whenever it got into print, and he hesitated
over that but finally said he couldn't give his name and
address because he didn't want to be thanked. It was only
to me that he had said his name was Berkovitz. And of course
there are many Berkovitzes in New York, so it isn't much of a
clue. But wasn't it a nice thing to have happen just as I
was finishing the ultimate paragraph of my Musikalisches Opfer?

Also—one other oddity—I had two copies to
send(most of mine having gone to neighbors in Vermont). I
inscribed one to Toscanini, telling him it was my
Musikalisches Opfer and calling him(as I have done before)
"maestro di color che sanno." The other I inscribed to
John Pinney,the farmer at Steepletop who loved Edna. We were
in Concord, Massachusetts, having gone to see the museum
and Emerson's house and Thoreau's room. I took the two books
into the book-shop in Concord to have them wrapped for
mailing, carefully distinguishing between the copy marked
P and the copy marked T. After our round of sight-seeing I
returned to the shop, claimed the books(carefully marked
T and P) and mailed them. I suppose it was a species of
fatality or inevitability, but anyhow Pinny got Toscanini's
copy and the Maestro got Pinney's.

Forgive gabbiness. But I must also tell you that
Edna's letter to you mentioning the memorizing of
the two Shelley poems was a godsend to me, because I have
often and often doubted my own memory on the Hynn to

Intellectual Beauty. I thought she recited the entire poem to me, but since there was nobody else in the room and it is a long poem I have since often wondered if I had not somewhat romanticized that. It is a great relief to me, privately, to learn that she really did know all the words and I wasn't dreaming. After the episode of that damned window that I thought was

PARK CHAMBERS

68 WEST 58TH STREET

NEW YORK, 19

Edmund Wilson, Esq.,

c/o Laroche,

17 East 97th St.,

New York, N.Y.

PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY: ORIGINAL MATERIAL RESTRICTED

307 East 44th St., New York. (That's the Beaux-Arts,
right beside the United
Nations).

Wednesday March 4

Dear Bunny Wilson,

Thank you very much for your book. It was sent to the farm in
Vermont and all the books were held there—not forwarded—during the autumn and
winter, so it was only last week that I actually received it. I have taken great
pleasure in it. Your early exchanges with Ernest Hemingway fascinated me. You knew
him even before I did. I have admired Ernest's writing inordinately at various
times, but I must say I think he went into an altogether new dimension with "The
Old Man and the Sea." It carried me off the way you're carried off sometimes by
poetry. I remember seeing Harold Ross one day at the Algonquin, lunching alone,
and I stopped to speak to him about that profile of Hemingway which appeared in
the New Yorker. (I had the crazy notion that maybe Ernest had written it himself,
by conspiracy with Ross—some of it sounded so much like him). Ross set me
straight about the profile and then made a few regretful remarks about Ernest.
"Just about done for," he said. "That rot-gut that xx he keeps on putting inside
of him doesn't do him any good, either." That was some years ago.

Some day when you have nothing better to do we might meet for a drink.

I'm sending this in care of your publishers because I'm sure the
address I had for you last year was a temporary one.