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Mrs Jared French
416 West 20 Street
New York New York

November 3, 1959. Home.

Dear Margaret,

Thank you for the fine dinner and the showing of your picture and the
long affectionate evening.

I slightly feel that I ought to express a little apologetic sentiment,
for the length of it. I sometimes feel that we should all three apologize
to you for our mannish debating, insolent articles of faith, the pro and the
con, the semi-pro, the pseudo-con. All that must not be, I suppose, the kind
of talk you enjoy most.

Naturally, as I mention this to you, it is not a criticism of Jared
although perhaps he is the most faith-full. It is self-criticism; I certain-
ly do not appear at my best when I reason. I always start off very much
amused, as you might say "brilliantly", with my realism or pragmatism or
opportunism. But when I try to follow myself through to my logical con-
clusion, I'm afraid I become (as Jared once suggested) a sort of sophist.
Perhaps there is no conclusion for me. So I get tiresome, inconsistent,
fluent, steamrolling... In any case I'm afraid I was a little tiresome
last night.

I had a preoccupation or two: wondering about the troublesome
character of a certain person; also observing my own nature, as it were a
landscape, but a landscape always somewhat in motion, as it were Yosemite
National Park. But, because your hospitality is exquisite, neither sense
of inferiority nor scorn of human nature nor mournful self-contemplation
seemed at all unhappy.

You'd have been scandalized but gratified if I'd included you in
one of my playful categories, with Pavlik the mad type, Paul the sensitive,
myself the materialist, Jared the idealist...

ST

Mrs + Mrs Jarred French
416 West 20 Street
New York N.Y.

August 9, 1940

My dears,

Your poor old hawk: I think you must never have seen him
in such a sickly condition as last evening. Although in fact I am too
much yours to be proud; I don't mind being beholden to you for endurance
of the seamy side -- once in a while.

You will also be pleased to hear that a better perch turned
up for me in the course of the night, a sufficient comfort and a good idea;
and I'll have The Refugee to read to you when you ask me to Saltaire.

We're a great band, I believe. By the way it seems to me
a good fortune for me that Jared's art is developing just as it is. For
all my life I have wanted to do a marble daydream like that, and never
could. It doesn't suit my material; and if you think of me as you saw
me last night, you will understand why, one reason why.

By the way I have been calling it, that is, the three-figure
picture: The Sleeping Beauty.

Now odd jobs, and then to Easthampton in the interests of
my complexion, etc.

48 EAST 89TH STREET
NEW YORK CITY

July 2, 1942.

Dear Margaret,

Thank you, sorry, thank you both, thank you.

We are all in a trouble and problem and fuss,
chiefly because Monroe has been summoned to a new job
in Washington full-time or at least half-time, and he
must give his answer on Monday; and various other because.

I've had to let Jim Soby do all the writing about
Pavlik, which was a sad disappointment to me; and I have
undertaken a good part of the work of the portrait-show,
which is a kind of duty, patriotic as a matter of fact be-
cause it frees Monroe...

As for my literary art more strictly speaking, the
plan now calls for a short form of A Fortune, perhaps to
be included in a volume with a lot of the other European
stories.

I am writing this in haste with evidently not enough wits about me, that is to say _esprit_, but with my profound true affection.

Tell Jared that the big Saltaire pictures looks like a million dollars over the sofa, and I revel in having it here for a while.

Always,

November 14.

Dear Margaret,

Until today I have regarded this evening's pint-sized party as a
damned duty, all for the Hemisphere and for Macy's. With a pain, and an
ugly face, one-sided woodchuck, and other silly troubles -- just lightly
hidden within a somewhat self-satisfying histrionic technique. Odd: I enjoy
posing and showing off before some of my dearest; but you're not one of
those...

Today I have felt much better and looked a bit prettier, so I regret not
having asked you to come; but I am embarrassed to ask you on such short notice.
I do not mean to suggest that you mind non-invitation. I mean to say that I
miss you in anticipation; you both.

Until we meet again, soon...

By the way I am keeping in mind a good many reader-reactions on The P.H.
to report to you; that of a Noble Prize winner for instance.

Mrs Jared French,

4 16 West 20 Street,

New York, New York.

November 15.

Dear Margaret,

My foolishness and bad manners in the last week or two have been
really remarkable, certain instances of which Paul may have given you. And
my not having telephoned about our week-end at St.-bl. is an instance. I
can say this morning that yourtelephone has been disconnected, but I must
admit that I didn't try it until this morning... Shall we go out Friday
afternoon at 5 p.m. from Liberty Street, and return Sunday night or Monday
noon? We'll dine that night with my brother and sister.

Come to think of it -- the 23d Street ferry is more accessible to you
than Liberty Street; and that leaves at 4.45 p.m. It's the same train
on the Jersey side. I'll meet you there at about 4.35 or so.

I shall not try to tell, but you can surely imagine, my true delight
in this prospect.

410 PARK AVENUE

My darlings,

Do you want to know what happened?
My date with you was safely recorded in my engage-
ment book. But This was such a day -- so many
appointments, I mean -- that my secretary typed out
a list of them all and she just left off, through
the sort of error that occurs once a year, my date
with you here. So I lingered over the last date
on HER list -- down the street HERE with one of my
trustees, Adele Levy, until after you had left.
Glenway was enchanted to see you, and I am glad
that he was here. But will you forgive me and come
to dine on Wednesday the 31st, and let me give you
my reports on my long European sojourn and hear
yours about New York? Please say you will come.
I've just tried to phone you, but there was no
answer.

I'll phone you in the morning.

With love from your none-the-less

devoted

October 3.

From the Diary of Edward Hicks the Quaker, 1843:—

"Painting seems to me to be one of those arts which say nothing and signify nothing, which have never brought any real profit to mankind. But as the inseparable companion of lust and pride, it has foretold the fall of empires and kingdoms; and in my opinion it is now one of the warning signs of the rapid decline of the American Republic."

 Eh what?... Missing you. Brave creatures, in
this weather. But more power to you. Love, Glenmoray-

February 2, 1943.

Dear Jared,

Will you inscribe the exact titles, dates, and name of the publisher of the two volumes by Sheldon upon the enclosed note to Mrs Zimmer, and drop it in the mail-box?

Zimmer is a jovial, learned professor and she is von Hoffmannsthal's daughter. I met them the other day at Jakob Goldschmidt's, and Edgar Wind having talked a bit of the mediaeval classifications of man, I mentioned Sheldon's; and afterward she asked me for information, which I was abashed not to remember. She is a psychologist, she says, and wants to compare these with Jung's types...

I have already taken some repose and therefore am feel exhausted; the weather is celestial and I am chilly; and all is well. I shan't try to write you a proper letter tonight, but in a few days I will. I delighted to see your pictures, thank you. I keep thinking of them, which is one of their great merits.

Love to Margaret and Paul.

Stone-blossom, Hampton, New Jersey

III.19.1946

Dear Jared,

It is a luxury of the spirit to have your
own written invitation, thank you.

In fact, and not at all vaguely, George did
 invite me and I accepted.

Don't fret. I can't think what could go
wrong, with yourselves and ourselves present.

As for the picture, now that it is finished,
does it matter what you think of it? And if we
think something that you have not intended, per-
haps we are fools or perhaps, as God is not mocked,
you may have wrought otherwise than you knew, even
better than you knew...

I may not have time to stay as long as I should
like because I have an appointment for literary
business just before it, and dinner and the theatre
with my sister just after it — but I shall be
there, happily, to do whatever handholding or body-
guarding or handshaking or small-talking may be
called for.

STONE-BLOSSOM
HAMPTON, NEW JERSEY

III.26.1946

Dear Jared,

Thank you for the picture-party, thank Margaret for the party, thank you for the picture. I made a great muddle of trying to tell you what I liked in it, how I understood it, why I liked it — I suppose I always do, except a bit at a time in a stray phrase. I am eager to see it again, not hanging over the dear freakish pleasant people's heads — there it was like a real live ghost or pair of ghosts, gemini, and yet domesticated; the people weren't frightened.

I am returning to you under separate cover a little book that you lent me long ago and I read with enjoyment. I wonder why I am not blackballed as a book-borrower; I'm afraid I keep everything until a day of general house-cleaning... W.S.M. made me a present of a great grand Tolstoi, room on my shelves had to be made for it, and then I found your volume.

Mrs + Mrs Jared French

5 St Luke's Place

New York

GRAND

Mr & Mrs Jared French,

416 West 20th Street,

New York, New York

May 12, 1944

My dears,

Monroe is giving a little party for me to read *A Change of Heart* on
Wednesday May 24th; and this is to invite you to hear it, with particular
excitement, eagerness, and anxiety.

I thought of not inviting you — in fact I spoke of it to G.P.I. —
which thought I wish to confess to you in some detail, just in case you
should hear of it, and by way of warning you not to have too high hopes
of this particular story. My notion is that you, Jerry, may dislike it. It
may not be agreeable for you to hear me read a story that you dislike.

It is my war-story, and very tight and abstract, and long, and it may
be tedious. I have tried to place and balance my bitterness in it in such
a way that, when and if it goes out of date and seems untrue, it will not
turn inartistic; so that it will still serve as a proper part of the fiction
and drama. But whether or not I have succeeded, I cannot tell.

For war-emotion, whether it be the right kind or the wrong kind, is
the devil. You and I have had certain unhappy experiences of it together;
and believing that its importance as an issue in the relationships of artists
is only relative and temporary, my notion was to try to avoid it or get
around it.

But upon second thought it seems to me that there is no getting around
it. For you two are among the very few whom I work for, write for; and it
would be silly to read it to anyone if not to you. It would be a kind of
cowardice that I should be ashamed of even if I sincerely felt it; and in
fact I scarcely have felt it, I have only thought it.

2.

Subtlety, subtlety... For, on the other hand, I mean no peremptoriness
or urgency. If you happen not to be in the mood or in trim to listen to
two hours of gloomy abstract reading-aloud, or if you want to get away to
Fire Island before that, of course I shall not be unhappy about it, or even
jump to any foolish conclusions about it.

It intimidates me anyway, both as literary artist and as reader-aloud;
and in one or two other respects as well it will be an evening as strange
as the devil.

With love,
Glenway

# Profit by my experience

## BAD DREAMS

All during my boyhood I dreamt one nightmare again and again, in which I lay at the foot of a steep slope or cliff in a helpless position, looking up. Whereupon a large face loomed over the horizon, and stared down at me, and said something: the same sentence each night. It was blame or doom or damnation, and invariably I was struck with that entire terror to which sleep lends itself. The worst of it was that I never quite understood it; nor could I recall the words afterward. I would wake up trying to grasp them, breathless, sometimes in tears, as they went echoing back away from my ear into subconsciousness. Only the echo and the cadence remained, to torment me all morning. Have you never suffered from a confused tune, or a name just under the skin of memory, impossible to get at? The harder you try to recall it, the more stubbornly your mind refuses, until it verges upon anguish. My sentence was like that; worse than that, because I was an emotional boy and it had the demoralizing power of night.

In 1918 I caught the great influenza, of which there were serious consequences. Certain spiritual troubles of youth also came to a head that winter, and I had what is called a nervous breakdown; for almost a year I was an invalid in body and soul. Then my dream of weakness and terror ventured out of its nocturnal realm and attacked me amid my day-time depression. A passing street-car or automobile, the murmurous steam-heat in my sickroom, the breath coming and going in my lungs, would start the rhythm of the ~~unknown~~ sentence; and in this waking form too, it made me feel like a damned soul. In due course my health improved; my mature way of life and my life-work began. Still it happened now and then, by day or by night interchangeably; and all I could ever do ~~was to crouch or lie alone in despair, a mere lump of human clay, shapeless, hopeless, until it passed. For ten years in all, I suffered from this bad habit.~~

2. Bad Dreams

Then one evening I fell into gossip with a couple of not close friends about an eccentric old author whom they happened to know. They had recently met the author's son also, a youth of poor character who, especially when he was often, shockingly blamed his famous parent for the damage his life. My friends reported the scandal to me in detail and commented upon it with that slipshod kind of tolerance which may be carelessly deduced from modern psychology. It was an interesting conversation, although unpleasant, to which presently I contributed certain episodes of my own difficult relationship with my father: childhood. On my way home at the end of the evening I was ashamed of having done so. It was a morbid kind of thing to dig out of my memory, I thought, and an undignified thing to confide to my chance companions.

That night my nightmare returned once more, and it was not the same. I was not no longer a horror-stricken soul; I was a baby. I lay helpless, under a preci-
pice but in a perambulator, tucked in amid blankets so that I could not move.
My father came and bent over me and teased me with his forefinger. In infant
merriment, with both my small fingers, I struck back at him, and happened to hit
him hard on the tip of his nose. He was a quick-tempered man; my small blow must
have hurt; and he gave way to irritation in a little string of hard words,
swear-words. They probably were the mildest in the language, as I know my father.
Only I had never heard them until that moment, when I expected his hand
to fall on me. "Darn" is as terrible as "damn" to a mind innocent of either.
Such was the sentence which had preyed on my imagination for a de-
cade. I woke in mere alarm, amazement, and then sense of humor. I never dreamt
the dream again, which is the point of this story; and the peculiar little
diffused attack of terror which had arisen from it never recurred. It had
been brought down to earth and returned to my infancy where it belonged.

This bit of good luck influenced me greatly in the years after that.
It led to a conviction of the general validity of that science of psychology

5. Bad Dreams

which Freud stared at. It suggested to me, as a writer, there that there is a more
precise, potent truth in story than in philosophy. I think that my slight eman-
cipation from dreaming teaches an everyday lesson as well. Certainly for grown
men and women, most of the time, the main issues of life are nothing like this.
The main thing is what some problem of working for a living; of keeping in good
health; and of pleasure or boredom, matrimony or loneliness, war or peace. But
if you are afflicted by mysterious heartache, distracted by acci-
dents half forgotten, stung by anxieties which elude you when you try to re-
solve them, you are likely to make a botch of whatever you have to decide or do.

The answer to almost any bad habit or sore point or embarrassing phobia lies in the circumstances of its origin. Do not be afraid to remember. A minimum of skeleton closeted in yourself. The plain truth in real detail always does some good. Do not be too proud to tell your little story, whatever it may be, even to Tom, Dick, and Harry. If I had not been indiscreet that evening in cynical company, my sleep might still be under the terrible cliff, subject to the looming face; and my ear, still visited by the bad whisper.

might

Glenway Wescott

March 17, 1942. Parker's Ferry.

Dear Margaret,

Thank you with all my heart. With your correct German components
of
I was able to make the poor Frenchman's sentences exactly what I had in mind.

Fred Allen accepted it with enthusiasm, at his best rate of payment.

He did not commit himself about the series; and as he could have had this
for much less with the lot, I suppose it augurs ill in that way. But we'll see.

This is a large brand-new house furnished in perfect comfort and
order and spaciousness with Macy's best, and run by two merry superior colored
maids and a dopy houseman named Sunday. It overlooks a tract of a thousand
acres which used to be planted with rice. Now in the spring it looks like
a vast poor crop of wheat ready for harvest, all inlaid with pools. The
brilliant but thin new lawn around the house is fragrant with tea-olive
and daphne.

William and I are alone, and I will tell you how we live:-- We
have breakfast in our beds and then we work. My sitting-room adjoins his
bedroom, and after breakfast I can hear him in a strong voice saying some
prayer or reciting something; but as he is a shy man and in a way forbidding,
I doubtless shall never discover what it is. After lunch he naps and I go
on working or writing letter s a while. Then we talk e a long walk upon the
man-made banks around the rice-field, led by an ardent and fooling cardinal-
bird; or we go riding through the swamps and past the quite African little
houses of the Africans; or one named Isaiah takes us in a paddle-boat through
the canals to see the birds, duck and bittern and heron and egret. The
alligators are still in their winter sleep. We visit the big house at tea-
time, where William plays gin-rummy with pretty Mrs Doubleday. Sub-publishers
and with their little wives, a houseful of them, keep coming and going; and the
talk there is all shop, bookshop, and not very good.

One night we had a serenade of slaves amid the camellias under the cloudy
live oaks by firelight.

Tomorrow William and I will broadcast from Charleston in solicitation
of books for the armed forces. Then I shall move into town for a few days
with Rawly and Fanny and their swell S'uth'n kin whom I cannot like at all;
and I shall return to New York, I think, a week from today. Homesick.

I have been writing Baba a daily letter to distract her from her
weariness and breast-fever and loneliness in the Somverville hospital; and
I was able to work well upon the script for our broadcast, and the revision
of THE FRENCHMAN; and I have enjoyed advising William about his five-and-ten
anthology. But now that I ought to begin No. 1 of my putative series, my
Set of Memories, or perhaps give that up and tackle A FORTUNE again, nothing
seems quite conducive. Lonesome.

Love to Paul and Jared. Your devoted,

Friday

Dear Margaret,

This in haste, to urge you to come with
Jared to one of our our mixed Mardi-Gras-ish
parties -- the initiative and the whiskey fur-
nished by Lincoln -- here on Wednesday next, 8th,
after nine.

It was delightful to dine with J. on
Tuesday, but melancholy to think of you indisposed,
and in general to miss you. Nor will seeing you,
as I hope, on Wednesday, satisfy my wish to see
you. I hope you are in good health once more.

Yours with every compliment Glenway

September 25, 1939. 48 E. 89 St.

Dear Margaret,

Thank you for your gratifying letter. I was about to write you to
explain that it has come to seem unlikely that I shall be able, with any-
thing like a light heart or a clear conscience, to come to Saltaire this
fortnight; and your renewal of invitation makes it a still sadder duty. As
I have told you, I think, I have humiliatingly failed to get any writing done
for some time; I have not even been able to try hard or to think hard about
it... Just now, instead of calming down as I hoped, everything for me has
developed a new set of distractions. Your amiable Dr Clementine is perhaps
the worst. My Doctor Corydon was more of a rogue than I feared; and I shall
be paying my back-debt to nature all fall, not to mention the dollars and
cents. This afternoon the broken tooth, after an effort to save it, heroic
on Dr Clementine's part and even on mine, has got to be extracted, as to
which I can scarcely pretend to be heroic... By the way I have great confi-
dence in her and a certain liking for her, thank Heaven, and thank you.
Also my trunant Mother is returning this week-end. Also my sister-in-law's
stepmother is arriving with two youngsters, for the duration of the war:
Verna again, and a reputedly very naughty fourteen-year-old whom we do not
know; and in a manner of self-defense I expect to have to consult with Ll.
and B. about what can be afforded, what avoided, what desired. The war
has not demoralized me as much as I supposed it would, not yet; or the
demoralization is very delicate and deep. My laborious pretentious foolish
talktative intellectual interest seems to cushion my emotions a bit. I
do believe Geo is the most shocked of us... He has low blood-pressure and
takes pills and is advised to go for a trip soon -- Mexico? We are begin-

Mrs Jared French
416 West 20 Street
N.Y. N.Y.