If you care to use any of this, it should be by direct quotation.

GALEANA 411
CHAPALA, JALISCO,
MEXICO.

May 8, 1951

Dear Elsie:

Sneden's

Yes, it's a long time since that day at Sneden's Landing, and sadness
has come for us both in the interval. Being on the very edge of seventy,
I have had to learn that I can hardly turn round without another friend's
slipping out of sight into the shadow. I had already been missing Betty
in Santa Fe before having to miss her altogether. And Ridgely and I had
been happy friends from the early years. Ties had been closer still for
me with Arthur Ficke, Edna Millay, Porter Garnett, Porter Sargent and others
who have lately gone.

As to Willa Cather, you are right that we began badly at McClure's. It
was for me a tough and unfair episode that started it. Mr. McClure, as you
felt
were
and was abetted by Viola Roseboro'.
Cather gift. After reading the first story which came from her, he sent
for her. Was she still at that time teaching school in Pittsburgh? I am
not sure but I think that a fine old dame named Mrs. Kirk, of Pittsburgh,
had already recognized the Cather gift and handed her an allowance to re-
lieve her of school duties. Mrs. K. told me later of the allowance and I
think that this was the time when it was donated. Then when Miss C. came to
New York, Mr. McClure arranged to pay her a fair sum a month as advance on
her writing. It seems to me that he agreed to take anything she wrote, he
was so deeply impressed first by her writing and then by her personality.
You may have discovered which of her stories he took earliest. I have
forgotten. But I well remember episodes connected with two of them.

The original script of THE SCULPTOR'S FUNERAL was eight or ten thousand
words long. "The Chief," as we called S.S., brought it to me, asking me

or rather bidding me to reduce it, by three or four thousand words, to
magazine size. This was a job. I worked like a dog on it, being told that
she preferred not to do the work herself, and I could see why. There were
no sizable sections which might be cut. It had to be done by blue-pencillin
of words throughout; and my memory is that I hacked mainly at adjectives.
How I wish I had that manuscript now! After hours of work, I handed it to
the Chief, who highly commended me on the performance, my best of the sort
to date. With such cuttings previously other authors had already been either
appreciative or submissive. But not Miss Cather! She came storming into
with the proofs,
my office, demanding my head. How had I dared to tamper with her master-
piece! Before I could answer, she had practically yanked me into Mr.
McClure's office. How had he dared to let me do this thing! "What thing?"
He was almost cowering in a corner before her fury and, to my bitter aston-
ishment, let me down completely. He had known nothing about it, had not
seen it, it had been done entirely on my own presumptuous initiative. Why
acted
had I done such a thing without his order or permission? If I had been
older, more experienced, I should have flung out at them both. But I was a
meek cub and he was boss, and by the look in his eye I felt, that to take this
Though I later learned
this beating was part of my job. Later I learned that he expected me to be
a buffer, but with this first experience of the role, I felt not only angry
and humiliated on my own account but ashamed of S.S. I felt also that Miss
Cather should have sensed the situation and I believe now that she did but
that the two of them found it convenient to have a whipping-boy. The story
was printed in almost its original shape.

The other episode concerned a story called "The Profile." It was in
type and the issue containing it was almost on the presses when three other
callers came to the office. I think it was three, one of them being a
Pittsburgh girl, daughter of a judge there, with whom Willa Cather and
Dorothy Canfield had taken a trip abroad - calling, incidentally, on A.E.
Housman. There may have been but two callers, Dorothy Canfield and her
father, who was then librarian at Columbia. "The Profile" was a story of

2

on her face
a girl with a bad birthmark, who refused and refused to marry the man she
her physical effect
loved because she felt that it affected her on other people's eventually
alienate him. Having yielded and then found that her prophetic instinct
was sound, she committed suicide. The Canfields were shocked and indignant
because the beginning of the story concerned a friend of Miss Cather's
and theirs, a highly sensitive girl who, against her instinct as to the
persistent
effect of her meat-red birthmark, had just accepted her lover. They said
that publication of the story would either break the engagement and ruin
the friend's life or else was likely to lead, in life as in the
story, to her suicide. Soft-hearted S.S. agreed not to publish the story.
Then Miss Cather entered the scene, with the rest of us present. She was
about
adamant. She did not care what might happen to the girl but only what
People might die but art must live.
happened to her own artistry. She would not change the end of the tale,
"The Profile"
as S.S. suggested. Finally she insisted on publication of the story just as
it was, demanding her rights according to contract and even threatening to
sue McClure's. Despite entreaty from the Canfields, Miss Cather's face
grew only harder and at last Mr. McClure yielded. I do not know the sequel
to a imaginatively
but have a faint memory, which may have been melodramatically induced, that
the girl broke her engagement and lived unhappily ever after.

At about this time Mrs. Kirk came to stay at the Seymour Hotel, where
we were living in New York, and told us that, after all her kindness to
Miss Cather, financial and otherwise, the incipiently successful writer
was now having nothing to do with her, was even cutting her.

And then the Edith Lewis occurrence. Miss Lewis, if I remember rightly
came to the office as personal secretary to Mr. McClure. I do not recall
whether she came there through Miss Cather or whether they met through the
magazine. I should say that at this time Miss Cather was actually in the
office and most efficiently assisting in preparation of the

biography of Mrs. Eddy. The next thing I knew was that Miss Lewis had left the office and was working outside with Miss Cather. Then it appeared that Miss Lewis had either disliked her family and would not communicate with them or else was not being allowed to communicate with them. Through Pittsburgh friends of mine, the Edmond Esquerrés, who were also friends, they said, of the *lewixxfamily* Lewises, I was given the latter view of the case and asked to help. I was told that letters to Miss Lewis from her family were returned to them unopened and that the girl was being held incommunicado, as a sort of hypnotized slave. I cannot believe that I ever said anything to Miss Cather on this subject but I may have asked Mr. McClure about it, as the best I could do for the Esquerrés. Mr. McClure

I think I answered that Miss Lewis was of age. And that was all of that, except that for a while, after these succeeding occurrences, Willa Cather seemed to me a sort of monster, toward whose inhumanity I felt a sickish awe. I liked her work, however, and tried to advance it, even sending a copy of THE TROLL GARDEN to Henry James. He acknowledged it in an amusing letter, which I subsequently published in some reminiscences of James about James, which appeared in THE SATURDAY REVIEW several years ago.

Miss Lewis at McClure's was a bit demure but very likable. I met her, years later, with Miss Cather at the Knopfs' and elsewhere - perhaps a Cather apartment on 10th or 11th St. - with no apparent remnant of rancor between any of us. I do not, however, recall meeting Willa anywhere in New Mexico.

present physical are

By odd coincidence my difficulties, like yours, a heart at odds with the pulse and an eye which sees as through a glass darkly. Mayos gave me a leather collar fifteen years ago and declared that the very next year I'd be a bedridden arthritic. Patent remedies seem to have saved me, largely "Urodonal" for sale in France and here but not in the States.

You nearly heard from me, asking your permission to quote from your review of THE PLUMED SERPENT. I do quote from it - but not enough words to need permission - in JOURNEY WITH GENIUS, about the Lawrences, my first prose book, out in July. Affection to you from Yours as ever.

1-121

PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY: ORIGINAL MATERIAL RESTRICTED

340 Piermont Avenue
Piermont, New York
May 16, 1951

Dear Hal:

What a wonderful letter you have written me! In spite of having had one of my eye hemhorrages today I have read it eagerly, and would have plenty to say about it were I able to take pen in hand, but all I can do is to say thank you, thank you, and I will remember your injunction to use direct quotations. Most of the material I would not be able to use, I am sure, because of Miss Lewis's feelings, but it is of great interest to me.

I have read the profile -- the story as it stands in McClure's is not exactly as you describe it -- but it all comes to the same thing. I had heard rumors that Dorothy Canfield had disapproved of the publication of this piece, but never knew the background. If you can, do let me know what issue of the Saturday Review your reminiscence of Henry James appeared in. I want to look it up and get his reaction to The Troll Garden.

Yesterday I saw Amy Loveman, and she spoke of your book on Lawrence which I hadn't heard about yet, and said you had credited me with some story which I didn't remember ever hearing. It will be great fun to read the book. I didn't like The Plumed Serpent very well, and always thought that Lawrence was unfair to present almost a portrait of you at the beginning of the book and then turn it into something quite different.

More later when I recover my eyes. Thank you again ever so much for all your time and trouble in writing these pages. Ridgley Torrence last summer described a period when Miss Cathérine and Miss Lewis were living at Judson's, and Miss Lewis always cried straight through meals. Perhaps that was the moment you alluded to.

With affectionate greetings,

WITTER BYNNER
GALEANA 41
CHAPALA, JALISCO.
MEXICO.

May 26, 1951

Dear Elsie:

Thanks for your warm response.

You are quite right about not hurting Miss Lewis's feelings. I imagine they have been hurt enough. I had not heard about the Judson tears but have a feeling that the Judson period came later than the time I wrote you about and that Scarsdale was the place where Miss L. was sealed away. It may have been, though, that Scarsdale was where Miss L's family lived.

As to THE PROFILE - the Canfields probably said that their friend might commit suicide if she read the story. What did I do in my note? - transfer the suicide to the story? It's all long ago.

When I return to Santa Fe a month or so hence, I'll send you a copy of the James letter about Miss Cather. I can't remember even the year when it appeared in the Review.

Yours as ever,

Weren't you a friend of the James family
and didn't you know Peggy James? I have just have
a letter from Bruce Porter, telling me that Peggy
died last October leaving him a very lonely old
fellow. I was best man at their wedding in the
little Swedenborgian church at Cambridge. Only
there;
the immediate family was present; but I well remem
ber Bruce's turning to kiss Peggy after the cere
mony and her rebuffing him with lifted countenance
"No, Bruce, not here!" and stalking past the pews
as though a thousand commoners were present.

If you have the present William James' address
and could jot it for me on a card, I'd be grateful
I used to know him and like him at college and
feel prompted
xLIKE to send him a word.

WITTER BYNNER
342 BUENA VISTA ROAD
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO

July 27, 1951

Dear Elsie:

As soon as I returned I was
yanked to the hospital and operated on
for acute glaucoma in the right eye.
Though the vision appears gone, they have
hopes of saving the eyeball, so you see I
can sympathize with your troubles.

Coming into balance again, I
have laid hands on the Henry James letter
I promised you, and enclose a copy. I
find after all that your letter is not in
my SATURDAY REVIEW paper: On Henry James'
Centennial, May 22, 1943, so I have not
had specific permission for printing it.

Bruce Porter's address, by the
way, is 3234 Pacific Avenue, San Francisco.
As I think I told you, he sounded remote
and withdrawn from all but family. I am
sure nonetheless that he would like a word
from you if you have time and strength for
it.

Several reviews and letters
about the Lawrence book are most promising.

With all best to you, I am

Yours faithfully,

(COPY)

(Henry James to W.B.)

Lamb House
Rye
Sussex

1st February, 1906

Dear Witter Bynner:

I have your graceful letter about "The Troll Garden;" which duly reached me some time ago (as many appealing works of fiction duly reach me;) and if I brazenly confess that I not only haven't yet read it, but haven't even been meaning to (till your words about it thus arrive,) I do no more than register the sacred truth. That sacred truth is that, being now almost in my 100th year, with a long and weary experience of such matters behind me, promiscuous fiction has become abhorrent to me, and I find it the hardest thing in the world to read almost any new novel. Any is hard enough, but the hardest from the Innocent hands of young females, young American females perhaps above all. This is a subject--my battered, cynical, all-too-expert outliving of such possibilities--on which I could be eloquent; but I haven't time, and I will be more vivid and complete some other day. I've only time now to say that *will* then (in spite of these professions) do my best for Miss Cather--so as not to be shamed by your so doing yours.

Believe me,

Yours ever,

Henry James

WITTER BYNNER

342 BUENA VISTA ROAD

SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO

September 4, 1951

Dear Elsie:

Thanks for your sympathetic note and for your recommendation of Dr. Robert Chase, whose name I am recording. He may know about Dr. Albert Egenhofer, who came out here with Dr. F. I. Proctor and is apparently well thought of in the profession. He operated twice on both of Haniel's eyes and I have just ventured recommending to Haniel a treatment of cortisone drops which, after more than a month of black blindness, seem to be very gradually restoring a portion of sight to my bad eye. There is a definite, though small, gain each day.

Unhappily, Haniel took what seems to me the wrong side in a difference I had with Henriette Harris several years ago, and has broken relations.

Thanks to your giving me the address, I have just had a charming letter from William James. He too has worried about Bruce Porter's loneliness and says that he has tried to persuade Bruce to write reminiscences. William James writes: "He claims that, with pen in hand, he loses all the pleasure and elan he has when he talks. It is like letting gold be washed away by the stream--because I have come to hold that letters, reminiscences, and auto-biographies constitute the only history."

Don't, with your eye trouble, try to write Bruce at length, but I am certain that a word or two would be most helpful to him.

Give my warmest regards to Mrs. McDowell. I used to see her occasionally when I lived in New Hampshire, and was a director of the McDowell Club in New York. My best also to Olivia Torrance and to Marjorie Benét, who is a later friend but very much liked by

Your own old friend,

WITTER BYNNER

January 7, 1952

Dear Elsie:

I trust that Haniel has done better and
more promptly by you than I have. Unhappily, I
was out of the picture for a fortnight with some
trouble in the intestinal tract new to me--painful
and persistent, but now apparently done away with
by doctor and nurse. My correspondence suffered
as did its would-be author.

I had, however, made inquiries and my
secretary is undertaking further sleuth work locally
to find THE LIFE OF RIGHT REVEREND JOSEPH MACHEBEUF,
by Reverend W. J. Howlett, published in Pueblo, Colo-
rado in 1908 by a Catholic press. I am setting down
the data for her guidance.

In case Mrs. Chauvenet finds no trace of
a copy which might be lent you, what about the library
at Pueblo? A friend here, moreover, says that Walter
Hill, in the Marshall Field Annex Building, Chicago,
has been a wonderful ferret for him in finding rare
books, as also has been Wright Howse book store in

I note that your date line was imminent a
month ago, so perhaps all this is too late. If so
I am sorry I didn't bestir myself earlier for you.

It saddens me to hear that you continue to
have eye trouble. I have finally had to reconcile
myself to the fact that the sight in my right eye will
not again be better than looking through a heavily
fogged window; the fact that there is a touch of vision
left seems only to add to nervous irritation.

Hoping that you do better with your trouble
than I have with mine, and sending you all fondness,
I am

Yours as ever,

January 29, 1952

Dear Elsie:

Thanks for your letter--
though I trembled a bit for your eyes
in seeing you use them for so many
words from a pen. For me, a type-
writer is not nearly so much of a
strain.

Speaking of eyes, I have
experienced what you call black float-
ing stuff in the vision, but was given
some drops which quickly vanished it.
The oculist here called it the Latin
name for floating flies. If that is
what you were troubled with, might you
like the prescription?

I have not yet laid in the
Rutin you recomment, since it needs a
doctor's prescription, but I have
bought a bottle of Peri-hemin.

It is good to hear that you
have a three month's breather on your
book. We are still making inquiries
as to the book by the Reverend, but no
luck so far.

As to Willa Cather's letters,
I remember now that her narration of the
Heusman visit was in a letter to Viola
Roseboro', which I cannot lay hands on.
The three which I find to myself are
less interesting, but you might like to
look at them; so I enclose copies which
I know you will carefully return.

I think I told you that I had
exhumed a novel put away fifteen years
ago and was working on it. After five
months of pretty steady plodding, I have
just sent it off to the John Day Company,
hoping that in spite of its unfashionable
innocence, it may have an appeal.

All best to you from

Yours as ever,

(COPY)

(Cather)

Dear Mr. Bynner;

Thank you for sending me the story, which I think I have
been able to improve somewhat. You asked me about the novel - indeed,
you asked me about it once before and I neglected to answer your
question. The truth is that I had not taken it out of the wrapper in
which you sent it back to me, nor even opened it, until some weeks
ago when I needed a piece of string and used the one which had been
put around it in your office. So you see that I have done absolutely
nothing with it. It seems to me not quite bad enough to throw away,
and not quite good enough to wrestle with again, therefore it reposes
in my old hat box.

I do think it was most awfully zealous of you to put in a
word to Mr. James and definitely call his attention to the book, but
I know that you must think his reply worth your pains. It's such a
strikingly personal communication, although it's about something
toward which he declares himself dead. The letter has given me a
very keen kind of satisfaction, for the attitude he admits is so
exactly that which one would wish him to have. I've always known
that he must feel just so, but it's comforting, all the same, to have
it from him in black and white. If Mr. James and one or two other men
did not feel just as he affirms about our whole amazing scheme of
production, - well, it would really break one's spirit, you know.
It would be a very deep personal hurt. It's the unshrinking positive-
ness of his statement as to his estimation of the value of what he
terms "promiscuous fiction" that makes Mr. James' letter a kind of
moral stimulant. You shall see with what good grace I can stand up
to whatever punishment he metes out to me in his second letter, to
have had the satisfaction of the first. In anticipation of a second
letter, however, I certainly do ask your sympathy, even though he
should refine upon his treatment in the light of the presupposed
youth and innocence of the subject. I feel a good deal as if I were
about to undergo a searching physical examination from which I should
come away with my former unsuspecting confidence in the ordinary
reputableness and dependableness of my organs forever shaken. Or,
worse still, with my doubts horribly confirmed. The prospect of his
doing what he calls "his best" by me, -- well, wouldn't you, now,
were you actually facing the prospect of such an attention, have to
whistle to keep up your courage?

So I'll ask your sympathy and beg you, when you get his
diagnosis, to let me have it faithfully and soon.

Faithfully,

Willa Sibert Cather

February twenty-fourth, 1906

(COPY)

June 7, 1905

My Dear Mr. Bynner;

In regard to Mr. Slosson's question as to where I got my information about Western life, you know I lived there for ten years. When I was not quite nine years old, my father moved from the Shenandoah valley to a ranch in the South-western part of Nebraska, about ten miles north of the Kansas line. There was a word in Mrs. Delan's letter, you remember, about a "curious lack of a sense of beauty in the tales" which I suspect is true enough. I had never thought of it before, but I suppose one's early experiences rather cling to one, and the years when I first began to note my surroundings at all were pretty much devoted to discovering ugliness. If you've never been about in that part of the West, you simply can't imagine anything so bleak and desolate as a Nebraska ranch of eighteen or nineteen years ago. In "A Wagner Matinee" I used some of the features that I best remember of the one on which I lived. Up to the time of our going there I had always lived in the most beautiful part of that very beautiful valley, and during the first year that we spent in the West I came about as near dying from homesickness as a healthy child well could. There was one miserable little sluggish stream about eighteen miles from our ranch. It was perhaps ten feet wide in the Spring, and in the late summer it was no more than a series of black mud holes at the bottom of a ravine, with a few cottonwoods and dwarf elms growing along its banks. I remember that my little brothers and I would do almost anything to get to this creek.

The country was then almost absolutely treeless. About half way between our ranch and the town where we bought our supplies, or, in the local parlance, "did our trading", there was a row of Lombard poplars which had been planted for a wind break, and when we children went to town the sight of those poplars was the joy of the occasion. From the moment their tips came into view, we began to shout, - and as the town was twenty miles from the ranch, we were generally pretty tired before we got to the trees.

I shall never forget the first Christmas I spent in the West. Most of our neighbors were Swedes and Norwegians, and my brothers and I were taken to a Christmas entertainment at the Norwegian church. The Christmas tree was a poor little naked box-elder -- you probably don't know that travesty of a tree -- all wrapped in green tissue paper, cut in fringes to look like foliage.

During the four years in which I attended the State University at Lincoln, from 1890 to 1894, all that country was burned up by a continuous drouth. Our old neighbors, the Norsemen, began to go insane and to commit suicide in the most heartrending fashion. They were all deeply in debt and heavily mortgaged, and of course the credit of the country went all to pieces during those years. Those who lived through it are men of some means today, and it's a delight to go back there now and be shown their brussels carpets and bath tubs and shiny oak furniture, and to hear their daughters do runs on parlor organs. Nevertheless, those four years were a rather grim chapter of human history to have lived through. I know one little Norwegian girl whose sister committed suicide by drinking carbolic acid. The girl herself thought that was wrong, but she was always

(Cather, June 7, 1905)

2

praying to die. I don't believe you could imagine how sincerely
she wished to die. She was so uniformly sunk in depression that,
when they happened to have a half crop one year, her father sent
her to Iowa to visit his cousins. She went in a day coach, but
when she came back she told my little sister and me that she would
never want to die again because she "had found out how beautiful
the world was."

Things are a good deal better out there now, you understand,
but, whenever I go back, I see the old tragedies that I knew so
intimately in the background. I suppose the wild soil has to be
reclaimed and subdued in that way, and always at pretty much the
same cost, -- but it must be less grim in countries where the mere
external aspect of nature is something gentler.

I'm apt to be somewhat unrestrained and sentimental upon
this subject; that's why I avoided it when you wrote me before. But
this you have brought upon your own head.

Sincerely

Willa Sibert Cather

WITTER BYNNER
GALEANA 411
CHAPALA, JALISCO.
MEXICO.

March 1, 1952

Dear Elsie:

This is as quick as a acknowledgment as I
can make of your February 16th letter, which for
some reason has only just reached me. We left
Santa Fe on the 10th.

Paul Horgan has not told us of a projected
book on Machbeuf. For several years he has
been intent on a Rio Grande book (renewed
Guggenheim project) in which the Padre may be
figure.

I finished the novel ( no dictation, which I can only do and that not happily with letter before starting south but have a foreboding that it will prove too mild and slow-moving for these days, as well as too seriously innocent.

Vitamins, alas, trouble, my stomach and I
have to forego them.

We'll be here two months. Hastily, fondly
Excuse the staccato! 1-1-51

940 Piermont Avenue

Piermont, New York

November 21, 1952

Dear Bill:

Thank you indeed for permitting me to use
the letter of the dear old uncle, in spite of your
scruples. The truth is that "The Troll Garden",
Miss Cather's first effort, though it had several
remarkable stories that she later salvaged, had
some very bad ones also. Had Mr. James's eye fallen
upon two or three of these, he never would have pur-
sued the reading.

With best wishes and gratitude,

Thanksgiving Day

1952

Dear Elsie:

Not waiting for a secretary I send this off to you at once, and with
brevity enforced by all sorts of duties and doings, to say that of course
you have my consent to use the Henry James letter. I am glad that in
his will he left no such embargo as hers.

I had hoped that I might see you when I came through New York, just in
time to listen to returns as to the election, at Mary Goodwin's; but,
partly because of burst boilers and fallen chimneys here, we sped home.
I did manage dinner with Barry Faulkner, as enjoyable as ever.

The New York oculist intimated that the operation on my eye might not
have been necessary, that I might have had only secondary glaucoma,
though Dr. Egenhofer here called it explosive glaucoma and gave me only
an hour's pause before the hospital. Dr. Bassen also bade me not to spare
the good eye. So I don't, in spite of constant discomfort. Fortunately
for me, reading is easier than general seeing. I can't any more see
a whole landscape or carve a roast; but I can walk around in dumb anger
and remember or guess where things are. How glad I am that, even with
"excessive use," yours/ eyes are better.

Hoping that Miss Lewis eases her judgment and wishing you everything good,
I am

WITTER BYNNER

March 8, 1953

Dear Elsie:

On the instant of receiving your tele-
gram, I wired you that the publisher was right.
My own typewritten copy of the letter (which,
incidentally, was typewritten in the original)
contains the "I", which unfortunately slipped out
of the copy made from the copy. Somebody at
Lippencott's was astute.

It's a shame that those other two books
were published ahead of yours, but to yours is
attached a mind which should carry it sailing.

For three months here after my return
I had been badly bothered by a forty year old
intestinal malady, apparently cured by a New York
doctor six or eight years ago, but this time, with
his remedy failing, finally put to comparative
rest by the third doctor who has tackled it here.
The result has been a terrific renewal of working
energy, so that, devoting six or eight hours to
remembriscences, I am reluctant to bed myself even at
seven a.m. During all this the eye has held up
fairly well, as I hope have yours.

As ever,

P.S. Forgive me for not having answered your note
of mid-December and told you of my happiness
over your improved vision.

WITTER BYNNER

November 6, 1961

Dear Elsie:

Yes, I thought I had from early days called you 'Elsie' but I enquired of you about my letter concerning Mark Twain because I could not think of anyone else named 'Elizabeth' to whom I would have sent the material contained in it. Whoever the correspondent was, she had apparently been asking me something of my memories about him. The identity will probably pop back to me all of a sudden.

Meantime, I am glad that the query has brought us back into epistolary touch again, though not at all glad over some of your news. I too have had disabilities (both glaucoma and a cataract in my remaining eye and now for six months a tough scalding case of shingles), so I can sympathize. How stubborn the body is!

I am interested and glad to hear the propitious news about your writings and your prospect of working at Huntington Hartford nook in California, and the possibility of our seeing you here on your way home again. Bob Hunt joins me in hope that your look in on Santa Fe and us may happen. On the other hand, if the shingles abate we may meantime be interviewing my eye man in California and then proceeding for a few months to our house in Chapala which, after five years absence from it, we occupied last winter and the winter before. If there is a chance of your coming here, do give me a tip in advance.

Incidentally, it might serve you to look in on my eye specialist, Dr. S. Rodman Irvine, 9630 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 211, Beverly Hills, California (Telephone: CRestview 4-5265), if you reach the Coast. He is supposedly - as other men are too - the ablest of them all concerning cataracts as well as glaucoma.

As to physical difficulty interfering with your work, you have doubtless been advised to try tape recording. So have I and I may reach a point where I can do it.

Wishing us both well, and thanking you for your response, I am

Yours as ever,

You have probably heard of Victor Babin's appointment as director of the Cleveland Institute of Music, leaving him and Vitya part-time for their concert tours. We see a great deal of them when they are here and are very fond of them.

2.

it "gentle" and "warm." I was going to send it to him directly
but think I'll wait and let it reach him with the others. It's
too many years now since I have seen him but I watch his doings
with admiring envy of his vitality and doughty wit.

It occurs to me that you might possibly like to see
copies I have had made of his letters to me through the years.
If so, say the word.

As to Haniel and Alice, you will be glad to hear that
he came early to a seventy-fifth birthday party given for me on
August 10th by the Winfield Townley Scotts, and that we had a
warm talk and that, after that, I saw them several times just as
in the old days. It was a good renewal after the seven lean
years - or eight - during which we had been separated not by our-
selves but by an outsider. Even thoush Alice was pretty well
gone physically and mentally when I saw her, I had deeply hoped
that he would continue and record, in his fine grave way, experi-
ences of age. Please forgive me if, instead of telling you details,
I enclose a carbon of a letter relating them. I receive many
inquiries about Haniel and have resorted to this procedure in
answering. And will you mind letting me have the carbon back for
such use? Tony's address is: Mr. Anton V. Long, 133 Hope Road,
Liguanea P.O., Jamaica, B.W.I. Properly, I think, he has given
up the idea of a library in the Long house but will present the
books to the building on Washington Street. The poor fellow, in
the first cloud of his dismal experience, had summoned a roomful
of friends to La Fonda and proposed there raising a fund of $350,000.
I was the only one with grim courage enough to rise and try dissua-
sion. The poems of Haniel's which I had read at the service were
a fine group - making a sort of autobiographical garland. If I
can find a copy of the set and enclose it, will you let me have it
back too? If you write Tony, you might ask him when and where to
send the Adelaide Crapsey poems. for the library.

If you ever see Barry give him my best and of course
all affection to you from

It is just possible that Bob and I may drive east in
the spring, in which event I shall count on seeing you.