The Grosvenor

35 FIFTH AVENUE
New York

June 26, 1931.

My dear Mr. Canby:

I had to come on for the Princeton Commencement and hoped to be able to arrange a meeting with you before you got out of town. Things have been pretty thick ever since I got back from Princeton, and today, when I tried to arrange for a little visit with you, Miss Loveman told me that you were gone for some weeks. I am leaving for Canada myself on Tuesday, so I suppose we shall not meet until the Fall.

You put your finger on exactly the thing that I was trying to get in my new book - a firm texture; in a much less degree the kind of thing that the eighteenth century French writers achieved so splendidly, I think perhaps Bishop Laval is your favorite character largely because he was mine. More than any other one person he represents to me that stubborn loyalty to a grudging land and that adherence to French traditions of two centuries ago which I feel and admire so much when I am in Quebec. The mere desire to feel that loyalty in the air around me has taken me to the City and Province of Quebec a great many times during the last ten years.

Regarding the Book of the month matter, I let Alfred Knopf decide it entirely, as it seemed to me a publisher's proposition. But he would not have decided it as he did had I not withdrawn my

sentimental objections. Your letter and Mr.
Schurmann's convinced me that I ought not to oppose
Mr. Knopf if he wanted to try the experiment in
this case.

Please do not fail to let me know when Mrs.
Canby's book of verse comes out. While my mother
lives, I must spend a great part of my time in
California, and I get absolutely out of touch with
what is being published in New York. My warmest
regards to you both. If I ever really live in
New York again, one of the compensations for living
here will be that I can see something of you and
Mrs. Canby.

M.S.C.

men she nursed in her hospital experience left any "wound", it was certainly not
perceptible to her relatives, or in her letters - or in her very jolly books, as
I remember them. Catherine The Great might be called fair game for Miss Anthony's
obsession, but certainly that warm-hearted and very practical New England spinster
was not. I wish now that those letters to Mrs. Fields had not been destroyed.
All these remarks, of course, are entirely confidential and are meant for you and
Mrs. Canby alone, but the tone of your review is so right that I want to add my
hearty word of confirmation.

I am going to write to Mrs. Canby very soon, and I hope that we three
can get together again before this almost-gone winter is over.

With my warmest greetings to you both,

February 4, 1941.

Dear Mr. Canby:

I want to explain why I have not replied to any of the letters and invitations which told me of the interesting things the Academy is doing.

Since the middle of November, I have been incapacitated by an injury to my right hand, which kept me in the French Hospital for the month of December. My hand is still in splints, when it is not under massage. But for the last few days I have been able to write my signature, which is an encouraging advance.

May I take this occasion to express my appreciation of your review of my new book? I know that a reviewer has to take some pains to see what the writer of a book was really trying to do. Naturally, I feel very appreciative of such a clear statement as yours of just what I was trying to do in *Sapphira*.

I am as uncertain as you about the ending of the book, and I dislike the jump from the third person to the first person. But Nancy's return, which I witnessed in just the fashion I describe, was really the live core of the story. If I had not seen the meeting between my old nurse and her daughter, and heard, during Nancy's visit, so much of their talk about the old times before the war, I never would have written the story. The narrative worked round in a circle, and its end was really it's beginning. It may interest you to know that at one time I thought of using a subtitle like this:

SAPPHIRA AND THE SLAVE GIRL

(A Conversation Piece)

Of course, the idea wasn't very practical from a publishing point of view. When I saw the title of your review, I thought this was a coincidence which was flattering to us both.