Cosmopolitan Club,

133 E. 40th St., New York.

September 30, 1929.

Dear Miss Raphael:

Several years ago, before I began to write Short as any
Dream, and just before the publication of The Grandmothers, I
told our mutual friend, Glenway Wescott, about my theme and
material. He said; "your book and mine are cousins - but how
much more beautiful your material is than mine - I
envy you that !"

I am a profound admirer of The Grandmothers. But perhaps
I may, nevertheless, be permitted to criticize the publicity of
my book up to date in the sense that it has not stressed the
beauty of the material. To me the printed matter on the jacket,
etc., conveys the impression that this is a long winded
chronicle of an austere and drab New England family. It has seemed
to those who have read it among my own circle, to be the story of
two women who (though they happen to be a great-grandmother and a
grandmother, living in Maine and Minnesota in the pioneer days of
each state) are gay, witty, happy people, with lives as rich in
emotion and adventure as if they lived in New York today. The book
is not a period novel in the usual sense. Though based on authentic
documents, it is not built up, by a mental process of a thousand
small details. It is a work of intuition. Out of the stories of the
past, and the documents of the past, the people came alive to the
author and thereby automatically created their own period and atmo-
sphere and spoke in their own tongue.

Miss Raphael (2)

N. B. One of the interesting facts about the book is that the language changes as the time period changes. This again is not the result of any logical intention on the author's part. It just happened of itself.

A woman poet, who read the book in proofs in California this summer, told me she staid up until two in the morning to finish it and then dreamed it was called The Heart's Adventure. She said, "I don't see how you survived the writing of such a book - it has in it something so poignant and final about the life of woman - " she meant, as related to the life of man. She cited as among the most significant passages the one where Nancy, the first heroine, during her sister's mortal illness, is suddenly obliged to accept the burden of a deep spiritual bond with her sister's lover, the young doctor (the man she herself secretly loved and later married). And again the passage where Mary, the heroine of Part II, reunited with her husband Jamie, after his dangerous ride to relieve a fort during the Indian massacres in Minnesota, sees that she has all her life undervalued him.

Another friend of the book (a psychologist this time) said to me last week that in reading it and passing from one period of time to another, she felt like a traveller on a great river, stopping first at one city and then at another, finding each living, actual, full of its own inevitable atmosphere - 1818 as it was - 1850 as it was - 1870 as it was - the farm in the wilderness, the literary village, with its medical school and academy, the Minnesota river town, the Sierra sheep country, as they were.

She said: "So many modern novels and plays written episodically, seem a
and dealing with the"stream of consciousness"/series of disconnected

Miss Raphael (3)

and rather petty happenings - your book has a deep inward continuity
that carries one from the beginning to the end and makes the narrator
of the story (who in the Prologue takes up the burden of the Past, and
in the Epilogue lays it down and looks to the Future) the true descend-
ant of Nancy and Mary".

As to how it came to be written: it is perhaps striking (in spite
of my New England inheritance) that my first novel should be about New
England, for the pattern of my life shows many 'escapes' from New Eng-
land. When I grew up in Boston (I was born in Winchester, Mass. and
was educated at Miss Winsor's School) and chose my college, it was
not Radcliff, Smith or Wellesly that I selected, but Brwn Mawr - a
non-New England college. When after I graduated (I got the English
prize in my year and was already headed for writing) I had a chance
to make my own independent life, it was to New York and to France that
I turned. In Paris I made my first mature friends among writers and
artists - ties that have continued. My first book, French Perspectives,
published by Houghton and Mifflin in 1916, was a collection of stories
and sketches about French life and people. (French critics praised it
as one of the most discriminating interpretations of French life ever
made by a foreigner. My French friends, rather expected me to live in
France and I think I might have done so but for the war.)

In 1917, I returned to Paris from Boston, as correspondent for
The New Republic, with which I have been connected since its start
in 1914. For a year I was closely allied with all the American Activities
in France and sent back series of articles. In October 1918, I was very
seriously injured on an old battlefield and spent seven months in The
American Hospital of Paris. Shadow-Shapes, my second book, was the
inevitable outcome of that experience. It is the journal of a wounded
woman who sees the end of

Miss Raphael (4)

the war and the peace conference through the eyes of a group of
friends, American and international, who came to her bedside. In
this book one finds another series of portraits.

After my return to Boston on crutches, and a series of painful
orthopedic treatments, I made another quick escape from my cold and
native heath to the primitive and vastly exciting Southwest, which
in 1920 was very different - much more Spanish and Indian and primeval
than the land now exploited by the Santa Fe Railroad and the artists.
There I bought a half share in an Adobe house in the Tesuque Valley,
six miles from Santa Fe. Though still very lame, I was able to ride
horseback; and next year returned to rebuild the house and live there for
some time. This adventure was recorded in The Journal of a Mud House,
four articles published in Happer's Magazine. I used to return as
often as possible to live on horseback and visit Indian pueblos and
ceremonials. Perhaps I scarcely realized at first that I was repeating
the Western urge of my ancestors - connecting myself, in the manner
of my own generation, with one of the great, untouched, pioneer regions
still left in the West. I made many friends among the Indians and
have often wondered how my grandmother would feel if she could see
me with them. I have never forgotten the accent of horror, with
which she spoke of Indians, because of her Minnesota experience. During
the delirium of her old age they used to come back to her as symbols
of fear and terror.

Because, after all, I could not live without sophisticated
human contacts, New York became my permanent residence and the South-
west merely an occasional retreat or place of adventure. Fire Under
the Andes, my last book, published by Knopf, expressed a growing absorbtion
& absorption in the great American Southwest in contemporary America. (This book, a
series of short biographical sketches of very varied lives, was
thought by many critics to have an unusually living quality -

Miss Raphael (5)

it was said to have an almost fictional value, and it was undoubtedly
a bridge to my first novel. But when I had at last faced writing
that novel, I could not write of a modern America or of the Southwest
or of France. Whether I wanted to or not, I had to deal with that
deepest and earliest ancestral chord which had sounded since childhood
in my ears. My escapes into the Latin and the primitive had not
saved me the burden of my New England inheritance. I had to take
it up, and lay it down as a work of art before I could write any
other book.

So I turned to the stories that had come to me during my New
England childhood from my maternal relatives. (My father's New England
family would make another equally significant story, one I can perhaps
deal with a few years from now.) I pored over a vast accumulation of
letters, journals, etc. that had been handed over to me by an older
relative whose interest had been outstandingly in the past. I returned
to 'Verona', Maine (pseudonym for a famous village near the White Mountains
on the New Hampshire line) where I had made several visits as a child with
my grandmother. I again climbed Jockey Cap (out of whose granite I had
dug garnets and mica) and looked down on the Ox Bow of the Saco River;
read the old letters stored in a wonderful old family house full of
relics; tried on the old dresses; played the tinkly music in my great-
aunt's music albums, slept in the painted Tree Room. I also went, in
a Ford, to the lovely old 'Penton' houses in South Ponaicherry (another
a Near East minister in Nancy's birthplace, across the way, and
pseudonym), climbed into the window of one, found a family connection
cherishing The Brick House of my mother's dearest childhood memory, and
a native Maine farmer with a Polish wife occupying the great Penton
house across the road and cultivating the Penton fields.

Miss Raphael (6)

Many extraordinary things happened which I did not notice at the time, but which I remember with great clarity. My intuitive task of recreating the past. I met at a Church in Verona, the only person in the United States who knew the details of my grandfather's death, and who also knew theSierra sheep camp. I called on an old gentleman in Portland (the husband of the deceased cousin of my mother's) and found that through his father, who like my great-grandfather, 'Reuel Bumstead', was an early New England doctor, he had an intimate knowledge of that strange Scotch anatomist, 'Dr. Alexander McGregor' who figures in the early part of my book.

When I came back to New York, I began not to construct a novel, but to write about some people whom I had come to love and in whose lives I took a quite peculiar and poignant interest. I cannot say "these are my great-grandmother and my great-grandfather, my grandmother and my grandfather - 'I can only say "they are people I have come to know"". What I have set down as may not be themselves, but it is undoubtedly something they have handed down to me out of their inmost family essence. To me they are real people, who dictated their own shapes and substance when they became characters in fiction.

Perhaps this is enough for a beginning!