Hazel Hawthorne,
1245 Madison Avenue,
New York, N. Y.

<table>
  <tr>
    <td>PLEASE RETURN</td>
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  <tr>
    <td>TO</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>JOHN SIMON GUGGENHEIM</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>MEMORIAL FOUNDATION</td>
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</table>

## PLAN FOR WORK

I want to write a novel about the expedition of Richard Vines to the coast of Maine in 1616.

1. Summer of 1616 in Plymouth, England. The savage, Nahanada, from New England, in the home of Sir Ferdinando Gorges.

11. Captain John Smith selling his Description of New England and his maps from house to house, or rather, guild to guild.

III. A young Englishman (not yet fully imagined) has been influenced by the savage and by Captain Smith, and now he joins the expedition to New England led by Richard Vines and sponsored by Sir Ferdinando Gorges. The purpose of the trip is to disprove the general belief that the new world is "cold, and in respect of that not habitable by our nation."

IV. Winter Harbor now Biddeford Pool, in Maine.) Here begins the ice sequence. There will be three aspects of the life of the Englishmen during October, November and December, at the Pool.

### A. Political.

On the edge of the wild, dark, cold, new world these thirty men discuss ideas of government. I have not not done nearly enough research on this subject of what men thought of government in that time, but here are samples of how it will be treated. The first is a paragraph I have already written for the book:

> There were times when he would rather have been at any European ending than at this dark beginning. A diet for the imagination, here, was of nature's own green, a salutary diet, he said, smiling. In Europe there was man's history to feed upon, all the courses and the wines of a most subtle banquet...

The other is a viewpoint typical of Calvinism:

> Those who rule in an unjust and tyrannical manner are raised up by time to punish the iniquity of the people...

### B. Moral.

The plot resolves itself into a moral study. The passage from good to evil will be the Indian part of the story. Among the Algonquins was a legend of the icy heart, a legend which is related to certain concepts of evil in the Norse mythology. An imagined creature from northern Canada, so monstrous it can only be seen from mountain tops in dim blue outline, like a cloud, will chill the heart of a human being upon occasion chill (the heart of a human until it is at length replaced by a piece of ice "like a little human figure, with hands, feet, head, and every member perfect.")

I will use this legend because it is at every point psychologically interesting, and because nothing could be more suggestive of absolute cold than its details.

The Englishman is a great friend of Nahanada, who has returned to his own tribe at Pemaquid. However, he falls in love with Nahanada's wife. She, through her sense of guilt, is persuaded, and the whole tribe with her,

Hazel Hawthorne: PLAN FOR WORK 2

that her heart has been chilled. She associates her desire for the Englishman with the spell; she believes she is becoming evil. The change in Nahanada.

As the expedition departs, in the beginning of spring, the Indians burn alive the Indian wife, but when they find her heart, it is not of ice.

The Englishmen have found the new world cold indeed, but they have proved it habitable.

## C. Physical.

The young Englishman takes note sensitively of the river (the Saco), and the country that would be "Maine". I want the style to be cold and clear as winter, and simple as a botany textbook.

V. There will be interludes of the historical happenings that distinguished the year 1616: death of Hakluyt; first actual instance of Independency in England; the sailing of eight ships to New England during that year; all fishing vessels but one that may have turned pirate; death of Shakespeare; the plague that reduced the numbers and unity of the North American Indians and so made English settlement possible: Cromwell became a fellow commoner of Sidney Sussex College at Cambridge University.

I have worked on the book for about six months, but with many domestic interruptions. I have read for it in numerous Colonial histories, Aubrey's Lives, the History of Plymouth, England, John Smith, Champlain, and in all the sources suggested by Levermore, a little of Hakluyt, etc. Last winter I went to Biddeford Pool, where I took notes on the landscape through one week-end, and worked for one day at the Maine Historical Society Library in Portland. The rest of the reading was done in the New York Public Library and in the New York Society Library.

The actual writing of the novel is so far fragmentary. Without the need to stop work to make money in other ways I could, I think, finish the book in about nine months. There is still research reading to do, and I want to explore the Saco River carefully for miles in the same right season. I wouldn't think of finishing the book without the notes from such an exploration.

My contract with E. P. Dutton and Company calls for two more novels of similar nature to the one (Three Women) already published. This novel will be of similar nature.

As far as my ultimate purpose as a writer: it is, simply, to be able to write, to have more time for writing than I have had in the past, and to write always purely.