Los Angeles, Calif.

September 11, 1956

Dear Mary Ellen Chase:

Perhaps it would be more prudent not to write to you while the knot is still in the throat. Yet I must. I've just come home from Vroman's bookshop in Pasadena where I panhandled a copy of the Herald Tribune Book Review of last Sunday. I sat under the oak trees around the Pasadena Rose Bowl to read what you had written about my book.

Though I knew from Ted Weeks that you were going to write something in something about THE NUN'S STORY, I was totally unprepared to find that the Trib was IT...which only goes to show how rusty you can get when you live 3000 miles away from the big places where the big things happen. So there it was and there was I, reading and weeping.

I need not tell you (because you are a writer yourself and must have had it happen to you for a first time when you least expected it) what it means to a perennial beginner to read such words from One Who Knows spread out on page one of the booklovers Book Review section.

I read sort of crazily, then read again less crazily, and 'Sister Luke' sitting beside me in the car read also, and when at last we could speak it was in those flutey voices of throttled emotion. "It just can't be that good," I fluted. And 'Sister Luke' woodwinded back to me, "C'est incroyable."

To come out of that long dark tunnel where a writer lives, wrestling with doubts, Fowler and a Thesaurus for a couple of years or more, to come out blind as a mole and as cringing - when it finds itself suddenly topside instead of deeper down where it meant to dig for safety's sake - and then to read words like yours which say in substance, I understand exactly what you were digging for all the time you were in that tunnel....

Well, you see, it's impossible to say thanks for such understanding. So I won't try any more.

Yours,

Los Angeles, Calif

October 3rd 1956

Dear Mary Ellen Chase:

Your beautiful *beautiful* letter to me was totally uncalled for. You had no business to put me in your debt like that, showering me with such love and so many good wishes that I felt born again and this time with a whole troupe of Good Fairies standing about my cradle. Also, you took a great risk, allowing me to see you polishing your silver and unfreezing your chicken for that night's supper. Bracketed by those two contrasting actions - one belonging to an older, richer and more gleaming day and one belonging to our streamlined present of "pan-ready" foods - I see you perfectly, so perfectly, indeed, that I invade your privacy with great surges of tenderness every time I think of you.

But, as I say, you brought this all upon yourself....

I wonder if you know that I am flying to New York at the invitation of your lovely Irita Van Doren, to say a few words at the Book and Author luncheon on October 23 in the Hotel Astor? My publisher underwrites the costs and his publicity people are packing me into a schedule of press interviews and "appearances" which absolutely paralyses me. But if I thought that I would see you at that luncheon, I believe I could get through the intervening weeks without falling apart in sheer trepidation.

But if I do *not* see you then, I shall most certainly be standing at any crossroads you name when you come West in November. I should love to bring you to my place if you could spare a luncheon time for me. I do not live in the "throbbing" part of Los Angeles. I live on a hilltop in Eagle Rock, adjacent to Pasadena, in a section that feels like the country, with live oaks about my old-fashioned house through whose branches I look out upon the San Gabriel Mountains. There is an easy switchback path up to my place and until I read your charming article in the current ATLANTIC and ran head-on, heart-on, into your sentence about "invalid transportation", I was seeing you coming up that little paved path, pausing to look at the view as you mounted. I was, to be perfectly honest, doing more than mere "seeing". I was actually bringing you up daily, since your letter, kidnapping you in spirit while you polished your silver and looked out at the rain in your woods. I tell you all this in a penitential mood of mea culpa. I accuse myself of invading your blessed privacy. And I await the penance you will mete out with your great charity...

Loving, sight unseen, as I love you, seems to me to be one of the strangest and loveliest of all God's graces.

Los Angeles, Calif.

October 9th 1956

Dear Mary Ellen Chase:

Please imagine that my Corona is set with Diamond type and that I am writing to you in that smallest of print.

I have been reading you since your first letter to me. With every page of your beautiful prose, with every flash of some new bright facet of your incredible mind, my boisterous western nature has shrunk and shriveled so that I wonder now with dumb dismay how I could have had the temerity to address you as if I'd known you all my life. (And you even speak Hebrew... Holy Mackerel!)

So now, in that tiny type which I will this to be, I am telling you that I have made a circle around that date you named. November 11th. It's the pot of gold at the end of an arc of gray time, or time that seems gray by comparison. And between now and then I shall not steal any more of your time by writing importuning letters to which, out of the great goodness of your heart, you reply so richly.

But could I just tell you before signing off how I adore the way you write? A GOODLY FELLOWSHIP was a banquet for me. MARY PETERS was another. Now I'm halfway through THE PLUM TREE and I've got WINDSWEPT waiting on my bed table. There is one more thing I must tell you to underline the deep fascination your material holds for me. (But you must promise not to pick this up and comment upon it until we meet, else I should beat my breast that you waste your precious writing time on me). In MARY PETERS you mention the launching of the GREAT REPUBLIC in 1873. My grandfather, Captain John M. Cavarly, a clipper ship commander who made the transition to steam sailing, brought that ship around the Horn to San Francisco to join the fleet of the Pacific Mail S.S. Co, and he sailed it on its first voyage to the Orient and I've got his original log of that voyage in my studio, along with letters and clippings he sent back from that and all his other voyages, to his family transplanted from New London, Connecticut to San Francisco...and that's some of the material for my next book which I've kept secret until now. THE OLD SALT. Don't you think it strange? (Don't reply.) When I first saw your review of my NUN in the Herald Trib, with two books about the Cape Horn breed reviewed on the same page, I said to 'Sister Luke', "The coincidence would frighten me if I weren't a believer in Signs and Portents!" Then, there was my first letter to you; then the reading of your books which took me right out to sea where I'd been preparing to go in spirit as soon as I get off this publicity rat-wheel! Strange is too customary a word to describe what I feel about all of this. (But don't you go looking for a better one!)

I keep you in my prayers each night.

October 17, 1956

Dear Mary:

You give me permission to write to you once again.
"So if you will name the hour", you wrote. I shall go
to church at eight o'clock on our Sunday and be back home
a bit before nine, and then I shall await your telephone
call at whatever hour on that blessed morning you choose.
My number is CLinton 6-0521. Please write it down so you
won't have the horrible labor of searching the monster
directories of Los Angeles. Then I shall ask you if I may
come for you in my little Chevrolet, not only because I
love driving (and especially in traffic) but also because
I could not bear to think of you in a taxi, back-tracking
around Eagle Rock with a driver who doesn't know my hills
and none of them do. Will you believe me? And will you
grant me this last loving request? (You would if you saw my
slightly weepy state...)

I wept with anguish when I read your letter. That I
should cause you "immeasurable concern" almost kills me.
I could curse that radio which blared into your kitchen
last Sunday morning to disturb your peace. I could curse
the Boston Globe reporter who ingratiated himself and secured
an interview with 'Sister Luke' (against both our better
judgements, but we had not yet learned how to say No) and
above all I could curse my own stupidity in thinking that
by sitting in on that interview, I could master-mind it
and keep it within dignified bounds. For I suppose that
that broadcast emanated from the interview and that it must
have been quite awful. But I beseech you not to be terrified
by the thought of what such carryings-on may be doing to me.

Listen, dear Mary, I am a crocodile. You probably heard
of George Gurdjieff because Katherine Mansfield died in his
"school" in Fontainebleau. I was one of a small special group
that studied with Gurdjieff in Paris in the Thirties. He had
Plato's way of naming certain of his "folowers" (followers)
after specific animals, so that they would study the psyches
or the make-ups of those animals and learn something about
themselves as he, Gurdjieff, saw them. Gurdjieff called
me Krokodile. He said that I had seven skins and great
endurance. I used to go to the zoo and look at crocodiles.
After a while I grew quite fond of the repulsive saurians.
Sometimes birds perched on their scaley backs, mistaking
them for rocks. I saw how they lay submerged hours on end,
with only their snouts and eyes protruding, totally oblivious
to the world around them, even to stones thrown at them, or
peanuts...and I began to see, after a while, some of my own
basic traits. This may all sound like a rigamarole to you
but I hope not. I hope it convinces you that I have a
natural aptitude for that "trance notion" you beg me to
cultivate. Only I call the place where I go, "my mud"...
this in affectionate memory of the man who taught me much.
But my "mud" and your trance are one and the same, I think.
A way to be when the world starts pawing at you in vulgar
curiosity, a state to interpose between your sacred inner
world and the profane probings of "enemy aliens" toward

it. (Please don't chide me for going onto another page!)

If I were *not* a crocodile, I doubt I'd have survived
the terrors of invasion thus far. Most of the letters
I receive are kind, thanks be to God. But occasionally
comes one that might have been written in rattlesnake
venom. Despite my seven skins, there is a moment of
pain. But the public appearances are, I think, the
worst of all for me. You took away much of my fear about
New York when you told me what a lovely creature Irita
Van Doren is.... but alas, she is only one encounter on that
surcharged schedule which has a lot of idiot radio inter-
views in it and some TV, I think. Atlantic-Little, Brown
pays my air passage but they're taking it back in pounds
and pounds of my trembling flesh! But I'll be a crocodile,
I promise you. And knowing that I will be, and that I
really *am* in essence, will you smile again? That's my
only wish...

November eleventh is my personal armistice day.
Will you come as early as you can and stay as long as
you can? There will be eight beings in this house
waiting joyously to greet you - Sister Luke and I,
Lady and Helga, our two German shepherds, and Helga's
four new pups who will be not quite eight weeks old-
when you come. (And if you don't like dogs, I can lock
the whole pack up in my studio.)

Forgive me for writing at such length. I'm leaving
out everything about what it means to me to feel your big
strong wing over me as I falter toward that New York
rendezvous with Publicity.

Los Angeles, Calif.

November 4th 1957

Dear Mary:

At least two weeks ago your beautiful EDGE OF DARKNESS came to me direct from your publisher, like a warm handclasp from you across space. I dropped everything and began reading it at once, very slowly, savoring each lovely turn of phrase, each exciting new use of some indispensable old word which made it look like something newly minted. And how wonderfully you make each character come alive and become loved, so that in the end one sighs with relief that they are all left richer than when first uncovered, rewarded with the treasure of human understanding which gives the book such a lovely 'and so they lived happily ever after' feeling.

I'd have written to you at once had I not been packing for one of those hasty junkets to New York, to accept an award from the National Council of Women and (more important to me) to talk with Ted Weeks and my agent about my still-unstarted Next Book. I had a queer hope that I might see you in New York, since I arrived there October 29th, the day after your book was officially launched. (Not that you goin for such horror exhibitions...but my wistful hope that I'd see you again made me believe you might, just might, be there on book business of some sort.)

Would you ever have time, dear Mary, to drop me a tiny card saying all is well with you and yours? Do you know my last word from you was when you took off for England? So often I've reached out after you in thought, begging you not to forget me. Then along came your book and I was happy again. God bless you for remembering.....

This letter brings you my love as always,