126 Fremont Place
Los Angeles 5, California

December 16th

E1956J

Dear Florette -

I had stupidly mislaid your fine letter which bore your address and could not find it until this morning, a gloomy wet Sunday, and then by coincidence the postman made a Xmas delivery of mail and amongst it was a note from rving giving me your address - I'd asked him for it. So now I know twice where you live and I must get off a note.

It is too bad I have lost that intensity of feeling which your grand book stirred up in me for several days after I'd read it. I'd meant only to taste it one night before turning in, and I would up reading in bed until 4. a.m. simply because I could not put it down.

It is a wonderful book you are wonderful people, you and your husband, and you are a wonderful writer. That sounds as if I'm overworking that poor word wonderful but I am not in the least, not this time.

I wasn't deliniate my emotions. You know them fully, far more fully than I do, for you and your husband lived them, were torn beyond endurance by them, and then you went through them all again as an artist when you wrote the book. It is superb and I don't know why I'd not heard the book acclaimed before. I'd not even heard of it. Did your publishers put it out by stealth? For one thing, it is a pity, an artistic pity, that you had to use a dim de plume. The disguise of names in the work itself doesn't matter one whit, I think the book would be just as powerful and artistically true if it were fiction - that is a work of imagination based on fact and life. But the pen name you chose somehow doesn't sound real, it's a little misty for some reason I can't fathom, not solid and vital like Florette Henri - or like Joseph Conrad or Henry James or (taking pen names) George Eliot or Georges Sand or, say, even Rebecca West (which is an imagined name right out of Ibsen - Rosmersholm, isn't it?). There is something insubstantial in the pseudonym you chose. And I wonder if the title wasn't in some way wrong. I don't know, I'm just wondering, trying to account for the fact that the book is not talked about in every journal and on every tongue.

For it's a powerful story. Also it is written without a wasted word and straight from the heart. It is almost intolerably suspensive, that is why I had to read it straight through. And the way you handle two time sequences, one of five or more years and another of a few heart-tearing hours, is sheer mastery. Surely you couldn't have done that straight off, you must have rewritten many times. As I told rving, if I were younger and had my old vim and drive, I'd be wanting to see it translated into film, with you doing the script (there is little to do, really). It is sheer drama as it stands. Or why don't you make a play of it? The subject-matter is important...No matter. There stands the book!

Thank you, thank you very much, for a prized book. You and your husband are very special people.