Much love,
Elizabeth
Did the permission get cleared up? I wrote HM [Houghton Mifflin], and the agent — long ago now. The agent was also furious with HM—“absurd” he said.
Here for a few days only—
Ouro Prêto, Minas Gerais
May 20th, 1965
Dear Anne:
I hope you can forgive my long silence, and I do hope I haven’t held up the book or given you a lot of trouble about it … I really don’t know why I found such difficulty writing about it, except that I don’t seem to like to talk about myself any more. I am afraid you will think these many little corrections both finicky and egotistical. But you are the first person who has ever written any of this down, and you may well be the only one to, and so I’d really like to get the facts right, this once. I’m sure you can understand that feeling? They aren’t important to anyone but me, really. — I must have written to you hastily and incoherently and now I am putting you to a lot of work, and I am really sorry.
Perhaps I’ll mail off just this first page today and re-write the other corrections — all Chapter 1*—and mail them from Rio. I see I started to do this for you in March … I have never stalled so before. I really am dreadfully sorry.
You know, I didn’t receive your letter written from the hospital — and I am sure now that you didn’t get at least one of mine. I have lost a lot of letters lately — Write only to the Petrópolis address (oh — I think you already do that) — because I suspect I lose even more of those sent to Rio. Now I see that a month ago you said you’d write after you got properly moved, and I do hope that didn’t go astray. I hope your new house is working out nicely — how very exciting, and send me a snapshot of it! Lota and I were supposed to go to Italy on May 2nd — and had to change our plans because of her job. I had thought I might get back to England just about the time I did last year. Now we are planning to go to Italy in late September or the first of October — but I must say it seems a bit doubtful to me, she is so busy with this last stretch of park-building.
I am sorry to hear about the miscarriage — and I’ve always been told by my friends that they have an awfully depressing after-stage. I wonder when your child & husband take off on their summers, and if you are really all alone in Cambridge? Where is Mark going? And what are you writing? Yes — please don’t get a dog until I know when I am coming back! — unless you are just too lonely, or need a watchdog badly — Surely I could stay at some inn or other — only they’re apt to have dogs, too, in England. I am trying to persuade Lota — to come to England with me — telling her London is the best place to shop in the world, because that’s what she likes to do best — but so far I haven’t had much luck.
I have been working away seriously at Wittgenstein, some every morning, after coffee, in bed, — and it still comes and goes, but I have found some wonderful paragraphs. I think the quotation you use at the beginning is splendid.
I’ve read your book through three times now, I think. — And, I think I told you — and hope it finally reached you — that my first impression was one of real freshness, spontaneity — and feeling how wonderful it is to have even one reader as good as you. Do you suppose there are any others — or even a few half as perceptive? The other Twayne books are academic-sounding—“competent”, all done in the latest approved clichés — yours is very different, thank heavens, I think it must have been horrible to do — my life is so uneventful and I have done so very little, really — but you managed it, somehow. Lota read it, and said right away “This sounds as if she really liked your poetry.” And I hope you did at the time, and are not forever incapacitated from doing in the future. […]on Monday. Please do forgive me, once more — I feel very guilty about this slowness. I hope you’re all well and will please write me again very soon—
Love,
Elizabeth
INTRODUCTION
P iii, 5 lines from the bottom. Shouldn’t or be left out?
P v: My grammatical mistake, pure carelessness. PLEASE change to “interpret exactly as he sees fit.” Horrors.
CHRONOLOGY
1934 went like this: Met MM. Mother died. Graduated. And leave out Mary — we had been friends for three years, but she graduated in 1933, and other friends were more important to me. I’m afraid I sound a bit too friendless in this part and in chapter one — I really wasn’t!
1939,—again, the emphasis seems a bit wrong. I had friends in N Y and in Key West. Loren MacIver, the painter, and her husband, Lloyd Frankenberg, stayed with me in K W, and through Loren I met the Deweys. Leave out Mrs. Hemingway here — we were closer friends in the later ’40s.
1951—Academy Award earlier — a year before Bryn Mawr, I think, or 1 in the spring, other in the fall.
1952. Lota’s name is Maria Carlota Costelat de Macedo Soares, no accent marks. But you don’t need all that, just Lota de Macedo Soares. You could say “stopped over to visit friends in Brazil” (I had others beside Lota — I met several Brazilians in N Y during the war) “Had a violent allergic reaction to cashew fruit and had to give up trip to the Straits of Magellan.” That is what actually happened. I hate “ill” and think it sounds too mysterious, or neurasthenic. (See Chap 1, p 16, for the same thing. Couldn’t you say there that I had asthma and bronchitis? Except for asthma, a hereditary tendency, I am really very healthy, and I think it is better to come out and say what ails one rather than give the impression one is a hypochondriac, or perhaps a dope-fiend …)
1952—“short stay” in N Y, rather than a “visit”. I still feel like a New Yorker. I kept my garret in N Y all the time I was in Florida, too — so I could get back whenever I wanted to. I would now if I could afford it—
1961—yr. I went to the Amazon 1st (I’m going again next month). But I have traveled some almost every year I’ve been there.
1962—Chapelbrook Fellowship
1964—Book on architecture comes 1st; I worked on it in 1956. I wish you’d skip the translations. They amount to next to nothing, no real work, and no real interest. Or just say I have translated some prose & some poetry, from the Portuguese. I can’t be considered a cultural go-between, nor do I want to be. The fact that I live in Brazil seems almost entirely a matter of chance … perhaps not, but that’s the way it seems to me.
QUESTIONS OF TRAVEL is coming out in October, with Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Houghton Mifflin is bringing out a re-print (paper back) of the 1st 2 books, about now. Chatto and Windus is also bringing out another collection this year or next.
I am working on a book of prose pieces about Brazil, — places, mostly, with a bit on baroque churches, popular music, one or two life-stories, — maybe. This will be done in about a year or 18 months. At present I am using the title BLACK BEANS AND DIAMONDS:
Petrópolis, this time — but Rio is the best