Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2471

Carbon of letter to grandson Crawford J. MacCallum and wife Cather (née Betty Cather), Ithaca, New York,

October 25, 1956

 

 

Dear Crawford and Cather:

 

We are sending you a third set of galley sheets with a lot of pleasure. The reactions from the first two have been so very helpful and so stimulating of our cause.

 Spencer and I have read and re-read Cather’s previous letters. Her suggestions have been most valuable and have been adopted everywhere except where too much re-writing or re-arrangement would be required.  I certainly wish we could have had these two letters before the original copy went to the printer.

 Her grasp of the whole thing, from its fundamentals on up, is truly remarkable, and the humor and facility with which she sets down her reactions is most intriguing. I am afraid I can­not at this moment adequately express myself upon the pleasure and helpfulness of what she has written. So we are sending this third lot in joyous anticipation of her further sprightliness and per­ceptive penetration. But we will be satisfied if what she next writes is only half as good.

 We have now warmly adopted the Santayana quotation. We certainly appreciate the promptness with which you have gone over these proofs so far and hope it will be easy to find a place for the new lot without too greatly disrupting the domestic or other routine of either or both of you.

 We have carefully considered the three “false” statements in the footnote, and from what we have learned on the subject, we are not surprised that Crawford did not attempt to clarify the matter in any detail. Anyhow, the footnote does not seem to have any particular pertinency in support of the text to which it is attached, so we are thinking seriously of eliminating it as surplusage altogether. Amendment by cancellation is sometimes the best of all; so we are under quite a debt of gratitude for Crawford for this (even though he has not been very fulsome either in his praise or blame).

 

 We are leaving for New York today and will not be back until about the 15^th; so, anything you send to us had better come directly to 11 Waverly Place.

A whole lot of sugar plums for those three “monsters”, and something just as good, we hope, for their capable progenitors.

Affectionately,

 

        PD

 

SH/m