Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1441

Carbon of letter from Heath to M. Helen Healer, c/o Jack Healer, Copperal Cove, Texas

December 1, 1944

 

 

 

Dear Miss (or Mrs.) Healer:

    Your long expected letter finally arrived. For days I have been thinking how to answer it. You seem in it less revealing of your essential self than you were by way of the SRL /Saturday Review of Literature/ — and rather self-depreciative. You seem to have passed through “deep waters” struggling valiantly but at last vainly for some dearly cherished object or end. You have devoted, I think, extraordinary talents and powers only to find, despite all hopes, that under the special circumstances failure was foredoomed. It has left you shaken and bewildered, seeking a new orientation and new confidence in life’s high possibilities and in your own powers of realizing them. The divinity that stirs within must create; its dream must be wrought.

    I wish we might talk together. Your great resources of energy — emotion — in which you will not be seriously frustrated and your fine intellect overwhelmed as you say it has been.

    Please do not suppose that I have had such good fortune as to escape much the same as has borne you down. As regards matters of the mind and all impersonal things, I have but little if any to complain; but in the realm of feeling — the secret and intimate seekings — there is in all this but little warmth. Though fortune has been kind to me in respect of power to command material things I am still inwardly alone and too little warmed and co-ordinated thus far to make effective use of the mental and material resources that have fallen to me. I, too, send out an S O S, not because I’m a ship sinking or in dire distress — just full rigged (shall I say) and laden but with not enough wind (or is it steam?) to make headway and port with the cargo.

     Texas seems far. Do you live there or plan to or are you visiting and recuperating? The latter, I imagine. I will be in Detroit and Chicago the last ten days of this month. Where do you expect to be then or in the near future? I have a daughter in Michigan, one in Mexico City, one with the WACS in Georgia, all married, and no other ties. I infer you are equally unbound — perhaps a modern Promethea, having expiated your bringing down to earth of some heavenly fire. I am wondering much about you and wishing you a joyous Christmas and a bright new Easter time soon to come.

 

Sincerely,