I WAS nineteen when I went to Paris on my first leave in the autumn of 1917, and to me the French aviators with their Croix de Guerres with palms, one palm for each German plane destroyed, were much more glamorous than any cocotte. I had been in the army long enough to realize that those bronze palms meant an Army Citation, the highest. Lieutenant George Guynemer, the French ace who had shot down fifty-three Germans, I had seen face to face at the front that August, just a month before his death, his extraordinary pallor --- for he was tubercular --- accentuated by his jet-black uniform with its breast of decorations; now in Paris, lunching on the Boulevard des Italiens, I found myself seated at the table next to Nungesser, France's second ace, in his sky-blue tunic and swank trousers of the same hue, with the bright scarlet stripe. The French had tolerance in such things: any pursuit pilot good enough to be an ace could choose his own uniform.

We who were in the ambulance service knew that we were in a minor league, and after six months at the front the natural impulse was to try for a transfer to the Lafayette Flying Corps, which was originally a single French squadron of American aviators who had scored against Baron von Richthofen's Circus and whose Indian-head insignia, painted on the planes, was made famous by the exploits of Raoul Lufbery, Norman Prince, Bill Thaw, James McConnell, Conrad Chapman, and Harold Willis. It was Willis who, after he had been shot down and captured by the Germans, made repeated attempts to escape from prison camp; on his third try he was one of thirteen who broke clear. Ten were recaptured, two of them wounded, but Willis was one of the survivors who reached the border; he swam the Rhine and knocked at a Swiss farmhouse at 3 A.M., stark naked but for the bacon grease which protected him from the chill of the water.

Such men were our heroes, and in these post-Hiroshima days their idealism and their air duels seem as far distant as if they had been members of Jeb Stuart's cavalry.

My application for a transfer was turned down, but in the years after the war I was to know two of these pilots with intimacy and affection: Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. Nordhoff, from Lower California, Harvard Class of 1910, was an erect six-footer, blond with blue eyes, very diffident and a lone wolf until he met Jim Hall. Hall, a farmer's boy from Colfax, Iowa, and a graduate of Grinnell, was slender and dark with a homespun simplicity, altogether one of the most modest and gentle men I shall ever know. His hair was black and close-cropped; his nose, a long aquiline beak, had a noticeable break to it, the result of being smashed against the control board when his Spad made a forced landing into some trees behind the German lines. The two men came to know each other in Paris after the Armistice. Their initial meeting was not a success, but the ice thawed when they were assigned to write the official history of the Lafayette Flying Corps. So began their inseparable friendship and what is surely the most remarkable collaboration in American literature.

Those days in Paris in the spring of 1919 were to set the pattern. Nordhoff was the gourmet and he introduced Jim to grilled kidneys and escalloped brains, steamed snails and frogs' legs. Over the wine they planned their future: neither was content at the thought of returning to his former activities --Nordhoff to the lonely ranch in Lower California, Hall to the blend of settlement work and free-lancing which had barely supported him in Boston. Nordhoff came of adventurous blood: his grandfather for whom he had been named was a contemporary of Herman Melville's and had served on warships and whalers in the Pacific. The old man had written books, so had his father, and that was what they, too, proposed to do. Where could they live on next to nothing and write as they pleased? Bermuda was a possibility, for both of them hankered for island life, but Bermuda was dismissed when their thoughts turned to the South Seas.

"Why shouldn't we go as soon as we are demobilized?" Nordhoff said. "We'll both be at loose ends. We're not married and have no jobs to return to." This was their dream as they brought to completion their two-volume history in Paris.

Hall from the outset was the more experienced writer and the more poetic. He had been on a bicycle trip in the British Isles the summer of 1914 when war was declared, and romanticist that he was he promptly enlisted in the British army, faking his credentials as a Canadian. He was trained as a machine gunner, came unscathed through the hard fighting of 1915, and when the British, who finally discovered his origin, sent him home with an honorable discharge a year later, Jim wrote his first war book, Kitchener's Mob, which appeared chapter by chapter in the Atlantic; so did his second, the chronicle of his later experiences as a volunteer in the Lafayette Escadrille, which was published under the title High Adventure. It was on the strength of these two books that the young veterans were given the modest advance of $1000 by Harper and Brothers which paid their way to Tahiti in February 1920.

At the Aina Paré or "Paré's Retreat," an old, ramshackle hotel overlooking the lagoon, they rented two rooms opening on the upstairs veranda with brass bedsteads, china crockery, mosquito nets, and a tin bucket for slops. This was their living quarters, and their workroom for years. The place was riddled with termites, but it was the view that claimed them, the view from the veranda giving out to the open sea with the mountains of Moorea in the distance. Stevenson said that one's first tropical landfall touches a virginity of sense. "There is a magic about these islands," wrote Hall, "that is time-defying; that loses nothing of its power however long-contained one's association with them may be. Landfalls or departures, by day or by night, each one seems to be the first and most memorable." This magic, which informed every book they wrote about Tahiti, made its fresh impress in their first, Faery Lands of the South Seas; they finished the book for Harper's in ten months and it was as agreeable to write as it is to read. The essay form was always congenial to Hall though less so to Nordhoff, who preferred narration; the chapters grew unpretentiously out of their experience and assimilation as they came to understand the language and character of the place.

Nordhoff's blondness and austerity endowed him with an almost godlike attraction for the daughters of Papeete and it was in the cards that he would be the first to marry. He fell in love with a very beautiful Polynesian, the daughter of a chief, and their marriage in 1921, which was opposed by his family and about which he was at once proud and sensitive, temporarily broke up the teamwork. When Nordy established his new home some distance from Papeete, Jim was left for a time on his own.

Hall as a bachelor, and up until his marriage to Sarah Winchester in 1925, was subject to occasional bouts of self-doubt and loneliness. His tether to Iowa was so much stronger than he had anticipated; his loyalty to Grinnell and particularly to professor Payne, his mentor on the faculty, called him back; so did his memory of the New Hampshire hills in the autumn and Walden Pond, where, when he was working in the Boston slums for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, he would go for solitary refreshment. Nor did Jim's short stories and verse bring him the wider readership he needed. He had always yearned to be a poet and from boyhood he had written reams of verse; at its best it held a nineteenth-century charm and sincerity but rarely that fine edge of distinction which he brought to his short stories like "The Forgotten One" and his essays --- and of the latter he sold only enough to pay the more pressing of his debts. Hall's love of people saved him from depression and on the island these were his dependables: Chin Foo, the Chinese moneylender who helped him when he was "stony"; Harrison W. Smith, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, long resident in Tahiti, with whom he talked books endlessly, particularly those of his great models, Conrad, Lafcadio Hearn, and Wordsworth; Robert Dean Frisbie, a young American beachcomber whom Jim bailed out of trouble and encouraged to write; and Captain Viggo Rasmussen, on whose trading schooner Hall could always find a berth. These, his letters from home, and always Nordy, gave him buoyancy.

A voyage to Iceland --- the opposite end of the earth --- did not pull him out of his rut or provide the source material for the book he hoped would defray the cost of the trip, and after his marriage Hall was really hard-pressed. He must have been very grateful when in 1927 Nordhoff proposed that they join forces again, this time to write a novel about the Lafayette Escadrille. Nordy had already tested his wings in two books for boys, The Pearl Lagoon, based on his own early life in Lower California, and The Derelict, both of which had sold quite well under the Atlantic imprint; his hero, Charles Selden, had grown old enough for the war, and what was more natural than that he should be a pursuit pilot in their old squadron, embodying the adventures --- Hall's combats and nearly fatal crash in the trees, Hal Willis's famous escape --- which they knew to the last detail?

This was their first venture in fiction; the chapters were evenly divided between them and were written apart --- I can still see the typing, Nordy's a rusty brown, Hall's a newer ribbon and black --- and then tested and revised in the Aina Paré workroom. They adopted a style which had many points in common; they were equally fluent in the war idiom and dialogue; Hall did the better description, Nordhoff the faster action. Editorially my most constant problem was in the opening paragraphs of each chapter; since they were writing apart they invariably spent too much time reidentifying the characters before they embarked on the new episode. This was best cured by cutting and by tying the transitions together, which I did in Boston. When Falcons of France was submitted, they asked that their chapters be separately initialed in the table of contents, and this I overruled since it broke apart the very unity they were after. In this book for the first time they succeeded in fusing their creative abilities and I did not want any reviewer drawing invidious comparisons as he might have done had the chapters been initialed. They were coming to realize how much each supplemented the other: Hall's self-distrust evaporated in the face of Nordy's confidence, his tough realism and his forward drive, and when Nordhoff was tempted to push the narrative too fast, Hall would intervene to give something of the horizon view, the elevation of the spirit which is also part of the pilot's experience.

Falcons of France was serialized in Liberty, for which each of the team received $5000. Hall's share was gone in six months. He had been troubled about the health of their only son, Conrad Lafcadio Teheiuri Hall, and when in 1930 he and Sarah brought the ten-year-old boy to the Mayo Clinic it was to discover that he had contracted amebic dysentery; the cure would be long-drawn-out and there was the strong likelihood that the boy after his recovery would not be able to resume year-round residence in Tahiti.

With this sadness in his heart and knowing that Sarah's second child was on the way, Jim went East to New York to see if he could sell the play, The Empty Chair, which he and Nordhoff had devised about the Falcon's aviators. The play-readers liked it, but the producers were unwilling to gamble on any more war material. Then a friend, James Curtis, said he would back it. Hall's decision, expressed in a letter to Mr. Sedgwick, is characteristic:

The public appetite for war plays seemed to me jaded, and much as I should like to see our play put on, I could not bring myself to accept Jim Curtis's generous offer to back it. I felt that he would not have an even break for his money, so I talked him out of the business. I had a hard time persuading him to withdraw. It was really an amusing situation: there was he more than willing to go ahead, and actually urging me to let him do it; and there was I talking against my own interests! The worst of it was that I was by no means persuaded that the play would not succeed. Perhaps it would have made a real "hit." But my reasoned judgment said "No," and I am glad that I remained firm in my decision. If the play had been put on and had failed, Curtis would have stood to lose $15,000 or $20,000, and although he assured me that he could easily afford to lose that amount, I would have felt very badly had he done so, and so, I am sure, would Nordy.

This prompting to resist the gamble of Broadway at a time when he was broke, and when I was shopping out his short sketches to the Boston Globe and the Christian Science Monitor at $12.50 apiece, is Jim to the bone.

Falcons as a book, in its gay French jacket painted by Julian Peabody, was slowly attracting attention. A second printing, then a third, were sold out, and on Jim's return to the islands we urged that the collaboration be continued. Not a boys' book this time but a mature novel --- and surely the theme was to be found out there in the Pacific. The answer came from Hall's library. In 1916 when he was an aviation cadet at Buc, he had picked up in a Paris bookstall Sir John Barrow's factual account, published in 1831, of the Bounty mutiny, the most famous rebellion in the British navy. Barrow had written it down as the Secretary of the Admiralty and when one day Hall quoted from him, Nordhoff caught fire. The scene is described in Hall's autobiography, My Island Home:

I saw in my friend's eyes a Nordhoffian glow and sparkle which meant that his interest was being aroused. "By the Lord, Hall!" he said. "Maybe we've got something there! I wish we could get hold of a copy of Barrow's book."

"I have it," I replied. "I bought it in Paris during the war."

The result was that Nordhoff took the book home to read and the next day he was back, and he was in what I can only call a "dither" of excitement. "Hall, what a story! What a story!" he said, as he walked up and down my veranda.

"It's three stories," I replied. "First, the tale of the mutiny; then Bligh's open-boat voyage, and the third, the adventures of Fletcher Christian and the mutineers who went with him to Pitcairn Island, together with the Tahitian men and women who accompanied them. It's a natural for historical fiction. Who could, possibly, invent a better story? And it has the merit of being true."

"You're right, it is a natural," said Nordhoff, "but . . ." he shook his head, glumly. "It must have been written long since. It's incredible that such a tale should have been waiting a century and a half for someone to see its possibilities."

Jim was right: not Melville nor Stevenson nor Conrad had ever applied himself to this long-vibrant theme.

Their first task was to project themselves into the British Navy at the time of Nelson, and this they did with the help of Mr. Sedgwick and by assimilating the mass of eighteenth-century literature which at his direction was shipped out to them from London. Charts and the deck plan of the Bounty were tacked on the wall of their workroom; Lieutenant-Commander J. A. B. Percy, R.N., who had been helping with the detective work, went on to build an exquisite and accurate model of the Bounty which we purchased for them. The Bounty was an armed transport of 200 tons, which had been fitted out for the purpose of transporting a cargo of young breadfruit trees from the South Seas to the West Indies; the stern quarters were converted into a greenhouse, the living quarters for officers and men were more than usually cramped, a circumstance doubtless contributing to the tension aboard ship. Nordhoff and Hall read all the contemporary accounts of Captain Bligh, and they studied the log of his 3600-mile voyage in the open cutter in which he and the men loyal to him were set adrift; they read of the court-martial and of the confessions of the recaptured mutineers which were sent to them in photostats from the Admiralty; they read and were shocked --- Hall in particular --- by the brutal discipline, enforced by the lash, which then prevailed in the Royal Navy. Imperceptibly this absorption of the lucid, ordered prose of eighteenth-century England, falling on the inner ear, formed their style for the new book.

Nordhoff began; he was to carry the tale through the outward voyage; he would draw the portraits of Captain Bligh with his harsh temper and of Fletcher Christian, the second in command who repeatedly tried to intercede for the men. All this would be told through the eyes of young Midshipman Byam. Nordhoff would give the impressions of the seamen as they entered upon the almost untouched beauty of Polynesia, and of the love affairs which bound both Christian and Byam to the island. This, of course, he was perfectly qualified to do, for through his wife and his father-in-law Nordy had come to acquire a word-of-mouth knowledge of Polynesia before the white occupation.

Hall took up the story at the outbreak of the mutiny, early on the homeward voyage. He was responsible for the mutineers' return to Tahiti and the secession when they began to quarrel among themselves under Christian's leadership; he would describe the arrival of the Pandora, the ship which was sent from London to capture the mutineers; he would tell of its shipwreck and of the eventual court-martial of the survivors, the execution and the ending.

But as the book came to be written these boundaries tended to disappear. In the Aina Paré, they read aloud the chapters to each other, and there were frequent interruptions. Jim kept pausing to describe and to wonder; Nordhoff would grow impatient to keep the narrative moving, and it was inevitable that they should work in and out of each other's pages as their spirits prompted.

Thus in the chapter where Byam surprises Tehani at the pool, it was Nordy who went too fast, and Hall interposed. It was not enough that Byam should see her in her loveliness; they must swim together, and there must be provocation before the surrender. The scene could not be taken swiftly, and in the end it was Hall who wrote it in three times the space of Nordy's original scene.

This process of interruption and expansion reveals the complete confidence they had in each other, and it also explains why it was so difficult for either of them to initial --- even for my personal copy --- those chapters for which Hall was finally responsible in the Bounty Trilogy. It is enough to say that their contributions to these three books and to The Hurricane, the novel which followed, were in equal strength.

When the manuscript of Mutiny on the Bounty reached Boston in the early spring of 1932, t did not take us long to realize that we had a book of exceptional beauty and one which drew a striking contrast between the golden age of Polynesia and the tough brutality of man to man which existed aboard Bligh's ship. It was a big novel, and perhaps its length was responsible for Horace Lorimer's decision not to serialize it in the Saturday Evening Post. But our confidence in the book was sustained by the judges of the Book-of-the-Month Club who chose it for their October selection, and when this was announced, the bidding began in Hollywood. Paramount seemed keenly interested but backed away when they estimated the production costs if the shooting was to be done in the South Seas as the authors insisted. Fox Films continued to bid, and as I reread today the messages which passed between Brandt & Brandt, who were acting as the authors' agents, and our office, I am amazed at the figures even though this was at the very bottom of the depression. Fox bought the book with a down payment of $1000 against a final selling price of $12,500. What a figure for a film in which Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh was to play the finest part in his career, and in which Clark Gable as Mr. Christian and Joan Crawford as Tehani made new reputations! These negotiations which I relayed to Papeete by cable left the boys, as Hall said, "dazed," but they recovered promptly enough to ask that we wire some of their new royalties to put their good Chinese friend and banker back on his feet again.

Insecurity was not new to them; the depression did not deflect their interest in the eighteenth-century mutineers. With hardly a day's pause they went to work on the sequel of what happened to the mutineers after they had set Captain Bligh, and the eighteen men who remained loyal to him, adrift in the open boat. The mutineers were still in possession of the Bounty and still under the nominal command of Fletcher Christian, the acting lieutenant who had led the uprising. The rebels soon began quarreling among themselves. The more indolent remained in Tahiti, where, in time, they were tracked down by H.M.S. Pandora and taken back to London to be tried for their lives. But the more audacious Mr. Christian, with eight of the crew and eighteen Polynesians (twelve women and six men) sailed away in the Bounty in September of 1789 for an unknown destination. The Pandora could not find them and no word came; for eighteen years they were given up for lost. Then in February 1808 an American sealing vessel, Topaz, in need of water sent the longboat ashore to an uncharted, supposedly uninhabited rocky-tooth, and there on the plateau of Pitcairn Island they discovered the remnants of Christian's colony, a colony of many women and English-speaking children presided over by the last living survivor of the mutiny, Alexander Smith. So much for history.

What had happened on Pitcairn was a bloody race riot, and the team had a hard time in bringing it into focus. When the mutineers had deposited their stores, their livestock, guns and ammunition on the uplands of Pitcairn, they destroyed the Bounty and locked themselves in. But there was a natural antagonism between the whites and those they called "Indians" and even more between the men who had wives and those who wanted them, and when this was exacerbated by a virulent homebrew made from ti roots, there could be only one result. In the ensuing riot every man fought for his life, and only one, who had been wounded and hidden by the women, survived.

Nordhoff and Hall had planned to tell the story in the third person by omniscience, but as murder followed murder the narrative became too sanguinary and repetitive. When they had finished 65,000 words Nordhoff threw up the sponge.

"You will receive the first thirteen chapters of Pitcairn Island, by this mail," he wrote on May 22nd. "Hall and I agree that it is no good, though we differ strongly as to why. If you could tell us precisely what is wrong with the story, and why, one or the other of our opinions would be confirmed and we should be able to go on with it immediately having agreed to abide by your word. Please go into all the detail you have time for, as this is damned important to us."

When I read the fragment I had to agree. It was much too full of bloodshed for either interest or sympathy. Walking to the office one morning soon after, I had a clue. I had been thinking of the American ship Topaz, and of what a surprise it must have been to the boatswain when with his crew he toiled up the path to the plateau, there to be greeted by that incredible colony. There must have been a feast, and while they were eating and afterward the white-bearded patriarch, Alex Smith, would surely have told the American sailors how they got there and of the fighting which almost wiped them out. He would have told only as much of the final tragedy as he could have seen before he was wounded, rolled up in the matting, and hidden by the women, and his telling of it would have been softened by time and by loyalty. If the boys related the story through his eyes it would hold warmth and a certain pathos.

I outlined all this in my next letter to Tahiti, and the suggestion broke the log jam and they began to rewrite; but that Nordhoff still had his misgivings he expressed to me in his letter of September 10, 1933:

. . . The 65,000 words we have done will have to be scrapped ---not a sentence or a paragraph can be used. Yet even now, I am far from convinced, as is Hall, that Smith can tell the story as it should be told. I believe old Shakespeare himself would have had to reflect for a moment or two before sitting down to dash it off. It should be told, I think, in a robust, bloody, and slightly pornographic Elizabethan fashion, but the meat would be too strong for the women who seem to buy about 80% of all novels. To romanticize it and tone it down as we tried to do, goes against the grain --- mine anyhow. It is not a story of ladies and gentlemen, but of waterfront wenches and coarse red-blooded seafaring men, who loved carnally, hated lustily, and murdered one another in the cheerful manner of the renaissance. Infidelities, poisoning and raw severed heads were humdrum to them. Well, all we can do is our best.

Meantime, in the two months while they were waiting in despair over Pitcairn, they had been impelled to write a short book, a clear, cool little gem, the story of the hazardous trip in the open boat which brought out the best of Bligh's leadership as the cruise of the Bounty had brought out the worst. He had piloted the outcasts 3600 miles to safety, a feat of hardihood and navigation for which, like Lindbergh, he was proclaimed throughout Europe. Here the boys had only his log to work with --- supplemented, of course, by their knowledge of the islands through which he had threaded his way; and it was a work of imagination to describe the enormous fortitude and the near-death which was endured in that frail boat, twenty-three feet long, with a beam of six feet nine inches and its human cargo of nineteen thirsting men. They wisely told the story through the eyes and apprehension of the acting surgeon of the Bounty, Thomas Ledward, who by training would be best calculated to notice every change in the behavior and psychology of the suffering seamen.

For Pitcairn, as I had done earlier with each of the other books, I sent out to the authors seven or eight pages of typewritten reading notes and suggested corrections which they would annotate, accepting or rejecting as they saw fit. My notes ran like this and I am picking at random:

There was no air mail to Tahiti in those days, so I had to wait two months for their corrections which came back in bulk, and in one envelope from Hall was this note which I cannot quote with any attempt at modesty:

I believe that you were born to be a publisher. You must, somehow, have sucked in printer's ink before you had a tooth in your head. What amazes me, in a man who has such an appalling number of typewritten pages to read, is your gift your genius I had better say --- for taking such pains in reading. No smallest slip on the part of an author escapes you. In considering the larger aspects, you are able to keep details in clear focus behind them, and busy as your mind, and hands, must be, you find time to put an unerring finger on weak or shoddy spots in a manuscript however beautifully glossed over they may be. I doubt whether many publishers have this dual gift, so valuable to the writers whose work passes through your hands.

The Bounty Trilogy is as alive today as when they wrote it. I put it in the very front rank of American historical fiction, and so I think will readers to come. The financial returns were solid but not spectacular. Hall's half, as much as he could spare, went into a Boston trust fund; Nordhoff used his to acquire real estate in Tahiti, but it speaks for the longevity of the books that the Trilogy, with illustrations by N. C. Wyeth, has earned as much for the authors' families since their deaths as it did while they were alive.

The team next devoted themselves to The Hurricane, a book for which I have a particular fondness since it was dedicated to me. Here again the writing was equally divided between them, and here again there was a magnificent film for which they were fairly paid. This was the last book they were to do on their high plateau. Teamwork as sensitive and as difficult as this cannot be sustained indefinitely, and I think Nordy would wish me to say that in their collaboration after The Hurricane he deferred more and more of the work to Hall. Jim never mentioned this to me, but I could tell from our correspondence that it was so. Nordy's marriage was going on the rocks. He was harassed with grief and at this point the drive had to be Hall's.

Young Conrad Hall was in school in California, and his presence there was an incentive which brought Jim back more frequently. He would turn up in that wide-brim, cream-colored Texas hat which some friend had given him and a small overnight suitcase holding the barest necessities, and yet always among them gifts for his friends in Boston. Guava jelly which Sarah had made for my wife and pink pearls for my daughter Sara. He constantly made plans for one last plane trip around the world, and he once got as far as Boston on the outward leg, but his tether worked both ways, for a long-distance telephone call to Sarah and his daughter Nancy reduced him to tears and he canceled the flight.

No Pulitzer Prize was ever awarded to Nordhoff and Hall, and for twelve of their twenty years of writing together they were unrecognized and in debt. Jim carried the load almost alone at the end, and he was doing his own books too: his book of seafaring fantasies, Doctor Dogbody's Leg; his novel Lost Island, which had its origin in Nordy's long siege of sea blindness incurred when he was fishing with his father-in-law at sunrise; and the Tale of Mowie, the legendary romance of how the islands were settled by adventurers from the mainland of Asia.

Nordhoff died in Santa Barbara in 1947 and Jim wrote:

"Now that Nordy is dead, I write in a vacuum, so to speak. There is, actually, no one here to whom I can appeal for criticism and advice, and as I read over my stuff I often get deeply discouraged and disheartened. I wish that you might have time to give me some criticism in detail."

And he urged me again to visit him in Papeete as they both had with such tempting invitations in 1934.

In 1950 he came home for his Fortieth reunion at Grinnell, and the college delighted and embarrassed him by making him a Doctor of Letters. He had been troubled by a rather painful numbness in his left leg during the long flight, and when he came on to Boston he had a foreboding checkup at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He was warned that it was arteriosclerosis and that trouble was ahead and his one thought was to get back to Sarah. He said little about it to any of us at the time, and the bright spot of that visit --- for me --- was a luncheon for him at the Tavern Club attended by some of his old friends in aviation: Harold Willis, Charlie Codman, Paul Rockwell, and myself. The talk went back to the Lafayette Escadrille and to those gay spirits who had made it the unique squadron that it was. And I remember Hal Willis at a pause in the conversation leaning across the table and saying with that shy bark of his, "Jim, there was one thing about you which we all felt at the time, though I doubt if anyone bothered to say it. You were the greatest Christian of us all."

PRIZE contests were a novelty when in 1926 we made our plans for a semiannual competition in fiction. The Atlantic Award was set at $10,000, which was big money for those days (with a purchasing power of twice what it is today), and we made it a condition of the award that the prize-winning novel should also lend itself for serialization in the Atlantic. February 1, 1927, was the closing date, and it was our guess that upwards of 500 book-length manuscripts would be submitted, a guess which seemed confirmed in the early stages by the inauspicious number of thumb-worn travelers, Westerns, honeysuckle romances of the Confederacy, stories of rumrunners, and battle scenes of the First World War which straggled into the office bearing every evidence of having been repeatedly rejected. But shortly after New Year's Day the heavens opened, and we were suddenly swamped by a deluge of fresh manuscripts. They came in all sizes, some of more than 1500 pages, some handsomely bound and insured, and some --- the most difficult to cope with --- came in installments, the author struggling desperately to get at least four-fifths of the narrative into our door before the deadline. The total count was 1117 (one contestant, I remember, submitted six), and when unwrapped, recorded and stacked on trestle tables in our largest storeroom, they looked like reading for a lifetime.

Theodore Morrison, now himself a novelist and a member of the English Department at Harvard, and I were the first readers, and it was obvious that we should have to have outside help. We recruited our wives, both of Bryn Mawr; they were known as "the Harem"; were paid, if I remember rightly, a dollar an hour, and they did their reading right there in the storage room. I also asked the head of the Boston Public Library to designate one of their reliable readers to whom we might send 200 to 300. At the outset our objective was to weed out the incompetent and we aimed to return 80 a day. The manuscripts to be declined were marked with a big "D" on the yellow report sheet and beside it, briefly, the reasons for the rejection. Manuscripts about which the reader had doubts with a minimum of hope were marked "D reread," with a fuller report, and those which recommended themselves as semifinalists for the award were reported on at length and placed on a separate table where eventually they would be read by all of us.

Of the first hundred manuscripts which we shipped to the librarian, not one, in her opinion, rated better than a plain "D." This seemed to me either bad luck or poor judgment, and I decided to check her reading. The first eight which I picked out at random were certainly duds; the ninth I noticed, as I picked it up, had at least been typed by a professional. The reader's comment said: "This is the story of a large love-making family in Canada, dominated by the old grandmother. The brothers have unseemly affairs with their sisters-in-law, and there is quite a lot about the stable, including the odor. Not recommended." I glanced at the title page, which was certainly uncommon:

And I began to read. Three hours later I was still reading. Now that I have served as a judge in more than a score of prize contests, I know that when a winner emerges it is rather like a quarter-miler breaking clear in the home stretch. Such was the case with Jalna. (The librarian, incidentally, we paid for her unimaginative thoroughness, but discouraged from further endeavor.) Jalna was the book to beat, the contestant against which all others were measured.

Jalna was indeed the saga of a passionate Canadian clan, dwelling and feuding on the shore of Lake Ontario, a family protective in their loyalty and downright in what they disliked. The grandmother, old Adeline, who ruled over them and who was ninety-nine when the book began, was indomitable and seemingly indestructible. She seized the imagination the moment she appeared on the page, and it was her gusto, her will and her pride which gave the book so much of its animation. Morrison and I were captivated by the story, as were our associates, and we passed it on with enthusiastic reports to the other judges, Mr. Sedgwick, and Alfred McIntyre and Herbert Jenkins of Little, Brown. In the course of the next two months the field was narrowed down to twelve manuscripts, and then to the six finalists, every one of which we were to publish. Jalna was the unanimous choice for the prize, and Red Rust by Cornelia J. Cannon was the runner-up.

In May I went to Toronto to represent the Atlantic at the banquet in honor of Miss de la Roche. The check had already been deposited to her account, but I carried with me a blank check in a sealed envelope for theatrical effect and the congratulatory speech which I had prepared in Boston. Miss de la Roche had invited me to tea, and I remember thinking that the apartment was rather small, perhaps because of the few large heirlooms which gave luster to the room, chief of them the oil painting of her great-grandmother which had been brought from Ireland in a sailing ship. Mazo's Scottie regarded me dourly (she was later to be the heroine of a most endearing dog book) and I was given a warmer welcome by Mazo's cousin Caroline Clement, a delicate little blonde with Watteau coloring. Mazo de la Roche herself was tall and slender, aquiline, with dark eyes and soft auburn hair. I had the impression that here was a person of remarkable, wiry strength.

This, the first of my many friendly visits to Toronto, was a leisurely one, and I am everlastingly thankful to the late Hugh Eayrs, then the head of Macmillan in Canada, for drawing me so agreeably into the circle of Mazo's friends. Hugh was her publisher and literary adviser. She trusted him absolutely, and it was he who counseled her to submit the book in the Atlantic contest when the American branch of Macmillan failed to show the enthusiasm which he felt the novel deserved. Hugh told me of the relationship between Caroline and Mazo, of how they were cousins who had been brought up as sisters --- living inseparably in the same household and, for much of the time, in a world of imagination created by Mazo. In the family drawing room the young girls would often act out the plays which Mazo had written. Their kinship, which has been vividly described by Miss de la Roche in her autobiography, Against the Wind, had its roots in the Ontario lake shore, in their love for horses and dogs and for their spicy, sometimes eccentric family circle of aunts and uncles. Mazo's father was of French and Irish descent, generous, impulsive but not successful, and when he died, the fruit farm, the last of his ventures, had to be sold, and the two girls with Mazo's mother returned to Toronto, where Caroline entered the civil service.

Then later as our friendship deepened, I came to understand how indispensable was the partnership of these two. Actually it took twelve years for Mazo to establish herself; during that period of trial and disappointment she published a volume of short stories, another of one-act plays and her two early novels, Possession in which we see her father, and Delight. In the evening Caroline read aloud what Mazo had written that day, talked it over with her, and made constructive remarks. She was a perceptive reader and her appraisal has sustained every book in its progress.

Before I left Boston I had inquired of our head proofreader, Caroline Church, who had been copy-editing the manuscript for the magazine, whether there were any points about Jalna which she wished me to discuss with the author. Churchie had a nice regard for the decencies of life. She thought for a moment and then she said, "Mr. Weeks, you know I've been troubled about the size of that house, Jalna. For the life of me I don't see how they could all fit into it, especially when Eden, the married son, brings his wife there to live. There just aren't enough bedrooms. Why don't you see if she has really worked it out." Good. This was in the days when the Watch and Ward Society had gone to extremes in banning books in Boston, and naturally I had some fun at Mazo's expense after the politesse in my speech. As I turned toward the guest of honor to make my point I saw that she was blushing, and later when we were standing together in the receiving line she said, "It was wicked of you to say what you did about those bedrooms, because your proofreader is right --- there aren't enough. We shall have to make some changes in the proofs." Ten days later when I returned to Boston I received the following note shepherding back to us the first batch of corrected galleys:

Dear Ted:

In thinking over the sleeping space in the house, I find that there should have been six bedrooms instead of five. I have, therefore, made this change in the proofs. I have also added a few words to the effect that the attic was divided into two bedrooms which in my own mind was clear.

Of the six bedrooms, Renny and Wakefield occupy one, Piers and Finch another, and the remainder are occupied by Nicholas, Ernest, Meg and Eden. When Piers marries, Finch goes to one of the attic rooms, and when Alayne finds that Eden has been unfaithful to her, she takes the other attic room. Grandmother's bedroom is on the ground floor, and the servants, Wragge and Mrs. Wragge, have their quarters in the basement. This, I think you will agree, is very snug. .

Well, there they were, all decently settled in their own beds, the original and irrepressible Whiteoaks whose doings have come to fill fourteen volumes. In the course of the serial, Atlantic readers began to claim their favorites. No one could resist old Adeline, so sudden in her rage, so eager for affection, munching her food with such relish or petting her irascible parrot, Old Boney, with his Hindu oaths. She ruled the reader as she ruled the clan despite her ninety-nine years. Of the men it was Renny, her eldest grandson, who most resembled her --Renny with his red-fox head and his lean strength, who could make any horse --- or woman --- do his bidding. And in contrast to Renny were the two artistic members of the family: Eden, the poet, romantic and clever; and Finch, the moody, vulnerable adolescent, the musician to be. These were people you could see: Uncle Nicholas with his gout which made him so grumpy; Wakefield, the youngest, precocious and theatrical, whom everyone spoiled; Piers, the stolid farmer of the family; and Rags, servant to all and doing his raddled best to keep the rambling, crowded house in order. They were charged with life. I once heard a Canadian remark that the Whiteoaks were not typical of Canada. No indeed, they are not "typical" of any region, but their family loyalty, their bickering and their zest are qualities which bind together any big family anywhere.

Mazo had no intention of writing a sequel to Jalna. While the sale of the book was climbing to 100,000 copies, she and Caroline were making plans for their first trip abroad, to Sicily, thence to the Continent, and on to England. At Taormina they met and were much attracted by a young English couple; the husband was an artist whose career had been interrupted by a serious attack of tuberculosis, his wife was caring for him and their baby daughter, and was expecting their second child that summer. They cheered the invalid with talk of a reunion in London when it was hoped that his convalescence would be at an end.

But when several months later the travelers reached England, it was their grief to learn that the artist had died of a hemorrhage in Sicily and that the wife, borne down by sorrow, had lost her life in giving birth to their son. Two infants under two years of age --- with the nearest of kin an aged great-aunt. With boldness and generosity that are characteristic Mazo de la Roche applied for the legal adoption of the children. It was a brave undertaking on the strength of her first successful book and, speaking as an editor and godfather, I can testify that the buoyancy and perennial refreshment which Esme and René have brought into Mazo's life are equaled by the love she has brought into theirs.

While they were abroad we forwarded many scores of letters from the Atlantic office, and in them readers demanded to know more about the Whiteoaks. "To whom will Adeline leave her money?" they asked. "May we know the outcome of Renny's affair?" queried a reader in Australia. ". . . Alayne, poor Alayne, pitchforked into the Vesuvius of Jalna." "I am an old lady," wrote J.H.B. from Maryland, "but I hope I shall live long enough for you to give us another Jalna book. Of course I am in love with Renny, who is a splendid man, but not without faults."

There was one technical difficulty which might prove to be embarrassing in a sequel. Never thinking that she was at the outset of an extended family chronicle, Mazo de la Roche had fixed an actual date for Gran's birthday. In Jalna she has Mrs. Wragge bake a three-tiered birthday cake with, on the side, in silver comfits, the date of Gran's birthday, "1825." Gran was in her 101st year at the close of the story which would bring us into 1926, and the book itself was published in 1927. Thus when in 1928 she began to write the sequel, Miss de la Roche found that she was limited by the calendar: the ages of all the family in Jalna were fixed and could not be altered. Most novelists like to space their incidents through one or more decades, but she never enjoyed this latitude; because of that inescapable date on the birthday cake, she has had to confine the adventures of each new book to two years at most. This has meant that except for the death of old Adeline, there could be no great climax of finality in the Whiteoak novels. Instead, we have the various members of a family going about their many private concerns, sometimes jealous, sometimes furious with each other, but always maturing; each book resolves a personal crisis --- Renny's inarticulate effort to regain Alayne's love, Finch's struggle to become a pianist and to have Sarah, Wake's passion for the stage --- with such naturalness that we almost forget the author's skill.

To write of death is the test of every novelist. In The Whiteoaks of Jalna the impending death of old Adeline supplies the mounting suspense; and as we detect the signs of her failing, we begin to worry as if she were one of our own. That final scene in which Gran has her gallant backgammon game with Mr. Fennel, the rector, is one of the most stirring that Mazo de la Roche has ever written. After Gran's death the writer said to herself, "There, this is the end." But the novelist did not know her own mind. She did not realize how completely the fierce, affectionate old tyrant had come to possess her imagination. Old Adeline's death did not settle the score. For one thing she had left her money to the most talented of her grandsons, Finch, the nineteen-year-old musician, and what was he going to do with it? Had he the strength to break away from home and develop himself as a concert pianist? And if he took Gran's money with him, would the house go to rack and ruin? Finch was turning out to be the most talented as well as the most reliable of the younger generation. With editorial curiosity, I tried to probe the future. "Finch," I wrote to Mazo, "will need to get away for study and travel abroad. Sensitive as he is he'll have a hell of a time when he falls in love. Wake will be coming to man's estate. Furthermore, I think there is something owing to Piers and Pheasant --- especially the former, who for all his stolidity has certainly shown himself a man of strength and capacity. Of course, there will be deep tragedy if for some physical or economic reason Jalna had to be given up and the family dispersed to the city. This is the tragedy that occurs so relentlessly in the States where the comfortable home in which one is born is too often turned into a filling station or apartment house before one's life is half spent." Insistent questions like these poured in from readers now as numerous in Britain as in America, and they compelled the writing of the third novel, Finch's Fortune.

It is unusual for an author to devote the most creative years of her life to writing about the activities of a single family. Mazo did her best to escape from her predicament. In the 1930s, when she was living in England, she repeatedly locked the Whiteoaks out of her imagination and went to work on new themes. I don't know how much this effort cost her; what I do know is that the Whiteoaks went right on living in the back room of her mind.

"You ought to be forced by law," J. B. Priestley said to her when first they met at a party in London, "to write a new novel about those Whiteoaks every year for the next twelve years. But," he added with emphasis, "no more about that fellow called Renny. I hate thin horsy men."

"Don't listen to Jack," put in his wife, "he's just jealous of Renny."

The compulsion to go on with the Whiteoaks came from within, and once Mazo de la Roche realized that it was unavoidable she was as happy in her writing as Galsworthy was in his devotion to the Forsytes. A dramatization was made of the first two novels, and the play which resulted, Whiteoaks, was produced in London in 1935, and played for more than 800 performances. Then it was brought to New York, where it scored a solid success with Ethel Barrymore in the part of old Adeline and Stephen Haggard, Finch to the life.

It was because of old Adeline that Mazo de la Roche decided to turn the clock back, a decision which her publishers for a time considered rather risky. How, we wondered, would readers respond to a book which showed us Gran in her early seventies and Renny a wild youngster of seventeen? Would it be plausible to go back that far, or even further to the 1850s, when Adeline was a bride and when Captain Philip Whiteoak, late of the Hussars, was superintending the building of Jalna? Turning the clock back meant that the family tree had to be projected backwards as well as forwards, every date had to be checked with slide-rule accuracy. And could Mazo de la Roche write as vividly of the past as she had of the present?

My very efficient secretary, Jeannette Cloud, became the custodian of the family tree. On huge sheets of graph paper she worked out the genealogy; she nailed down the birthdays of all the legitimate --- and illegitimate --- offspring of the Whiteoaks (one or two of them had gotten out of line); she computed the ages of the servants, the neighbors and of all the visitors the boys brought home, and as far as necessary she clarified the family relationships in Ireland and London. This became the Jalna Who's Who against which each new manuscript was checked, sometimes to the author's exasperation, mostly to her relief.

Mazo overcame our misgivings, first in Young Renny, and then even more triumphantly in The Building of Jalna, in which she showed us the young couple who had come so confidently from an army garrison in India to the wilds of Ontario to stake out their 300 acres and rear their family. Here was the living history and the heritage from which the contemporary stories derived, and if she strayed from the straight and narrow path of authenticity, there were readers --- as well as proofreaders --- to help her with the corrections. When she was writing The Building of Jalna, she chose a certain hymn to be sung by the passengers of the sailing ship. She took pains to verify the date on which the hymn was written and found it to be a year or more later than the year in which Philip and Adeline had crossed the Atlantic. "Still it is near enough," she thought, "no one will notice." But she was wrong. A few weeks after the publication of the book she received two letters, one from England, the other from Massachusetts, both giving her the correct date of the hymn.

A gentleman wrote in from China saying that she had inaccurately described the characteristics of the Dutch face. A well-known English musician set her right on several points in connection with Finch's music. This is not to imply that Miss de la Roche is a careless craftsman. It is simply to say that it is no light assignment to be responsible for the many diverse activities of a family now in its fourth generation. Each book widens the circle and it is sheer virtuosity that keeps the episodes in verisimilitude and away from the melodramatic. Here I could sometimes help.

There is nothing soft about the Whiteoaks. They blaze with anger when aroused; they live with a high emotional voltage: when Finch decides to drown himself, or Renny is tempted to choke the life out of Mr. Clapperton (who has proposed to subdivide the neighborhood into bungalow lots), the crime is but a step away. It is a real thing that could take place any minute. In their rage and in their drama, in their comedy and devotion, Mazo de la Roche's novels are, as Sterling North well says, "a blend of two great traditions, the English tradition of smooth, well-rounded narrative with good characterization and the lusty American tradition with its humor of exaggeration and its moments of irrepressible animal spirits. Probably the finest extensive work on an American family which the continent has yet produced.

"Scarcely less important than the family itself," continued Mr. North, "is the estate, Jalna, with its wide acres, rambling stables, great oak trees, lawns, gardens, and orchards. One feels certain he has explored every room of the big house from Finch's narrow corner under the sloping eaves to the disordered kitchen and pantry in the basement where Rags and his temperamental spouse prepare the marvelous dinners. Certainly one could describe to the very pictures on the walls the bedrooms of Ernest, Nicholas, and Augusta, Alayne's cool and tidy bedroom, the careless but comfortable quarters where Renny, even after his marriage to Alayne, continues to sleep with pampered young Wakefield. Downstairs is the great living room with its fireplace, the dining room with its Chippendale and Sheraton pieces, and Adeline's bedroom with its imposing and unusual bed. A cacophony of the ugly and the beautiful . . ."

It is quite impossible for me to speak objectively about an author who for more than three decades has been my very dear friend. I have had the fun of editing each one of the Jalna novels, and the pride --- and sometimes amazement --- of seeing what this sturdy, loyal family has meant to other families the world over. I have said that Mazo de la Roche's achievement makes me think of Galsworthy --- as it does of Trollope. I am too close to her to attempt a comparison in quality, but I do know that neither of them ever created more living people.

Miss de la Roche's novels about the Whiteoaks of Jalna have been translated into fifteen languages. A million and a half copies of them have been sold in the United States and considerably more than that number in Britain and throughout Europe. It is significant that their period of greatest currency was during and immediately after the Second World War when Mazo's writing carried a very special message to those who were living in exile or under domination, to those whose homes were broken or destroyed. The petitions sent to her in thankfulness by Polish prisoners now liberated, the pathetic little hand-carved chest conveying the blessing of the Balt D.P.'s, the letters from families in the Dutch underground and French resistance, the letters of inquiry from Norway and Czechoslovakia attest the hope and vitality which her books held out to others. For family fealty there is one tongue and universal sympathy.

JAMES NORMAN HALL was the most humble author I have ever worked with, and Dr. Harvey Cushing was the most exacting. I made my first bow to him in the spring of 1928 when he was Surgeon-in-Chief of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston and the greatest brain specialist in the world. He had acquired a reputation for performing miracles, and a fearsome reputation among those who worked under him; young nurses went in to his operations trembling, and there were interns who never forgot what he taught them but who hated his guts. Because of the professional demands upon him, he wrote only occasionally, but what he wrote had the fine edge of distinction and the driving force of his personality. His two-volume biography of Sir William Osler, who had been his teacher, was regarded as the definitive study of that great Canadian physician and of the famous associates at Johns Hopkins who had worked with him. Now we had accepted for publication a collection of Dr. Cushing's papers; the book was to be called Consecratio Medici, and it was my responsibility to see the manuscript through the press, to check the Doctor's corrections, learn his preferences for the binding and jacket and to make sure that there was nothing to offend him in the blurb. He took the proof-reading very seriously, had an eye like a hawk for printers' errors or a loose line, and made meticulous corrections, first in the galleys, and then in the page proofs. Nothing escaped him. I had heard that he was a perfectionist and, in his taut, decisive way, intimidating; now I knew it.

When the last page of his book had been corrected, I went up to his office in the hospital to collect the proofs and to say good-by. Dr. Cushing's reception room in the hospital was really a library: here was his famous collection of medical books, bound in vellum and calf, many of age and rarity, locked in behind the Victorian glass-fronted shelves. On top of the shelves at the height of my eyes was an assortment of his war souvenirs, tin hats of the soldiers whose skulls he had operated on, punctured by shell fragments coming up or going down; photographs of field hospitals in the quaggy mud; a medical team solemnly seated before a tent, and beside the picture a dud which had thudded close but never exploded.

As he escorted me to the door, he paused for a moment before one of the bookcases and lifted down a delicate object on a stiff piece of cardboard. It was a pair of field glasses --- or rather it was half a pair of field glasses --- which a French officer had been looking through when he had suffered a direct hit from a German sharpshooter. The bullet had smashed the glass and metal into the man's right eye and dangerously close to the brain.

This took place during the First Battle of the Marne in the autumn of 1914. The officer lived, but no surgeon dared operate until months later --- in April 1915 --- when Dr. Cushing, in an operation which took hours, and which is still one of the most notable in the record of the Neuilly Hospital, extracted the bits of the metal from the Frenchman's head. The patient survived, and here were the field glasses and the scraps of metal to show what one brain could do to save another. It was a sight to shudder over, starkly impressive to one who had seen too many wounded and dying men in France. But now it was time for me to depart; Dr. Cushing had replaced the relic, and as we started to shake hands he gave me an impulsive grin. "Weeks," he said, "here's the makings of a good book. But one that can't be published till I'm dead."

"Where?" I asked. He was pointing to a row of eight large leather-bound volumes in the bookcase beside us.

"My war journals," he said. "More than a million words, and full of indiscretion. Well, thanks for your help. Good-by."

That is not something an editor can forget. Six months later I rang up Dr. Cushing's office and told his secretary, Miss Madeline Stanton, that I would like to speak to the Doctor if he wasn't too busy. When I heard his voice at the other end, I said, "Hello, Dr. Cushing. This is Edward Weeks. How are you feeling?"

"Who is it?" he asked. "Weeks? Why, I'm feeling all right. How are you?"

"Fine," I said. "Well, good-by." And I hung up.

Another six months later I did the same thing, rang him up, and this time he was operating so it wasn't until late in the afternoon that he came to the telephone. I went through the same routine: "Dr. Cushing, this is Edward Weeks. How's your health?"

"Say, what is this?" he asked. "You've done this before. Why are you so concerned about my health?"

"Well," I replied, "you said I couldn't print those war journals until you were dead, and I want to know whether my chances are improving." I could hear the bark of his laugh at the other end of the line.

"Oh, you go to hell!" he said.

That was in 1929. When the stock market crashed that autumn, much of Dr. Cushing's savings were lost in the wiping out of Kreuger & Toll. So, although he was now in his sixties, he continued to operate on a full-time schedule and to carry on his teaching at the Harvard Medical School with undiminished vigor. For he had to recoup. In the autumn of 1932 he knew that he was entering on his last year before mandatory retirement, and he had already installed Dr. Elliott Cutler as his successor at the Peter Bent Brigham. He had hoped that the Harvard Corporation might prolong his usefulness at the Medical School, but when no special treatment was forthcoming he accepted the Sterling Chair of Neurology at Yale which President Angell had proffered to him without publicity. In effect this transferred his genius (and his library) to his alma mater before President Lowell woke up to what was happening.

If I was ever to have access to those war journals, it would have to be this summer before Dr. Cushing cleared out for good. The books, I understood, had been transported from his office to his home in Brookline, and there in June I went to pay him a call.

The Doctor greeted me in his shirt sleeves and relaxed. "We've been uprooting," he said, and the house showed it, for the rooms had already been half dismantled. "The family has gone up to Boar's Head for the summer," he said, "but I think I'll stay on here. I've got twenty years of records to sort out."

"Let me get a man to help you," I said. "Listen, I'll get a Ph.D. from Yale. You can stow him in one of the empty rooms upstairs, and together he and I will go through those journals of yours, marking the passages which we think are of general interest and which ought to be published. We'll pay for him; it won't commit you to a thing if you don't like the final result. Besides, his companionship may compensate a little for your not being at Old Bores' Head."

"Boar's Head," he said, correcting me, and then he saw I was teasing. "Well, if you want to take the risk, it's all right with me."

Yale willingly supplied me with the Ph.D., Ralph E. Collins, a quiet-spoken, agreeable individual who could type like the wind, and together we took our way slowly through those eight huge volumes, marking with white slips the passages to be copied. Dr. Cushing had served as an operating surgeon with the French in the first winter of the war, and in the spring of 1915 he visited the Royal Medical Corps in Flanders. In 1916, sure that we would be involved, he was intent on organizing a medical unit in America. With Base Hospital No. 5 he went back to the front early in 1917 and was attached to the British Army through the campaigns of Messines Ridge and during the dreadful slaughter on the Somme and at Passchendaele that autumn. In 1918 he was attached to the A.E.F. and with his operating teams he took care of most of the head wounds resulting from the fighting at Château Thierry, the Argonne and St. Mihiel.

The diary was graphic and sparky, forthright, crackling with anger or humor, full of denunciation of all that was unsanitary and incompetent, charged with compassion for those who bore the brunt of the fighting. He began operating at 8:30 A.M., and on record days he would be called on for as many as twelve major cases. No operation was of less than an hour's duration; some took twice that amount of time. There he would stand hour after hour on the little stool which gave him the elevation he needed as he worked over the unconscious soldier.

By midnight or after he would be too excited, his nerves too taut for sleep, and so, on old temperature charts, scraps of yellow paper, anything that was handy, he would write down the details, the humor and exasperation of that exhausting day; thus the piano wires of his mind were relaxed. Day after day the entries are made at "2:00 A.M." and here's how they read:

Operating from 8:30 A.M. one day till 2:00 A.M. the next; standing in a pair of rubber boots, and periodically full of tea as a stimulant . . . It's an awful business, probably the worst possible training in surgery for a young man, and ruinous for the carefully acquired technique of an oldster. Something over 2000 wounded have passed, so far, through this one Casualty Clearing Station.

Some of the journal was indeed too personal and some of it too technical; but the great passages were a spirited, magnificent chronicle of a doctor at war, and often we read and reread aloud before we could bring ourselves to move on:

Neuilly, April 29, 1915

Several unsuccessful trials this morning to extract the shell fragment by the aid of the magnet from the brain of poor Lafourcode. I was afraid to use the huge probe which they have and so determined to make, or have made, another --- of which later. We had tried every possible thing in our own cabinet and in those of the lower floors without success. Finally, while I was at lunch, Boothby hit upon precisely what was needed in the shape of a large wire nail about six inches long, the point of which he had carefully rounded off.

Well, there was the usual crowd in the X-ray room and approaching corridor, and much excitement when we let the nail slide by gravity into the central mechanism of smiling Lafourcode; for at no time did he have any pressure symptoms, and all of these procedures were of course without an anesthetic. While the X-ray plate was being developed to see whether the nail and missile were in contact, who should drop in but Albert Kocher with a friend from Berne; and then shortly a card was sent in by Tom Perry's friend, Salomon Reinach, Membre de l'institut, author of the "History of Religions," and much else.

So all together we finally traipsed into the first-floor operating room, where Cutler mightily brings up the magnet and slowly we extract the nail --- and --- there was nothing on it! Suppressed sighs and groans. I tried again, very carefully --- with the same result. More sighs and people began to go out. A third time --- nothing. By this time I began to grumble: "Never saw anything of this kind pulled off with such a crowd. Hoodooed ourselves from the start. Should have had an X-ray made when the man first entered the hospital." The usual thing, as when one begins to scold his golf ball.

I had taken off my gloves and put the nail down; but then --- Let's try just once more! So I slipped the brutal thing again down the track, 31/2 inches to the base of the brain, and again Cutler gingerly swung the big magnet down and made contact. The current was switched on and as before we slowly drew out the nail --- and there it was, the little fragment of rough steel hanging on to its tip! Much emotion on all sides especially on the part of A. Kocher and Salomon Reinach, both of whom could hardly bear it.

Or this, written when the Battle of the Somme was in progress and the wounded were swamping the Clearing Station:

This sergeant of the Machine Gunners had almost the whole of his right frontal lobe blown out, with a lodged piece of shell almost an inch square, and extensive radiating fractures, which meant taking off most of his frontal bone, including the frontal sinuses --- an enormous operation done under local anaesthesia. We crawled home for some eggs in the mess and to bed at 2:30 A.M. six hours for these two cases.

This man "Chave" queer name --- when roused from his semi-consciousness made it known that he had some precious false teeth. They were removed, somewhat more easily than was his broken frontal bone. They must have been on his mind, for I remember when rongeuring out fragments of his skull he kept muttering that I was breaking his teeth . . . He seems to be all right today, and is wearing his teeth.

There was a fierce driving dedication in Dr. Cushing which showed in his features, the long dominating nose, the blue eyes that could turn so swiftly cold or angry, the tight lips with the lines of sorrow that deepened in his cheeks after the death of his reckless and beloved son Bill ---this was the face of a driver. But beneath this exterior was a tenderness which went deep and which shows itself repeatedly in the journals. Harvey could steel himself against death on the operating table, but the death of friends was a different matter, as witness this account of Jack McCrae, the Canadian poet and physician:

January 28th, 1918. Boulogne

I saw poor Jack McCrae with Elder at No. 14 General last night --- the last time. A bright flame rapidly burning out. He died early this morning. Just made Consulting Physician to the 1st Army---the only Canadian so far to be thus honored. Never strong, he gave his all with the Canadian Artillery during the prolonged second battle of Ypres and after, at which time he wrote his imperishable verses. Since those frightful days he has never been his old gay and companionable self, but has rather sought solitude. A soldier from top to toe --- how he would have hated to die in a bed. A three days' illness --- an atypical pneumonia with extensive pneumococcus meningitis, as we learned this afternoon --- for Rhea came for me and we went out with Sir Bertrand Dawson. They will bury him tomorrow. Some of the older members of the McGill Unit who still remain here were scouring the fields this afternoon to try and find some chance winter poppies to put on his grave --- to remind him of Flanders, where he would have preferred to lie. Was anyone ever more respected and loved than he? Someone has said that "children and animals followed him as shadows follow other men."

January 29th

We saw him buried this afternoon at the cemetery on the hillside at Wimereux with military honors --- a tribute to Canada as well as to him. A large gathering of friends --- all who could get there, even from a distance: the Canadian Corps Commander with his divisional generals; General Dodds, Jack's former Artillery Commander; General Sloggett and the D.D.M.S. of our district; the Base Commandant; we Americans, with some Portuguese M.O.'s from No. 3 Canadian; all the C.O.'s and Consultants of the neighborhood.

We met at No. 14 General --- a brilliant sunny afternoon and walked the mile or so to the cemetery. A company of North Staffords and many R.A.M.C. orderlies and Canadian sisters headed the procession --- then "Bonfire," led by two grooms and carrying the regulation white ribbon, with his master's boots reversed over the saddle ---then the rest of us. Six sergeants bore the coffin from the gates, and as he was being lowered into his grave there was a distant sound of guns --- as though called into voice by the occasion. An admirable prayer by one of the three Padres who officiated. The Staffords, from their reversed arms, fix bayonets, and instead of firing over the grave, as in time of peace, stand at salute during the Last Post with its final wailing note which brings a lump to our throats --- and so we leave him.

At the summer's end, and before the family had returned from Boar's Head, Collins had typed about 45,000 words, enough for four full-length Atlantic articles. The master copy was the Doctor's, I kept the carbon. We shook hands all around and then went our separate ways. But I had left a number of slips in the big books just in case I might be asked back.

That autumn Dr. Cushing was intensely busy settling the library and himself into the new quarters at New Haven and adapting himself to the fresh regime; he must have pushed himself hard, for he was ill for a considerable period in the midwinter and early spring of 1934, I wrote to say that there was to be a German edition of Consecratio Medici and added: "There are times when I would give a good deal to be able to dip into those war journals of yours. They have the fervor and intensity which bring back the old days and make one feel twenty years younger." Perhaps this gave him the nudge he needed in his convalescence, for in July back came the manuscripts we had prepared in Brookline, carefully checked and ready for the Atlantic. He was still uneasy lest he be violating medical confidence, and he sought the reassurance of Boston medicos to whom he showed the proofs. They had no misgivings, and he got his final answer when the first of the four articles appeared in October.

Letters poured in on him from all over the world, one of the first a moving note from a veteran in Texas whose life he had saved. Friends in Baltimore, friends in England urged him to continue. Meantime, we had grown apprehensive on another score, for we knew that rival publishing houses were interested, and in the emergency Mr. Sedgwick pressed our claims:

2 January, 1935

Dear Harvey:

I really hope very much you will see Weeks. His confidence in the proposed book is complete, and he is not by profession a chaser of rainbows. To me, there is interest in the fact that during a period of five weeks, while your articles have been running, a count was made of the new subscriptions received from physicians and surgeons. They amounted to almost 1900. But even if I had no statistics at my disposal, I should be sure in a realistic meaning of the word that your war diaries would not only sell widely, but that they would take a permanent place.

Please don't let this chance go, but whatever is your final decision, this letter is simply to ask you to give an hour to Weeks.

On January 20 I made my initial visit to the big house on Whitney Avenue where I was installed with the journal in a little sun porch off the living room. Fourteen months later, after eleven visits and the exchange of 113 letters, From a Surgeon's Journal came off the press. The manuscript had grown from 45,000 to 190,000 words. Not a sentence was rewritten; my editorial touch was needed only in the preparation of an Introduction and Afterword --- and here Harvey edited me. Caring for Cushing as an author was a full-time occupation: the enormous correspondence, the give and take which engrossed us and our secretaries, was concerned, fastidiously and impatiently, with questions of propriety, typography, punctuation ("In the manuscript, Miss Stanton was apt to put a line of dashes whereas I think they had better be two or three inches of dots"), illustrations, capitalization ("In the matter of Cap, Capt., Captain and so forth it does not seem to me that consistency is necessary"), maps and libel. As the book grew, the royalty terms which he demanded rose; the contract was renegotiated three times; he never would accept the libel clause; and midway in the manufacture he obliged us to discard all galleys in the original type face and reset the entire text in a format more closely resembling a diary --- which we did at the cost of $2100.

The record of this intercourse is probably of interest only to other publishers, but I wish to set down a few of the hot points to record an aspect of editing not generally appreciated.

The Type Page. We had twice shown him sample pages and we thought we had won his approval when in came this blast:

23 September 1935

Dear Ted:

After your telephone message yesterday, I looked over the galley proofs and found so many things to criticize that I wired you last night suggesting that you hold up the printing of any further galleys until you heard from me about them. Herewith my criticisms for your information and discussion.

The book which we counted on as being 350 pages I understand has expanded to 450 pages, which is a little larger book than we had banked on. You will recall my criticism about the earlier sample sheets, that they were too open; and I think that that is even more pronounced than before on these galleys. I believe it is possible to make a far better looking page and save a great deal of space. I have an idea that we have rushed into this without sufficient consideration of trial samples; and even though it may cost something to set the thing up differently, I believe that we should do so .

27 September 1935

Dear Ted:

My grouse about the business is that we flew into this galley before actually coming to any agreement as to format. I disliked intensely the original page in the dummy first provided and didn't think that the second that was sent on was much of an improvement. After that, you got busy with a tennis tournament [I was in it for exactly two days. E.W.), or something of that sort and that's the last I heard of it until we saw the galley which I think is worse than second-class.

This grouse is not going to be cured by taking soda . . .

Telegrams were exchanged and four days later I wrote to say that I should come down the following day and that we should then "go to the mat." Who came out on top will be seen from the following memorandum from Alfred McIntyre to the head of the manufacturing department.

October 4, 1935

Mr. Scaife:

I have seen Mr. Weeks this morning with regard to Cushing's book. He had a very satisfactory interview with Dr. Cushing except that it is obvious that the book must be entirely reset. The type used for the diary date lines is unsatisfactory and these date lines must be on the right-hand side of the page. The insertion of leads in abbreviations of names, such as A. E. F., is unsatisfactory. These have to be closed up. Cushing's manuscript has so many em dashes that it becomes necessary, in order to have the book look right from his standpoint, to use en dashes instead. One or two other difficulties have presented themselves.

I have therefore agreed that we shall set new sample pages which must take care of all these difficulties, and that when we receive the O.K.'d page in writing from Dr. Cushing, we will reset the book completely and the expense of typesetting already done will be divided equally between the Atlantic Monthly Press and ourselves. We shall set from corrected galley proofs carefully marked for style in respect to the points mentioned above, thus putting the entire responsibility of having things right on the printer. The price of the book will have to be $5.00, and we shall have to make new estimates in the hope that we can afford to include 32 pages of half-tones, at least 12 maps and an end-paper map in one or two colors, since this is what Cushing wants.

When this is all settled, he will sign the contract on the basis of a 15% royalty. Mr. Weeks learned yesterday that his Life of Osler had to be entirely reset.

I hope that the sales of the book will justify all this expense and effort.

A.R.M.

The Afterword, on the writing of which, incidentally, I had taken pains.

H.C. to E.W., 7 February 1936.

. . . Now for your epilogue. I can't truthfully say that it makes me want to sit up and cheer and sing Fair Harvard. It possibly was just a flier and that you wanted us to work it up.

E.W. to H.C., February 12, 1936.

. . . I hold no brief for the Epilogue. In the words of John Keats, "I am always awkward in making a bow." It was simply my wish to indicate that after the Armistice you began to show the effects of the steady pressure under which you had been working. You were dead tired; you were fretful with red tape (as was everyone else) and very eager to get home. Having made a calculation of the expense of the war in terms of flesh, and having seen at Rheims a rather typical flash of French militarism, home you went. Correct the script any way you see fit, or omit it entirely. It's all one to Hippocrates.

H.C. to E.W., February 20, 1936.

Dear Ted:

I am sending on the Afterword for your perusal; and also a suggestion which might help balance the book since I have left in the Afterword some quotations from Walt Whitman's "Memoranda" of the Civil War which he jotted down when he was a Red Cross worker visiting hospitals in Washington. If you have never seen the book, I recommend it to you. If you approve of leaving in these two quotations, to which Osler called my attention else I should never have heard of the book, I suggest that we put in somewhere in one of the preliminary leaves, possibly, for example, on the verso of the dedication to K. C., what I have put on the following sheet.

You may not think it is necessary to put in the "Afterword" all those entries from the "Canopic," but I rather want to get in somewhere the idea of the accumulating demoralization of the breakdown that followed the Armistice and the absolutely unnecessary humiliation in the way of physical examinations and things of that kind to which most of us, officers as well as men, were put before they were allowed to land. The Base Hospital No. 5 people had a most awful time at Camp Devens, which I shall tell you about some day. If they hadn't been so effectively cowed, they certainly would have had a mutiny

Libel. H.C. to E.W., November 5, 1935.

". . . I am leery about all this business in article three about matters 'libellous or otherwise injurious.'"

He had his way and in the end we assumed the risk for libel for which the author is usually held responsible. All went well on this side, but on the day when Constable published the English edition, there was an immediate explosion in London. In his journal Harvey had remarked inadvertently that it had been raining pitchforks and his Burberry had leaked like a sieve. We had spelled it with a lower case "b," but even so the manufacturers of the famous British waterproof were not to be mollified. A "burberry" was a Burberry and no Burberry ever leaked. They sued for damages, demanded an apology, that books be recalled and that the offending page be corrected and recast --- all of which was done at our expense.

Our work together was not as fractious as it must sound. The visits to New Haven were often gay. Barbara, the youngest of the Doctor's daughters, was a debutante and a perfectly lovely one, and girl friends of hers from Brookline and Dedham were usually in attendance with Yale undergraduates swarming in and out; doctors from England dropped by occasionally to take tea and Harvey would question them about the threat of socialized medicine, and when the weather was fair Thornton Wilder and John F. Fulton might spend the afternoon with us, taking part in the croquet game which was now the Doctor's way of exercising. The circulation in his legs was beginning to give him serious trouble (the price of having operated so long standing on that little stool). I saved up stories about Boston and Harvard and the Tavern Club to tell him, and I never ceased to tease him. Generally he enjoyed it, although once I overstepped the mark. He had been the shortstop on the Yale varsity, and if I remember rightly, captain of the team. In the final game with Harvard, which was played at Cambridge, he went back under a towering fly, caught his cleats on the wooden rim of the cinder track which encircled Soldiers Field, and fell flat on his back, missing the ball to his eternal mortification. I kidded him about it one day, and suddenly realized that even after all these years, I should never have brought it up. The Harvard-Yale football game, as it happened, was only ten days away and to change the subject and because I was feeling cocky about Harvard's chances, I bet him a hat on the outcome. Thanks to the Frank-Kelley combination, he won it.

There were times when, as his health worsened, he reached out in an affectionate way to cuff and tease me. In September of 1936 he had been invited to Harvard for the Tercentenary and I had been urging him to come. He wrote:

. . . In a moment of feeling, for me, moderately lively, I wrote Fitz [Dr. Reginald Fitz) to ask if I might motor from here direct to Memorial Hall and get a seat with the Faculty as an Emeritus Prof. for the exercises on the afternoon of the 16th at which I proposed to wear a red gown and a John Knox bonnet. But the very next day I was back more or less on crutches and have now abandoned the idea.

Glad to learn that the Journal still sells though it is steadily falling off, I note, in the N. Y. Herald-Tribune's list of non-fiction. Expecting some day to have a windfall from you, I find to my horror that I spent $7000 last month on old books. So when you have a royalty check ready for me, you'd better send it, attention of Mr. Hobart W. Spring, direct to the Merchants National Bank for deposit on my Investment Account where I shall have less temptation to blow it in.

I am working on another book --- fiction list this time --- entitled "Experiences with the Meningiomas." Is that what you want to see me about?

Always yours,                 
HARVEY CUSHING

And when Warner Brothers wrote him to ask if they could consider the film rights of A Surgeon's Journal, Harvey was vastly amused:

In the same mail comes the enclosed from Warner Brothers. So far as I can see, they missed their only chance for a good talking picture and that was one afternoon on our screened porch when we were persuading you to do another galley proof and the score was about 40-30 in the last game of the set. I shall write Mr. Deakin of the Story Department that I have forwarded his letter for you to answer.

Always yours,                 
HARVEY CUSHING

On one of our last meetings Harvey had been sorting through the records of some of his more difficult cases, and I remember in particular the humbleness with which he spoke of his operations on Leonard Wood. The Colonel had come to him straight from the Philippines in the early 1900s, lopsided, unable to disengage his left hand from his trouser pocket, the victim of a brain tumor and a big one, which Harvey removed. He had not been too sure of the operation at the time, Harvey told me. "If I'd known then what I know now, I could have gone deeper," he said, "and there would have been no need for the second operation at the height of his career in 1922." He spoke in an accusing way, and I sought to divert him. The second volume of his Osler was at hand, and I turned to the passage in the summary which seems to me one of the finest pieces of Cushing prose:

Osler had the God-given quality of being a friend with all, children or grownup, professor or pupil, and what is more of holding such friendships with an unforgettable tenacity --- a scribbled line of remembrance with a playful twist to it, a note of congratulation to some delighted youngster on his first publication, a telegram to bring cheer or consolation, an unsolicited donation for a worthy cause, an article to help a struggling journal get a footing. He was sought far and wide not only because of his wide knowledge of medicine and great wisdom, but because of his generosity, his sympathy, and great personal charm.

"Never believe what a patient may tell you to the detriment of another physician," was one of Osler's sayings to his students, and then he would add with a characteristic twist, "even though you may fear it is true."

I read it aloud and added, "The guy who wrote that knew his business."

Harvey looked at me quizzically and then picked up a book by Stephen Paget, Confessio Medici, which I knew to be his favorite. "Listen to this," he said, and he began to read:

Every year, young men enter the medical profession who neither are born doctors, nor have any great love of science, nor are helped by name or influence. Without a welcome, without money, without prospects, they fight their way into practice, they find it hard work, ill-thanked, ill-paid. But they stick to it, and Heaven, sooner or later, lets them know what it thinks of them. They hesitate to give the name of divine vocation to work paid by the job, and shamefully underpaid at that. Surely a diploma, obtained by hard examination and hard cash, and signed and sealed by earthly examiners, cannot be a summons from Heaven. But it may be. For, if a doctor's life may not be a divine vocation, then no life is a vocation, and nothing is divine.