THE Atlantic is more receptive to unknown writers than any other magazine I can think of in America. The truth is that we need young writers quite as much as they need us. Their unsolicited manuscripts come to us "over the transom," tossed in and uninvited, and always one --- sometimes as many as six --will be found in any issue.

In the autumn of 1937 a manila envelope with bizarre stamps reached my desk. The letter accompanying the manuscript began: "I enclose the account of Saudin, a young Murut of North Borneo, who visited America. I was recently engaged in the struggle with home mail when Saudin arrived back at our home in Sandakan after his visit to the United States. Saudin and our 'boy,' Arusap, are brother Muruts from the same village and Saudin has always been accustomed to weekend in our back-quarters when in the vicinity of Sandakan. When Arusap interrupted my mail to tell me that Saudin had returned from my country with news of its strange doings we called him in, and my husband and I spent all morning listening to his naive but not un-wise comments about what he had seen." And it ended, "I am an American woman married to an Englishman in Civil Service, the Conservator of Forests for British North Borneo." The author signed herself Agnes Newton Keith.

Saudin, it appeared, had taken care of the wild animals the Martin Johnsons had captured in Borneo and were shipping back to the States; at the end of the voyage he had passed several months in New York City, wandering about with an "IF LOST RETURN TO" tag on his collar and marveling at the behavior of American women who in the dead of winter "did not wear many clothes except around their necks, where they wore the skin of animals."

When he was asked what he liked best of all in New York, he said "the red electric signs that run like streams of fire," and he added, "Mr. Johnson took me to eat at a place where you put money in a hole and take out a plate of food. I think this place was very cunning indeed, because the hole to receive a ten-cent piece was so small that you could not put in a five-cent piece, and the hole for a five-cent piece did not answer if you put in a one-cent piece." Saudin's experiences, so shrewd and innocent, were related in Malay to Mrs. Keith and her husband, and her translation was a happy discovery for the Atlantic.

It took six weeks for my letter of acceptance to reach Sandakan and by return post came a second manuscript accompanied by this message: "Saudin visits us occasionally, and I give him news of America. His natural niceness has not been spoiled by his travels. He does not work energetically, but why should he? His bank account will last him a lifetime, as a Murut spends money. His store clothes have been much admired. A few years ago the popular picture postal card in Borneo was Mensaring, the Murut Chief, in loin cloth. Now it is Any Munit in Saudin's borrowed New York suit." The letter went on: "The natives of this country are a saddening, maddening, lovable, heartbreaking lot. They are a gentle and courteous people, yet one from whom the zest of life seems to have been taken since the ancient rite of Headhunting has been banned by Government . . ."

I held up the publication of this second paper, since it gave me the definite hope that we had the makings of a book here and I knew that the serial would be more effective when the volume was finished. Instead of acceptance, I sent her the announcement of an Atlantic $5000 Award which we were offering for the best book of nonfiction to reach us by February 1939, and I added this encouragement:

. . . What I want you to do is to tell the story of your daily life in North Borneo so that any stay-at-home here or in England might read it with an active sense of participation. Sandakan, you say, is "ultra-conventional English." Well, so it may be to your experienced eye, but from the evidence I have seen thus far in your narratives, there are trimmings which would set your headquarters apart from most other outposts of England. The book should begin, then, with a friendly account of your headquarters, how long you have been in Sandakan, the scope of your husband's activity, the nature of your compound and its staff, and once having defined your daily orbit, you will be free to take up the strangers who interrupt your routine --- Usip and Abanawas --- and equally free to write about those excursions to Sulu Sea or that longer jaunt up the Kinabatangan River . . . I want you --- "Agnes Newton Keith" as you sign yourself --- to be the connecting link, and thus your presence in every chapter is required, whether as referee, partisan, or merely an observer.

"To journey together is happiness," she had once written ---indeed, this was to be the theme of the book --- and she gave me fascinating itineraries of the journeys she made with her husband: "We plan to leave here in three weeks for a trip into Interior North Borneo. From the border of Dutch Borneo we will go in native canoes up the Kalabakang River to its headwaters, then cross the watershed on foot, and come down the rapids of the Kinabatangan River in small native boats. This country is the last stronghold of the headhunters, and has not been visited by white men since about 1880, at which time a punitive expedition was directed against the headhunters for their activities. We will see natives who have had no contact with civilization, living their own way of life. I can see material for stories which should come from the trip in time. Might a more direct journal form of the trip also be acceptable? No white woman has been in the part of the country I mention. I do not mention this from the Adventuring White Woman point of view, because all the initiative in these trips is my husband's and I just go along. But I do find in comparing notes with men that I see different things in the native villages from what the men see."

Of course I wanted the journal of that trip for the book, and I wanted other more homely details too. Where did she go for a hair-do in Sandakan? (To the Chinese, she replied.) How did Harry protect his rare books on botany from the damp heat? (They had built an inner room, she said, which could seal off the effect of the rains.) How many Europeans were there in Sandakan and what was the attitude toward the Eurasians and the other racial groups on this, the third largest island in the world? This was deliberate needling, but I was eager to have her finish the book for the contest, and I was not sure she could make it in the intervening year for she seemed to be laboring under difficulties, whether from the heat or illness I could not determine.

Her manuscript arrived in the closing days, and as the outer wrapping with the gay, even more exotic stamps was removed, here was a mound of white paper bound up in a sarong of striking brown and blue design. (We were to reproduce that lovely pattern later for the binding.) The top page bore the title Land Below the Wind and beneath the last page, separated by tissue, were pencil sketches of Sandakan, the houseboys, the affectionate apes who were the family pets, a tent in a dripping jungle and the author propped up in a cot, writing underneath an open umbrella --- casual drawings which conveyed so surely, often humorously, what Agnes wanted the reader to see.

The title was beautifully euphonious, but whatever did it mean? Land Below the Wind, we were told, was the translation of the Malay name for Borneo. The use of the southwest monsoon for trading led the ancient navigators to divide Southern Asia into lands "to its windward" and others "to its leeward." Borneo, in the latter group, was thus the "land below the wind." This point being clarified, the judges went on to read.

As I have indicated, this was a book of episodes, some of them laid in Sandakan, which was the capital of North Borneo, others deep in the forests or in remote native villages. When Harry went on his official expeditions, Agnes went with him, eager, protesting and usually vulnerable. The trip to Timbun Mata Island held moments of "immoderate joy." "On the other hand," as she says, "there were also the leeches, pig-ticks, mosquitoes, sand flies, and red ants, and the night when our palm leaf hut blew away in a changing monsoon, and had to be reassembled leaf by leaf from the jungle." Some of the episodes were better than others, and the time sequence was not always clear; what bound the book together was Agnes's ability to make do under any conditions, her extraordinary sympathy for the common lot of mankind, no matter what color the skin, and the trust and fidelity which the Keiths reposed in each other. Of the three finalists, Land Below the Wind was the most absorbing and refreshing; it was different from any other book we had ever published, and I was elated when it won the Award by a vote of 6 to 1.

All this time I had envisioned Mrs. Keith as a short sturdy little woman in a felt cloche and heavy tweeds, an image derived from my concept of those who dwelt in the periphery of the Empire. The Keiths flew to America for a six months' leave in June of 1939; Harry stopped off at Victoria, British Columbia, to see his ninety-year-old mother, and Agnes after a family reunion came East for the Atlantic reception, the press interviews, and the Prize. When she stepped off the plane at the Boston airport I had my first sight of that slender, long-legged Californian whose high cheekbones and dark almond eyes reminded me instantly of Queen Nefertiti, and I could tell from the admiring glances of the reporters and from the way people turned to look at her in the restaurant that we had here one of a kind.

On this first visit to Boston she spent the mornings working with me on the manuscript as we fitted it together chronologically, and the afternoons in her room inking in her drawings.

She bought a trousseau of new clothes, for she and Harry were planning to spend the late summer and early autumn at Oxford where he was to take a refresher course. Bit by bit she pieced together for me the mosaic of their background. They had met at the University of California where Agnes was majoring in English and where Harry Keith in his thorough English way was soaking up everything he could learn about the tropical rain forests and the agriculture of the Pacific. After her graduation Agnes went to work as a cub reporter for the San Francisco Examiner. Here she did well until one bright Saturday noon, as she left the building, she was attacked by a dope addict with a two-foot iron pipe who had made up his mind to kill the first person to emerge from the Examiner doors. He very nearly succeeded. The concussion with its aftermath of blinding headaches (these were what interrupted her writing) invalided her for nearly three years. When she was at last well enough to travel, she went abroad with her brother Alfred, an engineer who had just graduated from the California Institute of Technology, and it was on this trip that she again encountered Harry Keith, once of Berkeley, now a young forester, home on his first leave after four years in North Borneo. Their attraction for each other, which was irresistible, and their determination to marry hastened her recovery. Her family was dubious that she could stand up to the demands of the life in the tropics, but Agnes seemed to thrive on the prospect. She went out to Borneo as a bride with the eagerness of an American, uninhibited by the traditions of colonial civil service. The headaches had lost their hold, she told me, and as she was caught up in the adventure of her new life her writing became obligatory.

The exhilaration of the Atlantic Award was the high point, for the Keiths never did get to Oxford. The outbreak of the war cut short their holiday; they were recalled to Sandakan and Agnes took back with her in her trunk the Atlantic trousseau, much of which she was never to wear.

The success of Land Below the Wind, which we first serialized in the Atlantic and which was then chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club, I reported to her long distance. The royalties we arranged to pay her over a series of years, for she had serious misgivings about the future, but the first check assisted in the arrival of Henry George Keith II, who was born in Sandakan on April 5, 1940. "The producing of young George," she wrote me, "who spent his pre-natal days travelling byplane, by bus and motor, by train and by ship, through war zones and blackouts, in a violently unorthodox manner much disapproved of by consulting obstetricians, has about monopolised my creative energies for this last year. However I have literary hopes for the future now that young George has his toes dug firmly into life on his own account."

From the first Agnes had no illusions about the Japanese invasion, and after the fall of Singapore she was under pressure to return to America with her baby. Instead she built up a life saving kit of drugs for George, Harry and herself, and in an article which reached me shortly before Pearl Harbor she foretold how the three of them might retreat by canoe into the interior to hide away with friendly natives in the jungle until the Japanese had been driven off. We published the paper, "Before Invasion: A Letter from North Borneo," in the Atlantic for February 1942, and the week after it appeared Agnes and Harry and George were prisoners of the Japanese; when the Japs landed, the Keiths like the other officials were at their posts.

For three and a half years they survived in separate prison camps, Agnes and baby George with the other white women and children, Harry with the other males from Sarawak and Dutch Borneo. What happened to them during their long ordeal we were not to know until later: the humiliation and the filth, the bodily depletion due to malnutrition, the spirit-cracking degradation of captivity, and the torture (at one time the Japanese questioned her for several days, and during this episode they broke her collarbone, dislocated and strained her left arm, and broke a rib) could hardly be imagined by us who were free. Three times the curtain was lifted by prisoner-of-war postcards from the Imperial Japanese Army, the first to her mother, the other two to me:

Xmas Day, 1944

Dear Ted:

Quote Sherman reference war. What about Red Cross? Resources this country limited. Our one hope peace soon. All three ragged, tired, homesick, but surviving. Love,

AGNES & HARRY & GEORGE KEITH

Internment Camp, Borneo

 

May 18, 1945

Meet husband occasionally. Health moderate. George fine, energetic. My new professions: truck gardening, white wing, privy engineering.

Fed up with war. "Hope deferred . . ." etc. Love,

AGNES, HARRY, GEORGE KEITH

Internment Camp, Borneo

On the eleventh of that September they were liberated by the 9th Australian Army Division after Sandakan had been burned by the Japs and reduced to rubble. This is what Agnes wrote me as they waited for the prison gates to open.

Kuching, Internment Cam
Sept. 11, 1945

Dear Ted:

At last! Peace & freedom! We hope to be completely free in a few hours time, as the Nipponese are expected to evacuate Kuching at 12 noon today. There are no words to express our feelings. War is Hell --- Peace is Heaven. Thank God, Thank God, the end has come. We have been fed by parachute from Australian Red Cross for 2 weeks now. I have put on almost a pound a day. Harry is also improving in strength. George is fine. Ate his first piece of bread & butter with terrific excitement. First parachute dropped bread. We showed it to children with wonder. "That's BREAD!" Children had all forgotten what it was.

There is a GOOD story here. I long for time & paper to finish it. I have much material & notes, etc. Of course much difficulty in hiding everything while under Nip. rule. When I arrive U. S. shall CONCENTRATE. Home soon as possible. Nobody knows yet. Love to you --

AGNES & GEORGE KEITH

The Japanese commandant of their camp, for whom at the close Agnes had pity, committed hara-kiri; the prisoners --Agnes was down to 87 pounds---were fed and doctored; Agnes eventually wangled them a passage by plane to Manila and thence by Army transport to Seattle.

So the Keiths came home. Six years had elapsed since they had last seen California. Agnes's mother had died while they were captive; Jean their daughter had grown up into a life of her own; she and Agnes's beloved brother Alfred were there to greet them; and there was a second happy reunion with Harry's mother, whose age was now edging up to the century mark but who had been holding on indomitably until her son's return. It was a small family circle contracted even further by Alfred's tragic death from a heart attack within the month of their return. Grief-stricken, the Keiths went to the hospital for the treatment and surgery they had so long needed.

In October with her strength building up Agnes again flew into Boston bringing with her the notes for a new book written on tissue and other scraps of paper which she had hidden in George's stuffed panda and in the tins which she buried. She was much thinner and the strain she had lived through had left its mark, but the eyes still held the same eagerness and luster and her spirit was intact. Her fingernails which she had lost through malnutrition were only beginning to grow in and her fingertips were so sensitive that she could not type for more than an hour each day. She stayed with my associates Dudley and Jeannette Cloud, and her cogitating was done in a quiet room they put at her disposal. At the office we had plenty to talk about, for the manuscript pages she had brought with her, occasionally and very naturally, went into excessive detail. There were passages that read like overstatements and the fact that they had actually happened as she said did not lessen my criticism that they lacked the power to convince. Agnes was quite aware of this herself and of something deeper: she was writing against war, not against individual cruelty, and she summed this up when she said, "All I want is to forget talk of revenge, and get down to the basic fact that as long as we countenance the great atrocity of war, it is ridiculous to protest at personal atrocity." So we sifted and read aloud and tried by the eye, now modifying, now letting the stark realities stand until the pages spoke for her as she intended, and with magnanimity.

Three Came Home as it emerged that autumn is a unique book. No other woman in any country has so perfectly preserved the undaunted will and the compassion of the spirit in defeat. The last page of the book is the most eloquent, and it should be quoted for those who have not read it:

I know now the value of freedom. In all of my life before I had existed as a free woman, and didn't know it.

This is what freedom means to me. The right to live with, to touch and to love, my husband and my children. The right to look about me without fear of seeing people beaten. The capacity to work for ourselves and our children.

The possession of a door, and a key with which to lock it. Moments of silence. A place in which to weep, with no one to see me doing so.

The freedom of my eyes to scan the face of the earth, the mountains, trees, fields, and sea, without barbed wire across my vision. The freedom of my body to walk with the wind, and no sentry to stop me. Opportunity to earn the food to keep me strong. The ability to look each month at a new moon without asking, How many more times must this beauty shine on my captivity?

I will never give up these rights again. There may be more to life than these things. But there is no life without them.

I must also quote the beginning and the end of a letter which she wrote me on her return to Victoria in November 1946.

Dear Ted,

I am wanting to thank you for all that you and the Atlantic family did for me in Boston --- but I find that I just can't do it. Unless you know what I was before you can't possibly know what you did for me.

My secretary, who had typed out my original almost illegible diaries for me, has been reading the typescript sent from Boston of the finished manuscript. She is pleased with me --- and disappointed with the book; she says the starkness and terror are gone from both of us. That's what Boston did; took the starkness and terror out of me, and made of the facts a readable book. I hope I haven't sacrificed too many principles by the way. And if I have --- well, it's something to be a human being again . .

My dear Ted, again thank you for my pleasure in Boston. To come home to the Atlantic, the only home and family in my own country that I now have, was everything that a homecoming should be ---and something to remember dearly when I am again in exile.

And for your help on my book I also am at a loss to thank you sufficiently. But if I didn't know you were so damn good, I would never forgive you for cutting out some of my favorite vulgar phrases!

As it proved Harry Keith was actually back in Sandakan and hard at work less than six months after his release from the Kuching prison. The compulsion which took him there Agnes explained in a letter written shortly before his departure. The book could not go to press until we had received her final additions, and the last of the illustrations, and here is her accounting for the delay:

Harry may go at any moment. Just waiting for the High Commissioner at Ottawa to get him a seat on the next push-bike to the orient. Fortunately, there do not seem to be many boats, planes, submarines going to Borneo just now. How wonderful if there was never another one!

As soon as Harry goes I will get down to work. But at the moment --- well, one must live sometimes. It will appear ridiculous to anybody else that two middle-aged persons can be madly in love, but there you are. There is nothing like prison life to make married life seem good. After 3-1/2 years with 280 females I center all my affections on your sex.

I guess the reason Harry is going back is because he is English. If you see his face when somebody remarks philosophically that England is finished, and the British Empire a thing of the past, then you know.

Also in Borneo we had many Asiatic friends who risked their lives, sometimes gave their lives, to help us. We can get no news of these people now. Harry wants to ascertain their fates, and help those whom he can help. Those are his reasons for going --- But as for me, I couldn't possibly go for any reason yet. I just become ill at the thought.

Agnes followed Harry out to the East in July of 1947 after the publication of Three Came Home, and after she had spoken at Irita Van Doren's Book and Author Luncheon with an intensity which moved and stilled that vast audience. She went with dread. Harry had flown up to Hong Kong to meet her, and when she went ashore with him, her nerve came back.

I arrived at Sandakan on September 2, having left Victoria on June 26. Coming back here with Harry, after a month of happiness together, subdued the ghosts of my past, and it wasn't as bad as I feared. We have a glorious location for our shack, surrounded by sky and Sulu Sea on the very top of a hill, and I like it.

To my surprise I find that the tropical beauty, the wildness, and the primitive people of Borneo enthrall me again. So much so that I want to write another book . . .

In 1950, after four years of reconstruction, the three Keiths came home on leave. Agnes brought with her the manuscript of her new book, White Man Returns, and after perusing it in Boston I flew out to Seattle where we spent one forty-hour day in a bedroom of a Seattle hotel with Harry stretched out and drowsing beside us while at the desk Agnes and I went through it page by page.

There was need for haste and not only for the book. The Korean War had broken out and North Borneo had been calling for Harry to come back immediately. It was a wrenching decision, and most of all for Harry who had been considering the possibility of teaching in a school of forestry. This, of course, would hold the trio together. If they went, it would reopen scars which were just healing; it would force them to leave George at home alone in Canada for schooling; and it would expose them to the new hostility which was breaking out in "Asia for the Asians," a hostility which had already resulted in the assassination of a British official known to them both.

At the day's end we dined on "New York T-bone steaks," which always seem such an absurd item for a Western restaurant, and afterwards they escorted me to the airport. As we waited for my flight to be announced Agnes drew me apart. We stood there looking at the Indian gewgaws and Alaskan souvenirs which were on display and suddenly I noticed that there were tears in her eyes. "Ted," she said, "we are going, and I am very afraid. If anything should happen to us, will you please look after George?" The eyes and the pressure of hands can only acknowledge a trust like that.

Two years later at the behest of the United Nations the Keiths moved on to the Philippines to take part there in the reconstruction and the revival led so magnificently by Magsaysay. Their extended tour of duty there opened up still another window on the Pacific, and it was here that Agnes wrote Bare Feet in the Palace, growing out of her living knowledge of the Philippines. Today, still under orders from the United Nations, the Keiths, with George as a young assistant, are in Libya, where for three years they have been devoting their skill and energies to the problems of that impecunious but hopeful and developing country.

This is a century when in America it has been fashionable to deride colonialism and those who bore any part of the white man's burden. The dedication of the Keiths and their heart-testing decision to go back when they could so understandably have retired from the field is unselfishness beyond the call of duty. The Keiths have been doing in the Southwest Pacific what Dr. Schweitzer has been doing in Lambaréné, and what Barbara Ward and her husband, Sir Robert Jackson, have been doing in Ghana --- devoting their skill, their encouragement, and their farsightedness to the faith that what men hold in common is so much more important than that which divides them.

EVERY editor must have back of him a president and a partner who will give him the trust and the latitude which he needs. Trust and latitude are indispensable if an editor is to make the experiments and the changes which his times require, and I was very fortunate to have back of me Richard Ely Danielson, for a kinder, fairer man never lived. When Dick and his wife Barbara became the proprietors of the Atlantic in 1939, the publisher, Donald B. Snyder, and I were in the midst of renovations. The magazine had been losing ground all through the depression years. The newsstand sale had dropped to less than fourteen thousand copies a month. The contributors --- too many of them---were in the higher age bracket and they were all of them underpaid. The format which had been designed in the '20s by the master hand of Dwiggins was out of date. We needed new blood in our own veins and we needed to find a sizable body of younger readers. Any periodical that has lived to a great age, and the Atlantic was then over eighty, must be subjected to a periodic checkup and the process can be hazardous.

The Atlantic had always been printed on a soft uncoated paper such as you would find in any good book, and on this paper we could not print fast enough for economical production. Now the Graphic Arts Unions in the Rumford Press, which does our printing, were asking for another raise (they have had five during my editorship) and the only way we could meet it was to get off the obsolete presses and change to a tougher, thinner paper which could be sped through a hot-ink rotary press at the rate of seven thousand copies an hour. The less time we were on the press the better. The Atlantic had always been hand-stitched. It was an expensive form of binding but it made the magazine pliable and easy to handle; now Don found a wire stapling device ---it was just as secure, just as supple, and it saved us $2000 a month. The Atlantic had a table of contents cover, a listing of the contributors and the departments against a buff-brown background. Mr. Sedgwick had stepped up the color to a Chinese red but the magazine still had a sameness of appearance which was a handicap on the newsstand and in the home. People could never tell at a glance whether this was an issue they had read before, and it is fatal for a magazine to be taken for granted. But a magazine's cover is an index of its character and the problem before us was whether we could alter ours in a way to make it more attractive without impairing the quality which was our trade mark. We worked over this for years. Don Snyder set up a trial run in three Midwestern cities, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, and St. Louis. For ten months special photographic covers, the best picture we could get of our leading contributor, were transposed on the copies destined for these three cities. The comparative sales showed conclusively that the biographical cover had a much stronger drawing power than our traditional table of contents, for these special copies outsold the regular magazine at better than three to one.

These were only a few of the alterations which we believed would rejuvenate the Atlantic. The size of the page was enlarged so as to accommodate the advertising plates prepared for Time and Newsweek --- when at last the agencies decided to place them with us. Dwiggins devised a new format with more attractive title pages and with decorations to break up the somber columns of type. Don took the initiative for most of the physical alterations and I for the change in the contents; I was bird-dogging hard for new contributors, I was paying more for our contributions (borrowing against the future readers), and by 1947 my annual expenditure for manuscripts was double what Mr. Sedgwick had spent ten years earlier (it is three times today). In all these changes we drew on the advice and the reassurance of Dick Danielson, who was wary of change, and we were talking to a professional, for in his editing first of the Independent, then of the Sportsman, he had lived with rising costs. He shuddered when some of our decorative covers did not pan out as we had hoped: "Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego," he remarked when we showed him the engraver's proofs of Clarence Randall, the president of Inland Steel, painted against a fiery steel furnace, but when the cover with the profile of T. S. Eliot outsold any other we had placed on the newsstands, and when we featured a painting of Robert Frost leaning on his fence in Vermont, smiling quizzically at the onlooker, Dick knew and we knew that we were moving in the right direction.

Dick brought to our editorial roundtable a profound knowledge of American history; the Revolution and the Civil War were his favorite epochs, and Washington, especially the young Washington, appealed to him. The loneliness, the immense stamina, the iron self-discipline, the forethought about the developing West, and Washington's careful husbandry of Mount Vernon --- these Dick appreciated far more closely than most of us. He knew the battles of the Civil War by heart, and when he talked about them, which he enjoyed doing, his hero worship of Lincoln and of Lee, of young daredevils like John Pelham and Will Cushing, touched the mainspring of his sentiment. Dick had served in France in Army Intelligence in the First World War and under Colonel Percy Black in G-2 in the Second; he had had a hand in the planning of the North African invasion and had gone to Dakar as an aide to Admiral Glassford. Out of this had grown his respect for the armed services and a veneration for our leaders in the high command. He was a patriot in the real, rare sense of that word and his patriotism had its roots in Connecticut where his forebears had founded the village of Danielson. The best of his short stories, "Corporal Hardy," "Laylocks," and "Grandma Robinson," have their origin in the memories which were implanted in him in his Connecticut boyhood.

He had the leanings of a scholar ---he taught at Groton immediately after his graduation from Yale --- and the classics were never to lose their luster for him. In the autobiographical "Grandma Robinson" he draws the character of his grandmother and tells how in her old age she made him learn the Odes of Horace as she herself had learned them from her father. She had no patience with Caesar's Commentaries with whose hateful, meticulous bridge Dick had been struggling in school. She said: "I suppose you want to spend the rest of your life building bridges?"

"I said, 'No, Grandma, no!' It was inconceivable to me, even then, that any human being or domestic animal would have trusted him ---or itself to any bridge built by me. It would probably have been constructed of straw and some form of moss, and under the pressure of any creature weighing more than five ounces would have collapsed in fearful ruin. I simply could not see myself as a bridge builder or construction engineer. Nothing in my unduly prolonged afterlife has led me to change this opinion so precociously adopted. But Grandma was not satisfied; 'Fools,' she said, 'can be hired to build bridges, but you must think for yourself; you must study and know and do." That passage catches them both, the firm old Puritan and Dick who even at twelve could regard himself with such whimsical self-deprecation.

He grew up to be a broad and muscular six-footer, powerful enough for the tackle slot, first at Penn Charter, and then on his freshman squad at Yale. He claimed that he was never good at games and I don't think he liked them. At New Haven, where he was a member of the Class of 1907, the lectures of William Graham Sumner the historian and the lectures and talks which he had with Chauncey Brewster Tinker were what he most prized. He was elected to the board of the Yale Lit as his classmate, Sinclair Lewis, was not, and those in college at the time, so I have been told, rated Dick the better writer. My informant, Charles Seymour, added, "We have never forgiven Dick for not writing more."

There are some in every generation who light up in action and in conversation the flame they might have kindled in their writing. Dick was the best of company whether at a hunt breakfast or cruising with his older friend, William Amory Gardner, or in a fishing camp with those master fly-fishermen, Drs. "Chubb" Newell and William Ladd, and Richmond Fearing. He loved life, he enjoyed the company of older men, as they enjoyed him, and he was much in demand. In his middle years and especially during his decade as the editor of the Sportsman, what he wrote was spurred on by the needs of his magazine --- editorials, articles, accounts of race meetings, dog shows, and the Kentucky Derby. It was his gay, vigorous taste which made that periodical the beauty that it was until the depression drove it to the wall, and so often it was his gay humor which brightened the text. The National Amateur Championship was played on the famous links of the Country Club in Brookline in 1931, and six weeks before the event Dick arranged a match between Francis Ouimet, who had scored his greatest triumph on the course, and Powell Cabot, who was the business manager of the Sportsman and a pretty average hacker. Dick walked around with them, solemnly making note of Ouimet's affinity with par and of Cabot's aberrations. The paper which resulted was the perfect way of introducing distant readers to the test that was coming and the laughter in it made it all irresistible.

When the Sportsman had to be given up Dick, whose spirits were badly bruised, turned for solace to his own writing. This is the period in which he wrote his short stories, "Corporal Hardy" and "Laylocks," which were about the Civil War, and "Martha Doyle" and "Banbury Cross," which were dedicated to the horses he had ridden and loved in the hunting field. In each case the narrative springs from the well of sentiment, not sentimentality, which lay deep in Dick, and which he had allowed the years to grow over. These were reprinted at the time, and twenty years later when we placed "Corporal Hardy" in the Atlantic anthology it delighted me to find that readers immediately responded to its undiminished emotion and integrity. Had it not been for the war which called him to Washington and away from this creative period, we should certainly have had more of Dick's stories for he loved doing them. And this was almost the last season of his good health.

He was a tired man when he came back to us in 1945, thin, war-weary, and he showed the effects of his months in the tropics. He had been laid up in a hospital in Dakar with malaria and a high fever, and I remember his telling me that among their rather scanty reading matter they had two copies of the Atlantic, both from 1938, which had been read from cover to cover until the covers had fallen off, and in each of which was a story of his. At Arlington Street he took hold where he had left off, resuming his administrative duties as our president, reading hard for the magazine and reviewing for us at essay length the war books which were then in spate. His comments were crisp and salty and to the point. When Hanson Baldwin sent us a longish manuscript dealing with "Our Worst Blunders in the War," Dick wrote:

Very strong for this. Baldwin assembles all the major mistakes as no one else has done. Besides, he speaks objectively, whereas most of the other commentators on strategic errors, etc., have been interested parties, Sherwood, Eisenhower, Stilwell, Churchill, etc.

I think all his strictures are sound, although I am too ignorant on the subject of General MacArthur to know if Baldwin's pretty severe criticism is justified or not.

The book needs editing. The text is lucid but has a good many minor mistakes. Second, I think the arrangement of his argument should be studied. For instance he outlines the four false premises and then proceeds to discuss False Premise No. 2. Some adequate marking should indicate in the text which premise is being discussed. Also would put "unconditional surrender" ahead of MacArthur.

If used as a book, a good foreword by some top Brass would be helpful.

Two long installments in the A.M. and the book to the Press. Pronto.

R.E.D.

Commenting on a short paper by Raymond Swing on "Unconditional Surrender," he wrote:

"The phrase gave great anxiety --- it was carelessly thrown off by F.D.R. --- and maybe it worked a long time good. This is a classic example of F.D.R.'s frivolous and careless speech, seized upon as an expression of reasoned policy. Vote yes. R.E.D."

We found ourselves in a long-drawn-out argument with a Washington correspondent about an article threatening doom which the writer kept enlarging until it had lost most of its initial point and force. Each time it came back I asked for a new set of opinions which finally prompted Dick to write: "Haven't I written my little heart out on this goddam piece already yet? Have I got to read it again? R.E.D."

Our readers in the back room were much taken with a long, avant-garde literary essay involving the eccentric John Mytton. It told, among other things, how Mytton never hesitated to bite ferocious dogs when they snarled at him, and how, while driving in a two-wheeled gig, Mytton innocently asked his companion if he had ever been upset in one. No, said his friend. "What!" replied Mytton, "never upset in a gig? What a d----d slow fellow you must have been all your life"---and up over the bank they went and wham! When the manuscript was shown to Dick, he would have none of it.

"Mytton --- Mytton," he said, "everybody knows about Mytton. Why, I was Mytton!" -the last phrase uttered with a plaintive reminiscent glow.

On another occasion at an editorial meeting Dick had been communing inwardly while the rest of us debated over the merits of an overly nice biographical portrait of John Ruskin.

Dick woke up. "What Ruskin needed," he remarked quietly, "was a good kick in the pants." And there was the time when we found ourselves caught up in a never-ending biography and while it was in progress Dick went off to the hospital for an operation. When he returned we were still at it. "Isn't this the last installment?" he asked. "I can't believe that anyone wants to know that much about anybody."

In the years that followed Dick was dragged down by internal suffering and by an illness which for a long time defied analysis. He underwent innumerable tests and continued to do his manuscript reading for us in a succession of hospitals, until at last the surgeons at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania made the correct diagnosis and, in a dangerous, prolonged operation, removed his pancreas. It was touch and go but we knew he was on the safe side when in answer to our anxious inquiries came this characteristic message in his own hand:

Dear friends:

I won't "tell you about my operation" --- a dreary story for all except the teller. But I file an objection against the assertion that I am an Iron Man. Charles Morton sent me a nice friendly letter congratulating me on my iron qualities. Nothing --- and please forgive me --- could be more ironic. I seem to share, along with horned pout and some of the more sluggish snakes, a physical disinclination to expire. In other words I am hard to kill. But there is nothing steel-like about my performance. I feel like an angleworm impaled by Mr. Weeks, drowning and gesturing in a feeble and unbeautiful way. This body is such a worn out, patched, re-relined and made over garment that I don't believe Morgan Memorial would accept it as a gift, but it's all I've got and I'll go on living in it as long as there's a spark left in the ashes. My metaphors are more mixed than usual, for which I beg your indulgence

He returned to us a semi-invalid living on a precarious diet and a bushel of pills each day (85 by actual count), susceptible to insulin shocks but undaunted. He was in constant pain. It is pitiful for friends to see one they love reduced. Dick was knocked out by an insulin shock one day as he was leaning over my secretary's desk. I happened to be standing by and I caught him and we slid slowly to the floor together just missing the formidable corner.

I felt then how gaunt and vulnerable he was. But watching Dick brave life, with crutches and his grin, brought us much closer to him.

In the ten-year reprieve which was granted him he did some of his best writing, his clearest thinking. He encouraged his friend John Hutton, the Englishman, a fellow invalid who had lost the power of his legs but who was an artist with the fly rod, to do a book for us on trout and salmon, and I quote the opening paragraph of Dick's introduction as a shining example of his humor:

During three successive seasons on the Miramichi River in New Brunswick it was my good fortune to see and to admire the author of this book as a salmon fisherman. During the first two seasons the river conditions were atrocious: what water there was fairly steamed. In fact I am not sure that it was not dry. In the third year the river looked very handsome indeed, but the September run of fish failed to materialize and the salmon which had summered in the river were dark and sullen, and paid no attention to the assortment of flies which I --- and the other anglers --- hurled at them from dawn to dusk. Except to Mr. Hutton's. These they continued to take --- as had the low water fish of previous seasons --- with a steady, persistent, monotonous regularity. This unjust preference of his lures might have caused in us a deep anger and hatred toward Mr. Hutton, if he had not been so modest, so generous with his flies and other equipment, and so frank --- when questioned as to the methods he followed and the technique of his art. He did not volunteer advice to an unsuccessful angler, but when such an unhappy wretch desperately queried, "How do you do it?" he explained with patient good humor exactly how he fished in various pools and why.

Injustice always infuriated Dick and the more he considered the costly, headstrong, futile strikes, some of them engineered by tiny minorities, to which America was recurrently subjected, the more he believed that they were the Achilles heel of our democracy. For months he worked on an article which we finally published in 1947 under the title of "The Right to Strike." It was clearly thought and forcefully argued, the principles back of it were undeniable, and it brought him an enormous correspondence from readers the country over. Here is the heart of the argument in which he shows the depth of his concern:

. . . Our common purpose in living and working together is, I suppose, to achieve a kind of civilization which permits a maximum amount of fairness and equality of opportunity, a maximum of compassion toward the handicapped, and a hope of reasonable happiness for all. This is an immensely complex and intricate business; it involves all manner of concessions, of give-and-take; it involves injustices and their rectifications, advantages and disadvantages which must be equalized. It is almost a miracle that it succeeds, here and there, in existing at all. An orderly city street where robbers and murderers dare not tread, where lights shine and houses are heated, where children walk in safety to school, where milkmen deliver milk and postmen deliver mail --- this phenomenon, which we take for granted, represents a coordination and cooperation of human effort so widespread, an integration of divergent interests so involved, as to stagger the imagination. It is a condition possible only where private interests are subordinate to the public good.

If certain members of society combine to dim and extinguish those lights; if, as a result of their action, houses are cold, children are at the mercy of the hoodlum and the thug, and enforced unemployment stalks the streets, those members of society have committed a crime against the civilization of which they are themselves a part. They have exercised a right which ceases to be a right and becomes an agent of anarchy.

Not only labor leaders and members of militant unions, not only the writers for PM and the Daily Worker, but all men everywhere, owners of property, white-collar workers, managers of businesses, all of us, must think more clearly before we invoke our particular rights or prate about human rights in general. Let us consider always what the unlimited applications of an individual right may involve before we push our argument to the brutal absurdity of an attack on society in general.

A better method of settling disputes between labor and management in the public services and public utilities and in the vital industries and services, a better solution, must be found than the paralysis of the strike, local or national. It must be found because that method is intolerable and contrary to the public good.

A paper he took particular pleasure in writing was his essay appraising the fifth volume of Douglas Southall Freeman's George Washington. It deals with the skillful and fortuitous concert of power at Yorktown; it gave Freeman's and his own estimate of Washington's leadership in the field, and it revived a scene which was surely one of the most affecting in American history. In these words:

. . . Peace had been declared, the treaty signed; the British were preparing to evacuate New York, taking with them the unhappy and embittered Loyalists. In due course, while the last of the British warships and transports were still in the outer harbor, Washington entered the city and, having completed his duty as a soldier, saw the civil authorities take over; it only remained for him to say farewell to the small group of officers who accompanied him before resigning his commission in person to Congress.

Mr. Freeman is at his best in describing the infinitely touching scene in Fraunces Tavern. Washington's composure and iron self-discipline for once broke down. Tears were blinding him. "I cannot come to each of you," he said in a faltering voice, "but shall feel obliged if each of you will come and take me by the hand." Chance fixed it that in the absence of Nathanael Greene, the soldier best entitled to be first among them was nearest at hand --- Henry Knox, the man who had brought the cannon over the ice from Ticonderoga, youthful father of the artillery corps, the one senior officer of whom it could be said that in eight years of service he had not given his General an hour's needless concern. Knox stepped forward silently and held out his hand; Washington extended his own, but as he looked into those honest eyes and remembered what Knox had meant to him, he could not say farewell with a handshake. Impulsively he put his arms around Knox and, weeping, kissed his Chief of Artillery. Once done, this had of course to be done with all, from Steuben to the youngest officer. With streaming eyes, they came up to him, received the same embrace and passed on. Even the most talkative was awed. Not a man had the bad taste to attempt any expression of thanks or of admiration. "The simple thought," Tallmadge wrote long afterwards, "that we . . . should see his face no more in this world seemed to me utterly insupportable."

That scene in the Fraunces Tavern was one which Dick lived in vicariously; it was almost as if he knew the men in that line who came up to embrace the General. I have heard him characterize them and their achievements, and I believe that he treasured that farewell because of the fundamental loyalty it revealed. I used to lead him on to talk about such things in our evenings at Tihonet, the little trout club in the cranberry bogs at Wareham where he still fished when it was a miracle that he could fish at all. Even after both his hips had been broken he managed somehow to scrabble down the banks and endure for an hour the bow seat in the small aluminum canoe. It was his last touch with the out-of-doors and he loved it.

In the evenings we sat before the Franklin stove, bourbon in the glass and the lamplight falling on the water-colors of the bogs which Frank Benson and Ralph Gray and Bob Bellows had done in their day, and on the laughable mementos anglers always seem to collect, and Dick's mind would rove back to the night at the Tavern Club when coming in late he had almost assaulted Waddy Longfellow with a beer bottle, mistaking for a burglar the little figure crouched at the roundtable, sleeping it off after the lights had been extinguished; back to Dakar and to the Inauguration in Liberia when the flags of the United Nations, which fluttered above the reviewing stand and which had been painted by the schoolchildren, suddenly released their colors in a cloudburst and Dick in his dress uniform found himself inundated with vermilion; back to Marseilles in 1918 when he had requested and been refused permission to cross the Spanish border and kill the German agent who was directing the submarine tracking of our transports. "I knew where he was to be found, and I'd have killed him," Dick said simply, and I believe he would.

One morning at Tihonet I had driven the car to the upper reach of A.D.M. bog and was unstrapping the boat from the rack while Dick with his rod and crutch went limping down to the brook. I thought I heard a thud and when I turned he was on his knees propped up with his left hand, while with his right, tip up, he was playing a heavy fish. I came running. "Not a bad fish," he said, looking up with that beatific smile. "I wish you'd been here to see him take it."

THE quest for new material is as arduous as it is unpredictable. The Atlantic has prospered under those editors who traveled far and hard and has been most precarious under those who stayed put in Boston. New York does not attract any such galaxy of writers as are found in London, and Hollywood for all the money lavished on visiting authors will never produce half as many good books as Concord. The creative minds in America today do their writing either at the universities which are our centers of patronage or in those regions which are most conducive to their work. And what is true of established writers is equally true of beginners: you find them in teaching or advertising or journalism, in any number of jobs that will pay their way and still keep them in touch with a typewriter. Usually they are far to seek, and for an editor like myself who is searching with one hand for new books and with the other for those ideas and issues which press upon the American conscience and which manifest themselves so differently in different parts of the country it is obligatory to travel. I average about thirty thousand miles a year; I have lectured in forty-six of the fifty states and shall never lose my zest for the all-season exposure to this country. I am simply thankful that I do not have to carry my blankets with me as did Emerson when he made his lecture circuit. During one of my absences Bennett Cerf, on a visit to Boston, called at my office and learning that I was away said to our receptionist: "You tell Mr. Weeks that if he stayed home more often, he'd be a better editor." Bennett was teasing, for his peregrinations are only a little less than mine, and he knows as well as I that there is no substitute for hearing what the other fellow thinks --- and laughs at ---on his home grounds.

Sometimes I come on talent at the end of a long journey, sometimes it is unexpectedly close to home. Sometimes it is just a big idea ---and my luck to be there when it sparks; sometimes it is the first third of a manuscript for which the writer needs reassurance and financial aid. In these initial encounters the editor's role is to appreciate the situation and to think quickly while he listens.

In the spring of 1933 I spoke at Worcester and at the end of the talk my friend Esther Forbes, the novelist, introduced me to the new Director of the Worcester Art Museum with whom we were going to have cocktails. Francis Henry Taylor, with his ample girth, merry brown eyes and fine hooked nose, looked like someone out of a Renaissance portrait, and his talk was captivating. He sat us before a tall glass funnel of martinis which he stirred and poured, and while his charming wife Pamela spread the cream cheese I found myself soaking up with my cocktails an account of J. P. Morgan the Magnificent as an art collector, the like of which I have never heard. Here were the Italian dealers who lay in wait believing they knew Mr. Morgan's whim; here was their skulduggery with which the work of art was extracted from its impoverished owners, and here finally was the boldness with which Mr. Morgan himself sized up the deal. A moment later we were in Mr. Morgan's dining room watching the effect his paintings had on his guests, other empire builders like Frick and Hill, who strove to emulate. This talk opened up a whole new world to me and I said, as any editor would, "But this is wonderful stuff; it ought to be in a book. Why not a History of Collecting in America, beginning with the earliest museum in Boston and coming straight down through the Empire Builders, the Armory Show and Mellon?" I overstayed, it was too much fun not to, but I had his promise when I left.

The Worcester Museum shone with a special incandescence under the direction of Francis Henry Taylor; the exhibitions attracted national attention, and it is no wonder that he was eventually called to New York to be the Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There, the book which had begun as a gleam in the glass began to take form. Francis's research and reading notes were compiled through the dictaphone, and the related sections came into focus as they were revised by hand. It was a far vaster work than we had first contemplated, and there was cutting to be done if we were to fit the big text within a single volume; to his surprise Francis discovered that there was no authoritative history of collecting in Europe, no account of the great European collectors and of how their masterpieces had passed from hand to hand, from country to country, following the flow of gold, until they came at last, some of them, to the New World. So he had decided that his first volume, The Taste of Angels, would begin with the breakup of the Roman Empire and follow the great conquests, the court favorites, and the fluctuating fortune which made now Rome, now Florence, now London, now Paris the capital of art, down through the conquests of Napoleon. A huge undertaking for so busy a man, and a superlative and comprehensive book he made of it.

After fifteen strenuous years in Manhattan in which under his cultivation the Metropolitan flourished handsomely, Francis hankered for Worcester and the time for reflection. His gay spirit had turned somber, he was deeply troubled about the state of Europe and very evidently in need of refreshment. He asked me if I thought he could supplement his reduced income by steady writing and I was sure he could. The next book, covering the century from Napoleon through the Armory Show of 1913, beckoned and there were articles we wanted him to do for the magazine, chief among them his spirited and affectionate Letter to Bernard Berenson, for which he made a special trip to Florence, shortly before B.B.'s ninetieth birthday, and a second magnificent essay, "The Summons of Art," which I ordered for our Centennial.

When we lunched together in the summer of 1957 Francis told me that the lectures he had been giving at the Harvard Summer School were really a roadmap of the new book. "I've got the title for it," he added with his irreverent grin. "'Mummies, Millionaires, and Masterpieces.'"

"You're having fun with it?" I asked. He said yes, and that he expected to have the opening chapters ready to show me by Thanksgiving. First he would have to go to the hospital for a small operation; it had been worrying him, no, it wasn't serious, but he had kept putting it off and now was the time. Perhaps not even Pamela suspected that time would cut him short.

Francis Taylor's writing was a spring which Esther Forbes led me to at precisely the right moment. The idea for Roland Hayes's book came from my life insurance agent, Herbert Sargent. Herbert as a young man had studied for the opera in Germany. And he still sang for pleasure and, informally, with Mr. Hayes. "He's a remarkable person," Herb told me. "You know, his mother was a former slave, and at first she opposed his singing, thought it would land him in a saloon singing for quarters. He has made his way against all the old prejudices, building up his repertoire in Europe and through his study of African music --- it is really a big story, and I think Roland is at the point where he'd be willing to talk."

Mr. Hayes, when I called on him at his home in Brookline, was only mildly interested. "But I've got so many other things to do first," he said with his modest laugh. "All my concerts, and then I've been making notes for a new opera, and this summer I'll have my teaching to do." We were seated in his dining room where we were being served a delicious meal in the mid-afternoon, for he had to sing that evening. From where I sat I could see over the living room mantel an oil portrait of an elderly Negro woman with a shawl over her shoulders. "That's my mother," said Roland. "We used to call her 'Angel Mo'.' She's the person to write about. Traveled with me on my tours, cooked for me, did my laundry, gave me courage when I was down. She was the greatest person I have known." From that and subsequent meetings it became clear that Roland's autobiography would have to wait for a fortuitous moment in his career, for a time when he would be in a relaxed and expansive humor, and even then he would almost certainly need an amanuensis. The problem for us both was eventually solved by MacKinley Helm, the art connoisseur and writer who was Roland's near neighbor and friend. Mac persuaded him to talk his book as they were summering together in Maine, and the text, spoken in the natural rhythm of a born musician with an individuality Roland might not have been able to impart with the pen, was fitted together chronologically and then opened up and amplified when Mac read it back to the author. As Roland promised, it was as much the story of Roland's mother as it was of the singer, and this we stressed in the title, Angel Mo' and Her Son, Roland Hayes, by MacKinley Helm.

In the autumn of the book's publication, I received a request for Roland to appear at an autographing party. "Good gracious," he said, "I couldn't say anything before all those women."

"Of course you can," I said. "I'll ask you questions, and you'll sing your answers," and on that basis he agreed. I asked him three questions: What was his mother's favorite song on the program when she first heard him sing at Symphony Hall? And he sang it. Then I asked him what was the most important of the new songs which he added to his repertoire in mid-career after his original concert manager had said that he would book no more concerts for him. And he sang it. Finally I asked him to sing the German song with which he quieted the huge hostile audience in Hitler's Berlin after twenty minutes of hissing and catcalling. Roland had intended to open with a group of spirituals, but after being greeted by the hostile demonstration, he walked over to Mr. Boardman to change his program. And he sang Du bist die Ruh.

These books were surprisingly close to home. Ved Mehta's Face to Face, on the other hand, came to me at the end of a transcontinental trip which landed me on the campus of Pomona College in Claremont, California. Pomona, which is the Swarthmore of the West Coast, is one of my favorite small colleges, and its president, E. Wilson Lyon, a dear friend.

Lunching with him and the faculty after my lecture on campus in the midwinter of 1953, I was told that they had a young Hindu student in their sophomore class who was quite an exciting boy. He had been blinded by meningitis at the age of three. He had been studying in this country since he was fifteen, and he had come to Pomona because of the state law in California which provides $1000 for blind college students. Ved used the money to pay his classmates to read aloud to him, and during the summer vacation of his freshman year he began dictating to a classmate the opening of his autobiography.

Ved's first chapters were typed, and I took them with me back to Boston. Reading them, I learned that Ved's family came from the Punjab and that during his boyhood and until they were driven out by the Partition they were well-to-do. Ved's mother was convinced that the Indian medicine men could restore the boy's sight; his father, who was a Western-trained doctor, knew otherwise. Ved himself was brought up in the big family compound with his brothers and sisters; he learned to ride a bicycle even though he could not see, and not until he was twelve did he begin to feel a sense of deprivation. Then he was left behind when the others went to school, for in India little provision is made for education of the blind.

At the time of the Partition, Ved and his family lived in terror of the Moslems, and eventually they were stripped of their property and driven into exile. Then Ved persuaded his father to let him study Braille at the rehabilitation center for the Gurkhas who had been wounded in the war. As he learned Braille, he also learned the addresses of the American institutions for the blind, and on his own initiative, and in fractured English, he wrote asking if they would accept him as a student. He received more than thirty turn-downs before at last the Arkansas School for the Blind said yes, for $600 they would accept him. And so alone at the age of fifteen he flew to this country. He had never used a knife and fork before, and on the long flight, although he could smell the food the hostess was passing, he was too ashamed to ask for anything but orange juice.

I sent Ved an advance royalty and urged him to come on to Boston in the summer holidays to continue his work on the book, and so he did for the next two summers, thumbing his way without cane, or dog, or sign. In all I think he thumbed his way across our country seven times. Ved's boyhood in India, his struggle for self-mastery, the liberation that came to him in Little Rock, and the maturity which came to him in Pomona, he was to describe for us so eloquently in his book Face to Face. Every word of it was dictated and read back to him, with many sensitive suggestions from Nancy Reynolds, our managing editor. We tried to preserve as much as possible of the Indian imagery, and since the text was overlong we persuaded him to cut. But there was a reason for every sentence he spoke. He kept the meshwork of the book clear in his mind, and gave in very reluctantly and only when he agreed that it was for an improvement.

At Little Rock, where he called himself "a donkey in a world of horses," he learned "facial vision," and how to walk between spinning mobiles whose currents of air warned him to duck. At Pomona he learned self-assurance and the self-confidence that comes with knowledge, and he found such friendships that he was tempted to spend the rest of his life here. But Ved Mehta is as outgoing as Ralph Bunche. He believes that he has a job to do home in India, and when his graduate studies at Balliol and Harvard are at an end, I believe it will be a good job. His capacity is incredible. The summer of his graduation from Pomona when he was living in Cambridge finishing the American section of his book, he also found time to take a course on the modern novel at the Harvard Summer School which required the reading of forty-two novels, only five of which were in Braille.

All during that summer we had been searching for a title. Across the Bridge or Crossing the Bridge were the titles in Ved's mind, but I didn't think either one of them was quite good enough; the problem must have been pressing on my thoughts too, for I remember waking at two in the morning with the words of Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians echoing as if they had actually been spoken: "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face." And there it was.

So the trail leads to Bective and County Meath for the short stories and novels of Mary Lavin, to London and to Montegufoni for the big anthology of poetry by Dame Edith Sitwell, and for that lustrous five-volume autobiography by her brother Sir Osbert, a work which, as Evelyn Waugh says, is "surely a monument of our time"; to Abingdon for my annual spring visit with John Masefield, and to that other Abington under the great beeches where I spent an unforgettable afternoon with Sir Max Beerbohm; to Dorset, the Hardy country, to visit Geoffrey Household; to Southwest Harbor, Maine, where I have walked the bright September mornings with Walter Lippmann, to Agnes de Mille's studio in Greenwich and Agnes E. Meyer's library in Washington, and to Chicago, where I had my first meeting with Richard Bissell and his beautiful blonde wife Marian. By some freak of circumstance we were seated at a table directly under the guns of Wayne King's forty-piece orchestra and only fragments of what we were saying drifted across the table over and under the trumpets. This, in brief, was coming my way from Dick: "Marian kept saying that if I didn't have a book published by the time I was thirty-five, I would have to . . . We have four kids and making [I couldn't tell whether he said shirts or pajamas) is at least a steady business . . . in Dubuque."

"How old are you now?" I shouted back at him.

"Thirty-six."

What keeps an editor young are the vibrations he receives from those who are younger. In 1956 we received a short story from an unknown, Jesse Hill Ford. We all read it, for it drew a most vivid picture of a Southern heel and the girl he was betraying. The ending did not seem quite right; we could not bring ourselves to accept the story---neither could we forget it.

Mr. Ford wrote from Chicago, and with my note of rejection, which kept the door open for revision, I made a mental note to look him up.

We had our first breakfast together sixteen months later in Memphis, Tennessee. Mr. Ford, who is thirty, had driven seventy miles to hear me the night before and had arisen at 5:30 that morning to catch me before I flew off to my next stop. We talked about writing, and to explain why he had moved back to the South he gave me a copy of an article he had prepared for his home-town paper, the Nashville Tennessean. These were the paragraphs that sank in:

I left the concrete canyons of Chicago a year ago to come to Humboldt, center of West Tennessee's strawberry industry.

But I didn't come here to pick strawberries. I came to write my novel.

I am already famous. I have the biggest dog, the smallest car, the oldest house and the most scandalous children in town.

And I'm still writing my novel.

I left a good job with the American Medical Association's public relations staff to strike out on my own. When I decided to begin writing full time, my wife suggested we move to Humboldt. After all, it's her home town, and she could teach school while I worked on my novel. Meanwhile our children would be free to rove and roam as never they were in the Windy City.

Having been raised in Nashville, I was more than eager to return to Tennessee. We packed up our Volkswagen, and with our little girl, who is three, and our boys, who are four and six, we headed south.

On the way down we stopped at Omaha, Illinois, and ordered a Saint Bernard puppy at a kennel there.

Six months later I had made five dollars, averaging a little less than a dollar a month. The five dollars came from a sportsmen's magazine for a tip to fishermen on how to tape a fold-down fingernail snippet to a casting rod for clipping line. But the novel was going tolerably well and the St. Bernard had arrived, with a small but insatiable appetite.

I must explain that I am not an independently wealthy coupon clipper with oil wells in Texas. Would that I were! And unfortunately, no foundation has taken me to its bosom to nurture as I write.

I am here and writing because my wife was willing to leave her household duties and begin teaching in the sixth grade after seven years of marriage. I am here because we were able to save a little during the years I was in public relations, and I am here because my parents and her parents believe in me enough to bridge the gap between our income and our outgo.

We have swapped the latter-day American dream of two cars and a new house, complete with automatic dishwasher --- a dream we had achieved incidentally --- for one small car and an old, old house where you wash dishes by hand.

Naturally we cannot afford my role as a dollar-a-month writer indefinitely. Either I begin earning before the wolf breaks down the door or back I go into the salaried world of nine to five.

On January 21, I wrote accepting Mr. Ford's new story, "The Surest Thing in Show Business," and telling him we would print it as an "First" in the April issue. Back came this reply:

26 January 1959

Dear Mr. Weeks:

There is jubilation here, and it is spreading like pond ripples after a stone; I am not going to say that I pinched myself, but I will say that I got a little giddy and almost waxed sentimental. I didn't open the letter until I was back outside the Post Office and on the way back up the sidewalk towards home. I'm always fearful when I open letters nowadays, especially those from Boston. So I held it a while and wondered. My dog, Captain, who is almost well after being hit by a car, was along with me, and his pal, the Labrador from next door, was along too. So finally, I opened it and there your letter was with the check.

I'm sorry now I just didn't go ahead and yell. It's all right in Humboldt to yell. They haven't quite forgotten David Crockett, a former resident of this country, and on occasions, and this would be one, you can just holler and nobody cares. In fact they are sympathetic. But I just kept on walking until I got home where the kids were shut in with chickenpox and their grandmother was reading to them. We kissed all around and they yelled and did an Indian dance and then I took off up to the schoolhouse and showed my wife, Sally, and she called several of the other teachers out in the hail and they read the letter and came very close to tears, but managed to hold them back.

I came back by home and the Cumberland Presbyterian preacher was there waiting for me. My father-in-law had told him down at the clinic and he was right there to shake my hand and read the letter. We talked about duck hunting a minute and he left and then the dogs had caught the excitement so they jumped the city trash collectors and I had to go out and separate them. Now I'm at the office writing you, and I want to say here and now that your letter couldn't have come at a better time.

I suppose the way to repay something like that is to write the very best I can, and you can be sure, Sir, that I will bend every energy in that direction. I'm too immersed just now in new emotions to write more.

I think it well that readers be occasionally reminded of the gamble, the dismay and sacrifice which young writers (and their families) make to be writers. There is a happy postscript to this: the story we originally rejected --- in a letter which the author says "raised me literally out of the dust" --- has been revised and accepted and now Mr. Ford is on his way.