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12 October 1979
Wes McNair
Dept. of English
Colby-Sawyer College
New London, NH 03260
Dear Wes,
It is kind of maddening of me to admit this, but I cannot stop
from doing it: I have known that glorious secret for about two
months. But I was sworn to secrecy (which I will retain) and I
like to be somebody you can count on. I was bursting to tell
you, but I had promised that I would not tell you. But it was a
great pleasure for me, to hold that inside, and to think that you
would be hearing about it one of these days. The person who was
the chairman of that committee, which gave you the award, the
chairman of the literature committee of the NEA, or something like
that was…Frances McCullough! You might say, your fellowship is
not a bad sign in coming (partly) from an editor as well as from
other poets.
I know those fellowships well, and most of my friends – the
older ones, that is – have had one. Jane tried this year, and
apparently did not. I tried years ago, twice in a row, and got
turned down. But back then they were only worth three or four
thousand dollars anyway. What are you going to do? My only, very
faint distaste about all this is that I bet you will be off next
autumn, when I am teaching. Well, I cannot complain. I’m absolutely
delighted, and I hope that you translate those dollars into poems,
with a little leisure, time to read, time to take walks – such as
you have never had, or not for twenty years or so. I’m really so
happy for you I cannot tell you.
Joey has the word. Actually, there are some poems at the New
Yorker right now. The New Yorker saw a few last spring, and by the
time they had decided not to take them, it was too late to send them
other ones – so they had to wait until this autumn. Joey will hold
[Written in margin: i.e. they close down all summer for poems]
onto these until he hears from The New Yorker about the ones that
The New Yorker already has. And by the way, Joey just made his second
sale to that magazine.
Joey needed fair copies of the two poems because he doesn’t
like to steal Donald’s. And Donald’s, as a matter of fact, were residing
together with your letter in a box which will achieve the immortality
of files at the University of New Hampshire.
Joey says send no stamps, he will just keep ten per cent, like
all the other agents.
The Bly poem is one of his best known, from his best known book,
Sleepers Joining Hands. I assumed you would know it.
2/
I have not had time to read the new manuscript. In the last
few days, I have mailed a two-thousand word article to The Nation,
a book review; a treatment of “film” for a textbook; and a three-
thousand word article on Robert Giroux for the New York Times Book
Review. I have finished drafting six thousand words for Country Journal,
twenty-thousand words of an Appendix for a textbook, and a three-thousand
word introduction to the textbook… I have been writing twenty to
thirty pages a day, and revising earlier draft on the same days. And
next week I go away for five days, four reading in four nights. Life
is full, you might say.
I would like to keep this copy. Why don’t you send a copy
– after it returns from Dartmouth College, further duplicated – to
Fran McCullough at Harper & Row, telling her you have added a
bit and updated a bit. …And asking her how she likes the changes.
She is, by the way, a very clever intuitive editor for such things.
She helped me quite a bit with the structure of Kicking the Leaves.
I say “intuitive” because she finds it hard to tell why she thinks
what she thinks. But once she really thinks something, one does
well to pay attention.
I really look forward to reading the revision, and new poems,
and everything…but the thing I look forward to the most is your time
off from teaching because of this new fellowship!
Love as ever,
Don |