A Letter written on Feb 22, 1920

Princeton
February 22nd
1920

Dear Margaret:

I am down to two sheets of decent writing-paper, and don't dare waste them on my friends and kin. I still wait for paper ordered a week before Xmas, and tried this with fear and trembling, because most paper purchased in Princeton is a net for any pen I can use. But I must write you in petition .......

One Miss Bickerton wrote me a long time ago asking for permission to print a dramatization of one of my stories in the Monthly, & her letter, I regret to say, merely joined the pile of the scarcely-read and totally unanswered. I was ill when it came; and then the cook departed, ill. (She was away 3 weeks) and Gordon came down with a nasty case of grippe which the doctor said would be pneumonia with the barest hint of invitation: and it's only within two days that he has ceased being weak as a kitten; and my nurse has now cared [?] in and must go off for a rest-cure lest dreadful things befall her; and the furnace-man has alternated between strained ligaments and out of town funerals - and the long and short of it is that the last month has been impossible, and that if Miss Bickerton tells you I'm a beast, I'd be grateful if you'd tell her that you have authentic information to the effect that I have been by no fault of my own, out of the world.

Once able to put my mind on her request, I realized that it was something I probably hadn't the technical right to grant without Scribner's assent. I forget what my contract says (it's in the bank)and I think I have dramatic rights; but when this sort of thing has come up before I have consulted them - as I've just written Miss Bickerton - and think it safe to do so. The trouble lies in the fact that a version in the Monthly would not be copy-righted, and while I can't imagine any dramatic future for The Great Tradition, you never can tell what is going to pop up. Also I wish to be very correct vis à vis my publishers. (If a preposition is needed there, kindly supply it. We spent 3 days at Atlantic City during this horrid interval, and when I lamented that poor Gordon hadn't a more amusing companion, I found that he was getting amusement all the time from my perfectly unconscious and unintentional malapropisms. I haven't much back left, and no hair.)

I didn't mean - and don't mean - to put any task on your shoulders: I only had a desperate desire to defend my self a little to you, in case you should hear perfectly true reports of my general mannerlessness and negligence.

I don't know how the winter has been in South Hadley. It has been the worst ever, here - everyone snow bound, pneumonia all over the place people dying, every body frightened - oh, unspeakable. I have been so worried about Gordon that I haven't cared about much else. I suppose it is a good sign that I can now safely take my mind off him for a few minutes and consider the painful spectacle I present to the world. I am afraid, though, I may really have degenerated more morally: for last night I was trying to read my self to sleep with Paul Elmer More's "With the Wits," and found him a little too moral for me. He's a very engaging person, and I usually agree with him. But I am afraid I've got the Romantic virus in my blood. I've tried for fifteen years to think Fairfax Rochester absurd and I can't do it. It's a little like Kit, last night, elaborating the characters in a detective-story he was trying to invent: "His grandfather's brother had married a Turk woman, so there was a tradition in the family for them all to wear fezzes." Yes, just about like that.

What we all need is to get away, a nice group of us, and live in a heavenly climate, between palms and sea, and sit on the sands and have delightful conversation - about food and drink, and the shadiest place, and the grand style. Dish-washing and politics completely cut out.

Sylvia grows apace and thrives. Being a perfectly selfish person, who consents to no privations and never makes a concession to domestic upheaval or anyone's headaches or backaches, she is the joy of all our lives. If she ever for one instant showed a moral preoccupation, we should undoubtedly begin to criticize her, and find her wanting.

To babble thus is part of my brainlessness, and I hope you will forgive it. Anyhow it has been a pleasure for me to babbly. I hope your appendix is all right: i.e. that you don't get reminded of the place where it was. I still have mine, and I know that sooner or later a climax is going to come in our relations. But I do hope not before my nurse is cured and I have found a cook to take the place of mine, who is leaving.

So give my love to Aunt Helen and Uncle Albert when you see them. As always

Affectionately yours
Katharine

[A pencil notation follows: "Katharine Fullerton Gerould - a cousin of MEB, and a writer"]