Dear wizard: the letters of Nicholas Delbanco and Jon Manchip White 9780472119523, 0472119524, 9780472120918, 0472120913

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Dear Wizard

Dear Wizard The Letters of Nicholas Delbanco and Jon Manchip White Edited by Nicholas Delbanco

University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor

Copyright © by Nicholas Delbanco 2014 All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid-­free paper 2017 2016 2015 2014  4 3 2 1 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978–­0-­472–­11952-­3 (hardcover) ISBN 978–­0-­472–­12091-­8 (e-­book)

Also by Nicholas Delbanco Fiction Sherbrookes: One Volume The Count of Concord Spring and Fall The Vagabonds What Remains Old Scores In the Name of Mercy The Writers’ Trade, & Other Stories About My Table, & Other Stories Stillness Sherbrookes Possession Small Rain Fathering In the Middle Distance News Consider Sappho Burning Grasse, 3/23/66 The Martlet’s Tale Nonfiction The Art of Youth: Crane, Carrington, Gershwin & the Nature of First Acts Lastingness: The Art of Old Age Anywhere Out of the World: Essays on Travel, Writing, Death The Countess of Stanlein Restored: A History of the Countess of Stanlein ex-­Paganini Stradivarius Cello of 1707 The Lost Suitcase: Reflections on the Literary Life Running in Place: Scenes from the South of France The Beaux Arts Trio: A Portrait Group Portrait: Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, & H.G. Wells

Books Edited Literature: Craft & Voice (with Alan Cheuse) The Hopwood Lectures: Sixth Series The Hopwood Awards: 75 Years of Prized Writing The Sincerest Form: Writing Fiction by Imitation The Writing Life: the Hopwood Lectures, Fifth Series Talking Horse: Bernard Malamud on Life and Work (with Alan Cheuse) Speaking of Writing: Selected Hopwood Lectures Writers and Their Craft: Short Stories and Essays on the Narrative (with Laurence Goldstein) Stillness and Shadows (two novels by John Gardner)

Also by Jon Manchip White Fiction The Bird with Silver Wings, and Other Musical Stories Rawlins White: Patriot to Heaven Solo Goya: Goya and the Duchess of Alba at Sanlúcar Echoes and Shadows Whistling Past the Churchyard: Strange Tales from a Superstitious Welshman The Last Grand Master Death by Dreaming The Moscow Papers Send for Mr. Robinson The Garden Game The Game of Troy Nightclimber The Rose in the Brandy Glass Hour of the Rat The Mercenaries No Home but Heaven The Girl from Indiana Build Us a Dam Mask of Dust Poetry The Mountain Lion The Rout of San Romano NonFiction The Journeying Boy: Scenes from a Welsh Childhood The Land God Made in Anger: Reflections on a Journey Through South West Africa A World Elsewhere: One Man’s Fascination with the American Southwest

What to Do When the Russians Come: A Survivor’s Guide (with Robert Conquest) Marshal of France: Life and Times of Maurice, Comte de Saxe, 1696-­1750 Diego Velázquez: Painter and Courtier Cortés and the Downfall of the Aztec Empire Ancient Egypt Everyday Life in Ancient Egypt Everyday Life of the North American Indians Anthropology (Teach Yourself book series) Books Edited and Introduced Life in Ancient Egypt, by Adolf Erman The Tomb of Tutankhamun, by Howard Carter Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, by E.W. Lane Egypt and the Holy Land: Historic Photographs, by Francis Frith (with Julia van Haaften) A History of the Ancient Egyptians, by James Henry Breasted Introduction to Old Calabria, by Norman Douglas Introduction to Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, by Robert Louis Stevenson

Contents Introduction –1–

Section I: 1978 to 1989 –7–

Section II: 1990 to 1999 – 115 –

Section III: 2000 to 2013 – 407 –

Illustrations following page – 726 –

Introduction The habitual exchange of letters is a custom now nearly extinct. There was a time when letter writing served as the necessary discourse for men and women not within earshot or in a shared room. That time has gone. The telegram and telephone, a cell phone or e-­mail, text message or Skype, the various new forms of telecommunication—­Facebook, Twitter, and the rest—­have each in turn displaced and finally replaced the habit of correspondence; few practice it today. Those who read collections of letters hereafter will read about the fast-­receding past. My own past recedes; so did that of Jon Manchip White. I have begun my eighth decade; he reached the end of his ninth. This collection spans the period of 1978 to 2013. Our “habitual exchange of letters” therefore lasted not merely for years and decades but centuries, millennia. We shared rooms and cities but only seldom spent uninterrupted time in each other’s company, with no need to write. I could have wished it otherwise—­have wished, I mean, to live more near and see with greater regularity a man I both loved and revered. What we have here instead is the record of a friendship attested to by correspondence and enacted largely in the epistolary mode. These last two words suggest a kind of formality, an archaic-­ sounding language-­set; it’s fair to say that some of what follows will seem, to some, arcane. We two were “men of letters,” and it’s not a phrase that either disavowed. For the years encompassed here, we stayed busily at work. Though much of what follows deals with matters personal and familial, a central theme throughout is the professional life. Between us we published more than sixty books of fiction, poetry, and non-­fiction; we edited and introduced an additional fifteen. I spent the bulk of my academic career at Bennington College and the University of Michigan, where I am at present the Robert Frost

Distinguished University Professor of English; Manchip White retired as the Lindsay Young Professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. We founded writing programs, paid visits to each other’s sponsoring institutions, taught together in summer creative writing workshops and academic courses of study in Vermont and London. We dedicated texts to each other and solicited each other’s editorial advice. Further, we collaborated on a project, “Hotel de Dream”—­ first as a novel, then as screenplay—­which was at length abandoned. Almost every letter discusses at least in passing the hopes and fears and challenges attendant on a creative or research-­based project: the lifelong work of words. It’s not for me to offer a detailed analysis or critical overview of these pages; they will and must speak for themselves. But, at the risk of navel-­gazing, let me offer a few thoughts. First, the nearly twenty-­ year disparity in age between correspondents suggests that I began as decidedly the junior partner in the enterprise; my opening letters are formal, and the respect expressed is that of a young writer for someone who’s long played the game. On the other hand, the older author had made his name in Great Britain and was to a degree removed from the American “scene.” So I became, more often than not, the one to provide introductions or to offer support in terms of publication. On balance Manchip White retained, for the first twenty years or so, the position of consigliere, and many of his observations come couched in retrospect. The “confessional” bits of his discourse—­ allusions to time spent in the film industry and the Foreign Office, to his life as squire of Minsterworth Court or traveling in Spain—­are scattered here throughout. As the years wear on, however, this avuncular role recedes, so that the two of us seem equal partner-­players (particularly, perhaps, during the period of shared labor); thereafter it’s the undersigned who gives a helping hand. Central to this shift, perhaps, are the close readings each provides of the other’s work-­in-­progress and the incrementally candid assessment of what succeeds, what fails. Although these readings are detailed and manuscript-­specific, they’re reproduced in full. Second, as the friendship deepens, levity enters in. Bad jokes and multi-­lingual puns become the rule, not exception; most of the letters

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contain at least a line and often several paragraphs of comic excess and rodomontade; the notepaper and postcards are irreverent where not erotic or purposively silly. Much of the language is playful; limericks abound. Again, it’s not for me to say how laugh-­out-­loud these lines may seem to others, but I can assure the reader of what seemed to me my correspondent’s wit. His letters were a genuine pleasure as well as instruction to read. Third, and importantly, there’s pain entailed. What Delbanco calls “the misery-­griseries” and White describes as the “black dog” become more and more pervasive as the years ensue. The principal sorrow here recorded is the death of Valerie Leighton White, who suffered a catastrophic stroke in 1985 and lived a diminished bedridden existence thereafter for ten years. That “time will darken it” is a near-­universal truth, and as the men grow older their letters grow more somber, both in personal and public terms. The arc of correspondence, therefore, has the classic shape of a bell-­curve—­from hopeful to hope-­filled to grim. Yet there’s rarely self-­pity or bitterness expressed; again and again the refrain is that of satisfaction in a life well-­lived. The disciplines of music and painting enter in repeatedly; both men were committed to both. “Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage”—­a phrase from the sixteenth century French poet, Joaquim du Bellay—­seems apt: “Happy the man who, like Ulysses, has had a good voyage . . .” White quotes the poet at a shared lunch, then copies out the sonnet with which that line begins. Thereafter it serves as epigraph for The Lost Suitcase, Delbanco’s collection of “reflections on the literary life” dedicated to his colleague in the year 2000. We decided not to float a raft of footnotes; this is not a scholarly enterprise, and context seems more or less clear. When Saul Bellow or Eudora Welty are referred to, for example, it should be needless to insert “Nobel prize winning author of, among others, the novels Herzog and Mr. Sammler’s Planet,” or “A writer of novels and short stories about the American south.” Our readership, we trust, will know the names of those who composed Treasure Island or The Radetzky March, and whom we mean when we refer to Stephen and Cora Crane. Under the assumption that the letters themselves provide sufficient information, there is no glossary here. Some few explanatory

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lines have been added by way of introduction to the various sections of this narrative, but those notes are brief. There are three sequential units—­roughly a decade-­long each. The first encompasses the late 1970’s and ‘80’s, the second the 1990’s, and the third begins in the year 2000 and terminates with the elder author’s death in 2013. The arrangement is chronological; we begin at the beginning and end at what became the necessary end. Several characters play important if supporting roles. My wife, Elena, our daughters, Francesca and Andrea, and Manchip White’s deceased wife, Valerie, as well as their daughters, Bronwen and Rhiannon, make regular appearances and are reported on throughout. The three colleagues most often referred to are Alan Cheuse (who introduced us in Tennessee), Richard Elman, and George Garrett—­also fellow-­members of the Bennington Writing Workshops Faculty and admired friends. These last two died, respectively, in 1997 and 2008. Other names perhaps less widely known (Carl Navarre, for example, who was for some years publisher of the Atlantic Monthly Press, or Larry Kart, a Book Editor of the Chicago Tribune) are identified at need. The papers from which this compilation is drawn reside in their entirety in the Rare Books and Manuscripts collection at the Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library of the University of Michigan. (Jon Manchip White’s own archive is lodged at Boston University, but his letters from and to Delbanco have been catalogued in Ann Arbor.) The full correspondence includes more than a thousand notes and postcards and articles and letters. These pages represent roughly half that total, and the process of selection took some time. It has been made more in the service of narrative flow than discretion. If a postcard or letter deals with business only, it will have been omitted; so too have been excluded such announcements as “Arriving on Tuesday,” or “Happy Birthday” or “Thought this article might interest you.” Handwritten letters and postcards (the authors’ handwriting resembles nothing so much as hieroglyphics or a medical prescription pad) are only seldom reproduced. Most of the letters are typed, a handful composed (by Delbanco) on computer; the relatively few errors of spelling and inaccurate

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quotation have been here preserved. Ephemera are unavoidable, but insofar as possible we tried to avoid repetition. For these reasons, the correspondence is not always or entirely a back-­and-­forth; three letters in a row from an individual author may signify either that a response has been misplaced and lost or that it has been cut. For similar reasons, a gap in correspondence means either that we were together (as in the summer of 1996) or pelting each other with postcards (as in the first three months of 1997). Within the letters themselves, excisions are rare—­and, where a passage has been cut, the redaction is (due to the facsimile-­nature of this reproduction) visible to all. At an early point in the correspondence, we stumbled on the notion of “borrowed finery,” and began to write on letterheads from points far-­flung or obscure. Delbanco, born in England, arrived in the United States when young; White, born in Wales, came to America in middle age. Both traveled much. These letterheads also should speak for themselves, but it became a point of honor to address each other on stationery from hotels and institutions and places—­a Cuban jail, The White House—­attesting to worlds elsewhere. (One of Delbanco’s titles is Running in Place: Scenes from the South of France, and White wrote several travel books, as well as The Journeying Boy: Scenes from a Welsh Childhood.) This joke soon enlarged into contest, a kind of jockeying for position, and often the letters begin with the assertion that X has bested Y by mailing, say, a letter from those who flew across the Burma Hump or broke ice in Antarctica; there are claims of at-­ least momentary affiliation with or residence in the Supreme Court of Ohio and the Council on Foreign Relations, a school in rural China, the Inn at Foggy Bottom, the Pudong Shangri-­La, Vienna’s Hotel Sacher, and Swakopmond in Namibia (“Where the Skeleton Coast Comes to Life”). Often the envelopes “doubled” the score, so that a letter from Jordan would be sealed inside an envelope from Brazil. To correspondents spending hours at their desks, such evidence of travel seemed both a release and relief. Most of this stationery was acquired by the authors as a result of actual visits; some sheets were provided by voyaging friends in the service of our competition, and set aside for use. We placed an annual bet on who would score more “points” for eccentricity or exotica and kept our own, admittedly biased, running

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tally of results. We reveled in the back-­and-­forth, the stationery gathered or collected by those referred to as “agents.” Particularly daring forays were made on each other’s home turf—­so that Delbanco, for instance, purloined stationery from the Reform Club in London while there on a visit with White; the latter snatched sheets from the Michigan League and Ann Arbor Campus Inn. At the end of each year a bottle of 16-­year-­old Lagavulin whiskey was the prize, with the proviso that the bottle then be shared. To the pair of us, this seemed like a game worth playing; to a readership it may seem self-­indulgent but, to quote an unrepentant Gloucester speaking of his bastard son, “there was good sport at his making, and the whoreson must be acknowledged.” Had I fifty more such letterheads, I would deploy them here. This enterprise was planned and prepared for while both authors lived; it grieves me sorely that but one of us has seen it to fruition. Jon Manchip White died at home in Knoxville, Tennessee on July 31, 2013, at the age of eighty-­nine. The Last Grand Master was among his novels’ titles; to Jon’s enduring memory, I dedicate our book. Nicholas Delbanco Ann Arbor, Michigan

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Section I: 1978 to 1989 These letters span the first full years of correspondence, from 1978 to 1989. A very few are opening salvos; the majority date from the decade of the 1980’s—­neatly bisected, alas, by the illness of Valerie White. (Letters of 11/5/85 et. seq.) The two men met in Knoxville, through the good offices of Alan Cheuse, who was teaching at the University of Tennessee; in short order ND invited JMW to join the Faculty of the Bennington Writing Workshops, of which he was the founding Director. ND lived principally in Bennington, Vermont, and, as of 1985, in Ann Arbor, Michigan; JMW remained in Knoxville, Tennessee. Their travels are attested to, their books as well, in the pages that follow; by the end of 1989, when JMW writes from the Otelinn Hotel and Le (Field Marshall) Montgomery Restaurant, and ND from the Guandong College of Education in The People’s Republic of China, the correspondence is full-­throated and the letterhead-­hunt in full cry. Notes: Owen Glendower, it’s probably needless to remind the reader, is the name of the great Welsh general from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I who claims that “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.” Hence our title. The first reference to publication (JMW, 12/21/1980) is to a copy of “The Bennington Review,” for which ND served as Editor and of which he sent JMW a copy. Thereafter the texts referenced are those on which the authors labored, principally (ND) Group Portrait: Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James & H.G. Wells, and (JMW) The Last Grand Master. They exchanged previously published novels and current collections of short stories, as well as a biography of Diego Velázquez: Painter and Courtier (JMW) and one of The Beaux Arts Trio: A Portrait (ND). ND wrote a travel book about his years in Provence (Running in Place; Scenes from the South of France), and JMW reciprocated with a copy of The Land God Made in Anger, his book about Namibia. ND served as the Literary Executor for his friend and colleague, John Gardner, and several letters refer to that task; oth-

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ers discuss the divorce of Alan Cheuse from his second wife, Marjorie Pryse. Brian Swann was ND’s successor as Director of the Bennington Writing Workshops, where JMW returned to teach. Both ND and JMW published autobiographical essays in the Gayle Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, and the letter of 9/30/1986 cites those documents. Preparing to leave Bennington, ND asked JMW for letters of reference to Syracuse University and the University of Michigan (William Wasserstrom was Chairman of the English Department at Syracuse, John Knott at Ann Arbor); when offered a job at the latter institution, ND and his family moved. By 1989, the two begin to collaborate on “Hotel de Dream,” the name of the place of assignation in Jacksonville, Florida, of which Cora Stewart was the proprietor and where she met Stephen Crane.

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Section II: 1990 to 1999 These letters report on several visits paid to each other’s homes, plus a shared summer (1996), when ND directed the Michigan Office of International Programs in London, and where JMW—­called a “cuddlesome charismatic” by admiring students—­taught. (Guest speakers referred to for that program include the poet Dannie Abse and the architect “Sam” Scorer, JMW’s old associates.) ND wrote at length on his difficulties with “Rumford”—­a novel eventually published as The Count of Concord—­and JMW on The Journeying Boy: Scenes from a Welsh Childhood, a book of reminiscences published by Carl Navarre of The Atlantic Monthly Press. “Devotion” is the working title for what became ND’s novel. Old Scores, “Dr. Death” for In the Name of Mercy, and “What You Carry” for his What Remains. Larry Kart assigned books for ND and then JMW to review in “The Chicago Tribune.” The writers Julian Barnes, Stephen Becker, Richard Ford, and Scott Russell Sanders were among those introduced by the former to the latter; Alex Haley was JMW’s neighbor on “Cherokee Bluffs” in Knoxville. Helen Pike—­now headmistress of the South Hampstead High School—­was their program assistant in London. For three years ND (under the auspices of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation) paid week-­long visits to Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina; from there he drove to The Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina, and met JMW for a meal; those occasions are referenced here. Notes: Much of the correspondence details their shared efforts at a draft of a novel, then screenplay, about the love affair between the writer Stephen Crane and Cora Stewart, the mistress of a bordello he frequented in Jacksonville. Crane’s masterful “The Open Boat” describes the sinking of the S.S. Commodore and his (mis)adventure at sea. In 2007, Edmund White (no

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relation to JMW) published a novel called Hotel de Dream, also focusing on Stephen Crane; by that time the two men’s project had been shelved. There are frequent referents to the work of Ford Madox Ford, in particular his tetralogy Parade’s End and his last work of non-­fiction, The March of Literature; JMW gave ND the Bodley Head Edition of the Ford’s works. The two also discuss the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, on whom ND wrote briefly for TV Guide and JMW wrote at length by way of introduction to RLS’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes. Since the working title for In the Name of Mercy was “Dr. Death,” JMW’s joke about “Jack the Dripper” refers to Jack Kevorkian. In his letter of April 11, ’97, JMW refers to ND’s landlord on the island of Anna Maria, baseball legend Warren Spahn. That year JMW, in the company of his daughter Rhiannon, became an American citizen. “Be Kind to Young Peter” is a note pasted by JMW on ND’s refrigerator door, with reference to Francesca’s first boyfriend, her father thought his daughter’s suitor should wash the family car and mow the family lawn. The comic allusion (JMW, 11/30/1993) is to a photograph of ND in The New York Times; the obituary alluded to (ND, 1/1/1998) in the same paper is that of Richard Elman. JMW writes at length about his efforts to complete the novel that finally appeared as Solo Goya (2000) and had been provisionally titled The Duchess and the Deaf Man or A Summer in Sanlucar. After the illness of his wife, JMW kept company with the pianist Patricia Zagorsky, to whom he here often refers.

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Section III: 2000 to 2013 The letters exchanged in the twenty-­first century are, increasingly, Janus-­faced, both forward-­looking and retrospective. The men and their families travel to England, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Namibia, Spain, Switzerland and elsewhere, but much of the time stay at home. Issues of health enter in. The deaths of friends and family are here recorded and mourned. ND’s father died at the age of 98, his father-­in-­law—­the cellist Bernard Greenhouse—­died at 95. JMW scrutinized some first-­edition Goya etchings ND’s father owned. JMW gave ND a James Gillray caricature of Lord and Lady Hamilton; ND reciprocated with an etching from Goya’s Tauromachia series. ND’s uncle, Gustav, (an art dealer in London celebrated for connoisseurship) is the author of the phrase which JMW repeats, “Nein, nein, lower Rhine.” In the last year, the frequency of correspondence tapers off—­largely because JMW was, as he put it, “indisposed.” ND paid visits to Knoxville, and there were regular postcards and telephone calls, but the end of this volume more or less mirrors its start in terms of the number of letters exchanged and the intervals between. In the last months, moreover, JMW proved unable to write; he dictated his final truncate letter to his daughter Bronwen and told his daughter Rhiannon he was too tired to go on. His last words to Rhiannon were, “Promise me, you’ll try to get some rest.” Notes. Peter Ho Davies, a young colleague of ND’s at the University of Michigan, wrote The Welsh Girl (2007), a novel of which the elder Welsh author approved. (JMW was featured on a map of Welsh literary history, and the men write jokingly of his inclusion therein.) Some other authors referenced are the prose fiction writers Charles Baxter, Lynne Freed, and Allen Wier, the poet Louis Simpson, and the critic Russell Fraser. The letter from JMW on Guy Fawkes’s Day, 2002, refers to an article on ND in the New York

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Times. In the course of the decade both Delbanco daughters got married—­ Andrea in Vermont, Francesca in California—­and several letters refer to the festivities entailed. In 2004, Francesca published a novel called Ask Me Anything, and JMW wrote appreciatively thereof. The painter referred to by ND (3/30/2005) is Beauford Delaney. Peter Heydon is a classic car buff and oenophile based in Ann Arbor; JMW, on a visit, admired his collection. Allusions to James Baldwin, Agatha Christie, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth etc. are, or should be, self-­explanatory. So are the titles of the novels, short story collections, and textbooks the men published and re-­issued; the article on his father-­in-­law’s cello ND wrote for “Harper’s” and then enlarged into a book has the jaw-­cracking title of The Countess of Stanlein Restored: A History of the Countess of Stanlein ex-­Paganini Stradivarius Cello of 1707. The book described on 3/6/2006 is a biography of the playwright Avery Hopwood, for which ND wrote the Prefatory Note; the book he sends JMW on 5/17/2011 is Edmund de Wall’s The Hare with Amber Eyes.

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Ed. Note. As suggested in my Introduction, what we have here is roughly half the correspondence. The archive also contains a fistful of postcards and handwritten letters, as well as photographs. A small sampling follows. The card sent by ND on 8/2/95, for instance, comes from the famous restaurant in Paris where the ducks are numbered—“which ain’t no canard.” The card sent by JMW to King Nicholas and Queen Elena “acknowledging” the “joyous advent” of their granddaughters depicts King Babar and Queen Celeste. These jokes rely on the illustrations on the front-face of the postcards and can’t be reproduced. Neither can the envelopes in which the notes arrived. But by way of representation we here include a two-dollar note from the Central Bank of Belize—accompanying a reference to Queen Elizabeth II in JMW’s letter of December 15, 2006—and a napkin from the restaurant in the Hotel Fauchère, described by ND on November 5, 2010. The final photograph is of JMW behind the wheel of his beloved Mercedes, “Siegfried,” in Mesilla, New Mexico, in the 1960s. When we undertook this project, the elder author, though weakened, was very much himself. We decided we would each compose a kind of farewell letter, an “envoi” with which to complete if not conclude the exchange. Here below is mine. Its second paragraph should now include the name of “White” after that of “Updike,” but I chose to leave unchanged the lines I wrote a living man as to the roll call of the dead—a muster he would join six weeks thereafter. The long delay in Jon’s response seems in retrospect a symptom of withdrawal. Halting and incomplete, the last word is nonetheless his.

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