Constance Smith: a Greenwich Village girlfriend — Sheri Martinelli said WG was “madly in love with her”—who later became head of acquisitions at the Pius XII Memorial Library at Saint Louis University, where she met WG again when he visited St. Louis in 1979.
Hartley Cross: unidentified.
Robert L Stevenson: the British writer (1850–94) is cited several times in R; he traveled widely for his health and settled on the island of Samoa near the end of his life. as Granga does with shudders of ignorant horror: this is how R’s Aunt May regards Catholicism, suggesting WG’s grandmother was partly a model for her.
Lucky Luciano: Sicilian-born American gangster (1897–1962), deported to Italy in 1946.
Pancho Villa: Mexican revolutionary general (1878–1923).
‘sense of drift’: Toynbee writes: “The sense of drift, which is the passive way of feeling the loss of the élan of growth, is one of the most painful of the tribulations that afflict the souls of men and women who are called upon to live their lives in an age of social disintegration” (444).
abandon […] self-control […] truancy: all terms from Toynbee: see A Study of History, 440–42.
meaning of the word) sophisticated: that is, practicing sophistry: cleverly deceptive reasoning or behavior.
Bishop Butler […] pleasures of the world”: quoted by Toynbee (486) from Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion.
menu: an Hotel Pan American menu offering a lunch consisting of spam on tostadas (“really a large salad,” WG indicates), pea soup Dutch style, porterhouse steak with creamed cauliflower and French fries, fruit (“pineapple very fresh”), and coffee.
To Edith Gaddis
Puerto Limón, Costa Rica
[11 May 1948]
dear Mother.
I have your note here, forwarded from San Jose, as any others will be if you have written more, but I advise to not write more after now because apparently it takes letters a good time to get down here and I am vaguely on my way out. And may not write again, recently don’t feel much like writing letters, unless something importunate occurs, then I shall.
What is to be said about the Music sch. fire? Somehow the whole affair has been wrapped in disaster since I was 5, all of it has always seemed to me hopelessly sad and waiting for just. As for the loss of valuable MSS, well that is what happens when you own things; and if you will own I suppose that insurance is a part of responsible ownership, &c &c. The prospect of the place reopening is abyssmal.
Here in Puerto Limón. With a room in a fairly ramshackle building and the sea under the window endlessly smashing against the seawall that surrounds the town. Very hot, most of the people black, very quiet. I like it quite well, for this raggle-taggle sort of living. I came down here hoping to get a boat back to the states. Tried UnitedFruit, no; of course, these American monopolies I have a cruel feeling about, the devil with them. (But so funny to see, all of the White unitedfruit colony lives behind a barbed-wire fence next the sea. Ech.) Anyhow through the agency of Costa Rican friends I meet one person and then another and think it may well be possible to get work-for-passage on one of their small banana boats; there are some here who have little boats that struggle upto Tampa and Miami loaded with bananas, and since they are all Figueristas (with the oppositionist govt) and since I did what little I could I believe that I shall be able to manage something. Cannot tell how long it will be, probably a week or more, until I can start from Florida. If that business doesn’t work out I may have to take a small boat back to Panama and try to get out from there, we shall see. But if I can make Tampa, I shall either call or wire you (not for $) and fly from there to NY, hoping that you may find it possible to meet me at LaGuardia — with a block-long limousine with chauffer to carry my luggage of course. Unless I find another tampa — NY way, like a car, then will call you when I make NY. There. Like I say, it may be a week (the little boats take 4 or 5 days) or two or three (or four), so don’t be on tenterhooks (whatever they are).
Meanwhile I look at books, at Mr Toynbee’s in particular, try to think & make notes for heaven-knows-what; and subconsciously prepare for recieving NY back into my — well, what? Heart? Perhaps. Afraid I am a rather tatterdemalion affair, somehow my clothes seem all to have worn out at once. If I look woeful when you see me do not be alarmed, it is not because I am woeful (though I am) but getting a little delapidated, and will probably need a haircut.
Love,
Music sch. fire: perhaps a reference to his uncle Ernest’s music school in Brooklyn.
Puerto Limón: large city on the Caribbean Ocean, 75 miles east of San José. It appears to be the model for the Central American town where Otto stays (R I.4).
To Katherine Anne Porter
Pto Limón, CR
May 1948
My dear Miss Porter.
Now I presume to write you again; and I say presume because I cannot tell but that after my last letter you may have wearily shaken your head and said, — There must be some way to put an end to this. But it is a rather unfair game I have been playing with people recently, to write a letter and then finish it saying, — I am sorry but can give no address. . Well; and if the letter asks questions they have no way of answering, and know I am somewhere making the answers — the wrong ones, but better ones — myself. Or they cannot return argument about some wrong assumption; or they cannot say, — Please stop bothering yourself writing these things to me. No: the postman always rings twice and there is the letter, he must read it and be futilely provoked, or bored without recourse. Or is it instead presumption to assume that the people want to answer the letter? (That business of ‘owing someone a letter’ is horrible.)
Anyhow there are some things I have tried to think about recently, or been provoked over, and wanted to communicate them to you. I am in an Atlantic port waiting for some kind of boat that I can work back to the states on, and fortunately I suppose have not much to read and so I read what I have read and also get a little work done. It has been raining for four days, it rains outside and in one corner of my room, but the bed is in the other corner; but they cannot load bananas and so the days go. It is a place like that lazy man WS Maugham wrote about all the time, where the days dissolve into each other and one is suddenly surprised that it is Tuesday, or Sunday, though there is no reason to be surprised, it does not matter. I have thought about Maugham of course right from the word ‘rain’, and Sadie Thompson was a good story. But do you know what I mean about lazy? Like in that Razor Edge book (a story he has told so many times) we finish with the revelation that the hero was ‘good’. Well good, what good. All I could make out was that he was a rootless American, a life I know well enough. But good? Because he was disinterested; that is fine, but I don’t remember his doing any acts of disinterested goodness; he wanted to marry the girl who had turned up a whore — that saintly complex, but it has been done so many times and better explained as such than simply shown as a picture of goodness. And what girl who has gone that far wants to be ‘saved’ by being married, none that I have known, they usually have their futility pretty well in hand. Certainly the picture of the whore and salvation is one of the most tempting, excitingly symbolic to play with (and Maugham did it well that once, when Sadie Thompson said — Men, they’re all alike. Pigs, all of them.) But it has been done with such maudlin stature by the Russians, I don’t think anyone could out-do Sonia and Raskolnikov.