5. 1923:
Rapid City, Man. May 10,
1923
Dear Mr. Phelps,
Thanks for your two notes - I won't call them letters. You know
why, I suppose. But jests apart. I have been very ill twice,
in danger of pneumonia both times, since I saw you and Mrs. Phelps.
It seems also that the danger of moving is re-moved. The school
board here has resolved to keep the High School going. But it
will mean a reduction in income. However, that little worries
me.
Further news is this: I am head over ears in the Pioneers. I
have made up my mind to let it go in three volumes. I am working
on it before school in the morning, at noon, after school in
the evening, and at night, and in school too. I don't know where
two get the two hundred hours a day to do enough work on it.
I am myself dumbfounded at the thing. I can't believe that I
did certain things to it. Surely I must have read something similar
to it somewhere, sometime. (I have, too; in Hamsun's Growth of
the Soil). But this thing was written in 1919, largely. I believe
that that is going to be a book after my heart. I do wish I had
a typed manuscript of the first part, but I haven't. Otherwise
I'd send it to you, rather than that old yarn of the Search.
If anybody wanted just now to bring out the Search, I'd say,
No. I have done something to the "Summer Showers" that you many
not approve of: for that is apparently the book that M.&S.
have been talking about. If you'd agree to write a few words
for it, I'd be awfully glad. Then it will not seem half so presumptuous
to me any longer that I bother the public with my "Juvenilia".
You are very good to write to me in such encouraging ways. I
sometimes think: O. it's all a mistake that I want to write.
But it doesn't matter, I've got to do it anyway. But the Pioneers,
as I am shaping them now, cutting out immense pieces (I'm cutting
it down to 300 000 words), works into something really great,
I believe: in the material I mean. What the writing will amount
to, I don't know as yet. But that book should not be written.
It is. By merely thinking over a chapter or so I get myself worked
up. I have been reading passages to Mrs. Grove; and she, too,
says that all day long, every now and then she is thinking of
and for Niels (the hero), wishing he would not do this or would
do that. And that is after all the test, it seems to me. And
then she says. But after all he would not be Niels unless he
did that just when he does do. But, as for any publishers, I
am afraid the thing is too open, too frank; for instance in sexual
things.
However, since you ask me for a Ms. of the Search, I'm sending
it, of course. But it is too obvious, too coarse. Don't think
too badly of the writer after you've read it.
Best regards for Mrs. Phelps and yourself
Yours,
F.P. Grove
