Well, not as much as I should. I have two darling professors now at VPI.
You know what it is? They come up and help. Oh, they're just heaven to
me. Both helping on the grounds and helping with files.
But, you two intellectuals, that's the saddest thing there is. All of
these people have [UNCLEAR] There's a thing called a
letter a day for every day of 1932. Nearly all letters to me, but
they're essays. And Sherwood wrote them and put them beautifully in
envelop up in a big closet at the farm and said that he would leave me
and I would be lonely. Well, of course, publishers, everybody wants
those letters. They're at the Newberry, sealed. But these two darling
professors who had helped me so, I did have a set of those letters and I
let them see it. . . . . . . Without say- [UNCLEAR] ing
anything to me. They weren't deceitful; I just didn't get the point.
They wanted to edit them. Well, I had already, ten years ago, told a man
named Ray White. . . . He was at Chapel Hill. I've just had so many
letters from Ray. I had told him that I wasn't going to publish, but
that if I did I would consider him. I didn't say I would do it. As an
editor. Well, now dear Ray's terribly sick. He has written me the most
heartbreaking letter about it. You know, he did a lot of work on
Sherwood. But the worst of all is Sutton who. . . did you see his Road
to Winesburg? He has really written. . . he's worked 40 years on
Sherwood. He's been to see the most remote relatives of which Sherwood
had never heard. But, he's found a manuscript. . . . It must be psychic.
He's found a manuscript at Newberry called Mary Cochran. And he wanted
to publish at the same time as a man I don't know from South—I know him
now, he's been to see me this summer from British Columbia. He got them.
And I had written notes on this manuscript. It looks as though they were
my notes. But I had read them to Paul Rosenfeld. He couldn't read
Sherwood's writing. Here I've got three people. I guess it's my
carelessness. Who think. . . they want to publish that. And I had
promised Sherwood's best friend . . . . I wouldn't
publish anything Sherwood didn't publish. But Paul Rosenfeld took the
opposite position, that anything Sherwood wrote, even his failures, were
worthy of publication. How did I get off on that.