Virginia Mangrum, December 21, 1964: Difference between revisions

As I wrote to a Negro friend of mine just yesterday, I decided this year to lay down the White Man's Burden and send out no Christmas cards. But of course it's still agreeable to receive them. I'd held off from answering your last long letter because there was so much in it which was interesting and generous and large that I didn't want to reply too stingily. At the same time I kept working on An American Dream, I really finished it off just yesterday. It's a curious book. I worked the hell out of the last chapter and gave a lot to the others. Yet when you read the book you may not be able to detect the difference, for the structure is exactly the same. But nearly every sentence was worked on nearly every which way, sometimes leaving it alone, or going back to leaving them alone, sometimes changing a preposition, some- times cutting a phrase or adding one, but I felt more like a musicia than a writer, as if I had a very good kettle drum which was devilish to tune. I think I'm guilty of having used this image in several letters before, and if I were a Catholic I would now cross myself against the possibility that I used exactly the same image in my last letter to you. But my memory tells me that I did not, and so it might have been wiser to have presented the metaphor as an original rather than a copy.