TYPED LETTER SIGNED (TLS)

New York, 14 March 1928. Letter. Crease from mailing. About Fine. Two pages on the recto of two sheets (5-3/4" x 7-3/4") of his personal stationery SIGNED "Alexander W." to an unidentified playwright addressed as "My child." In part: "I suppose you will bear up splendidly under the news that I cannot possibly get away from here just now. My life seems to be a grotesquely complicated mess of revenue officers that have to be paid and a small estate that has to be settled and old sick folk that have to be attended to. I look ahead to the middle of May when I want to get on that boat.... If I do nothing else next year, I will see to it that I am free to go about and do purposeless and unimportant things, if I have to go barefoot and live on lentils. Life is so monstrous, like a lurking shadow thrown on a wall. A week ago Junior [his young African-American servant] was sighing in what seemed to me an unnecessarily melodramatic way, and I was finally goaded into asking him what was the matter. He replied shyly that there had been a death in his family. I asked him who had died and he told me that his wife and two children had died that morning in Chicago. It was the first I knew that he had ever been married. And all this time he has been shipping his money out to take care of them and having a lot of heartbreak and saying nothing about it. Jed Harris worked all day yesterday with the authors on your play. I am engaged in an effort to persuade them that it must not be called ‘Loved I Not Honor’.... I have suggested ‘The Hollow of Her Hand’, which, I must say, I think is a good title, although not necessarily for this play. Perhaps I would know better if I had read it. In that respect, both the authors and Jed all have such a crushing advantage over me." (Inventory #: 021793)