Autograph letter signed : [Hollins College, Roanoke, Virginia], to Samuel Vaughan, 1970 July 7.

Concerning the manuscript for Ralegh and his wish to "clarify a few things generally, & question the method as well, before we make some serious mistakes...I think your memo of June 10th...is based upon some serious misapprehensions of the whole of the MS and of its aims & purposes...it is essential to my choice & my method that I should be faithful to the 'truth', as it is known, of the man's life & of the times. That is prerequisite for the fiction to work;" explaining and justifying the choices he has made in writing the novel with specific examples of narrative device choices; saying "One of the things this book is supposed to be 'about', one element of what it 'means', is how we imagine history. Any history. How we imagine the world we live in, create it as it were, then have to live in it, for better or worse. That is, reduced to blueprint, it's a book 'about' the human imagination, its limits & its possibilities. 'Meaning' is important to me only as yet another part of the magic of a story. It too, is a tool. It is used, then expendable. which, you see, is what happens. At the end -- if we get there -- it becomes pure event, all imagination & indeed the massive structure of this imagined & imaginary world are refined away & vanish...The movement of this story is from almost pure passivity to almost pure action. It could be, but isn't, as still & passive as the 'front' on 'Heart of Darkness' where the men are becalmed on a sailboat & Marlowe tells them the Kurtz story. I've reversed that. For my purposes the passivity is active in sense that the consciousness of the 3 men is, on the edge of sleep & dreams but not quite there, wildly active, jumpy, nervous. And the scene at the end is the opposite, almost tranquil. So, in a sense, the movement is that the reader begins to dream his way into history; through this means, the imagination is involved, becomes more & more active & concentrated. Until by the end it becomes possible, briefly, an earned right, to be with Ralegh on the scaffold;" explaining that he feels any attempts to change it would be "a total loss to me. I know one thing, it would not be a better book;" discussing the actual method of editing proposed for his book; adding "Let's don't lose sight of the big picture, please, even as we handle a lot of little details. I think that's what I'm trying say. And trying to find out if we have in mind the same big picture."