Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Letter from Katherine Anne Porter, Paris, to Madeleine Chapsal, 1963 August 5 : typescript signed.

BIB_ID
432772
Accession number
MA 9849.1
Creator
Porter, Katherine Anne, 1890-1980.
Display Date
Paris, France, 1963 August 5.
Credit line
Purchased on the Drue Heinz Twentieth-Century Literature Fund, 2018.
Description
1 item (3 pages) ; 28.1 x 21.9 cm + envelope
Notes
Porter gives the place of writing as: "Villa Adrienne, 19 Avenue du Général Leclerc, / Paris XIV (A hide-out, but mail reaches me!)"
Envelope with stamp and postmarks: "Mme Madeleine Chapsal / 14 Avenue Pierre 1er de Serbie / Paris." The street and city address have been crossed out and replaced with "La Sauterie / Eymoutiers / Haute Vienne."
Madeleine Chapsal is a French novelist, essayist, playwright, and poet. In 1963, she published a volume of interviews entitled Quinze écrivains: entretiens. She also interviewed Porter that year, possibly for a newspaper or magazine profile. Porter's notes on the interview are enclosed with this letter.
Acquired with one other letter from Porter to Chapsal, cataloged as MA 9849.2.
Provenance
Purchased from Michael R. Weintraub, Inc., March 5, 2018.
Summary
Praising Chapsal's talents as an interviewer; saying she looks forward to having her interview included in Chapsal's next book; adding that she particularly enjoyed the interviews with André Breton, Jean Giono, and Jean Paulhan in the current collection; commenting on Truman Capote, also interviewed for the collection: "I have known Truman Capote since he was about eighteen years old, and he started out light as a puff of thistle-down, perverse as a feathered kitten, delightful as a mischevious baby, and he has shown the most solid qualities such as capacity for loyal friendships and an independance [sic] of mind in literary judgements and all sorts of daily virtues nobody could have expected in him, and he is a pugnacious and witty writer who fearlessly follows his light. You have beautifully captured his tone;" describing her reaction to "dreadful caricatural photographs" of herself that appear in the press and assuring Chapsal, "Your lovely story more than makes up for the picture. I am trying to grow accustomed to the mean small cruelties offered by such people to women who are old. I could see by that photographer's face that he was not friendly and I expected the worst, but also I expected to be allowed to defend myself!"; saying how much she enjoyed talking to Chapsal and suggesting a future meeting; commenting on the fact that she has typewritten the letter: "My translator Marcelle Sibon has described my handwriting as 'pattes de Mouche' and I try not to inflict it on any one!"; clarifying certain statements in her interview on a separate sheet of paper, especially regarding her family's social and financial position: "We were an old family, very respectable and literate and conventional; everybody had negro servants, my family were slaveholders and two had stayed on after emancipation and I was brought up in the house with two former slaves--besides of course other free negroes. I have stories about them in The Old Order. Also Flwring [sic] Judas and The Leaning Tower. I do not want to insist on this; it is just that I shudder at the vulgarity of even appearing to claim more for one's position in life than one has. We were very good people with a fine library and much land, but we were not rich or grand."