Set This House on Fire Read Free

thank you for what you did in Sambuco for Poppy & all. She told me everything you did & now I should apologize, using the weak excuse that I didnt know how to contact you in N.Y.C. But this would be a lie, so will only say now thanks again & trust you to understand.
Also, I can understand very well your interest in M. & your desire to know more of the situation down there in Sambuco. Myself I find it most difficult to talk or even think about M. & what went on, much less write about it. Yet its funny you know, just as you say youre in the dark about what happened in Sambuco, so from time to time I keep wondering who M. was, I mean really WAS & what was eating him & how he ended up the way he did. I dont guess anybody will figure that out & suspect that its all for the best any way you look at it. You are right in “surmising” that I had a rough time down there. I guess I drew pretty close to what is commonly described as the brink, but I seem to be O.K. now. Have not incidentally had a drop of beer, even, in going on to 2 years. It makes Sophocles much easier to read, and am now beginning to work my way straight through Shakespeare, making up at this advanced age for the deprivations of the U.S. public school system.
Anytime youre down this way, Peter, let me know. We live near the Battery in a 200-year-old house which doesnt rent for much & theres plenty room for a guest. Poppy remembers you with affection, also the kids.
    Molti auguri Cass
    I have never had much faith in that “Any time you’re down this way”—having used it several times myself in sticky situations when the true sentiment behind the phrase was all too apparent. It is polite and it is friendly, but it certainly does not plead or exhort. It is not the same as “It would be nice to see you again,” and it is as far removed from “Please come see me, I miss you” as simple civility is from love. There was some quality in this letter of Cass’, though, that made me believe that he would not take unkindly to a visit from me—actually, as regarding Mason, that he might even be as eager to see me as I was him. I had three weeks’ vacation due me in September. The first of these weeks I had planned to spend with my girl Annette (there is something foregone and conclusive about that word fiancee) in the White Mountains. The other two I had left aside for a visit with my parents down in Virginia: they were both old and ailing and, while we have never really been as close as some families, something weary and sorrowful in their letters made me long to see them again. What I proposed to do, then—and this I wrote Cass right away—was to discommode him to the extent of spending a week end with him in Charleston, flying down from Norfolk sometime during the visit with my parents. I would not expect to stay at his house, despite the implied invitation. Would such and such a week end be all right? Would he get me a room in a hotel? It should in no way have surprised me, I suppose, but it did: I got no answer from Cass at all.
    The time spent in New Hampshire with my dazzling Annette was a total and sweeping catastrophe. I will deal with it only to the extent of saying that it rained, that we lasted two days, and that when we left our mountain cabin in a downpour we were unbetrothed. There were no sexual difficulties. We were just not meant for each other, we decided. Both of us put up a brave front about it all, but a love affair, like some prodigy of plastic surgery, is flesh laid on to living flesh and to break it up is to tear off great hunks and parts of yourself. I went down to Virginia feeling mournful, grim, indescribably bereft.
    Of my sojourn in Virginia, however, there is a little bit more to say. Nothing in America remains fixed for long, but my old home town, Port Warwick, had grown vaster and more streamlined and clownish-looking than I thought a decent southern town could ever become. To be sure, it had always been a shipbuilding city and a