Interlude: Letters from a Foreign Correspondent - Softcover

St. Clair, Mary Archer ; Washburne, Mollie H.; Greene, Roger D.

9781883911218: Interlude: Letters from a Foreign Correspondent

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1883911214 ISBN 13: 9781883911218

Publisher: Brandylane, 1998

View all copies of this ISBN edition

1 Used

From US$ 7.50

0 New

After a chance meeting in 1924 (a blind date at Princeton University), Roger D. Greene and Mary Archer St. Clair corresponded until 1936. Roger Greene, a young writer, was soon to become a journalist with the London office of the Associated Press, and Mary Archer was a vibrant young woman in her twenties. Through his letters, we are allowed a personal glimpse into the evolution of Roger Greene's infatuation with the lovely 'Mary Lou' and the unique closeness they shared. The story captures the improbability of a relationship separated by distance, by personal circumstances and other lives. His letters also provide a first-hand account of the life of a foreign correspondent, as well as the history of our times from the Jazz Age to the Great Depression, a period captured vividly in the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who is present in this story.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author

Originally from Bluefield, West Virginia, Mary Archer St. Clair attended Holton Arms Junior College in Washington, D.C. She later studied art and architecture at the Finch European School in Versailles, France and with a teacher of Renaissance Art in Virginia. Mrs. St. Clair married Dr. Wade Hampton St. Clair, and they had four daughters. Her book, An American Girl, was published in 1991. Mrs. St. Clair currently lives and writes in Charlottesville, Virginia.

From the Back Cover

After seventy years, Mrs. St. Clair is now sharing Roger Greene's private correspondence-- whose value, according to her, is now "...more than personal."

Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From the Prologue: When I returned from my Grand Tour of Europe that spring, there was a letter from him. It was tucked in a pile of mail my parents had stacked on my dressing table. His letter I kept, not because I was madlly in love with him or because I thought I would be one day. I just could not throw it away. I saved the next letter from him too, and the next. I have them all. Almost seventy years later, I open the first letter again. I read it slowly. There is no rush these days. I used to race through his letters, eager to get to the next word, phrase, paragraph. Now I look upon them with the gift of remembrance. The letters have been with me through many moves. Today, I am packing them up once more to go with me to an apartment in a retirement community... I glance through some of the other letters and put them in the box. There is still a disposition to his writing that attracts me. It is witty, dramatic, moving and shy. It is my friend, Roger Greene. I saw him only twice, but for a while we had a friendship so personal and improbable that it seemed almost invented.

Page 46, a letter from Roge: Dear Mary Lou: The leaves begin to fall, red-brown and gold and glorious. The fog seeps in, like the white breath of a ghost. And the rains come pattering down in monotone, chill and dreary. But my coal-fire is warm and glowing, and I hug its warmth without heed to the wind soughing mournfully over Hampstead Heath...

I don't suppose I've changed much. I haven't had time; I've been too busy. And it alarms me. I feel I should get gruff and hugely serious about life, but I can't. I see my old school- mates and college-mates settled into a stiff collar behind a jowl and a sombre scowl, and they bore me. Yet I wonder, "Good God, ain't you never goin' to grow up?" Maybe. I want to. But, it seems a long way off...and that's probably why I became a newspaper man, because there I don't have to fit into the grim mold of business and get all serious, but instead find a vibrant worldliness, and excitement, an intensely tense sense of "this minute counts" which doesn't demand the sober "I-am-a-broker" visage of other modes of living. A new day, a new edition, tomorrow.

Page 76-78, a letter from Roge: Dearest Mary Lou: These days are furious. This week: MONDAY: spent battling the keys, madly, on advance stories about tomorrow's funeral procession for King George. A myriad angles. Six kings attending. Scotland Yard on guard to protect them from the possibility of stray "pineapples" from would-be assassins. The tens of thousands queuing up around Westminster Hall, standing hour after hour in the fog and rain and cold, waiting for their turn to pass by the bier of the dead King... TUESDAY: funeral day. I got up at 6:30, read the papers and at 8:15 sallied forth to cover the "crowd angle" of the gorgeous procession. The whole town strangely alive, rushing, running, bumping, hurrying to a place along the route. The subway jammed-- so crowded you could not breathe. Women beginning to faint. I finally got through, elbowing my way in the good old American football spirit through what by now had become a mob as wild as Carlyle wrote about in his scenes of the French Revolution...It was then about 9:45 A.M. Somebody shoved a tall tinkling highball in my hand, and although I never drink at that hour, I gulped it down with a prayer of thanks. The whole atmosphere was electric, super-charged with hysteria. I felt weak. The drink felt good...So we watched the massed crowds in the square below our window fainting, at the rate of two a minute, for two hours before the procession came into view with the coffin on a gun-carriage and all the kings, diplomats, soldiers, sailors, royalists and princes all in gorgeous uniforms slowly marching behind... a grand scene I will never forget...the people fainting like flies...we watched them through our opera or field glasses, and wagered on how many minutes they would take to recover before the next white-faced sagging body was yanked out of the swaying, surging crowd and laid down on a tarpaulin stretched on the gutter-side...and we pitied them, and I am afraid we (all Americans) were very rude on a funeral day of mourning because we drank highballs standing in the wide-open windows overlooking the scene...it seemed like a football day of a Big Game to us, and to them it was a day of mourning and intense emotion...something we couldn't feel, except partly...and they stared up at us, I don't know yet whether it was in envy at our lovely free-moving place to watch something that they had stood up all night long and all through the dawn and the morning to see, or whether they were staring coldly in disapprobation of our drinking and talking amid the solemn silence of their mass-hysteria grief. I don't know.

Page 79: Well, Mary Lou, honey, that brings the diary up to the present minute--which is 2:55 A.M. The grate fire is glowing cherry red. The night is silent, except for the staccato beat of my typewriter. It seems lonely. I wish you were here. I wish you were here, sitting across from me on the soft-blue divan, so that I could talk to you about a lot of things like shoes and ships and sealing wax, and cabbages and kings, instead of knocking my fingers on keys that somehow won't translate the funny ache in my heart about you. Maybe you know Edna St. Vincent Millay's line about "Love like a burning city in the breast..." and maybe she was right. And maybe, too, you are only someone I dreamed about--and still dream on.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.