PRINT SOURCE: Thomas Raddall Fonds, Correspondence. From Thomas Raddall to Barbara Lucas Grantmyre, 15 September, 1960. MS-2-202 41.64.
Subject HeadingsWhen fellow Nova Scotia writer Barbara Grantmyre writes to compliment him on his new novel, The Governor's Lady, and especially on his characterization of John Wentworth, T. H. Raddall responds with a brief assessment of Wentworth's final years. Raddall notes that Doubleday made three errors on the dust-jacket blurb for The Governor's Lady, the most irksome being the misrepresentation of his relationship with John Buchan, Kenneth Roberts, and Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.
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Sep.15, 1960 Dear Mrs. Grantmyre, I'm glad you liked Governor's Lady. And Johnnie Wentworth.1 He was really an admirable character in his New Hampshire days, and his story after that is simply the decline and fall of a good man. After his return to Halifax as Governor (where I chose to end my book) he soon sank into the rut left by Parr2 before him, or rather he permitted Fannie to push him into it, constantly seeking money and favor for himself, his friends and relatives. He became a pompous autocrat, out to squelch anyone who questioned his ways, and finally the British Government was glad to get rid of him, and the Nova Scotians were glad to see him go. Oddly enough, in the year he died in a boarding house at Halifax, his old mansion in the New Hampshire hills was des- troyed by fire, and the great pine tree on Mount Delight was shattered by a bolt of lightning. His house in Portsmouth still stands, and to this day you can stand by the site of the Atkinson house and see the west bedchamber where Johnnie used to watch for Fannie's signals. The jacket blurb infuriated me. It was slapped together by some hasty idiot and sent off to the printers without being checked by me or by the editor who looks after my books at Doubleday's New York office. Apart from the silly errors -- Nova Scotia an island -- and the statements that I live in Halifax and wrote a book called "Nova Scotia, Warden of the North" -- there was that line about "having become friends with John Buchan,3 Kenneth Roberts4 and Theodore Roosevelt Jr.5" It would have been much more accurate to say that these three men befriended me, a struggling young writer whom they had never met, as they had befriended dozens of others. I trust you are in good health and that your pen is fruitful. Mrs. Barbara Grantmyre, Elmsdale, N.S. |
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