Footnotes

'I AM RUDE, NERVOUS, IRRITABLE & UNKEMPT': THOMAS WOLFE WRITES HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN LONDON & RAGES AGAINST HIS GERMAN PUBLISHER & THE FASCIST THREAT.

Wolfe had spent the autumn of 1926 living in Wellington Square in Chelsea whilst writing his first book Look Homeward, Angel, and returned to London in 1930 to write his fictionalized autobiography Of Time and the River, published in 1935, and his only American bestseller. Frere found him '...the top two floors on Ebury Street, complete with a charwoman... In this atmosphere of order and repose, he settled down to a midnight-to-dawn routine of work, at the end of which he would sit by his window and watch London awaken...' (Andrew Turnbull, Thomas Wolfe, 1968, p.165-166). Wolfe had also spent time in Germany and our letters show his despair at the rise of fascism in the country. On witnessing increasing incidents of discrimination against the Jews there, he returned to America and published a story based on what he had seen, 'I have a Thing to Tell You', in The New Republic, leading to his books being banned in Germany. The papers also include a letter to Frere from Wolfe's estranged editor and friend Maxwell Perkins in which he encloses a copy of Wolfe's famous last letter to him, movingly written a month before Wolfe's death of tuberculosis, beginning '...I'm sneaking this against orders, but I've got a "hunch"...'. Perkins distributed several of these copies to other friends apart from Frere, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, editor Hiram Haydn and author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, whose reply to Perkins is published on the Letters of Note website. Our letters from Wolfe to Frere are not published in Elizabeth Nowell's Selected Letters of Thomas Wolfe, 1958, nor seemingly elsewhere.

This lot forms part of an archive of letters and papers from the personal collection of publisher Alexander Stuart Frere-Reeves (1892-1984), known as 'Frere' to his friends, which brings together many of the most important authors of the twentieth-century, and demonstrates a wide web of influence and relationships. As managing editor of William Heinemann, he built up an extraordinary list of talent represented here in correspondence from, amongst others, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, Rebecca West and her lover H.G. Wells, W. Somerset Maugham, Noël Coward, and J.B. Priestley, a lifelong friend with whom he edited Granta. Frere tended towards the younger, more 'modern' authors, several of whom became close friends, as is shown by these intimate letters, which blur the lines between personal and business relationships: '...He had a flair for detecting talent, and encouraging it, and the gift of establishing friendships with the people he liked and respected, among whom were most of his authors. He prided himself on publishing authors rather than books only...' (obituary, The Times, 6 October 1984). As a young man he had an intense relationship with the novelist Elizabeth von Arnim, nearly 30 years his senior, their hitherto unpublished correspondence also offered here (see lot 91). Many of our letters are addressed to his wife Patricia Marion Caldecott Wallace (1907-1995), writer, theatre critic and daughter of the author Edgar Wallace, most notably some revealing correspondence from her close friend Daphne du Maurier (see lot 92).

After leaving Christ's College, Cambridge, Frere's career began as a journalist on the London Evening News. He joined William Heinemann, a subsidiary of Doubleday, in 1923, rose rapidly within the firm and was made managing director in 1932 after F.N. Doubleday sold his shares after the Wall Street crash. He resigned as chairman in 1961 and retired a year later. His papers have remained in the family until now.

Provenance: Alexander Stuart Frere (1892-1984); thence by descent to the present owner.