Last Spring, in So. Cal. [Southern California] I began to feel that I had—that the scene laid there—& the old Mexican life mixed in with just enough Indian, to enable me to tell what had happened to them—would be the very perfection of coloring. You know I have now lived six months in So. Cal.
Still I did not see my way clear; got no plot; till one morning late last October, before I was wide awake, the whole plot flashed into my mind—not a vague one—the whole story just as it stands to-day: in less than five minutes: as if some one spoke it. I sprang up, went to my husband’s room, and told him: I was half frightened. From that time till I came here it haunted me, becoming more and more vivid. I was impatient to get at it. I wrote the first word of it Dec. 1st. As soon as I began it seemed impossible to write fast enough. In spite of myself, I write faster than I would write a letter. I write two thousand to three thousand words in a morning, and I cannot help it. It racks me like a struggle with an outside power. I cannot help being superstitious about it. I have never done half the amount of work in the same time. Ordinarily it would be a simple impossibility. Twice since beginning it I have broken down utterly for a while—with a cold ostensibly, but with great nervous prostration added. What I have to endure in holding myself away from it, afternoons, on the days I am compelled to be in the house, no words can tell. It is like keeping away from a lover, whose hand I can reach!
Now you will ask what sort of English it is I write at this lightning speed. So far as I can tell, the best I ever wrote! I have read it aloud as I have gone on, to one friend of keen literary perceptions and judgment, the most purely intellectual woman I know—Mrs. Trimble. She says it is smooth, strong, clear—“Tremendous” is her frequent epithet. I read the first ten chapters to Miss Woolsey this last week—she has been spending a few days with me ... but she says, “Far better than anything you ever have done.”
The success of it—if it succeeds—will be that I do not even suggest my Indian history till the interest is so assured in the heroine—and hero—that people will not lay the book down. There is but one Indian in the story.
Every now & then I force myself to stop & write a short story or a bit of verse: I can’t bear the strain: but the instant I open the pages of the other I write as I am writing now—as fast as I could copy! What do you think? Am I possessed of a demon? Is it a freak of mental disturbance, or what?
I have the feeling that if I could only read it to you, you would know. If it is as good as Mrs. Trimble, Mr. Jackson & Miss Woolsey think, I shall be indeed rewarded, for it will “tell.” But I can’t believe it is. I am uneasy about it—but try as I may, all I can, I cannot write slowly for more than a few moments. I sit down at 9.30 or 10, & it is one before I know it. In good weather I then go out, after lunching, and keep out, religiously till five: but there have not been more than three out of eight good days all winter:—and the days when I am shut up, in my room from two till five, alone—with my Ramona and Alessandro, and cannot go along with them on their journey, are maddening.
Fifty-two last October and I’m not a bit steadier-headed, you see, than ever! I don’t know whether to send this or burn it up. Don’t laugh at me whatever you do.
Yours always,
H. J.