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Nell Blaine
210 Riverside Drive
N.Y.,N.Y.
10025

Ted Leigh
1000 Boone Street
Webster City, Iowa
50595

March 22, 1982

Dear Nell Blaine:

I received the wonderful packet of Fairfield's letters, photo, medium recipe and your reminiscence last week. Thank you very much.
It's a geat pleasure to savor and remember Fairfield through your reminiscence and his beautiful letters to Howard Griffin. You mentioned the "gracious and ample" lifestyle of Fairfield and Anne. I know what you mean. In between years at Amherst College I studied at The Studio School in the Village, where Fairfield visited me occasionally. I visited their Southampton home when Jimmy Schuyler lived there and gave me copies of two of his books. To experience the hospitality of their wholesome family and the ambience of Fairfield's painting and meet my first poet moved me deeply. I glimpsed how persona commitments--family ties--and the sensuality of painting could coexist happily. I felt, underneath, a deep trust of Fairfield which kept mecorresponding, inspite of my discomfort at his eccentric manner that you mentioned.
These letters of his to HOward Griffin convey, as in other letters of his, the freedom he felt expressing himself on paper which was greater I found than he felt in person. I sensed, too, that he respected and trusted H. Griffin. The tone of the letters was warm; he shares alot of himself (I especially like Fairfield's description of the healthy, happy, young collie and the sire, "just like a middle-aged human father, he ruled through the force of his bad temper...); and he doesn't dwell, in talking to Howard about his work, on explaining his assumptions. A simple "this speaks to me directly" suffices. I read almost no poetry, but Fairfield's quote from H.G.'s, Eveningfall, describing sunset as "like a woman drowned with all her scarves", and these letters,makes me interested in Howard Griffin's.