Autograph letter signed to George Spencer
El Paso, TX, 1988
Autograph letter to George Spencer, from El Paso, Texas. Two pages on yellow ruled paper, 18.5 x 12.9 cm., written on one side only in black felt pen. With original mailing envelope addressed to: “George Spencer / Whittle Communications / 505 Market Street / Knoxville Tenn / 37902”.The sender is: “Cormac McCarthy /1011 N Mesa / El Paso Texas / 79902”. Both writings are in the same black ink of the letter and in McCarthy’s hand. The envelope is postmarked “El Paso TX 5 Jan 1988”.
CONDITION:near fine.
PROVENANCE:purchased at Heritage auction in October 2013.
The letter reads in full:
“Dear George Spencer,
Sorry to be so long in answering your nice letter. About the only way I can manage it is just to take a couple of days every few months and at least answer some mail. I appreciate the photos also. Some familiar landmarks there. The one of the river left me unsure of whether I was looking toward the north bank or the south. Is that a paddlewheel boat?
The incident about the boxing ape happened to a friend of mine – Billy Rhodes – now dead I’m sorry to say. I wish I could have told it as well as he did. Thank you for the nice comments on books by CM. I am working on a couple of books but I doubt I’ll have anything in any sort of finished state in time for your magazine. I don’t do anything really but write novels and don’t even have short pieces except as someone might excerpt from a book occasionally. Maybe at some later date I’ll have a book done that you can pick something from before publication. I think the magazine sounds like a good one and I hope it gets the support it needs. Thanks again for writing. All the best
Cormac McCarthy.”
The recipient is George Spencer, editor of Tennessee Illustrated, a monthly magazine similar to Texas Monthly, which was published by Time, Inc., and author of “Courage 101: True Tales of Grit & Glory”. The Heritage auction description of the letter reads: “Mr. Spencer, as editor, sought out the finest writers born in Tennessee. At the time, McCarthy was not yet the nationally-known author he is today, but Mr. Spencer recognized his genius, and began a correspondence with him in the hopes of getting McCarthy to contribute original material (or an except from his novels) to Tennessee Illustrated, which, unfortunately, McCarthy never did. Mr. Spencer states: ‘I recall telling him I thought he was a master of what Faulkner called ‘maniacal risibility’. He was and is’”.
Spencer published this letter, along with the other he received by McCarthy, in an article published in June 2023 on Substack (“When Cormac McCarthy wrote me”, https://georgespencer.substack.com/p/when-cormac-mccarthy-wrote-me?utm_source=publication-search ). Strangely enough, his dating of the letter (June 1988), is wrong.
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