"I Can Manage Multiplicity" draft 1
- Attribution:
- Holmes, John A.
- Date:
- 1953
- Additional Information:
- This draft was probably enclosed with a letter Holmes wrote to Frances Randall, dated September 8, 1953: "The new masterpiece enclosed, about multiplicity, was begun a couple of years ago, apparently because I had been reading about nails somewhere. It trailed off into real multiplicity and got nowhere. I added our own mailman's real name, and the business of catalogs, because it happened that the Casco Bay Trading Post catalog did come, and it does have shirts for hunter's wives, and it does have belt-holders for deer-calls, and similar gadgets. What if I really went into, and had Hammacher Schlemmer, and Schwarts, and Abercrombie and Fitch, and son, not to mention S. S. Pierce. "And the magazines are really incredible: every trade and rank of every trade and profession has its magazine and its organization. Legal specialists for morticians have a magazine. The NE College Registrars have an organization, and a bulletin. In the National Association for Octogenarians Named Frances, I understand you are Regent for the eastern states, and write descriptions of FM broadcasts for its magazine. "I've sent this poem to the New Yorker, and it has at least a fifty-fifty chance of being accepted. But one never knows."