Haley, Alex. (1921-1992)
Archive of Personal Letters during the writing of "Roots"
An intriguing small archive of three substantial typed letters signed, together with an original photograph of Haley with some of his Mandinka ancestors affixed to a printed card with some of the family history, signed and inscribed in ink by Haley. The letters addressed to the American novelist and social critic Harvey Swados, and/or to his wife and children. As follows:TLS and Flyer. 1 p, signed "Alex" and with an autograph postscript to the left margin. Letterhead of Hamilton College. Rome, NY, February 2, 1969. To Harvey, Bette, Robin and Felice [Swados].
In part: "Especially the family card, around the holiday season, struck home to me how incredibly much has transpired within one year! For it was just about that time that, last year, reluctantly I was starting to pack to leave Haut de Cagnes (just as I was starting to learn the second word of French!) to come here and start "teaching" at Hamilton. And in that ensuing year, woW! I've been lecturing all over the country, time and again. And have been working like a demon on my book, which still is considerably away from finished. And some wonderful things have happened re it, as word has gotten around. Most of all, Columbia has taken the motion picture rights in advance. A purchase price simply incredible to me (I obtained one of Hollywood's very best lawyers) with an equally-so percentage of the picture's profits. They project a minimum fifteen million production investment, a four-hour film (two in Africa, intermission, two in U.S.) that will require about two years to make." Together with a American Library Association bulletin featuring a portrait of Haley ("Alex Haley illuminated the heart of the black man"), and a plug for Roots, here advertised with the original working title "Before This Anger," inscribed in green ink "As well you know, now finally in the actual writing stage, it seems interminable! Love! Alex."
TLS. 2 pp, signed "Alex". Personal letterhead (San Francisco). February 6, 1971. To Robin [Swados] ("By copy of this I am writing, too, to Harvey and Betty, which is most in keeping with my preeminent image of the Swados family -- that you are all one...").
In part: "My bookshelves contain a fine, full copy of Standing Fast. such great feeling of pride, I bought it in New York. I stood there remembering the day Harvey announced he had passed the thousandth page. And a lot of other Cagnes memories came rushing back to me. From that day to this day, I have not read the book. The reasons are two: somehow, the book is The Swados to me. And I have a thing about reading books, that I will not start one if I do not feel I can read right through it, without stopping to do something else. (I have not, either, read "Autobiography Of Malcolm X.") I look forward to when I can. And I look forward to having it autographed by Harvey.
My own book goes on, seeming interminably. Several reasons. In its very concept, it inherently is one of those kinds of books to write: it will sweep across 260 years of history, Robin and Harvey and Betty. My God, what a book it aspires to be! I have worked, by now, so much, so long, so hard, so painstakingly, that I feel, sometimes, dulled, and as if in a morass. Then at times two weeks of working will produce another twenty or thirty pages that make me buoyant. Sometimes my editor, who is working very, very closely with me, will recommend that a paragraph here or there might well become a short chapter in length, with that greater wealth of insights, of details, of dimensions -- and I will fume and grump; but then I will kind of see what he has in mind; and I will put another week, maybe ten days into doing that and when it is done, I cannot see why I ever considered having not done such detail in the first place. You know? Of course you do.
Recently there was a meeting of xxxxx principal people involved in this book, publisher, editor, film people, xx lawyer, whatnot, and everybody manfully accepted my projection that I needed to work yet longer enough that realistically publication will be in Fall 1972. And that's where I stand. Working. Lecturing a lot. "Too much" some say. Maybe. I don't know. But I do know that I enjoy the lecturing. I do know that all I ever lecture about is this coming book -- so that I am building up the biggest advance audience ever heard of, I imagine. And I do know that lecturing supports me better than writing ever did. . and that it was lecturing which emancipated me from the treadmill of the selling to magazines month after month after month, by utter necessity. Which had gotten to be no kind of fun at all. I have been a great many places. I will enclose a thing which my lectures bureau put together of excerpt remarks from some of the places."
TLS. 1 p, signed "Alex". Personal letterhead (San Francisco). April 25, 1973.
In part: "Re the matter of acting for Robin: it's about as tough a business as there is to get into, I guess, nowadays. It's true, as you read, that I wrote the script for Superfly II, recently filmed in Senegal, now being edited in New York. I really don't know much more of the film business than the scripting end, and not a whole lot about that: the producer and star just flew out here and convinced me that I should write it, then I flew to New York, cooped up in a hotel and did so.
As to how you might go about getting an acting job, however small, Robin, the fact is I really can't give much worthwhile advice -- beyond that you should enter an acting school, or class, if that's at all possible, for those in charge would have some kind of entree to where jobs are. I know some even "name" actors who are unemployed now; there just seem to be far more actors than roles about. Were I making a film of my own, in which we could call you in, in any capacity, you know that you'd quickly have that call -- but I won't be doing that for a year, at least. I realize I'm being anything but encouraging, Robin, but there's nothing brighter I can give in the acting advice area right now.
Incredibly, I'm still not finished with this interminable book, but I hope that this year will see it done, all three volumes that it has developed into, like an accordion, and then it will get published in 1974, at forever last."
Already known as the author of a definitive biography of Malcolm X (1965), which was based on interviews done with the Black leader in "Playboy" magazine, Haley created a sensation -- and single-handedly launched a new interest in genealogy -- with his book, Roots. The saga, which traced his African roots, was first excerpted in "Reader's Digest" before publication in book form in 1976. The story, which was televised as a successful miniseries in 1977, resulted in a number of awards for Haley, including the National Book Award, a special Pulitzer Prize and the NAACP's Spingarn Medal as well as several honorary doctor of letters degrees for his research, which spanned 12 years.
Haley was briefly a "writer in residence" at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, where he began writing Roots. He enjoyed spending time at a local bistro called the Savoy in nearby Rome, where he would sometimes pass the time listening to the piano player. Today, there is a special table in honor of Haley at the Savoy, and a painting of Haley writing Roots on a yellow legal tablet.
Harvey Swados (1920-1972) lived with his wife Bette Beller and children first in Valley Cottage, NY and in Amherst, Massachusetts from 1970. Cagnes-Sur-Mer in Southern France, mentioned numerous times in the present letters, was considered a second home. Harvey Swados had two principal passions: politics and literature. "By temperament and conviction he was a socialist...His belief in the possibilities of a just society was as primitive in faith as it was sophisticated in judgment" (Katz, Leslie, "Thoughts after Harvey Swados" in American Journal, 4-10-73). According to Swados: "I remain a social radical, at once dismayed and exhilarated by my seemingly doomed yet endlessly optimistic native land" (unpublished autobiography). "To call himself a socialist meant for Harvey most of all to preserve the power of moral responsiveness...It meant, as he wrote..., 'My kinship has been with those writers who imply, even as they treat of trouble and terror, that the world could be better just as my commitment has been to those human beings who believe-despite every awful evidence to the contrary-that the world must be better'" (Howe, Irving, "Harvey Swados 1920-1972" in Dissent, Spring 1973). His papers are held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Robin Swados (b. 1953) has had a long and varied career as a playwright, prose writer, editor, copy editor, and copywriter. Trained as a classical pianist, following studies in Amherst and in London at the acting academy Studio '68 of Theater Arts, Swados began his acting career in Manhattan in 1975 and moved to Los Angeles in 1978, where he spent six years acting in theater and television, before returning to New York in 1984, soon abandoning his acting career and turning to writing. His first play, A Quiet End, was first performed at the London 1985 Gay Sweatshop theater festival, has subsequently been produced at many theaters across the United States, and has been published by Samuel French, Inc. and anthologized in Gay & Lesbian Plays Today. From 1988 to 1999, Swados was an editor at Knopf and Doubleday, later working as an independent travel writer, copy editor and copywriter.
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