The very nice lady at the Huntington Library just emailed me back today to let me know that I don't have to worry about including three letters and a reproduction of a drawing and a poem from a fourth letter that are in their collections of unpublished manuscripts, in my new novel. I discovered late in the game that they had a collection of letters that Joe Strong and his wife wrote to their friend Charlie Stoddard from Samoa about the time that my novel takes place. (The novel is Joe's diary from the period) Charlie's claim to fame:
In 1864 he visited the South Sea Islands and from there wrote his Idyls — letters which he sent to a friend who had them published in book form. "They are," as William Dean Howells said, "the lightest, sweetest, wildest, freshest things that were ever written about the life of that summer ocean." He made four other trips to the South Sea Islands, and gave his impressions in Lazy Letters from Low Latitudes and The Island of Tranquil Delights. - from Wikipedia. He beat Gauguin and John La Farge and R L Stevenson and London out there.
Anyhow, he kept Joe's letters and Joe's wife, Belle's. Great stuff, as I've mentioned earlier.
Joe was certainly worth the journey. The letters only confirmed what I guess I knew all along - that I knew the man and was a kindred soul. How does one find one's friend in a life that ended 53 years before you were born?
I've also written the University of Delaware: they have the photograph collection of George Handy Bates which has a couple of shots of Fa'apio and one of her father, the lady I've fictionalized as Joe's lover. I was led there by a biographer of Joe's who hasn't finished his biography. The guy will hunt me down and shoot me for my gross inaccuracies. Ah well, as a friend of mine says: "It's only a novel."
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