Letter from Carl D. Duncan to Patricia Whiting, January, 1966

              I took celery juice to Doris and hamburgers, fries and choc malts for everyone and we had a feed together. Lots of fun!
Dearest Patricia:
I’m sorry my car couldn’t carry your frames out to your mom’s. the full sized Ford would have done it, but I wouldn’t go back to the big car from the Falcon, even so. The Falcon saves me too much energy. I think it is a factor in my healthy improvement that is still going on and I have you to thank for it. No one else shows me as much genuine personal interest and understanding as you, so remember, it was you who kept after me to change to a smaller car until I did. I am both pleased and grateful.
Your mom told me this evening the story of your guinea pig - that preceded the big long haired black “kitten” that you are holding in the picture I had duplicated. It is a delightful story - told as it was - with your mom’s sense of humor and mischievousness. It deserves being written up for publication!
One other (or two pieces) piece of information in this brief note is that I’m still reading Sartre’s “Literary and Philosophical Essays”, and his essay (chap 7) “John Dos Passos and 1919” delights me as much as the first one in the book disturbed and angered me. As he says in his last line “I regard Dos Passos as the greatest writer of our time.” This feeling produces such gems as the following.
“Dos Passos has invented only one thing, an art of story-telling. But that is enough to create a universe!” the next is a quote from Malraux in “Man’s Hope” - “the tragic thing about death is that it transforms life into a destiny”. “The lives he tells about” (this is now Sartre about Dos Passos) “are all closed in on themselves. We constantly have the feeling that these vague, human lives, are destinies.” “in capitalist society, men do not have lives, they have only destinies.” “we are neither mechanical objects nor possessed souls, b ut something worse; we are free.” And finally “beauty is a veiled contradiction.” Of course much of the impressiveness of these is lost because they are out of context.
The other thing I have to report is that yesterday while listening to some subdued music on KPFA as I worked, the music ended and dialog began. I realized that something exciting was being said, so I turned the radio up and listened, enthralled, to a recording of a panel of the “Harlem Playwright’s Guild” as the 6th (I’ve missed the last 5) presentation in a series on what the negroes really think about America. It was varied, but mostly very forceful, often angry - and who can blame them and though it supposedly was about plays written about negroes by negroes, mostly it was an angry defense (or offense - as you choose) of the “fortunes” of good negro playwrights (not all of them) when or as they have struggled through the last 130 years to win a place on merit in the American Theatre. The last one was one of the most brilliant pieces of angry literature I have ever heard. I promptly sat down and wrote to KPFA requesting the whole thing (including the 5 in the series I have missed) if available. All the American public should hear this - especially the first (historical) and the last (angry young man). It is necessary if we are to convert America (as the speakers said) into an America for everyone - regardless of color. You’ll thrill to it if I can get it. Love - Carl.