"One of the nicest friendships I have ever known:" The editor of Draggerman's Haul remembers one of his clients
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May, 2022: An Addendum
Since the launch of this exhibit in 2020, photocopies of seven letters relating to the origins of Draggerman’s Haul have been shared with the McGuire Library by a Connecticut viewer who enjoys a close family connection to the book. From him we learned that in 1947 his mother, Louva Henn Calhoun, now 97, had typed up Thompson’s handwritten manuscripts at the behest of Daniel Merriman, the Yale biologist for whom she worked at the University's Bingham Oceanographic Laboratory. Merriman knew Ellery well from their research expeditions, appreciated the uniquely entertaining style of his stories and believed they were publishable. Of course, Ellery was already something of a celebrity as the subject of a New Yorker profile that January.
Below: In an October, 1947, letter to Louva Henn, Ellery wrote, “My word what work you did on my stories! Words fail me, I don’t know what to say - only thanks.” Later he adds, “Now I’m trying to write— the thing for which I had the least training.”
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Robert Ballou, the Viking editor who shepherded Draggerman’s Haul through to publication in 1950, wrote to Louva Henn Calhoun later that year. The opening paragraph reveals the warm friendship that had developed between editor and author:
Ballou goes on to write about his "enforced idleness" after "keeling over and becoming quite incapacitated," a condition he attributes to "worry," acknowledging that he and his wife must engage in "more play and rest and quiet." Their Connecticut home is only thirty miles from New Haven and he tells Louva not to be surprised by a phone call some Sunday afternoon to ask if they might come over in their "cute little new English Ford" to pay a call.
After a paragraph about family matters unrelated to Ellery, he signs off:
Ballou uses the term “ghosting” instead of “editing” - very likely what an editor feels he is doing after poring over a manuscript for hours on end and making changes he believes will improve it. In any case, what comes across in the pages of Draggerman's Haul is the writer himself, and if Dan Merriman “did a lot of correcting and suggesting,” as Ellery once wrote, or if his editor “ghosted” some of the words, in the end the voice was Ellery Thompson’s.
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A 2023 Footnote to this Chapter
On November 1, 2023, Louva Calhoun and her sons, Paul and Michael, came to New London to present their gift to McGuire Library of the six letters Ellery wrote to her in 1947 and 1948 prior to the publication of Draggerman's Haul.
Mrs. Calhoun also gave the Library her letter from Robert Ballou together with an offprint of Joseph Mitchell's New Yorker profile of Ellery. These valuable additions greatly enrich the Library's Ellery Thompson Collection.
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