[Richard Condon, novelist] Typed Letter Signed 'Richard Condon' to Hunter Davies, journalist and broadcaster., with literary content as he talks about Tony Godwin (d.1976) influential British publisher of the 1960s/1970.

One page, folio, 22 x 35cms, a trifle battered but clear and complete, with three minor additions in Condon's hand, along with bracketing and underlining of sentences and phrases perhaps the work of Davies. As well as having the Dial Press Address it has a printed advertisement for Condon's New novel 'Arigato'. See Image. Text: About Tony Godwin: when my daughter Wendy [& I added in Condon's hand] wrote a Mexican cookery book (in Ireland) called THE MEXICAN STOVE [bracketing follows] Tony is the only editor I've met who test-cooked eleven of the dinner recipes at home,decided on three that worked best for him, then gave a dinner party for eight friends as about the only fully fledged Mexican cook on Primrose Hill [bracket close]. I wrote a novel about American political assassination [preceding The Manchurian Candidate?]. After he read it he took me for a long, fifty minute walk in Hyde Park and explained why he thought Jane Austen had been such a good writer. [Bracket opens] Tony is a man of cultivated innocence. As he admires Miss Austen's hopelessly sophisticated simplicity so does he seek to remove the adornments from his own spirit. [Bracket closes] Tony is a spectacular, but not gaudy. Which is cause [bracket opens] to worry about him as he stalks in the New York publishing market. He has spent such a complicated lifetime studying English guile that I worry that he will not have the time to learn how to recognise the American kind, [Bracket closes] Under a change of rules like that the lion which Tony's spirit is could be swallowed by the yawning New York mice. [Bracket opens] But more likely he will overcome because more than any man, literary or otherwise, whom I have known, Tony is actually inquisitive about change. [Bracket closes] He doesn't take change for granted or merely tolerate it. He examines it like a pawnbroker and , hypnotized by its beauty/novelty every time, is able to explain it to his authors and thus make them his bodyguards. This world which has too many books does not have enough book-idolaters like Tony. It seems more than likely that Hunter Davies did the bracketing and perhaps produced an article on Tony Godwin himself. Note: The titles included ?The First Casualty? by Phillip Knightley; ?Spy Story,? ?Yesterday's Spy? and ?Eleven Declarations of War? by Len Deighton; ?The Siege of Krish napur? by J. G. Farrell and ?A Ford Not a Lincoln,? by Richard Reeves.Other authors whose work he edited and published here and in Britain included Irwin Shaw, Mordecai Richter, Margaret Drabble, Eric Ambler, Ronald Searle, Richard Condon and Lady Antonia Fraser.