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Correspondence from Charles Stansfeld Jones to John Symonds
[typed at top left of paper: "Sorry paper ran short. Hope your book is a real success. Give my regards to Yorke [Gerald Yorke]. Jones."]
12 December 1948
Dear Symonds,
Your letter of December 5th was held a day or so as I was away from home until last night. I hasten to reply.
Thanks for news of the progress of your book; am sure that when published it will be very interesting and that you'll have made an excellent job of it.
I have never heard or seen the slightest hint of the matter to which you refer, and honestly do not think it can be true or, as you state, a fact.
You state: "I know for a fact etc.". A fact, as I understand the term, is: " a close agreement of a series of observations of the same phenomenon." That means that several persons need to have observed and be in agreement on the point you mention before you can be sure that it is a Fact. It seems to me more like a damned lie put out by A.C.'s enemies in a "smear" campaign. Perhaps that's why Clymer [R. Swinburne Clymer] backs down when it comes down to any questions of actual proof.
Anyway, I joined A.C. in N.Y. on March 30, 1918. The small portion of A.C.'s diary which I withheld covered the period he was on Oesopus Island, July—early Sept. that year. I was in New York until early March 1919 and went from there to Detroit. I was in Detroit until March of 1921 and then went on to Chicago, where I remained until 1926-1927. The so-called "Detroit scandal" did not get in the papers until some time after I had been in Chicago—about 1923 if I remember rightly; so that could have nothing to do with an event which you suggest took place 1918-1919. Unless this thing occurred before my arrival in N.Y. in 1918, it is quite certain that it did not happen while I was living in that city, and it is quite inconceivable to me that any such thing could have occurred while I was in Detroit and in constant touch with A.C. by mail—or while I was in Chicago, for that matter, before the time I broke with him in 1926—by which time he had been in Cefalu for years. Had any such thing happened the papers would have been full of it, and they would have brought it up again and again against him in the London scandals and so on. Yet, until now, I've never heard the slightest hint of such a thing from a single person in the U.S.A. (I've only just returned from six weeks in the Middle West (Chicago and Detroit) where of course his name still crops up frequently).
I'd certainly not believe that unless I had an official letter from the Department of Justice of U.S.A. with full details.
Yours with best wishes:
Jones.
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