Part I

THE LETTERS OF HART CRANE

_By Brom Weber_

HART CRANE: A BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDY, 1948

[Illustration:

_H. W. Minns_

HART CRANE

(_Taken c. 1921_)]

THE LETTERS OF

HART CRANE

1916-1932

EDITED BY BROM WEBER

_The imaged Word, it is, that holds

Hushed willows anchored in its glow.

It is the unbetrayable reply

Whose accent no farewell can know._

HERMITAGE HOUSE · NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT, 1952, BY BROM WEBER

_All rights reserved_

_First Edition_

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PREFACE

“Of the poets who came into prominence during the 1930’s in America,

none is more likely to achieve an immortality than Harold Hart Crane.”

So write Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska in their recent,

authoritative _History of American Poetry_. The extraordinary quality of

Crane’s poetry and the tense drama of his brief life make such an

observation valid and inevitable. It is amply supported in an indirect

sense by the amount of devoted attention which Crane has received in the

twenty years since his death by drowning in 1932. Waldo Frank’s edition

of the _Collected Poems_ appeared in 1933. The first full-length book on

Crane, Philip Horton’s _Hart Crane_, came in 1937. Eleven years later,

in 1948, the editor’s _Hart Crane_ was published. Meanwhile, magazines,

anthologies, and critical volumes have given substantial space and

consideration to the poet.

It seems fitting then, and necessary too, that the correspondence of

this outstanding writer be presented now. Crane’s letters exist in

scattered condition: some in magazines, others in the appendices of

books, still more in libraries and private collections. Many have

already been lost, because of carelessness, wartime events, or other

factors. But apart from such matters as preservation and compilation,

there are the human revelations and literary merits which distinguish

Crane’s letters and make this collection desirable. Seldom has a man

laid his heart bare as does Crane in these documents, seldom with the

passion and skill which he so masterfully infused into his poetry as

well. It seems undoubted that many of these letters will before long

find their way into anthologies of great letters and prose.

The large quantity of letters written by Crane may be ascribed in part

to the geographical gulf which separated him from those to whom he

believed he could honestly announce his thoughts, emotions, and

meaningful experiences. As soon as it became possible to enjoy closer

contact with once-distant friends, he stopped writing to them. Thus

scores of letters were sent to Gorham Munson from November 1919 to the

early spring of 1923, at which time Crane joined Mr. and Mrs. Munson in

New York. Thereafter, few letters were received by Mr. Munson, except in

rare instances when either of the two men had left the city, or when

Crane had an urgent need for communication which could not be satisfied

with speech. In the case of friends like Slater Brown and Malcolm

Cowley, where friendship was initiated and continued with social

intercourse hardly ever broken by physical separation, only a handful of

letters exist as a result.

As happens with some of us, many letters were the perfunctory

expressions of a sense of obligation. An explanation of this character

must often be assigned to a series of letters written to one person, or

to a particular letter. It is as mundane sometimes as insistence by the

poet’s mother that he write her several times a week and make sure to

send her a special delivery letter timed to reach her punctually each

Sunday morning. In this class, too, must be placed those letters

occasioned by Crane’s failure to pay a debt, his desire to make amends

for a squabble, and similar causes.

But far more compelling than distance or propriety as the dominant force

behind Crane’s prolific composition of letters was an emotional impulse

which drove him to discharge so much expressive energy in a non-poetic

form: his acquisitive need for sympathy, pity, understanding, affection

... a need accompanied by the belief that these responses could be

evoked with a persuasive explanation in words. Let us not confuse this

poignant situation with dishonesty or a huckster’s fraudulency. Crane

was, after all, a poet to whom language was paramount. The outcome was

that even those of his letters which had been intended as geographical

bridges, or as duties, speedily found themselves converted into detailed

and uninhibited recitations and exhortations. Examining the letters to

his mother in this light, to choose one instance, we can understand why,

despite the profound mutual misunderstanding of which each was aware,

Crane persisted in alternately cajoling, threatening, and informing a

basically-unresponsive correspondent.

The resultant rich character of Crane’s letters, in terms of factual

data and emotional subtleties, has enveloped them with a completeness

calling for little amplification or clarification in the form of notes.

These have consequently been held to a minimum. When Crane, for example,

announces a decision, he bathes it in such a sea of rationalization and

background that its origins, its validity, and its likely conclusion

are all too evident to the reader. One is, indeed, encouraged to

speculate whether the tremendous amount of energy involved in the

production of so vast a profusion of details for even the most trivial

of communications did not drain away some of the feeling and thought

that might more happily have been incorporated in poems.

Strangely enough, however, it is apparent that the quantity and quality

of Crane’s letters were not negatively, but positively related to his

poetic output. A correlation of the letters with the history of Crane’s

productivity reveals that it was precisely during periods of great

poetic fertility and well-being that his most evocative and profound

letters were composed. An illustration of this symbiotic relationship

between the poetry and the prose, surely a phenomenon which demonstrates

how organic and deep-seated was the urge for literary expression

animating him, is the remarkable series of letters written to Gorham

Munson between 1919 and 1923, when Crane perfected his control of a

mature, individual language and music and composed some of his most

striking lyrics. The highly-charged group of letters which Crane sent

off to Waldo Frank from the Isle of Pines in 1926, while so feverishly

engaged in molding several brilliant sections of _The Bridge_, is

another relevant example.

The self-sufficiency of Crane’s letters has made it less disappointing

for the editor to be unable to include correspondence addressed to him,

or to make extracts from it, as a complementary balance and check.

Because of Crane’s peripatetic career, letters he received were left

behind in the boarding houses, steamship cabins, and hotels wherein he

spent his days. A more drastic reduction in the number of remaining

letters was apparently accomplished by his impetuous habit of destroying

letters from people with whom he had severed relationships on an

unfriendly note. Finally, the irregular and careless storing and

handling of Crane’s papers after his death has had its own inevitable

results.

The responsibility to be exercised in the task of organizing the letters

of a tempestuous and controversial man like Hart Crane, is as much a

matter of human judgment as it is a familiarity with the canons of

scholarship. Crane conformed less, overtly at least, to the dominant

mores of his age than probably any of his contemporaries. The leitmotif

was restless deviation--whether aesthetic, social, religious, or sexual.

The record of his days vibrates with an explosive terror and

repose--elated, wretched, violent, Rabelaisian--which find dynamic

outlet in his letters. Insofar as Crane’s letters will serve to develop

a self-portrait and contribute toward an understanding of three decades

of our American past, no harm can be accomplished by a forthright

presentation.

The editor, therefore, has not suppressed any portions of Crane’s

letters which might disturb the genteel or excite the prurient. Those

who have studied Crane’s poetry with perception know how richly studded

it is with the imagery, symbolism, and themes of love. As this preface

was being put into final form, the editor received a copy of Dr. Paul

Friedman’s “The Bridge: A Study in Symbolism” (_The Psychoanalytic

Quarterly_, Jan. 1952). After discussing such writers as Wilder and

Kafka, Dr. Friedman, one of the few psychoanalysts who displays a

genuine concern for literary values, goes on to say: “It implies no

irreverence toward Crane’s poetic sensibility to introduce these

[psychological] concepts. The sexual imagery in his poetry is overt,

undisguised.” Of the “Voyages” series, Dr. Friedman writes: “Here the

psychoanalyst could hardly be more explicit than Crane himself.” Under

no circumstances could the wealth of background experience and emotion

which produced the alternately-pessimistic and ecstatic love poems of

Crane conscientiously be omitted from a volume of his letters. One of

the great love-poets of our time, few men have been so tyrannically

governed by a chronic need to love and be loved. One need only observe

in these letters how Crane’s disinterest in poetry and his torpid

creativity after 1929 were affected by a new and surprising love

relationship. Miraculously rejuvenated, as it were, he wrote “The Broken

Tower,” one of his best poems.

The course of a man’s life is inextricably linked with his fellows. For

Crane in particular, relationships with other people were among the most

weighty problems with which he had to cope. The letters uncover a

pattern of tragic and repetitive failure which cannot help but influence

our response to his statements about men and women. As one views the

past with the advantage of hindsight, the fact is inescapable that

almost everyone with whom Crane had close contact eventually became

estranged from him in greater or lesser degree, though from a distance

they may have continued to admire certain of his qualities. This held

true for his literary as well as non-literary associates. All too often,

it was Crane’s vigorous egocentricity, his self-destructive behavior,

which impelled a shocked and helpless friend to seek protective cover,

to avoid Crane as gracefully as possible. Yet, far more frequently,

those who drifted within Crane’s orbit became the unwitting centers of

emotional dramas in which fantasy was as powerful a constituent as

reality. The fantastic distortion which blurred some people for Crane

must be attributed to his insecurity, his sexual inversion, his

resentment against those who could or did help him, his alcoholism, his

paranoiac misrepresentation of motives and events, his hysterical

existence ... in short, to the complex of neuroses which finally

burgeoned forth during the last year of his life into what was probably

a full-scale psychopathic state. Of course, this does not deny that

Crane was probably also the victim of envy, misunderstanding, and

distaste for his poetry and personality.

With these considerations as a guide, the editor has not thought it

necessary to delete those of Crane’s comments which reflect unfavorably

upon the works or persons of artists or other public figures, especially

where such comments are balanced elsewhere in the letters by favorable

remarks. History, in any event, does not take kindly to being expurgated

or twisted for special purposes, no matter how laudable the intention.

The editor has been encouraged in his respect for honesty and frankness

by Gorham Munson, Editor of Hermitage House, who has interposed no

stipulations although he figures prominently in a variety of ways in the

letters. The procedure has been different if it seemed that Crane’s

observations would psychologically or socially harm any living person or

the close surviving relatives of a dead man. In such cases, and they

have been few, either the offensive material, or names and data which

might identify an individual, were omitted.

A few words of caution about some of the conclusions to be drawn from

the letters are in place. The editor has expanded space and tried his

publisher’s spirit, in order to include every important letter. But he

has, of course, selected. Therefore, no ultimate conclusions,

particularly those involving the personalities of Crane’s contemporaries

or the nuances of relationships, are implied by the arrangement which

follows.

Further, the poetry of Hart Crane ought not to be hastily judged by his

life or letters, though the latter should no doubt be studied to support

an understanding and appreciation of the poetry. Art is not subservient

to the man; it has a life of its own which may be related but never

subordinated. For example, the Brooklyn Bridge as conception and poem

will be seen to have occupied a compulsive position in Crane’s

experience and thought. Granted that _The Bridge_ was a failure as a

unified, major epic; this should not lead us to conclude that Crane

failed as a poet too, even though he did not succeed as a latter-day

Dante or Virgil. Various sections of _The Bridge_ are individually

magnificent; in addition, Crane wrote other poems before, during, and

after his work on _The Bridge_ which suffice to give him first rank

among contemporary poets. Nor should we, at the same time, assume that

Crane’s poetic gift was gone because he said so, or because he didn’t

write much in his last years. “The Broken Tower” was completed little

more than a month before he died in the Caribbean Sea. With only one

such poem to his credit, a poet would deserve and gain the immortality

predicted for Crane. Finally, Crane was admittedly not a thinker, rather

a creative being who depended on sensation, intuition, taste. It would

be unwise to characterize his poetry as valueless expression simply

because he was neither a logician nor a pundit preoccupied, sensibly or

otherwise, with questions of ideology and systematic knowledge. In his

own valid and fruitful manner, Crane illuminated recesses of the human

mind and heart with pregnant clarity.

The editor has prepared a chronology of Crane’s life and works. The last

chapter in the Crane biography occurred in 1947. On July 30th of that

year, Mrs. Grace Hart Crane, the poet’s mother, died in Teaneck, New

Jersey. Before her death, she told Samuel Loveman that she wished to be

cremated and her ashes to be cast into the East River from the Brooklyn

Bridge. The necessary arrangements were made, and the editor was one of

a small party which proceeded along Brooklyn Bridge on a windy, sunlit

afternoon in Fall 1947. At intervals on the Bridge, there are signs

warning pedestrians not to throw anything from the structure. By the

time the party reached the center of the Bridge, considerable

trepidation existed about the feasibility of respecting Mrs. Crane’s

last wishes. It remained at last for the editor to grasp the small,

undecorated tin can and shake the ashes into the air, where they swirled

about for a few moments and then fell mistily into the water below. Thus

Crane’s mother joined him in the element which had claimed him fifteen

years earlier.

Crane’s father had died in the Summer of 1931, bringing to an end a

similarly complex relationship with his son. Though each bore a great

and genuine love for the other, there is little doubt that the divorce

of his parents in 1917 tended to separate father from son. Mrs. Crane’s

proximity, her emotional nature and her evaluation of her ex-husband’s

motives and actions, made it impossible for Crane to suspend himself

impartially between both parents as he wished. Instead, he swam into the

aura of his mother’s beliefs and reactions. The resulting alienation

from his father was not fully surmounted until almost a decade later,

for it was not until then that each man grew reconciled to the other’s

personality and values. However, it seems unwarranted, if one can say so

on the basis of their extensive correspondence, to perpetuate Crane’s

own misconceptions of the older man’s values and attitudes in relation

to his son prior to 1927. From an early date, the elder Crane was

apparently profoundly interested in his son’s choice of a literary

career and anxious to have him prepare for it. During 1916 and 1917, for

example, he pressed insistently for Hart to enter college, so that the

latter might obtain the educational background expected to assist him in

functioning as a writer. Although the elder Crane had only studied for a

few years at Alleghany College, he had no contempt for education or

culture such as marks some self-made practical men. When Hart refused to

attend college, Mr. Crane recognized no realistic alternative for his

son other than adjustment to the business world and development of his

poetic life as an adjunct of his mercantile life. From a non-romantic

point of view, Mr. Crane was unfortunately justified. Even in our

advanced age, most full-time poets unsupported by private incomes,

relatives, or philanthropic gifts either cease writing poetry at all or

become embittered producers of occasional pieces. Perhaps Mr. Crane

should have supported Hart from his adolescence onward with an allowance

sufficient to enable him to write poetry and do nothing else. The moral

and psychological results of such beneficence are mixed and

problematical. In any event, his young son’s early poetry did not yet

reveal the merit which would have called forth a clamorous and effective

acclaim to which Mr. Crane might have acceded; furthermore, Mr. Crane

did not stem from a wealthy aristocracy to whom a life of cultured

leisure is natural rather than phenomenal. Finally, the immediate

outward signs of Mr. Crane’s success were somewhat illusory; his

business enterprises partook of the overblown quality of 1920-ish

prosperity, and were underlaid with an insecurity not conducive to the

assumption of a unique personal and financial responsibility. Once Mr.

Crane recognized the impossibility of shaping his son’s values, once he

accepted the fact that Hart was (as he not unkindly wrote him) a poetic

“vagabond,” he generously supplied him with money to the best of his

ability and understanding, continually offered him the security of his

home, and ultimately left him a large cash bequest and an annual

allowance that would have sustained his son under normal circumstances.

Crane was in great part responsible for creating the time-worn legend of

a hard-hearted father. During the years from 1917 to 1925, less so

afterward, he wrote or informed countless friends of the brutality of

his father’s behavior, his lack of kindness and generosity, and the

suffering this caused. Yet it was during these years that Crane was

most uncompromising, patronizing, intransigent, prone to distortion of

his father’s image. The correspondence between them, not all of which is

included here, is a tragic record of misunderstanding for which neither

is to be adjudged guilty. It shows that they were temperamentally alike

in many ways: in their humor, their warmth of spirit, their reckless

pride, their strong need for freedom.

* * * * *

The letters have been assembled chiefly from original manuscripts, as

well as microfilm and photostat copies, generously made available by

their recipients, libraries, and collectors. Herbert Weinstock and

William Wright furnished typed copies of letters to them; Samuel Loveman

gave typed letters to William Sommer. The editor has been able to

examine the papers of Crane and his mother; these provided Crane’s own

carbon copies of typewritten letters to his father, Otto H. Kahn, Yvor

Winters, Edgell Rickword, Thomas Seltzer, and his stepmother ... letters

to his mother and grandmother ... typed copies of several letters to his

father and stepmother. Despite the hazards of transcribing manuscript,

the editor has striven to attain maximum faithfulness to the original.

The major portion of the letters were obtained by the editor when he

collected material for his book on Crane. Since then, he has made every

reasonable effort to collect additional letters from people to whom

Crane might have revealed himself fully and uniquely. The result is an

edition which makes available the letters evoked by Crane’s most

important literary and personal relationships.

As a general rule, only those letters which are routine in nature, of

little general interest, or which deal with subjects more intensively

and significantly treated in other letters, were excluded. In this

connection, it is pertinent to note that it was Crane’s habit, when he

wrote several people at about the same time, to write the same things in

almost identical phraseology to each of his correspondents. This has

made it necessary to delete portions of letters as repetitious. Another

feature of Crane’s letter-writing has required some editorial excision.

Though he wrote lengthily and often, his letters were usually prefaced

and closed with excuses for writing briefly and infrequently. These

apologies are corollaries of his insatiable desire for affection and his

fear of hostility. Though he acknowledges their psychological meaning,

the editor has acted on the assumption that an excess of such material

is bound to distract the reader from more valuable sections. He has

accordingly deleted most of it, together with conventional greetings,

regards, and other closes, though a few letters were left intact so

that the flavor of Crane’s apologetics might be communicated.

The editor has strengthened the punctuation, corrected obvious slips of

the pen and the spelling of names and words when there seemed no

advantage to letting them remain as Crane hastily set them down,

supplied dates and addresses for letters which did not bear them or were

incorrectly headed, italicized names of books and periodicals, enclosed

titles of poems, etc., in quotation marks, and made a few insertions to

supply missing words or to explain initials. Brackets indicate the

editor’s insertions; omissions of 1-25 words are shown with -- -- -- --,

omissions of over 25 words with --/--/; names deleted except for

initials are given as J----, though Crane often used initials himself.

Recurrent details were reduced to uniformity by placing address and date

on left and right respectively, allowing no indentations at the opening,

and transferring all postscripts at top or side to the end.

The kindness of the following who assisted in the compilation of letters

or furnished explanations of their contents is gratefully acknowledged:

Eleanor Anderson, Peggy Baird, Slater Brown, Malcolm Cowley, Donald C.

Gallup, Bessie M. Hise, Philip Horton, Philip Kaplan, Samuel Loveman,

David Mann, Newberry Library, Norman Holmes Pearson, Katherine Anne

Porter, Selden Rodman, Edwin Seaver, Isidor Schneider, David Swetland,

F. Swetland, Robert Thompson, University of Chicago Library, Yale

University Library, and Morton Dauwen Zabel. I am indebted to Richard

Rychtarik and the late Charlotte Rychtarik for aid, friendship, and the

1920 photograph of Crane by Hervey Minns which serves as frontispiece,

while to Horace Gregory, Marya Zaturenska, and Henri Peyre I owe

gratitude for moral support of which they may not be aware. The interest

and understanding of Gorham Munson and M. U. Sheldon has stimulated me

to complete what began as a labor of love and was too quickly encumbered

with depressing complications. I reiterate my thanks to those people and

institutions earlier cited in the preface to my _Hart Crane_; their

generous cooperation on that book made this one possible. Joseph Frank’s

name was inadvertently omitted from that group, as was that of Georgia

O’Keeffe, Executrix, Alfred Stieglitz Estate; I thank them now. Martha

Crossen helped with the manuscript at a crucial moment. Some of the

editorial work was done at Yaddo, for which I am grateful to Louis

Kronenberger, Elizabeth Ames, and the Yaddo Corporation. As always, my

wife Nettie has done more than can here be listed.

BROM WEBER

CHRONOLOGY

Harold Hart Crane was born on July 21, 1899, in Garrettsville, Ohio, the

only child of Clarence Arthur and Grace Hart Crane. In 1909, after a few

years in Warren, Ohio, the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio. There Crane

attended public high school, while his father developed a confectionery

manufacturing and sales business. The boy also travelled with his family

to the Isle of Pines, Cuba, and through parts of Western United States

and Canada.

Crane’s interest in writing and art evidenced itself at an early age.

His first published poem (“C 33”) appeared in _Bruno’s Weekly_ (N.Y.),

Sept. 23, 1916, while his first prose, a letter, was printed in _The

Pagan_ (N.Y.), Oct. 1916. Thereafter, his devotion to poetry superseded

any other concerns.

During 1916 and 1917, Crane’s parents separated and were divorced.

Symbolic of the effect on their son was his assumption of the maternal

surname “Hart” as his own first name. In 1916, when the divorce actions

were initiated, Crane left for New York City alone. There he soon became

familiar with writers, artists, and editors. He remained in New York,

despite a few return visits to Cleveland, until the late Fall of 1919.

At that time, he returned to Cleveland to work for his father and to

live with his mother and maternal grandmother, both of whom had been

Christian Scientists for many years. Dissatisfaction with his working

and living arrangements led him, in 1921, to leave his father’s employ

and, in 1923, to move permanently to New York City.

By dint of night-school courses and practical experience, he had been

able to earn his living in Cleveland during 1922 as an advertising

copywriter. After a few months of this in New York, he resigned his job

and left for Woodstock, New York. Thereafter, his periods of employment

grew shorter until eventually he was generally without an income ... his

movements between country and city were frequent.

He had first conceived of his major poem, _The Bridge_, in February

1923, but was unable to work on it as he wished. Accordingly, his first

book of poems, _White Buildings_, appeared late in 1926 without any

sections of that poem. Fortunately, Otto H. Kahn granted him a sum of

money to work on _The Bridge_ during 1926, and Crane wrote much of the

poem in Patterson, New York and on the Isle of Pines, Cuba. With his

father’s help, he wrote more in 1927; finally, in 1929, under the

impetus of publication offered by Caresse and Harry Crosby, he completed

the poem. It appeared early in 1930 in a Paris and a New York edition,

and was generally acclaimed as one of the remarkable poetic achievements

of our time.

In 1927 and 1928, Crane stayed in California as the companion of a

wealthy invalid; in 1928, a bequest made available to him after his

grandmother’s death permitted him to travel in England and France. When

he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing in 1931, he

left the United States for Mexico, where he hoped to write a

never-initiated poem on Cortez.

With the exception of a brief return to the United States to attend his

father’s funeral, the remainder of his life was spent in Mexico City and

its environs. On April 24th, 1932, he sailed for New York from Vera Cruz

on the _S.S. Orizaba_. Three days later, on the 27th, he either jumped

or fell into the Caribbean Sea and was drowned. His body was not

recovered.

CONTENTS

PREFACE v

CHRONOLOGY xv

PART ONE 1

OHIO (1916-1922)

PART TWO 111

NEW YORK (1923-1925)

PART THREE 229

WEST INDIES-EUROPE (1926-1930)

PART FOUR 361

MEXICO (1931-1932)

LIST OF CORRESPONDENTS 413

INDEX 415

PART ONE

Ohio

(1916-1922)

1916

1: TO HIS GRANDMOTHER

[_Cleveland, Ohio_] _Jan. 26, 1916_

My Dear Grandmother: Examination time is _on_ now and I am kept

completely occupied in the preparation for them. We had _English_ today

and Latin and Geometry are due tomorrow. They are my hoodooes and so I

am not a little worried tonight about the outcome. I am invited over to

G. Crane’s for supper tonight as Aunt Bess is to be there on about a

day’s visit so Dora can go out early. As you already know, Father and

Mother are in New York and I am running things alone now. The store was

doing surprisingly well today when I was there owing perhaps to the

balmy weather (almost summer) which we are having. Alice has been _very

sick_ and in response to my gift of some roses she sent me a beautiful

note as soon as she was able to sit up. Your letters would augur a

fairly favorable winter and good conditions on the island. So you rest

as much as you can and enjoy the care-free feelings while you can whir

around with the Wilcoxs in the machine. It is fine that you have found a

group of such sympathetic thinkers and be sure and carry the

_science_[1] as far as you can. I know of few better places to get a

foothold in the faith than in the quiet and beauty of the island.

Mother left feeling fine for New York and suppose, tho busy, she is

enjoying a splendid time. They will be back Sat. morn.

With the exception of a little sore throat I have felt fine myself

lately. I think it is unnecessary to go to Mr. Ely.[2] My writing has

suffered neglect lately due to study for examinations, but I will soon

resume it with vehemence as I am intensely,--grippingly interested in a

new ballad I am writing of six hundred lines. I have resolved to become

a _good_ student even if I have to sit up all night to become one. You

will undoubtedly wink when you read this state declaration so often made

but this time it is in earnest.

2: TO HIS GRANDMOTHER

_Cleveland Ohio_ _Feb. 10, 1916_

My dear Grandmother: --/--/ I am now a Junior (capital) in high school

and feel quite elated at having so passed my examinations. The present

too, is more encouraging as fine marks have been in the great majority

since my promotion. -- -- -- --

I’ll bet you were glad to be rid of that musty, fusty old preacher! Let

him scramble the Andersons awhile with his talk. It is strange, in view

of the fact that last winter I defended the desirability of northern

winters to the expense of much discomfiture from other arguers, that the

whole illusion has melted away and I have often this winter thought of

the South with longing--yes, even Florida. My blood, I guess, has been

thinner or digestion poorer. Some of these days have cut me thru and

thru so that I have for the most part of the season been exquisitely

uncomfortable, “Once south has spoilt me” as they say.

-- -- -- -- It is surely lonely for me here, eating alone and seldom seeing

any one but in the darkness of morning or night. If you were here it

would be different, but I am consoled amply by knowing of your comfort

and welfare where you now are. I have been working hard lately at my

writing but find it doubly hard with the task of conjoining it to my

school work. They are so shallow over there at school I am more moved to

disdain than anything else. Popularity is not my aim though it were easy

to win it by laughing when they do at nothing and always making a

general ass of oneself. There are about two out of the twelve hundred I

would care to have as friends. --/--/

3: TO HIS FATHER

[_New York City_] _Dec. 31, 1916_

My dear Father: I have just been out for a long ride up Fifth Ave. on an

omnibus. It is very cold but clear, and the marble facades of the

marvelous mansions shone like crystal in the sun. Carl [Schmitt] has

been very good to me, giving hours of time to me, advising, helping me

get a room, etc. The room I have now is a bit too small, so after my

week is up, I shall seek out another place near here, for I like the

neighborhood. The houses are so different here, that it seems most

interesting, for a while at least, to live in one.

It is a great shock, but a good tonic, to come down here as I have and

view the countless multitudes. It seems sometimes almost as though you

had lost yourself, and were trying vainly to find somewhere in this sea

of humanity, your lost identity.

Today, and the remainder of the week, I shall devote to serious efforts

in my writing. If you will help me to the necessities, I think that

within six months I shall be fairly able to stand on my own feet. Work

is much easier here where I can concentrate. My full love to you, dear

father. Write me often and soon.

1917

4: TO HIS FATHER

_N.Y.C._ _Jan. 5, 1917_

My dear Father: -- -- -- -- It does me a great deal of good to hear from

you often, and I hope you will continue to write me as often as you have

lately done. While I am not home-sick, I yet am far from comfortable

without letters, and often, from you.

Nearly every evening since my advent, has been spent in the

companionship of Carl [Schmitt.] Last night we unpacked some furniture

of his which had arrived from his home, and afterward talked until

twelve, or after, behind our pipes. He has some very splendid ideas

about artistic, and psychic balance, analysis, etc. I realize more

entirely every day, that I am preparing for a fine life: that I have

powers, which, if correctly balanced, will enable me to mount to

extraordinary latitudes. There is constantly an inward struggle, but the

time to worry is only when there is no inward debate, and consequently

there is smooth sliding to the devil. There is only one harmony, that is

the equilibrium maintained by two opposite forces, equally strong. When

I perceive one emotion growing overpowering to a fact, or statement of

reason, then the only manly, worthy, sensible thing to do, is build up

the logical side, and attain balance, and in art,--formal expression. I

intend this week to begin my studying--Latin, German, and philosophy,

right here in my room. They will balance my emotional nature, and lead

me to more exact expression. --/--/

5: TO HIS MOTHER

_N.Y.C._ _Jan. 26, 1917_

Dear Mother and Grandma: --/--/ Earl Biggers, the author of _Seven Keys

to Baldpate_, was in for some grub, and I was shocked nearly off my

feet by the quietness and un-worldliness of his behavior. He is a fine

fellow however. I hear only pessimistic lines from Father, and hear from

Erwin[3] (via, rather) that he is very unwell. The travel that he is

planning, will straighten him out into better shape. We all needed to

get away awhile.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Sullivan drop in any day, for his

letters intimate such. He will be darn welcome, I can assure you, and

promise you also that we shall have some fine times. You heard, I

suppose, that I sent him a choice volume of Irish songs autographed by

one of the principal literary figures in America today, Padraic Colum. I

have invited Colum and his wife to dine with me tomorrow night at

Gonfarones, an Italien eating-place, where the table d’hote costs only

60 cents per plate, and where the food is fine. Colum says I should have

a volume of verse out in two years without any difficulty, and has

offered to write a preface for it also. He has seen, as I said before,

all my work,--nearly all, and admires it.

Every day I do my studying, and read a good bit also. The room I have

been occupying has been too dark, and I shall change lodgings as soon as

is possible. Friends of Carl have asked me out to dinners several times,

and I have enjoyed as much of social life as I have ever cared for. When

you move here, there is a fine bunch of friends waiting for you. O this

is the place to live, at least for nine months of the year. --/--/

6: TO HIS MOTHER

_N.Y.C._ _Feb. 19, 1917_

My dear, dear Mother: --/--/ Last night I took dinner with Harold Thomas

and Carl in an Italien restaurant where you have to speak Italien to get

anything at all to eat. They cook everything in olive-oil so that one

has a good cathartic with his meal besides a splendid gratification of

the palate. And this morning, it being Sunday, I took a long ride on an

omnibus out into the Bronx and back, and saw all the fashion on Fifth

Ave. When you see the display of wealth and beauty here, it will make

you crawl. It is the most gorgeous city imaginable, besides being at

present the richest and most active place in the world. The swarms of

humanity of all classes inspire the most diverse of feelings; envy,

hate, admiration and repulsion. But truly it is _the_ place to live.

--/--/

I wish above all other things that you could be here this week, for

there are several big things that I have been invited to. The initial

exhibition of the choicest of Chase’s pictures is to be privately (by

invitation) opened tomorrow afternoon from four until six. The greatest

painters of the day will attend. Carl having given me his invitation, I

am going to take Mr. Colum and perhaps his wife. Then Mr. Colum has

given me a ticket to the reading by Vachel Lindsay of his own poems at

the Princess Theater. Also, on Thursday, I shall attend the meeting of

the Poetry Society of America, which is quite exclusive. By the way, Mr.

Colum intends to suggest me for membership. --/--/

7: TO HIS MOTHER

_N.Y.C._ _Feb. 22, 1917_

My dear Mother: Your good letter I have just read, and it cheered me up

a good deal. You know, I am working hard and see very few people and

even now haven’t had more than a half-hour’s talk with anyone for over a

week. My work, though, is coming along finely, and I shall be published

both in _Others_ and again in _The Pagan_ this next month. Yesterday was

a day of tremendous work. I turned out, in some ways, the finest piece

of work yet, besides writing a shorter poem also.

Mother, you do not appreciate how much I love you. I can tell by your

letters that there exists a slight undercurrent of doubt, and I do not

want it there. If you could know how I long to see you perhaps that

might make some difference.

Now everything is in truth going splendidly, only I get terribly

lonesome often when I am through working. A man _must_ wag his tongue a

little, or he’ll lose his voice. Hurry, so that we can both wag!

8: TO HIS FATHER

_N.Y.C._ _August 8, 1917_

My dear Father: I am very, very sorry that things are going so badly

with Mother. I guess there is nothing for her to do but to get back here

as soon as is possible and try to re-instate herself in poise and

health. I look for her this week. At least I see no reason why she

should linger longer. But I have received no word from her and am

uncertain as to much of the true state of affairs with her. I only hope

you are avoiding any meetings as much as possible, for as I said, it is

now too early,--she is not yet established well enough to endure the

strain which you know any contact causes. --/--/

I have been diabolically nervous ever since that shock out at the

house, but Sunday Carl, Potapovitch and I went out to Long Beach, and

lying in the sun did me some good. If you could shake responsibilities

like this for a week or so, it would work inestimable good upon you. You

cannot worry on such a beautiful beach with the sound of waves in your

ears. We all get to thinking that our heads are really our bodies, and

most of the time go floating around with only our brain conscious,

forgetting that our bodies have requirements also.

I feel so near to you now that I do hope that nothing can ever again

break the foundation of sincerity that has been established beneath our

relations. Never has anyone been kinder than you were when I was last

home. I want you to know that I appreciate it, and also your two fine

letters.

9: TO HIS FATHER

[_New York City_] _Sept. 18, ’17_

My dear Father: Your good letter rec’d yesterday. From what Hazel says I

presume this will find you back in Cleveland, and busy looking over what

has happened while you have been away. I haven’t written more because,

as you can readily perceive, I haven’t known your address most of the

time, but once again you may expect my regular letters. This one thing

though, I am going to ask of you. If, when you write me, you are

thinking of Mother in a distasteful way, please conceal it, remaining

silent on the subject. And if, in thinking of her, one kind thought

should occur (as I know it does) express it. You remember that when I

last was home, I said that I “was through.”--That was possible with me

for but one hour. My heart is still as responsive to both your loves,

and more so, than ever. I have seen more tears than I ever expected in

this world, and I have shed them through others’ eyes, to say nothing of

my own sorrow. And now, when I hear nothing but forgiveness, tenderness,

mercy, and love from one side, how can [I] bear resentment and caustic

words coming from the other without great pain? Happiness may some time

come to me, I am sure it will. But please, my dear Father, do not make

the present too hard,--too painful for one whose fatal weakness is to

love two unfortunate people, by writing barbed words. I don’t know how

long we three shall dwell in purgatory. We may rise above, or sink

below, but either way it may be, the third shall and must follow the

others, and I leave myself in your hands. -- -- -- --

10: TO HIS MOTHER

[_New York City_] _Sept. 28, ’17_

My dear sweet Mother: I have just read your letter and find it hard to

express my rage and disgust at what you say concerning C. A. Crane’s

conduct. “Forget him,” is all I can say. He is too low for

consideration. I am only quietly waiting,--stifling my feelings in the

realization that I might as well get as much money as possible out of

him. Why be scrupulous in one’s dealings with unscrupulous people,

anyway? --/--/

Maxwell Bodenheim called the other evening, complimented my poetry

excessively, and has taken several pieces to the editor of _The Seven

Arts_, a personal friend of his. Bodenheim is at the top of American

poetry today, and he says that after four years of absolute obscurity,

he [is] succeeding in getting publication only through the adverse

channels of flattery, friendships and “pull.” It is all a strange

business. Editors are generally disappointed writers who stifle any

genius or originality as soon as it is found. They seldom even trouble

to read over the manuscript of a “new man.”

Bodenheim is a first-class critic though, and I am proud to have his

admiration and encouragement. As soon as _Others_ begins again this

winter, he says I shall have an organ for all of my melodies, as he is

one of the editors. Success seems imminent now more than ever. I am very

encouraged, practically, at least. --/--/

11: TO HIS MOTHER

[_New York City_] [_October 1, 1917_]

My dear Mother: --/--/ O if you knew how much I am learning! The

realization of true freedom is slowly coming to me, and with it a sense

of poise which is of inestimable value. My life, however it shall

continue, shall have expression and form. Believe me when I tell you

that I am fearless, that I am determined on a valorous future and

something of a realization of life. The smallness of hitherto large

things, and the largeness of hitherto small things is dawning. I am

beginning to see the hope of standing entirely alone and to fathom

Ibsen’s statement that translated is, “The strongest man in the world is

he who stands entirely alone.” --/--/

12: TO HIS MOTHER

[_New York City_] [_October 3, 1917_]

My own dear Mother: There is not much to tell you except that I am about

to begin a novel. The plot is already thick in my head and tonight the

first chapter will be written off, at least in rough draft. It is a

story whose setting is to be Havana and the Isle of Pines. Walter Wilcox

is to be the hero, and the heroine a N. Y. society maiden who is

attending the races in Havana. More of this will doubtless bore you, now

at least, so enough![4]

Grandma writes that you are succeeding beautifully. As soon as you found

some active interests I knew you would improve in outlook and

distinguish between a disgusting personality and the world in general.

These delightful autumn days, filled with cool sunshine, make me feel

fine. I am alone a good deal of the time and am glad of it. My work will

always demand solitude to a great extent in creative effort. Your son is

improving every day, so don’t worry one moment about me. -- -- -- --

13: TO HIS MOTHER

[_New York City_] [_October 31, 1917_]

Ma chere et charmante mere: Yesterday it poured rain all day, and I

remained sheltered, studying French. But November is less evident now,

and the sun is out again. I suppose that you are all right although I

have had no letter since Sunday. Mrs. Walton[5] went off to the movies

this morning, which makes me think again that it would be agreeable for

you to enter them when you arrive.[6] After I mail this, I am going up

to _The Little Review_ office to have a talk with Margaret Anderson (and

perhaps dispose of a poem). --/--/

1918

14: TO WILLIAM WRIGHT

_Cleveland, O._ _Aug. 12, ’18_

Dear William: Your letter freshly “arriven.” Your reference to ambulance

service arouses me to protest. You will _not_ be drafted--this year

anyway, and I hope you won’t become agitated so much as to rush into any

kind of service. A word in the ear: I tried to enlist this morning and

was not permitted even to enter the office. The guard at the door said

to “look in the paper,” which I did and found that all minors are to be

excluded from “volunteering,” and if drafted at all, will be apprenticed

in machine shops, etc., during the war period. Anyhow, I think by the

way things look at present, ambulance service, after the time necessary

for training, transportation, etc., would be a little superfluous. (Some

would call me a demon of the Huns for whispering this in your ear) I

really believe the war isn’t to last much longer.

Being destined, as you are, for Yale, you won’t be drafted for anything.

But you will have to undergo some discipline, as Mother, who visited no

less than twelve Eastern colleges in her last expedition, states.

Let me clear myself. Heat and conditions at home (both of which you

comprehend, I’m sure) drove me to the deed from which I was frustrated

this morning. I take no credit for patriotism nor bravery. Neither was

it an attempt to get into a uniform before the war is over for certain

effects with the ladies. I am really sorry I couldn’t get in,

principally, I suppose, because I had made my mind up, and disposed of

so many seductive distractions, such as, (well--) love, poetry, career,

etc. Now the damned things come back again, sporting about me with all

too much familiarity.

I may go to New York, I may remain here, I may explode, Lord knows.

Thank your stars that you have a settled course to follow, and write

soon.

15: TO CHARLES C. BUBB

_Cleveland, Ohio_ _November 13, ’18_

Dear Mr. Bubb: I hope I am not guilty of an officious presumption in

approaching you with this meagre sheaf of poems. I am merely offering

them to your consideration as being perhaps of enough interest for you

to publish them at the Church Head Press. As you have published, much to

the gratification of the few really interested in poetry, some recent

war-poems of Mr. Aldington, I know your critical judgment to be of the

highest standard, and while I am certain that you will be the first to

detect any flaws and aberrations in these lyrics, I know that you will

also be alive to whatever beauty they may contain.

These few poems are “gleanings,” as it were, from my work of the last

few years, representing the best that I have done so far.--There is

still hope, as I am yet under twenty. They have been published mostly in

_The Pagan_, one in _The Little Review_ of December last, and while they

are few in number, I thought that they might possibly be equal to the

boundaries of a modest pamphlet. “Six Lyrics,” or some such title might

be used for the booklet. But anon for such matters....

I am at present engaged on the _Plain Dealer_, and am too much occupied

there for much of any personal “business.” So, in lieu of a real call on

you at your residence, I am leaving these with Mr. Laukhuff, as he says

that you are a frequent visitor to his establishment.

May I again express my hope that I have not infringed upon your

generosity, and assure you that I shall welcome any opinion that you

might express regarding the poems themselves, or my suggestions.

1919

16: TO HIS MOTHER

_New York_, _Feb. 24_,

Dear Mother: I have just returned from a dinner and evening with Mrs.

Spencer. After the dishes were cleared away we sat before the wood-fire

and talked Science, and I played the piano while she washed the dishes.

She tells me some astounding stories about the numerous demonstrations

she has made. Pat [Spencer] is very deep in it too, it seems, and has

been twice saved in very dangerous falls from over 500 feet which would

otherwise have meant instant death. It is convincing enough testimony

that he is the only one living of the ten instructors chosen for the

position at the time of his appointment. I am to help Mrs. Spencer move

some things from her rooms over to Claire’s [Spencer] apartment next

Tuesday afternoon. Mrs. Brooks has evaded all my efforts at a meeting

today, but I hope to get to go to church with her tomorrow morning.

--/--/

17: TO HIS MOTHER

[_New York City_] _March 7th, ’19_

Dear Mother: The landlady has committed enough atrocities since writing

you last to fill a book, and I have found another room which I expect to

move into some time next week. In all truth she is quite insane. Mr.

Brooks called me up three times the other day, and each time he asked

for me was he told that there was no such person as Mr. Crane living

here. Finally one of the roomers came to the rescue and took down his

name and number, so that when I got in I was duly informed. Then in

other ways she has been unbearable, coming up to my room several times,

and vaguely pointing to some unseen object and inquiring, “Is that

yours?” At other times she has come up and announced in a hushed voice,

“It’s down there.” That would be all one could get out of her as to what

was “down there”--letter, caller, or delivery man, and several times it

has been nothing at all. --/--/ It has been very funny and very

unpleasant, and I regret having to incur the expense of moving again.

However, the room I have secured is better than the one I have--on the

first floor, front, and much roomier. One of the fellows in the house

here, a Harvard man and lieutenant just out of service, has roomed there

before and swears to the complete sanity and integrity of the little

Irish woman that runs the place. All these little trials have to be

accepted in true sportsman-like fashion, in fact one might as well take

them that way, or else get out of town.

--/--/ I am not sure, of course, but I feel quite certain that Mrs.

Brooks is afflicted with consumption against which she is doubtless

putting up a strenuous Scientific fight. I have noticed an incessant

little cough that she has had on both my meetings with her since I

arrived in town. She is quite thin, too, and without much colour. It

must be due to a change of disposition within myself, but I find the

Brooks’s much more cordial and agreeable. That I, myself, am largely

responsible is borne out by what Mrs. Spencer told me the other day. She

said that Mr. Brooks had remarked about the astounding change in my

manner and disposition, and said that I was now quite a delightful

personality. I should blush to tell this on myself were it not such an

interesting testimony to the influence of Science. --/--/

18: TO HIS MOTHER

[_New York City_] _March 11th, ’19_

Dear Mother: Just a word to let you know that I am busy casting about

for a position somewhere. I have several ideas suggested by friends as

to where to find jobs as an ad-writer, etc., and am investigating the

matter. I may make a call on Mr. Kennedy, the friend of Grandmother’s,

if two or three other projects do not turn out well. He runs a

trade-journal, you know. Zell [Hart Deming] writes me that she is to be

here for two weeks next month, and if I am settled by that time, I am

positive that she will be able to get me in somewhere. You have no

conception of the difficulties here in finding work of any description

just now. Every day a couple of troop-ships dump a few thousand more

unemployed men in the town, and there really is danger of a general

panic and much poverty as a result unless the government takes a hand to

assist in the matter. I know you are not worrying about me. As it

happens, I am very fortunately situated in comparison with the rest. I

wrote Mr. Ely yesterday, and so that is off my conscience. I would

prefer that you discontinued his treatment of me, as I feel quite able

to stand on my own feet and demonstrate the truth without assistance

from without. I shall probably not move from here for some time. I have

decided to make a demonstration over the landlady, and already have

noticed an improvement.

19: TO HIS MOTHER

_N.Y.C._ _March 26th ’19_

Dear Mother: --/--/ At the recommendation of Colum, I am going to

interview the publishing house of Boni and Liveright tomorrow in the

effort to secure a job as proofreader, etc., with them. I have been

around to several Sunday Feature Syndicates today but have found nothing

there. I hope you aren’t worrying,--for you must realize that one cannot

continue looking and looking as I am doing without finding something in

time. I have some interesting news for you. I phoned up Alice Calhoun

last night and find that she is working in a newly-organized

moving-picture production company here.--She is now engaged in her first

big picture, and is very busy, she tells me. How about writing a

movie-story for her? It looks as though there might be a chance for some

of my work to get an attentive reading after all. She can’t see me this

week, but we are going to have a visit soon and I imagine it will be

interesting. Alice certainly is pretty enough for success in the

movies, and young enough (only 18) to develop a good deal of dramatic

talent. A telephone conversation is rather a slight thing to offer

judgment from, but I was rather impressed with a decided improvement in

Alice, both in manner and character. Byron’s [Madden] letter arrived

this morning. I think he is certainly a sincere well-wisher of mine. I

hope to get into some sort of position in time to write him about it

when I do write, because it “makes more to say,” as it were. I’ll write

again in time for a Sunday delivery. The days are amazingly beautiful

and the nights superb. Last night I took a long walk up Riverside Drive

which is just around the corner from my room, and the Hudson was

beautiful with the millions of tiny lights on the opposite shore.

-- -- -- --

20: TO HIS MOTHER

_New York City_ _April 2nd, ’19_

My dearest Mother: -- -- -- -- Yes, you do seem to be quite occupied with

various engagements, pleasant and painful, as in the case of the

dentistry, although I am very glad to hear of your having that duty

performed as you have needed work and attention expended on your teeth

for a long while back. I think you are holding the wrong and

un-Scientific thought concerning me and my attitude toward Science. The

fact that I do not talk and write about it continually is no sort of

testimony that I am not as much interested as ever in it. You know that

I am not and probably never will be one of those who make the matter a

complete obsession, reducing every subject and thought and description

to the technical language of the textbooks. I have met a number of

Scientists who by such proceedure managed not only to bore me and others

quite dreadfully, but also to leave one with the impression that they

were scared to death about everything and found it necessary to maintain

a continual combat against every aspect and manifestation of life in

general. Perhaps it may serve as sufficient testimony to the efficacy of

right thought, etc., that I am finding far less problems and fears that

demand denial. I certainly have not felt quite so well or quite so

clear-headed for several years, and that is, or ought to be enough to

reassure you and alterate your somewhat morbidly anxious fears for me

which have leaked into your last few letters. I again beg you to relax

from such fears, etc., which seem to have you in their power enough to

prompt you to such seemingly strenuous conflicts of resistance and

denials. Your letters seem to be prompted by some fear (I mean certain

references in them) that seems to me entirely un-Scientific. Please do

not mistake me and become hurt or offended. I only feel that you have

not overcome, not quite, what might be called “the fear of fear” which

is an ultimate Scientific triumph. --/--/

21: TO WILLIAM WRIGHT

_New York, New York_ _May 2, 1919_

Dear William: Your letter came this morning, so you can’t deny my

promptitude. Dash haberdashery! I hope you have more freedom in writing

your next letter,--the note of pain caused by the watchful eye of the

floor-walker was too evident. It was like a hurried lunch. I felt your

situation and rushed from line to line in trepidation of the next

moment. And then you asked such very vital questions that you have set

me thinking a good deal. No:--at present I am not a Christian Scientist.

I try to make my Mother think so because she seems to depend on that

hypocrisy as an additional support for her own faith in it. So,--mum’s

the word to her. If it weren’t very evident how very much good it has

done her I should not persist in such conduct,--lying to both Lord and

Devil is no pleasure,--but as I frankly was very much interested in

Christian Science at the time of my exit from home, I have not made any

distinct denial of it to her since, and for the aforementioned reasons.

However, Bill, I have unbounded faith in its efficacy. Not that a normal

optimism will not accomplish the same wonders,--it is a psychological

attitude which will prevail over almost anything, but as a religion,

there is where I balk. I recommend it to you if you are nervous, etc.,

though, as a cure, and the best and only one to my knowledge. What it

says in regard to mental and nervous ailments is absolutely true. It is

only the total denial of the animal and organic world which I cannot

swallow.

I don’t quite understand your criticism toward my “attitude of mind,”

and sincerely wish you would particularize more in detail. We have had

so many good talks that I wish you were here right now to tell me. But

when you come to New York next autumn we shall have an opportunity. I am

laying many plans for your coming, and you will enjoy meeting some of my

friends here, I am sure. My advertising work for _The Little Review_ is

coming a little slower than I expected. You have no idea how hard it is

to even break into some of these huge and ominous mechanisms, New York

offices. It ought to toughen me a little and perhaps that it what I

need. It is a very different matter when one approaches with the intent

of selling, and selling the appealing article,--space. However, _The

Little Review_ has the possibility of affording me over four thousand

per year on commissions if I can fill up the allowable space, and

perhaps I am not wasting my time after all. --/--/

22: TO WILLIAM WRIGHT

_New York, New York_ _May 14, 1919_

Dear William: --/--/ At present I am under the spell of the first wave

of rose fever! My reading lately has been rather diverse as is evident

from any such list as Chaucer, D. H. Lawrence, Cervantes, Henry James,

Plato, and Mark Twain.

Oh, by the way, I met Robert Frost’s daughter at a theatre party the

other evening, and had the pleasure of taking the very interesting and

handsome young lady back to her Columbia dormitory. I am hoping to see

more of her at a near date, as she is worth looking at.

23: TO HIS MOTHER

_New York City_ _Decoration Day, ’19_

My dear Mother: I received your letter with check enclosed

night-before-last, and hasten to thank you for them. Your letter was

filled with the customary complaints about my not writing oftener. Now I

admit that the last two weeks have been poorer in letters from me than

usual, but you seem never to have realized, Mother, that there is

absolutely nothing to fill up the three-or-four-letter-a-week program

which I have been trying to conduct,--even were my days filled with

tremendous action. A couple of letters a week will contain all the news

worth telling, and whether you have appreciated that fact or not, the

truth remains.

I see you are displeased at my having changed rooms, but I would like to

ask you what you would have done faced with a like situation at the time

I was. I felt indeed very fortunate to have located so successful a

bargain as the two rooms here on the top floor of 24 West 16th St., for

ten dollars per month. It only costs me that because Hal Smith uses one

of the rooms as a study separate from his apartment to come to for his

writing, and so I have the use of his room as well as my bedroom. When I

told Hal and Claire of my predicament, Claire rushed to the cupboard and

the result was that a bed was bought for me and temporary bedding

loaned. Hal also sent over other furnishings, etc., which has made the

place livable and even comfortable for me. I see no reason for

returning now to a rooming house, and shall probably remain here for

sometime to come. I asked for the rugs because they would be simply an

additional comfort, but if it’s too much trouble for you to send them,

or against your principles, it’s all right with me to do without them.

What I wrote you about sending money still holds good. I have cashed the

checks you sent as there is no use in my being foolish about such

matters when I have only fifteen cents in my pocket and a very empty

stomach. I do ask you for more, however. I am very much against your

sending me money from your personal allowance. It seems to me that it

would not be very much trouble to go down and see Sullivan for a half an

hour for a few days and get sufficient results from the enactment of a

perfectly just and practical contract so that I would not be due to hear

within a few years the accusation of having made you economize and

scrimp your own pleasures for my assistance during this trying time when

I am making every possible effort to get started in something. You know,

Mother, I have not yet forgotten your twitting me last summer at my not

paying my board expenses when I was at home, and I don’t welcome your

generosity quite so much now on the possibility of a recurrence of such

words at some future time. I don’t want to fling accusations, etc., at

anybody, but I think it’s time you realized that for the last eight

years my youth has been a rather bloody battleground for yours and

father’s sex life and troubles. With a smoother current around me I

would now be well along in some college taking probably some course of

study which would enable me upon leaving to light upon, far more readily

than otherwise, some decent sort of employment. Do you realize that it’s

hard for me to find any work at all better than some manual labor, or

literary work, which, as you understand, is not a very paying pursuit?

My present job in connection with _The Little Review_ possibly offers me

an opportunity for experience in the advertising world, which is a good

field for money,--but it’s the hardest thing in the world to get worked

up, especially with my complete inexperience in the work. I am looking

for something else now every day,--anything that comes along,--with the

intention of one way or another, establishing my independence from all

outside assistance. In the meantime I am carrying on with this job, and

should it give enough promise, will continue in it. I have found out

recently what it is to be like a beggar in the streets, and also what

good friends one occasionally runs across in this tangle of a world. For

some time after your letter I was determined not to write rather than

compromise with hypocrisy or hurt your feelings. If this letter has

wounded you, then I am ready to beg your pardon in apology with the

understanding that I write no more, for I have discovered that the only

way to be true to others in the long run, is to be true to one’s self.

24: TO WILLIAM WRIGHT

_New York, New York_ _June 17, 1919_

My dear William: I’ve just returned from several days in the country

with Hal Smith and wife (Claire). They rent a little cottage out in New

Jersey that is perfection itself and we go canoeing and play tennis and

eat amazingly every time we go out there. I am, unfortunately, badly

sunburned today,--rather a sight,--and am remaining in my room rather

than shock my friends and enemies by exposing myself. It is fine

(though) to get out of this crowded metropolis once in a while, and see

the moon and stars and hear the frogs croak. We intend to go out again

next Friday and stay until Monday, living in our bathing suits most of

the time. From your last letter, you’re in for quite a pleasant summer.

I wish I could be in Cleveland when you are there. Hope you’ll go out

and see my mother if you get time,--she likes you very much and always

asks about you in her letters. We have had some differences of late, but

my fundamental feelings toward her are not in the least altered. If I

can get enough money together I intend to take a short course in

business and advertising out at Columbia this summer,--which might

possibly be continued next fall when you will be there. I agree with you

that for such as ourselves business life is not to be scorned. The

commercial aspect is the most prominent characteristic of America and we

all must bow to it sooner or later. I do not think, though, that this of

necessity involves our complete surrender of everything else nobler and

better in our aspirations. Illusions are falling away from everything I

look at lately. At present the world takes on the look of a desert,--a

devastation to my eyes, and I am finding it rather hard at best. Still

there is something of a satisfaction in the development of one’s

consciousness even though it is painful. There is a certain freedom

gained,--a lot of things pass out of one’s concern that before mattered

a great deal. One feels more freedom and the result is not by any means

predominantly negative. To one in my situation N. Y. is a series of

exposures intense and rather savage which never would be quite as

available in Cleveland, etc. New York handles one roughly but presents

also more remedial recess,--more entrancing vistas than any other

American location I know of. When you come to Columbia you will not be

apt to feel it because any college (less Col. than any other) enforces

its own cloistral limitations which are the best things in the world

while one is there. It will only be after you have left the place and

lived and worked in the city (should you do so) that you will begin to

feel what I mentioned. May I venture a personal criticism on your last

letter? It’s out of my habit to do so, and if I didn’t care for you so

much I wouldn’t. Your remarks “about the ladies” really hurt me with a

kind of ragtime vulgarity. It’s hard to say in the limitations of a

letter what I mean. You know I am very free from Puritanical

preoccupations,--as much as from excessive elegance. What I lament is

that gross attitude of the crowd that is really degrading and which is

so easily forced upon us before we know it. You are far too sensitive to

harbour it long, I know. It is only because I hate to see the slightest

tarnish at all in you that I run the risk of offending you. I do hope

you won’t resent it. -- -- -- --

25: TO HIS MOTHER

[_New York City_] _July 10, ’19_

My dear Mother: Your nice letter arrived this morning just a few minutes

before the books, and I must thank you much for them and the check

enclosed in the letter, which I have certainly sufficient use for as I

need a haircut badly and a new set of razor blades besides being much in

debt to Hal for this last week’s meals. It has been rather humiliating

to have to come to one person for absolutely everything, rent, food, and

minute sundries and rather than do it I have several times gone for long

periods without food. But Hal and Claire have been wonderfully

thoughtful and I haven’t had to ask,--evidences seemed to be enough and

better than words. At last now, things seem to have lightened a little.

I leave with them tomorrow for Brookhaven, Long Island, where Hal has

rented a beautiful establishment for the rest of the summer. I am going

along as their guest, although Hal lightened any embarrassment I might

have felt at receiving such endless munificence at their hands by

suggest[ing] an office for me as handy man about the place,--gardener,

chauffeur, etc. --/--/ I can always find work in the machine shop and

shipyard but cannot help avoiding them as a last resort, as they would

merely suffice to keep breath in the body and get me nowhere in

particular. I made no requests for assistance from C. A. [Crane] in

regard to the Columbia summer course which began day before yesterday.

In answer to his letter which announced his intention and _promise_ to

take an advertisement in _The Little Review_, I thanked him and told him

that his payment would help me in taking a course in business

advertising which I was hoping to take at Columbia this summer. That

was all there was said about it. He didn’t mention the matter in his

next (and last) letter and has not even paid for the advertisement which

he said he would do, as long as I was associated with the magazine, and

he has heard nothing to the contrary, I am positive. Of course all my

friends think his treatment of me is disgraceful and unaccountable. My

own opinion is hardly less reserved, as you know, but I try my best to

turn my thoughts to other channels as much as possible. It is only when

hunger and humiliation are upon me that suddenly I feel outraged. --/--/

26: TO HIS MOTHER

_Brookhaven_, [_Long Island_] _July 30th, ’19_

My dear Mother: Your letter dated the 8th has just come, and in answer,

I of course will not need to repeat the contents of yesterday’s note. At

best I think your words are a little unkind and very inconsiderate. I

will not attempt again to reckon with your misunderstanding, etc., of

the part you and I together, and as individuals, have played in relation

to C.A. You either have a very poor memory, or are very confused when

you think you have a right to accuse me of either a wrong or a right

attitude toward him,--an unfriendly or a friendly one,--after the

continually opposite statements and accusations you have made to me for

the last four years yourself. At one time you have recommended a course

of diplomacy toward a veritable devil, and five minutes later a blow in

the face and scorn of any relationship whatever. And now you suggest a

wily and conniving attitude toward a character which you claim as

fundamentally good. With such inconsistencies in memory I fail to see

how you have adequate reasons for “accusing” me of a “wrong” attitude

toward him, whatever position I might have taken. It has all been very

hard, I know. Probably the truth consists more moderately in the

estimate of him as a person of as many good inclinations as bad ones.

Your feelings as a woman lover were bound to be dangerous in diverting

you from an impersonal justice, and, however much I may have been

blinded by my own relationship with him, I cannot deny having been

influenced by your sufferings and outcries. There are reasons for acts

and prejudices which cannot always be justified at the turn of the

moment, but look hard enough, and substantial roots will be found.

I returned to Brookhaven last night after a very satisfactory interview

with Mr. Rheinthal, of the firm of Rheinthal and Newman, which handles

the Parrish prints. I shall begin work there in the order department

early in September, until which time I’ll be out here with Hal and

Claire. My note of yesterday was expressive enough of the satisfaction I

am feeling about the matter without repetition here. Everything is

pointing toward very friendly relations with C. A. in the future, which

good turn is greatly due to the interest of the New York office. People

change in their attitude either from enlightenment of the understanding

or change of impulse. In the case of father toward me I think a revival

of interest was seconded by a more adequate understanding of my motives,

interests, character and position which the office supplied. Also, a

certain pride (now that his wealth begins to assume rather large

dimensions) in the position of his only son, was equally responsible.

--/--/

27: TO GORHAM MUNSON[7]

[_New York City_] [_August 22, 1919_]

Have been back in town for last 2 weeks very busy at my new job. Glad to

know you are enjoying yourself. Look me up as soon as you return!

Haven’t been over to see _The Modernist_ but suppose it is racing along

as usual.

28: TO CHARMION WIEGAND

_N.Y.C._ _Nov. 5th, ’19_

Dear Charmion: Here are the rest of your poems; I think they are all

there. _The Modernist_ took one of the Egyptian sonnets, I cannot

remember the exact name of it, and hopes you will send more soon.

I leave for Cleveland tomorrow night, and am very anxious to get off.

Packing all the truck I have accumulated here has proved a delirious

task. Let me thank you and Hermann [Habicht] again for the evening last

week and the many other treats of the summer.

Let’s write occasionally and be as metropolitan as possible. You know

I’m now out in those great expanses of cornfields so much talked about

and sung, and you can’t very well dispense with me even though you do

live “in the big city.” I am beginning something in an entirely new vein

with the luscious title: “My Grandmother’s Love Letters.” I don’t want

to make the dear old lady too sweet or too naughty, and balancing on the

fine line between these two qualities is going to be fun. I hope that

living close to her in the same house won’t spoil it all.

P.S. Much to my surprise I got yesterday a very friendly letter from

Sherwood Anderson thanking me for the _Pagan_ art[ic]le.

29: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Nov. 13, 1919_

My dear Gorham: It begins to look as though my work was to be confined

to the hours between midnight and dawn,--that is, in writing. I go to

Akron, O., next week to take up a position in my father’s new store

there and my own hours are to be from six in the morning until eleven at

night. I was down there with him yesterday, and find that he has a

wonderful establishment,--better than anything of its kind in New York.

It’s too bad to waste it all on Akron, but there seems to be a lot of

money there that the rubber tire people have made. The place [is full

of] fresh growth. A hell of a place. The streets are full of the debris

from old buildings that are being torn down to replace [with] factories,

etc. It looks, I imagine, something like the western scenes of some of

Bret Harte’s stories. I saw about as many Slavs and Jews on the streets

as on Sixth Ave. Indeed the main and show street of the place looks

something like Sixth Ave. without the elevated.

The size of my father’s business has surprised me much. Things are

whizzing, and I don’t know how many millions he will be worth before he

gets through growing. If I work hard enough I suppose I am due to get a

goodly share of it, and as I told you, it seems to me the wisest thing

to do just now to join him. He is much pleasanter than I expected him to

be, and perhaps will get around after awhile to be truly magnanimous.

You evidently were not consulted about the Josephson mss., as I saw one

of them returned the day I left N. Y. I haven’t been able to locate a

single copy of _The Modernist_ anywhere in Cleveland, and I suggest that

Richard Laukhuff, 40 Taylor Arcade, would be a good one to send it to.

He handles most of the radical stuff, and _The Pagan_, he tells me, is

getting too tame. He also says that _The Little Review_ has suffered

neglect since the last Baroness [Freytag-Loringhoven] contribution. The

B. is a little strong for Cleveland.

I don’t know when I shall get time or the proper mood to work more on

the Grandame poem. Contact with the dear lady, as I told you I feared,

has made all progress in it at present impossible.

Rec’d a letter from Sherwood Anderson this morning in which he tells me

about early business experiences in Cleveland and Elyria. The latter is

about as unpleasant as Akron, so I guess I needn’t despair. My mother

and grandmother are going to Cuba this winter and close up the house, so

I fear that our visiting plans will have to be postponed a while. I

won’t be in Akron long. After that it may be Kansas City, Frisco, or

even New York. The business is simply enormous now and growing so that I

expect I will have a real job in time. I like to think that I can keep

on writing a little, at least, of good quality, until,--someday when I

shall start up a magazine that will be an eye-opener. I feel in a Billy

Sunday mood this evening, and am very much in haste, so I hope you will

not consider this letter as anything other than a scrap-heap of petty

news. -- -- -- --

30: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Akron, Ohio_] _Nov. 22nd_

My dear Gorham: --/--/ If business were to continue so slow behind my

counter at the drug store as it has thus far, I could get a good deal of

reading done. As it _has_ been, _Pavannes & Divisions_, T. S. Eliot,

Maupassant and _The L. R._ have been my steady companions. I have to be

on the job about 14 hours every day, and when the Christmas rush begins

I fancy I will be indeed well tired out at night. However, I don’t

expect to remain here very long after that date on account of a probable

promotion, when my evenings, at least, will be free. And, after all,

that is about all I ask for.

Josephson wrote me a fascinating letter last week enclosing a poem of

his own and two translations from Jules Romains. If you two continue to

keep me warm, I am not at all pessimistic about my interest waning in

les arts. Josephson’s opinions of _The Modernist_ will more than match

your own, I think. Fawcett sent me a copy of _The Modernist_, and having

time to peruse it, I was quite astonished by the amount of literary

rubbish he had managed to get into its confines. There was hardly a

gleam of promise through it all. Your three poems were practically the

best things in it, and I am not complimenting you thereby. For a time I

was sorry for you and for me. I wanted to write a letter withdrawing my

contributions. But a certain resignation to fatality dissuaded me from

the effort.... -- -- -- -- is a poor ignorant bastard of some kind. His

comments on history and government are not even in a class with the

_Evening Journal_. The rest of the sheet seems like a confused,

indiscriminate jelly-like mass.... But, ah, well-a-day, the time must

come when we can do more than groan and hoot.

I have thought for some time that your connection with it resulted

mostly in a waste of time. I may send them more stuff simply to have it

published and also on account of a kind of dumb-animal affection that I

have for Waldo [Fawcett]. How furious he would be to hear this!!

I am liable to break forth in song about any time, but nothing has

happened as yet. I wrote a short affair last night that I may hammer

into shape. Grandma and her love letters are too steep climbing for

hurried moments, so I don’t know when I shall work on that again. As it

is, I have a good beginning, and I don’t want any anti-climax effect. If

I cannot carry it any further, I may simply add a few finishing lines

and leave it simply as a mood touched upon. New theories are filling my

head every day.--Have you given the poems of Wallace Stevens in the Oct.

_Poetry_ any attention. There is a man whose work makes most of the rest

of us quail. His technical subtleties alone provide a great amount of

interest. Note the novel rhyme and rhythm effects.

Josephson sends me a list of names for reading that you might be

interested in. Marlowe is one of his favorites, John Webster, and Donne;

the last is a wonder speaking from my own experience. I’ve got to rush

back to work now so this is all. -- -- -- --

31: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Akron_ _Friday_

Dear Gorham: Have been up to Cleveland for over Thanksgiving, and rushed

back again at dawn today and spent the day as usual. I enjoyed your

letter with its encouragement to Grandma and am sending you a record of

her behaviour to date. She would get very fretful and peevish at times,

and at other times, hysterical and sentimental, and I have been obliged

to handle her in the rather discouraging way that my words attest.

However, I think that something has been said, after all, although the

poem hasn’t turned out as long as I had expected. Tell me, pray, how you

like it.

Have you read _The Young Visitors_ by Daisy Ashford (alias Sir James

Barrie) yet? I don’t know when I have been more delighted. Subtle satire

par excellence!

I shall try to get hold of your article in _The Smart Set_ and see how

you have got up in the world, according to Joe Kling.

I hear a little gossip even here in Akron. There is a bookseller here

who is well known far and wide as a character. I had known him years

ago in Cleveland, but our acquaintance has recently come to more

ripeness here. I just missed dining with Alfred Knopf who came here to

see him the other day. Knopf tells him that Mencken is about to publish

a book with him of which the title I forget, but the last scene is laid

in the Sultan’s bed. The S. having a very large and luxurious one. This

bookseller also gave me the enclosed booklet which was written by Mark

Twain in one of his ribald moments. You will enjoy it, I know, and it

gives me a stronger light on some of Mencken’s enthusiasm for the

writer. The grand ejaculatory climacteric speech of Queen Bess is

magnificent. You will regard the book as quite a treasure. I don’t know

where else on earth it could be procured. --/--

32: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Akron_] _Dec. 13th, ’19_

My dear Gorham: I think you are wrong about _1601_. The bookseller

friend who gave me the book you have, informs me that that is just

another name for the same piece. So you see it is even more scarce and

valuable than you thought. Will you ever forget that sentence of

Raleigh’s where he says he was but clearing his nether throat!? I must

get another one and send it to Josephson, who, by the way, has just

written me about my “Grandmother.” He has some of the same complaints to

make of her as yourself, and many others, but he ends up by calling it

the best thing I have written, and, what is more flattering, begs to

keep the copy I sent him. He says he has had a falling out with Amy

Lowell, but a falling in with T. S. Eliot by way of compensation. His

letters are charming with a peculiar and very definite flavor to them,

and buck me up a good deal. I have lately begun to feel some wear from

my surroundings and work, and to make it worse, have embarked on a love

affair, (of all places unexpected, here in Akron!), that keeps me broken

in pieces most of the time, so that my interest in the arts has sunk to

a rather low station. Now that Christmas is coming in with its usual

inhuman rush in candy selling, I shall not have a moment for anything

but business and sleep. My life is quite barbarous and the only thing to

do is recognize the situation and temporarily bow to it.

Waldo Frank’s book IS a pessimistic analysis! The worst of it is, he has

hit on the truth so many times. I am glad to see such justice done to

Sherwood Anderson, but this extreme national consciousness troubles me.

I cannot make myself think that these men like Dreiser, Anderson, Frost,

etc., could have gone so far creatively had they read this book in their

early days. After all, has not their success been achieved more through

natural unconsciousness combined with great sensitiveness than with a

mind so thoroughly logical or propagandistic (is the word right?) as

Frank’s? But Frank has done a wonderful thing to limn the characters of

Lincoln and Mark Twain as he has,--the first satisfactory words I have

heard about either of them. The book will never be allowed to get dusty

on the library shelves unless he has failed to give us the darkest

shadows in his book,--and I don’t think he has. I notice that Marsden

Hartley is mentioned, but how does it come that “our Caesar” [Zwaska] is

omitted!?

This last makes me think of _The Little Review_, and how terrible their

last issue, November’s, is. I have sent them my poem, but have heard no

answer as yet. If _The Dial_ goes on as you announced in your letter,

perhaps they would care to print it. I am thoroughly confident about the

thing itself since it has got by the particular, hierarchic Josephson,

and I won’t blush to show it to anyone now.

If _The Modernist_ is not already in the mails for me, please do not

forget that I am anxious for a copy. I wrote Fawcett a long time ago,

but he hasn’t responded. My last letter from Anderson urges me to make

him a visit, and I am hoping that sometime next summer such a thing will

be possible. He calls the poem beautiful, but says that it is not as

much poetry to him as “the flesh and bone” of my letters. He and

Josephson are opposite poles. J. classic, hard and glossy,--Anderson,

crowd-bound, with a smell of the sod about him, uncouth. Somewhere

between them is Hart Crane with a kind of wistful indetermination, still

much puzzled.

33: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Akron, Ohio_ _Dec. 27, 1919_

My dear Gorham: --/--/ My stand in the drug store has not proved exactly

a success, although my father is good enough to admit that I am not to

blame in any way. The principal reason that it will be discontinued is

that no one can be found to work there without a quite exorbitant

salary, and the location is too poor to afford that. So many things have

happened lately with the rush of Christmas, etc., that I am tired out

and very much depressed today. This “affair” that I have been having has

been the most intense and satisfactory one of my whole life, and I am

all broken up at the thought of leaving him. Yes, the last word will

jolt you. I have never had devotion returned before like this, nor ever

found a soul, mind, and body so worthy of devotion. Probably I never

shall again. Perhaps we can meet occasionally in Cleveland, if I am not

sent miles away from there, but everything is so damned dubious as far

as such conjectures lead. You, of course, will consider my mention of

this as unmentionable to anyone else.

Sherwood Anderson is coming to N. Y. this week, he writes, and perhaps

it would be possible for you to meet him. Vide _The Little Review_ for

information as to his whereabouts. He says that Van Wyck Brooks has

given in Doran’s hands for publication a book well named,--_The Ordeal

of Mark Twain_, which, I imagine, will follow on something the same line

of direction that Waldo Frank suggests in his book. Hackett’s review of

the latter is a bit severe, although he touches the weak points in every

instance. The work _is_ too rhapsodical, and I noticed frequent lapses

in plain grammar, not to mention diction. But the meat is there anyway,

and the book is stimulating, even though a bit pathetic. Anderson says

he respects the mind of Brooks more. Brooks and Hackett belong, both, to

a harder and more formal species. Therefore Hackett’s critique is quite

consistent with his characteristics.

I have been reading Masters’ latest, _Starved Rock_, and must mention to

you my enthusiasm for “Spring Lake,” the best thing he has written since

the _Spoon River_ elegies. “The Dream of Tasso” has a few splendid

passages free from rhetoric, and there are others, a few, that satisfy.

More and more am I turning toward Pound and Eliot and the minor

Elizabethans for values. I have not written anything for a month, but I

feel, somehow or other, as though progress were being made. Your

estimates of Djuna Barnes and Ida Rauh are interesting and true. I have

been instructed recently not to read behind my counter and so, working

twelve hours per day, have not had time to do much reading. I want to

get at your _New Republic_ reviews, if possible, tomorrow. The booklet,

_1601_, is your own to keep. I can get another, I think, any day for the

asking. My write-up in the paper was silly enough, but forced upon me,

and misquotations as well. However, I took it as an agreeable joke and

an anachronism in Akron. But the pater was furious, at the headlines in

particular, and I spent a nervous day yesterday with him in

explanations, etc. Sic semper. Akron has afforded me one purple evening,

however. I got dreadfully drunk on dreadful raisin brew, smoked one of

the cigars made especially for the Czar, defunct, of Russia, and puked

all over a boarding house. You will believe me an ox when I tell you

that I was on the job again next morning, and carried the day through

with flying colours. I enclose an opus by Eugene Field,--very

exclusive,--which you will copy if you wish, and then return. Do not let

Burleson or your father see it, as it is quite strong. I think you will

more than smile. --/--/

Yes,--Edgar Saltus _is_ gone. I remember reading him and a rare and

wonderfully complete edition of Catullus on the night of the debauch.

However,--I hope you will not think that my companion on that occasion

was the one I mention early in the letter. This fellow of the raisin

brew is another poor soul like myself, in Akron exile from N.Y. A very

sophisticated and erudite fellow to whom I was introduced by my

bookseller.

1920

34: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Akron_] _Jan. 9th, ’20_

My dear Gorham: What a good job Somerset Maugham does in his _Moon and

Sixpence_! Have just finished reading it at a single sitting. Pray take

the time to read it if you haven’t already. How far it follows the facts

biographical to Gauguin, I am not able to say, but from what little I do

know, it touches his case at many angles. Your letter coming this

morning calls echoes in my ears of many such moods familiar to me during

my times in N. Y. and I know how you feel. The mentioned book, I suggest

as a tonic for hardness,--we all need how much more of it!

Complaining of a headache this morning I was excused from my duties for

the day, and so have had time for reading, etc. I have not had to serve

at the soda fountain as yet, and as a matter of fact, have not had much

of anything to do,--my duty seeming to be a kind of marking _time_ until

I shall be occupied in the addition to the store,--a restaurant,--or am

sent up to Cleveland to fly about in a Dodge car, selling. I have a kind

of tacit quarrel with everyone at the store, in spite of smiles, etc.,

but am becoming accustomed to the atmosphere, and suffer considerably

less. Akron has, after all, afforded me more than N. Y. would under

present circumstances and time, and, odd as it may seem, I have almost

no desire for an immediate return there. Of course, I suppose my

“affair” may have a great deal to do with my attitude. And I have also

made two very delightful friendships, one,--the fellow I mentioned as my

companion in the raisin brew debauch (Candee), and a more recent

acquaintance with a filthy old man,--a marvelous photographer [Minns],

the only one in this country to hold the Dresden and Munich awards, and

who has several times been “written up” in the _International Studio_.

Authorities rank him with Coburn and Hoppé of London, and there is no

one in New York who compares with him. He used to read _The Little

Review_, knows Marsden Hartley,--and lives in a tumble down old house in

the center of the city. I expect the pictures of me that he takes to be

wonders. He refused to take the “rubber-king,” F. H. Seiberling, for

love nor money, simply because he thought his face without interest. He

confided in me yesterday that he was an anarchist, and I picture with

some pain the contrast in his circumstances here with what acclaim he

would achieve in a place like London. He has always been afraid of

N.Y.--and wisely,--for probably he would have long since starved there.

I was suddenly surprised last evening (Candee and I have been in the

habit of talking until two and three in the morning) to hear him mention

the Baroness. It seems he knows her very well. Knew her before she came

to the village and Margaret Anderson got hold of her at all, and believe

me he had some surprising tales to tell. He goes on for hours telling of

exotic friends of his and strange experiences. He know[s] Europe well,

English country house parties, and Washington society,--prizefighters,

cardinals, poets and sculptors, etc., etc., and the wonderful thing is

to find him here in Akron, forced to earn his living as secretary for

some wheezing philanthropist.

Your anecdote of New Year’s Eve was interesting,--who knows,--perhaps

someday you will fall too. Prenez garde!

35: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland, O._ [_January 15_]

Dear Gorham: Your play presents simple difficulties of criticism as far

as particular details. Of course you cannot take it seriously as a work

of art after the first page. It is stark propaganda, however much in the

right direction it may be. For types like ourselves it should hold no

deep interest, as it begins and ends with the universally-obvious

understanding between the artist and what is supposed to be his

“audience.” The Comstock raps are good, but not well enough,--humorously

enough, placed to be sufficiently amusing or effective. Humor is the

artist’s only weapon against the proletariat. Mark Twain knew this, and

used it effectively enough, take _1601_ for example. Mencken knows it

too. And so did Rabelais. I think that _The Liberator_ would be likely

to take it, but I cannot imagine it presented on a stage. You have a

sense of humor and I cannot see how you allowed some lines of it to pass

your pencil. I have marked a few. You’re too damned serious. You

victimize your hero. Your aristocrat is much more vital and admirable

than the polyphonic God, chosen to symbolize the artist. And

anyway,--it’s sentimentality to talk the way he does. The modern artist

has got to harden himself, and the walls of an ivory tower are too

delicate and brittle a coat of mail for substitute. The keen[est] and

most sensitive edges will result from this “hardening” process. If you

will pardon a more personal approach, I think that you would do better

to think less about aesthetics in the abstract,--in fact, forget all

about aesthetics, and apply yourself closely to a conscious observation

of the details of existence, plain psychology, etc. If you ARE an artist

then, you will create spontaneously. But I pray for both of us,--let us

be keen and humorous scientists anyway. And I would rather act my little

tragedy without tears, although I would insist upon a tortured

countenance and all sleekness pared off the muscles.

My love affair is affording me new treasures all the time. Our holidays

are spent together here in Cleveland, and I have discovered new

satisfactions at each occasion. The terrible old grind at the factory is

much relieved by this. I live from Saturday to Saturday. Gold and

purple. Antinoüs at Yale. So the wind blows, and whatever might happen,

I am sure of a pool of wonderful memories. Perhaps this is the romance

of my life,--it is wonderful to find the realization of one’s dreams in

flesh, form, laughter and intelligence,--all in one person. I am not

giddy or blind, but steadier and keener than I’ve ever been before. The

daily grind prevents me from doing anything productive. Here is

something enclosed on which I would like your opinion, as frank and

unmerciful as mine has been of your play.[8] -- -- -- --

36: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland, O._ _Jan. 28th, --20_

My dear Gorham: Well, I hope that Kling will be able to sell out for the

price of dinner anyway,--but most of all that he sells out, and rids his

own arms, as well as the public’s, of that fetid corpse, _The Pagan_.

The last issue is the worst ever, and I don’t think there are lower

levels to be reached. Joe doesn’t properly belong in an editor’s

chair,--hasn’t taste or discrimination, and that’s all there is to it.

He can make just as good money a thousand other ways,--most Jews can.

I am enraged at Mencken and Nathan for satisfying the public and

insulting their admirers so grossly with that cheap and banal

play,--_Heliogabolus_. Any one who has read even Saltus’ _Imperial

Purple_ knows that there is not a vestige of historical truth in the

setting or dialogue,--and that character, Heliogabolus, the most

dissolute minion of decadent Rome, portrayed as I thought our authors

were about to do,--so truthfully that a limited edition hastily gathered

up would be the only possible method of presentation in America,--that

delusion induced me to part with two good dollars. Instead we have a

senile Al Jolson, farting the usual bedroom-farce calamities. If you

want to read up on Heliogabolus, read some of Dio Cassius, if you can

procure the old scribe,--at least this is what my Akron man-of-the-world

prescribes. He agrees with me about the book, and writes thus: “I

confess I was terribly disappointed. When I think of that slim child of

seventeen with his hair powdered with diamond dust and gold, his half

oriental eyes all but closed, dressed in the costume of a priest of

Baal, offering his hand covered with jewels, to a gladiator who has

fallen at his feet with the words,--‘Hail, Lord,’ and answering

him,--‘Call me not Lord, for I am thy Lady,’ and then read of the

senile, doddering creature with twelve wives as he is pictured by the

joint authors, I have to laugh.”

Your N. Y. notes of the journalese, artists, etc., keeps me awake during

these days of trial at the factory. I am packing cases and moving heavy

cases of chocolate, barrels of sugar, etc., for my living at present,

but even this is better than a station behind the soda counter. My

father is just as impossibly tedious and “hard” as ever, and still as

insistent on starvation wages. I’ll be glad when my mother returns from

the south and the house and my own room are open to me again, and living

will be a little less expensive. Then, too,--I am beginning to discover

that I enjoy her society,--I have worked over her for three years

painfully,--and the result is a woman of more interest than I had dared

to hope for. I’m still in love, too, so I have much to be sad about.

--/--/

37: TO WILLIAM WRIGHT

_Cleveland, Ohio_ _Feb. 5th, --’20_

Dear William: --/--/ But I have cheering news to tell you. “My

Grandmother’s Loveletters” tempted _The Dial_ to part with ten dollars,

my first “litry” money,--the seduction was complete,--and you may begin

to look for outrageous exposures next month or the next, in that

magazine. I cannot write much now, cramped in this rooming house room,

but when my mother returns from the tropics next month and I am

re-installed in my own room with my little Victrola, I hope to revive my

intimacy with la Muse. Just now I am deep in Baudelaire’s _Fleurs du

Mal_, and won’t brook anything healthful or cheery about the place.

38: TO WILLIAM WRIGHT

_Cleveland, Ohio_ _Feb. 24, 1920_

My dear William: --/--/ Take a layman’s word of advice and remain in

your present surroundings as long as possible and extract the full

amount of enjoyment from them while they last. It is not very exciting

to arise and essay forth to ten hours dull and exasperating labor every

morning at five-thirty and return home at night with a head like a wet

muffin afterward. And that is the routine that I am enmeshed in at

present, to say nothing of trying to exist on starvation wages. It’s the

old bunko stuff about “working from the bottom up” and “earning an

honest dollar” in practice, and if there are not some enlivening changes

in it soon, I am liable to walk into the office and tell the amused and

comfortable and rich and thriving spectator that “the joke’s up.”

Catullus uses somewhere in his epigrams about a man that he was “----ed

flat,” meaning I suppose a reference to emaciated thighs, etc., but the

phrase is none too vivid for me to use at present in reference to my

nervous and intellectual state. Add to this, an uncomfortable room,

cold, etc., and a routine of hasty and inadequate meals snatched from

chance lunch counters and there is further evidence for the state o’

things. --/--/

39: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _March 6th, --’20_

My dear Gorham: Well,--my mother is at length returned and the house

open again. At present, however, the domestic vista appears a desolate

prospect to me,--a violent contrast to the warm pictures that the former

rooming-house room had conjured up as anticipations. I wrote you a while

ago that I had gotten ’round to enjoy my mother’s companionship. That

illusion, at least for the present, seems to be dispelled. She left here

two months ago, a rather (for her) ductile and seductive woman with a

certain aura of romance about her. She comes back now, satisfied,

shallow, unemotional, insistent on talking food receipts and household

details during meals. The weight of this terrible Christian Science

satisfaction I feel growing heavier and heavier on my neck. Tonight I am

distraught after a two-hour’s effort at camaraderie and amusement with

her. “Dutiful son,” “sage parent,”--“that’s nice,”--and a pat on the

back and the habitual “goodnight kiss.” I give up evenings to her to

hear advice about details in business affairs which she knows nothing

about. Mon Dieu!!! And there is Grandmother in a loud background to add

to the confusion. Exhausted as one may be from an inhuman day, one must

beam out the dinner and evening in proper style or there are

exclamations culminating in excruciating tears. However, I mind it most

when I am alive, like tonight,--not tired, stupid, mild, as on “week

nights.”

Well, anyway, last night was made enjoyable by the spectacle of a good

prize-fight. I have been to a number lately as guest of a newspaper man

who lived over at the rooming house. Of course many matches are

boresome, but provide two sublime machines of human muscle-play in the

vivid light of a “ring,”--stark darkness all around with yells from all

sides and countless eyes gleaming, centered on the circle,--and I get a

real satisfaction and stimulant. I get very heated, and shout loudly,

jump from my seat, etc., and get more interested every time I go.

Really, you must attend a bout or two in N.Y. where a real knock-out is

permitted. Along with liquor, that aristocratic assertion has

disappeared here. There is something about the atmosphere of a ring show

that I have for long wanted to capture into the snares of a poem. I

shall not rest easy until I do, I fear. To describe it to you,--what I

mean,--would be to accomplish my purpose. A kind of patent leather

gloss, an extreme freshness that has nothing to do with the traditional

“dew-on-the-grass” variety conveys something suggestive of my aim. T. S.

Eliot does it often,--once merely with the name “Sweeney,” and Sherwood

Anderson, though with quite different method in a story of his in _The

Smart Set_, some time ago, called “I Want to Know Why,” one of the

greatest stories I ever expect to read,--better even than most of the

_Winesburg_ chapters. This brings me to your story in _The Plowshare_.

What there was of it was well done. But it seems to me that the humor

and satire of this kind of theme depends on a continued heaping-up and

heaping-up of absurd detail, etc., until a climacteric of either

bitterness or farce is reached. For example,--have you read Gogol’s “The

Cloak,” ever? I don’t know what Hervey White did to it,--but I would

mistrust him of any improvement on it after reading his comments on

Frank’s _Our America_. -- -- -- -- I am as anti-Semitic as they make ’em,

but Frank’s comments cannot afford to be ignored merely because of race

prejudice. White is just an ordinary ass, though, and can easily be

disposed of. I don’t understand, though, how you can consent to such

“alterations” in your mss.

I’m very glad you sent the poem. It begins well,--dramatically, and

maintains itself well until the last two lines. They are an appendix

which I’d remove--merely repetition of better phrases in the beginning.

Why not divide up the second verse into two equal parts and have three

quartet-line verses? Another thing,--the “shoot-the-chutes” image

jars,--one wants to laugh,--and one shouldn’t--something else there

would be better. Also, why use a French title? I know it’s “done in the

best families,” but there seems a touch of servility,--inadequacy about

it to me. I’d send it to _The Dial_ if I had it, and be quite proud of

it whether taken or not.

Josephson writes me that _The Dial_ is causing a great stir, but that

clique favoritism, the old familiar and usual magazine button, is

beginning to become evident. J’s letters are charming, and a recent love

affair of his, a disappointment, has added seasoning to his

observations. I only hope that you, he, and Anderson continue to keep me

awake [?] with occasional mail.

I had a long and hypocritical conference with my father today, and

succeeded to the extent of a five dollar per week raise in salary,--this

makes existence at least possible.

I don’t know, G., whether I’m strong and hardened or not. I know that I

am forced to be very flexible to get along at all under present

conditions. I contrive to humanize my work to some extent by much

camaraderie with the other employees and this is my salvation there. Of

course I am utterly alone,--want to be,--and am beginning to rather

enjoy the slippery scales-of-the-fish, continual escape, attitude. The

few people that I can give myself to are out of physical reach, and so I

can only write where I would like to talk, gesture, and dine. The most

revolting sensation I experience is the feeling of having placed myself

in a position of quiescence or momentary surrender to the contact &

possession of the insensitive fingers of my neighbors here. I am

learning, just beginning to learn,--the technique of escape, and too

often yet, I betray myself by some enthusiasm or other.

My Akron friend has not been able to see me for some five [?] weeks, and

I am in need of a balm, spiritual and fleshly. I hope next Sunday

something can be arranged. -- -- -- --

40: TO MATTHEW JOSEPHSON

_Cleveland_ _March 15th --’20_

Dear Matty: Your praise of _Parsifal_ reminded me to buy a certain

Victrola reproduction,--_The Processional_,--that I have long wanted,

and I have found it an incessant pleasure ever since. I read the _Times_

often enough to realize that music is the only extra stimulus that N.Y.

has to offer above Cleveland in these dry days. As I’ve said before, I

don’t especially long for N.Y. as of yore, except once in awhile when an

overwhelming disgust with my work afflicts me and I want to lose myself

in the chill vastness of the old place. (I should better have said “find

myself,” for I play a business part so much and so painfully, that the

effort wears.) The little “iridescent bubbles” of poems that you suggest

as fortnightly events simply refuse to come to the surface, and as I get

so much of regularity in my daily routine,--time-clock ringing, etc.,

and rushing,--I won’t even worry about it. I cannot commit the old

atrocities,--and I have not time at present for new adventures. At any

rate, in the slow silence my taste is not suffering. There are still

Rabelais, Villon, Apuleius and Eliot to snatch at occasionally. In my

limited surroundings I grow to derive exceptional pleasures from little

things such as a small Gauguin I have on the wall, Japanese prints, and

Russian records on the Victrola, in fact, the seclusion of my room. My

mother is able to offer me only the usual “comforts of home” combined

with stolid, bourgeois ultimatums and judgments which I am learning how

to accept gracefully. So, if you are bored and spleenful, we have much

in common, though you are less impulsive and emotional than myself, and

take it, I am sure, more lightly. Your suggestion of a flight to the

walks of Chelsea or the Mediterranean tempts me exceedingly. I should

like to be rash. I assure you that if I were in your position I should

do just such a thing, but I feel too much bound by responsibilities in

connection with my Mother’s fate, to more than dream of it. However, I

wish we could get together for a while next summer. Perhaps you could

make me a visit here. I will be badly in need of your conversation for a

tonic by that time, and perhaps you will consider it. I can offer you no

woodland retreat or metropolitan carnival,--only a very middle-class

house and dull conversation,--but the time we had to ourselves would be

very interesting to me, at least.

The last _Dial_ was interesting, mainly on account of a story of

Anderson’s and “Mrs. Maecenas.” Burke can write at least very cleverly.

I was entertained. The hero, I cannot help remarking, touches

resemblance to you in several intellectual instances. Physically,--I

never saw you broken out with a rash, or gawky,--but Burke has known you

longer.--Is there an understanding between you about it?... My opus

comes out in the April issue, and you will remark a couple of salutary

changes,--omissions.

It’s late, and those who arise at five must get sleep, so I’ll

barbarically acquiesce. My poem, the phallic theme, was a highly

concentrated piece of symbolism, image wound within image.[9] You were

only too right in your judgment of it. When I get some time I’ll work

more on it. What you saw was fresh and unshodden enough.

41: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland, Ohio._ _April 14th, ’20_

My dear Gorham: --/--/ Yes,--the Grandmother poem came out very nicely.

You notice, of course, that I cut it in several places, which improved

it, I am sure. It is the only thing I’ve done that satisfies me at all

now,--whether I can ever equal it in the future remains to be seen. I’ve

recently been at work on something that I enclose for your verdict.[10]

As usual I am much at sea about its qualities and faults. It is

interesting to me,--but do I succeed in making it of interest to others?

Please slam and bang your best about it,--pro and con. I have much faith

in your critical powers. Much remains to be done on it yet, but enough

is done with it at present to detect the main current of it, which is

principally all that worries me. My daily routine tends to benumb my

faculties so much that at times I feel an infantile awe before any

attempt whatever, critical or creative. This piece was simply a mood

which rose and spilled over in a slightly cruder form than what you see.

It happens to be autobiographic, which makes any personal estimate of it

all the more dangerous.

I like Marianne Moore in a certain way. She is so prosaic that the

extremity of her detachment touches, or seems to touch, a kind of

inspiration. But she is too much of a precieuse for my adulation. Of

this latter class even give me Wallace Stevens, and the fastidious

Williams in preference. Is there anything more fastidious in poetry than

these lines of his in a recent _Little Review_ ...--? --/--/ [“To a

Friend Concerning Several Ladies,” II. 1-7.]

The Bynner poems and translations were fine. Vildrac is the one who set

me on the track of the Grandmother mood, and it is odd that our poems

should have come out in the same number.

Have not heard from Josephson for some time. His last letter told of

splenetic days following his post-graduation from Columbia, and an urge

to ramble toward the continent via a stewardship on some vessel.

Perhaps, for all I know, he has left our shores. Anderson writes me

often from his Alabama bower. He is enthusiastic about the Negroes and

their life, and will probably write something, sooner or later, on the

subject.

The prospect of Easter spent at home was too much for me, and so I went

to visit an Akron friend armed with two bottles of dago red. That didn’t

seem to suffice after we got started, and a quart of raisin jack was

divided between us with the result that the day proper (after the night

before) was spent very quietly, watered and Bromo-Seltzered, with

amusing anecdotes occasionally sprouting from towelled head to towelled

head. The bath in the unconscious did me good, though, and was much

better than the stilted parade and heavy dinner that my home

neighborhood offered. Since then I have been beset by two terrible

occasions,--a Crane-grandparent--golden-wedding celebration, and a

collegiate ball. The terrors of the first were alleviated by some real

champagne, but the second was aggravated by auto trouble on the way home

with two hysterical, extremely young and innocent females under my care

at three in the morning. I am just getting over it.

Well, this is all for tonight. I have no youths to put to

bed,--otherwise perhaps my correspondence might suffer. I’m afraid I

wouldn’t do in your position at all. But enough! I read in the paper

that John Barrymore is going to appear before the movie public in

_Dorian Gray_!! Mercy me!! Poor Oscar’s ghost upon the screen!! I wonder

what will be done with the part.

42: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _April 26, ’20_

Dear Gorham: Thank you “muchly” for your speedy response to the plea for

a critique. I was very anxious for your words, and they proved very

valuable. You are right in every particular, except in so far as the

understanding of my personal motive of interest in the poem. I realize

that it is only my failure in the realization (concretely) which has

permitted you this possibility. The poem fails, not because of

questions, propagandistic and economic, which you mentioned, but because

of that synthetic conviction of form & creation, which it lacks. It is

all too complicated an explanation to attempt least wise on paper at

this time of the night,--but perhaps you will miraculously be able to

penetrate through to my meaning. As it stands, there are only a few

fragments scattered thru it to build on,--but I may make something of it

in time. However,--if it does evolve into something,--it will be too

elusive for you to attach sociological arguments to, at least in the

matter of most of the details you have mentioned. At present,--I feel

apathetic about it,--but there is, of course, no telling when I will

take it up again. The “Garden Abstract” has got hold of me now--and I

venture that you would not recognize it. It is carrying me on with all

the adventuresome interest that “Grandmother’s Love Letters” did, and I

am very hopeful. Later, when I am further advanced with it and surer,

I’ll send it to you. Also, I am “working up” the “Aunty Climax” which

you will remember,--and a new piece in conventional form about a child

hearing his parents quarreling in the next room at midnight,--a rather

Blake-ian theme, I fear.

I have gone through a great deal lately,--seen love go down through lust

to indifference, etc., and am also, not very well. This, I blame mostly

to overwork. In fact the most of last week I spent at home mending an

incipient rupture caused by the incessant heavy lifting at the factory.

The possibility of such a thing made me furious with resentment against

all those concerned in the circumstances of its cause. But I am quieter

now that the affair has not been so serious as I at first suspected. I

am back at it again today,--but shall in the future take more

precautions against strenuosity. Your letter breathed an equanimity

which it seems is more [than] in your late surroundings. The change must

be doing you good.

43: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _May 25th, ’20_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ Your story in _The Plowshare_ was good and in the

right direction, I think. Somewhat in the Chekhov tradition,--but a

little too slight to leave many foot-marks. Work up to a few more

complications in plot and treatment, and you will give us more of a

chance for a grip. But the main point for praise strikes me in the

evident fact that you have attained an hygienic attitude (“naturalism,”

or what you will, but the only foundation left for serious and

interesting modern work). I’m, I fear, a little obscure, but I need a

conversation with you to get at the root of the matter.

I am plugging along in a very sodden way, planning as much as I dare on

a chance to work a little in the New York office for a few weeks this

summer by way of a change. After a recent conversation with my father

the move seems rather more probable than before,--so, it may be that I

shall see you within six weeks from now of a hot evening. Have been

reading Stendhal’s _Chartreuse de Parma_, _Noa Noa_, _Way of All Flesh_,

and Landor’s _Conversations_,--a strange mixture. Anderson wrote me

very much the same criticism of my “Episode of Hands” poem that you did.

I haven’t done anything more with it in spite of frequent attempts. The

new version of “Garden Abstract” I enclose for your criticism. _The

Dial_ has rejected it, but that doesn’t mean much to me after reading in

their last number that vacant lyric of Alter Brody’s.

This “business life” is getting me in a terrible way,--and I am

beginning to feel that I must contrive a jolt for myself soon. If it

were only myself concerned in the “jolt” I wouldn’t have delaying

qualms,--but,--perhaps I am fated to a life of parental absorptions. My

interests are as keen as ever, though, and so I suppose I need not worry

about myself,--as long as I keep worrying.

44: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland_, _June 8th, ’20_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ I’ve just read your critique in _The Freeman_, and

while I have never been to a Provincetown performance, I should

certainly want to after this of yours. _The F._ rejected my “Garden

Abstract” along with _The N. Rep._ and _The Dial_, and I’m at a loss to

understand such things in the light of some of the mediocre effects that

are more-or-less the rule in the columns of the first two. Of course the

theme was pure pantheistic aestheticism,--and I suppose they would say

that it was too detached from life, etc. I’m started on a set of

sketches connected with Akron life now, and enclose a sample.[11] Maybe

I shall be able to do something in New York in the mornings, the best

time for such work, but as you know, plans for that kind of thing can

never be made. -- -- -- --

45: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _July 30th, --’20_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ I have been promised the territory around

Washington, D.C., Norfolk, Richmond, Va., etc., as a hunting ground for

“selling,” beginning about the second week in September when I shall

embark for Washington as headquarters. This last named place strikes me

as interesting in the extreme,--even better than N.Y. which I know so

well anyway. I shall more or less freely govern my own operations, rise

and retire at later hours, and have a drawing account at the bank at my

own disposal in addition to a good percentage commission on everything I

sell. I must admit a happy surprise at my father’s recent appreciation

of my efforts here during the last six months. He even made the

unhoped-for concession of mentioning that he had chosen this territory

for me on account of the better sort of business type that is in

Washington and also on account of Washington’s “literary and

journalistic associations.” Well, it will be much better than this smug

atmosphere around here, and I rather tend to expect a moment or two of

revived inspiration. Before closing, I must mention my enthusiasm for

our Henry James. I have read recently his _American_, an early novel,

and a group of tales in his “middle manner” collected in a book called

_The Better Sort_, also I have been at his letters which I bought

riskily but wisely, after all. -- -- -- --

46: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _August 18th --’20_

Dear Gorham: I am delighted to hear about your sudden appreciation of

D’Annunzio’s novels. In fact, I get a picture of you running with them

under your arm, (one arm, I should say,--the other being occupied with

other cargo,--) away from the, as usual, glaring M. Schopenhauer who

stands in the doorway of your erstwhile quiet ivory tower waving his

arms and shaking fists at you. I would rather, and more truthfully, I

think,--think of you thusly than as another picture, more common to

humanity, that always obtrudes upon me when anyone announces “an

engagement”--“The Storm”.... You will remember seeing it in a thousand

“art store” windows:--a curly youth partly in a bearskin trotting

amiably with a barefooted flaxen lady away from something that evidently

hasn’t taken the starch out, as yet, from a rag that they are dragging

along above them. It is all “too lovely” and pink. I am sure there is

more of a “rouge et noir” cast to your surrender. Well,--betrayal brings

memories and wisdom (to the male, anyway), and so I congratulate you on

your splash even though I suffer from unaccustomed silence. One word

before we close the subject, though:--you must not expect me to read

D’Annunzio.

Did I tell you that I have been enjoying the letters of Henry James?

Also, Aldous Huxley’s “Limbo,” and the Noh plays of Fenollosa and Pound.

Conrad’s _Nigger of the Narcissus_ seems to me all polyphonic prose,

plus the usual quality of Conrad characterization, etc. Then I’ve read

most of the tales in James’ _Better Sort_ vol. and that is about all

I’ve been able to cram into the exhausted evening hours since New York.

I’ll chuck in a page of the Akron poem that I struck off the other

evening just because I want an opinion on it from you.[12] Hustle back

to the ivory tower and put on your specks for a minute, please, and tell

me what you think of this uncouth trifle, sir. In view of my attitude

toward what Akron so strongly represents, I have been thinking that it

might be amusing to call the whole series “Porphyro in Akron.” I don’t

much care whether anyone will care for it or not. What I seem to want to

do more and more as time goes on, is to preserve a record of a few

thoughts and reactions that I’ve had in as accurate colors as possible

for at least private satisfaction. --/--/

47: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Washington, D. C._ _Sept. 13th, ’20_

Dear Gorham: -- -- -- -- Here I am after a three-days search for a room in

an unexceptional maison in a row of other rooming houses. There are

charming places in Washington, but it takes time and information to get

at them, and as I haven’t either, and had to give the Cleveland office

“an address” very quickly, I shall remain here for three weeks yet,

anyway. Your last came just before I left home. You ought to thank your

stars for such a summer as you have had. I haven’t any idea yet how much

I shall like Washington. There is a certain easiness about it, and

geographically it is, I should judge, the nearest like Paris of any

American city. An endless number of parks and monuments, and all the

streets are lined with trees. At least it is more elegant than any other

American city and with a very different psychology than N.Y., Cleveland

or Akron. This last name reminds me that I sent “Porphyro” to _The Dial_

with some additions and subtractions from the version you read, before

leaving home. I dread this tramping around trying to sell Crane’s candy,

but this week will see me started in it, and my affection for Washington

will largely depend upon how well I get on. At present I feel a terrible

vacuity about me and within me and a nostalgia for Cleveland. -- -- -- -- I

share your enthusiasm for Cowley’s poem in _The L.R._

48: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Washington_] _Sept. 24th, --’20_

Dear Gorham: -- -- -- -- I’ve been running around talking, talking, talking

and waiting for the proper persons to arrive at their offices, etc.,

etc., etc., all week, and have succeeded to the mild extent of

inaugurating two new accounts for the firm. Fortunately, people here

don’t seem to arrive at their offices until after ten, and so I have the

opportunity to sleep more than I did in Cleveland where the requirements

commanded my resurrection at five A.M. My Akron friend, Mr. Candee, gave

me an introduction to a poet friend of his who has charge of all the

official communications, etc., that come into the State Department. He

has proved a charming person, and has introduced me to several other

interesting people. He is one of the few who is cognizant of what is

going on abroad, knows some things weeks in advance of the newspapers

and, of course, a great many things that never come out. His opinion of

most of Europe, especially the greedy tactics of some of the freshly

hatched nationalities, is below cynicism. I have not yet heard from _The

Dial_ about “Porphyro,” or at any rate he has [not] been redirected to

me. I am beginning to feel that he is my lost soul, and will be a long

time in returning. This simply means that I haven’t had a creative

impulse for so long that I am even getting not to miss it. I am not in

the type of Washington life that offers material or incentive for

writing. The diplomatic circles have all kinds of scandals waving around

which I generally hear a whisper of from the fringes, but there is

really no cafe life here or factory or shop life worth mentioning.

Thousands of clerks pour out of government offices at night and eat and

go to the movies. The streets are beautiful with many parks, etc., but

it is all rather dead. I am really more interested in the soldiers and

sailors that one meets than anything else. They have a strange

psychology of their own that is new to me. This sounds bad, and perhaps

it is so,--but what should one do with the reported example of our new

VICE -- -- -- -- scenting the air as it does. From what I’m hearing, about

every other person in the government service and diplomatic service are

enlarged editions of Lord Douglas. Amusing Household! as Rimbaud would

say. I shall look for _The Rainbow_ in Brentano’s here, and hope that it

may be interesting. -- -- -- --

49: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Washington_] _Oct. 1 ’20_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ New York seems to be set for a fine musical and

dramatic season. I took in _Footloose_ here last week and enjoyed it in

spite of many obvious impossibilities of situation, etc. Emily Stevens

did well in it--I suppose it would have failed without her. _Stepping

Stones_ is here this week and I may go to see it. -- -- -- --

What think you of this Aldous Huxley’s “Leda” poems? They strike me as

dry and very clever,--but is real poetry so obviously clever? Modern

life and its vacuity seems to me to be responsible for such work. There

is only a lime or a lemon to squeeze or a pepper-pot left to shake. All

the same I admire his work very much. He comes in the line of Eliot and

Sitwell. Eliot’s influence threatens to predominate the new English.

50: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Washington, D.C._ _Oct. 20th,--’20_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ Your letter that arrived this morning had the true

rage of the celibate unwilling in it. I sympathize with you.... My

nights are uneasy also. But you ought to pity me more than yourself,--my

satisfactions are far more remote and dangerous than yours, and my

temptations frequent, alas!

I have just been reading your Pollard article, and on bringing it to the

attention of my friend Wilbur Underwood here, was delighted to find that

U. knew Pollard very well, the latter having been enthusiastic about the

two vols. of verse that Underwood brought out in England a long time

ago. What pathos there is in these sudden flashes on forgotten people,

forgotten achievements and encounters! Here is this man, Underwood, with

the beauty and promise of his life all dried and withered by the daily

grind he has had to go through year after year in the State Dept. with a

meagre salary. A better critic and more interesting person one seldom

meets, yet the routine of uninteresting work has probably killed forever

his creative predispositions. A very few friends is all that life holds

for him. Yes, Pound is right in what he says in his “The Rest,”--“O

helpless few in my country, O remnant enslaved!... You who cannot wear

yourselves out by persisting to successes.”

U. has a very fine collection of rare translations, etc., from

antiquity, and I have just been enjoying to the full his copy of the

_Satyricon_ of Petronius (Arbiter), a rare and completely unexpurgated

Paris edition, purported to have been translated by Oscar Wilde,

although it seems to me too fine a job for what I imagine Wilde’s

scholarship to have been. Also, I am enjoying _The Golden Asse_ of

Apuleius, and some Saltus vols. that he has.

I went to see Hampden in _The Merchant of Venice_ recently here. The way

it was done, setting, costumes, speech, gestures,--everything was

sickening. Hampden, in one scene only,--the tantrum with Tubal,--was

good, everywhere else his acting was indifferent. I cannot understand

how a man of his intelligence,--for I remember his Hamlet as being quite

good,--will venture forth with such a cast of burlesque queens, (his

Portia!!!) and bitches. The worst examples of antiquated theatricality,

and mouthing of words! And the audience was ample and enthusiastic,--a

true barometer of the American stage at present. --/--/

I shall be glad to get back to Cleveland for a while, if only to see the

copies of Vildrac, Rimbaud, and Laforgue that have arrived from Paris

since my leaving. I expect to return to W. later, in Jan. when the

“season” here is on. I find agreement from my father that my lack of

results here has not been so much a matter of personal inadequacy as the

weather and general slowness of business here at this particular

time.... I shall certainly be in an ungodly rush, though, all the time I

am at the factory, as the holiday season orders will be coming in and

things become perfectly maddening there for two months. However,

anything will be better than the maddening experience I have been having

here of clawing the air day after day without getting any but the most

meagre results. --/--/

51: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland,_ _Nov. 9th--’20_

Dear Gorham: -- -- -- -- Yes, “Jurgen” has been breathing his _native_ Ohio

air for two weeks now, and is elbow and knee-deep in shipping and

packing at the factory. The Christmas rush has already begun and I’m

tired to death tonight after a rush since five this morning. But in

spite of all it has been better to get out of the ghostly time I was

having in Washington, back into the usual smoky and tawdry

thoroughfares. Does one really get so used to such things as, in time,

to miss them, if absent? I am sure I should not miss factory whistles in

Pisa or Morocco, but I frankly did miss them in Washington. Anyway, they

were more enlivening (and the people they claim) than anything or anyone

that I saw in W., which seemed to me the most elegantly restricted and

bigoted community I ever ventured into. They say it has changed a lot

since the war, and prohibition, of course, smothered its last way

out.--I almost hope I will not have the opportunity of returning there

in Jan., as expected. But you’ve heard most of this before.--

I have written Margaret Anderson to find out the _L.R._ situation.

Probably what you have heard is only too true. There is no use

expressing familiar resentments about such proceedings, and anyway one

grows rather calloused and numb in time. There is that danger with

me,--of relaxing into an indifference more comfortable than an interest

in the arts nowadays and here, allows. I suppose the Minns pictures, my

poems, etc., are smothered,--at least I’ve reconciled myself to it

peacefully. I’m sorrier about the Minns pictures than anything else, as

it meant a great deal of trouble to bring their reproduction about.

Perhaps they’ll print them again, I don’t know yet. My great wonder is

that M.C.A. and j.h. keep persisting as they do.

When you get a chance see the new monograph on Jacob Epstein including

fifty photos of his works. He seems to be much better than most of

Rodin, and I’m enthusiastic almost to the point of silliness. I’m

reading _The Possessed_ at your suggestion. Dostoievsky is a stranger to

me beyond _Crime and Punishment_ which caught me by the throat. He

_does_ give one more life than my mundane world supplies,--and

stimulates. He makes you forget yourself (should I better say, lose) in

the life of his characters for days at a time. And how few writers can

do that! You see this record of my temper at present,--I’m tired, with

every evidence of it. -- -- -- --

52: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _11/23/20_

My dear Gorham: Your letter has just come, and I’m sorry to know you are

having such an ordeal of “nerves.” Of course, being thrown back

violently again on celibacy after your Woodstock freedom would naturally

tend to bring about such a result, and it is only a pity that you cannot

find anything near you of sufficient temporary interest to relieve your

situation. Of course, I realize, that the puritanical taboos of a

typical boys’ school are what stands in the way most of all, and then

you might possibly resent and refuse sheer sensuality after having

experienced what I imagine has been offered you. I don’t believe in the

“sublimation” theory at all so far as it applies to my own experience.

Beauty has most often appeared to me in moments of penitence and even

sometimes, distraction and worry. Lately my continence has brought me

nothing in the creative way,--it has tended to create a confidence in me

along lines of action,--business, execution, etc. There is not love

enough in me at present to do a thing. This sounds romantic and

silly,--you understand that I mean and refer to the strongest incentive

to the imagination, or, at least, the strongest in my particular case.

So I have nothing to offer you for reading and judgment. Mart Anderson

writes me that the next _L.R._ will be out the twenty-fifth,--96 pgs.,

and will contain my poem, etc., and a publication of the J. Joyce trial

and proceedings which she says are interesting. It ought to be a rich

number with John Quinn and Burleson throwing epithets at each other. I

stopped in the middle of _The Possessed_ to read _Poor White_, but am

again on the Russian trail. What marvelous psychology!!! A careful

reading of “Dosty” ought to prepare one’s mind to handle any human

situation comfortably that ever might arise.... You will like the

Anderson book. It fascinated me as much as _Winesburg_ and this in spite

of a great fear I had of disappointment. There is a woman in it

something like jh although too removed to do anything but suggest her. I

wish, after you have read it, that we could have a fireside hour over

the book. We might agree perhaps on the exquisite work of such scenes as

the description of the murderer-saddlemaker sitting by the pond and

rocking gently to and fro (the simplicity of A’s great power of

suggestion is most mocking to the analyst)--and the scene where the sex

awakening girl hears the men in the barn in speaking of her, say,--“the

sap is mounting into the tree.” Nature is so strong in all the work of

Anderson--and he describes it as one so willingly and happily

surrendered to it, that it colors his work with the most surprising

grasp of what “innocence” and “holiness” ought to mean. Also, his

uncanny intuition into the feelings of women (a number of women have

remarked to me about this) is very unusual. I have an absurd prejudice

against Frank’s _Dark Mother_ merely on account of what I read of it in

a copy of _The Dial_. There it seemed to me too exclamatory, Semitic,

and too much in the style of David Pinski, whose stuff I somehow am

terribly bored with. So I probably shall never read it, as I probably

shall never read more than the three pages of W. D. Howells that I once

attempted. Frankly, you see, I admit to a taste for certain affectations

and ornamental commissions. I wish I could follow your finger guide to

the advice of Brooks in _The Freeman_ about “outside interests” for the

fallow seasons between poems. I had read the article and agree with it

in many ways. But with me, there are no poems for “doldrums” to lag

between, and no time, literally, for poems, to say nothing of energy.

The fact is last week I ran gait at the factory at the rate of fourteen

hours straight per day of rushed and heavy and confusing labor, and as

it will probably continue that way until very near Christmas, I have all

I can do to think of getting enough sleep to begin the rush again next

day. Of course I am becoming very morose and irritable under this

pressure of exertion, not to mention disgust and boredom, and yesterday,

my first day of a chance to sit down and think a minute, I found myself

in a rather serious state of indigestion and neurotic fever. So it goes.

Our age tries hard enough to kill us, but I begin to feel a pleasure in

sheer stubbornness, and will possibly turn in time into some sort of a

beautiful crank. Pax vobiscum!!!!

53: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Sunday, Dec. 5th,--’20_

Dear Gorham: Your article in _The Plowshare_ was so late as to have

arrived only a few days ago,--the “Pascal” came yesterday. In almost

every way, I think, the latter work is superior, and to me, more

suggestive, but this is probably because we agreed pretty well over most

of the contents of “Cafe St. Beuve” last summer in my parlours at the

Prince George and so it was familiar material to me. I have never read

Pascal and so can’t speak beyond telling you that I like your handling

of the theme and it seemed to me that your style was richer than I have

noticed before. I am filled with a kind of bleakness of mind and spirit

lately, so that even this answer to your appreciated interest in my

bland career is somehow an unsatisfactory effort. I should like to be

able to see and talk to you,--the mere technical mechanics of writing

have become so foreign to me from long neglect, that I feel awkward at

best. Again I am very much at sea about everything that personally

concerns me. --/--/ I am not sure about remaining in Cleveland much

after the first of the year, as there is a possibility of my being sent

out on the road again as salesman. On the other hand, it seems to me

that it will be about as much as I can endure to remain at my present

work in the shipping dept. until Christmas is over without a clean and

final break with my father and his company, owing to various

humiliations he seems interested in either forcing or countenancing

others about the place to force, on me. As soon as my mother is off the

scene I shall feel freer to do more as I please. I have practically no

money and as employment is hard to find now, she is very much worried

for fear I shall do something rash and suffer for it. About the only

course I see is to save for all I am worth for two years or so, and then

embark once and for all for foreign lands, Italy or Russia or Paris, and

not come back until I want to. Literature and art be hanged!--even

ordinary existence isn’t worth the candle in these States now. I enclose

Matty Josephson’s last letter to me with his plans. They make my mouth

water.

I wish I had three poems to send to _The Nation_, but I shall have to

desist from a lack of “numbers.” _The Possessed_ was one of the most

tremendous books I’ve ever read, I think, and I am planning on reading

_The Brothers Karamazov_ as soon as time permits. At present I dip into

Seutonius’ _History of the Caesars_, which is easy to recognize as one

of Saltus’ principal authorities and sources for his _Imperial Purple_.

-- -- -- --

54: TO SHERWOOD ANDERSON

[_Cleveland_] _12/8/20_

Dear Anderson: Your mention of a possible trip East soon makes me hope

very much that you will care to stop off at Cleveland here (a few hours

at least) and see me. I shall not be living at home at the time as my

mother expects to leave for her place in Cuba very soon, closing the

house, but if you come alone I can accommodate you at my room wherever

it may be. I want very much to talk with you and hope you can “make it”

this time. Better look me up at the factory at 208 St. Clair Ave. if you

arrive between 8 A.M. and 5 P.M. You don’t know how much I appreciate

the encouragement your letters give me. Although I am not at present

doing anything creatively, I have not sunk too much into despair or

indifference to hope.

Do come,--won’t you!

55: TO ----

[_Cleveland_] [_Dec. 22, 1920_]

Dear ----: NEWS! News! NEWS!--The “golden halo” has widened,--descended

upon me (or “us”) and I’ve been blind with happiness and beauty for the

last full week! Joking aside, I am too happy not to fear a great deal,

but I believe in, or have found God again. It seems vulgar to rush out

with my feelings to anyone so, but you know by this time whether I am

vulgar or not (I don’t) and it may please you, as it often might have

helped me so, to know that something beautiful can be found or can

“occur” once in awhile, and so unexpectedly. Not the brief and limited

sensual thing alone, but something infinitely more thrilling and

inclusive. I foolishly keep wondering,--“How can this be?--How did it

occur?” How my life might be changed could this continue, but I scarcely

dare to hope. I feel like weeping most of the time, and I have become

reconciled, strangely reconciled, to many aggravations. Of course it is

the return of devotion which astounds me so, and the real certainty

that, at least for the time, it is perfectly honest. It makes me feel

very unworthy,--and yet what pleasure the emotion under such

circumstances provides. I have so much now to reverence, discovering

more and more beauty every day,--beauty of character, manner, and body,

that I am for the time, completely changed.--But why aren’t you here to

talk with me about it! How I wish you were here.

I have written you this way (typewriter) because, as you have

discovered, my writing is hard deciphering. I have given up trying to

improve it, and don’t try any more. You have probably got the candy and

hymn by this time,--neither amount to much, but I wanted to send them. I

don’t understand -- -- -- --’s silence,--but certainly hope that I have not

been relinquished as one of Akron’s temporary “makeshifts” or “reliefs.”

It would really hurt. I have told you all that has happened. This rest

would merely be to mention details of ungodly strain and hours of

“Christmas rush” at the factory,--seventeen hours a stretch sometimes.

When I have had time I have spent it with Dostoievsky’s _Les Freres

Karamazov_ which I like even better than _The Possessed_. The beautiful

young Alyosha, and Father Zossima! Dostoievsky seems to me to represent

the nearest type to the “return of Christ” that there is record of,--I

think the greatest of novelists. But I am forgetting Frank Harris, who,

you know, comes second to the “woman taken in adultery.” --/--/

1921

56: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _1/14/21_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ I’m slightly disabled today with a touch of la

grippe and am remaining away from the factory. A talk with my father

last week settled things more definitely for me than many months have

afforded. I shall remain in my present capacity at the factory

indefinitely until I find a job at some more “literary” work, when my

father and I will more-or-less conclusively part hands so far as a

business connection is concerned. At last he seems, after questioning

various mutual friends as to my interests, etc., to have been forced

into this much recognition of my persistence in artistic

directions,--and it was gratifying to observe as gracious a surrender as

he offered me. You see I have not said anything to him about my

personal interests for almost two years, leaving him only what details

of indifference to business as naturally revealed themselves throughout

my association with him, to judge from. I long ago “gave up” talking

over such sores with him,--and it has amused me vastly to find that at

last the attitude aroused him to seek such indirect solutions to the

“enigma.” Now I can hope to get a little reading and writing done before

spring here in some sort of tranquillity. Before the summer is over I

may have found me a journalistic job,--but the main point under either

drudgery is that I accomplish some real writing. But this is the usual

ante-room soliloquy, and I won’t bore you further with more of it.

I am just as glad for you that you didn’t start your magazine,--and with

the same considerations in mind that you gave as your reasons against

it. Italy will do you infinitely more good,--why waste your good money

on what is, after all, an indifferent public. It is bad enough to waste

brains and time--but not money!!! I haven’t seen _Contact_ yet, but will

try to get ’round to send for a copy soon. Williams has a very fine poem

in the last _Poetry_ and also there is a beauty by Padraic Colum. By the

way, I hope you saw Colum’s write-up of Ezra Pound’s _Instigations_ in a

not very recent _New Republic_. It was the best appreciation of Pound on

his own grounds that I’ve ever read.

Your last letter, although very brief and fragmentary, did bring a whiff

from you of revived sensibilities. N.Y. does that to one always after

any period of provincial stiffness. What are you writing now? Of course

I shall send you whatever I do,--but the waiting is longer, by far, for

me than for you. I’m caught dead tight in a new affair de coeur that at

least keeps me stirred up in some ways. I don’t know how much blood I

pay for these predicaments,--but I seem to live more during them than

otherwise. They give the ego a rest. I may sound like an utter

profligate,--but there is much sincerity, too painfully much, for me to

laugh.

57: TO MATTHEW JOSEPHSON

_Cleveland, O._ _1/14/21_

Dear Matty: --/--/ What you say about the Akron suite is very true. I

have only one point of disagreement with you,--crudeness of form. This

was deliberate, and you have got to convince me that such a treatment of

such a mood and subject is inconsistent before we can pick asphodels

together again on the slopes of Parnassus. By the way,--do you care for

my “Garden Abstract” in its final form in _The L.R._? I think that the

version I sent you was an earlier and poorer experiment. I must bestir

myself soon and write something new. My main difficulty is at present a

kind of critical structure that won’t permit me the expression of the

old asininities, _and_ (as you say) the poverty of society in these

“provinces.” Your suggestion about the trade paper work is alluring.

However, I am bound not to break away from my father’s concern until

spring, when there may be a little striving and stirring up of the

dust,--I hope.

Are you still planning on Italy? Why not the island of Capri? I hear

there is interesting company about there,--D. H. Lawrence and Mackenzie

musing and moping around the baths and arcades of Tiberius.... I don’t

long so much for change of surroundings as time, TIME which I never seem

to get to read or write or amuse myself. I hear [that] “New York” has

gone mad about “Dada” and that a most exotic and worthless review is

being concocted by Man Ray and Duchamp, billets in a bag printed

backwards, on rubber deluxe, etc. What next! This is worse than The

Baroness [Freytag-Loringhoven]. By the way I like the way the discovery

has suddenly been made that she has all along been, unconsciously, a

Dadaist. I cannot figure out just what Dadaism is beyond an insane

jumble of the four winds, the six senses, and plum pudding. But if the

Baroness is to be a keystone for it,--then I think I can possibly know

when it is coming and avoid it.

58: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _1/28/21_

Dear Gorham: Your N.Y. bulletin interested me immensely. Last Sunday I

went down to Akron to see Minns after a four months’ separation. I read

him the opinions of Man Ray, whereat he flew into a holy rage. “There is

no sense in the theory of interesting ‘accidents,’” and I am with Minns

in that. There is little to [be] gained in any art so far as I can see,

except with much _conscious_ effort. If he doesn’t watch his lenses, M.

Ray will allow the Dada theories and other flamdoodle of his section run

him off his track. He seems to have done much good work so far, but it

has been in spite of his ideas. If he is just recently infected, it’s

too bad, because there is less chance of him containing his qualities

under such theories--But so much for photography.

--/--/ When I get “Dosty” more cleared out of the way, I intend to get

more poetry reading again, but just now he is all-absorbing, and somehow

his offering is such a distinct type of itself that one doesn’t want to

mix any other kind of reading with it. Here is my sum poetic output for

the last three months--two lines--

“The everlasting eyes of Pierrot

And of Gargantua,--the laughter.”

Maybe it is my epitaph, it is contradictory and wide enough to be. But I

hope soon to turn it into a poem and thereby, like Lazarus, return.

59: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _2/11/21_

Dear Gorham: Yes, my writing is quite Dada,--very Dada (I like the term

as applied) and yet you must put up with it again as my machine has

suffered another relapse.

I was very much amused and interested by the _Contact_ that arrived

about a week ago. Thank you, as always, dear old bean, for being so

thoughtful. You are always sending me something to make my eyes blink

delightedly and arouse me from the general stupor of these parts. How

fine the Wallace Stevens were! And some of Williams’ talk was good--but

how horrid that the room had to be splashed with the wet-dream

explosions of Virgil Jordan and McAlmon. Their talk is all right--but

what is true of it has been said adequately before,--and all they can

seem to add is a putrid remnant or two. Perhaps I am on the downward

grade, but when I come to such stuff as theirs I can only say “Excuse

me.” I will be glad to receive stimulation from the sky or a foetid

chamber or maybe a piss-pot but as far as I can make out they have wound

their _phalli_ around their throats in a frantic and vain effort to

squeeze out an idea. In fact they seem very “Dada” in more sense than

one. But enough!!!

Don’t disown me,--but I have done literally no writing to give you. The

fact is that I am entirely engrossed in personal erotic experience

lately that nothing seems possible in that way. O if you had ever seen

the very Soul of Pierrot (in soul and incarnate) you would at least

admire. Never, though, has such beauty and happy-pain been given me

before--which is to say that my love is at least somewhat requited. You

and one other are the only ones to know now or later of this, so do not

think me vulgar or silly to tell you. Well, you have felt the fire

somewhat yourself so you may appreciate my mood. Never have I suffered

so, or reached such moods of ecstasy....

What do you think of _Poor White_? It certainly has made Anderson one of

the most talked-of artists there are. I wrote you my opinion some time

past. I’m still on “Dosty”--a very fine biography and estimate and

analysis by J. Middleton Murry.

You will please forgive this letter. I have been perhaps a little too

personal,--perhaps vulgar. But if anything’s to blame it’s the

Subconscious rioting out through gates that only alcohol has the power

to open. --/--/

60: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _2/24_

Dear Gorham: Your article on education, etc., in the last _Freeman_

delights me. Remarkably courageous and true. I hope it may do at least a

little good concretely,--but at least it will serve as an accentuation

mark in the minds of a good many like myself who have felt with you

along that line for some time.

Two new pictures just arrived from Minns that I wish you could see.

One,--an old man’s head that is as good as a Rembrandt, and at the

opposite pole, a young girl’s head that brings Pound’s sonnet lines

persistently into my head,--“No, go from me. I have left her lately. I

will not spoil my shield with lesser brightness.--” You know how it

goes. I intend to send the old man’s head to _The Dial_ for publication,

but scarcely hope they will accept it after the mediocrities they have

lately staged there. Really,--I flatter myself, you see,--I have more

doubts about their accepting a poem I recently wrote and sent them,

which I enclose.[13] You see, my present job allows me more time while

“at work,” and I may even do more,--for better or worse, according as

you feel about it.

This is all now until I hear from you and have more to build on. You

know there is precious little for me to build on here, and so you must

not too much mind if my letters have a predominance of what must seem

banality to you. If so, forgive me,--and when you get tired of vainly

tugging at your end of the line, let me know, and I’ll take it

philosophically.

61: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _April 10th_

Dear Gorham: -- -- -- -- For me here--the same old jog-trot except that I

have lately run across an artist here whose work seems to carry the most

astonishing marks of genius that have passed before my eyes in original

form, that is,--I mean present-day work. And I am saying much I think

when I say that I prefer Sommer’s work to most of Brzeska and Boardman

Robinson. A man of 55 or so--works in a lithograph factory--spent most

of his life until the last seven years in the rut of conventional

forms--liberated suddenly by sparks from Gauguin, Van Gogh, Picasso and

Wyndham Lewis, etc. I have taken it upon myself to send out some of his

work for publication, an idea that seems oddly, never to have occurred

to him. --/-- I enclose an incipient effort of mine of recent date.[14]

62: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _April 20th_

Dear Gorham: Your letter did me good, and has left a good hangover for

me for the last few ungenerous days. I left my father’s employ yesterday

_for good_--nothing, I think, will ever bring me back. The last insult

was too much. I’ve been treated like a dog now for two years,--and only

am sorry that it took me so long to find out the simple impossibility of

ever doing anything with him or for him.

It will take me many months, I fear, to erase from my memory the image

of his overbearing head leaning over me like a gargoyle. I think he had

got to think I couldn’t live without his aid. At least he was, I am

told, furious at my departure. Whatever comes now is much better than

the past. I shall learn to be somewhere near free again,--at least free

from the hatred that has corroded me into illness.

Of course I won’t be able to get to N.Y. now for any summer vacation.

You know what a privation that means to me. I have nothing in sight in

the way of employment,--and as times are so bad,--I don’t know when I

shall. A job as copy-writer for an advertising house will probably be

open to me about June 1st. And there is a newspaper opening out here

soon,--perhaps that may yield me something. I have a roof over my head

and food, anyway--here at home--and maybe I shall write something. The

best thing is that [the] cloud of my father is beginning to move from

the horizon now, you have never known me when it has not been there--and

in time we _both_ may discover some new things in me. _Bridges burn’t

behind!_

Glad you like “Estador.” I’m beginning to myself. I cannot quite accept

your word changes although I’m far from satisfied with it. But the more

I work over it the less I seem likely to be,--so I’m going to try it on

_The Dial_.--Anything for some money now.

63: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _May 3rd 21_

My dear Gorham: --/--/ I feel sure S[ommer]’s work is as important as

any contemporary work anywhere, and I’m very interested to hear what

you will think. I wish I were better trained for analysis of this kind

of work,--but as it is I can only “feel” the power of it. I may send you

a few of his drawings at any time,--and later if you have time around

N.Y. after school is out, you might care to show some of them to people

who could give him a chance perhaps, of exhibition somewhere. --/--/

I agree with you about your distinction between the earlier and later

Anderson. I have never got hold of _Windy McPherson’s Son_, but I never

could clap very loudly for _Marching Men_, although I imagine that it is

an improvement on the former. He, I understand, is anxious for these two

books’ extinction. They will probably never be issued by the publisher

again. I’m anxious to read his “Out of Nowhere into Nothing” that _The

Dial_ announces for three summer issues. By the way, a new book of

essays by my acquaintance, Charles S. Brooks, has a chapter in it, “A

Modern Poet,” which is a burlesque on me, the Baroness, and my rooms

over _The Little Review_ on 16th Street. His effort is all the funnier

for the especial lack of comprehension he has for _The L.R._ and “modern

poetry.” I promise you a laugh or two anyway. The Yale Press has just

got it out,--its title is _Hints to Pilgrims_. Brooks lives a few houses

down the street from me here, but at that time he was a New Yorker, and

used to be very hospitable to me with theatres and dinner at his

apartment on 10th St. --/--/

64: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _May 16th, ’21_

Dear Gorham: I am delighted that you have found so much to hold your

interest in Sommer’s work. Some later things that he had recently shown

me only confirm my convictions the more. I’ll send you more of his work

as soon as I can assemble what I want to. Sent two watercolours to _The

Dial_ again last week, which I don’t see how they can let pass by--but

all things are possible to them. --/--/ There is a French-Swiss artist

here just eight months from Paris,--doing very interesting work with a

peculiar sharp diabolism in it. Willy E. Lescaze. His work at a local

exhibition here recently caused a terrible furor, being in company with

Burchfield’s, the only work worth looking at. It amuses me to see

Lescaze praise Sommer’s work--there [are] all the differences between

them that distinguish Baudelaire from Rabelais. I recently sent some of

L’s work to _The Little Review_ along with S’s--but what ever keeps

Margaret Anderson so impolitely silent I cannot figure out. Do what I

will, I can’t seem to get a word out of her. I begin to despair. At

least I hope she will return the drawings someday. If you want more to

take about with you, you might call on her when you next are in town and

find out if she wants them. If not you will find some interesting

additions to add to your bundle. I cannot but feel that there is an

audience in N.Y. ready for such work. Sommer has tried Cleveland people

and found them so indifferent that he didn’t even send one canvas or

sheet to this last exhibition here. In one way, a mistake, I think.

Before I forget your request,--_William Sommer_ is as completely as he

signs himself.

Went yesterday to see the first movie for a long time. Did you see

it--_Deception_--the foreign picture of the affairs of Henry VIII and

Anne Boleyn? It really was stimulating. I could wish for more of such

fare, even though it should (horrid thought!) impoverish our native

celluloid manufactories. There were mob scenes in it, perfect in every

detail, that only the screen can produce. And the old sensualist king

was well acted.

I am still without work. There is absolutely nothing doing here. Things

are at such a standstill that I hate to think of it. I am practically on

my mother’s hands here at home,--and you can believe me that such a

situation is far from a pleasant one for me who have been used to paying

my own way now for some time. If only that promise I have for a job with

a local advertising house fulfills itself next month I shall be all

right. But most friends and friendly offers have proved themselves such

slippery fish! Two years thrown away at the feet of my father without

the gain of a jot of experience at anything but peon duties in a

shipping room! I can never forgive him, nor my own foolishness. Just now

I am too uneasy to concentrate on any writing. Have got to prepare

myself for some kind of practical activity--and so I do not even read

much but advertising books and business folders! Roger Fry’s _Vision and

Design_, a large tome beautifully illustrated, is good to unloosen one’s

tongue about such work as Sommer’s. He brought it around one evening,

and I have enjoyed it. Haven’t read _Main Street_ or _Moon Calf_ yet,

nor _Miss Lulu Bett_. I am beginning to feel rather distinguished about

it all.

65: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland_ _May 21st_

Dear Gorham: I’m glad to say that my tension is less acute at present

than when I last wrote you. An improvement of the weather with

opportunities for tennis and getting out and around more helps me work

off surplus energies generated by my “change of life.” And you are, of

course, very much right in urging me not to be ridiculously bourgeois in

accepting bourgeois standards.

I’m very glad you liked “A Persuasion.” Perhaps it seems a bit tame to

me on account of having used several phrases coined some years ago in

it. I was much pleased this week to get word from _Double Dealer_

accepting “Black Tambourine” for publication and urging me to send them

some prose. They claim they are much in need of some. Haven’t you some

to offer them? I might write something on Joyce or Anderson--but I don’t

know. I always feel singularly lacking in ideas about these people

excepting to blindly enthuse or refute some ridiculous criticism of

them. Their (“_D.D’s_”) check has not arrived yet but they promise it

soon--before the June number when they expect to use the poem. It

surprises me to find such a Baudelairesque thing acceptable _anywhere_

in U.S. I sent it out as a kind of hopeless protest--not expecting to

see it printed at all. I’m beginning to lose interest in it now--it

cannot be as good as I had thought it. --/--/

66: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland_, _Friday_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ Excuse my apparent evasion of your request for an

explanation about “Black Tambourine.” The Word “midkingdom” is perhaps

the key word to what ideas there are in it. The poem is a description

and bundle of insinuations, suggestions bearing on the Negro’s place

somewhere between man and beast. That is why Aesop is brought in,

etc.,--the popular conception of Negro romance, the tambourine on the

wall. The value of the poem is only, to me, in what a painter would call

its “tactile” quality,--an entirely aesthetic feature. A propagandist

for either side of the Negro question could find anything he wanted to

in it. My only declaration in it is that I find the Negro (in the

popular mind) sentimentally or brutally “placed” in this midkingdom,

etc. Tell me if I have made it plain or not to you.

67: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland_, _June 12th ’21_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ Sommer said you had something in a very recent

_Freeman_ which I’ve been trying to get, but guess I’m too late.

Sometimes I get so exasperated with the “intellectual” attitudes of

these papers like _The Freeman_, _New Rep._, _Nation_, etc., where

everything is all jumbled together,--politics, literature, painting,

birth control, etc., etc., etc., that I ignore them for a time and

probably miss some good things. It’s the way they are served that I

object to. I’m beginning to be somewhat pained by this “Intelligentsia”

mood when it comes upon me. This probably indicates that I am not a very

responsible individual--and truth is--I’m not. How tired I am of the

perpetual ferment of _The New Rep_. Those fellows are playing a canster

game nonsense. Does anything they ever say have any concrete effect? Old

Washington goes on just the same on the old rotten paths. These

gentlemen are merely clever at earning their livelihood in clean cuffs.

But hear me rant on!!! I don’t care two-pence for the whole earth &

heavens and least of all for politics. It’s only when the political

gentlemen (Irish potatobeds) obstruct my view of my petunias and

hollyhocks that I’m thus aroused,--and even that is a small complaint in

the long list of larger ones I have. --/--/

No job in sight even now! I’m about convinced of the hopelessness of the

advertising plan. Business gets worse and worse and they don’t have

enough to do to keep a new man busy.

Oh well!--I manage to get drunk once a week on delicious wine served out

by a friend of mine here and I have an evening a week with Sommer when

we do all kinds of stunts from Chopin Ballades and Heine lyrics to

sparring with an old set of gloves I have. Wish I could think of

something entertaining to write--but, at present I’m mostly trying to

regain a mental and spiritual status that has been lost to me for over a

year. What I want to do is gather up the threads again and go on, to put

it stale-ly.

I have reached such blind alleys and found no way out of them that there

is nothing at present for me to do but laugh a little and

_endure_--which I hope to do. --/--/

Did I tell you I’d been drawing and painting some? I find it a

tremendous stimulation--and you begin to see so many more things than

before wherever you look. My drawings are original, at least, and Sommer

professes to see much in ’em. --/--/

68: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland_ _June 16th ’21_

Hail! Citizen of the world! --/--/No work here except what I’ve lately

been making myself. This has all been occasioned by a very cordial

letter from the editor of _The Double-Dealer_, Basil Thompson, who urged

me to write something for them on Anderson. This has been done (to the

extent of 2000 words which, if taken, means $20.00) and dispatched. In

my present mood it seems to have been a good job. Also, I got up courage

and erudition enough to “do” a Vildrac translation for them which in the

original at least is fine.

I was very disappointed to find quite a bad typographical error in

“Black Tambourine.” “Mingle” instead of “mingl_ing_”--last line 2nd

verse. How foolish it makes me feel that way! It quite destroys the

sense of the thing.

They pay .30 per line of verse & 1 cent per prose word and want prose

badly. As I need money worse, I may do something in the short story way

for them if they fancy the Anderson thing. This last little effort has

rewarded me much already merely in getting my mind to working a little

again. I don’t dare hope for an ultimate success as a “free lance” but

am beginning to think that this writing game offers a chance to augment

one’s savings a little now and then at least.

69: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Saturday midnight_

Dear Gorham: Well. It has been a day I shall not soon forget. I have

just a little time since returned from my first visit to the Sommer farm

and studio--about half way between here and Akron in a beautiful

untrodden valley. He has an old old-fashioned schoolhouse for his

studio--the walls are white and hung with such an array of things as you

never have seen. Forgive my enthusiasm--I have been so dazzled for the

last 8 hours that I may seem somewhat incoherent in my expression. I

have brought home with me a considerable number of water-colours and

drawings which I am going to send on to you within a few days. These are

representative of his _best_ in this medium and I think you will be

enthusiastic about them. I could picture a dozen N.Y. picture dealers in

that studio today--radical or pedantical--all tearing [each] other’s

hair for the first chance of exhibiting such stuff. I feel convinced now

that all that needs be done is to get some samples of this work before

them,--and if they have any sense at all--either artistic or

commercial--they will seize upon it. --/--/

“Dynamism” is the splendid & fitting word for Sommer--the word I had

been looking for and got only as far as the adjectival use. --/--/

70: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland,_ _July 8th_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ The weather has been terrifically hot here, making

action and thought alike impossible,--but I am slowly trying to labor

out in the suitable style for _Shadowland_ an article on Ezra [Pound]

which may bring me in a little money. This magazine is popular and in

some ways becoming more interesting than _Vanity Fair_. I would like a

foothold in it if it is possible. It seems evident enough that I have

accomplished something in the estimation of the editors of _The D.D._ as

they have incorporated me in their list of contributors on their

stationery. I got word the other day that they will bring out my

Anderson article in this July issue. I haven’t got my check yet but it

ought to be twenty dollars or so.

I have a query for you. What would you think of a play on or around the

figure of John Brown? There is plenty of material, but the only trouble

I see is the issue of slavery, North and South, etc., which might kill

it. I am reading a fine biography of the man by Villard. As I am

principally interested in this idea for mere commercial reasons the

possibility of popularity is the largest factor. I tend to think the

subject, in this light, too forbidding.

-- -- -- -- I always seem to choose the wrong moment for my letters, when

the ice-man is hammering at the door or the family is waiting to be

driven to town, so my letters are more like bulletins and telegrams than

anything else. Things pan out the same way when I start on an essay,

article or poem,--but I hope for better days. --/--/

71: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland_, _July 14th, ’21_

Dear Gorham: This is the kind of note I got yesterday from JH of _The

Little Review_, returning some mss.,--“Found this as I was going through

Mart’s files. She’s crazy. The drawings are fine but we haven’t any hope

of printing them for ages, so I sent them back.--jh.” So it looks as

though _The L.R._ was done for, and perhaps poor Mart. Doesn’t the way

jh puts it makes you feel rather uneasy. I wish I knew more

details,--whether it is a mere -- -- -- -- rumpus that is all the matter,

or whether Mart Anderson has worn herself out in vain assaults against

the decision against her in the Joyce trial. I wish I could get in touch

with her direct, but as she hasn’t answered any letter for the last six

weeks she probably cannot write. I happen to know from Mart’s friends

too much inside information on the two women’s mutual relationships to

feel certain of any direct truth about Mart from jh. If you hear

anything about them or their plans please let me know. You know my

admiration and (yes) affection for Margaret Anderson is very strong, and

I detest nothing more than such a brutal squib as this thing that jh

just sent. --/--/

The cover for the July _Double Dealer_ gives me the shivers, but my

Anderson article is all there. Write me what you think of it now that

you have read him more or less completely. I enclose a letter of

introduction [to Anderson]. My Pound article is a far more difficult

thing and progresses slowly, but I am bent now on making as much money

writing as I can, and I’m going to get it published one place or

another. Your encouragement anent the John Brown adventure is very

gratifying. This is a long winded matter, but I think I shall go ahead

with it, hoping by the time you get back from Europe to have something

to show you. By the way, when you are in Paris there is one place you

must go. Joyce’s _Ulysses_ is to be brought out complete in Paris this

fall. I enclose a subscription blank with address, etc. I have already

subscribed for it. --/--/

72: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland_ _July 22nd, ’21_

Dear Gorham: The “march of events” has brought upon me Cleveland’s 125th

anniversary with all its fussy & futile inanities and advertisements to

make hideous the streets. Blocked, and obliged to wait while the initial

“pee-rade” went by today, I spent two hours of painful rumination ending

with such disgust at America and everything in it, that I more than ever

envy you your egress to foreign parts. No place but America could relish

& applaud anything so stupid & drab as that parade--led by the most

notable and richest grafter of the place decked out in Colonial rags as

the founder of the city Moses C. Ah--the Baroness, lunatic that she is,

is right. Our people have no _atom_ of a conception of beauty--and don’t

want it. One thing almost brought tears to my eyes (and I hope you do

not think me too silly in mentioning it)--the handful of Chinese who

came along in some native and antique vestments & liveries to prostitute

themselves in the medley of trash around them. To see them passing the

(inevitable) Soldier’s Monument ablaze with their aristocratic barbarity

of silk, gold and embroideries _was_ an anachronism that could occur

_only_ in America. And the last of their “section” brought a float with

a large “melting pot”--its significance was blazoned in letters _on_

it!! All I can say is--it’s a gay old world! If ever I felt alone it has

been today. But I must encounter fireworks, bawling “choruses” and more

“pee-rades” for 7 more days--as the community believes in celebrations

that are productive of business.

Your letter came this morning, and I agree largely with what you have to

say about the Anderson article. A friend of mine here, Lescaze the

painter, who is an excellent literary critic as well, told me that

reading it gave him the impression of a young man inflating and playing

with a series of variously-colored balloons in the boredom of his

chambre--which in an imagistic way singularly seems to agree with the

substance of your opinion on it. Well,--this is true & rather painfully

so--I must admit. My only justification is the singularly inadequate

surroundings I have here for any kind of concentration. My one hope is

to do better with more practice at such work and relieved somewhat of

the haste that the pressing necessities for money presently force upon

me. I struggle with the Pound article still,--but the subject itself is

so complex and (I fancy) the audience interested so small, that I may be

forced to give it up.

You are right about _The D.D.’s_ exceedingly uneven quality. To my mind

almost every issue has been largely filled with utter weakness and

banality. Will some one tell me how an (often) good poet like Haniel

Long can bring himself to allow to be printed such _stuff_ as he has

signed himself to in _The D.D._? As a matter of fact I am continually

being more and more horrified at what names we had always been

accustomed to hoping rather much of,--are rushing into print with, and

obviously out of the urgent need or desire of more money. _Shadowland_,

especially the August number with Babette Deutsch’s list of American

poets! Alas--what Fletcher wrote on the artist’s conscience in _The

Freeman_ (July 12th or so) makes me think a good deal. Living _is_ at

last becoming quite impossible, at least here,--when you get to Italy I

advise a permanent residence there for you. Later, perhaps I’ll come

over and join you. In time there may be only D. H. Lawrence, the

rainbow, and Capri left. I shall (with my millions acquired by that time

in flattering biographies of rich businessmen)--I shall rejuvenate the

baths and temple there of Tiberius and we shall live in state,--waited

on by the only fair and unsullied youths & maidens then procurable in

Europe. --/--/

73: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland, O._ _Aug. 9th ’21_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ My unemployment lingers. I learn a Scriabin

Prelude,--make a drawing,--stroke my black cat (a recent acquisition)

and read intermittently. Lately I had a good letter from Colum, who

likes my “Black Tambourine,” and yesterday a long letter from Matthew

Josephson, the first word for almost a year. He is up in Maine with Carl

Springhorn and Kenneth Burke in a kind of camp. (Also his wife.) They

both expect to sail for Italy six weeks from now, to stay two years or

more. I don’t know their proposed localities, but hope you will meet.

-- -- -- --

74: TO CHARMION WIEGAND

_Cleveland, Ohio_ _August 13, ’21_

Dear Charmion: --/--/ I am very glad to know that you have been keeping

up the writing,--whether prose, poetry, or drama doesn’t so much matter.

The point about it all is that it serves to keep you alert and alive

much more than any other activity I know of,--and especially anything as

warm as a “Byzantine drama of blood” sounds interesting. The historical

drama seems to me as legitimate as any other provided it has enough

organic life of its own and doesn’t depend merely on the fame, etc., of

the protagonists for effect. Have you read Stendhal’s _Chartreuse de

Parma_? So far as I know it has never been dramatized, and there is much

good material in it. I find Stendhal, incidentally, one of the few men

who wear deeper with familiarity. You probably have read his _Rouge et

Noir_. --/--/

75: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland, Ohio_ _Sept. 19th ’21_

My dear Gorham: --/--/ _The L. R._, I was informed on a card from j.h.

the other day, is recovering, will shortly re-appear as a quarterly

under Pound, Picabia, etc., 24 illustrations and 96 pgs! Mart Anderson

also recovering “sanity,” etc. -- -- -- -- I sold them [_The Dial_] the

poem you read just before leaving, “Pastorale”--which will come out

soon. I also sold one, “Persuasion,” to _The Measure_--and “Porphyro in

Akron” came out in the last _Double Dealer_ in first place.

The result of all this is that I am “sold out” and will have to rush

rhymes and rhythms together to supply my enthusiastic “public” as fast

as I can. But the family is all upset about my unemployment and money

_is_ needed. I am too uneasy to accomplish a thing, but hammer out a

translation of de Gourmont’s marginalia on Poe & Baudelaire for _The

D.D._ I have projects and a few lines started on poems,--but nothing

“comes through”--it is at times discouraging. I do not expect to hear

from Josephson again. He wrote me several letters full of brilliant

criticism and suggestions--but we do not exactly agree on theory and he

has become so complex--that the lack of sympathy my last letter offered

him will bring no response from [him] I’m quite sure--especially now

after an unusually long interstice. But this extremity of hair

splitting palls on one after awhile. A little is interesting--but goes a

long ways. He seems afraid to use any emotion in his poetry,--merely

observation and sensation,--and because I call such work apt to become

thin, he thinks me sloppy and stupid,--as no doubt I am. But after

all,--I recognize him as in many ways the most _acute_ critic of poetry

I know of--the only trouble is that he tries to force his theories into

the creative process,--and the result, to me, is too tame a thing.

--/--/

76: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland_ _Oct. 1, ’21_

Dear Gorham: My terrible hay fever days are over, and the fine autumn

weather that I like the best of the year has arrived to console me. My

mood is neither happy nor desperately sad. It will best be conveyed to

you by the quotation of a new poem, “Chaplinesque”--only started (if I

can help it) as yet: --/--/[15]

And I must tell you that my greatest dramatic treat since seeing Garden

in _The Love of Three Kings_ two winters ago, was recently enjoyed when

Charlie Chaplin’s _The Kid_ was shown here. Comedy, I may say, has never

reached a higher level in this country before. We have (I cannot be too

sure of this for my own satisfaction) in Chaplin a dramatic genius that

truly approaches the fabulous sort. I could write pages on the overtones

and brilliant subtleties of this picture, for which nobody but Chaplin

can be responsible, as he wrote it, directed it,--and I am quite sure

had much to do with the settings which are unusually fine. If you have

not already seen it in N. Y., it may now be in Paris. It was a year late

in arriving in Cleveland, I understand, on account of objections from

the state board of censors!!!! What they could have possibly objected

to, I cannot imagine. It must have been some superstition aroused

against good acting! But they will always release any sickening and

false melodrama of high life and sex, lost virginities, etc., at the

first glance. Well, I am thankful to get even what their paws have

mauled of the Chaplin and _Caligari_ sort. My poem is a sympathetic

attempt to put in words some of the Chaplin pantomime, so beautiful, and

so full of eloquence, and so modern.

--/--/ It will be time for me to raise my voice in praise of Anderson

soon, as his new book _The Triumph of the Egg_, and other stories, is on

the market. This also includes the serial “Out of Nowhere into Nothing,”

recently completed in _The Dial_. I would lay a bet on it that long

after Zona Gale, Lewis, etc., are forgotten, Sherwood will hold his own.

There are lots of things I want to read but haven’t the money to buy,

like Hecht’s first novel, a great success they say, _Erik Dorn_,

recently out. I wrote you how much I enjoyed Shaw’s _Back to

Methuselah_, a review of which I wrote for _The D.D._

I am taking a course in advertising two nights of every week until next

May which is very good and ought to help me get started. It has the

advantage, at any rate, of giving one a diploma which, I understand, has

a real value. I am now pretty sure of making advertising my real route

to bread and butter, and have a strong notion that as a copy writer I

will eventually make a “whiz.” --/--/

77: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland_, _Oct. 6th, ’21_

Dear Gorham: Here you are with the rest of the Chaplin poem. I know not

if you will like it,--but to me it has a real appeal. I have made that

“infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing” of Eliot’s into the

symbol of the kitten. I feel that, from my standpoint, the pantomime of

Charlie represents fairly well the futile gesture of the poet in U.S.A.

today, perhaps elsewhere too. And yet, the heart lives on....

Maybe this is because I myself feel so particularly futile just now that

I feel this pathos, (or is it bathos?). Je ne sais pas.

Yesterday I worked my first day foreman-ing three men on a distribution

job, and walked untold miles of city blocks. I am stiff,--but the

exercise did me much good. No work today,--perhaps tomorrow. At this

work the most I can hope to get before spring is $30.00 per week.

Yesterday brought me $2.50. Needless to say, I will look for something

better as soon as I can get hands on it.

A new light and friend of my friend, the Swiss-French painter, Willy

Lescaze, has arrived in town,--Jean Binet, teacher of Eurythmics in our

very alive Cleveland School of Music which Ernest Bloch heads. I am to

meet him tonight and with some anticipations, as I am told he is a

remarkable and inspired amateur pianist, playing Erik Satie, Ravel,

etc., to perfection. Lescaze has proved an inspiration to me. Knowing

intimately the work of Marcel Proust, Salmon, Gide, and a host of other

French moderns, he is able to see so much better than anyone else around

here, the aims I have in my own work. We have had great times discussing

the merits of mutual favorites like Joyce, Donne, Eliot, Pound, de

Gourmont, Gordon Craig, Nietzsche, etc., ad infinitum. After this it

goes without saying that I never found a more stimulating individual in

N. Y.

78: TO WILLIAM WRIGHT

_Cleveland, O._ _Oct. 17, 1921_

Dear William: I can come half way with you about Edna Millay,--but I

fear not much further. She really has genius in a limited sense, and is

much better than Sara Teasdale, Marguerite Wilkinson, Lady Speyer, etc.,

to mention a few drops in the bucket of feminine lushness that forms a

kind of milky way in the poetic firmament of the time (likewise all

times);--indeed I think she is every bit as good as Elizabeth Browning.

And here it will be probably evident that most of her most earnest

devotees could not ask for more. I can only say that I also do not

greatly care for Mme. Browning. And on top of my dislike for this lady,

Tennyson, Thompson, Chatterton, Byron, Moore, Milton, and several more,

I have the apparent brassiness to call myself a person of rather

catholic admirations. But you will also notice that I _do_ run joyfully

toward Messrs. Poe, Whitman, Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge,

John Donne!!!, John Webster!!!, Marlowe, Baudelaire, Laforgue, Dante,

Cavalcanti, Li Po, and a host of others. Oh I wish we had an evening to

talk over poetic creeds,--it is ridiculous to attempt it in a letter. I

can only apologize by saying that if my work seems needlessly

sophisticated it is because I am only interested in adding what seems to

me something really _new_ to what _has_ been written. Unless one has

some new, intensely personal viewpoint to record, say on the eternal

feelings of love, and the suitable personal idiom to employ in the act,

I say, why write about it? Nine chances out of ten, if you know where in

the past to look, you will find words already written in the

more-or-less exact tongue of your soul. And the complaint to be made

against nine out of ten poets is just this,--that you are apt to find

their sentiments much better expressed perhaps four hundred years past.

And it is not that Miss Millay fails entirely, but that I often am made

to hear too many echoes in her things, that I cannot like her as well as

you do. With her equipment Edna Millay is bound to succeed to the

appreciative applause of a fairly large audience. And for you, who I

rather suppose have not gone into this branch of literature with as much

enthusiasm as myself, she is a creditable heroine.

I admit to a slight leaning toward the esoteric, and am perhaps not to

be taken seriously. I am fond of things of great fragility, and also and

especially of the kind of poetry John Donne represents, a dark musky,

brooding, speculative vintage, at once sensual and spiritual, and

singing rather the beauty of experience than innocence.

As you did not “get” my idiom in “Chaplinesque,” I feel rather like

doing my best to explain myself. I am moved to put Chaplin with the

poets (of today); hence the “we.” In other words, he, especially in _The

Kid_, made me feel myself, as a poet, as being “in the same boat” with

him. Poetry, the human feelings, “the kitten,” is so crowded out of the

humdrum, rushing, mechanical scramble of today that the man who would

preserve them must duck and camouflage for dear life to keep them or

keep himself from annihilation. I have since learned that I am by no

means alone in seeing these things in the buffooneries of the tragedian,

Chaplin, (if you want to read the opinions of the London and Paris

presses, see _Literary Digest_, Oct. 8th) and in the poem I have tried

to express these “social sympathies” in words corresponding somewhat to

the antics of the actor. I may have failed, as only a small number of

those I have shown it to have responded with any clear answer,--but on

the other hand, I realize that the audience for my work will always be

quite small. I freely admit to a liking for the thing, myself,--in fact

I have to like something of my own once in a while being so hard to

please anyway.

The job I mentioned lasted just one day. I took the men out and carried

the thing through to success, sore feet, and numb limbses,--but,--there

was no work to be done next day, nor the next,--and I got tired of

trailing around hoping for only $2.50 for a fortune, and don’t care

whether there is little or much awaiting me there now, having hit the

employment trail again toward other fields. When I once get pastured

again, I’ll praise even Edna Millay--may even buy her _Second April_ (if

it is in Season) and not bore you so much with long diatribes on Poetry.

Just now, though, that is all I have. Can’t even buy the books I long to

read, like _Three Soldiers_, _Erik Dorn_, and the new _Little Review_

(Quarterly--AND $2.00). Write me soon and cheer me up. Just for fun,

look up the poems of Donne in the Library and read some of the short

lyrics like “The Apparition,” “A Jet Ring Sent,” “The Prohibition,” “The

Ecstasy,” and some of the longer things like “The Progress of the Soul,”

etc., if you feel intrigued.

79: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland_ _Nov. 1st, ’21_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ Yes,--I much wish I could share your

horizons,--instead of retracing day after day a few familiar circles of

routine & thought. Keep on writing me your bright kindly letters. They

are a lantern of hope and a warmth to the heart. I sometimes wonder if,

without you, I should have kept writing so long.

Just read _Erik Dorn_ and am shy a little of criticizing it. Undoubtedly

it is a fine piece of work,--and an odd addition to Am. literature.

Almost European in viewpoint. I cannot, though, yet make sure whether

Hecht has his tongue in his cheek part of the time or not. Hecht is a

virtuoso, and arouses suspicions that one would never feel for Dreiser

or Anderson. One sees an influence of Joyce in the book,--diluted or

“rationalized” just enough to be more pleasing to the public taste. Carl

Sandburg and Anderson are given parts in the scenery in an interesting

way. --/--/

80: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Nov. 3_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ You are very much right about the poems. I can’t

blame you for not seeing as much in “Chaplinesque” as myself because I

realize that the technique of the thing is virtuosic and open to all

kinds of misinterpretations. Maybe, though, since you have seen _The

Kid_ which “inspired” it, you have got nearer to my meaning. For me, it

holds double the interest of “Pastorale” which is more perfectly done,

but to me, not so rich. Chaplin may be a sentimentalist, after all, but

he carries the theme with such power and universal portent that

sentimentality is made to transcend itself into a new kind of tragedy,

eccentric, homely and yet brilliant. It is because I feel that I have

captured the arrested climaxes and evasive victories of his gestures in

words, somehow, that I like the poem as much as anything I have done.

But we will see. My mind changes sometimes sooner than I plan. I was

much surprised that Sherwood Anderson should like it, who is not prone

to care for complicated expressions. He was, further, more or less in

agreement with you about the sea poem.[16] --/--/

Further time and thought on _Erik Dorn_ lessen my opinion of it. It

hangs somewhere between the prose symphonies of Huysmans and the poetic

symphonies of Aiken. Impressionistic. However, there is little

character. As long as we have _Ulysses_ and _Tarr_ to praise we need not

spend too much breath on it, recognizing it, nevertheless, as a hopeful

sign, not much more. One misses any actual sincerity,--and somehow the

issue or accusation of meretriciousness creeps in. It brings back to me

something about Hecht that Saphier once told me:--“A brilliant fellow,”

he said. “He can sit down to a typewriter and reel off that stuff by the

yard. Has three or four of them (short stories) on hand at once.” This

was apropos of the really fine little things of his that were appearing

in _The L.R._ then. In fact I am moved into sympathy with Seldes’ review

of it in the Oct. _Dial_ which you will have read by this time. --/--/

Tonight I attend the weekly “salon” that Lescaze gives to his friends.

There will be banter and chatter enough to be tiresome. Somehow, when

there are women present (the kind one has around here) no conversation

can be had uninterrupted by little compliments, concessions to them,

etc. They insist upon being the center of attention irrespective of

their ability to take part in any argument. Consequently there are

interminable innuendoes and clucking and puffings that never terminate

anywhere. One of the few women who would carefully avoid this kind of

thing is Margaret Anderson. Hommage to Margaret!!

The Dada dramas are tres amusant,--but--well--alright56789--*!!

81: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland_, _Nov. 21st._

Your letter about the _Gargoyle_ plan has just come and as I haven’t

written you for some time, I’m giving some kind of answer, however

unworthy. These enclosed poems you are welcome to use if you care to.

-- -- -- -- _The L. R._ has it [“Chaplinesque”] in hand now, but I shall

probably not hear from them about it for months and should they decide

to take it,--I cannot see that its publication in France should

complicate matters any. The same applies to “Black Tambourine” which

came out misprinted in _The D.D._ last July. I would like to see it

printed right sometime and it occurs to me that this may be an

opportunity. I am doing nothing new worth while, so I can’t send you

anything else. If you get the names your letter mentions together as

contributors you will have something worth while. Burke’s contribution

to the new _L.R._ quarterly just out is about the only good thing in it.

I don’t need to go on about it, as you have probably seen it in Paris by

this time. About the only thing to be gathered from Pound’s article on

Brancusi is that Pound wishes to avoid being obvious at the cost of no

matter what else. For myself--I [have] just finished a week’s trial at

selling real estate--of which, of course, I didn’t sell any. Trying now

to get into a bookstore to help out during the Christmas rush.

There is nothing but gall and disgust in me,--and there is nothing more

for me to tell you but familiar, all-too-familiar complaints. I wish I

could cultivate a more graceful mask against all this. --/--/

82: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland_ _Nov. 26th, ’21_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ I’ve been having a wonderful time diving into Ben

Jonson, so you see I haven’t been so far off, after all. After one has

read _Bartholomew Fair_ it isn’t so hard to see where Synge got his

start,--a start toward a husky folk-element in the drama. I can see

myself from now rapidly joining Josephson in a kind of Elizabethan

fanaticism. You have doubtless known my long-standing friendship with

Donne, Webster, and Marlowe. Now I have another Mermaid “conjugal” to

strengthen the tie. The fact is, I can find nothing in modern work to

come up to the verbal richness, irony and emotion of these folks, and I

would like to let them influence me as much as they can in the

interpretation of modern moods,--somewhat as Eliot has so beautifully

done. There are parts of his “Gerontion” that you can find almost bodily

in Webster and Jonson. Certain Elizabethans and Laforgue have played a

tremendous part in Eliot’s work, and you catch hints of his great study

of these writers in his _Sacred Grove_. I don’t want to imitate Eliot,

of course,--but I have come to the stage now where I want to carefully

choose my most congenial influences and, in a way, “cultivate” their

influence. I can say with J[osephson] that the problem of form becomes

harder and harder for me every day. I am not at all satisfied with

anything I have thus far done, mere shadowings, and too slight to

satisfy me. I have never, so far, been able to present a vital, living

and tangible,--a positive emotion to my satisfaction. For as soon as I

attempt such an act I either grow obvious or ordinary, and abandon the

thing at the second line. Oh! it is hard! One must be drenched in words,

literally soaked with them to have the right ones form themselves into

the proper pattern at the right moment. When they come, as they did in

“Pastorale” (thin, but rather good), they come as things in themselves;

it is a matter of felicitous juggling!; and no amount of will or emotion

can help the thing a bit. So you see I believe with Sommer that the

“Ding an Sich” method is ultimately the only satisfactory creative

principle to follow. But I also find that J[osephson] stirred up a

hornet’s nest in me this summer with his words about getting away from

current formulae, from Heine to Wallace Stevens, by experimentation in

original models, etc., and my reaction to this stimulation is to work

away from the current impressionism as much as possible. I mean such

“impressionism” as the Cocteau poem (trans.) in _The Little Review_,

which you have probably seen. Dada (maybe I am wrong, but you will

correct me) is nothing more to me than the dying agonies of this

movement, maladie moderne. I may be even carried back into “rime and

rhythm” before I get through, provided I can carry these encumbrances as

deftly and un-selfconsciously as, say, Edward Thomas sometimes did. I

grow to like my “Black Tambourine” more, for this reason, than before.

It becomes to my mind a kind of diminutive model of ambition, simply

pointing a direction. S’much for this endless tirade, but write as usual

and keep me cheered and momentarily thrilled.

Maybe J[osephson] has already started on his novel, burlesquing the

Americans in the Quartier, that he intended. Tell him to send me some

poetry, anything he is writing. It’s sure to be better than anything the

magazines offer here.

83: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland_ _December the tenth_

Dear Gorham: Your letter in French (which innovation I like) reached me

yesterday, a welcome evening stimulant after the day’s work. For I am,

in a way, very glad to announce that I’ve been busy for the last two

weeks at selling books in a store here during the seasonal “rush.” This

is, in all probability, entirely a temporary tent for me,--but it has

enabled me, though intensely occupied, to get free of the money complex

that had simply reduced me to ashes. This item added to a total lack of

any sex life for a long period had left me so empty that I gave up

insulting you with a mere heap of stones for a letter, and though I

haven’t more to offer you now, I have sufficient interest again in the

activity of writing to make my meagreness seem less obvious. Erotic

experience is stumbled upon occasionally by accident, and the other

evening I was quite nicely entertained, in _my_ usual way, of course.

And thus the spell is broken! I can’t help remarking also that this

“breaker of the spell” is one very familiar with your present haunts,

“La Rotonde,” etc., etc., only of a few years back. You see, then, that

one may enjoy a few Parisian sophistications even in Cleveland!

The _Ulysses_ situation is terrible to think on. I shall be eternally

grateful to you if you can manage to smuggle my already-subscribed-for

copy home with you. If this will in any chance be possible, please let

me send you the cash for purchase, etc., at the proper time. I _must_

have this book!

De Gourmont’s _Une Coeur Virginal_ has just been published here, (trans.

by Aldous Huxley), and I have snatched it up against its imminent

suppression along with _Jurgen_ and other masterpieces. If this is a

fair sample of its author, and it’s supposed to be, I cannot see how his

_Physique d’Amour_, translated by Pound and to be published by Boni &

Liveright, will ever get beyond the printers’ hands. Yet how mellow and

kindly is the light from de Gourmont! One hates to see him on the tables

with Zane Grey and Rex Beach. Maybe, after all (and since I have

procured my volume), it will not be so heart-rending to see the

destruction of the jealous Puritan at work again. Two weeks of

book-service to the “demands of the public” in a store have bred curious

changes of attitude toward the value of popularity (of the slightest

sort) in my mind. The curious “unread” that slumber lengthily on the

shelves, and whose names are never called, are much nearer my envy than

I had once thought they might be from the mere standpoint of neglect.

This pawing over of gift-book classics in tooled leather bindings, etc.,

etc., is a sight to never forget. Poor dear Emerson must slumber badly.

Aristocratic is Whitman, though--no one ever calls for that “democrat”

any more than for Landor or Donne. And Edgar Guest and Service, death

heads both, are rampant.

Of course you have heard of Anderson’s winning of _The Dial_ prize. I

was quite certain of it anyway, but intensely gratified at the fact now

he has. He will probably go to Mexico now as money was all he needed. He

wrote me an answer recently to my criticism of _Erik Dorn_, praising

parts of it much and damning others. The book still puzzles me, which

makes me dislike it a little more than ever. As a whole it is deficient,

but I have always admitted certain parts good. But when one compares it

with such a book as Anderson’s _Triumph of the Egg_, it fades out

terribly. This latter is an anthology of recent short stories of

Anderson and re-reading them together I get the most violent reaction.

He has written of ghastly desolations which are only too evident in my

own experience and on every hand. I am more enthusiastic than ever in my

praise for him although I feel in an odd way, that he has, like a diver,

touched bottom in a certain sense, and that his future work must

manifest certain changes of a more positive character than the bare

statement of reality, or conclude his promise. --/--/

84: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Dec. 25th, ’21_

Dear Gorham: Your letter arriving a few days ago, of the 5th, and the

note of the seventh announcing my presence on the boulevards (in

Chaplinesque attire) have provided me with rich materials for a kind of

Christmas tree, at least as thrilling as any of remotest childhood

memories. Names and presences glitter and fascinate with all kinds of

exotic suggestions on the branches. I can be grateful to you for the

best of Christmas donations, as I can thank you for the main part of my

mental and imaginative sustenance of the last six months, weary and

tormented as they have been. And now things seem, at least, to look a

little better for me. I have been asked to remain on for a brief period

in the capacity of book-clerk, and there is a possibility in sight of my

gaining a very promising position soon in a very high-class advertising

house here that has the attraction of the best connections with the

largest agencies in New York and elsewhere. At least my interview with

the “authorities” there today proved favorable to me, and if I can only

manage to write them the proper kind of letter and “sell myself” as they

ridiculously put it, I may secure myself something profitable.

Leastwise, however, I have paid off an obligation that worried me and

had a little change to spend during the last few weeks which has worked

unbelievable miracles on my spirit. My work has been so hectic during

the last month that I have not had time to write you, much less poems,

but I have a feeling that now that the rush is over and the New Year

started, I shall again do something. You see I am promising again.

You cannot imagine how interesting to me have been your opinions of the

personalities you have come in contact with. Your opportunities in this

direction have far exceeded my happiest anticipations for you. It

strikes me that you have met about all the personalities in the younger

left-wing at all worth while. --/--/

It has been very gratifying, also, to hear of your amiable progress with

Josephson. His “tightening and hardening” effect on one is exactly the

compliment I owe to him. In a way he is cold as ice, having a most

astonishing faculty for depersonization,--and on the other hand, you

have no doubt found a certain affectionate propensity in his nature that

is doubly pleasant against the rather frigidly intellectual relief of

the rest of him. He likes you much, and wrote me so, also sending me

some poems to submit to _The D.D._ which I cannot fancy as having a

ghost of a show in such an uneven corner. But he needs money, and I

shall be glad to do anything in my power to help him along,--not

worrying, however, very, very much, as he has a flexibility and

resourcefulness that I envy.

--/--/ If I were only in N.Y. I would see to it that S[ommer]’s work

were given its due,--but that time will have to wait. Meanwhile he shows

not the slightest inclination to wilt. As I said, his achievements

present one gorgeous surprise after another. A mutual friend of ours

here recently died, a Nietzschean and thorough appreciator of all the

best, who has pursued his lonely way in America since the age of fifteen

when he left his family in Norway on account of religious differences.

Bill and I were among the pallbearers at this funeral, where there were

only a few others present, although all appreciative of what the man

was. I can’t go into detail, but the affair was tremendous, especially

the finale at the crematorium. It was beautiful, but left me emotionally

bankrupt last Sunday, the day following. That funeral was one of the few

beautiful things that have happened to me in Cleveland.

Now for a brief résumé of American literature. It is, in a way,

hopefully significant that Anderson’s _Winesburg_ has been issued by

Boni and Liveright in their Modern Library with a very fine introduction

by Ernest Boyd which gives much praise to _The L. R._ for having had the

acumen to introduce Anderson to the world. --/--/

_The Dial_ for December has a fine article in it on American painting by

Rosenfeld, singling out Hartley for extra and very intelligent praise.

It also includes a fairly good poem by Malcolm Cowley, a rather

disappointing article on Flaubert by Middleton Murry, and an atrocious

piece of dull nonsense by Bodenheim. The new _Shadowland_ is [as] far

from thrilling as those tepid baths it did offer last summer, and the

_Ladies Home Journal_ and the _Atlantic_ are as bouncing as ever.

This is all for tonight. We have a houseful of indiscriminate relatives

and it has been hard to collect myself for even this potpourri, but I

have more to say when I can get to it. I need time (a natural

requirement with me for all writing or thought) to sit Buddha-like for a

couple of hours every day and let things sift themselves into some

semblance of order in my brain. But I haven’t had the opportunity for

such operations for weeks, and may never,--until which time I pray you

to be contented as you can by such thrusts in haste as this letter.

Your figure haunts me like a kind of affectionate caress through all

sorts of difficulties. You are always my final and satisfactory “court

of appeal,” and it is useless to attempt to tell you how much this means

to me. So believe me when I tell you that I love you, and plan and plan

for the glorious day when we shall get knees under the table and talk,

and talk, and talk. The inefficacy of my letters to you always troubles

me.

1922

85: TO SHERWOOD ANDERSON

_Cleveland_ _Jan. 10th_

Dear Anderson: Waiting on shoppers in a book store during the holiday

hurricane deferred my answer to your letter. I was glad to get any kind

of work, however, after my empty-pocketed summer and fall. Now I am

working as a copy-writer for the Corday and Gross Co. here which you may

have heard of. I like this better than any bread-and-butter work I’ve

ever done. You were right about the real estate job. Ogling poor people

for small investments against their will didn’t appeal to me very long.

I had given it up before you wrote.

If I can satisfy the requirements of my position here, I shall feel a

little hope returning for the satisfaction of a few aims again. I mean,

of course, to turn out a little verse or prose this winter. When out of

work I am not able to rid myself of worries enough to accomplish

anything. Some pecuniary assurances seem necessary to me to any opening

of the creative channels. Now things begin to look a little better for

me.

I saw your story “The Contract” in the last _Broom_, and would like to

offer a criticism. It may be an infraction, but if it is I want to ask

your forgiveness. This story in some ways strikes me as inferior to the

intensity and beauty of your other recent work, and I have an idea that

it is something you wrote quite a while ago. Coming from anyone else, I

would think, “This is good; but this fellow is trying to imitate

Anderson and can’t quite do it.”

I wouldn’t attempt any suggestions nor try to point out any places. Your

work is always too much a composite whole for that critical sort of

prodding to yield anything. I only felt this story as somehow an

anti-climax to the amazing sense of beauty I recently got in re-reading

the short stories you have done during the last few years that are

collected together in the _Egg_ volume. Please pardon me for this

doubtless unnecessary comment. It is only in the light of my own desires

and feeling in such circumstances that I have ventured it.

In my own work I find the problem of style and form becoming more and

more difficult as time goes on. I imagine that I am interested in this

style of writing much more than you are. Perhaps, though, we include the

same features under different terms. In verse this feature can become a

preoccupation, to be enjoyed for its own sake. I do not think you will

sympathize with me very strongly on this point, but, of course, if you

got as much pleasure out of finding instances of it in other writers as

I do, you would see what I mean. For instance, when I come to such a

line as the following from John Donne,--I am thrilled -- -- -- -- [“Of the

Progresse of the Soule, The Second Anniversary,” ll. 296-98]. Or take

another, called “The Expiration”: --/--/ [ll. 1-12]. What I want to get

is just what is so beautifully done in this poem,--an “interior” form, a

form that is so thorough and intense as to dye the words themselves with

a peculiarity of meaning, slightly different maybe from the ordinary

definition of them separate from the poem. If you remember my “Black

Tambourine” you will perhaps agree with me that I have at least

accomplished this idea once. My aims make writing slow for me, and so

far I have done practically nothing,--but I can wait for slow

improvements rather more easily than I can let a lot of stuff loose that

doesn’t satisfy me. There is plenty of that in the publishing houses and

magazines every day to amuse the folks that like it. This may very well

be a tiresome ranting for you, but I think you will like the quotation

anyway.

What are you going to do this winter: go to Mexico as you had thought

of? I was all ready to scrape around for money enough to start for

Europe when this job came along, and I thought I had better take it. Two

friends of mine, however, have been in Paris for some time, writing me

letters that made me foam at my moorings, and the desire to break loose

has been strong.

If you aren’t too busy write me. A friend of mine, Lescaze, was in N. Y.

over Christmas and says he had a very pleasant talk with you one evening

at Paul Rosenfeld’s.

86: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Jan. 23rd, ’22_

Dear Gorham: I come to my first evening, free and alone, in some time,

and recognize quite plainly that I have neglected you. There are so many

rather interesting people around this winter that there is always

something or other doing. A concert to go to, a soirée,--and then since

I have been writing ads a certain amount of hangover work to be done

evenings sometimes,--that altogether I don’t like it. But I like my work

and am wonderfully treated at the office. Never guessed a commercial

institution could be organized on such a decent basis. And they actually

will come of their own accord and tell you that they are pleased with

the work you are doing for them!!!!!!!!!! I pass my goggle-eyed father

on the streets now without a tremor! I go on mad carouses with Bill

Sommer wherein we begin with pigs’ feet and sauerkraut and end with

Debussy’s “Gradus ad Parnassum” in the “ivory tower.” Around Ernest

Bloch at the Institute of Music here are gathered some interesting folks

from all over everywhere. There is even a French restaurant here where

the proprietress stands at the cashier’s desk reading _La Nouvelle Revue

Francaise_ and where wonderful steaks with mushrooms are served--alas,

everything, including real garçons, except vin. The place looks like a

sentence without any punctuation, or, if you prefer, this letter.

And now, mon cher, willy-nilly as it all may be, we come to your

magazine. I don’t want to hurt you at all, but I must confess to little

or no enthusiasm at the prospect of another small magazine, full of

compressed dynamite as yours might well be. Unless one has half a

million or so, what’s the use of adding to the other little

repercussions that dwindle out after a few issues!? Don’t waste your

time with it all, is my advice. Much better sit down and pound on your

typewriter, or go toting mss. around to stolid editors. Listen,--there

is now _some_ kind of magazine that will print one’s work however bad or

good it is. The “arty” book stores bulge and sob with them all. I pray

you invest your hard-earned money in neckties, theatre tickets or

something else good for the belly or the soul,--but don’t throw it away

in paper and inefficient typography. Don’t come home three months sooner

for the prospects of that rainbow.

No one will especially appreciate it -- -- -- --. By all this you must not

think that I have joined the Right Wing to such an extent that I am

rollicking in F. Scott Fitzgerald. No,--but by the straight and narrow

path swinging to the south of the village DADA I have arrived at a

somewhat and abashed posture of reverence before the statues of Ben

Jonson, Michael Drayton, Chaucer, sundry others already mentioned. The

precious rages of dear Matty [Josephson] somehow don’t seem to swerve me

from this position. He is, it strikes me, altogether unsteady. Of

course, since Mallarmé and Huysmans were elegant weepers it is up to the

following generation to haw-haw gloriously! Even dear old Buddha-face de

Gourmont is passé. Well, I suppose it is up to one in Paris to do as the

Romans do, but it all looks too easy to me from Cleveland, Cuyhoga

County, God’s country. But Matty will always glitter when he walks

provided the man in front of him has not sparkled,--which we hope he

never does, of course,--and so I am happy to hear from him always about

his latest change of mind. Quite seriously Matty is thrilling, in prose

especially. His performance is always agreeable despite my inability to

sympathize with his theories. Paris seems to be a good place for him to

work and I suppose he will stay there at least until his contes are

published. --/--/

87: TO WILLIAM WRIGHT

_Cleveland, O._ _February 11, 1922_

Dear Bill: Don’t let me keep on worrying. Your visit was a great

pleasure to me, resulting in the renewal of old contacts and the

discoveries of many new ones. I am so much interested in you now, that I

am in danger of pestering you with all kinds of advice and admonitions.

One of these is: not to let the caprices of any unmellow ladies result

in your unbalance or extreme discomfiture. Even the best of them, at

times, know not and care not what they do. They have the faculty of

producing very debilitating and thoroughly unprofitable effects on

gentlemen who put themselves too much in their hands. Woman was not

meant to occupy this position. It was only the Roman Catholic Church who

gave it to her. Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians knew better how to handle

her. I suggest your reading De Gourmont’s _Virgin Heart_ for a delicate

dissection of this kind of problem. De Gourmont was something more than

a purely “literary critic,” you know. He was one of the most thorough

students of physiology and psychology of the modern world. He was an

adept scientist of the emotions. Stendhal was another, but less clear.

All this suffering is quite romantic and beautiful, you know, but you

pay a stupid price for it. I can’t help saying these things because of

my interest and because I saw you go away in ominous style. I hope you

haven’t been ill, and that you have merely forgotten to write me.

I have been through two or three of these cataclysms myself, harder than

yours because of their unusual and unsympathetic situations. Maybe I

have gained something by them, I don’t know,--but it is certain that I

lost a great deal too.

88: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland?_] _Feb. 25th --’22_

Dear Gorham: Arrived yesterday the new _Gargoyle_. Altogether not such a

poor issue as Matty predicted in one of his letters of last month. Your

translations amuse me without interesting me as thoroughly as your

nicely administered spanking of McAlmon. Maybe your translations (or

rather selections) would excite me somewhat if I weren’t somehow so

hopelessly tired of Art and theories about Art lately. I can’t quite

account for it--never having suffered from indigestion like this before.

It is, after all, I suppose, because I have nothing of my own to “give,”

and therefore feel so little at stake in all the deluge of production

and argument that I grow either bewildered or else indifferent. I am

going through a difficult readjustment right now, besides meeting a

period in my so-called “creative life” where neither my conscious self

nor my unconscious self can get enough “co-operation” from the other to

do anything worth while. I wrote something recently which I thought, on

the moment, was good. Today I have faced it as a hopeless failure,

disjointed and ugly and vain. I am only momentarily depressed by these

facts, however, as I am kept so busy with my ad writing that I haven’t

time to think much about it. --/--/

89: TO WILLIAM WRIGHT

_Jamestown, New York_ _March 2, 1922_

Dear Bill: This is my second excursion to this place, no doubt somewhat

familiar to you,--having been here part of last week. It’s a matter of

business for the Co. (“investigation of the product,” in ad. lingo) and

I rather enjoy getting out of Cleveland for a day or so. I’ve been

getting out a catalog for the Art Metal folks here and puzzling my head

over blue prints and figures until I have become somewhat dull. --/--/

By this time I suppose you are back again and full tilt in your

customary carousels. I was glad to know that the trouble with you was

only “physiological.” By this time you have probably read some of De

Gourmont’s observations on that sort of thing, and, wise man!, were

fully experienced to appreciate them. What an awful lot of novel forms

there are! The novel is the most flexible literary form there is. It

permits the freest and completest expression. Have you read Louis

Hemon’s _Maria Chapdelaine_ yet? The young French emigrant who wrote it

died shortly afterward, but for what it intends it is one of the most

finished things one could hope for. Human emotion in it is like delicate

pastel tinted flowers on a background of midnight black. The black

terrific power of the forest and winter threatens continually behind

every word in the action. But I am nowhere near so enthused about this

book as I am about Gogol’s _Taras Bulba_ that I read on the train

recently. I think someone has called it the Russian _Iliad_. It is

certainly not secondary to _The Iliad_ in many ways. That sting and tang

of those Cossack adventures are something I won’t forget, and the hero,

old Taras, is altogether memorable. This is something you _must_ read.

I don’t want to go any further without thanking you for your “Ballade.”

I find so much that is good in it that I am tempted beyond the proper

respect for your very dégagé gesture of presentation in your letter, and

want to risk the impropriety of some criticism of it. The main faults of

it are faults inherent with the form you used. I do not, as you know,

insist by any means on vers libre forms. But it is just when I see such

a thing as your ballade with the (unavoidable) tiresome repetitions of

sound or rhyme, that I am most moved to applaud even the slouchy vers

libre work that seems to “get over” its meaning or lack of meaning at

least without that mechanical insistence of certain formal patterns that

can sometimes infuriate me. For instance, after “sweet, feet, deceit,

conceit, and fleet” have all successively pecked at the ear, along comes

“discreet retreat”!!, giving the whole poem at the point a tone of the

neatest mean-ness. And that sort of tone is exactly what you do not

want,--at least not along with some of your quite exquisite imagery that

speaks in largeness of a full heart.

The first verse, the first four lines especially, is fine, and the idea

behind that “discreet retreat behind sophistications of bread and meat”

is good. It would be improved by using another and richer word than

“sophistications” just to _improve_ the sophistication a little,

however. I feel this way,--that however you wrote this poem,--in jest,

literary exercise, or emotionally,--it proves distinct poetic

possibilities in you, which, whether you care to follow or not, are

still there. Why don’t you work this poem into an easier form or perhaps

into a vers libre form? I could do it to show you what I mean, but that

would take all the fun out of it for you. Forms as strict as the

ballade, can, in my opinion, be used satisfactorily for only very

artificial subjects, or abstract themes.

I’ve been doing something myself, but don’t feel satisfied enough with

it yet to send it.

90: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _March 2, ’22_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ Just now, I apologize for it, I am so much worried

by family finances that it’s hard for me to do anything more than my

work. My mother’s alimony has reached its limited time and she is

preparing (at 45 yrs. of age!) to go out into the world to learn to make

her living!

I, naturally, shall henceforward be called upon not only to “keep”

myself, but to lend as much of a helping hand as is possible in this

predicament. So, it’s hard work for some time ahead for me, I guess. My

present wages just suffice for my own limited requirements. My pater is

too much of a cad to really do anything for his former wife except what

the agreement between them says. The fact that this was made when she

was partially out of mind and very ill, makes no difference to him.

However, I shall not resign myself to the proverbial and sentimental

fate of the “might-have-been” artist without a few more strenuosities. I

will have to expect a certain tardiness of gait, however.

I have just read Aldous Huxley’s latest, _Crome Yellow_, one of those

things that evokes much quiet laughter and holds delightful savours, at

least for a contemporary, between its covers. -- -- -- --

As no good plays ever get to Cleveland, and the Chicago opera not at all

this year, my outside entertainment has been meagre. Only a symphony

concert every other week, and little new there.

Ernest Bloch, however, conducted two weeks ago his _Trois Poèmes Juifs_

which were magnificent enough for Solomon to have marched & sung to. I

occasionally pass him on the streets or in the aisles of the auditorium,

and realize that genius, after all, may walk in Cleveland. -- -- -- --

91: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _March 24th_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ You know I shall talk it [_Secession_] up,--but the

worst is that most of my acquaintances are totally unfitted for

enthusiasms of this sort. The indifference you will encounter when you

return to these States you must be prepared to face. Every one is

suddenly and enormously _busy_--making money, attending teas, motoring,

starving--God knows what all. It makes me reel! Life is too scattered

for me to savor it any more. Probably this is only on account of my

present work which demands the most frequent jerks of the imagination

from one thing to another, still--the war certainly has changed things a

bit here. The question in my mind is, how much less vertigo are we going

to suffer in the latter whirl than we did in the first blows and

commotion. If I am drifting into nonsense, it must be because I’m

getting no time lately for anything but work.

If you come home in May--one of the first things you must do is to make

me a good visit. You will be free to come, whereas there is a

considerable doubt now about my coming east at all this summer. Here in

my tower-study, rimmed with Sommer paintings and grey cracked paper, you

will have a good chance to focus your recent observations -- -- -- --.

Besides,--you have never seen any of the midwest, and it ought to be

part of your education. --/--/

92: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _March 29th, ’22_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ With the banal arrival of spring and weeks of rain

and cloudy skies, I have again fallen in love! I guess I might about as

well take up quarters at La Rotonde--and be done with it. However,

_something_ must be indulged in to make Cleveland interesting.

93: TO WILLIAM WRIGHT

_Cleveland, O._ _April 2nd_

Dear Bill: Your prose is much better than your verse. I don’t know how

to explain--perhaps if I saw more of your poetry I might,--but certainly

the story you recently sent me makes me quite certain of it. The poem

has the tepid and pubescent steam in it that always seems to issue from

the environs of a college campus. It is college adolescence in only a

slight advance from the ordinary. It has enough in it to “get by” on the

first reading with a rather pleasing effect. But the second discovers

much to be criticized. It’s not in the technique but in the attitude

that I blame you for this. You have a real flair for phrasing, and two

years ago I should have probably praised you for the poem.

But now let’s turn to the story. It is vital and well told. Nobody can

imitate Anderson, of course, but that is not what we want anyway. Your

story stands on its own feet quite well. In some places it is too

accented. I say this in spite of my realization of the intent of it and

also via recommending the very effective literary device of

under-accentuation in just the right place to produce “overtones” of

overwhelming effect. Then you could afford to be more sparing of

adjectives! But I won’t rail any further! You certainly are displaying

evidence and promises of a hopeful career. If you don’t get too

engrossed in commerce after you leave college the break will do you

good, I think. No matter how “free” one may be in college, the campus

world with its idols and codes is very different from the world outside.

Don’t think, please, that I’m decrying education, it’s only a mention

that things are somehow harder and a little “scarey.” “Practical people”

suddenly surround one, and they have such an insistence about being

listened to. --/--/

The more speed I develop in ad-writing the more occasion I’m given to

use it, and I seem to need to keep in touch with so many people that the

hours spent at home are too few. This hankering for continual

conversational excitement is one of my weaknesses. What I _should_ be

doing is working. Truly, on this gay Sunday afternoon, my conscience is

weighted.

94: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _April 19th --’22_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ The two copies of _Secession_ reached me yesterday.

Of course they were immediately and doubly devoured. But right here I

ought to stop--I have so many things to say about it. --/--/

I find I have many, at least several disagreements with you. I can’t say

nearly so much for Matty’s poem as you do--I mean the Café phallicus.

The Tzara poem is perfectly flat. The Cowley poem is encouraging,

although dreadfully alike something he had published in one of the last

_L.R’s_. The Aragon prose is, in its odd way, a quite beautiful thing.

But what has happened to Matty!?! And,--just _why_ is Apollinaire so

portentous a god? Will radios, flying machines, and cinemas have such a

great effect on poetry in the end? All this talk of Matty’s is quite

stimulating, but it’s like coffee--twenty-four hours afterward not much

remains to work with. It is metallic and pointillistic--not derogatory

terms to my mind at all, but somehow thin,--a little too slender and

“smart”--after all.

O Matty must be amusing himself perfectly in Paris. And so he took you

to be a real, honest-to-God disreputable and commercial editor! Serve

you right, you bad boy, following the primrose path of the magazines!

--/--/

95: TO CHARMION WIEGAND

_Cleveland, Ohio_ _May 6th, ’22_

Dear Charmion: --/--/ You must put me in direct touch with Emil Reeck,

however, as soon as possible. I have just written Anderson all about the

plan, and shall rush the answer to you as soon as possible. But letters

take such a dreadfully long time to get back and forth and you say you

are leaving Berlin just about a month from now!! I somehow feel as

though I were rushing to catch a train!

I very much agree with you that Germany would be really appreciative of

Anderson, and they ought to have him. However, as Huebsch, Anderson’s

publisher, is himself a German and very much in touch with Berlin, I

suspect that already translation arrangements may have been started.

Anderson is having a great enough vogue here at present to turn the head

of anyone but a pessimist like Anderson. He is, I understand, very much

made of by _The Nouvelle Revue Francaise_ Group (headed by Jacques

Copeau) and has been translated into French. His trip to Europe last

summer put him in direct touch with all the younger crowd in France.

However, we’ll see about Germany. There is still a chance.

Did I tell you that our friend, Gorham Munson, has been in Europe all

this time? He is the one we went with to that meeting against

prohibition, restricted speech, or something at some church on Central

Park W. one night. Gilbert Cannan spoke, etc. Munson has been quite a

bit in Berlin, and from Vienna has started a new literary magazine of

his own, _Secession_, which is (first number) just seeping into this

country. Munson must have just arrived in New York again, is due to

anyway. He expects to print his magazine in Vienna right along as he can

get it done there so much cheaper. His magazine is filled with quite

ultra things by EE Cummings, Marianne Moore, Slater Brown, Matthew

Josephson, Malcolm Cowley, etc., all of whom were with him in Paris last

fall and winter when the inception of the magazine took place. I am

sceptical about all such dear, darling and courageous and brief

attempts, but shall do my best to make his magazine a success, despite

my literary and philosophical differences with him in this project.

--/--/

Thinking it might interest Chaplin to read the poem I wrote about him, I

sent it to him,--and with the result that today I’ve received a most

delightful acknowledgment of the same.... You know I worship Chaplin’s

work. Think he is the greatest living actor I’ve seen, and the prime

interpreter of the soul imposed upon by modern civilization. --/--/

You asked about French books. I have not been reading much modern work,

but I am in touch with a good deal of it through a French-Swiss painter

friend of mine here who has modern tastes and is in touch with Europe

and the best of it all the time. --/--/

Any of the works of Andre Gide are good, same of older ones like

Rimbaud, Laforgue (Jules) and Guillaume Apollinaire. The latter’s

_Calligrammes_ and _Alcools_ (poems) are just being talked about in

this country. I am mad about Laforgue, but he is hard to translate and

very acid.

There is a wild bird and fashionable, Jean Cocteau, who writes plays,

poetry and novelties that I understand is the present king of les

boulevards, but I haven’t read him. The scene in France today is, I

judge, about as scattered as the Genoa Conference. Everybody is being

intensely clever, and everybody is also worried about what new standard

tomorrow may erect. However, I have tried to name people here who have

already been more-or-less settled and accepted, or who bid fair to be.

The people I am closest to in English are Yeats, Eliot, Pound, and the

dear great Elizabethans like Marlowe, Webster, Donne and Drayton, whom I

never weary of. I’ve lately been enjoying Melville’s _Moby Dick_,

however. --/--/

I’ll write to you as soon as I hear from Anderson. If you come across

any good monograph on Cezanne in Germany I would be glad to pay you for

it as soon as you get back. Otherwise--with the exception of a good book

illustrating Greek Vases well, I can’t think of anything.

96: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _May 16th ’22_

Hooray Whoop La! That little note on the back of the envelope meant a

lot to me. And I somehow feel good that you are once more with me on the

same stretch of land! Jump right on the train, old dear, and I’ll meet

you at the station. I’m very anxious to see you. I want you to meet this

_great_ Bill Sommer--and tell me all about all you have done and seen. I

have the assurance now that you’ll come as soon as you can get the

money, and it makes me quite happy.

Your rough & tedious transition back to the States gave you a good

chance to prepare for the surprises of New York--there must have been

some new aspects of the place awaiting you. I know that even a few

months in the West Indies and Canada open your eyes to new things on

your return. Of course there will be only too evident all the old

aggravations,--but from occasional references in your letters I judge

that you have more than once been touched by these same things during

the last six months. The world is fast becoming standardized,--and who

knows but what our American scene will be the most intricate and

absorbing one in fifty years or so?

Something is happening. Some kind of aristocracy of taste is being

established,--there is more of it evidenced every year. People like you,

Matty and I belong here. Especially Matty, who was doing better work

last summer before he got in touch with the Paris crowd than I suspect

since. --/--/ His present crazes are, frankly, beyond my understanding.

They are so much so that I have still a great deal of confidence that no

matter how wild and eccentric he becomes, it’s just a phase which will

be a practical benefit in the end. But, on the other hand, if one denies

all emotional suffering the result is a rather frigid (however “gay”)

type of work. Let us watch & pray! --/--/

97: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Same evening (May 16th)_

Dear Gorham: I forgot to mention that the art books reached me and how

pleased I am. Derain is one of my favorites--more even than Matisse &

Picasso--and Vlaminck I have long admired. Marie Laurencin is

amusing--but no more than any febrile female. Have you seen the amazing

satires of Georg(?) Grosz and the beautiful metaphysics of Chirico? My

friend Lescaze has put me in touch with a lot of moderns that I fear,

off here in Cleveland, I should otherwise never have heard of.

I’m at work on a metaphysical attempt of my own--again I mention the

familiar “Faustus & Helen” affair which has received a little stimulus

lately. The trouble is--I get so little _expanse_ of time undisturbed

for it, that it’s hopelessly fragmentary so far. Here is a tentative

beginning. -- -- -- -- [See Weber, _op. cit._, p. 175]

I wish you would tell me how you like my translations from Laforgue’s

“Locutions des Pierrots” in the current _Double Dealer_.

You will notice below them a very interesting poem by Allen Tate. This

poem interested me so much that I wrote him a letter and his answer

reached me along with yours today. --/--/

98: TO ALLEN TATE

_Cleveland_ _May 16th ’22_

Dear Allen Tate: Being born in ’99, I too, have a little toe-nail in the

last century. You are not alone in all your youth and disgrace! But

perhaps the umbilical cord made a clean margin of it with you, for I am

reminded that it is 1922 and there is a chance of that. I popped on the

scene shortly after Independence Day! and consequently have always had a

dread of firecrackers.

Despite all this desperate imminence, I want to thank you for your

answer to my letter. It has thrown me clear off the advertising copy

work I brought home with me (yes, I’m one of the band!) as I feel more

like putting that off until tomorrow, than this. But on the other hand

there are so many things I want to say that I don’t know where to begin.

Letters are sometimes worse than nothing, especially for introductions,

so if I am chatty and autobiographical you must pardon it.

Certain educated friends of mine have lamented my scant education, not

in the academic sense, but as regards my acceptance and enthusiasm about

some modern French work without having placed it in relation to most of

the older “classics,” which I haven’t read. I have offered apologies,

but continued to accept fate, which seems to limit me continually in

some directions. Nevertheless, my affection for Laforgue is none the

less genuine for being led to him through Pound and T. S. Eliot than it

would have been through Baudelaire. There are always people to class

one’s admirations and enthusiasms illegitimate, and though I still have

to have the dictionary close by when I take up a French book, a certain

sympathy with Laforgue’s attitude made me an easier translator of the

three poems in _The D.D._ than perhaps an accomplished linguist might

have been. However, no one ought to be particularly happy about a

successful translation. I did them for fun, and it finally occurred to

me that I might as well be paid for them.

As I said before, it is because your poem seemed so much in line with

the kind of thing I am wanting to do, that I felt almost compelled to

write you. While I am always interested in the latest developments in

poetry I am inveterately devoted to certain English old fellows that are

a constant challenge. I refer to Donne, Webster, Jonson, Marlowe,

Vaughan, Blake, etc. More “modernly,” have you read and admired Yeats

(later poems), Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Edward Thomas, Wallace Stevens?

I am missing a few, but I like all these people.

I am interested greatly in seeing your poems in _The Fugitive_. It

occurs to me that my friend, Gorham Munson, editor of _Secession_, would

possibly be interested in publishing some of your things, although he

can’t pay anything yet for mss. Notice and N.Y. address of his magazine

are in the back pages of the current _D.D._ I am trying to give him

something myself, but I write so little that I simply haven’t anything.

The last went to _The Dial_ and ought to be out next month.

Don’t tell me you like the enclosed poems unless you really do. You may

have seen them in different places, but I’m in the dark as to that.

P.S. Robinson is very interesting--his work is real and permanent, yet

it is also a tragedy--one of the tragedies of Puritanism, materialism,

America and the last century. Wm. Vaughn Moody’s beautiful tonality

suffered in a kind of vacuum, too. We are more fortunate today, despite

Amy Lowell!

The poetry of negation is beautiful--alas, too dangerously so for one of

my mind. But I am trying to break away from it. Perhaps this is useless,

perhaps it is silly--but one _does_ have joys. The vocabulary of

damnations and prostrations has been developed at the expense of these

other moods, however, so that it is hard to dance in proper measure. Let

us invent an idiom for the proper transposition of jazz into words!

Something clean, sparkling, elusive!

99: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _June 4th ’22_

Dear Gorham: -- -- -- -- I probably should not be here at the Corona were

it not that I want you to see the new coin from the mint enclosed

herewith.

I have been at it for the last 24 hours and it may be subjected to a few

changes and additions, but as I see it now in the red light of the womb

it seems to me like a work of youth and magic.

At any rate, it is something entirely new in English poetry, so far as I

know. The jazz rhythms in that first verse are something I have been

impotently wishing to “do” for many a day. It is the second part of the

(three section) “Marriage of Faustus and Helen” that I must have tired

you with mentioning. The other parts are entirely unlike it, and God

knows when they will be done. The first part is just begun. However, I

have considerable ambitions in this opus, as I have told you. Please let

me know your sentiments regarding the enclosed.

The reassurance of your projected visit here makes me happy in spite of

rose-fever cyclones. What talks we shall have! and there are three

others here who have heard so much about you that they are anxious to

meet you too. Bill Sommer has moved to his country place where the

charming schoolhouse-studio is located. We shall have to spend a

week-end there among the gay canvasses that line its walls.

100: TO ALLEN TATE

_Cleveland_ _June 12th_

Dear Allen: So you are in love with the dear Duchess of Malfi also! How

lovely she speaks in that one matchless passage: --/--[17] Exquisite

pride surrendering to love! And it was this that faced all the brutality

of circumstance in those hideous and gorgeous final scenes of the play!

The old betrayals of life, and yet they are worth something--from a

distance, afterward.

What you say about Eliot does not surprise me,--but you will recover

from the shock. No one ever says the last word, and it is a good thing

for you, (notice how I congratulate myself!) to have been faced with him

as early as possible. I have been facing him for _four_ years,--and

while I haven’t discovered a weak spot yet in his armour, I flatter

myself a little lately that I have discovered a safe tangent to strike

which, if I can possibly explain the position,--goes _through_ him

toward a _different goal_. You see it is such a fearful temptation to

imitate him that at times I have been almost distracted. He is, you have

now discovered, far more profound than Huxley (whom I like) or any

others obviously under his influence. You will profit by reading him

again and again. I must have read “Prufrock” twenty-five times and

things like the “Preludes” more often. His work will lead you back to

some of the Elizabethans and point out the best in them. And there is

Henry James, Laforgue, Blake and a dozen others in his work. He wrote

most of this verse between 22 and 25, and is now, I understand, dying

piecemeal as a clerk in a London bank! In his own realm Eliot presents

us with an absolute _impasse_, yet oddly enough, he can be utilized to

lead us to, intelligently point to, other positions and “pastures new.”

Having absorbed him enough we can trust ourselves as never before, in

the air or on the sea. I, for instance, would like to leave a few of his

“negations” behind me, risk the realm of the obvious more, in quest of

new sensations, _humeurs_. These theories and manoeuvres are interesting

and consolatory,--but of course, when it comes right down to the act

itself,--I have to depend on intuition, “inspiration” or what you will

to fill up the page. Let us not be too much disturbed, antagonized or

influenced by the _fait accompli_. For in the words of our divine object

of “envy” (“Reflections on Contemporary Poetry,” _Egoist_, London,

’19--): “Admiration leads most often to imitation; we can seldom long

remain unconscious of our imitating another, and the awareness of our

imitation naturally leads us to hatred of the object imitated. If we

stand toward a writer in this other relation of which I speak we do not

imitate him, and though we are quite as [....]”[18]

101: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] [_ca. June 18_]

Dear Gorham: I have been in a house up in “Little Italy,” a section of

Sicilian immigrants very near our house where one can get good

three-year Chianti,--and incidentally am feeling very fine as Sunday

evenings go. _There_ is the place to enjoy oneself, in the family

parlour of a pickslinger’s family with chromos on the walls that are

right in style of Derain and Vlaminck. Bitch dogs and the rest of the

family wander in while the bottle is still half empty and some of the

family offspring. _Tristram Shandy_ read to a friend with a Spanish

Bolero going on the Victrola sounds good in such a milieu! I never

should live without wine! When you come here we shall make many visits

to this charming family. You will like my classic, puritan, inhibited

friend Sam Loveman who translates Baudelaire charmingly! It is hard to

get him to do anything outside the imagination,--but he is charming and

has just given me a most charming work on Greek Vases (made in

Deutschland) in which satyrs with great erections prance to the

ceremonies of Dionysios with all the fervour of de Gourmont’s

descriptions of sexual sacrifice in _Physique de L’Amour_, which I am

lately reading in trans.

I am glad you like Lescaze’s portrait of me. He _has_ an athletic style.

Your criticism of painting et al strikes me as very exact and

appreciative--at least, as far as I am able to justly criticize it. He

hates Cleveland with all the awareness of the recent description of this

place accorded in the last _Masses_ or _Liberator_, as I understand.

Just now I am in too banal a mood to give sympathy to anything. At

times, dear Gorham, I feel an enormous power in me--that seems almost

supernatural. If this power is not too dissipated in aggravation and

discouragement I may amount to something sometime. I can say this now

with perfect equanimity because I am notoriously drunk and the Victrola

is still going with that glorious “Bolero.” Did I tell you of that

thrilling experience this last winter in the dentist’s chair when under

the influence of aether and _amnesia_ my mind spiraled to a kind of

seventh heaven of consciousness and egoistic dance among the seven

spheres--and something like an objective voice kept saying to me--“You

have the higher consciousness--you have the higher consciousness. This

is something that very few have. This is what is called genius.”? A

happiness, ecstatic such as I have known only twice in “inspirations”

came over me. I felt the two worlds. And at once. As the bore went into

my tooth I was able to follow its every revolution as detached as a

spectator at a funeral. O Gorham, I have known moments in eternity. I

tell you this as one who is a brother. I want you to know me as I feel

myself to be sometimes. I don’t want you to feel that I am conceited.

But since this adventure in the dentist’s chair, I feel a new confidence

in myself. At least I had none of the ordinary hallucinations common to

this operation. Even that means something. You know I live for

work,--for poetry. I shall do my best work later on when I am about 35

or 40. The imagination is the only thing worth a damn. Lately I have

grown terribly isolated, and very egoist. One has to do it [in]

Cleveland. I rush home from work to my room hung with the creations of

Sommer and Lescaze--and fiddle through the evenings. If I could afford

wine _every_ evening I might do more. But I am slow anyway. However,

today I have made a good start on the first part of “Faustus & Helen.” I

am, needless to say, delighted that you like the second part so well.

The other two parts are to be quite different. But, as yet, I am dubious

about the successful eventuation of the poem as a _whole_. Certainly it

is the most ambitious thing I have ever attempted and in it I am

attempting to evolve a conscious pseudo-symphonic construction toward an

abstract beauty that has not been done before in English--at least

directly. If I can get this done in the way I hope--I might get some

consideration for _The Dial_ prize. Perhaps I’m a fool for such

hopes--sooner or later I expect to get that yearly donation. --/--/

I am not going to read this over in the clear sober light of the dawn.

Take it for what it is worth tonight when I seal the envelope--_if_ you

can read it!

102: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _June 22nd_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ This is just rushed off between jobs. I must have

insulted you to the limit with that letter of Sunday night,--but when I

am filled up I am feeling too good to be taken seriously, so please

don’t mind.[19] Your applause of the “Faustus and Helen II” has

heartened me, although I am having a terrible time with the first part

of it. The best way for me to speed up, I guess, is to forget all about

time and be quite indifferent. --/--/

103: TO ----

[_Cleveland_] _4th of July_

Dear ----: --/--/ I am sorry to disappoint you about my “Praise.” There

were no accouchements there at all. Not even temptations in that

direction. It is, or was, entirely “platonic.” Nelson was a Norwegian

who rebelled against the religious restrictions of home and came to

America when a mere kid. Went to art school in Washington and won some

kind of distinguished medal there. As soon as he was through school, an

aunt of his in America who had been paying his tuition abruptly withdrew

all her help and forced him into the prostitution of all his ideals and

a cheap lithographic work that he was never able to pull out of

afterward. He wrote several good poems published in _Scribner’s_ &

_Century_ a long time ago, got married, and I finally met him here in

Cleveland where he had been living in seclusion for a number of years.

One of the best-read people I ever met, wonderful kindliness and

tolerance and a true Nietzschean. He was one of many broken against the

stupidity of American life in such places as here. I think he has had a

lasting influence on me. --/--/

104: TO ALLEN TATE

[_Cleveland_] _July 19th, ’22_

Dear Allen: -- -- -- -- Let me salute you again. “Bored to Choresis” is as

good as “Euthanasia,”--if not better. You do the trick here. Your

vocabulary is exceedingly interesting--you have a way of meticulously

accenting certain things in a quiet, yet withal so sharp a note, that

the effect is greater than as though you roared. “Tribal library,” “Her

rhythms are reptilian and religious,” etc., are excellent. And then, of

course, I like your lunge at the bourgeois literary biographical

interests. No one has ever put it better than you have.

You see what is good about this poem is over and above the merely

personal sketches and digs that Robinson has been getting you into. Here

you come into something larger, as you did in “Euthanasia,” where you

hit all humanity a few slaps, but in so interesting a way! In other

words,--this poem is _creative_ where the ordinary “character” portrait

is merely analytic and, generally, unimportant (at least in poetry).

You needn’t be afraid of running too squarely into Eliot with work like

this.

I would like to see you follow out the directions indicated in this

poem--not their downward slant (interesting enough), but (if you get

what I mean) their upward slant into something broadly human. Launch

into praise. _You_ are one who can give praise an edge and beauty,

Allen. You have done so well in a couple of damnations, that I feel

confident in you.

I must close. Bosses brush near my shoulder, and poetry isn’t exactly

encouraged around here. Munson is strong for you with this new poem. I

think he would like it for _Secession_ if _The Dial_ does not take it.

He asks me to inform you that no particular “jargon” is necessary for

_Secession_ contributors. Be your own language--in so pure a way that it

will be noticeable, and you will do well enough.

My hay fever temporarily passes. I peer again on the world with

subsiding eyes. It’s a pleasure to think you of down in the clear

valleys, and feeling so top-spinning! Marriage! Well, it sounds ominous.

Think well, beforehand. Are you easily satisfied? That’s the main

danger.

105: TO ----

[_Cleveland_] _July 27th, ’22_

Dear ----: --/--/ I feel like shouting _EUREKA_! When Munson went

yesterday after a two weeks visit, he left my copy of _Ulysses_, a huge

tome printed on Verge d’arche paper. But do you know--since reading it

partially, I do not think I will care to trust it to any bookbinder I

know of. It sounds ridiculous, but the book is so strong in its

marvelous oaths and blasphemies, that I wouldn’t have an easy moment

while it was out of the house. You will pardon my strength of opinion on

the thing, but it appears to me easily the epic of the age. It is as

great a thing as Goethe’s _Faust_ to which it has a distinct resemblance

in many ways. The sharp beauty and sensitivity of the thing! The

matchless details! I DO HOPE you get a copy, but from what Munson says

there is little hope unless you can get some friend of yours in Europe

to smuggle it in in his trunk. It has been barred from England. It is

quite likely I have one of two or three copies west of New York. _The

Dial_ ordered six and has only been able to get one so far, etc., etc.

Munson, who met Joyce several times in Paris last summer, tells me that

the Man Ray photo of J. in the recent _Vanity Fair_ is really not a good

resemblance. The face is not so puffy-looking, nor the odd ocular

expression. Man Ray, you know, has his own individual temperament to

express! Ah, these interesting photographers. Joyce dresses quietly and

neatly. Is very quiet in manner, and, Anderson says, does not seem to

have read anything contemporary for years. His book is steeped in the

Elizabethans, his early love, and Latin Church, and some Greek;--but the

man rarely talks about books. I rather like him for that. --/--/

Joyce is still very poor. Recently some French writers headed by Valery

Larbaud, gave a dinner and reading for his benefit. It is my opinion

that some fanatic will kill Joyce sometime soon for the wonderful things

said in _Ulysses_. Joyce is too big for chit-chat, so I hope I haven’t

offended you with the above details about him. He is the one above all

others I should like to talk to.

I have been very quiet while Munson has been here. Tonight, however, I

break out into fresh violences. --/--/ And thanks, dear -- -- -- --, for

the newspaper bundle. In the _Times_ I enjoyed Colum’s account of

Joyce’s early Dublin days, although he told me the story of the Yeats

encounter several years ago. --/--/

106: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Aug. 7th, ’22_

Dear Gorham: I sent 27 Sommer things off to Anderson last Saturday,

feeling very much as though I were delivering Plato into the hands of

the Philistines. Anderson has been very nasty besides being “just

another fool.” I have been shocked, sensation very rare with me, with

the contents of your letter relating his manoeuvres. He is evidently

none too sure of the quality of his work so highly praised by Rosenfeld.

I realize that he insulted me while he was here--it wasn’t necessary to

tell fibs to avoid my company--but I shall beam on until all hope of his

getting Bill an audience has vanished. In that event, I judge by your

letter that we can depend fairly certainly on Frank, and Stieglitz,

perhaps. I haven’t much hope in Anderson’s interest in anything

connected with us now, after disgracing himself the way he has. Encore,

regardez, mon ami,--don’t let kittens out of the bag before they have

claws again if you want to be an effective iconoclast. --/--/

Why haven’t I received _Secession_ #2 yet? Your letter of last week

mentions it, and I am anxious to get at it. I got the new _Broom_ with

your Epstein trans. in it and Matty’s very clever translations and

criticisms. Delightful “Blahs” and “blagues,” too! Matty has developed a

“high hand” attitude in criticism that is (to anyone ignorant of his

subject matter, direct contact with his authors, etc.) as effective and

compelling as Pound’s. I am beginning to see little Caesarian laurels

sprouting on his brow. His (anti-Zwaska) Caesarian attitude is not a

little pleasing. Matty and Julius! Surely they have both gone into Gaul

with somewhat the same stones, though Matty will have to wait until he

gets back to the good old U.S.A. to be divided into three parts!

I am glad Frank took so well to your book. I have since wanted to read

it over again, say fresh in the morning to better absorb its many

compact and rich allusions toward your esthétique. Stupid and hasty as

this letter is--I hope you won’t think I am satisfied with it. I’ve got

so much on my mind that you must bear with me until a cool day comes

when I shall not be so tired at night, nor the garret study be so hot as

it is this evening. I enclose some poetry.[20] I think the first part of

“Faustus” is about right now. Tell me what you think of the thing as a

whole. Read it entirely over from the first so as to judge better of my

graduation from the quotidian into the abstract, and tell me frankly

what you think about it. I have been so close to the thing for so long a

time that at present I cannot judge it _synthetically_ at all. The third

part has not been even started yet. The other evening I had a hint for

the speed that I wanted in something like the following [four] lines:

-- -- -- --[20] But I have found nothing yet to satisfy me at all. It must

be a dramatic comment done somewhat in a new idiom. I have got to search

awhile yet for it. Meanwhile I have a homely and gay thing to show you

that I did yesterday out of sheer joy, “Thinking of Bill----“, etc.[21]

-- -- -- --

Joyce is being savoured slowly--with steady pleasure. Meanwhile I find

_Enormous Room_ a stimulating article. It has taught me to better

appreciate Cummings’ poetry--although the things in the last _Broom_ of

his are, I think, boresome. _Since Cezanne_ by Bell has interested me a

good deal.

_Dominick!_ O yes! I think we both were bored with the climacteric after

your departure. I have not seen him since!

“The Bottom of the Sea” is too deep for me to model yet as I want it. I

haven’t forgotten it though.

107: TO CHARMION WIEGAND

_Cleveland, O._ _Aug. 15th, ’22_

Dear Charmion: You will be delighted to know, I’m sure, that the

Anderson trans. matter has been settled. I got a letter from Huebsch

last week saying that he had given Herr Reeck the rights--so _some_

letters got across the waters anyway! This suggests the mention that

Anderson was here about six weeks ago while Munson was visiting me, and

came out to the house for an evening. The man’s personal charm supported

the impressions his letters had given me (we had never actually met

before) but I have been very disappointed in him since he went down to

N. Y. afterward and stirred up a petty rumpus in _The Dial_ office,

about something that Munson told him [in Cleveland] on the subject of

Rosenfeld’s position as a critic, etc. The story is not worth going

into, but it showed Anderson to be surprisingly petty and malignant, not

to say untactful. La-La! Well,--he hasn’t yet destroyed my taste for

some of his work yet--despite that most of my friends don’t value his

work above a Russian rouble.

“Pandora’s Box” is a good piece of “general” criticism. It is more

social than literary and is the kind of thing, above all, that Americans

need to read. I hope you find a good market for it. You must let me know

where and when your things are published so I can look for them and get

them.

Since Munson brought me my copy of _Ulysses_ I have been having high

times. A book that in many ways surpasses anything I have ever read. 800

pgs! You must read E. E. Cummings’ _Enormous Room_ for a real

inspiration in language and humanity.

The first issue of _Secession_ does not come up to the second, now out.

You should get it somewhere there in N. Y. and read Cowley’s two poems

and Josephson’s story. “The Oblate.” --/--/

108: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Friday night_

Dear Gorham: -- -- -- -- My enthusiasms, the hot weather, the onset of hay

fever, the infinite and distasteful detail work I have been doing at the

office, and the suspense of finding another position, etc., etc., have

brought me very near the ground. In fact, for several days this week I

have been unable to retain food and have thought at any moment something

would snap and I would go into a million pieces. I haven’t felt as

“dangerously” for several years. But I am picking up today--since I have

got the job matter settled and informed the office that I shall not be

with them after the first of September. This bit of news I had the

wonderful pleasure of delivering to them just as my boss was starting in

on a series of gentle reprimands, etc., and so instead of ever hearing

the end of that rigmarole--I was begged to remain at a higher salary.

Where I am going however, I shall have complete charge of the copy work

and shall receive ten dollars a week more to start with and a

considerable raise within sixty days. I was literally urged to come with

them--a new agency--which was a unique pleasure for me!

Well,--we heard from Anderson! Rosenfeld’s remarks along with those of

several other artists present at the time of the “trial” were quoted in

effect that S[ommer] was not a notable man at all--had no personal

vision--his work a mixture of half-a-dozen modern influences--and

_couldn’t draw a head on man, woman or animal_! Anderson was very sorry

he had had anything to do with any adverse criticism, etc., etc. So much

for that. Dear G., let us create our own little vicious circle! Let us

erect it on the remains of such as Paul Rosenfeld. But enough of this

for now.

Of course I’m enthusiastic about “Faustus and Helen” now! Who wouldn’t

be after your comments. However,--when it comes to the last section--I

think I shall not attempt to make it the paragon of SPEED that I thought

of. I think it needs more sheer weight than such a motive would provide.

Beyond this I have only the surety that it is, of course, to include a

comment on the world war--and be Promethean in mood. What made the first

part of my poem so good was the extreme amount of time, work and thought

put on it. The following is my beginning of the last part--at present:

--/--/ How neatly here is violence clothed in pathos! --/--/

109: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Thursday_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ My vacation has given me the time to read _Rahab_

and finish _Ulysses_. _Rahab_ is a beautiful book. It has a synthetic

beauty that is more evident than the lyric note behind _Ulysses_. It

contains beautiful language--Frank is a real artist--no doubt about that

and of course way beyond Anderson when it comes to craft. My only doubt

about _Rahab_ comes in with the question, as yet undecided, as to

whether or not there isn’t a slight touch of sentimentality attached to

Frank’s “mysticism.” Certainly the man is not a _realist_--certainly he

is sincere. There is also this question--Fanny’s later development, so

far as I can see, does not put her far enough beyond her initial

appreciation of life at the time she is deserted by her husband to

warrant the stress on that thesis which Frank evidently intends as the

_motif_ of the book. As a picture of crucifixion the book is

superb--but, after all, what tangible gain has Fanny got out of it

except an attitude that Butler outlines in some such words as I believe

I have repeated to you: “No one has ever begun to really appreciate

life, or lived, until he has recognized the background of life as

essentially Tragedy.” It is from this platform of perception that I

conceive every artist as beginning his work. Does Frank consider Fanny’s

course as complete where he leaves her at the end of _Rahab_--or isn’t

there still something more to be said? The reason I pose this question

is because Stephen Daedalus has already gone as far as Fanny before

_Ulysses_ begins. The _Portrait_ took him beyond where Fanny sits at the

end of _Rahab_. Of course it would stretch reality a great deal,

probably, to take Fanny Dirk any further--but, in my mind, it is just

this stubborn impossibility (however nonresponsible Frank may be) that

makes my judgment of _Rahab_ suffer in the light of _Ulysses_. Perhaps I

am unfair and “all off.” Both books, however, have a strong ethical and

Nietzschean basis and reading them at the same time as I have, I am

irresistibly drawn into comparisons. Frank is so young that he has lots

of time to benefit by Joyce and even go further--although I doubt if

such will will be done for a hundred years or more. The point is--after

all--I am interested in Frank and thank you for putting me out of

prejudice. As an American today he is certainly in the front line--no

doubt about that at all. --/--/

110: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Monday_

Dear Gorham: I’m glad that Burke meets you in approving the “sea”

poem,[22] and I’m sorry that it is, or at least appears to be beyond me

to make changes in it. Of course you know I have never been very

enthusiastic about it. Its only value in my mind rests in its approach

to the “advertisement” form that I am contemplating and, I think, spoke

to you about. It is a kind of poster,--in fact, you might name it

“Poster” if the idea hits you. There is nothing more profound in it than

a “stop, look and listen” sign. And it is the conception of the poem

that makes me like the last line as I do--merely bold and unambitious

like a skull & cross-bones insignia. --/--/

111: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Tuesday_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ God! I wish I were on the New York scene, what with

the items of your last letter. I was especially thrilled at the Damon

book on Blake. You know how much Blake has always interested me. I’ve

always thought Damon a very capable figure, and hope you get the

Vers-Libre histoire for _Secession_. Sam [Loveman] was telling me today

that he had seen some notice of issue #3 of that notable sheet in

Sunday’s [N. Y.] _Times_, with a mention specific of Matty too.

I answered jh last Saturday, with a slight reprimand for the impotence

of her “kick” at you in _The L. R._ I should rather like to see her

aggravated a little longer, which is pretty sure to occur. I, as you

know, have a certain admiration for Cuthbert Wright, but I felt his

anti-DADA article in _The D. D._ was rather weak. I’m so tired of seeing

the _young_ turn their heads and wag them despairingly at every modern

manifestation. They don’t need to accept them all,--but it’s so

uninspiring to see them turn back to Greece and quote some Meleager

lyric as the paragon of all time. This gesture from Wright was a little

disappointing to me. Allen Tate writes me that he has returned to

Nashville and joined the Ransom crowd there again. Your rejection of

“Choresis” I presume was largely responsible for this return to the

native.

I’m about fed up on furnaces and hot water heaters. I’ve been very

attentive to the little ad. stories now for quite awhile. It’s about

time that I did something about “F and Helen” again. To make things

better or worse (I don’t know which yet) I’ve almost fallen in love. I

may add, an object more than usually responsive this time. --/--/

112: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Sept. 29th, 1922_

Dear Gorham: What would you think of my using the first part of “F and

H” alone? Calling it just “For the Marriage of,” etc. This would seem

rather disappointing, I know, but I feel that it is fate. This

conviction comes after much thought and especially after writing one

added verse (originally intended for part 3) to be inserted as the

next-last, coming just before the “eye motif.” I feel that with this

added the first part becomes an intensity that is definitely developed

and closed,--and that further additions such as part 2 are

irrelevant--at least anti-climactic by position. And as for the third

part, I am interested enough in the aeroplane, war-speed idea but I

think it would be better developed under a different sky. Let me know

what you think of the idea;--what you think of the additional verse

also.

“The Springs of Guilty Song,” or former part 2, would do very well, I

think, to send to _Broom_. Of course, I want to try _Dial_ on “F and H,”

before it goes anywhere else. Its present length will slightly overlap

two pages.

I am glad to have the _Secession_ program in advance. You’re travelling

right along it seems. I wish I could spare an erection, as suggested,

but I have to save them all for Seiberling Tires, Furnaces, etc. I have

a widening interest, you see, in tilling the public mind with my ideas

of excellence. Frankly, I’m tired to death. The new job has been beyond

expectations in many ways, but it simply keeps my imagination tied down

more than ever. I have so much to do.

Allen Tate is in Cincinnati visiting his brother and may come up here

for a couple of days. I really enjoy admonishing him--Matty is not the

only one who has “disciples.” By the way,--I guess that latter gent got

peeved again at my last letter. I preface every letter now, you know,

with the prediction that its contents will absolutely disgust him beyond

the desire to answer--someday, perhaps already, that prophecy will be

fulfilled.

I can’t spare the money to put into reproductions of Bill’s [Sommer]

pictures for some time. It will cost over twenty dollars just for six.

It will be two months before I even break clear from the dentist and hay

fever bills of the year,--so I guess we can’t send Loeb anything yet.

--/--/

113: TO CHARMION WIEGAND

[_Cleveland_] _Oct. 9th, ’22_

My dear Charmion: --/--/ I’ve changed jobs only to find myself

completely imprisoned now, there’s so much more to do. It’s copy work

(as before) only now I have about _all_ of it to write. I haven’t had

time to think about poetry for weeks and letters have to wait. There are

birth pangs to go through with, even in so staid a thing as advertising

copy and ideas. I hammer my forehead for hours some days trying to get

an idea that will be read, and loosen purse strings. --/--/

About _Ulysses_--I paid $20.00 for mine, that being the original

subscription price (1-1/2) years ago when I ordered it. But I should

never have got it past the censors and customs had Munson not brought it

all the way from Paris in the bottom of his trunk. I know that already

it is bringing such prices as $200.00-$300.00 (depending on binding and

paper) in some places. Certainly I should never part with mine for any

price. I feel quite luxurious!

I got a beautiful German monograph on Etruscan art the other day. But

the art books I ordered months ago from Halim (Bremen) haven’t yet

arrived. God knows,--I suppose the postoffice found something “obscene”

in the Japanese landscapes somewhere, or the Chinese temples--or the

Egyptian monuments!! --/--/

114: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Oct. 12, ’22_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ Today also brought me the most prodigious book on

Egyptian sculpture that I’ve ever seen. Of course it’s German,--one of

the books I ordered from Halim (Bremen) months ago. I shall gloat over

it many hours.

Looking it over gives one the impression that the children of the Nile

completed every possibility of sculpture long before the Greeks began to

work. The latter added some architectural features, in figures they only

added a few rondures and a certain humanity that is less evident in the

African forms. It’s largely the spacious austerity of Egyptian art that

particularly hits me. --/--/

Williams wrote Bill [Sommer] a memorable letter accompanying his

check (for $25.00) in which he said that Bill got under his

under-drawers!--and went on to say that he was potentially greater than

Marin. It has heartened Bill wonderfully. Such a letter was worth more

than the plaudits of a hundred Rosenfelds. I’d like to meet Williams!

(Repeating this statement so many times won’t do any good I suppose, but

there’s that directness about the man that I know I’d find cleansing.)

I’m sending off “F. & H.” to _The Dial_ today. I’m impatient for the

money--besides that I feel that it is complete and might as well be out

and aired. Having it around stagnates new ideas for me.

Allen Tate sends me a good poem, acknowledges myself and Eliot as his

models--calls me mature and perfect--so that now (with a grain of salt)

I feel vastly superior to Matty. I feel quite jolly tonight! -- -- -- --

O Hell! what can you expect with a gallon of sherry gone since Sunday!

It’s as smooth as Prufrock and is only supposed to be sold to _rabbis_

for religious purposes. Rabbi Crane! What strange conversions there are.

I’ve been reading Rebecca West’s _Judge_ with much delight. She’s the

best exponent of the old novel form I know, and she has fine pathos and

a certain cleanliness that is more than neatness. “Codes” are

interesting after all. As a rabbi and upholder of document and

tradition, I applaud. -- -- -- --

115: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Oct. 25th, ’22_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ You should see me in my luxurious new coat. Light

brown with wide cross-stripes in orange! My progress down the avenue is

attended with awesome gazes, to say the least. From now on, having

broken the spell of modesty and bashfulness, I shall wear what I want

to--providing I can afford it. But I just got a raise,--so maybe I stand

a better chance in the future. --/--/

116: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Nov. 7th, ’22_

Dear Gorham: “F and H” came back from _The Dial_ on Monday. Evidently

Mr. Watson, Jr., has something to say about things as Seldes mentioned

that he was obliged to keep it over time in order to show it to Mr.

Watson, concluding with, “Regrettably, we cannot use it.” Now it is on

its way to _Broom_ along with “The Springs of Guilty Song” (former part

II). I would like to make a vow, if I felt capable of keeping it, not to

send anything again to _The Dial_ for two years. But, of course, I am

merely cutting off my own nose with such tactics.

Matty wrote me quite a long letter from the _Broom_ office in Berlin,

arriving last week. After dissecting the copy of “Guilty Song” that I

had sent him last summer as a sample of what I was doing, he came forth

with the statement that there was damned little stuff of this calibre

being written these days. So I am presuming that he will be glad to

publish that poem, whether or not he fancies “F and H.” This latter he

will probably find too emotional or old fashioned to praise, but I

thought I’d submit it anyway.[23] If you care to, show it to Burke. In

case of its second rejection--I am assuming your continued interest--you

might care to use it in _Secession_. _The Dial_ seems to have abandoned

all interest in publishing American things, or anything, in fact, that

comes to them unheralded by years of established reputation. Certainly,

if the remaining installments of Anderson’s _Many Marriages_ are equal

in stupidity and banality to the first installment, they are going to

make pretty fools of themselves. Anderson’s “naiveté” or what-you-will,

becomes very aggravating.

I am strong with you in my admiration for Burke. I repeat for the

eleventh time, I wish I could be in New York to talk to him, especially

lately do I feel an intense need for contact and conversation with the

right sort of people. I have rather missed Lescaze’s stimulation since

he left, while Loveman, the only other person left here, becomes more

incoherent every day. I am, really, suffering a great deal these days,

and the worst is that I have almost no impulse toward writing. This

wholesale “fertilization” of America by such half-baked people as the

Algonquin gang is one of the most depressing features of all, because it

is without any sense of values. Ben Hecht and Eliot get equal honors in

such company. But at any rate I can rival you in some ways. Where you

have Untermeyer, I can trot out Braithwaite. A letter from Braithwaite

came last week inviting or rather soliciting my “Praise for an Urn” for

the 1922 _Anthology_. At last I shall rub shoulders with Florence [sic]

Wilkinson!

Allen Tate was a week later than expected in getting to N. Y., but you

have probably met him by this time. I am rather looking forward to his

two days here--he has enthusiasm and brains, however, undeveloped his

style may be. Matty’s trans. from Soupault in the last _Broom_ are

undoubtedly clever, but I don’t see how he can rave so about this man’s

conceptions. Matty mentions his recent love for Francis Jammes and

Vielé-Griffin, the latter as being much abler than Laforgue. Where is he

headed for, anyway? His Joyce article was amazing in its lack of

recognition of the great elements in Joyce. I look forward to his final

suicide with Frank. But, after all,--Matty will always keep his head up,

and sniff ominously. --/--/

117: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Nov. 20th, ’22_

Dear Gorham: I am immersed totally in a rush job and will be for a week

or so more. These campaigns are taxing affairs and very confining, so I

can’t write much. But I do want to assure you of my enthusiastic desire

to both write the jacket for your _Frank Study_ and also write a

communication to the Double Skull[24] (delightful name) about it. As

regards the latter,--it will necessarily be very short, as they once

returned a reasonably-sized review I had written on Shaw’s _Back to

Methuselah_ on the argument that it was too long for the comparative

importance of the book! Please send me the proofs as soon as they are

out and I’ll begin.

I hope you enjoyed -- -- -- --. I took the liberty of writing him to look

you up because you had once mentioned a certain interest in him incurred

in Pollard’s _Their Day in Court_. -- -- -- -- is delightful company,

whether he goes in for post-Beardsley attitudes or not. The episodes of

the _Satyricon_ are mild as compared to his usual exploits in N. Y.

during vacations. --/--/

Are you continuing with the advertising instructions? What do you think

of Eliot’s _The Wasteland_? I was rather disappointed. It was good, of

course, but so damned dead. Neither does it, in my opinion, add anything

important to Eliot’s achievement.

I like the admonitions you offered on Macy, etc., in _The New Republic_.

You are developing a tightened hold on criticism that is a favorable

opposite to Mr. Rosenfeld’s rapturous Turner-sunset technique.

118: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Thanksgiving Day ’22_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ I have not seen Sommer for weeks and weeks. He is

very peculiar, never looks you up, never phones or manifests the

slightest interest. I have got tired of ever-lastingly tagging after him

and shall wait until I have some important news for him before I crash

into his cosmos again. I don’t think he ever so much as replied with a

note of thanks to Williams for his purchase and beautiful, generous

tribute of praise. I can’t understand it. But it is perhaps good to

become impersonal in the admiration of art.

Poor -- -- -- --! I feared you would not like him very much. My affection

for him is based on a certain community of taste and pursuit we have

which you will understand. Because he has been mewed up so long with

unpleasant work -- -- -- -- in a city where conversation and letters never

existed--he has, out of sheer ennui, been forced to find entertainment

in ways which have taken the best of him to feed what has become a sort

of obsession. His creative impulse was never very strong, but in his

letters and on his favorite topic you get as strong a satire as

Petronius! Life has tamed him terribly,--yet he has lived a great deal

if the senses mean anything.

I haven’t had time to read all of #3.[25] But I can well understand your

dismay at Matty. With all his boasted time and leisure he ought to have

made a better job of it. And that silly slant at Joyce--putting him

along with Cabell! Matty’s “gay intellectualism” will eventually expose

him to the jibes of a psychoanalyst if he continues in such loose

estimates as his article in _Broom_ on advertising displays. Some things

he says may be true,--but how damned vulgar his rhapsodies become! I

would rather be on the side of “sacred art” with Underwood than admit

that a great art is inherent in the tinsel of the billboards. Technique

there is, of course, but such gross materialism has nothing to do with

art. Artistry and fancy will be Matty’s limit as long as he is not

willing to admit the power and beauty of emotional intensity--which he

has proved he hasn’t got.

Burke has an Egyptian quality of hard and solid speculation. Egyptian

literature is, of course, not my comparison,--but in looking at the

sculpture of that nation one gets the same impression, the same

austerity. I have decided, perhaps I repeat myself, that no advance in

sculpture has been made since the Egyptians so far as essential

plastique is concerned. This after looking at the 200 or so photographs

in a modern German book on the subject that I got recently.

Sam Loveman didn’t like your Saltus review. Said it was scattered, etc.

I haven’t read it. His book on the man and his works is progressing, he

says. I think it will probably be very bad. He is the kind of “critic”

that feels it needful to damn every one else in order to praise. He made

the terrible assertion that “while Saltus was steadily working,

neglected in obscurity, Henry James was applauded in two countries for

his _puking_.” James never did that, whatever else you may say about

him. Ridiculous. Of course I don’t take Sam seriously in any criticism.

The man _Rychtarik_ and his wife are really the best company I have now.

(Note the spelling of his name, correct this time.) His initials are W.

R. I mention this because it would be sad to get his name wrong for that

cover. He was pleased greatly by your acceptance and praise. --/--/

119: TO WALDO FRANK

[_Cleveland_] _Nov. 30th ’22_

Dear Waldo Frank: I have heard through Munson that you care for some of

my poems. Let me take the occasion of _Secession_ #3 to tell you how

powerfully I think you can write in such a story or episode as “Hope.”

This is so fine that I cannot keep [from] writing you.

I never read prose before that flowed with such lyricism and

intensity.--I suppose there are sure to be shocked cries, but the

beautiful manipulation of symbolism in the thing has made your daring

(if it took any) infinitely worth while. Writing like this is a real

legacy, and nothing could be cleaner!

You may be interested in seeing six reproductions of work by Wm. Sommer

that I sent Gorham today. In that case, anyway, this outburst may have

served some purpose.

120: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Dec. 7th, ’22_

Dear Gorham: Frank’s “Hope” struck me so strongly that I wrote him a few

encomiums. I also wrote Fisher, ordering a copy of the Kuniyoshi

monograph. His reply included mention that he failed to get to New York

last week but expected to see you this week; that he would not be able

to publish anything of Sommer’s for some time in any case until he got

some monetary returns from his recent collections, etc. I hope Stieglitz

likes them.

I haven’t heard anything whatever from Tate, not even a rumor. He must

be quite ill, deranged or something. If, by any chance, he is sore at

me, I cannot account for a reason.

Untermeyer’s article was at least decent, it was a non-insulting sort of

bulletin and one of the better sort of things that could happen to

_Secession_ and its group. I was quite surprised that this parodist and

facile assessor could so gracefully rise to the occasion of a new

attitude. Whether we like him or not, his “position” in the American

scene carries some weight, so I rather hope to see him continue his

interest. --/--/

121: TO ----

_Cleveland_ _December 10th, ’22_

My dear ----: My mother will not tolerate wine at the house--so I am

rebelling. I am thinking seriously of moving into permanent private

quarters where one need not be questioned about every detail of life and

where one can be free of the description of one’s food and its contents

and manner of preparation while it is eaten at the table. To this end I

am at present staying for a few days at a hotel. Maybe I shall move out

as above indicated, or maybe I shall go back; it all depends on the

course she takes. Because I dread to leave her on account of the

position it puts her in I hope she will be more lenient with me. I don’t

ask much, and the little wine I succeed in getting has never resulted in

embarrassing her. I never “carry on” at the house or annoy her. The fact

of wine, alone, is what infuriates her puritanical instincts. All this

is tedious and maudlin stuff to write, but that very fact makes it in

some measure an excuse for my present dull outlook on things. Life is

hard enough, God knows, without having to put up with a hundred extra

restrictions in order to just have a room and a bed! --/--/

How _do_ you manage such exquisite delights every time you journey to

the Metropolis?! Your letter was superb. I can understand, also, how you

failed to “mix” with Munson and his friends. You are so much of the

Nineties that it was scarcely to be expected. You had the same reactions

as H---- would have had to such a meeting. I am not saying that there is

any single attitude toward art that is final. I do contend, however,

that Munson, Burke, Cummings and Waldo Frank all have something new and

fine to offer. And whether or not you agree with their critical “lingo”

you will nevertheless find their creative results interesting and vital.

In last week’s _New Republic_ there was an article on the group by Louis

Untermeyer, non-committal but intelligent, on _Secession_ and its

contributors in which I was mentioned casually. We are all of us quite

different. Our differences from the attitude of the present

generation-in-power are in each case individual. I shall probably never

amount to anything--but the others that I have just mentioned will do

things of considerable importance. Frank, in _Rahab_, and Burke in his

criticisms and in a number of short ideographic stories, have already

established places in contemporary letters. --/--/

I am quite disrupted. Family affairs and “fusses” have been my

destruction since I was eight years old when my father and mother began

to quarrel. That phase only ended recently, and the slightest

disturbance now tends to recall with consummate force all the past and

its horrid memories on pretext of the slightest derangement of

equilibrium. As I write I am ensconced at my office. Everybody else is

away, for it is Sunday. Yet, in forgetfulness someone was very kind in

leaving a gallon of delicious sherry. I have already had two good

glasses of it without permission. I shall probably have two more before

I go to see Isadora Duncan this evening and go back to the uninteresting

room at the hotel. For without my books around me and my pictures and my

Victrola with its Ravel, Debussy, Strauss and Wagner records--I am

desolate, I find. I have grown accustomed to an “ivory tower” sort of

existence. I am succeeding very well in my advertising writing. Salary

raised and promises of more and decent people to work with who enjoy

Joyce, Cabell, Pater and the best things of life. Yet even so--Life is

meagre with me. I am unsatisfied and left always begging for beauty. I

am tied to the stake--a little more wastefully burnt every day of my

life while all America is saying, “every day I am growing better and

better in every way,” and Dr. Coué makes his millions!

I am just enough filled with wine at the time of this letter to make

confessions that will bore you. Yet, oddly enough, it is at such times

that I feel most like writing you and H----. He is floating under the

shades of bamboos up the rivers of China under the dragon stars. You and

I are in offices--seeking the same things--but my gift of humor has left

me today. --/--/

122: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Tuesday, Dec. 12th_

Dear Gorham: You, as well as some of my local friends, must share in my

excitement at seeing Isadora Duncan dance on Sunday night. She gave the

same program (All Tschaikowsky) that she gave in Moscow for the Soviet

celebration and, I think, you saw it in New York recently. It was

glorious beyond words, and sad beyond words too, from the rude and

careless reception she got here. It was like a wave of life, a flaming

gale that passed over the heads of the nine thousand in the audience

without evoking response other than silence and some maddening

cat-calls. After the first movement of the _Pathétique_ she came to the

fore of the stage, her hands extended. Silence,--the most awful silence!

I started clapping furiously until she disappeared behind the draperies.

At least one tiny sound should follow her from all that audience. She

continued through the performance with utter indifference for the

audience and with such intensity of gesture and such plastique grace as

I have never seen, although the music was sometimes almost drowned out

by the noises from the hall. I felt like rushing to the stage, but I was

stimulated almost beyond the power to walk straight. When it was all

over she came to the fore-stage again in the little red dress that had

so shocked Boston, as she stated, and among other things told the people

to go home and take from the bookshelf the works of Walt Whitman, and

turn to the section called “Calamus.” Ninety-nine percent of them had

never heard of Whitman, of course, but that was part of the beauty of

her gesture. Glorious to see her there with her right breast and nipple

quite exposed, telling the audience that the truth was not pretty, that

it was really indecent, and telling them (boobs!) about Beethoven,

Tschaikowsky, and Scriabin. She is now on her way back to Moscow, so I

understand, where someone will give her some roses for her pains.

I am in great ferment, and have been staying at a hotel for several days

until I talk to my mother about some things that will determine whether

or not I shall continue to live out at the house any more. They are

little things, mostly, but such little things accumulate almost into a

complex that [is] too much for me to work under. There is no use in

discussing them here, but just the constant restraint necessary in

living with others, you may appreciate, is a deadening thing. Unless

something happens to release me from such annoyances I give up hope of

doing any satisfactory writing. -- -- -- --

123: TO WILLIAM WRIGHT

_Cleveland, O._ _December 24, 1922_

Dear William: However much boredom you may find in Warren--I assure you,

it will not be as strenuous as the hot water I am stewing in. The

Pittsburgh Water Heater surely has been on my mind the last three weeks,

and the burden is still unshifted. I am growing bald trying to scratch

up new ideas in housekeeping and personal hygiene--to tell people why

they need more and quicker hot water. Last night I got drunk on some

sherry. Even in that wild orgy my mind was still enchained by the hot

water complex,--and I sat down and reeled off the best lines written so

far in my handling of the campaign. All of my poems in the future will

attest this sterilizing influence of HOT WATER!

Nothing happens here, either. I am grateful only for wine. I have

neither women or song. Cleveland street car rides twice a day take out

all hope of these latter elements. I think of New York and next summer

when the present is too sharp (or is it dull!). But the main faults are

not of our city, alone. They are of the age. A period that is loose at

all ends, without apparent direction of any sort. In some ways the most

amazing age there ever was. Appalling and dull at the same time. --/--/

PART TWO

New York

(1923-1925)

1923

124: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Jan. 5th, ’23_

Dear Gorham: I cannot remember a more hectic month than the last unless

I recall some of the old bivouacs of New York days, when I ricochet-ed

“from roof to roof” without intermission. Two rush campaigns to write,

gifts and remembrances to buy and send to far too many people--suppers,

parties and evenings--much tossing of the pot,--“prison, palace and

reverberation”! That is why I’ve been so slow in writing.

At present I’m flabbergasted and dull. But my carousing on New Year’s

Eve had one good outcome; it started the third part of “Faustus and

Helen” with more gusto than before. When I catch my next breath I hope

to carry it on to the end. --/--/

Waldo Frank wrote me a very cordial letter in answer to my written

praise of “Hope.” I should like to be in New York now and hear his

lectures at the Rand School. I am hoping to make my visit along in May

or June when the weather is mild and some of the shows are still going.

I shall appear with a new cane that was given me for Christmas. Despite

my objections to cane-carrying last summer, I find it very pleasant.

Puce-colored gloves complete the proper touch.

I notice that _Broom_ has been consistently weak in poetry. Cowley’s

things have been by far the best--but (with all due modesty) I think

that my “F. and H.” will be an improvement over their past offerings.

Matty appears to rest in clover and periwinkles, what with the

Guggenheim millions and the international sweep of editorial authority.

(In accepting my poems he merely mentioned that he thought Loeb also

liked them!) What do you think of his _Broom_ ad in the Dec. number? He

asked my opinion on the grounds that literary ads were generally the

flattest in the world. It seems “attractive” enough to me--but the

prize-subscription offer I balk at as a matter of policy in such a type

of magazine.

Stieglitz voiced an old feeling of mine about Bill’s [Sommer] work--the

lack of finish evident in so much of it. This has always pained me. As a

whole, his comments seem very just. But I tend to differ with him on

one point in common with other critics who are so obsessed with the

importance of current developments in art that they fail to recognize

certain positive and timeless qualities.

I refer to the quality of line in Sommer’s work. That has, in

particular, nothing more to do with modern work than the draughtsmanship

of Michelangelo. It is something that may not distinguish a man as a

great innovator or personality--but it is, for all that, a rare and

wondrous quality. From what you write Stieglitz has the sense to

recognize this quality and to value it. But a person like Georgia

O’Keeffe, who has so distinctly her own horn to play, is scornful of

everything short of evolution and revolution.

It is a relief once in awhile to detach one’s judgment from such

considerations as hers, and to look at a piece of work as totally

detached from time and fashion, and then judge it entirely on its

individual appeal. I think that in Sommer’s case, you, Williams and

myself are appreciators of this kind. I can enjoy Bill’s things

regardless of their descent, evident or otherwise, from French or German

artists of the last generation. He has certain perfections which many of

the most lauded were lacking in. God DAMN this constant nostalgia for

something always “new.” This disdain for anything with a trace of the

past in it!!! This kind of criticism is like a newspaper, always with

its dernier cri. It breeds its own swift decay because its whole theory

is built on an hysterical sort of evolution theory. I shall probably

always enjoy El Greco and Goya. I still like to look at the things

Sommer makes, because many of them are filled with a solid and clear

beauty.

I have frequently wondered why you were so laggard in your interest in

Eliot. Your recent announcement brings me much pleasure of anticipation.

Please let [me] know what you find in Eliot. With your head knocked

against Burke’s over such a topic there ought to be some fine

illuminations. You already know, I think, that my work for the past two

years (those meagre drops!) has been more influenced by Eliot than any

other modern. He has been a very good counter-balance to Matty’s

shifting morale and violent urgings. My amusement at Matty’s acceptance

of “F and H” considerably heightened by the memory of several sly hints

against Eliot which some of his more recent letters had contained.

There is no one writing in English who can command so much respect, to

my mind, as Eliot. However, I take Eliot as a point of departure toward

an almost complete reverse of direction. His pessimism is amply

justified, in his own case. But I would apply as much of his erudition

and technique as I can absorb and assemble toward a more positive, or

(if [I] must put it so in a sceptical age) ecstatic goal. I should not

think of this if a kind of rhythm and ecstasy were not (at odd moments,

and rare!) a very real thing to me. I feel that Eliot ignores certain

spiritual events and possibilities as real and powerful now as, say, in

the time of Blake. Certainly the man has dug the ground and buried hope

as deep and direfully as it can ever be done. He has outclassed

Baudelaire with a devastating humor that the earlier poet lacked.

After this perfection of death--nothing is possible in motion but a

resurrection of some kind. Or else, as everyone persists in announcing

in the deep and dirgeful _Dial_, the fruits of civilization are entirely

harvested. Everyone, of course, wants to die as soon and as painlessly

as possible! Now is the time for humor, and the Dance of Death. All I

know through very much suffering and dullness (somehow I seem to twinge

more all the time) is that it interests me to still affirm certain

things. That will be the persisting theme of the last part of “F and H”

as it has been all along. --/--/

125: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Jan. 10th, ’23_

Dear Gorham: Your _Study_ came day before yesterday. So far I have only

had time for a single reading, but am ready to offer whole-hearted

congratulations. It IS much improved from the fragment I read last

summer, and I think you have made a criticism that, besides being quite

exact and fair, is dramatic--and very constructive beyond the actual

boundaries of the man and subject concerned. I shall go over it again

this evening. By early next week I hope to have some words for the

jacket written,--later a review for the Double-Skull. I’ll send them

both to you as soon as they are ready, for suggestions or “corrections.”

By this time, according to a recent letter of yours, you will be

something of a “copy” critic also.

Sommer’s gratitude to you for your interest and success in helping him

will never reach the frenzied pitch of a letter,--but I know that he

feels quite deeply grateful. As I am his official and unofficial

secretary in other matters I include mention of his sentiments here. I

must admit that I personally got a greater “thrill” out of the news than

any personal acceptances have given me for many a day.[26] -- -- -- --

126: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Jan. 14th, ’23_

Dear Gorham: This (enclosed)[27] may, or may not yet be finished.

Anyway, I think it is rounded enough as it is to be somewhat enjoyed.

Some things about it surprise and satisfy me. It has a bit of Dionysian

splendor, perhaps an overtone of some of our evenings together last

summer. It is so packed with tangential slants, interwoven symbolisms,

that I’m not sure whether or not it will [be] understood. However, I am

sure that it perfectly consorts with the other two parts of the poem as

I intend them:

Part I

Meditation, Evocation, Love, Beauty