_New York City_ _Jan. 6th, ’24_
Dear Charlotte: Your lovely gift and long beautiful letter made me feel
a little bit ashamed that I had written you such a hasty and doubting
letter. Isn’t it funny that just about the time one doubts humanity and
begins to take some kind of active resentment against it, along comes
fresh proof that there are, after all, many noble people that make life
worth all kinds of trouble for the reward of having known them, kissed
or shaken hands! I have been looking into your eyes--whether you knew it
or not; you looked into mine in that letter--and I’m grateful for the
confidence that you had in me, even though something made you doubt me a
little. I really am just the same old person--just as moody and
unreliable as ever I was in Cleveland when we used to exchange our
troubles and get rid of them in some music or over a book or a picture.
What I said about “prostituting my mind,” etc., I really meant. I _do_
resent it--and because so many others as good and better than myself
must also do the same in order to live and breathe doesn’t help things
at all. I shall keep right on talking that way--and probably not
practice what I preach at all. I seemed very bitter in my letter because
my mother seemed to think that a vacation was an extravagance--while I
knew that it was the only thing for me to do in order not to go all to
pieces. I feel now like a new man--better than I can ever remember
feeling and realize that the country and hard work out in the keen
sparkling air are the finest things in the world. Of course I should
like to have stayed in the mountains even longer, but I know that I must
now get to work again and earn some money. And I don’t mind it a bit,
either, feeling as I do.
I have two appointments tomorrow and I don’t think I shall have such a
slow time finding work as before. It is a better season, “business is
better” and I have had “experience in N.Y.” which counts some. --/--/
171: TO ISABEL AND GASTON LACHAISE
[_New York City_] _Jan. 9th --’24_
Dear Mme. and Gaston! There are no memories stronger than the spiritual
outlines of rock and branch so bare and fine as winter mountains yielded
me while I was with you and two precious others recently. So, in a
moment of enthusiasm for all things great I must inscribe a greeting and
regret (thus floridly!) that we can’t presently walk and talk “all
together.” And, as a sort of apology, offer the enclosed poem[32] to
your appreciation, or extenuation of such in relation to at least one
other admiration of yours--reflection to my better moods. Especially do
I send it--because I feel it had its first thought in the dance of
music, flesh and stone wherein you live always--you two! -- -- -- --
172: TO GORHAM MUNSON
[_New York City_] _Jan 9, ’24_
Dear Gorham: Back in the welter again. I’ve been so pressed with various
desires and necessities that the thought of writing any one at all has
seemed nearly impossible. I’ve lunched and dined with Burke and the
Cowleys, seen the new Stieglitz clouds, Sunday-breakfasted with Jean
[Toomer] and Lisa [Munson], argued an evening with Rosenfeld and Margy
[Naumburg], chatted with O’Neill, Macgowan & R. Edmond Jones--Wescott,
Matty, Light, and been to concerts with Jean--etc., etc. All this
besides running around and looking for jobs. As all these contacts have
brought so much in my mind to talk to you about, I began to and still do
despair of including anything but the above catalogue in this letter. It
will, after all, be only about a week longer before I see you and then
we can have an extensive outburst. Meanwhile--I somehow feel about as
solitary as I ever felt in my life. Perhaps it’s all in the pressure of
economic exigencies at present--but I also feel an outward chaos around
me--many things happening and much that is good but somehow myself out
of it, between two worlds. Of course none of this would be were I
creating actively myself. It certainly helps things a lot that you are
working on so well and it is very gratifying to see Burke and Cowley
gravitating constantly more parallel to your initial theories and
convictions. Cowley’s gaucheries in admitting his mistakes and _tactics_
are really funny. But I can’t write you more details now.
Along comes a letter from my father this morning offering me a position
with him as travelling salesman! This is unacceptable, of course, even
though I now can’t complete the rent on the room for the rest of this
month and simply don’t know what is going to happen. If worse comes to
worse I can go back to Woodstock and stay with Fisher who urgently
invited me to stay a month or so whenever I liked. Just now I haven’t
made up my mind about anything. I have no more illusions about
advertising, yet that is the only thing I can talk about at all.
Leffingwell (at Thompson’s) is out of town, so I have not been able to
attempt any reinstatement there. The lady at _Machinery_ says she wants
to use me there sometime and _may soon_, but the vacancy so far doesn’t
exist there. Hal Smith at Harcourt seems to be neither sufficiently
interested in me nor my work to fulfill any of my hopes there. And so it
goes. There’s no point in going into more details.
Jean’s new hygiene for himself is very interesting to me. He seems to be
able to keep himself solid and undismayed. Certain organic changes are
occurring in us all, I think, but I believe that his is more steady and
direct than I have been permitted. My approach to words is still in
substratum of some new development--the same as it was when we talked
last together--and perhaps merely a chaotic lapse into confusion for all
I dare say yet. I feel Stein and E.E.C.[33] as active agents in it,
whatever it is, and I’ve a short poem to show you soon which presents
more interesting speculation to myself than it does to anyone else.
Suffice to say that I am very dissatisfied with both these interesting
people and would like to digest their qualities without being too
consciously theoretical about it.
Stieglitz liked the drawings I brought back--and you’ll like the one of
Brown I think. I’d like to paint and draw half the time, and write the
rest. “Prince Llan” is published and I admire its strenuous prose.
--/--/
173: TO HIS FATHER
_New York City_ _January 12th, ’24_
My dear Father: Your letter has been on the table for longer than I had
expected. I had wanted to answer it more promptly in view of your real
consideration in offering me such a favorable opportunity in your
business, but I’ve been so altogether occupied since I came back from
Woodstock in looking around here for a new position, interviewing
people and answering advertisements, that there has been only the
evenings--when there was either someone in to call, or I was too tired
to write you as I wanted.
By all this you will probably have guessed that I don’t find it
practical to accept your offer, kind as it is, and beyond all that I
must also add in justice to us both that it would also not be honest of
me to do so, either. I realize that in order to be understood in both
the above reasons it is necessary that I at least attempt to explain
myself in more detail than I may have gone into with you ever before,
and as that is rather an unwieldy process within the limits of a letter
I may only touch on a few points about myself and try to make them
clear, leaving the rest to some later date when you may care to look me
up in New York, provided I am here at your next visit. In what follows,
father, I hope that you will take my word for it that there is no
defense of my personal pride involved against any of the
misunderstandings that we may have had in the past. I have come to
desire to talk to you as a son ought to be able to talk to his father,
that is, in a pure relationship, without prejudices or worldly issues
interfering on either side. That was the basis of my first letter[34] to
you in three years--that I wrote a little over two months ago, and I
hope it may be the basis of your interpretation of what I am writing you
now. I, at least, am doing the most honest thing I know to do in
whatever I have said to you and in whatever I may say to you since that
time. That’s a pledge from the very bottom of my heart.
In your letter you carefully advise me to turn a deaf ear to your offer
if I find my advertising work so absorbing, pleasant and profitable
that I might in later time regret a transfer into so widely divergent an
enterprise as your business. You were perfectly right in presupposing
that I had a considerable interest in this sort of work, for in less
than three years I had got into the largest agency in the world and was
to all outward appearances very much engrossed in carrying myself
through to a highly paid and rather distinguished position.
But if there had been any chance to tell you before I should have stated
to you I had no interest in advertising beyond the readiest means of
earning my bread and butter, and that as such an occupation came nearest
to my natural abilities as a writer I chose it as the quickest and
easiest makeshift known to me. Perhaps, in view of this, it will be
easier for you to see why I left my position at J. Walter Thompson’s at
the last of October, unwise as such an action would be understood from
the usual point of view. I went to the country because I had not had a
vacation for several years, was rather worn with the strain of working
at high speed as one does in such high geared agencies, and above all
because I wanted the precious time to do some real thinking and writing,
the most important things to me in my life. The director of the copy
department asked me to see him when I came back to New York, but he has
not returned yet from out of town and I don’t know whether or not I
shall return there. I told Grace that they had asked me to return
definitely because I didn’t want her to worry about me: she has enough
worries as it is. But so much for that....
I think, though, from the above, that you will now see why I would not
regard it as honest to accept your proposition, offered as it was in
such frankness and good will. I don’t want to use you as a makeshift
when my principal ambition and life lies completely outside of business.
I always have given the people I worked for my wages-worth of service,
but it would be a very different sort of thing to come to one’s father
and simply feign an interest in fulfilling a confidence when one’s mind
and guts aren’t driving in that direction at all. I hope you credit me
with genuine sincerity as well as the appreciation of your best motives
in this statement.
You will perhaps be righteously a little bewildered at all these
statements about my enthusiasm about my writing and my devotion to that
career in life. It is true that I have to date very little to show as
actual accomplishment in this field, but it is true on the other hand
that I have had very very little time left over after the day’s work to
give to it and I may have just as little time in the wide future still
to give to it, too. Be all this as it may, I have come to recognize that
I am satisfied and spiritually healthy only when I am fulfilling myself
in that direction. It is my natural one, and you will possibly admit
that if it had been artificial or acquired, or a mere youthful whim it
would have been cast off some time ago in favor of more profitable
occupations from the standpoint of monetary returns. For I have been
through some pretty trying situations, and, indeed, I am in just such a
one again at the moment, with less than two dollars in my pocket and not
definitely located in any sort of a job.
However, I shall doubtless be able to turn my hand to something very
humble and temporary as I have done before. I have many friends, some of
whom will lend me small sums until I can repay them--and some sort of
job always turns up sooner or later. What pleases me is that so many
distinguished people have liked my poems (seen in magazines and mss.)
and feel that I am making a real contribution to American literature.
There is Eugene O’Neill, dramatist and author of _Anna Christie_,
_Emperor Jones_, _The Hairy Ape_, etc.; Waldo Frank, probably the most
distinguished contemporary novelist; and others like Alfred Stieglitz;
Gaston Lachaise, the sculptor who did the famous Rockefeller tomb at
Tarrytown and the stone frescoes in the Telephone Building; and Charlie
Chaplin, who is a very well-read and cultured man in “real life.” I wish
you could meet some of my friends, who are not the kind of “Greenwich
Villagers” that you may have been thinking they were. If I am able to
keep on in my present development, strenuous as it is, you may live to
see the name “Crane” stand for something where literature is talked
about, not only in New York but in London and abroad.
You are a very busy man these days as I well appreciate from the details
in your letter, and I have perhaps bored you with these explanations
about myself, your sympathies engaged as they are--so much in other
activities, and your mind filled with a thousand and one details and
obligations which clamour to be fulfilled. Nevertheless, as I’ve said
before, I couldn’t see any other way than to frankly tell you about
myself and my interests so as not to leave any accidental afterthought
in your mind that I had any “personal” reasons for not working in the
Crane Company. And in closing I would like to just ask you to think some
time,--try to imagine working for the pure love of simply making
something beautiful,--something that maybe can’t be sold or used to help
sell anything else, but that is simply a communication between man and
man, a bond of understanding and human enlightenment--which is what a
real work of art _is_. If you do that, then maybe you will see why I am
not so foolish after all to have followed what seems sometimes only a
faint star. I only ask to leave behind me something that the future may
find valuable, and it takes a bit of sacrifice sometimes in order to
give the thing that you know is in yourself and worth giving. I shall
make every sacrifice toward that end.
P.S. When you next write better address me care of G. B. Munson, 144
West 11th Street. I may not be able to hold on this room longer than the
end of Jan.
174: TO HIS MOTHER
[_New York City_] _Jan 24--’24_
Dear Grace and Grandma: --/--/ Along came a note from B. W. Huebsch, who
evidently had some proposition to talk to me about. It only said to
phone him, which I did today, and we’re to have lunch together on
Saturday just for the personal pleasure. I told you, I guess, that I
find him one of the smartest men in New York--and he certainly is the
most cultured publisher here. I am thinking of submitting my book to him
when it is ready, in preference to Gorham’s publisher who is pretty
commercial and pettifogging.
To give you many details of my activities and contacts since I got back
from the country would take four or five pages. I was pretty blue for
awhile and poor, as you know, but that didn’t prevent my plunging into a
lot of varied company, meeting new people and revisiting the old, dining
here and there and enjoying free tickets to modern concerts, plays and
exhibitions of modern painters, etc. New York is abristle with its first
acceptance of European art and artists this year. It’s become
fashionable for the high-hatted uptowners now to buy Matisse’s
paintings, Picasso, and all the other cubists, and there’s a great
amount of “patronizing” going on. And talk, talk, talk!!! My visiting
list has reached its limits. I’ll be glad to quietly come home evenings
and work when I get into the treadmill again. I know about the most
interesting and vital people in New York, but there isn’t time to take
advantage of all that constantly. Some day when we get together you will
be astonished at the flow of anecdotes and amusing trifles that’ll just
naturally begin to rise out of me, but which can’t be written about.
--/--/
175: TO HIS MOTHER
[_New York City_] _Jan 29th, ’24_
Grace dear and Grandma: --/--/ I started in yesterday morning, and have
been working like a tiger since then, of course. So far I like boss and
office very much. There is only one other copywriter besides myself, and
he is an old friend of Gorham’s. The two stenogs and office boy are the
only otherwises. I, personally and alone, occupy the nicest niche I ever
sat in--15 stories up, and the corner of the building with windows, of
course, on two angles. Perfect privacy and quiet and a desk and chair
that are quite massive and comfortable. Every hour or so the office boy
comes in, inquiries if I want anything; otherwise I press a neat button
on the corner of the desk and service is immediate.
I always get mixed up in some strange topic. This time it is a book on
cheese, how happy it makes you and how good it is for tissues, stomach,
and bowels, etc. A large importing house wants it, and I’ve been having
to write it in no time. I hope to finish it tonight. Life certainly is
amusing. I’ve been quite happy up there the last two days. --/--/
I don’t believe that I told you about my second interview with B. W.
Huebsch, the publisher. It was at his request, and when I got there and
found what he wanted I fairly whooped. His office isn’t ready for it
yet, but he said that he had been wishing that in time I might enter his
employ as a kind of personal assistant to him and his responsibilities.
The combination of my advertising and literary judgment, he said, was
rather rarely found, and he thought I would be able to read manuscripts,
attend to certain details of printing, and superintend the publicity
where certain others would be too limited for that range. I felt
considerably complimented, especially after so brief an acquaintance
with him. As you [know], that sort of work is what I have been looking
for for years in New York.
Well, inasmuch as I told him that I was at least temporarily bound to
work at this agency, I would have to postpone his offer at least a few
weeks. But he wants me to take lunch with him a couple of weeks from now
and let him know how I like my present work, and discuss the prospects
with us both as they stand then. Right now, I am only interested in
making as good as I can at this job, and I’m not going to let that
prospect, alluring as it is, absorb me much. However, it’s fine to have
it to occasionally ponder, and, of course, something may develop.
I had loaned my room during the last few days to Elizabeth Smith and the
writer she was working for. Last night when I came in she was almost in
tears,--said he had just paid and fired her, and that he couldn’t stand
the room. Well,--Eliza was a little foolish in not finding herself a
separate room away from the club sorority, Smith Girls Home, or whatever
it is--so that she could have carried on his work under pleasanter
conditions. I know that in time I should certainly have had to ask [her]
to seek other arrangements because--after all, on Sat. afternoons, I
would have felt the lack of a place to go and work. She’s out of the
Macy book store possibilities, too, now--and running all over town for
something else today. It’s too bad, but I did my best,--even to the
extent of putting down money for a phone installation (which she said
was necessary) when I don’t have any use for it myself. She’ll find
something, though, I’m sure. --/--/
176: TO HIS MOTHER
[_New York City_] _Feb 3rd, ’24_
Grace, dear: --/--/ Yesterday afternoon I had a long talk with CA
[Crane] up at the Waldorf. He phoned me at my office yesterday morning
and asked for that time. He had been here since the morning before, but
had been so tied up with engagements, he said, that there had not been
time even to phone me before. Frances [Crane] was also along, but I
didn’t have to see her. They are returning home tonight.
We talked from 3 until five--and in the end it was very satisfactory. He
began in the usual arbitrary way of inquisition into my attitude toward
business life, etc., just as though there had been no exchange of
letters and recent understandings on that subject, and did his best to
frighten me into compromises. I parried these thrusts very politely,
although it was very hard many times not to jump up and begin
declaiming. However, I realized this time that my ordinary language
about such topics is simply beyond his comprehension, so I quietly kept
on doing my best to explain myself in terms that he would understand and
not resent any more than possible. He finally ended by accepting me
quite docilely as I am: in fact there was nothing else to do, especially
as I did not so much as hint that there was anything I hoped he would do
for me--or was ever planning that he would do for me.
Then he talked to me, as usual about his own affairs, and finally came
around to asking my advice on a new product of his, its proper naming,
and the best way to advertise it. He is going to send me data on the
subject, and wants me to write some ads for him about it! You see, from
this alone (and I have also other grounds to judge by) that he really
respects me. He inquired in detail about you and Grandma and seems to
have the right sort of interest in you. He also came around to agree
that I was quite exemplary of both sides of my family in not being made
of any putty--knowing what I want to do, and sticking it out despite
adversities. At parting he spoke of his anticipations of more extended
contact with me on his next visit here, urged me to write him often, and
thrust a greenback in my pocket. So that’s that!
The work at the office goes smoothly enough to reassure me somewhat. My
copy on the cheese book went over without any changes whatever, and that
makes one write the next job a whole lot faster and imaginatively. Your
own dear special has just come, and I’m awfully glad to know that things
are alright and that my letters are worth something to you in spite of
the haste they always have to be written in.
Tonight is the opening of a new play at the Provincetown Theatre and I
am invited to attend with Sue [Jenkins], who is the wife of James Light,
the stage director. Through Light and O’Neill I know the whole crowd
over there now, and it is very interesting to watch this most
progressive theater in America in the details of its productions,--going
behind scenes, watching rehearsals, etc. I have changed my opinions, or
rather prejudices, about Claire Eames since meeting her there and
watching her work in two recent productions. She isn’t at all stiff or
pompous,--and as an artist she is very flexible and exact. O’Neill, by
the way, recently told a mutual friend of ours that he thinks me the
most important writer of all in the group of younger men with whom I am
generally classed.
Last night I was invited to witness some astonishing dances and psychic
feats performed by a group of pupils belonging to the now famous mystic
monastery founded by Gurdjieff near Versailles (Paris), that is giving
some private demonstrations of their training methods in New York now.
You have to receive a written invitation, and after that there is no
charge. I can’t possibly begin to describe the elaborate theories and
plan of this institution, nor go into the details of this single
demonstration, but it was very, very interesting--and things were done
by amateurs which would stump the Russian ballet, I’m sure. Georgette
LeBlanc, former wife of Maeterlinck, was seated right next to me (she
brought them over here, or was instrumental in it, I think) with
Margaret Anderson, whom I haven’t seen since she got back from Paris in
November. Georgette had on the gold wig which the enclosed picture will
show you, and was certainly the most extraordinary looking person I’ve
ever seen; beautiful, but in a rather hideous way. --/--/
177: TO HIS MOTHER
[_New York City_] _Feb 13th, ’24_
Dear Grace: There’s a pack of troubles to listen to shortly so don’t
mind too much.
In the first place, I have been sick with the grippe for three days, but
am getting better. In the second place I lost my job on Monday
last--because, plainly, the man who had employed me had over-estimated
the volume of his business. I had heard that he was prone to
extravagances of such sort from one of the other men in the firm before
I took the job, but I took the chance. He couldn’t say a thing against
my work or copy as an excuse, but he had to invent some fantastic
pretenses that I saw through right away as grounds; it was a dirty deal,
and the only hope I have is that Huebsch is still considering me for the
position there, which, if it eventuates, will certainly be better than
anything I have ever had yet. To make matters worse, just a moment ago I
got a letter from the man from whom I have been renting this room and
its furniture. He is coming back to take possession again on the first
of March! I have only fifty dollars on me in the meantime and my 30
dollars rent for this remaining month on the room has not been paid.
So, you see how matters stand. I am going to try some feature articles
for the newspapers while I am looking for another job, but I have not
yet got paid for them yet, nor even made connections, nor written them.
_I shall do my best._ Right after this letter I am going to write CA
[Crane] and ask for a _loan_ of a hundred dollars to carry me over. If
he can’t do that at 6% interest I think he is rather careless, to say
the least. Otherwise I shall fare as best I may among my friends. They
have been so kind, and they so respect my genius that probably you need
not worry about anything serious happening to me. I feel quite
indomitable. I shall not return to Cleveland to live permanently, at any
rate, until I am such a wreck that I might as well go there as anywhere
else. I am so sorry about all this because I had been planning on saving
the first sixty dollars possible to save and returning for a week end to
see you and dear Grandma. You don’t know how I have longed to see you:
But we must wait. It may be [a] long or a short time still before that
is possible. There are opportunities for quick and plentiful money in
the newspaper field if I am lucky. --/--/
178: TO ALLEN TATE
_NYC_ _March 1st ’24_
Dear Allen: Somehow I imagine that you aren’t finding it so bad to stand
on the platform and dispense judgment and information after all!
Whatever your attitude may now be, I must say that I am damned glad
that you got the job,--first, because its remunerations may bring you to
me here in NY, and less selfishly, because I think that the activity
will put you in better spirits, whatever erosions and disgusts the job
may incidentally incur.
I’m dead tired.... You will note by the above [address] that I am
finally moved. It has taken more time and consternation than seems
believable,--all for just a few clothes, books, knicknacks and pictures:
but while I’m against my will now in a furnished room, I must admit that
it seems good to get to a comfortable bed that hasn’t ridges in the
middle! and to have someone to clean things up for me (the old room I
had was conducive to more dissipation and unease in some ways than any
place I have ever been, and I seem to have had to get away before
realizing it!). Forgive all this domestic bosh, please,--and consider my
mind for just what it is at present,--a melon sort of pulp, recuperating
into better shape.
Your comments on my poems were so sharp, yet at the same time so
pleasing to me, that I had to read them to Munson when he came in
yesterday. “Possessions,” it gives me much joy to know, hit you squarely
as you say: I cannot help thinking that more of “Recitative” will get
over better at some later date if you happen to re-read it. It _is_
complex, exceedingly,--and I worked for weeks, off and on, of
course,--trying to simplify the presentation of the ideas in it, the
conception. Imagine the poet, say, on a platform speaking it. The
audience is one half of Humanity, Man (in the sense of Blake) and the
poet the other. ALSO, the poet sees himself in the audience as in a
mirror. ALSO, the audience sees itself, in part, in the poet. Against
this paradoxical DUALITY is posed the UNITY, or the conception of it (as
you got it) in the last verse. In another sense, the poet is _talking to
himself_ all the way through the poem, and there are, as too often in my
poems, other reflexes and symbolisms in the poem, also, which it would
be silly to write here--at least for the present. It’s encouraging that
people say they get at least some kind of impact from my poems, even
when they are honest in admitting considerable mystification. “Make my
dark poem light, and light,” however, is the text I chose from Donne
some time ago as my direction. I have always been working hard for a
more perfect lucidity, and it never pleases me to be taken as wilfully
obscure or esoteric.
Your second version of “Light” was much improved, I think. But still I
don’t like it as well as that charming [the rest of this letter is
lost].
179: TO CHARLOTTE AND RICHARD RYCHTARIK
_New York City_ _March 5th, ’24_
Dear Charlotte and Richard: --/--/ This afternoon I went around to an
exhibition of sculpture by Maillol (who is an honest workman, but not
very creative), and in the same rooms were some large canvasses by
Rousseau (le douanier) the first I have ever had the chance of seeing.
Next door was a limited but splendid exhibition of Picassos, Braques,
and Duchamps. This is a very active year in New York for painting,
shows, etc. Modern painting seems to have come into its own here at
last. Stieglitz’s wonderful new cloud photographs are also on show at
the Anderson Galleries this week along with Georgia O’Keeffe’s work. And
there is the Independents at the Waldorf and an exhibition of Marins
which I have not seen yet. What with one’s work, one’s friends, books,
writing, eating and sleeping, things are certainly rushed! It almost
makes me long for quiet Cleveland. It really is good to be thoroughly
bored once in awhile, don’t you think so?
I have seen a great deal of Eugene O’Neill and his wife lately. They
have been wonderfully kind to me, invited me out to their house in the
country. O’Neill thinks my poetry is better than that of any other
American writing today, and in many ways we seem to agree about things.
I wish you could both see the charming play called _Fashion_ which they
are running now at the Provincetown Theater. An old play written
seriously in 1840, but the funniest thing in the world to see now. Such
costumes and settings by Robert Edmond Jones! You may have seen in the
papers what a terrible row is being stirred up all over the country by
the prospect of acting O’Neill’s new play, _All God’s Chillun Got
Wings_, in which a white woman marries a Negro. There will be some kind
of mobbing or terrors on the first night, and I expect to be there with
my cane for cudgeling the unruly! He is frightfully upset about it, and
receives terrible threats and insults through the mail from the KU KLUX
Klanners. This country is very immature as yet. Such actions prove that
thoroughly.
I didn’t hear Bloch when he was here, and have been awfully sorry about
that. In fact I have been to only three concerts this winter. One was a
miserable performance by Hofman of his own feeble compositions. The
other two were more stimulating, but rather exhausting. Bartok, Varèse,
Arnold Bax, Casella, Szymanowski, Lord Berners, and Schoenberg, the last
one named is my preference among them all as being the only one who
approached the magnificence of Bloch’s work as I still remember it from
Cleveland performances.
I have just finished reading a new novel by Waldo Frank in mss. which is
very exciting,--a sort of spiritualistic detective story that carries
one into abysmal terrors. Frank has been staying with the Arabs in an
oasis in the Sahara Desert for several months, and is probably now in
Spain. Munson and I have had some fine letters from him, although he is
in a broken state of mind and has had much trouble this last year.
--/--/ By the way, I think you would both enjoy reading a new book of
his, a collection of essays, which has just come out. It is called
_Salvos_, and contains his notable essay on Jacques Copeau, and the
Theatre de Vieux Columbier.
Munson is very busy writing his new book.... It will be a series of
criticisms on present-day influences and personalities in American
letters. _The Dial_ will soon publish one of them,--on the critic, Van
Wyck Brooks, who got the _Dial_ prize this last year. Did I write you
that I met and talked an evening with Paul Rosenfeld a few weeks ago? He
had some good things to say, but flopped into a frightful sentimentality
before the evening was over. When attacked he becomes like an
over-nervous prima donna and is really quite funny. I’m afraid we shall
never become intimate although I hear he recently asked Frank’s wife if
she thought I would like to be asked out to dine with him!?--
I am writing,--a little now and then. About the same speed as always,
never as much as I should like but enough to help me keep some faith in
myself. In a few days you will get the next number of _Secession_ with
my “Faustus and Helen” printed complete at last! I think you will also
enjoy the essay by Frank. I enclose the last poem I have written, which
you may not like at all. I haven’t much idea what you will say. I would
to God that I could get more done on my poem, to be called _The Bridge_,
but it cannot be the least bit hurried, not when one has to spend so
much time at the office. --/--/
180: TO HIS MOTHER
[_New York City_] _March 8th_
Dear Grace and Grandma: --/--/ It has been like spring here. The weather
veering from bright skies into showers. The wind blew a little snow this
morning, but not a handful, and now there is brilliant sunlight, the
wind continuing in almost a gale. It is always so pleasant to hear you
mention spring in your letters: the note is so genuine. And while I like
winter, too, and don’t respond as entirely to that season as you do, I
sympathize with you much. It always makes me hope that we shall have a
place in the country some time where I can come and go, and bring
friends occasionally that will charm you, while you can have endless
days and weeks for quiet reading and gardening. That beats life in the
city all to pieces! --/--/
My dear, you know I can’t tell you much more about CA’s letters than I
have been doing without retyping them or forwarding them on for you to
return.[35] I am telling you all there is in them that is definite
enough to matter, and while I have thought of sending them to you to
read successively as they came,--something has made me feel that while
there might be no harm in it, no real injustice, at the same time and in
the sum of things, I think it a little confusing, somehow not quite
right. I can’t put it into better words, but perhaps you will feel what
I mean, and not misunderstand and think me obtuse or ungrateful, or
unfeeling toward you. You see, it’s just because this present
relationship between himself and myself was started on such an entirely
fresh basis, without any more elements of the past entering into it than
could be helped. And also, because, really I don’t yet have much idea as
to how he really feels about me. He is a long time answering my letters,
and I now haven’t heard from him for over two weeks and don’t know when
I’m going to. I don’t feel that there is anything at present between us
but a fragile thread of feeling and communication: perhaps there never
will be anything more. At any rate we can speak on the street without
getting upset about it. --/--/
181: TO HIS MOTHER
[_New York City_] _March 23 ’24_
Dear Grace: --/--/ Before anything else I want to thank you for the fine
long letter you wrote, its assistance and thoughtfulness and its
unwavering confidence in me--the last-named most of all! And the suit
came, too--and seems to look better than ever on me.
Your advice about self-reliance, etc., is, of course, quite right. But
there are times when everyone I know has had to ask for a little help.
This has been one of those times with me:--otherwise you would not have
known by this time quite where even to write me. I went over and saw
O’Neill, but finally didn’t ask him for any loan whatever. Instead,
almost right out of the sky the next day came a cash gift from a friend
of mine who was managing editor of _The Dial_ when my first poem was
accepted there, and who simply had heard from others that I was in a
predicament. Consequently, my rent is now paid for two weeks more, and I
can keep on feeding a few more days. I’ve been invited out for dinner
considerably, and have accepted more generally than I should if I had a
job--for the obvious reason that free meals are a considerable help. The
Habichts last Sunday evening, Claire and Hal [Smith] on Friday night,
and I generally eat with Gorham and Lisa one night a week, if not
oftener. Then there are numerous other friends of mine about whom it is
useless to mention much as they are too unfamiliar to you. I certainly
am developing some interesting and perhaps valuable connections here as
time goes on, and my natural manners seem to induce a certain amount of
popularity and comment. How strange it seems to me sometimes to be
gradually meeting and talking with all the names that I used to wonder
over years ago,--and to find how, in most cases, I am valued as an
individual--for the attributes most natural to myself! It does give me
more confidence than I ever thought I should have.
--/--/ I have a revived confidence in humanity lately, and things are
going to come very beautifully for me--and not after so very long, I
think. The great thing is to Live and NOT Hate. (Christian Science, in
part, I think; and a very important doctrine of belief. Perhaps the most
important.)
I hope that CA will realize just a little bit of this truth before it is
too late for him to think of anything at all,--even his business! But we
are really so far apart, I’m afraid, that I have few ways of knowing
whatever he does think about practically anything. I shall keep on doing
my best to NOT DENY him anything of myself which he can see as worth
realizing (which means _possessing_, also), meanwhile not depending on
him either in thought or deed for anything whatever. He has not answered
my letter yet. And despite what you say about his probable need for
quiet and recuperation, he must be reading his mail all the time. The
trouble is that he might much prefer me off the scene anyway,--and it’s
just possible that such a thought was behind his urging me when he was
last here to go to the Isle of Pines (not a bad idea, I think, myself),
but I realize your feelings on the subject. His problems are many, and I
think he may realize in time that they are more than strictly those
concerned with his business, however much and fast they multiply. What I
love to think about is the way YOU have come through! And myself! It’s a
great game. We may realize that we are always losing, but it means a lot
to realize that, also, all the while you are losing you are also
gaining! And I think we both understand what that means. --/--/
182: TO WALDO FRANK
_Brooklyn, NY_ _April 21st, ’24_
Dear Waldo: For many days, now, I have gone about quite dumb with
something for which “happiness” must be too mild a term. At any rate, my
aptitude for communication, such as it ever is!, has been limited to one
person alone, and perhaps for the first time in my life (and, I can only
think that it is for the last, so far is my imagination from the
conception of anything more profound and lovely than this love). I have
wanted to write you more than once, but it will take many letters to let
you know what I mean (for myself, at least) when I say that I have seen
the Word made Flesh. I mean nothing less, and I know now that there is
such a thing as indestructibility. In the deepest sense, where flesh
became transformed through intensity of response to counter-response,
where sex was beaten out, where a purity of joy was reached that
included tears. It’s true, Waldo, that so much more than my frustrations
and multitude of humiliations has been answered in this reality and
promise that I feel that whatever event the future holds is justified
beforehand. And I have been able to give freedom and life which was
acknowledged in the ecstasy of walking hand in hand across the most
beautiful bridge of the world, the cables enclosing us and pulling us
upward in such a dance as I have never walked and never can walk with
another.
Note the above address [110 Columbia Heights], and you will see that I
am living in the shadow of that bridge. It is so quiet here; in fact,
it’s like the moment of the communion with the “religious gunman” in my
“F and H” where the edge of the bridge leaps over the edge of the
street. It was in the evening darkness of its shadow that I started the
last part of that poem. Imagine my surprise when E---- brought me to this
street where, at the very end of it, I saw a scene that was more
familiar than a hundred factual previsions could have rendered it! And
there is all the glorious dance of the river directly beyond the back
window of the room I am to have as soon as E----’s father moves out,
which is to be soon. E---- will be back then from S. America where he
had to ship for wages as ship’s writer. That window is where I would be
most remembered of all: the ships, the harbor, and the skyline of
Manhattan, midnight, morning or evening,--rain, snow or sun, it is
everything from mountains to the walls of Jerusalem and Nineveh, and all
related and in actual contact with the changelessness of the many waters
that surround it. I think the sea has thrown itself upon me and been
answered, at least in part, and I believe I am a little changed--not
essentially, but changed and transubstantiated as anyone is who has
asked a question and been answered.
Now I can thank you for the wisdom of your last letter to me, and most
of all for your confidence in me. (It is strange, but I can feel no
place for paragraphs in this letter!) (Yet one goes on making
paragraphs.) It came at the very moment of my present understanding, and
it is as though it, in some clairvoyant way, included it. Only, I so
much wish you were here these days for you are the only one I know who
quite encircles my experience. I shall never, of course, be able to give
any account of it to anyone in direct terms, but you will be here and
not so far from now. Then we shall take a walk across the bridge to
Brooklyn (as well as to Estador, for all that!). Just now I feel the
flood tide again the way it seemed to me just before I left Cleveland
last year, and I feel like slapping you on the back every half-hour.
Malcolm Cowley was very nice in telling me about an opening in the
office of Sweet’s Catalogues (architectural and engineering), and for
the last two weeks I’ve been up there at five dollars a week the better
salary than Thompson’s gave me. The work involves no extraneous elements
like “human interest” and such bosh, albeit a great deal of care and
technical information: but so far I’ve been able to straddle it, and
here’s hoping.
If it hadn’t been for the delicacy and generosity of people like Gorham,
Sue Light, Stewart Mitchell, and at the last, E----, I might have been
back in Cleveland long ago. My family did, I suppose, what they could,
but finally stopped at everything but my carfare back. I’m glad now that
I refused that. My father is still silent after over two months since,
when I asked him for a slight loan. The past would evidently like to
destroy me, at least I can interpret things in no other light.
But you, Cummings and Gorham are good people to talk to, and I guess I
[can] get along without the past entire! And my eyes have been kissed
with a speech that is beyond words entirely.
Allons! but I have written few poems during all this rumpus. I enclose
what I have,--the “Lachrymae Christi” written two months ago, and a kind
of sonnet written last week and, still unfinished.[36] -- -- -- --
183: TO HIS MOTHER
[_Brooklyn_] _May 11th, ’24_
Dear Grace and Grandma: I am told that this section of Brooklyn around
here (Brooklyn Heights) is very much like London. Certainly it is very
quiet and charming, with its many old houses and all a little different,
and with occasional trees jutting up an early green through the
pavements. I have just come back from breakfast and saw some tulips
dotting the edge of one of the several beautiful garden patches that
edge the embankment that leads down to the river. It certainly is
refreshing to live in such a neighborhood, and even though I should not
succeed in acquiring a room that actually commands the harbor view I
think I shall always want to live in this section anyway. Mr. ----, who
has such a back room in this house, has invited me to use his room
whenever he is out, and the other evening the view from his window was
one never to be forgotten. Everytime one looks at the harbor and the NY
skyline across the river it is quite different, and the range of
atmospheric effects is endless. But at twilight on a foggy evening, such
as it was at this time, it is beyond description. Gradually the lights
in the enormously tall buildings begin to flicker through the mist.
There was a great cloud enveloping the top of the Woolworth tower, while
below, in the river, were streaming reflections of myriad lights,
continually being crossed by the twinkling mast and deck lights of
little tugs scudding along, freight rafts, and occasional liners
starting outward. Look far to your left toward Staten Island and there
is the Statue of Liberty, with that remarkable lamp of hers that makes
her seen for miles. And up at the right Brooklyn Bridge, the most superb
piece of construction in the modern world, I’m sure, with strings of
light crossing it like glowing worms as the L’s and surface cars pass
each other going and coming. It is particularly fine to feel the
greatest city in the world from enough distance, as I do here, to see
its larger proportions. When you are actually in it you are often too
distracted to realize its better and more imposing aspects. Yes, this
location is the best one on all counts for me. For the first time in
many many weeks I am beginning to further elaborate my plans for my
_Bridge_ poem. Since the publication of my “Faustus and Helen” poem I
have had considerable satisfaction in the respect accorded me, not yet
in print, but verbally from my confrères in writing, etc. Gorham has
made the astounding assertion that that poem was the greatest poem
written in America since Walt Whitman! Malcolm Cowley has invited me to
contribute about a dozen poems to an anthology that he is planning to
bring out through a regular publisher, and I am inclined to assent, as
the other contributors are quite able writers and it will be some time
before my _Bridge_ poem is completed and I bring out my efforts in
individual book form. --/--/
184: TO HIS MOTHER
[_Brooklyn_] _June 19th ’24_
Dear Grace: The “wind-up” of your last letter was far from gratifying
and I am sorry that anything so common as my usual lack of time for
writing should have given you the impression of indifference or
ingratitude on my part. Now--lest I get no other seconds before Sunday
in which to write you, I’m going to get this off--for tomorrow evening
I’ll be tied up with a kind of picnic to Coney Island that the office is
giving and there won’t be a moment before midnight for myself.
--/--/ I wish I could be more interested in politics, but I guess it
takes a different kind of mind than mine and a different education. You,
however, seem stimulated very much by the spectacle and it makes me
almost wish that you would become more active in some work of that sort.
As for myself this last week--I’ve been most unhappy. My uric acid
resulted in urethritis which has been very painful and nerve-wracking. A
steady diet of buttermilk has finally relieved me, however, and I am
going to continue it for some time yet. I’m looking better now than when
you saw me in Cleveland but get neuralgic immediately as soon as I
deviate the slightest from my diet. I was in a perfect panic for several
days, fearing I had a venereal disease, but a complete examination of my
body and urine disproved any trace of that. I know now, however, just
how one is paralyzed with fear at any such suspicion. Believe me, it’s
awful! --/--/
185: TO GORHAM MUNSON
[_Brooklyn_] _July 9th, ’24_
Dear Gorham: --/--/ I do want to thank Lisa [Munson] especially--however
late--for the last and very pleasant evening at your place. Allen
[Tate] enjoyed it, he told me, more than any evening he had had in NY,
and I admit to a gratifying sense of excitement when I left that
recalled some of the earlier Munson-Burke-Toomer-etc. engagements that
took place before the grand dissolution, birth control, re-swaddling and
new-synthesizing, grandma-confusion movement (of which I am probably the
most salient example) began. Allen has a very good mind and a kind of
scepticism which I respect. I got very few chances to really talk with
him, but I suspect that at least we have established an idiom or code
for future understandings which may make our correspondence at once a
simpler and more comprehensive pursuit. The boy left NY in a frightfully
feverish state, however, and I am a little worried about what’s
happening to him since. He was to have written over a week ago. I shall
be pleased to know what he eventually comes to think about this
bronco-busting city. I liked his sense of reserved opinion on some
matters, and it may well be that a place like NY means less to him than
to the usual young literary man.
I have just re-read your Eliot article in _1924_, and hope I may
congratulate you again on some very accurate estimates and constructive
motives. The little magazine is better than I thought it might
be,--really quite sensible looking, and better in its initial contents
than several issues of _The Trans-Atlantic Review_ that I have seen.
(Even Seaver’s poetry surprises me!) It certainly is to be hoped that
the _Secession-Broom_ crowd can supply it to the point of crowding out
the ever willing members of the milky way that flutter into every little
magazine around the place.
I envy you the long walks and cool evenings. The office and all it means
gets rapidly unbearable again with this anvil weather. I feel less
querulous today, however, as E. is back with me again--to stay an
indefinite brevity but under much more favorable circumstances than
before. -- -- -- --
186: TO HIS MOTHER
[_New York City_] _Aug. 12th ’24_
Dear Grace & Grandma: I hope you got the postcard--it was all I could
muster up for the time being. Three more hellishly hot days since and at
4 this morning it began to rain. I hope it pours for days--as I have
been having queer feelings in my head from lack of sleep, swilling
spells and all the nervous tremors that go with such a state of
disorder. You may be glad to be in a place where you can have some
privacy, go riding in the country and take your time about things. If
you were once to pile into a steaming, rushing mob in the subway where
the stinks of millions accumulate from day to day--you’d see how I feel
about the next day’s work after a sleepless night. And when one goes to
one’s room afterward, believe me, it isn’t to write letters! There isn’t
much you can do in N.Y. in the summer but work & complain. I seem to be
doing both, I guess. --/--/
I don’t know what CA’s doing these days as I never hear from him. And
I’m not going to try to keep up a one-legged correspondence. I think of
him entirely too much however--as a poisonous and unnatural person--whom
it puzzles me to feel any attitude whatever toward, because from all
angles he is so baffling. If he would lose all his money and feel
himself disgraced I might come to have some feeling for him better than
hatred. But now--I can only think of him in profane terms. But enough of
this! I’m in a trap that will probably confine me the rest of my life,
so I might as well laugh at such a world as my imagination qualifies me
for.
When people like Gorham & Waldo Frank ask me why I don’t write more, it
fairly makes me rage. They--with money supplied them and their time all
their own!
But there’s no use in my going on like this when I know it will
displease you. You _will_ have _letters_ though!
187: TO HIS MOTHER
[_Brooklyn_] _Aug 17th--24_
Dear Grace and Grandma: --/--/ The last few days have been cool enough
to allow me a slight recuperation from the mood in which I last wrote to
you. I also admit feeling better, due to a long talk I had the other
evening with Waldo Frank, just back from abroad, on the present
situation and hopes for the artist in America, etc. In order to make
some money, Frank has signed up for a literary lecture tour beginning
next March, which will take him through the middle west and to
Cleveland. He is planning on calling on CA for a little persuasive
exercise in arousing CA’s interest in me. I told him that I certainly
wanted him to meet you, whatever else he did while there, and that he is
planning on. You, I’m sure, will give him readier welcome than the
chocolate maggot.
Frank has been showing some of my work to several of the finest writers
in France (most all of whom read English very well) and says there will
even be a little audience there for my first book (when it comes out!).
But that will be years from now, at my present rate. Even so it’s not
so bad. Conrad and Anderson did not begin to write until they were over
thirty-five. And Frank seems to think that I have written a few classics
already. I can allow my best, and that only, whatever happens; there are
too many others writing trash and near-trash these days for me to envy
them. --/--/
188: TO WALDO FRANK
[_Brooklyn_] _9/6/24_
Dear Waldo: Your love and thought were so welcome! For I had wanted to
see you; and I was afraid that I had proved not very encouraging of
(perhaps) your ideas of myself--I refer to my doldrums when we met last.
And now--I can’t tell you how glad I am that you know and realize me
more firmly. And, I know, I can thank you for all this without
apologizing for my real despair and torture at the time--and that still
tracks me a good share of the time.
The above[37] is an attempt at an approximation to the accompaniment of
your own words--an “even so” and “All hail!” to a love that I have
known. If it can give you anything like the illumination that the poem
by Jimenez has given me--I shall not be sorry I copied it out for you.
189: TO HIS MOTHER
[_Brooklyn_] _Sept. 14th, ’24_
Dear Grace and Grandma: I have just come back from a breakfast with Sam
[Loveman], and he has left to spend the rest of the day with the widow
of Edgar Saltus (whom you must have heard him talk about enough to
identify). I have been greeted so far mostly by his coat tails, so
occupied has Sambo been with numerous friends of his here ever since
arriving; Miss Sonia Green and her piping-voiced husband, Howard
Lovecraft (the man who visited Sam in Cleveland one summer when Galpin
was also there), kept Sam traipsing around the slums and wharf streets
until four this morning looking for Colonial specimens of architecture,
and until Sam tells me he groaned with fatigue and begged for the
subway! Well, Sam may have been improved before he left Cleveland, but
skating around here has made him as hectic again as I ever remember him,
and I think he is making the usual mistake of people visiting NY, of
attempting too much, getting prematurely exhausted, and then railing
against the place and wanting to get back home. This last alternative is
really what I am expecting him to do, although he has not yet finally
decided. But he does think that NY is too swift for him--and perhaps it
is, I don’t know. Sam is so often in an unsettled state of mind,
however, that it is hard to know in what direction to urge him. --/--/
So far, his most coherent and welcome conversation has been about you,
Grace, and several matters that you seemed to think were inadvisable to
put on paper to me.
But why you have been so cautious, or sweetly shy, I’m at a loss to
understand, because I certainly would never be timorous about writing
you any news about myself, however intimate, and feeling quite sure
enough that you would not be apt to quote it either far or near--just
from the very facts of our relationship. However, I don’t want you to
think that I in the least minded hearing such delightful news quite
orally from dear old Sam: good news is too welcome, however it comes.
And now I want you--or rather want to reassure you about something that
I have intended to write for some time, and in which you must believe my
fullest and most intense sincerity is voiced.
When grandma wrote me awhile ago about Mr. Curtis and his devotion to
you--describing as she did, such a human and very lovable person, I was
exceedingly happy. But when--later in the course of the letter she
mentioned that you felt that no alliance was worth anything that “broke”
our relationship--that made me very worried and sad. (I have spoken to
you about this attitude of yours before, and you should not persist in
assuming [that] what I feel is a somewhat biased and un-natural attitude
toward it. I also feel that you are unduly influenced by what Zell
[Deming] has to say on such subjects, and you should know that she is a
very different type of personality than you and is in a very different
relationship to life. The same differences--you should be aware of in
whatever opinions you hear from other people on the same subject. And
remember that people--sometimes no matter how much they like you--are
quite ready to sacrifice your personal happiness to prove or falsely
prove their own merely personal theories, etc.) What I want to repeat to
you again--and with emphasis--is that I, first, have an incessant desire
for your happiness. Second, that I feel you are naturally most happy--or
would be, given the proper opportunity--as a married woman. And thirdly,
that I have perfect faith in your ability to select a man that loves you
enough, and who has spirit and goodness enough to not only make you
happy,--but to please _me_ by his companionship. And you must remember,
that _whoever you chose and no matter what the circumstances might be,
no such element could ever affect our mutual relationship_ unless you
positively willed it,--which doesn’t seem likely by the undue
circumspection you feel about the matter.
You must remember, dear, that nothing would make me happier than your
marriage--regardless of such matters as money. And for God’s sake don’t
marry--or at least _seek_ to marry a mere moneybag. It has always hurt
me to hear you jest about such matters. A few material limitations are
not so much to the heart that is fed and the mind that is kept glowing
happily with a real companionship. That’s what I want to caution you
now,--and I must speak plainly before it is too late, because you have
made as many mistakes in your life as the average, and I don’t want you
to persist in what is a very sentimental attitude, I fear, regarding my
reactions to your natural inclinations. As the years go on I am quite
apt to be away for long periods, for I admit that the freedom of my
imagination is the most precious thing that life holds for me,--and the
only reason I can see for living. That you should be lonely anywhere
during those times is a pain to me everytime I contemplate the future;
you have already had a full share of pain, and you must accept--learn to
identify and accept--the sweet, now, from the bitter. And that you are
able to do that if you follow your trained instincts--I have not the
slightest doubt. I’m not urging you to do anything you don’t want to;
you, I hope, will see that clearly enough. I only want you to know that
life seems to be offering you some of its ripeness now, and that if you
will stop trying to reconcile a whole lot of opposing and often very
superficial judgments--and recall some of the uninjured emotions of your
youth which have revived, very purely in your heart, I know--you will
better decide _your happiness_ and _mine_ than if you allow a clutter of
complex fears and unrelated ideas to determine your judgment. I shall
always love you just the same, whatever you do; and you know that. I
can’t help but say that I shall respect you even more as a woman,
however, if you learn to see your relationship to life in a clear and
coherent way; and you are doing that, I must say, with more grace and
rectitude every day. --/--/
190: TO HIS MOTHER
_Brooklyn, NY_ _9-23-24_
Dear Grace: I allowed myself the luxury of three roses last Sunday, and
I intend to make it as much a habit as my more persistent taste for
“smokes” and wine will allow me--so pleasant have they made the room
these last three days. But you are already aware of how much flowers
affect me. And I am feeling better gradually as the cool days increase
and the sneezing and nervous fever attending it begin to subside. You
ask me about my summer, and I feel like answering that I am glad you
feel that you have known little about it for summer in a place like New
York (and especially when you are rushed with work as I have been) is
provocative of little but groans and sarcasms. Now it’s over and
“Sweet’s Architectural Catalogue” is ready for press. I may be laid off,
because of this latter fact, because there is very little to do there
for three months following the grand climax of the publication of that
monstrous volume; but whatever happens it wouldn’t be as bad as the
stifling days and nights and the strain of working with your head as raw
as beefsteak. Of course I had always some solace from my happy times
with friends, and I had a little swimming at Long Beach and one weekend
visit to the country, but you know about that already. O’Neill has been
at his place in Provincetown, Mass., all summer, so I have not seen him
as you thought. My happiest times have been with E----, and I am looking
forward to his return again from another South American trip next week.
He is so much more to me than anyone I have ever met that I miss him
terribly during these eight-week trips he takes for bread and butter. He
doesn’t know his father has died during his absence, so it will be a
considerable shock to him on landing.
-- -- -- -- I can scarcely imagine the old house as a foreign property,
perhaps no more standing. It’s so deep in my consciousness and so much
the frame of the past. When it comes to my things, please chuck what
books are in the glass-doored bookcase (never mind the others) in the
drawers of my desk, the only article of furniture which I should like to
keep. If you can’t keep that you might box the books and mss. and send
them on to me here. There are photos, clippings, letters, etc., in the
desk which I should like to try to hold on to. I have gotten so used to
never being sure of next week’s rent, however, that I feel like never
accumulating an extra sheet of paper because it’s painful for me to
think of giving up things that have become a sort of part of me. I
should rise above such feelings, I know, but I haven’t been able to thus
far.
Sam [Loveman] is still here, and sleeping in the back room. His catarrh
improved. What his present plans are--I don’t know, as I have scarcely
had a word with him since last Friday night. He doesn’t evidently think
about spending much time with me.... He has really had enough
opportunity, and even broken engagements on the spur of the moment. It
is all right with me, because I realize that Sam touches life at very
few points where I do, and this even comes into our abstract discussions
of literature, quite naturally, of course, because I see literature as
very closely related to life,--its essence, in fact. But for Sam, all
art is a refuge _away_ from life,--and as long as he scorns or fears
life (as he does) he is witheld from just so much of the deeper content
and value of books, pictures and music. He sometimes talks about them in
terms as naive as an auctioneer would use. Yet he is instinctively so
fine and generous that I will always love and pity him, however much my
admiration is curtailed. I don’t think he will remain in New York much
longer. He is really bound to his family more than we’ve ever realized,
although I have thought of that a good deal. He must have the assurance
of his mother’s attendance and he fancies that the “quiet” of Cleveland
is a more normal environment for him. Well, if he feels that way, it’s
so. Feeling, his own feeling, is the only scale there is to use in such
a matter, and I shall not urge him to stay here against his will--which
couldn’t be done anyway.
I have only written three short poems all summer, although I have had
four previous ones published: two in _The Little Review_ and two in
_1924_, a magazine published in Woodstock. These have brought me the
usual amount of select applause, but no money. I have sent a recent work
to _The Dial_, from which I hope to God I get twenty dollars because I’m
in bad need of a new suit--and that would help. Becky must have mis-read
the _Times_ if she saw any reference to me or a book of mine in it. I am
being urged frequently to publish a volume, and I think I would have no
trouble in finding a friendly publisher, but so far I have been witheld
by my own desire to complete a long poem I am working on,--you have
heard me speak of the _Bridge_ poem--before gathering my things
together. I need one good sized slice in the basket, and _The Bridge_ I
expect to fulfill that part. But a long poem like that needs unbroken
time and extensive concentration, and my present routine of life permits
me only fragments. (There are days when I simply have to “sit on myself”
at my desk to shut out rhythms and melodies that belong to that poem and
have never been written because I have succeeded only too well during
the course of the day’s work in excluding and stifling such a train of
thoughts.) And then there are periods again when the whole world
couldn’t shut out the plans and beauties of that work--and I get a
little of it on paper. It has been that way lately. And that makes me
happy. --/--/
191: TO HIS MOTHER
[_Brooklyn_] _Oct. 21st, ’24_
Dear Grace and Grandma: The last day of my vacation, and somehow the
best! So cold and sharp it is, you might think it time for turkey. You
know how keenly brilliant the atmosphere around these parts can
be--frequently in any season. On such days one gets an even better edge
to this glorious light here by the harbor. The water so very blue, the
foam and steam from the tugs so dazzlingly white! I like the liners best
that are painted white--with red and black funnels like those United
Fruit boats across the river, standing at rest. And you should see the
lovely plumes of steam that issue from the enormous height of the
skyscrapers across the way. I’ve been toasting my feet at an electric
stove, a kind of radio heater that I have in my room, and glancing first
at the bay, then with another kind of satisfaction at my shelves of
books and writing table,--for a long time unable to think of anything
but a kind of keen sensual bliss, that is in itself something like
action--it contains so much excitement and pleasure. --/--/
192: TO HIS MOTHER
[_Brooklyn_] _Nov. 16th--24_
Dear Grace: Another very active week. Luncheon with someone different
every day,--and nearly always someone to take up the evening. But I have
been so interested in several incompleted poems that I’ve sat up very
late working on them, and so by the advent of Saturday felt pretty
tuckered out. There’s no stopping for rest, however, when one is the
“current” of creation, so to speak, and so I’ve spent all of today at
one or two stubborn lines. My work is becoming known for its formal
perfection and hard glowing polish, but most of these qualities, I’m
afraid, are due to a great deal of labor and patience on my part.
Besides working on parts of my _Bridge_, I’m engaged in writing a series
of six sea poems called “Voyages” (they are also love poems), and one of
these you will soon see published in _1924_, a magazine published at
Woodstock and which I think I told you about heretofore.
It darkened before five today and the wind’s onslaught across the bay
turns up white-caps in the river’s mouth. The gulls are chilly-looking
creatures--constantly wheeling around in search of food here in the
river as they do hundreds of miles out at sea in the wakes of liners.
The radiator sizzles in the room here and it is warm enough for anyone’s
comfort, even yours. I feel as though I were well arranged for a winter
of rich work, reading and excitement--there simply isn’t half time
enough (that’s my main complaint) for all that is offered. And the weeks
go by so fast! It will soon be sneezing season again before I know it.
--/--/ He [Eugene O’Neill] seems to have Europe in applause more than
America. That is true of Waldo Frank’s work in France, also, where he
has been much translated and more seriously considered, far more so,
than here at home. The American public is still strangely unprepared for
its men of higher talents, while Europe looks more to America for the
renascence of a creative spirit.
Your letter came last night--was tucked under my door when I came in at
one o’clock. Its tenderness and affection were welcome adjuncts to a
good long sleep. I thought of you, too, just “turning in”--very
likely--after the dance you mentioned, and I was very happy to think of
your having had a lyric evening, dancing as you so enjoy doing. I’d like
to see the A----s and the P----s myself. They were a little unfair to
me--but good sports too, in a way, and unusually merry bosses. I still
like to think of those five o’clock booze parties we had in the office
and how giddily I sometimes came home for dinner. You were very charming
and sensible about it all, too, and I thank my stars that while you are
naturally an inbred Puritan you also know and appreciate the harmless
gambols of an exuberant nature like my own. It all goes to promise that
we shall have many merry times together later sometime when we’re a
little closer geographically.
My--but how the wind is blowing. Rain, too, on the window now! There was
a wonderful fog for about 18 hours last week. One couldn’t even see the
garden close behind the house--to say nothing of the piers. All night
long there were distant tinklings, buoy bells and siren warnings from
river craft. It was like wakening into a dreamland in the early
dawn--one wondered where one was with only a milky light in the window
and that vague music from a hidden world. Next morning while I dressed
it was clear and glittering as usual. Like champagne, or a cold bath to
look [at] it. Such a world!
193: TO HIS MOTHER
[_Brooklyn_] _Nov. 26th, ’24_
Dear Grace and Grandma: --/--/ Paul Rosenfeld, the critic, of whom, as
you know, I am not especially fond, has just called up and invited me
to a sort of reception he is going to give on Sat. evening for Jean
Catel, a French critic formerly on the staff of the _Mercure de France_.
When Rosenfeld gives this sort of party--whatever you may feel about
it--you at least know that everybody (spelled with a capital E) in
modern American painting, letters and art generally--will be there.
Well, I’m not only invited, but am urged to give a reading before them
all from my poems. Alfred Kreymborg and Miss Marianne Moore will also
read from their poems. So far I have declined to read anything--as I am
no vocalist, and I certainly fear the stage fright. But on the other
hand, I probably shall essay a poem or so, if I’m feeling at all assured
at the time, as I hate to be known as too shy a wall flower to speak to
even such a “picked” audience as that will be. While I lack almost no
assurance on the value of my poems, taken generally, I admit that I am
considerably flattered at this invitation occurring, as it does, before
I have published a single volume. (The other two have been known for
years.) And so, pray with me that the tongue be less stubborn than usual
in conveying my intentions from the written page. --/--/
194: TO HIS MOTHER
[_Brooklyn_] _Nov. 30th, ’24_
Dear Grace: --/--/ On Friday night I am quite certain that I suffered at
least a mild attack of the real ptomaine poisoning from something I ate
at dinner. I started to walk home after dinner, and before I got half
way I began to swell up and burn like fire. Just the usual and
bad-enough case of the hives, I thought at first. I finally managed to
get to my bed, but was deathly sick besides. My pulse was pumping so
that at the sink, as I was drinking some bicarbonate of soda, I lost my
sight and hearing in a kind of rushing and smothering of the blood, and
would have fainted had I tried to stand up any longer. Later on, when
the case had apparently subsided and I was lying rigidly still in bed,
it began all over again. It was perfectly maddening, and I never slept a
wink all night. All this convinces me that my malady was something more
than urticaria, and that I had eaten something positively poisonous. I
was able to evacuate in both directions during the night, however, and
somehow managed to go up to the office yesterday morning, retiring back
to bed again as soon as work was over and not getting up until it was
time to go to Rosenfeld’s. In the meantime I had refrained from
practically all food and taken a great deal of Alkalithia and milk of
magnesia, hot bath, etc. I was still very weak when I got to the party,
but as whiskey and soda was served I quickly revived, and everyone
thought I was a picture of health.
I’m very glad to have made the effort, after all, for I have reason now
to feel more assured than ever in regard to my poetry. The crowd was
representative as I had expected, delightfully informal, and proved very
receptive. I had met at least half of them before,--Stieglitz, Georgia
O’Keeffe, Seligmann, Jean Toomer, Paul Strand and his wife, Alfred
Kreymborg, Marianne Moore, Van Wyck Brooks, Edmund Wilson and Mary
Blair, Lewis Mumford, etc., etc. There was music by Copland, a modern
composer, and after that the readings by Miss Moore, myself, Kreymborg
and Jean Catel (who read a long poem in French by Paul Valéry) occupied
the rest of the time until one-thirty when the crowd broke up. I began
by reading three of my shorter poems: “Chaplinesque,” “Sunday Morning
Apples” (the poem to Bill Sommer which seems to be talked about
everywhere since it was printed last summer in _1924_), and thirdly, a
new poem which has not been printed, called “Paraphrase.” As I was urged
to read “Faustus and Helen” I finally did so. Kreymborg came to me
afterward and said that it was magnificent and even the conservative Van
Wyck Brooks clapped his hands, so Toomer told me. I certainly read more
deliberately and distinctly than I ever thought I should be able to, and
I find I have already been recognized with the applause of the most
discriminating. -- -- -- --
195: TO GORHAM MUNSON
_Brooklyn, NY_ _Dec. 5th, ’24_
Dear Gorham: I’m extremely sorry to have caused you such doubts and
misunderstandings by what I said yesterday at lunch, and I’m further
glad to say that I do not deserve all of them. In fact before your
letter reached me I suddenly remembered my mention of the proposed
attack on you and Waldo, and that I had given you a very incomplete
account of it.
When this came up at the coffee house a week since yesterday I at once
interrupted it by offering to withdraw from any participation in the
issue whatever. Allen Tate was there at the time, and as a fairly
neutral party I think you can rely on him to check my statement as a
fact. At any rate I hope you will ask him about it when you next see
him. I have so consistently defended you and Waldo in that particular
company that I have so far derived little from the meetings but an
unnecessarily aggravated state of nerves and feelings.
From your standpoint, I have long been aware, there is no excuse for my
association with people whose activities are so questionable from
several angles. And especially since I have been as strong in
denunciations of them as anyone. (And let me add that I have taken no
pains to conceal these opinions from anyone whatever.) Yet, at the same
time, and whether fortunately or otherwise, I have not been so situated
that I could possibly maintain the complete isolation which it has been
your desired good fortune to maintain. While there is danger, and a good
deal of it, I dare say, in my position, I have also felt that in yours,
Gorham, lurked the possible blindfolding of certain recognitions, which,
attached personalities being removed, you would have naturally found
interesting and worthy. I can summon very little that is definite to
support my feelings about this at the present time. Issues are not at
all clear, and I am disgusted most of the time. You have set yourself to
a rigorous program, part of which I subscribe to in action, a larger
part of which I applaud you for as a critic, and another part of which I
feel is unnecessarily unwieldy, limited and stolid. Perhaps all this
assurance-plus is necessary in fighting as stringently as you have done
and are doing, but so far I am not crystallized enough, as it were, to
accept the whole lock-stock-and-barrel of it. To a certain extent, as
Wyndham Lewis says, one must be broken up to live. Which I defend myself
by interpreting--the artist must have a certain amount of “confusion” to
bring into form. But that’s not the whole story, either.
Regardless of these issues you will be assured, I hope, that I have so
far found nothing in either your work or Waldo’s which I would wish to
attack. Your generosity, meanwhile, certainly deserves my thanks for
appreciating the sometimes necessary distinctions between a personal
friendship with a man and one’s opinion of his work.
My rewards or discredit from participation in a magazine issued by your
enemies will be bound to be, to a certain extent, somewhat embarrassing,
yet, as you recognize, I still feel that I can owe myself that freedom
on a clear responsibility. I am growing more and more sick of factions,
gossip, jealousies, recriminations, excoriations and the whole literary
shee-bang right now. A little more solitude, real solitude, on the part
of everyone, would be a good thing, I think.
Let us have lunch together soon. I won’t take absolute “vows” before
that, for this letter is a very crumb of my feelings.
196: TO GORHAM MUNSON
[_Brooklyn?_] _Dec. 8th, ’24_
Dear Gorham: Reflecting on our conversation at lunch today I have come
to feel bound to suggest that you take whatever decisions or formalities
are necessary to “excommunicate” me from your literary circle. How much
further you may wish to isolate me depends entirely on your own personal
feelings, but I am not prepared to welcome threats from any quarters
that I know of--which are based on assumptions of my literary ambitions
in relation to one group, faction, “opportunity,” or another.
1925
197: TO HIS MOTHER
[_Brooklyn_] _Jan. 4th, ’25_
Dear Grace and Grandma: I might say that this is the first “day of rest”
that I’ve had since I came back,--but fortunately that doesn’t mean that
I am all fagged out by any means.[38] I’ve managed to get some regular
sleeping hours, have curtailed my liquor rations (since New Year’s eve)
and am feeling as well as anyone could ever ask. Just came back from a
luscious breakfast (I make a practice of a regular meal on Sunday
mornings because I sleep so late and also walk a good distance to the
restaurant) and have bought some gay marigolds and narcissi from the
funny little florist woman nearby who has a regular case on me, or
rather has an amusing way of flattering one. She’s a sight, alright!
Bumpy body, pocked face, mussy hair and a voice that simply barks at
you, it is so raucous. I can’t be seen passing her place without her
glimpsing me, and signaling. When I enter she jumps at me with such
phrases as--“Well my handsome Good Looking again! How’s my big boy?
Ain’t he a dandy!,” etc., etc., etc. I generally get enough from her to
make my room gay on a quarter, and indeed, today, with my Christmas
decorations still up and the snow-light coming in from the roofs of the
piers below me--it is festive. Allen Tate, Sue [Jenkins] and Brown are
coming over for tea this afternoon, so I won’t be the only one to look
past the little flying swan still dangling in the window.
Tuesday night as I sat alone in my room I pictured you at the
_Miracle_. You must tell me how you like it, and what you did on New
Year’s eve. Our party at Squarcialupi’s (what a name!) was a delight. I
was sent out to get some more Victrola needles about midnight, and
before I got back the whistles began to blow. Even though it was in an
uncrowded neighborhood--people began throwing their arms around each
other, dancing and singing. Whereat I went into such an ecstasy as only
that moment of all the year affords me. I hugged my companion and
started singing Gregorian chants or something of my own version
approaching them, and I hope in good Latin. O New York is the place to
celebrate New Year’s! There is such spirit in everyone, such cordiality!
Your telegram came next morning before I was up (I didn’t retire until
6) and I trust you got my answer on my way to breakfast. I am very happy
these days and the more so because I trust you are. --/--/
198: TO HIS MOTHER
[_New York City_] _Feb. 10th, ’25_
Dear Grace: I suppose you’ve been reading about the great unprecedented
fog here, which still more-or-less continues. Well, it’s just been hell
for me over at Columbia Heights. I haven’t had 6 hours of solid sleep
for three nights, what with the bedlam of bells, grunts, whistles,
screams and groans of all the river and harbor buoys, which have kept up
an incessant grinding program as noisesome as the midnight passing into
new year. Just like the mouth of hell, not being able to see six feet
from the window and yet hearing all that weird jargon constantly. It
does no good to go to bed early under such circumstances, yet I’m forced
to do so, just because I’m too tired to do anything else. I hope tonight
will be somewhat better. --/--/
I’m hoping to hear from you today or tomorrow. Please give my best to
Charles [Curtis] which reminds me that I do not share your trepidations
concerning him which you expressed in your last letter. I don’t think
you ought to let such minor doubts annihilate the affection and devotion
that he has proffered you so beautifully. I’m really planning on your
marriage this spring, and I think you will be foolish to delay it until
later.
199: TO HIS MOTHER
[_Brooklyn_] _Monday_
Dear Grace and Grandma: It being the birthday of our country’s father
and a legal holiday, I’m not obliged to be at the office. But it
doesn’t mean that I haven’t been mightily busy. In fact, for the last
three days I have been working very hard to finish up a series of poems
for my book (if the printer ever gets around to take it seriously) and
they are about done. There are two more to be finished--and then I’ll
feel better, even if the book is a year in getting printed. You know one
makes up one’s mind that certain things go well together--make a book,
in fact--and you don’t feel satisfied until you have brought all the
pieces to a uniform standard of excellence. I have revised a good many
poems, and had to complete others that were half finished, and it all
takes a great deal of work. This sounds as though there were going to be
a great number of poems in the book, which, however, isn’t exactly so.
But the book will at least afford me some credit in the world, if not at
once, at least later on. --/--/
200: TO CHARLOTTE AND RICHARD RYCHTARIK
[_Brooklyn_] _Feb. 28th, ’25_
Dear Lotte and Ricardo: My grandmother sent me a picture of the artist
before the Public Hall garden model, clipped from the paper--and as
tonight is the night the beds were announced as being supposed to first
bloom, I think of you as walking in a perfect Venusberg of flowers and
shrubbery. Alas for me! I have only one white hyacinth in my window and
a bad breath from last night and luncheon today. But, for once, I was
able to retire to my room--away from friends and “enemies” and spend a
quiet and economical Saturday evening. I owe enough answers to letters
to keep me in a week, but I know well enough that tomorrow night will
find me in a Spanish restaurant near here, recently discovered, which
serves the finest ruby-colored and rose-scented wine in N.Y. besides
delicious smoky tasting sardines and hidalgoesque chicken. Waldo Frank
knows Spanish very well, and was able to convince the management,
thereby, that we were not revenue officers. Since then life even in “my”
retired neighborhood in Brooklyn has been gay. I know you think me
terrible, and given over entirely to pleasure and sin and folly.
Certainly I am concerned a great deal with all three of these--and even
so, don’t get _all_ I want. What worries me is that I’m so restricted in
other ways besides. Even, yea, on the holiest impulses. For didn’t I
promise to take Richard’s drawings or rather photos around to _The
Dial_--and haven’t I, so far, completely failed to make a move? Really,
I ought to sob in your laps for forgiveness. But to save your patience,
I won’t even mention excuses. I’ll only mention that the matter has
been frequently on my mind and that I’ll try to do something about it
very soon. I’ll also try to get back to you somehow without damage to
the drawings (originals, etc.) which I’ve kept so long.
It’s fine to know you have a new piano. Sam [Loveman] says that it’s a
beauty. If I ever get any money that is one of the first things I shall
put it into. After so many years of negligence, however, I doubt if I
shall be able to perform much on it! Which reminds me that I almost
never get to hear any of the fine concerts here, after all. Money, lack
of time and other things conspire to keep me away. Only once this winter
have I stared at the baton,--and that was Stravinsky’s. But he
disappointed both Waldo and myself by not including the _Sacre du
Printemps_ on the program. I don’t care for what I heard of his _latest
work_. Indeed, the _Petrouchka_ was the only fine thing on his program.
I can probably bet on your having heard him in Cleveland.
My book is indefinitely stalled as the printer has run out of money, but
I’ve been working hard to get finished with a f!!!?!!?!
_18 hours later_
_Sunday, March 1st_:
WELL! It isn’t often that one gets an earthquake inside a letter, but
this letter carries the evidence of one to you this time! Thank God I’m
living still to finish the ending of that last sentence. I had, as you
see, started the word “few” meaning to follow it with “poems”--when the
room began swaying frightfully and I had the most sickening and helpless
feeling I hope to ever have. By the time I got down the stairs people
were coming out of other rooms all over the house, etc. I ended up with
making a call and drinking wine, and so your letter has been waiting
almost twenty-four hours for me to recover. The feeling was simply
frightful. But you have probably read all the details in the papers by
this time. I understand it was even noticed in Cleveland.
201: TO HIS MOTHER
[_New York City_] _March 10th, ’25_
Dear Grace: It takes this night work at the office to make me
continually sulky, and with two more nights of it again this week in
prospect, don’t blame me if I’m not exactly gay. I would have written
you on Sunday had I been in a better mood. I certainly resent going
around and around feeling as though my legs as well as nerves would give
out at any moment. I dread to think of the summer and all that it
means--and it’s not so far away. I have pretty definitely made up my
mind to take a job on a boat for S. America during that season, at any
rate, and avoid the otherwise exhausted state of mind and body that the
city, heat and my hay fever always cause. But more of that later. The
trip to Norway possibly may not come through at all as there has been
some difficulty in settling the estate of E----’s father, and things are
at present very much tied up. --/--/
Gorham, of course, I don’t see at all, nor hear much about. I understand
that he regrets his awkwardness in dealing with me as he did, etc. But
his change of personality which had long preceded this particular
situation at which I took offense, had already changed my feelings about
him considerably, and I strangely enough don’t miss seeing him half as
much as I had once thought I would under such circumstances. Of course,
I’m really his friend, as I know he is mine, but it may do us good to
separate a little while. Many of his ways and opinions had begun to bore
me a great deal, and that feeling may have been mutual, so far as I
know. --/--/
202: TO HIS MOTHER
[_New York City_] _3/28/25_
Dear Grace and Grandma: --/--/ I have also been in a state of rush
regarding the completion of a few remaining lines and corrections on
poems to be included in my book, which the printer is beginning to set
in type. This little man, Jacobs, by name, certainly is devoted to the
cause of literature in going ahead as he is--paying for the cost of the
paper and binding as well as dedicating his time and strength--free of
charge--to the details of typography, setting, etc. For he is well
enough convinced that he will on no account reap any more remuneration
from the book than I will. Poetry of my kind is not popular enough
nowadays, you know, to sell.
Nevertheless, I am somewhat stimulated by the fact of the book being
actually now in progress. Getting that wad of my past work into
permanent collection and out of the way, so to speak, is an hygienic
benefit. Then--I shall feel myself all ready to begin the
honest-to-goodness efforts on my long _Bridge_ poem. --/--/
203: TO CHARLOTTE AND RICHARD RYCHTARIK
_Brooklyn_ _April 9, ’25_
Dear Charlotte and Ricardo: --/--/ It will be amusing to ask Sam
[Loveman] about this person when I next see him. We generally have
Sunday morning breakfasts together in a Spanish restaurant nearby and
talk over our troubles as well as pleasant reminiscences.
As you picture matters, the usual bacchanale of life around here and
among my friends still occupies me a good deal. Some of it is sweet and
clarifying--but as time goes on I tire of certain repetitions that occur
in it and seem to be developing certain reactionary tendencies toward
solitude and more austere examinations of myself. Above all, with the
regular amount of highly detailed work I have to do every day at the
office,--the “grind” in other words, and all the tempting other
activities outside my real self, I feel worn out most of the time and so
distracted that I lack the reflection and self-collection necessary to
do the work, the _real_ work that ultimately concerns me most. Still,
considering the slight time which I have for any real freedom I think I
have done a good bit of work during the last two years. But I cannot
profess to any real ability in measuring it. One struggles along blindly
most of the time. --/--/
You both should read _Port of New York_, a book by Rosenfeld dealing
with Stieglitz, Marin, O’Keeffe, Sessions, Hartley, Williams, etc.--I
differ with Rosenfeld on many matters, but the long chapter on Stieglitz
in this book is very fine indeed and [the rest of this letter is lost].
204: TO THOMAS SELTZER
_Brooklyn, N. Y._ _May 4th, ’25_
Dear Sir: In the same mail with this letter I am submitting the mss. of
a book of poems, _White Buildings_, for your consideration.
Mr. Samuel Jacobs, already known to you, I believe, by reason of his
composition work on the _Tulips and Chimneys_ book by Cummings, had
thought of bringing out this book himself, but recently has become
involved in other work to such an extent that he feels it would be
better handled by a “regular” publisher. He has, however, recommended
that I send the mss. to you. And his steady interest in the matter is, I
think, well evinced in the free cooperative services he says he is glad
to offer the publisher of _White Buildings_.
Mr. Jacobs has made me a cost estimate on an edition of five hundred
copies, quoting the prices of all work as done by his press, The
Polytype Press, 39 West 8th Street. In the following quotations, which
are based on an edition that should be admirable in every detail, Mr.
Jacobs has eliminated the cost of composition, which he says he would
like to do free of charge, on account of his personal interest in the
poems and in having them well set up. I quote from his signed
estimate:--
500 copies--_White Buildings_--64 pp.
Stock (Warren’s Oldstyle) $ 17.00
Makeup (by Pelley Press) 16.00
Lockup & Presswork 40.00
Casing and Shipping 2.00
Binding (@ 25¢ per copy) 125.00
TOTAL $200.00
In view of the fact that Mr. Jacobs’ reputation as a typographical
expert and producer of notably beautiful books is so well established by
this time, I feel that the above estimate is surprisingly modest. I have
taken the liberty of introducing it in such detail at this time because
it represents a considerable economy in proportion to the book’s
probable production cost through other hands.
As to the selling qualities of _White Buildings_,--I surrender that
prophecy to the publisher. That there are admirers of my work to the
number of five hundred, I am certain. And I can personally guarantee the
sale of at least 150 copies through the various mailing lists to which I
have ready access, and through the interest of my friends. Mr. Waldo
Frank has admired my poetry considerably, as well as Eugene O’Neill. I
have been assured that both of these writers will be glad to be quoted
to that effect on a jacket or announcement accompanying the book. And
these statements might have an appreciable effect on both sales and
reviews. Not to enumerate the reasons here, I have reason to expect that
_White Buildings_ will receive favorable review from at least six out of
ten writers who would be likely to treat with it, anyway.
The bulk of the book has already appeared in the following magazines:
_The Little Review_, _The Dial_, _Secession_, _The Double Dealer_,
_1924_, _The Fugitive_, _Broom_, etc. I am hoping that I may hear
something from you regarding your decision on this mss. within a month’s
time, as I may be out of the city for a period after that date.
205: TO HIS MOTHER
[_New York City_] _May 7th, ’25_
Dear Grace and Grandma: The photos of the cherry tree in bloom were a
joy to have and keep. I like especially the one with yourself, Grace,
standing underneath. The attitude and expression you took were gracious
and lovely. The tree and the entire yard, for all that, have a great
place in my memories, and now that the place is liable to be sold at any
time I’m especially glad to have the pictures.
By this time I hope and pray that you are both fully recovered from your
attacks of grippe and indigestion and nerves. The recent weather has
been pretty decent here, and as far as myself is concerned, great
improvements have been made. I’m feeling even better than at Christmas
when I was in Cleveland, and guess my color shows it. Diet and general
caution have put me in fine shape along with some slight medicine the
doctor gave me. It certainly makes a big difference in one’s mental
reactions and attitude, as you said in your letter, Grace.
Last Monday I had luncheon with Bill Freeman, and with the result of
some statements that may interest you. We talked about everything else
under the sun _but_ business during the meal, but before we left the
table Freeman abruptly introduced the proposition which I had faintly
expected. He asked me if I ever expected to go back to Cleveland to
live, and I replied that at present I had no wish to do so, but that
such a thing was by no means improbable if, for certain reasons, I
should sometime feel obligated to. Then he went on to say that the
Corday and Gross Company needed someone of my type in their copy
department very badly, and that they would be glad to connect with me in
case I cared to go back. He further mentioned that I was the one
“brilliant” copywriter they had ever had there, that the company had
fully realized, long since, that they made a great mistake in letting me
be lured away without raising my salary, etc., etc. Well! I must say it
was a satisfaction to be so spoken of. I was glad to know, too, that
such an opportunity will always be at least plausibly open to me in case
I am ever again located in Cleveland for any length of time. I suggested
to Freeman that I might still do some writing for the company on a
free-lance basis, here, if they cared to commit some special job to me
now and then, and from his answer I judge that the possibilities on that
score are not exceedingly remote. I would certainly like to make a
little extra cash on the side, as you know how pared down my present
salary keeps me.
I went in and made application for a raise again the other day, this
time with the expressed desire of knowing definitely within a week, as I
said “the decision will affect my future plans.” Which is no threat
merely, but a fact. I think I will get the raise, but if I don’t--it’s
me for the sea during these summer months, and a change from office
routine for awhile. It is going to be hot enough without working nights
at the office here, the way we shall undoubtedly be forced to, at a bare
living sum! If I can’t be paid enough with all the time and effort here
at the office to save at least $5.00 a week, then I might as well, for
all I can see, be seeing a bit of the world while I’m young enough. Two
more years of this routine here will kill my imagination anyway, but I’d
rather stay around here awhile now until my book is published and out of
the way. --/--/
On the whole I think it’s better that the printer acted as he did, as it
will mean much more recognition from the general public to have the
insignia of a regular and recognized publisher on the volume than it
would to have just a printer’s sign. That would suggest to the general
public, whether true or not, that I had paid to have the book brought
out myself, which makes a bad impression on reviewers, and puts me in an
unpleasant position. That’s one thing I would never do,--at least with a
first book. It’s enough to put good food on the table, without having to
rub people’s noses in the plate who don’t want to eat! --/--/
206: TO HIS MOTHER
[_Brooklyn_] _Sunday afternoon_
Dear Grace and Grandma: --/--/ I am enjoying a quieter afternoon than I
had expected, due to the happy failure of some people to call whom I had
invited for tea. I have received so many courtesies at one time and
other from Gaston Lachaise and his Madame that I invited them along with
Slater Brown and Sue [Jenkins]. But each of the parties finally phoned
and called it off for various reasons. The Lachaises are soon to leave
for their country place near Bath, Maine, and have been nice enough to
urge me to an extended visit with them this summer if I can possibly do
so. Just a mile from the ocean--and a wonderful beach set in a cove of
rocks topped by pines! How I would love to go--and I really may decide
to. As I have been mentioning, the summer at the office and the extra
night work required looms up before me as almost unthinkable. I have
asked for a raise--but it has not been settled as yet. I think I
impressed it upon the boss, however, that if it isn’t forthcoming I have
other plans. I inquired again yesterday, but have been put off until
Tuesday. Well, we’ll see. I have got into such a rut of repetitious
feeling, thought and dissatisfaction with myself that it seems the only
salvation to break away for awhile into some change of work and
environment. I am still considering a trial of ocean. Even if it’s not
at all ideal it may jog me up a bit. I really need more air and
exercise at my time of life, and after four years or more of this
sedentary office routine you can hardly blame me. Sam [Loveman] would
take over my room and things while I’m gone. All in all, though, I’ve
repressed my instincts so much that I can’t seem to make up my mind with
any decision about anything. --/--/
I have not yet heard what Thomas Seltzer, the publisher, thinks about my
book, but I ought to before another week. When I told Waldo Frank about
submitting there he became somewhat excited, said that he had wanted to
bring it to his own publisher, Boni and Liveright, and made me promise
to turn over the mss. to him immediately if Seltzer didn’t take it. As
you perhaps remember, Waldo had originally intended to take the book to
Liveright, but told me some weeks ago that Liveright was not in the
proper mood to be talked to at the time, etc., etc. Well, I got little
satisfaction from waiting around indefinitely--so decided to start the
book on its rounds. It takes long enough to find a publisher, as a rule,
without depending on the moods of any one of them. Even now, if the book
were accepted today, it would probably be next spring before it could
actually appear. I’m figuring that publication in book form will give me
at least enough prestige to get a little money for my magazine
contributions. Besides this, I have begun to feel rather silly, being
introduced everywhere as a poet and yet having so little collected
evidence of the occupation. There won’t be any explosions of praise when
the book appears, but it will make me feel a little more solid on my
feet. --/--/
207: TO HIS MOTHER
[_New York City_] _May 28th, ’25_
Dear Grace: --/--/ I gave notice to the boss as soon as I found out
definitely that I was not going to get a raise. The time is set for a
week from this Saturday. You know my feelings and reasons well enough
from former letters, so it’s not necessary for me to repeat them now.
Later on in the summer I may take a boat job on the South American or
West Indian Routes, but at present I have been very lucky in being
invited out to a lovely farm near here (Brewster, N.Y.), to spend a
month or so. Brown has just bought it, and has urged me to come out and
help him plant the garden, etc. And this is just what I have been
needing, exercise, open air, and relaxation from the tension of the desk
(which had become very threatening to my health and nervous stability,
I can assure you). This invitation came subsequent to my resignation at
Sweet’s--so don’t think that I have been seduced by a tempting prospect
of any kind. I was ready for ANYTHING after the prolonged tension and
confinement here for the last year, and whatever happens I shall not
regret having left the office.
E---- has or rather will take my room over at Columbia Heights, and I
have reserved it for myself again after October, as it’s such a good
room I don’t want to loose my hold on it if possible. Write me there up
to June 6th, when I leave for the country, and I shall write you much
more in a few days. You certainly haven’t been very generous, yourself,
with correspondence lately. I hope you are both very well. C.A. [Crane]
looked me up here recently and offered me a job which I was all ready to
take. Whereupon he became so pettily dictatorial that I withdrew
quickly. In some ways it was all very funny, and I’ll write more about
it later. We parted on friendly enough terms, I guess. -- -- -- --
208: TO HIS MOTHER
_Brooklyn, N.Y._ _June 4th, ’25_
Dear Grace and Grandma: Practically everything is packed up. There has
been a real turmoil, too, I can tell you. The frightful and sudden heat
of the last 3 days brought on a fearful attack of uric acid
trouble--headaches, bladder trouble and urethritis. No sleep for three
nights and I have been dieting on buttermilk and crackers. Besides
trying to complete all arrangements by Saturday and still give some time
to the office, I have had 3 engagements with the dentist. I thought one
tooth had an abscess and had to have an x-ray taken to find out that it
hadn’t. There is one more trial with a filling tomorrow and then I’ll be
through. I’m about done out, however, and a feather could knock me over.
Furthermore, all these exigencies have about used up all the money I had
saved up, little enough! -/-/
I did enjoy that talk with you over the wires to Cleveland! Your voice
is so much better than ink and paper.
Have a good time in Chicago, and, by the way, why don’t you explain my
case to the Ross’s--that is--if any opportunity appears. They give
thousands to charities every year--and boast about being patrons of art.
Why don’t they help some artist who is trying to live--and still get
something done? A small allowance for me six months of the year would
mean almost nothing to them--and it would keep me alive and productive
in some cheap place in the country. You might mention Frank’s and
O’Neill’s and Anderson’s admiration for my work,--and that I have a book
about to be published.
They won’t be hard to convince on C.A.’s neglect of me, as they have had
their own evidence of that side of him.
Everyone thinks it a crime the way I have been treated. I’d be glad to
work six or eight months of the year if I could have the remaining time
for my natural creative activity. Please see what you can do about this.
I hope Grandma is not too overborne by this torridity.
209: TO HIS GRANDMOTHER
_Patterson, New York_ _June 17th, ’25_
Dear Grandma: --/--/ As for myself--things couldn’t be better. I have
great quantities of fine Guernsey milk every day from a neighboring
farm, the finest butter and eggs and fresh vegetables--and so much
outdoor exercise than I am brown as a nut already with the sun and all
greased up at the joints. Sleep nights like a top and the uric acid
trouble has disappeared completely--at least for the time being. When
you consider that this is only about my tenth day out here such results
seem astonishing, don’t they? I should have written you more if there
had been a moment, but you have no idea how busy we have all been. There
has been a great deal--tons--of wood to clear away from the house,
rubbish, also, and a lot of old plaster they threw out in making
alterations. Then we have been building bookcases, shelves and tables
for the inside, as well as scrubbing and rubbing down floors. Getting up
every morning at five-thirty. The air is so fresh and the birds so sweet
that you simply can’t stay in bed a moment longer. And how good
breakfast tastes! We have bought a good oil stove, which works on about
10 cents a day. All our cooking and lamp-oil comes to much less cost
than similar means in the city would cost. Brown has a Ford which he got
for 35 dollars! We go marketing about 7 miles away to the nearest town
every three or four days. This place, you know, is quite delightfully
isolated from other houses. It’s about 150 years old--and did I tell you
that a lot of wonderful old rope beds and furniture came right along
with it? --/--/
210: TO HIS MOTHER
_Patterson, N.Y._ _July 10th, ’25_
Dear Grace and Grandma: --/--/ Life has been going along here at Brown’s
farm as pleasantly as anyone could wish excepting that the last few days
I have had a considerable touch of the [rose] fever. I had expected to
evade the whole season, but I guess I’m in for a few days of it here,
despite the altitude and other favorable circumstances. We have the
house painting almost finished. I’ve already mentioned how I enjoyed
doing that. Brown and I have been making screens for the last couple of
days and now I defy a mosquito to attack my slumbers or a fly to fall
into my soup. Although planted very late in season Brown’s garden is
about up, peas and beans, and soon will follow a whole menu of delicious
vegetables for the table. This is the kind of place I am going to have
when I can afford it. Perfect quiet and rolling hills, almost mountains,
all around--with apple orchards and lovely groves of trees and rocky
glens all about the house. Yesterday afternoon we picked
blueberries--about four quarts in an hour--and there’s nothing better to
eat with cereals for breakfast I can tell you. It’s pleasant to pick
them, too--great patches of bushes laden to bending with the beautiful
milky-blue fruit that looks the freshest thing on earth. The
huckleberries will be out later--and there will be simply bushels of
them. Brown also has great quantities of raspberries, blackberries,
currants and gooseberries--as well as elderberries on his place. Also
plenty of sap maples and walnut trees. I haven’t yet stopped enthusing
about the place, you see, and when you mention buying land in Florida,
that dry and tourist-ridden place, I find it hard to agree with you.
Brown has even been so nice as to offer me a strip of land as my own and
a great pile of cut timber to build me a cabin--if I will stay here with
him and Sue [Jenkins]. You can’t beat his affectionate generosity in any
friend on earth. I wish you could know Sue, also. Well, someday you
will, I’m sure, as I’m not likely to lose my enthusiasm for them very
soon.
This Florida plan of yours prompts me to worry a little, Grace. You must
certainly be cautious about investing your money there the way things
are going at present. Of course I have been hearing all that you have
about the tremendous sums exchanged there in real estate, and maybe more
than you. That information is certainly nothing that one has to be
“tipped on” these days. Everyone--even the farmers around here--are
scraping their coins together and rushing down to Miami to buy little
lots, and I know well enough that at least _some people_ have made and
are making fortunes there. But doesn’t such a great campaign of
advertising as this now seems to be--doesn’t it arouse your suspicions
as to the validity of the proposition to the small investor? Remember,
Grace, that the stock market is run on the same plan and with the same
tactics--and the daily crop of suckers can be reaped in other fields and
byways than Wall [Street], and often is. If you had thought of investing
in Miami property a year or so ago it would undoubtedly have meant a
considerable profit. But--as I see the situation now--the whole
proposition there is like a whirling roulette wheel that with every
revolution spins a higher figure--but which has already begun to slow
down. I don’t see how the situation can be otherwise when there has been
such a wholesale flux of gamblers to the place as there already has
been. For certainly there is a limit to the value of property--and there
is a limit to the present national craze of flocking to Miami. I may be
wrong, of course, but it seems to me that most of the fruit down there
has been picked up already. It might net you something to try and sell
for others down there, but I would be awfully slow about making any
investments myself--at least until after I had been there long enough to
ascertain some direct information of my own about matters. In such “gold
rushes” watch out for the boom psychology that animates everyone
concerned--even the losers--into bursting their voices with salutary
legends of their luck and the general prospects of the place. It amounts
to as much a conspiracy as though they had all sat down together at a
great mass meeting and agreed to swear they each saw Jesus bathing on
the beach. Of course I can see your special interest in going to Miami
this winter to make money--but I’m blind to the other advantages of the
plan. Especially when you have as lovely a place--only a day and a half
further away--down on the island [Isle of Pines] to go to, and where
living expenses will be about one third as much. (Miami is a very
expensive place to stay, I understand, especially since this boom.)
Further--it seems to me you ought to take a run down there--for at least
two weeks--regardless of other plans. Or otherwise, after all this time,
who is to know what is becoming of the place? I’d jump at the chance to
go there myself. Please don’t resent my advice about these foregoing
matters. My opinions on such matters have to be got off my chest
naturally--as they are inevitable concomitants to my interest and
affection in you both. I certainly have no desire to stand in the way of
anything you wish to do.
My trip to South America is as hazy as it’s always been. It may be that
line of boats or some other across the Atlantic for me when I get back
to New York--I won’t be able to wait long for employment anywhere as I
have only about the carfare back to town. I may even take some other
kind of office job. My chiefest concern while I have been out here is to
avoid worries of whatever kind for awhile; doing that, you know, takes a
kind of discipline after one has been so constantly precautious and
apprehensive as I have been for the last five years. With my health and
nerves all ready to snap beneath _that_ strain I decided that life
wasn’t worth it--and the pretense of living under such an attitude of
mind year after year was certainly not worth continuing. So I am--at
least for awhile longer--content to drift a little, let things take care
of themselves, reduce my needs and requirements to a minimum and avail
myself of as much time for free breathing and meditation as possible.
The boat job would--on the South American line--permit me practically
three weeks of time (absolutely to myself) out of every eight. This time
would be spent in Buenos Aires at one end of the trip, and at New York
at the other. I might get some time to write and read again. I really
hope very much to make connections with this line for that reason, even
though the first job I could get wouldn’t amount to more than 65 dollars
a month. At least three-fourths of my living expenses while on the job
would be gratis, of course. And I even long to be entirely away from the
best of friends at time. It gives you a fresh picture of the world. One
trip would decide whether I cared for the job or not--six weeks and
12,000 miles. I could probably get a job as night watchman or as
engineer’s writer. But you have to take what places are open when the
ship comes in.
Exactly how much longer I shall stay here isn’t decided yet. But it will
probably not be more than two weeks from now. In New York I shall stay
with either Allen Tate or E----,--probably with the latter as E---- is
still staying in my old room at Columbia Heights. At any rate that will
be the place to write me. I’ll let you know more details of course, when
they are settled. In the meantime I have written to Freeman who is still
with the New York office of Corday and Gross if he has any free-lance ad
writing which I could do for them while I am out here. That will
probably amount to nothing at all, but the idea occurred to me and I
thought I ought to try it out at least. If I could pay my share in
household expenses here I should like to stay all summer as I have
certainly been made to feel extremely welcome. Otherwise I can’t go on
accepting things as they are. --/--/
Eugene O’Neill wrote me that he was enthusiastic about some recent
things I had sent him, and I have enough enthusiasm from other astute
and discriminating people in America to make me feel that my writings
are justified. Publishers shy at it, of course, because they know it
won’t make them money. Meanwhile the same flood of mediocrities in verse
continues to be printed, bound and sold year after year.
Your story of the Fourth sounded very jolly indeed. Nothing could beat
the hilarity of this place--with about an omnibus-full of people here
from New York and a case of gin, to say nothing of jugs of marvellous
hard cider from a neighboring farm. You should have seen the dances I
did--one all painted up like an African cannibal. My makeup was lurid
enough. A small keg on my head and a pair of cerise drawers on my legs!
We went swimming at midnight, climbed trees, played blind man’s buff,
rode in wheel-barrows and gratified every caprice for three days until
everyone was good an’ tired out. The guests are still recovering, I
understand, in their separate abodes in the city. It certainly is
infinitely pleasanter drinking and celebrating on a wide acreage, like
this farm, than in the tumult and commotion of the city. Aside from this
one blowout I have not had a drop since I have been here--and have not
felt like drinking, either. The desire for booze in the city comes from
frayed nerves and repressions of the office, I’m sure. --/--/
211: TO WALDO FRANK
_Patterson, New York_ _Friday_
Dear Waldo: I’m awfully sorry about the Jimenez translations: they are
locked in my trunk at Columbia Heights in my letter file. But I’m going
back to New York about a week from tomorrow and I’ll be glad to copy
them--and either send them on to you--or directly to _The New Republic_,
as you may direct. That would be--at most--only a few days later than
they would arrive had I sent them along with this letter. I don’t know
what you are accenting in your thesis on the poet, but I think [the]
short poem on the Virgin better than the one called “The Three.” I think
you sent me only these two.
Along with your letter today comes the news from my mother that
transactions are about completed for the sale of our home in Cleveland.
If this really eventuates I may be called upon to help them move--which
will defer my plans for sea roving at least until after September.
However, I may decide to evade the moving: I can’t at present see my way
to make any definite plans without risking some kind of unpleasant
entanglement. I wish that “wile” and “guile” were easier instruments for
my imagination to use! There is always some other immediate duty or
requirement for me to perform than creation. I’ve had only above five
hours at the writing table since I came out here, and now it’s about
time to look for a postage stamp--I mean the wherewithal for it--to post
this letter! Of course I’ve had a good time, find I enjoy painting
house, gardening, etc. BUT----.
At any rate your sanguine hopes for _White Buildings_ warms me. It came
back from Harcourt yesterday. They couldn’t make anything out of most of
the poems. My “obscurity” is a mystery to me, and I can’t help thinking
that publishers and their readers have never heard the mention of Sir
Thomas [John?] Davies, Donne, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Valéry or even Emily
Dickinson. Within a few days, probably, I’ll get time to make you a copy
of the mss. It has been loutish of me not to have delivered the poems to
you long before this, but hurry and general confusion have been mainly
responsible. In looking over the selection I hope you will (when the
leisurely moment arrives) have the impulse to make what comments and
criticisms occur to you. I am dissatisfied with at least half the poems,
but I realize that this will possibly always be so with regard to poems
written more than two years back. Reason seems to dictate, then, a
certain amount of necessary indifference, that is, if I’m ever to print
any collection of poems before the grave. --/--/
212: TO WALDO FRANK
_New York_ _July 23rd_
Dear Waldo: --/--/ After the quiet and freshness of the country the New
York or rather Manhattan mid-summer seems more than ever intolerable.
Rather ghastly, in fact. But Cleveland won’t be much better. Gorham was
thoughtful in writing me news of a possible position with Henry [Robert]
McBride as publicity man. I am going to see them about it before
leaving,--as it might be a decent sort of thing for me.
Dos Passos has just come back from the hospital, after about two months
of some influenza complication which has almost finished him. Cummings
looks bilious and harried. His connections with _Vanity Fair_ are broken
and like the rest of us he is looking for pennies. Jimmy Light has just
sailed past Columbia Hts. for England where he expects to put on some
O’Neill plays. He has sole direction of the Provincetown theatre (not
Greenwich Village branch) when he comes back in September. Have you
thought of sending your play to him? The repërtoire that is at present
planned doesn’t sound any too brilliant to me. Haven’t seen Jean or
Gorham yet,--but expect to tomorrow. Such is the news in a hasty
batch.... --/--/
213: TO WALDO FRANK
_Cleveland_ _Aug. 19th_
Dear Waldo: I have been trying to get time and clarity to write you for
the last two weeks--ever since I sent you the mss. of _White
Buildings_--but the nightmare hurly-burly and confusion here intercepted
me consistently. Three more weeks of it and I shall be able to get back
to Brown’s place in the country and collect myself. Our old home will be
rented by its new owner to a fraternity, my mother and grandmother will
be leaving for Miami, and Cleveland will become for me, I hope, more a
myth of remembrance than a reality, excepting that my “myth” of a father
will still make chocolates here.