PART TWO
New York
(1923-1925)
1923
124: TO GORHAM MUNSON
[_Cleveland_] _Jan. 5th, ’23_
Dear Gorham: I cannot remember a more hectic month than the last unless I recall some of the old bivouacs of New York days, when I ricochet-ed “from roof to roof” without intermission. Two rush campaigns to write, gifts and remembrances to buy and send to far too many people--suppers,
## parties and evenings--much tossing of the pot,--“prison, palace and
reverberation”! That is why I’ve been so slow in writing.
At present I’m flabbergasted and dull. But my carousing on New Year’s Eve had one good outcome; it started the third part of “Faustus and Helen” with more gusto than before. When I catch my next breath I hope to carry it on to the end. --/--/
Waldo Frank wrote me a very cordial letter in answer to my written praise of “Hope.” I should like to be in New York now and hear his lectures at the Rand School. I am hoping to make my visit along in May or June when the weather is mild and some of the shows are still going. I shall appear with a new cane that was given me for Christmas. Despite my objections to cane-carrying last summer, I find it very pleasant. Puce-colored gloves complete the proper touch.
I notice that _Broom_ has been consistently weak in poetry. Cowley’s things have been by far the best--but (with all due modesty) I think that my “F. and H.” will be an improvement over their past offerings. Matty appears to rest in clover and periwinkles, what with the Guggenheim millions and the international sweep of editorial authority. (In accepting my poems he merely mentioned that he thought Loeb also liked them!) What do you think of his _Broom_ ad in the Dec. number? He asked my opinion on the grounds that literary ads were generally the flattest in the world. It seems “attractive” enough to me--but the prize-subscription offer I balk at as a matter of policy in such a type of magazine.
Stieglitz voiced an old feeling of mine about Bill’s [Sommer] work--the lack of finish evident in so much of it. This has always pained me. As a whole, his comments seem very just. But I tend to differ with him on one point in common with other critics who are so obsessed with the importance of current developments in art that they fail to recognize certain positive and timeless qualities.
I refer to the quality of line in Sommer’s work. That has, in
## particular, nothing more to do with modern work than the draughtsmanship
of Michelangelo. It is something that may not distinguish a man as a great innovator or personality--but it is, for all that, a rare and wondrous quality. From what you write Stieglitz has the sense to recognize this quality and to value it. But a person like Georgia O’Keeffe, who has so distinctly her own horn to play, is scornful of everything short of evolution and revolution.
It is a relief once in awhile to detach one’s judgment from such considerations as hers, and to look at a piece of work as totally detached from time and fashion, and then judge it entirely on its individual appeal. I think that in Sommer’s case, you, Williams and myself are appreciators of this kind. I can enjoy Bill’s things regardless of their descent, evident or otherwise, from French or German artists of the last generation. He has certain perfections which many of the most lauded were lacking in. God DAMN this constant nostalgia for something always “new.” This disdain for anything with a trace of the past in it!!! This kind of criticism is like a newspaper, always with its dernier cri. It breeds its own swift decay because its whole theory is built on an hysterical sort of evolution theory. I shall probably always enjoy El Greco and Goya. I still like to look at the things Sommer makes, because many of them are filled with a solid and clear beauty.
I have frequently wondered why you were so laggard in your interest in Eliot. Your recent announcement brings me much pleasure of anticipation. Please let [me] know what you find in Eliot. With your head knocked against Burke’s over such a topic there ought to be some fine illuminations. You already know, I think, that my work for the past two years (those meagre drops!) has been more influenced by Eliot than any other modern. He has been a very good counter-balance to Matty’s shifting morale and violent urgings. My amusement at Matty’s acceptance of “F and H” considerably heightened by the memory of several sly hints against Eliot which some of his more recent letters had contained.
There is no one writing in English who can command so much respect, to my mind, as Eliot. However, I take Eliot as a point of departure toward an almost complete reverse of direction. His pessimism is amply justified, in his own case. But I would apply as much of his erudition and technique as I can absorb and assemble toward a more positive, or (if [I] must put it so in a sceptical age) ecstatic goal. I should not think of this if a kind of rhythm and ecstasy were not (at odd moments, and rare!) a very real thing to me. I feel that Eliot ignores certain spiritual events and possibilities as real and powerful now as, say, in the time of Blake. Certainly the man has dug the ground and buried hope as deep and direfully as it can ever be done. He has outclassed Baudelaire with a devastating humor that the earlier poet lacked.
After this perfection of death--nothing is possible in motion but a resurrection of some kind. Or else, as everyone persists in announcing in the deep and dirgeful _Dial_, the fruits of civilization are entirely harvested. Everyone, of course, wants to die as soon and as painlessly as possible! Now is the time for humor, and the Dance of Death. All I know through very much suffering and dullness (somehow I seem to twinge more all the time) is that it interests me to still affirm certain things. That will be the persisting theme of the last part of “F and H” as it has been all along. --/--/
125: TO GORHAM MUNSON
[_Cleveland_] _Jan. 10th, ’23_
Dear Gorham: Your _Study_ came day before yesterday. So far I have only had time for a single reading, but am ready to offer whole-hearted congratulations. It IS much improved from the fragment I read last summer, and I think you have made a criticism that, besides being quite exact and fair, is dramatic--and very constructive beyond the actual boundaries of the man and subject concerned. I shall go over it again this evening. By early next week I hope to have some words for the jacket written,--later a review for the Double-Skull. I’ll send them both to you as soon as they are ready, for suggestions or “corrections.” By this time, according to a recent letter of yours, you will be something of a “copy” critic also.
Sommer’s gratitude to you for your interest and success in helping him will never reach the frenzied pitch of a letter,--but I know that he feels quite deeply grateful. As I am his official and unofficial secretary in other matters I include mention of his sentiments here. I must admit that I personally got a greater “thrill” out of the news than any personal acceptances have given me for many a day.[26] -- -- -- --
126: TO GORHAM MUNSON
[_Cleveland_] _Jan. 14th, ’23_
Dear Gorham: This (enclosed)[27] may, or may not yet be finished. Anyway, I think it is rounded enough as it is to be somewhat enjoyed.
Some things about it surprise and satisfy me. It has a bit of Dionysian splendor, perhaps an overtone of some of our evenings together last summer. It is so packed with tangential slants, interwoven symbolisms, that I’m not sure whether or not it will [be] understood. However, I am sure that it perfectly consorts with the other two parts of the poem as I intend them:
## Part I
Meditation, Evocation, Love, Beauty
## Part II
Dance, Humor, Satisfaction
## Part III
Tragedy, War (the eternal soldier), Résumé, Ecstasy, Final Declaration
There is an organization and symphonic rhythm to III that I did not think I could do. The last three evenings have been wonderful for me, anyway! A kind of ecstasy and power for WORK.
III doesn’t seem half long enough to me now--but I’m too much with and in it to know.
127: TO CHARMION WIEGAND
[_Cleveland_] _Jan. 20th, ’23_
My dear Charmion: It didn’t take me long to decide that Buschor’s _Graechische Vasenmalerei_ is a book that I shall always carry about with me, even though it has taken me an unforgivably long time to tell you so. You and Hermann [Habicht] have my sincerest gratitude for such an unexpected and beautiful holiday present.
With a few exceptions I prefer Egyptian sculpture to the Greek, and this
## book makes me feel that the Greeks had more to express in line and
design than they had in the third dimension. In pottery you get the less ambitious and less “cosmopolitan” aspiration and expression of these people. There is an intimacy and rusticity to the pottery which especially appeals to the literary instinct. The famous Nike of Samothrace always left me somewhat cool. Lady Milo is a bit imposing (Jove’s too near around the corner) and these idealized human dolls all stand too much on their dignity. O I know how they prostrated Heine and Pater et al., and I do respect them--but give me these lovely vase intaglios and arabesques--and maids and naughty satyrs with their rank lustful lives and leaves and brine and wine!
--/--/ I think it is a credit to Munson’s platform and writing that so much attention has already been proffered _Secession_. I was very lukewarm in the beginning and urged him not to “waste his time” on any magazine project. But after his visit here last summer I quickly switched about, especially as _S_ has contained such new and suggestive material as the last 2 numbers included. _Secession_ gets away from the “temperamental” editorial attitude of _The Little Review_ (good in many ways as this has been) and bases its judgment on more tradition while at the same time being far more daring in its experiments than such magazines as _The Dial_. It has been discouraging to see how very “safe” _The Dial_ plays sometimes, despite its protests to the contrary.
I find that I have derived considerable stimulation from _Secession_. Without it there would be only the vague hope that the steady pessimism which pervades _The Dial_ since Eliot and others have announced that happiness and beauty dwell only in memory--might sometimes lift. I cry for a positive attitude! When you see the first two parts of my “Faustus & Helen” that comes out in _Broom_ in Feb. or March, you will see better what I mean. I’ve about finished the third and last part now, and am pleased at the finale. --/--/
I’m rather worn out with the incessant activities of the last two weeks--last _month_, in fact. I can’t stand much “society” even with interesting people, and my acquaintance in Cleveland has somehow increased so extensively during the last two years that with work, reading, writing, etc., things are becoming entirely too febrile. You’ll excuse my mention of such “ailments” I hope, as part of my excuse for delay in writing. But I have already probably exhausted you beyond “resentments” of such nature by this lengthy gust. -- -- -- --
128: TO GORHAM MUNSON
[_Cleveland_] _Jan. 24, ’23_
Dear Gorham: I’ll wait for your next letter before sending any other versions of “F. & H. III” The last two days have been occupied with the enclosed strange psychoanalytic thing. I can’t quite justify the title in words, but it came to me quite freely as _the_ right thing. Let me know how you like it.[28] --/--/
129: TO GORHAM MUNSON
[_Cleveland_] _Feb. 6th, ’23_
Dear Gorham: Everyone writes me such encouraging notes about “F and H” that I am doubly sorry that I ever sent any to _Broom_ for publication. Frank wrote me a very shrewd appreciation of Part II which he probably repeated to you. Untermeyer’s mention of me among the New Patricians prompted me to send him a copy after reading his article on Eliot in a recent _Freeman_. I disagreed with him openly on many points, but the substance of his last paragraph made me think he would be interested in reading the poem. I was rather foolish to follow such an impulse, but his answer was quite decent. He made the charge of a new type of “rhetoric,” however, which is just what Frank took pains to mention as fully absent. Untermeyer comes here for a lecture on March 11th and says he wants to have a talk with me if possible. This is all right, but I am not keen about argument. Allen Tate writes me the most glowing praises possible, calls me the greatest contemporary American poet, etc., etc., so I feel about ready to deliver myself of my memoirs and expire in roses. And then, your appreciation has especially been enjoyed. You “get” the form and arrangement of the “Stark Major” poem much better than Frank does, but he is right about the second paragraph being too complicated and vague and you are wrong about the last verse being redundant. When I get the second verse worked out to suit me I’ll send you another copy. In the meantime I am ruminating on a new longish poem under the title of _The Bridge_ which carries on further the tendencies manifest in “F and H.” It will be exceedingly difficult to accomplish it as I see it now, so much time will be wasted in thinking about it. Your news about _Broom_ is discouraging in view of the fact that I had just sent part III of “F and H” to Matty last week. Everything has been bungled all the way through. I hope I can get enough material together during the next few months for a small volume where things can be arranged in proper order. I am so deadly sick of manipulating things with magazines, _The Dial_ included. This latter refuses my “F and H” and then takes such a silly thing as that Apleton or what’s-’ername woman contained this month in its covers. I have been so rushed around with too much society that I have not yet got at the review for your study, but it will be done within two weeks anyway. It was much easier to rap out this enclosed review for Fitts. Let me know what you like or don’t like about it. I am very awkward at reviews, mainly, I suppose, because the procedure is strange to me. I am through doing things for Sommer until he cooperates better. He has received notice and photographs from _The Dial_ I learn from second hand. Ten days ago this was. I had especially asked him to phone me as soon as he heard anything definite from them, certainly a small task, but he never peeps or comes near. I shall not send back the photographs to you to show to anyone until he returns them to me. He knows I paid twenty dollars for them and that I want to keep them circulating, etc. He knew that I would be the one to write to _The Dial_ and blow ’em up if they failed to keep their word on the reproductions, and naturally want to know the facts of the situation, yet he keeps his stolid distance. What’s the use? It’s too much trouble with all the rest I have to do, though I’d be only too glad to keep it up indefinitely if he’d show a little interest. --/--/
130: TO ALLEN TATE
[_Cleveland_] _Feb. 6th, ’23_
Dear Allen: I can’t seem to get around to write you a decent consideration of your recent poems, “Yellow River,” etc. When I get time to write, as now at the office, they are not by me, and you have already had evidence of my state of mind at other odd moments. Meanwhile, do not think me indifferent, please.
I’m afraid you will have to postpone your kind proclamations in regard to “F and H” until the three parts appear in book form and in proper sequence. The inadvertency of “The Springs of Guilty Song” in the _Broom_ is too complicated to explain fully. Josephson is most unscrupulous in his editorship, and it takes so long to get word back and forth that I shall probably not send anything more to _Broom_ even if they finish “F and H” with the other two parts. This is quite unlikely as Munson writes me doleful presages about its financial straits. Two more issues and it will probably expire. However, in case they do print the third part which I sent about two weeks ago, it will include a note at the bottom of the page explaining the sequence, etc., and correcting the misnomer “The Springs of Guilty Song.” In regard to this latter I had a very fine appreciation from Waldo Frank who was quite astonished at it. Then with your fine praise and Munson’s I feel more encouraged than ever about my work. I’m already started on a new poem, _The Bridge_, which continues the tendencies that are evident in “Faustus and Helen,” but it’s too vague and nebulous yet to talk about.
In the next _S4N_ I have an amusing parody of Cummings and have asked Fitts, the editor, to send you a copy. Don’t be puzzled by the name of this magazine, it’s taken from the insignia of a mosquito fleet during the war, I think. I wish I could partake of the genuine Tatian Theory, but it’s not so universal in its application, I fear, as it used to be. Sherry and bad Port are about all one succeeds in safely absorbing around here. When am I to expect that promised portrait of you?
131: TO WALDO FRANK
_Cleveland, Ohio_ _Feb. 7th, ’23_
Dear Waldo Frank: I have not been so stimulated for a long time as I was with your letter and its exact appreciation of the very things I wanted to put into the second part of “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” or its misnomer, “The Springs of Guilty Song.” The fact that its intention was completely evident to you without any explanations or “notes” from me, has renewed my confidence and made me quite happy. It has also made me doubly anxious that you should have a copy of the entire poem to read. This is enclosed, and, of course, is yours to keep if you want it. It has been very discouraging the way _Broom_ has handled the publication of this poem. The mails are slow and unreliable, and Josephson is hasty, to say the least, in his methods. At best now, it will come out in broken sequence, and a final Note with part III cannot much repair the situation. I want at least a few of my friends to have the thing in decent shape.
A few planks of the scaffolding may interest you, so I’ll roughly indicate a few of my intentions. Part I starts out from the quotidian, rises to evocation, ecstasy and statement. The whole poem is a kind of fusion of our own time with the past. Almost every symbol of current significance is matched by a correlative, suggested or actually stated, “of ancient days.” Helen, the symbol of this abstract “sense of beauty,” Faustus the symbol of myself, the poetic or imaginative man of all times. The street car device is the most concrete symbol I could find for the transition of the imagination from quotidian details to the universal consideration of beauty,--the body still “centered in traffic,” the imagination eluding its daily nets and self consciousness. Symbolically, also, and in relation to Homer, this first part has significance of the rape of Helen by Paris. In one word, however, Part I stands simply for the EVOCATION of beauty.
## Part II is, of course, the DANCE and sensual culmination. It is also an
acceleration of the ecstasy of PART III. This last part begins with _catharsis_, the acceptance of tragedy through destruction (The Fall of Troy, etc., also in it). It is Dionysian in its attitude, the creator and the eternal destroyer dance arm in arm, etc., all ending in a restatement of the imagination as in Part I. You would probably get all these things without my crude and hasty mention of them, but to me, the entire poem is so packed with cross-currents and multiple suggestions that I am anxious that you should see the thing as I do, even though I have perhaps not succeeded in “putting over” all the points which I think I have. If you feel like severe criticism in any cases I shall certainly welcome it. Certainly I was not “hurt” by the very accurate criticisms you offered in your last letter.
“Nuances” in Part II takes the American pronunciation, that is, the “es” is voiced. You were quite right about the second verse in “Stark Major.” I have never been satisfied with it as to clarity, and it will undergo revision before publication anywhere. --/--/
132: TO GORHAM MUNSON
[_Cleveland_] _Feb. 9th, ’23_
Dear Gorham: You don’t deserve my pains in copying these two charming things of Allen Tate’s until you send back that much belabored poem of Harris’s, but these being yours to keep or throw away, I submit them casually, as possible material for _Secession_. Tate sent them to me this week, and seems to have written them in a mood of amusement with no idea of their publication anywhere. I shall not say anything at all to him about above considerations unless you should happen to want one or both of them. Tate has a whole lot to offer when he finds his way out of the Eliot idiom, which as you know, is natural to him, and was before he ever heard of Eliot. These things are certainly not imitative of anyone to [any] noticeable extent. They certainly beat Gerty Stein on her own ground--that is from the standpoint of her announced desire to break up poetry into an idiom corresponding to cubism, etc. Tate has much more precision, while giving the same broken effect. Not that I care a damn about such theories beyond their being merely interesting, but that may be because from now on I feel that personal problems of my own, extenuating from the experience in writing “F and H,” will be enough to interest myself.
I am in a very unfavorable mood, and just after having congratulated myself strongly on security against future outbreaks of the affections. You see, for two or three years I have not been attacked in this way. A recent evening at a concert some glances of such a very stirring response and beauty threw me into such an hour of agony as I supposed I was beyond feeling ever again. The mere senses can be handled without such effects, but I discover I am as powerless as ever against those higher and certainly hopeless manifestations of the flesh. O God that I should have to live within these American restrictions forever, where one cannot whisper a word, not at least exchange a few words! In such cases they almost suffice, you know. Passions of this kind completely derail me from anything creative for days,--and that’s the worst of it.
Tate wrote me a charming old fashioned sonnet on my picture that I recently sent him. Because, in a loose way, it is so clairvoyant, I confide it to you, an act which would be almost immodest in other circumstances.
133: TO ALLEN TATE
[_Cleveland_] _Feb. 12th ’23_
Dear Allen: Let me congratulate you on the “Tercets of the Triad,” however mockingly intended. It is among your very best results, as is, also, the “Pins and Needles.” O I shall not soon forget “grandfather’s knees,” etc., etc. The interweaving of the lines is very cunning. I think you display a great amount of cleverness also in the “Pins and Needles”--although I’m not sure that I applaud the name for this. There might be others more apropos. To my mind you beat “Gerty” Stein on her own race track. That is, you succeed much better than she in accomplishing what is her avowed aim--to split up lyrical or picture-word sequences into pieces in the same way that Cubists do in painting. She is entertaining only at the expense of all coherence, whereas you break things up into sharp impressions and also preserve the outlines of the scattered pieces. This comparison, now that I see it written, is aimless, because your directions and temperaments are so entirely different. Yet its record here may amuse you as an idea that immediately came to my mind when I read your poem.
Odd paradoxes occur. These things which you claim to have written for amusement only, seem to carry through so far as completeness of form is concerned better than “Yellow River” and “Quality of Mercy” where your “seriousness” was, if anything, too evident. You won’t misunderstand me on this, I hope. I simply mean that your satirical leanings are very strong ... that their astringency frequently breaks up your lyrical passages and at other times overloads them to the point of obscurity. In an indifferent or gay mood you escape these encumbrances, as well as [the] slight tendency that such endowments always carry with them--the danger of occasional lapses into sentimentality. Do not be abashed. The same was true of no less a man than Jules Laforgue, who was like you in many ways and who naturally had far less temptations in Paris and Berlin than you and I, Allen and Hart in Kentucky and Ohio (U.S.A.) respectively. If I can find it I’ll send you a scrap of De Gourmont’s essay on Laforgue that I translated last summer. This is more illuminating than anything I could offer.
I think you need to cultivate greater simplicity of statement in your more emotional things,--however well your present facility suits the more ornamented and artificial congruities of satire or brilliant impressionism. In “Yellow River” there are many lines that are too noble to be wasted,--some of great penetration and beauty. So all this makes me wish you would devote some extra effort into perfecting this poem, willfully extracting the more obvious echoes of Eliot. You are certainly rich enough to get along without them. Don’t let your interest in _The Fugitive_ woo too many things into too sudden print. Forgive my pedantic bass and lifted finger, but I think you are inclined to too hasty mss. dispatches sometimes.
The ads are calling, so Addios. I feel like quoting the first verse of _The Bridge_ for a snappy close:--
Macadam, gun grey as the tunny’s pelt, Leaps from Far Rockaway to Golden Gate, For first it was the road, the road only We heeded in joint piracy and pushed.
134: TO ALLEN TATE
[_Cleveland_] _Feb. 15th, ’23_
Dear Allen: --/--/ I enclose a note from James Daly, whose poetry you may have sampled in _Broom_. He was here last Fall visiting a mutual friend, and I think I showed him some of your verse. After you have seen what “some others” think of you, please return the enclosed. _Broom_, by the way, has busted; N. Y. office closed last Saturday; March issue, the last, to be distributed from Berlin while the tent-stakes are being pulled up. I rejoice in a way. At least they won’t get a chance to murder my “F and H” any more. _Secession_ will publish the three parts together probably sometime next summer. (There is no use in my sending anything more to _The Dial_; they just rejected my “Stark Major,” and it is plain that their interest in helping American letters is very incidental. Note the predominance given to translations of the older generation of Germans, etc., who have absolutely nothing to give us but a certain ante-bellum “refinement.” They aren’t printing the younger crowd of any country.) All this should convince you, as well as myself, of the real place and necessity for _Secession_. Of course I’m sorry now that I fooled around sending “F and H” anywhere else at all. _Dial_ had a chance at that, too, you know.
You may be indisposed to Waldo Frank, but I must recommend to you _City Block_ as the richest in content of any “fiction” that has appeared in the American 20th century. Frank has the real mystic’s vision. His apprehensions astonish one. I have also enjoyed reading Ouspensky’s _Tertium Organum_ lately. Its corroboration of several experiences in consciousness that I have had gave it particular interest.
135: TO GORHAM MUNSON
[_Cleveland_] _Feb. 18th, ’23_
Dear Gorham: -- -- -- -- Your summary of praises for “F and H” was such a fine tribute that it might account for my backache and confinement to the bed yesterday. But the more probable cause for _that_, however, is liquor and the cogitations and cerebral excitements it threw me into regarding my new enterprise, _The Bridge_, on the evening precedent. I am too much interested in this _Bridge_ thing lately to write letters, ads, or anything. It is just beginning to take the least outline,--and the more outline the conception of the thing takes,--the more its final difficulties appal me. All this preliminary thought has to result, of course, in some channel forms or mould into which I throw myself at white heat. Very roughly, it concerns a mystical synthesis of “America.” History and fact, location, etc., all have to be transfigured into abstract form that would almost function independently of its subject matter. The initial impulses of “our people” will have to be gathered up toward the climax of the bridge, symbol of our constructive future, our unique identity, in which is included also our scientific hopes and achievements of the future. The mystic portent of all this is already flocking through my mind (when I say this I should say “the mystic possibilities,” but that is all that’s worth announcing, anyway) but the actual statement of the thing, the marshalling of the forces, will take me months, at best; and I may have to give it up entirely before that; it may be too impossible an ambition. But if I do succeed, such a waving of banners, such ascent of towers, such dancing, etc., will never before have been put down on paper! The form will be symphonic, something like “F and H” with its treatment of varied content, and it will probably approximate the same length in lines. It is perhaps rather silly to go on this way before more than a dozen lines have been written, but at any rate it serves to excuse my possible deficiencies in correspondence in the near future, should the obsession carry me much further. I hate to have to go to work every day! When I get _The Bridge_ done, or something of equal length, I think it will be time to try Liveright or Huebsch or Knopf for a collected publication. Just now I have hardly enough of even quality and tone to satisfy me. Of course I’m glad to know that Wheeler and Wescott are interested in me, especially as I am led to respect their standards, but I might as well relinquish my mss. to the desk drawer as to offer its publication to Wheeler, at least so far as I know. Did he publish Turbyfill in Chicago? or was it Berlin? You will naturally see my reasons for at least attempting the more standard publishers first, I’m sure. And until I have the extra and necessary amount to add, there is no use committing myself to any arrangements at all. In passing I do want to thank you, Gorham, for your constant interest in interpreting me to others whose added interest all makes me confident that I have more to offer than I once supposed. And I am even more grateful for your very rich suggestions best stated in your _Frank Study_ on the treatment of mechanical manifestations of today as subject for lyrical, dramatic, and even epic poetry. You must already notice that influence in “F and H.” It is to figure even larger in _The Bridge_. The field of possibilities literally glitters all around one with the perception and vocabulary to pick out significant details and digest them into something emotional.
Your visit to Amy Lowell was a characteristic literary experience in American letters of the day, a baptism, as it were, from the Episcopal font, endowing you with the proper blessing and chastisement necessary for the younger generation. All hail to Amy’s poetry propaganda! but I should not enjoy talking to her.
I think you discovered the weak points in my review pretty well. However, I think Wheelwright’s recent letter about _Secession_ in _The Freeman_ displayed very little evidence as prose workmanship, even of the most fundamental nature. He certainly sustained himself much better as “Dorian Abbott.” In the letter his partis pris emotionalism was too evident to convince his readers properly. In this sense, a course in advertising would be good for him, which reminds me that I’ll soon send you one of my campaigns that not only “went over big” but is theoretically a good piece of work. Are you still studying this modern science?
It must be rather hellish reading through so many books every week that your eyes pop out. Truly, you must look for some editorial post, copywriting job, or something that will relieve you of such strains. I think you will probably find things much smoother in your new apartment which I’m delighted to think of. Is it in the Village? I can’t quite place it. When I come down in June, I’ll probably plan on staying with you and Elizabeth [Mrs. Munson].
Just now, it’s Vulcan back to the Furnace! The “bowels” poem comes out in the next _S4N_, which bunch Tate writes that he has just joined through my communications. He has submitted “Pins and Needles,” which I imagine Fitts will use. I’m waiting now for _The Dial_ to send back my “Stark Major.” Just sent a caricature of Paul Rosenfeld to _The Little Review_, telling them to publish it, if they cared to, “along with the rest of my inadvertent correspondence.” It is called “Anointment of our Well Dressed Critic,” or “Why Waste the Eggs?”--Three-dimensional Vista, by Hart Crane. Allons!
136: TO ----
[_Cleveland_] [_Feb. 20_]
Dear ----: Those who have wept in the darkness sometimes are rewarded with stray leaves blown inadvertently. Since your last I have [had] one of those few experiences that come,--ever, but which are almost sufficient in their very incompleteness. This was only last evening in a vaudeville show with -- -- -- --. -- -- -- -- has manifested charming traits before, but there has always been an older brother around. Last night--it sounds silly enough to tell (but not in view of his real beauty)--O, it was only a matter of light affectionate stray touches--and half-hinted speech. But these were genuine and in that sense among the few things I can remember happily. With -- -- -- -- you must think of someone mildly sober, with a face not too thin, but with faun precision of line and feature. Crisp ears, a little pointed, fine and docile hair almost golden, yet darker,--eyes that are a little heavy--but wide apart and usually a little narrowed,--aristocratic (English) jaws, and a mouth that [is] just mobile enough to suggest voluptuousness. A strong rather slender figure, negligently carried, that is perfect from flanks that hold an easy persistence to shoulders that are soft yet full and hard. A smooth and rather olive skin that is cool--at first.
Excuse this long catalog--I admit it is mainly for my own satisfaction, and I am drunk now and in such state my satisfactions are always lengthy. When I see you ask me to tell you more about him for he is worth more and better words, I assure you. O yes, I shall see him again soon. The climax will be all too easily reached,--But my gratitude is enduring--if only for that _once_, at least, something beautiful approached me and as though it were the most natural thing in the world, enclosed me in his arm and pulled me to him without my slightest bid. And we who create must endure--must hold to spirit not by the mind, the intellect alone. These have no mystic possibilities. O flesh damned to hate and scorn! I have felt my cheek pressed on the desert these days and months too much. How old I am! Yet, oddly now this sense [of] age--not at all in my senses--is gaining me altogether unique love and happiness. I feel I have been thru much of this again and again before. I long to go to India and stay always. Meditation on the sun is all there is. Not that this isn’t enough! I mean I find my imagination more sufficient all the time. The work of the workaday world is what I dislike. I spend my evenings in music and sometimes ecstasy. I’ve been writing a lot lately. --/--/ I’m bringing much into contemporary verse that is new. I’m on a synthesis of America and its structural identity now, called _The Bridge_. --/--/
137: TO WALDO FRANK
_Cleveland, O._ _Feb. 27th, ’23_
Dear Waldo Frank: Such major criticism as both you and Gorham have given my “Faustus and Helen” is the most sensitizing influence I have ever encountered. It is a new feeling, and a glorious one, to have one’s inmost delicate intentions so fully recognized as your last letter to me attested. I can feel a calmness on the sidewalk--where before I felt a defiance only. And better than all--I am certain that a number of us at last have some kind of community of interest. And with this communion will come something better than a mere clique. It is a consciousness of something more vital than stylistic questions and “taste,” it is vision, and a vision alone that not only America needs, but the whole world. We are not sure where this will lead, but after the complete renunciation symbolized in _The Wasteland_ and, though less, in _Ulysses_ we have sensed some new vitality. Whether I am in that current remains to be seen,--but I am enough in it at least to be sure that you are definitely in it already. What delights me almost beyond words is that my natural idiom (which I have unavoidably stuck to in spite of nearly everybody’s nodding, querulous head) has reached and carried to you so completely the very blood and bone of me. There is only one way of saying what comes to one in ecstasy. One works and works over it to finish and organize it perfectly--but fundamentally that doesn’t affect one’s _way_ of saying it. The enclosed poem will evidence enough meaning of that, I fear, in certain flaws and weaknesses that, so far, I’ve not had the grace to change. The norm of accuracy in such things is, however, at best so far from second-reader penetration, that bad as it is, I can’t resist sending it to you now.
Please do not feel it necessary to answer me until you are perfectly free from other preoccupations. I know what such things cost, and knew before your last letter exactly why you delayed. (Now that I see this written, it sounds all-too presumptuous; however, my appreciation was “prematurely ripe,” for that idea did occur.)
Munson’s _Study_ came to me today. I think Liveright did a very good job, better than I expected. The photograph seconded an impression I remembered of you several years ago in New York. I may be repeating myself when I mention that you came into Brown’s Chop House one evening and greeted some friends near a table where Harrison Smith and myself were dining;--only, of course this Stieglitz portrait gives me a much deeper impression. --/--/
138: TO GORHAM MUNSON
[_Cleveland_] _March 2nd, ’23_
Dear Gorham: --/--/ The last several days have been equally among the most intense in my life. The annoyance comes in only on the swing of a repressive _fate_. To be stimulated to the nth degree with your head burgeoning with ideas and conceptions of the most baffling interest and lure--and then to have to munch ideas on water heaters (I am writing another book for house fraus!) has been a real cruelty this time, however temporary. The more I think about my _Bridge_ poem the more thrilling its symbolical possibilities become, and since my reading of you and Frank (I recently bought _City Block_) I begin to feel myself directly connected with Whitman. I feel myself in currents that are positively awesome in their extent and possibilities. “Faustus and Helen” was only a beginning--but in it I struck new _timbres_ that suggest dozens more, all unique, yet poignant and expressive of our epoch. Modern music almost drives me crazy! I went to hear D’Indy’s _II Symphony_ last night and my hair stood on end at its revelations. To get those, and others of men like Strauss, Ravel, Scriabin, and Bloch into _words_, one needs to _ransack_ the vocabularies of Shakespeare, Jonson, Webster (for theirs were the richest) and add on scientific, street and counter, and psychological terms, etc. Yet I claim such things can be done! The modern artist needs gigantic assimilative capacities, emotion,--and the greatest of _all_--_vision_. “Striated with nuances, nervosities, that we are heir to”--is more than a casual observation for me. And then--structure! What pleased me greatly about Frank’s comment was the notice of great structural evidence in “F. and H.” Potentially I feel myself quite fit to become a suitable Pindar for the dawn of the machine age, so called. I have lost the last shreds of philosophical pessimism during the last few months. O yes, the “background of life”--and all that is still there, but that is only three-dimensional. It is to the pulse of a greater dynamism that my work must revolve. Something terribly fierce and yet gentle.
You have no doubt wondered why I have behaved so strangely about the review for your _Study_. It is coming sometime. At present I have developed a chronic hesitation against it which must seem almost pathological. I am so enthused about it that I can’t seem to adopt a level-headed, conventionally-critical attitude about it. Also, the space for such considerations as I would [get?] into is too restricted in the Double-Skull to permit much more than either a screed, ineffective or broken, or mere jacket type of advertisement. I hope you won’t misinterpret my delay at any rate. As I said in my last note, the typography, paper, cover, photograph--everything in fact, is of the best taste and distinction. This book is bound to do you as much good as Frank. The latter is shown by Stieglitz’s picture to be an extremely mystic type. Don’t think me silly when I call the head and the eyes extremely beautiful. Frank has done me a world of good by his last letter (which promised another soon including further points on “F. & H.”) and, as I wrote him, now I feel I can walk calmly along the sidewalk whereas before I felt only defiance. He gripped the mystical content of the poem so thoroughly that I despair of ever finding a more satisfying enthusiast.
And now to your question about passing the good word along. I discover that I have been all-too-easy all along in letting out announcements of my sexual predilections. Not that anything unpleasant has happened or is imminent. But it does put me into obligatory relations to a certain extent with “those who know,” and this irks me to think of sometimes. After all, when you’re dead it doesn’t matter, and this statement alone proves my immunity from any “shame” about it. But I find the ordinary business of earning a living entirely too stringent to want to add any prejudices against me _of that nature_ in the minds of any publicans and sinners. Such things have such a wholesale way of leaking out! Everyone knows now about B----, H---- and others--the list too long to bother with. I am all-too-free with my tongue and doubtless always shall be--but I’m going to ask you to advise and work me better with a more discreet behavior. --/--/
139: TO CHARLOTTE AND RICHARD RYCHTARIK
[_New York City_] _Sunday_ [_March_]
Dear Lotte and Richard: --/--/ I am quite happy. A long walk this afternoon in salt air and clear sunlight. Everyone carrying canes and wearing bright clothes. Lunch tomorrow with Waldo Frank. Munson is enthusiastic about my staying with them. They have a fresh and charming apartment with room enough for me, so everything is FINE.
I sat a long while thinking about how beautiful you both were when I left you last night. Yes,--of course, Life is very beautiful when there are such people to meet and love as I love you both. Be very happy. Along with me. I never felt better before.
140: TO WALDO FRANK
[_New York City_] _Easter_
Dear Waldo: --/--/ I don’t need to mention that it was great to shake hands and talk with you. This I must mention, however,--that we have not yet had a real meeting. My mind has been packed with things that must be talked over with you when conditions are opportune. I am not intending mysterious words. But I am looking forward to the time--perhaps the times--that we shall get together and (in the wonderful slang phrase) “spark.” Since reading _City Block_ I have not wavered in an enthusiastic conviction that yours is the most vital consciousness in America, and that potentially I have responses which might prove interesting, even valuable to us both. My statements are awkward, and I really do not know how to proceed about such conversations: they “usually,” as you know, “just happen.” All this leads to a very simple suggestion, however,--and that is that I hope you will let me know when you are next in town when we can lunch or dine together. -- -- -- --
141: TO CHARLOTTE RYCHTARIK
_New York City_ _April 13th, ’23_
Dear Lotte: I am glad that you can use the smock. Richard’s illustration of you using it is very effective, and the “covers the earth” drawing is exemplary and inspirational indeed. --/--/
I am glad that you like _Our America_. Frank says some very wonderful things in that book. It is coming out again next year and with new additions. This time, as I understand him, he intends to mention my work in it. Meeting some of the older poets and writers down here is an odd experience. Most of them are very disagreeable, and don’t talk the same language as we do, they are not concerned with the same problems. I read “Faustus and Helen” to a group of people last evening, and very few of them, of course understood anything that I was talking about. If it weren’t for the praise and understanding I have received from people like Frank and Munson and Allen Tate, etc., I would begin to feel that I might be to blame. But this “new consciousness” is something that takes a long while to “put across.” I want Richard to meet my friends, the Habichts, who have their apartment filled with lovely things to touch and look at, and who serve wonderful sherry and Benedictine. I have too many invitations to really enjoy. Your friends quickly turn into enemies here, unless you limit the time you give for social affairs. --/--/
142: TO ALFRED STIEGLITZ
[_New York City_] _April 15th, ’23_
Dear great and good man, Alfred Stieglitz: I don’t know whether or not I mentioned to you yesterday that I intend to include my short verbal definition of your work and aims in a fairly comprehensive essay on your work. I had not thought of doing this until you so thoroughly confirmed my conjectures as being the only absolutely correct statement that you had thus far heard concerning your photographs. That moment was a tremendous one in my life because I was able to share all the truth toward which I am working in my own medium, poetry, with another man who had manifestly taken many steps in that same direction in _his_ work. Since we seem, then, already so well acquainted I have a request to make of you regarding the kernel of my essay, which I am quoting below as you requested. Until I can get the rest of my essay on your work into form, I would prefer that you keep my statement in strict confidence. I would like to give it a fresh presentation with other amplifications and details concerning what I consider your position as a scientist, philosopher or whatever wonder you are. You know the world better than I do, but we probably would agree on certain reticences and their safe-guarding from inaccurate hands. I shall be up to see you probably very soon, and we can talk again. The reason for my not accompanying Mr. Munson this afternoon, however, is that I want to get into certain explanations of your photographs about which, now, I feel a certain proud responsibility.
* * * * *
“The camera has been well proved the instrument of personal perception in a number of living hands, but in the hands of Alfred Stieglitz it becomes the instrument of something more specially vital--apprehension. The eerie speed of the shutter is more adequate than the human eye to remember, catching even the transition of the mist-mote into the cloud, the thought that is jetted from the eye to leave it instantly forever. Speed is at the bottom of it all--the hundredth of a second caught so precisely that the motion is continued from the picture infinitely: the moment made eternal.
“This baffling capture is an end in itself. It even seems to get at the motion and emotion of so-called inanimate life. It is the passivity of the camera coupled with the unbounded respect of this photographer for its mechanical perfectibility which permits nature and all life to mirror itself so intimately and so unexpectedly that we are thrown into ultimate harmonies by looking at these stationary, yet strangely moving pictures.
“If the essences of things were in their mass and bulk we should not need the clairvoyance of Stieglitz’s photography to arrest them for examination and appreciation. But they are suspended on the invisible dimension whose vibrance has been denied the human eye at all times save in the intuition of ecstasy. Alfred Stieglitz can say to us today what William Blake said to as baffled a world more than a hundred years ago in his ‘To the Christians’:
‘I give you the end of a golden string: Only wind it into a ball,-- It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate, Built in Jerusalem’s wall.’”
143: TO CHARLOTTE RYCHTARIK
[_New York City_] [_ca. May 7_]
My dear Lotte: --/--/ R[ichard Rychtarik] wanted me to ask Frank about the privilege of translating some of the stories in _City Block_. I got an answer from Frank this morning, suggesting that Richard translate the
## book if I thought him able. Well,--translating is difficult, and
especially Waldo Frank is hard to translate, I am sure. I think it would be fine if Richard went ahead with the stories. But before any are published I think it would be wise to try them out on some other people who do Czech trans. from _Czech into English_ and see how true the original style has been preserved. You are going to be angry with me for all this fuss, I am sure, but you see I have no way of judging how well Richard understands English as a literary language. I don’t want to misrepresent Richard to Frank either. Please let me know what you think of my plan. I shall send you back the copy of _City Block_ that R. brought. It is your copy _to keep_; Frank is going to send me another for myself.
I am going over to the office of _The Dial_ now to leave Richard’s drawings, etc., for their consideration. We can’t expect to hear anything about them for two or three weeks. I’ll let you know as soon as I do. --/--/
144: TO WILLIAM SOMMER
_N. Y. C._ _May 9th, ’23_
Dear Bill: At LAST a letter from you!!! And let me mention that it was one of the most beautiful I ever got from anyone. AND I am expecting more. I read it the second and third times during my meal last night down in one of the Italian restaurants on the lower East Side. There you get a bottle of wine (fine, too!) and a good meal (that delights the eyes as well as the stomach) for about $1. And such service! The waiters all beam and are really interested in pleasing you. As Rychtarik said when he was here last week, it’s just like Europe. I don’t know where I should have been by this time, however, had it not been for three or four fine people,--Gorham and his wife, and Slater Brown (the friend of Cummings, “B” in _The Enormous Room_) who, in spite of knowing me only a couple of weeks, has put me up nights in his room during the recent spell of grippe in the Munson household, and who has kept me in funds, poured wine into me, and taken me to the greatest burlesque shows down on the lower east side that you ever imagined. We went to one last night, and I so wished you were along. (They do everything but the Act itself right on the stage, marvelous jazz songs, jokes, etc., and really the best entertainment there is in N. Y. at present.) I have bids in for jobs at two very good agencies. The thing is a farce, however, the way you are kept waiting to know the outcome of one interview after another with various executives. J. Walter Thompson have had me on the string for three weeks, and a letter this morning tells me that within the next few days I must drag myself up there again for another interview with one more Thompson executive. It is the same way at Batten’s. I shall have to cast about for anything available from stevedoring to table-waiting pretty soon if they don’t get a move on.
Of course I have been rushing around to a lot of other agencies, too, but the ones I just mentioned are the only ones who have anything to offer me at the present time. I am very glad that you reminded me about the cost of the photographs as I certainly can use as much of that money as you can afford to send me at the present time. Hill charged me $20.00 for the six reproductions. I can’t cash any check here, so if you can send me whatever portion of this amount in currency through the mail (I enclose an addressed envelope) I’ll be immensely grateful. There is, you realize, no use whatever in my thinking about returning to Cleveland. I should simply have to go through the same process there of looking around for work, and under embarrassing conditions. You need me HERE, now, more than _there_, too, Bill, as I want to do everything I can to get your pictures shown around and maybe bought. And also, in almost every way, N.Y. is getting to be a really stupendous place. It is the center of the world today, as Alexandria became the nucleus of another older civilization. The wealthier and upper parts of the city have their own beauty, but I prefer as a steady thing the wonderful streets of this lower section, crowded with life, packed with movement and drama, children, kind and drab-looking women, elbows braced on window ledges, and rows of vegetables lining the streets that you would love to paint. Life is possible here at greater intensity than probably any other place in the world today, and I hope and pray that you will be able to slip down here for a week or so during the summer. You must plan on it. Later on I shall probably take a small apartment with Brown, and then there will be plenty of room for you to stay with us at no expense at all. --/--/
145: TO CHARLOTTE AND RICHARD RYCHTARIK
[_New York City_] _June 5th, ’23_
Dear Charlotte and Richard: If you have seen or heard from my mother lately you know already that I am all fixed up in my own room and as happy as a bug in a rug! I wish you could see it for it is very pleasant. Two windows opposite each other so there is almost always a breeze, square high ceiling, newly-painted light-grey walls, black floor and white ceiling, and all black furniture very plain but plentiful. I have a fine large table to write on. When my luck turned it seemed to turn equally favorably in every direction. I am not having to live in any rooming house with an inquisitive landlady always looking through the keyhole. A friend of my friend, Slater Brown, who has just left for a long trip in Europe, has let me take his room with all his own furniture and all for a very low price in comparison with the high rents everywhere around here. It’s also right in the neighborhood where most of my friends are living. Add to this good fortune a fine new Victrola, and you see I am all ready to begin on _The Bridge_ again. It would not have been possible to have done this if you had not been so generous and helped me out so much,--but I can’t tell you how fine I feel to get my feet on the ground again and put my nose up into the sky again for a few minutes with the _Meistersinger_ Overture.
New York has been like a blazing furnace for the last two days, but I shall be glad to stay here all summer working at my job and writing. I feel that I am getting now just where I have longed to be for so long. I can have absolute quiet and seclusion when I want it, wine when I need it, and the intense and interesting spectacle of the streets and all the various people. --/--/
146: TO HIS MOTHER
[_New York City_] _June 10th ’23_
Dear Grace: --/--/ Really, I’m having the finest time in my life. There’s no use trying to describe the people I go round with. Not that there are so many--there could easily be, but I’m always cutting down on all but the few I like the most. Last night marketing with Sue [Jenkins] and Bill Brown down in the Italian section (where everyone looks so happy!) was a perfect circus. We carried pots and pans, spinach, asparagus, etc., etc., from place to place--only buying one kind of thing in each store--jostling with the crowds, etc. I’ve never been with young people I enjoyed so much, and they, of course, have had real lives. Then there is Kenneth Burke up at the _Dial_ office, Matty Josephson (who has suddenly been moved to value me highly), Edward Nagle, Gaston Lachaise, Malcolm Cowley--but what’s the use going on with so many mere names. You can see how much fun I am having--and all the more because I have a job and a totally different world to live in half the time. Did I write you that I am getting quite a reputation with my “Faustus & Helen” poem? Although it is only now being printed in Florence, those critics and writers who have seen it are acclaiming me with real gusto. Waldo Frank asked me to luncheon with him recently and said I was the greatest contemporary American poet with that piece alone. And John Cowper Powys, whose _Suspended Judgments_ and _Visions and Revisions_ you have read, is very enthusiastic. Since I got presented with my Victrola I am ready to start again on _The Bridge_. Waldo Frank is very anxious for me to have that finished, as he intends to take me up to his publisher (Boni & Liveright), and have me published in volume form. But, of course, such things _can’t_ be rushed as he understands.
I have not seen or heard from Miss Spencer since I made her my initial bow. She spoke of finding me something but evidently didn’t sprain herself in the attempt. That’s all right, however. There was little reason why she should have. I didn’t _ask_ her, anyway. I shan’t see her again, as she is your friend and we have nothing special in common anyway. Waldo Frank, Alyse Gregory & others used some influence in getting me my job with _J. Walter Thompson_ (get the name right this time!), but I never would have got it if my samples and conversation had not convinced them. I begin to see N. Y. very much more intimately since I’ve been working. It makes living here far more pleasant than ever before. Such color and style (on men, too) I’ve never seen before--no two alike. That’s what is so interesting--the perfect freedom of wearing what you want to, walking the gait you like (I have a much less hurried gait than you’re familiar with) and nobody bothering you.
I don’t know many at the office yet. It’s too immense and I’m confined to a highly specializing dept., but I’ve already been invited out to tea by the personnel secretary. They employ a lot of real writers as copywriters at Thompson’s, and have an entirely different feeling about art & business than you encounter any place west of N.Y. In fact it’s a feather in your cap if you know a little more than you’re “supposed to” here. I think I’ve gained immeasurably by coming here now instead of dragging along in Cleveland month after month. --/--/
147: TO RICHARD RYCHTARIK
[_New York City_] _June 21st, ’23_
Dear Richard: --/--/ Dr. Watson, President of _The Dial_ (Magazine), has seen your drawings, etc., and wants me to ask you if you would care to sell him “one” of them, and the rights for reproduction for _two_ others in _The Dial_. He is offering the same price and terms to you that he made to Sommer,--$25.00 for the original, and the reproduction rights without any payment. So will you kindly let me know what you think about the matter very soon?
I don’t know what selections he has made yet, and will probably have no time to see him for weeks, as I have office hours and he is seldom at _The Dial_ offices,--but regardless of these details, I think that it would be wisdom for you to accept the terms, however modest, in view of the amount of prestige it will possibly give you, in the first place to be “hanging in his house,” and in the second place to have your work shown to about 18,000 people through the pages of the magazine. Of course, I am _very_ happy that he has liked your work so well. This makes _Two_ artists’ work that I have had a hand in getting exhibited,--both from my “home town.” --/--/
148: TO ALFRED STIEGLITZ
[_New York City_] _Fourth of July_
Dear STIEGLITZ: Your letter was the most welcome thing that has come to me in these last two weeks since you left, however late and partial my response may seem to be. You should have heard from me much before this if I hadn’t been neck high in writing some climacterics for my _Bridge_ poem. That simply carried me out of myself and all personal interests from the dot of five until two in the morning sometimes--for several days during which I was extremely happy. Those were also the very days when I wanted most to write you,--paradoxically as it sounds, I _was_, of course, for you and I meet on the same platform in our best and most impersonal moods,--SO, I’ve been with you very much. The thing which hurts me now that I have the time to write letters, is that I not only have left the creative currents that would have prompted me to better statements than I am usually equal to,--but also that I’m in a low state of reactions towards everything, following an evening with Mr. J----. Malice seems to settle inertly but very positively in some people, and as he is somehow attached to several really fine friends of mine whose company I would hate to forego on such account, I suppose I must learn to face this little clown with better results. So far, I can only say that wine is no ally against such odds. It even turns to vinegar! and that is much less pleasing than pure water. I don’t need to say any more to you about this man, his vacant mind, vague eyes and empty hands. We’ve given that enough attention. I rant here merely because I have been cheated (willy-nilly) of pouring out a clearer cup today, as I had planned. I, in the end, am really the one to blame.
When I say that I welcomed your letter it doesn’t mean that I was unconcerned enough with its testament of pain and accident not to think about you and your situation many hours. What the details of those matters were certainly would not help me to realize any the better that you have been going through a very tumultuous period and that it has been very fortunate that you should arrive in the country when you did, not that you escaped them,--but that you were able to _see_ them more tranquilly. The city is a place of “brokenness,” of drama; but when a certain development in this intensity is reached a new stage is created, or must be, arbitrarily, or there is a foreshortening, a loss and a premature disintegration of experience. You are setting the keynote now for a higher tranquillity than ever. It is an even wider intensity, also. You see, I am writing to you perhaps very egoistically, but you will understand that I am always seeing your life and experience very solidly as a part of my own because I feel our identities so much alike in spiritual direction. When it comes to action we diverge in several ways,--but I’m sure we center in common devotions, in a kind of timeless vision.
In the above sense I feel you as entering very strongly into certain developments in _The Bridge_. May I say it, and not seem absurd, that you are the first, or rather the purest living indice of a new order of consciousness that I have met? We are accomplices in many ways that we don’t yet fully understand. “What is now proved was once only imagined,” said Blake. I have to combat every day those really sincere people, but limited, who deny the superior logic of metaphor in favor of their perfect sums, divisions and subtractions. They cannot go a foot unless to merely catch up with some predetermined and set boundaries, nor can they realize that they do nothing but walk ably over an old track bedecked with all kinds of signposts and “championship records.” Nobody minds their efforts, which frequently amount to a great deal,--but I object to their system of judgment being so regally applied to what I’m interested in doing. Such a cramping cannot be reconciled with the work which you have done, and which I feel myself a little beginning to do. The great energies about us cannot be transformed that way into a higher quality of life, and by perfecting our sensibilities, response and
## actions, we are always contributing more than we can realize
(rationalize) at the time. We answer them a little vaguely, first, because our ends are forever unaccomplished, and because, secondly, our work is self-explanatory enough, if they could “see” it. I nearly go mad with the intense but always misty realization of what _can_ be done if potentialities are fully freed, released. I know you to feel the same way about your camera,--despite all that you actually _have_ done with it already. In that sense I hope to make it the one memorable thing to you in this letter that I think you should go on with your photographic synthesis of life this summer and fall, gathering together those dangerous interests outside of yourself into that purer projection of yourself. It is really not a projection in any but a loose sense, for I feel more and more that in the absolute sense the artist _identifies_ himself with life. Because he has always had so much surrounding indifference and resistance such “action” takes on a more relative and limited term which has been abused and misunderstood by several generations,--this same “projecting.” But in the true mystical sense as well as in the sense which Aristotle meant by the “imitation of nature,” I feel that I’m right.
I shall go on thinking of you, the apples and the gable, and writing you whenever I can get a moment. So much has to be crammed into my narrow evenings and holidays, that I am becoming a poor correspondent with everyone, I fear. You will realize how much I am with you, I feel sure, by other signs. I am sending you a roughly typed sheet containing some lines from _The Bridge_.[29] They symbolize its main intentions. However, as they are fragmentary and not in entirely finished form, please don’t show them around. I only want you to get a better idea of what I’m saying than could be “said” in prose. Some of the lines will be clear enough to give a glimpse of some of my ideas whether or not the Whole can be grasped from such fragments or not. -- -- -- --
149: TO CHARLOTTE RYCHTARIK
[_New York City_] _July 21st ’23_
Dear Charlotte: Your lovely letter came to me this morning ... I read it on the way to work. And I am full of happiness that you think of me as you do,--both you and Richard. Yes, it is my birthday and I must be a little sentimental,--especially as all my friends have recently left the city for places more cool and green and watery. It has been a frightful day, torrid and frying. And I have just come back from a lonely meal in Prince Street,--the place where Richard ate with me, and where I have been many times since he left. Ah, yes, _there_ is wine, but what is wine when you drink it alone! Yet, I am happy here in my room with the Victrola playing Ravel,--the Faery Garden piece which you and I heard so often together up in my room in Cleveland. When I think of that room, it is almost to give way to tears, because I shall never find my way back to it. It is not necessary, of course, that I should, but just the same it was the center and beginning of all that I am and ever will be, the center of such pain as would tear me to pieces to tell you about, and equally the center of great joys. _The Bridge_ seems to me so beautiful,--and it was there that I first thought about it, and it was there that I wrote “Faustus and Helen,” which Waldo Frank says is so good that I will be remembered by that, whether or not I write more or not. And all this is, of course, connected very intimately with my Mother, my beautiful mother whom I am so glad you love and speak about. Indeed it was fine of you to go over and see her as I asked you to do, Charlotte and Richard! And may I also say, in the same breath, that your letter was very painful? It really was,--because I have known all the things you said about her unhappiness for many, many months. _And_ there is really nothing that can be done: that is the worst of it. I am sure if you think a minute about my Grandmother’s age you will realize from that alone that my Mother could not possibly leave her to come here or anywhere else. And my Grandmother, at her age, cannot move. My mother has had her full share of suffering and I have had much, also. I have had enough, anyway, to realize that it is all very beautiful in the end if you will pierce through to the center of it and see it in relation to the real emotions and values of Life. Do not think I am entirely happy here,--or ever will be, for that matter, except for a few moments at a time when I am perhaps writing or receiving a return of love. The true idea of God is the only thing that can give happiness,--and that is the identification of yourself with _all of life_. It is a fierce and humble happiness, both at the same time, and I am hoping that my Mother will find that _feeling_ (for it need not be a conscious thought) at some time or other. She must _accept everything_ and as it comes (as we all must) before she can come to such happiness, glorious sorrow, or whatever you want to call it. You must never think that I am not doing all I can to make my Mother’s life as bright as possible, even though I do not always succeed. I am doing work of a kind which I should not choose to do at all except that it makes me (or will make me) more money in the end than the simpler things which would satisfy my own single requirements--and just because I want to provide for my mother’s future as much as I can. We shall be together more and more as time goes on, and this separation at present is only temporary. You don’t know how grateful I am that you have given her your sympathy and love, and that has been _real_ or she would not have confided in you the way she has. --/--/
I hope that I have not put you and Richard to too much trouble about those books. They will be fine here with me in my room. Mother sent me my trunk (that much debated question which you will remember!) this week, and it was full of all kinds of dear familiar things that you have seen and touched in my room. There is that ivory Chinese box, for instance, which is here before me as I write. It looks very charming on the black table next to the jade Buddha that Harry [Candee] brought me from China.
I have not written much this last week,--too hot for one thing,--and then there are always people dropping in in the evening. But I am sending you a copy (to keep) of the last part of _The Bridge_ which is all that I have done so far, that is, in a lump.[30] You will remember enough of what I told you a long time ago about my general ideas and the plan of the entire poem to understand it fairly well anyway. It is sheer ecstasy here,--that is, all my friends who have seen it, say that. It was written verse by verse in the most tremendous emotional exaltations I have ever felt. I may change a few words in it here and there before the entire poem is finished, but there will be practically the same arrangement as what you see. If I only had more time away from office work I should have made much faster progress,--but I am perfectly sure that it will be finished within a year,--and as it is to be about four or five times as long as the enclosed fragment when it is complete,--I shall have been working about as fast on it as I have ever worked in the past. I am especially anxious to finish it, however, because than I shall have all my best things brought out in book form, and with a jacket or cover by Richard Rychtarik, I hope. Waldo Frank is anxious to introduce me to his publisher when the right time comes, and so there is no doubt but that the book will come out eventually. In the meantime there is a long essay that I hope to write on the photography of Alfred Stieglitz. I ought to have about two weeks for that _away from everything_, when I could shut myself up somewhere and not have my mind taken away from it for a moment. In it I shall have to go very deep,--into, perhaps, some of the most delicate problems of art in the future. You see, I too, have my moments of despair,--for there is so little time for me to think about such things. I am succeeding in my position with the advertising agency quite well,--but all that means _more_ work there, and even _less_ time for what I want to do. I am forced to be ambitious in two directions, you see, and in many ways it is like being put up on a cross and divided. I hope to succeed in them both,--the reasons you will easily understand. This last week I got promoted to the copy department, and on Tuesday night I shall take the train for Chicago. Business of the company, of course, which will keep me out of New York for probably about ten days or two weeks. Being with the largest advertising agency in the world is giving me fine experience that will get me higher-paid positions in other places after awhile. In many ways I have been very lucky to get placed so well at my age, so I complain about nothing except that I would like to have the days twice as long as they are--for all I want to do. --/--/
150: TO ALFRED STIEGLITZ
[_New York City_] _Aug 11th ’23_
Dear Stieglitz: The imagination dwells on frangible boughs! For ten days now I’ve been travelling through the middle west on _business_ for the company. Investigating certain sales facts and figures among hardware and paint dealers on “Barrelled Sunlight,” a kind of white paint! My mind is like dough and _The Bridge_ is far away. Your card was a warm signal to me on the morning of my joyful return. I never saw the Venus in her sphere before--looking on the world with the wind from Delphos in her hair! How do you do it? You have the distinction of being classic and realistic at once. That, of course, is what _real_ classicism means. You don’t know how much I think about my essay on you and your work! Please don’t think me faithless. I fly in a rage when I think of the sacrifices I pay just to feed myself in the hope of time--a rightful heritage of all of us--and it takes time to say and think out the things I feel in your photographs. I’ll try and write you more soon, but don’t misunderstand any silences from me. _I am your brother always_--
151: TO HIS MOTHER
[_New York City_] _Aug 11 ’23_
Dear Grace and Grandma: --/--/ I came near a collapse near the middle of the week--the trip, hot weather, etc., certainly tested me and worries kept me from much sleep--as things are. N.Y. is bad in the summer anyway--takes all the vitality you have to give and gives you back nothing to build with or repair. I hope things are going better now. I’ll write maybe during next week--but worry about correspondence is a burden sometimes when I have so much new work to think about. You’ll understand me, I hope, in any case. I enjoyed your letter, Grandma, and it wasn’t too long. You write extraordinarily well!
152: TO CHARLOTTE AND RICHARD RYCHTARIK
[_New York City_] _Sunday, Aug. 19th_
Dear Lotte and Richard: Not much has happened since I got back, but it will interest you to know that ---- came around for lunch one day last week--and we had a talk about the book, _Ulysses_! I didn’t openly accuse him of _stealing_ it, just “borrowing” it,--but he certainly revealed a very weak position, leaving me to think more than ever that he is dishonest. He denied that he had been up to my room at all until I reminded him that he had told me so himself just a few weeks before, and that, anyway, my Mother had mentioned that he had been up there and had spoken about “borrowing” the book himself. This seemed to throw him into great confusion. He said he would look around among his things in his trunk, then, and “see” if he had taken it and forgotten to mention it to me. Imagine! Anybody who takes a book of such a size and value DOES NOT FORGET ABOUT IT SO EASILY. It seems to me that in admitting a thing like that he has practically admitted all I suspected. I told him to go ahead and look for it,--but he has probably sold it, and he will also probably keep away from me until I go after him in earnest. It would not have been tactful of me to accuse him of stealing right away,--but if he has done that I think he is going to be sorry for it. Isn’t it hard to believe!!!!
I also talked to him about the way he acted about your pictures--and told him that I had agreed with you both in your attitude. It seemed to make him furious that you had spoken to me about it, and he said he was going to write you--evidently an angry letter. Maybe you have got it by this time. It is all too bad--it has really shocked me enormously to have discovered such crooked hypocrisy in such a good mind. I was anxious that you should know about my conversation with ---- because, if he does write you as he said he would, you will know that I have tried to be as honest as I know how to be. --/--/
It is a beautiful day here, but as usual, I am sitting in, reading and writing. Just had breakfast with Gorham Munson and Liza, his wife. You would really like Liza, Charlotte. She teaches dancing and is dark and quiet and beautiful. The Munsons are about the only friends of mine who are now in town--all the rest being away in the country. --/--/
153: TO HIS MOTHER
[_New York City_] _Aug. 24th, ’23_
Dear Grace: --/--/ But I didn’t accuse him of anything further at the time--and haven’t since,--hoping that he would possibly be able to get hold of the book and return it to me somehow, if he got frightened enough. However, I have a letter all written to him. It will be sent just as soon as I get time to type it out; probably this week-end. There’s nothing doubtful about what I say in it either. I’m only sorry that no action can be taken against him. We are both out of the state where the theft occurred--and the book has been banned by the mails, anyway, so I wouldn’t get much favor in the courts on that account. -- -- -- -- had the brass to come here the other day (this makes me think him almost nutty) and instead of having himself announced at the outer reception room--comes ranging around among the people in the office, inquiring for me, and then comes up and stands and chats at my desk without the least concern! AND--what do you suppose he wants of me. --/--/ Just think of such an idiotic project--to say nothing of assuming that I would care to risk my standing around here for such a project! Then he keeps asking me out to the -- -- -- -- with a kind of desperate insistence, as though he thought I could be recompensed for his defaulting by satisfying some “social aspirations.” He certainly is terrible, silly as well.
I feel one hundred per cent better since I got back to copy work. I’m up on the fourteenth floor now with a wonderful view out over the Murray Hill section and the East River right off the edge of my desk. I’m far from being dissatisfied, as you suggested. The plain fact was, and still is--that New York takes such a lot from you that you have to save all you can of yourself or you simply give out. I need a good bed, but it will be a long time before I can get one unless you feel like shipping that little brass bed on the third floor down here to me sometime. That would be fine, and could serve me always here, but you’ll probably think it is out of the question to send it. It doesn’t make much difference how early you go to bed if you can’t get to sleep--you know that. And that has been the state of things with me for some time here. However, I’m really feeling all right. It’s just tiredness--and worry that you are very, very unhappy--what to do--etc.
I don’t know what is wrong with Charlotte and Richard. They haven’t sent my books to me on the date they said they would, nor have I had a word from them since Cleveland. If they are going to get upset and offended about something that I don’t even guess having said to injure them--then, they, like a whole lot of other people who go around just aching to cut their own heads off, will have to do it. Perhaps they’ve just been very busy, though; it’s certainly too early yet to make any definite assumptions. --/--/
154: TO ALFRED STIEGLITZ
_New York City_ _Aug. 25th, ’23_
Dear Stieglitz: I am hoping that you have seen Waldo, as you mentioned in your letter, by this time. The idea seemed so sensible to me, knowing as I have, the uneasy frictions that have bothered both of you and having regretted so much the evident misunderstandings all around. It is very important for us all--that is, all who are trying to establish an honest basis for what work we get a chance to do. It isn’t, as you say, a matter of politics,--but something akin to our spiritual bread and butter. Not all our manna comes from the skies. And we suffer all-too-much from social malnutrition once we try to live _entirely_ with the ghostly past. We must somehow touch the clearest veins of eternity flowing through the crowds around us--or risk being the kind of glorious cripples that have missed some vital part of their inheritance.
It’s good to hear that you have been “at the camera” again and that you are recovering, with physical and nervous rest, that extremity of delicate equilibrium that goes into your best activities. I know what it is to be exiled for months at a time. They’re the usual things with me, and lately it has been especially hard to be cut up between the necessities of a readjustment at the office (they’ve put me into a new department and I enjoy writing copy again to some extent) and the more natural propulsion toward such things as _The Bridge_. I’ve been in such despair about this latter for some time!--not seeing my way to introduce it in the way I want (the end and climax, what you have seen, is all that’s done so far) and not getting the needful hours to ripen anything in myself. If I can once get certain obligations disposed of in my family, I shall certainly break loose and do only such simple labor for my room and board as will not come into my consciousness after “working hours.” Streams of “copy” and ad layouts course through my head all night sometimes until I feel like a thread singed and twisted in the morning. This has been, very likely, as strenuous [a] year and as wasteful a one as I shall encounter for a long time, although you can never foretell such things as long as you have a family and connections. But I am looking forward to a more equable program when winter comes, when people’s windows are shut, cats are quieter and the air more bracing.
Every once in a while I [get] a statement or so noted down in regard to my interpretation of you and your photographs. There are still many things in the lucid explanation of them that simply baffle me. To use a modern simile that occurred to me in that connection--it’s like trying to locate “the wires of the Acropolis”; indeed, I may call my essay by that name before I get through. A little recent study of Picasso and his Harlequins has been illuminating on the inner realities and spiritual quantities that both of you possess, and perhaps by the time you get back to town I’ll have some other comparisons ready for you to deny or substantiate. I certainly miss seeing you, now, and wish you might send me one or two of those prints that are otherwise committed to the waste basket sometime soon.
155: TO HIS MOTHER
[_New York City_] _Sept. 8th, ’23_
Dear Grace and Grandma: Both of your last letters have been so sweet and gratifying that I am very grateful. I am glad to think of you as located for the winter, putting in coal, and assured of the comforts that I know you ought to have. They have raised the rent on Gorham and Liza,--and they have been trying to locate a new place at a more reasonable figure, but they may not move at all--so discouraging is the search. That’s one of the banes of New York--one is on a moving cloud here most of the time, for, either the house you live in is being torn down for an apartment, or else the landlord is gouging you constantly for your last cent. I never want to have any of us without some property of our own--land and building--whether we live in it or not, but just so that “we have it” and are not entirely subject to the whims of fortune. If I ever get any money, I know that I shall attend to that investment before I travel or anything else. You’ve got to have an anchorage somewhere if you are ever to have any repose of mind.
Of this latter-mentioned article--I can’t say I have had much recently. Of all the abominable snakes I ever heard of -- -- -- -- is the worst. I got a letter on Wednesday from -- -- -- --. He had evidently feared my exposure of him to them--and to ward it off he took the pains to tell her that I was a venomous person, upset by the heat of the City, and trying to torture him for mere pleasure. She recommended a dose of pills, a swim, etc., as a means of clearing up my head--and otherwise insulted me. The next morn--comes a letter from -- -- -- -- himself--in which he denies that his letter constituted a confession at all, said that the money was sent merely out of consideration for my loss, etc., and other kinds of weak trashy statements. I shall not reply to him, but I wrote -- -- -- -- that if she had any interest in the truth or cared to alleviate her own responsibilities in imposing such opinions on me--she might come into town someday next week and take lunch with me. I mentioned that I hadn’t the time to write out the extensive evidence that I had, but that I should be glad to discuss them with her viva voce. The whole matter made me ill the next day--but the worst now is over, whether I ever get anything out of -- -- -- -- or not. I shall not press the claim further than the telling of the story to -- -- -- --; it isn’t worth it. There is absolutely no doubt about the confession in the letter, however, and I am keeping it well out of reach in my trunk.
--/--/ By the end of a summer in New York everybody is at the limit of endurance; there is no place to rest, get away from the constant noise and vibrations of trucks, etc., and there’s a kind of insidious impurity in the air that seems to seep from sweaty walls and subways. Next year I shall have at least a month in the open country or by the sea--I haven’t had a real vacation now for several years, you know. The time spent in idleness when out of a job was always a worse strain than the hardest kind of labor, so that hasn’t counted for much with me.
--/--/ I see much of Gorham and Liza--they are restful to me and always kind. I don’t think I should care to stay in New York long if they weren’t here. --/--/
156: TO CHARLOTTE RYCHTARIK
_New York City_ _Sept. 23rd, ’23_
Dear Charlotte: --/--/ I am planning to move myself, and shall probably share with the Munsons in their [new] apartment. That would enable them to get a better place and I should have hot water and good heat for the winter which the place I am in now does not provide. I am wondering if you and Richard could spare me a loan of fifteen dollars to help me over the expenses of moving my things. I have not yet received a raise in salary at the office, and I have been getting so little that I am kept down to the bare necessities of life all the time. When something extra is demanded I have nothing to fall back upon and the situation is really far from pleasant. If you could do this I shall be able to pay you sometime soon, I think, and I would be a thousand times obliged.
I am getting along very well at the office, but I intend to speak up for an advance in pay very soon. The wages they have been paying me have been much less than my capabilities are worth, and I don’t think I shall have much trouble in getting that raise if I speak about it to them. They are putting new responsibilities upon me all the time, and I am learning quite a good deal. But there is something necessary in life besides learning, as we all know. It is quite a stylish and almost snobbish set of educated people at J. Walter Thompson’s--they are very lofty and certainly seem to think that the social superiority of the place is enough to make up for low salaries. When they can pay one of their art directors 30,000 a year they can afford to pay some of their copywriters more than they do.
I am working still on _The Bridge_, but it is far from complete yet. In the meantime I am working on some smaller poems that crop out from time to time very naturally. The situation for the artist in America seems to me to be getting harder and harder all the time. Most of my friends are worn out with the struggle here in New York. If you make enough to live decently on, you have no time left for your real work,--and otherwise you are constantly liable to starve. New York offers nothing to anyone but a circle of friendly and understanding brothers,--beyond that it is one of the most stupid places in the world to live in. Of course, one’s friends are worth it,--but sometimes, when you see them so upset by the fever and crowded conditions, the expenses and worries--you wonder whether or not there is much use in the whole business. I am, of course, rather tired out when I say these things. I shall probably be in a different and better mood later on when the weather cools, and when there is some life in the air. I have been through the hardest summer in my life--the hardest year, perhaps, when you consider the developments I have been through and the material difficulties that I have encountered. I want to keep saying “YES” to everything and never be beaten a moment, and I shall, of course, never be really beaten.
--/--/ He is in a very strange state of mind now that is dangerous. He and his wife, -- -- -- -- have separated. I have heard them each tell their stories, and there is nothing nasty or petty about it at all--they have simply agreed that they have failed in establishing a certain deep relationship which they had felt was a part of the reason for their being together, and they are still very good friends. It is complicated for both of them, however, by the fact of their baby boy, which both are very attached to.
I have been making a number of drawings lately. One of Jean Toomer, one of Waldo, and one of an amusing young lady. They are all very interesting, and even Gaston Lachaise, who was in to see me recently, thought that they were worth while. If I had time I should do more, but it is really only when I am not doing what I want to in my writing that I am very much tempted to draw. So I shall probably not do any more drawings for a year or so. --/--/
157: TO HIS MOTHER
_New York_ _Oct. 5th ’23_
Grace, dear! I had just got my pajamas on last night when there was a rap on the door. I opened and in walked Waldo Frank--behind him came a most pleasant-looking, twinkling, little man in a black derby--“Let me introduce you to Mr. Charles Chaplin,”--said Waldo, and I was smiling into one of the most beautiful faces I ever expect to see. Well!--I was quickly urged out of my nightclothes and the three of us walked arm in arm over to where Waldo is staying at 77 Irving Place (near Gramercy). All the way we were trailed by enthusiastic youngsters. People seem to spot Charlie in the darkness. He is so very gracious that he never discourages anything but rude advances.
At five o’clock this morning Charlie was letting me out of his taxi before my humble abode. “It’s been so nice,” he said in that soft crisp voice of his, modulated with an accent that is something like Padraic Colum’s in its correctness. Then he, blinking and sleepy, was swung around and was probably soon in his bed up at the Ritz.
I can’t begin to tell you what an evening, night and _morning_ it was. Just the three of us--and Charlie has known Waldo quite a while--they’ve been in Paris together and have a few mutual friends.
Among other things Charlie told us his plans (and the story of it) for his next great film. He has a five acre studio all his own now in Berkeley, and is here in New York at present to see that the first film he has produced in it gets over profitably. He doesn’t act in it. But he wrote story, directed and produced it entirely himself. It’s running now for just a week or so more at the “Lyric” theatre to box prices. Then it will be released all over the country. _A Woman of Paris_ it’s called. I haven’t seen it yet.
Our talk was very intimate--Charlie told us the complete Pola Negri story--which “romance” is now ended. And there were other things about his life, his hopes and spiritual desires which were very fine & interesting. He has been through so much, is very lonely (says Hollywood hasn’t a dozen people he enjoys talking to or who understand his work) and yet is so radiant and healthy, wistful, gay and _young_. He is 35, but half his head is already grey. You cannot imagine a more perfect and natural gentleman. But I can’t go on more now. Stories (marvelous ones he knows!) told with such subtle mimicry that you rolled on the floor. Such graceful wit, too--O that man has a mind.
We (just Charlie & I) are to have dinner together some night next week. He remembered my poem very well & is very interested in my work.
There’s nothing else worth telling you about since my last letter. I am very happy in the intense clarity of spirit that a man like Chaplin gives one if he is honest enough to receive it. I have that spiritual honesty, Grace, and it’s what makes me clear to the only people I care about.
158: TO HIS MOTHER
[_New York City_] _Oct. 12th, ’23_
Dear Grace and Grandma: --/--/ It has been a very busy week. I have not seen Chaplin as I expected to, he has been under the weather up at the Ritz -- -- -- --. But Jean Toomer, Margaret Naumburg and Waldo Frank have been very much in evidence, and to the extent of a very fine home-cooked chicken dinner one evening at Margaret’s which almost left me gasping--I ate so much. Toomer and I are great friends. I want to send you a copy soon of his book of short stories and a play which has just come out. It may interest you to read the inscription which he placed in the copy of this book which he recently gave me:--“For Hart, instrument of the highest beauty, whose art, four-conscinal, rich in symbols and ecstasy, is great--whose touch, deep and warm, is a sheer illuminant--with love, Jean.--New York, 24th Sept 23.” --/--/
Since the weather cooled I have felt almost a new being. Having had the gas turned on in my radiator and tried it out several times, I am now confident that I shall be able to keep quite warm during the winter. Two friends of mine have offered me the use of their tubs and faucets whenever I want a hot bath, which I shall avail myself of, providing I cannot succeed in persuading the landlady to install a hot water heater here. I do not think I shall have to buy any more clothes before spring what with the suit you are sending and what I have on hand to use. This certainly is fortunate, as my present salary at Thompson’s just suffices for rent and food, really nothing more. I am waiting until the end of this month, the sixth month, to inquire about the possibilities of a raise. If I find that I am stalled off, I shall quietly investigate for a position elsewhere. --/--/ I have been working very hard this week on a stiff sort of proposition. So far they have given me only tough little nubbins to handle--jobs that didn’t pay them anything and could best be turned over to a cheap man,--these little left-overs are, however, very often the most uninspiring and difficult things to handle.
--/--/ I think of you a great deal, and you must not be lonely. We are all going on in the regular course of things toward a higher consciousness of life and what it means. We have no reason or right to suppose that it should be predominantly happy--seen completely, from end to end, however, I think it is a great happiness. We must keep on over-riding the details of pettiness and small emotions that dwarf it to keep on seeing it that way, and that can’t be done without a real conscious effort and vision. We know each other too well to let physical separations mar very much. Christmas is not so far away now, either, and then I shall see you for several days. --/--/
159: TO HIS MOTHER
_New York City_ _Oct. 20th, ’23_
Dear Grace and Grandma: --/--/ I’ve been feeling so altogether rotten lately that my energies are about reduced to their minimum. In fact I am seriously considering going to the Isle of Pines this winter for a thorough rest and recuperation from the strain of the last five years. This is no sudden idea in my head,--it is something I have reconsidered many times for several months, and always with the growing conviction that it is the thing to do. I think that in weighing the numerous reasons you will agree with me quite thoroughly.
In the first place--my state of nerves and insomnia here due to the mad rush of things, and the noisy nights around the place I am obliged to live in, makes it imperative that I get away before I have a real breakdown. I feel that this is certain to happen before the winter is over unless I get some relief. And, as there seems to be no prospect of a raise in my salary at the office, I cannot afford necessities here that make life bearable and sufficient to keep me in a state of health.
And then, besides all this, the Island needs some personal attention from someone in this family. You, neither of you, are able to go, and if you were, it would cost you three or four times as much as I will need to live there. (My expenses would be just the boat fare and after that about 5 dollars a week for board with the Simpsons.) I need absolutely no more clothes or equipment in any way than I presently have, so that needn’t be bothered about. I would have a chance to breathe in some clear air, swim and use my body a little freely. I could live very simply and constructively--and really make it pay besides by seeing the lay of the land, how things are being cared for, what marketing opportunities are developing in the way of cooperative fruit markets, etc.
I think this and other letters of mine have said enough about living conditions in New York as it has now become--to make it plain that you will never want to settle here. I have never accented these points in any particular relation to you--but I am more and more certain that you will never want to _live_ here. Rents are terrific, food very high and unless you have unlimited funds you have to content yourself with trying to keep clean in a dinky stuffy apartment without a porch or any of the outdoor privileges that go with the poorest shanty. I think we have been not fools, but fooling ourselves, to have worried so about selling the island place. That is the best place to live I know of,--the place where you will be far happier than ever tied up in an overcrowded city--paying out every month more money than your food would cost you for a year on the Island. Besides,--that grove is going to pay, and _pay well_ sometime. It will pay you well enough to afford a month’s change in New York every year. And that’s enough! I have learned that from plentiful experience.
After the winter I can come back here to New York and get plenty of jobs that will pay more than what I have now. I can come back with a fund of health and energy that simply couldn’t be gained here even if I weren’t working at all. I think I deserve this much assistance not only as a son--but as [a] man who has done his best to cope with all situations that have come up, and I have been faced with some hard ones. This isn’t a dodge--it’s a sane precaution, and if you really care for me in [the] right sort of way you will give it your approval, I’m sure.
Please don’t think that I’m flat on my back or anything like that--by what I’ve said. I have been at the office every day and doing my regular work. It’s the steady and growing strain of it all that I feel--without relief or rest, and I don’t want to disregard too many red signals--at least with the obvious means we have of checking danger of this seriousness. I don’t want you to waste a lot of money by coming down here in the belief that I need bedside attention, I only want you to know the facts as they are. If I went I should certainly spend a week with you beforehand. But, of course, I’ll never consider living in Cleveland again permanently--no matter what happens.
Write me soon what you think of my suggestions. I think we should certainly not let that island property slip away. It’s a clean home with beautiful surroundings and sunshine with quiet and tranquillity--compared to this metropolitan living with its fret and fever--it’s a paradise.
160: TO ALFRED STIEGLITZ
_New York City_ _Oct. 26th, ’23_
Dear Stieglitz: I hardly know how to begin--such confusion reigns at present. It’s the usual state, however, with the additional complication that my nerves are a little frazzled. In fact they got so on edge writing that damned advertising under the pseudo-refined atmosphere of the office I was working in that I had to resign the other day to save my mind. I have the prospect of coming back after a six week’s vacation if I want to--but I don’t want to, and as things stand at present, haven’t got the money to carry me through the rest and contemplation that I need. Rather wound up, you see!
Your mention of the “sky” pictures really excited me. The greatest beauty comes out of repose, and I knew that as certain disturbances settled (were fought through) you would recapture the basis (on a higher plane than ever) for new penetrations and syntheses of vision. I had hoped to go down to a plantation that my grandmother and mother own in the West Indies this winter, in fact that was largely the basis of my leaving the job. My intention was to get the unbroken time there to write the essay on your work which I have never had the opportunity of doing here. I was also expecting to finish my _Bridge_ poem (which, done, would complete the material for my first book of poems). But these things must evidently wait. It is certain that they cannot be undertaken while my mind is divided between them and an office job. They are both of them too large conceptions to be accomplished under such tour de force conditions. Now, my mother writes me that the place may be sold at any time and that it is out of the question for me to go at all. _If_ I can get somebody to lend me the money, however, I may possibly go right ahead, regardless. Both of my parents are interested in money only in connection with my actions, and I have never been persistent enough in the past to really clear that notion away.
Munson said that he had a fine letter from you, and he has probably answered it by this time, telling you a number of things about his present position with regard to _Broom_ and _Secession_. He is the noblest young man I know in this country. Experience seems only to sharpen a native integrity and an almost clairvoyant sense of spiritual values. He was obliged to leave the city for his health, and while I miss him a great deal, I hope that he will remain where he is for the rest of the winter. Waldo [Frank], as you know, leaves for Europe tomorrow. I am sorry that he couldn’t get time to make you that visit. I have seen him going through a good deal, both in work and experience, and there is no use of trying to write out any details of these things. We shall talk about it some time. Margaret [Naumburg] has also meant a great deal to me lately. Isn’t this little handful of us fighting though?!
161: TO GORHAM MUNSON
[_New York City_] _Oct. 28th, ’23_
Cheero, Old bird! I have just seen the “last” _Secession_! and I am in no position, I must admit, to quarrel with you about your decision to destroy the garbled pages of “Faustus and Helen.” A beautiful bit of business--“blues in your breasts,” and the two lines that our hero decided were inessential to the poem! That damned note at the end with its ill-advised quotation from your personal comment is still worse. But never mind, I don’t care at all if you will make the necessary clipping. Some few friends of W[heelwright]’s have probably already received copies to treasure as their vision may permit, but I should like to keep as many people in America free from misconceptions about me as possible. Why don’t you wire the consulate in Florence to stop W. from any further rape of _S._--it is a positive elopement that seems to have no prospect of termination. I am thinking of starting abroad with _The Dial_, calling it “The Pile,” hemorrhoid, or something like that! My cable, of course, failed.
Waldo left today in a better state of health than he was in when you were here. I don’t know whether or not it was due to evasion of certain difficulties. I have no right to make any judgments of that kind, after all, until his writing indicates it. I am always his enthusiastic friend and brother, whatever happens. We had lunch together day before yesterday and he was in thorough approval of my resignation and trip to the Isle of Pines. I have since heard from my mother, however, that the place is liable to be sold at any time, and as that would contribute to a feeling of real unease in going there, I have about decided to come up to Woodstock for awhile for a rest and air, and then come back to town for either free-lancing or a return to advertising. I might get something at Harcourt Brace now, if Smith warms up a little. Certainly I am not at all regretful for what I have done, it being a purely organic necessity. I should have been “flat” if I had tried to keep up that damned hypocrisy of advertising much longer--at least for the time being. I am going to exact some meager contributions from my family--and not be sentimental about it. They want me to come home, but that is, at present, out of the question. The money it would cost for train fare would more than pay for my recuperation at Woodstock. I wish you would ask Brown and Nagle if it would be convenient for them to have me stay with them for awhile, beginning about next Saturday. Underwood expects to come here for a month and asked me to look him up a room. If I can get him to take this at 45 Grove, I shall have my rent free. Jean [Toomer] may arrive any day, also, and he is sure to want it if Wilbur [Underwood] doesn’t.
This is a mad letter. I am trying to get it off--along with the transcription of the English equivalents of the Sayn quotations from Frank and the _Fugitive_ finales--in time to get a bath at Lisa’s and over to the Lights in time for a free dinner. Please don’t forget your vote on the _Fugitive_ prize, the extra hundred is worth having these days! I’ll tell you all that amounts to anything about the _Broom_ meeting when I see you. At present Cowley feels that you have broken relations with him by your last letter which he read the night I dined with them. He additionally feels that you may naturally presume that his presence at the Burke farm on the day that B. resigned had a good deal to do with Ken’s action--which he says is not the case at all. I didn’t say that you had all along been wishing that K. would resign! I wouldn’t make any compromises with C. I like many things about him, but he is still in his adolescence when it comes to certain reactions. We really have two groups to the former ONE of _Secession_, and there is no use trying to evade that fact,--as, obviously, you are not trying to do.
162: TO HIS MOTHER
[_New York City_] _Nov. 1st, ’23_
Dear Grace and Grandma: --/--/ Tomorrow afternoon I leave, stopping off for a couple of days at Ridgefield, Conn., as a guest of Eugene O’Neill (the author of _Anna Christie_, _Emperor Jones_, _Beyond the Horizon_, etc.). I met O’Neill at some friends last week end when he was in town. He likes my poetry very much and invited me to come to stay with him. He has a regular estate, I am told,--an establishment that is quite complete, and breakfast for guests is never served out of bed. If everything goes right they are to drive me up to Woodstock on Sunday,--about three hours through beautiful hills and foliage. My address from then on will be _Woodstock, N.Y. care-of Slater Brown_. --/--/
I am depending on you to help me some, as I said in my last letter. I think you will agree that a thoroughly out-of-doors life for a month is not only a sensible thing for me, but really due me after all the time I have denied myself such a natural privilege. If you don’t understand such a rightful desire on my part, then I can only say that your vision is warped. It was fine of you to ask me home, but I know you will realize that the atmosphere of Cleveland is anything but conducive to rest _for me_. The amount to which I am asking you to help me will not exceed the carfare to and from Cleveland--at most. Brown is poor and can only offer me the hospitality of the house he has taken,--and extra board he is unable to provide, so I am anxious to do my part and be decent about not stretching his hospitality unreasonably. So please send me fifteen dollars in cash or check at Woodstock sometime next week. Even if you have to pinch a little bit, I think that the things I am trying to do deserve a few sacrifices. I make as many as I can myself, and still keep sound and living,--and I hope you will [be] faithful enough--whether you see my complete ends or not--to lend me some assistance. I hope you are both well and happy. Don’t worry about me. I know damned well what I’m doing.
163: TO HIS MOTHER
_Woodstock_, [_New York_] _Nov. 8th, ’23_
Dear Mother and Grandmother: Felling trees and piecing them up for warmth is a new sport to me, but I have taken to it with something like a real enthusiasm. This is my fourth day here in the mountains, but already I feel like a new person. My muscles are swelling and blood simply glowing. It is quite cold, even snowed today and the top of the nearest mountain is hooded white.
Slater Brown and Nagle make wonderful people to live with. I told you how fond I was of B. when I was home last summer. I am made to feel not at all a guest, as to a large extent I am not, of course, but they want me to stay all winter here with them now. I may and I may not, depending on how I find I can manage to earn enough money by poems and articles. Certainly I should like to become a giant again in health, as I naturally am. And I have never had an outing like this before in my life.
We do all our own cooking. Brown has developed a surprising faculty for supplying tempting and enormous meals. You have no idea what an appetite is developed with wood chopping, sawing, and much walking in the brisk air. I have a heavy army shirt of wool and corduroy trousers. I got all this along with some woolen socks for surprisingly little in an army and navy store in New York before I came out here. It was a good thing, now, that you sent that heavy underwear of mine in the trunk when you sent it.
The house we are living in is, of course, already furnished by a family that lives here only in the summer. There are four bedrooms, a bath, dining room, large studio with a huge open fireplace where we burn our logs, and kitchen provided with an oil stove. There’s just enough furniture and not too much, simple and in pleasant taste. The town is about two miles away. Walking in for our provisions is very pleasant--over rolling land, set in a valley by low mountains on all sides around. We are quite set away from everybody--no people passing to speak of and in a quietness that is a tonic after the endless noise and reverberation of New York which you feel there even in your sleep.
I certainly am hoping that nothing serious has happened to prevent you from writing to me. I have been expecting a letter from you for several days now. -- -- -- --
164: TO ALFRED STIEGLITZ
_Woodstock, NY_ _December 5th, ’23_
Dear Stieglitz: Your fine description of the snow makes me glad that I’m going to stay here until January--by which time I am sure that I may see a few pure flakes myself. So far, we have only had a gentle sleet--once and at nightfall. Today it rains and rains, and our usual wood foraging is broken.
Slater Brown and Ed Nagle are my hosts here in the shadow of the mountains. They were kind enough to ask me up here after I had to give up the trip to the West Indian plantation because I found out that my mother was trying to sell it as soon as possible. We’re about a mile and a half from the village and very much by ourselves. My first taste of the country for years--and a month of it has put me in a steadier mood than I remember since childhood. But enough of this god damned autobiography! When I get back to town I may drive trucks, stevedore, steward on a boat or even go back to advertising. I shan’t be serious enough about any of ‘em to worry now. I’ll certainly be glad to see you again and peer at some of your new pictures if you’ll let me. We can have some walks in the snow, too, I hope. Winter in New York is stimulating, and most of our talks, so far, have been carried on under the torrid auspices of summer.
There was a great crowd out here from the City for Thanksgiving, and the preparations, celebration and “aftermath” are still rather buzzy in my head. Altogether, it has kept me from writing you much sooner. When your letter came yesterday I felt and still feel very remiss, the most so now that my imagination, sunk in a kind of agreeable vegetable existence, refuses to offer you any real evidence that life in the country has been of personal benefit to me. But it’s rather pleasant to be irresponsible and purely bovine once in five years or so. About all I am doing besides the many chores is--grow a mustache (very slight so far!). You will probably see Munson very soon. He left here about ten days ago, and, I think, intends to remain the rest of the winter in Town writing as usual. His honesty IS outstanding and he has a veneration for that fundamental beauty in yourself which is not easily swerved. I’m hoping that you see more of Kenneth Burke, too. He is using my room at 45 Grove St. at present and is perfectly free with his time so far as I know. Burke (between us only) keeps fighting off a true spiritual revelation which is really his birthright, though he can’t consciously recognize it. So he falls a prey to Spengler and the cynics of more reasonable tongue--and lives in a rather unhappy and delicate state of scepticism. He sees the surface of your work and admires it intensely, but he simply thinks I’m cucu when I remain unconvinced that he has really SEEN one picture of yours.
Please let me know if you hear of any job--of any sort--that I could begin to “fill” about Jan. 1st. I think I’ll write Zigrosser if he knows of anything, too. --/--/
165: TO HIS GRANDMOTHER
_Woodstock, N.Y._ _December 5th ’23_
My dear Grandma: Your interest in my culinary triumphs is certainly very much appreciated. I’ve been waiting quite a while for the moment to tell you about the Thanksgiving dinner, etc., and have just about got adjusted again, the house in order and our simple program restored although the last guest left on Monday. Altogether, the party and every detail of the festivities was quite a success. Some things were very funny and some were a little aggravating. I think I did most of the cooking when it came right down to the last moment, as both my confreres were so occupied with their lady friends and rather daffy that they went around like dizzy roosters, and keeping the rest of the company entertained and out of the kitchen was some job, too.
The people we bought the turkey from had already cleaned it and plucked it, and had promised to make the stuffing. But at the last moment they went back on the stuffing, and so it was left to me entirely. You should have seen me going at it, sewing it up tight afterward and everything! Everyone said the stuffing was great, and I liked it myself. I rubbed the outside all over with salt and butter, and then the ten pound bird was put into a wonderful roasting machine that Lachaise brought out from New York which he got in the French bazaar. You put the bird on a long spit which had a crank and catches. One side of the cage was entirely open and that was turned toward the fire in the big studio. I never ate more luscious turkey than this process produced. You must have seen one of these roasting devices because similar ones have been used in New England for many many years. It’s a large, fat oval shape and looks a little like a big tin pig on its legs. We kept turning the bird around inside until it was a rich brown and thoroughly done. The meal began with potato and onion soup made by Nagle. Then turkey with mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, squash and gravy. Celery too. Then I made some fine lettuce salad with onions and peppers and French dressing. Dessert was composed of pumpkin pie and mince pie and the marvelous fruit cake. We had cider in abundance, Marsala wine and red wine as well as some fine cherry cordial. Nuts, raisins, etc. Quite a dinner, you see. And everyone went wild about the cake. We had all the walls hung with candles as well as the table. Sat down at five and didn’t get up to dance until eight. I danced fat Mme. Lachaise around until we both felt almost exhausted. Then there was a girl who could match me on my Russian dance and we did that together at a great rate. I forgot to mention that we had a Victrola, of course, which Lachaise bought in Kingston just the day before. Lots of jazz records, etc. Most of the guests had left by the following evening, but we have spent most of the time since in getting things straightened around again and catching up on our supply of wood. --/--/
166: TO CHARLOTTE RYCHTARIK
_Woodstock, New York_ _December 10, ’23_
Dear Lotte: I guess you and Richard have deserted me ... anyway I don’t hear from you any more. --/--/
You should not forget me. I am free now--at least more so than ever before in my life, but that doesn’t mean that I forget such people as you and Richard who have been so fine to me and whom I shall love always--even though I haven’t any way of proving it but to just keep on saying so. I hear that my Mother has taken a job of some kind and is working very hard. I am sorry to hear it, but I also know that she did not need to do it unless she felt like it. Everything is being sold as soon as possible. Only I refuse to sell myself any longer than I absolutely have to. I shall beg and steal when necessary to avoid it.
This letter is very intimate, and I have written it at the risk of a great deal of misunderstanding from you, I well know. Who knows,--perhaps you have some quaint ideas about me by this time. But I do hope that you will write me soon if you feel like it--and tell me all about yourselves, how you are playing and how R is painting. I am sure you are gaining on Time! One must.
167: TO GORHAM MUNSON
_Woodstock, New York_ _Dec. 10th, ’23_
Dear Gorham: Both Nagle and B. were enthusiastic about your investigation in obstetrics (needn’t voice my own disgust, I trust!). I am still a little blushing about my premature delivery of two poems and a quite personal letter to Miss Gregory as (already) Editor Managing of _The Dial_, asking for reviews, etc., etc. However, I do hope through her gentle accession and the rape of a former -- -- -- --to inveigle my brain children into a little more acceptance thereabouts--in time.
I approve of your going, as announced, to Croton. Do not become as other infectious bugs there--however much on second thought the worst vermin seems to haunt nearer, far nearer precincts adjacent to King Street, Lincoln Highway and the Battery for daily duels. (What you started rolling on your return to NY or what Burke had started just before that I am wild to know about. Cowley wrote the most mystifying hint of volcanic disorders at the end of a letter he wrote to B. anent _Broom_ and its publication in Kingston, _which fell through_, by the way). There have been three days of agony around here, just terminated, during which beads of sweat were wrung and sighs heaved perpetually, but B’s review of Cummings for _Broom_ at last is in the mailbox and I will get a chance to write a few letters, I hope.
Last Friday I climbed the mountain (Overlook) and called on the caretaker who lives in the house beside the ruins of the hotel. He is very anxious to leave, has been there for seven months, etc., and I am seriously thinking of taking the place myself at pay of 40 bucks per month and all expenses gratis. It would be a hard winter, perhaps a terrific experience, but I should like to keep away from the city and its scattered prostitutions for awhile. The man who owns the place lives in Brooklyn and I expect to hear detailed terms from him in a few days. B. is very keen about going with me, but his previous arrangements with Nagle may check that on grounds of honorable understanding. Certainly I should much prefer to have B. with me there, but the whole plan is in embryo now, and nothing may come of it. The prospect so far as money goes is so threatening and hopeless as I see it in New York that I may take this strenuous means of asserting myself against the traditional conflicts of my past. --/--/
Fisher has been over a couple of times for dinner and an evening. I couldn’t read the James book at all under present aspirations and interests, but I have been amazed much at the finesse and depth of Pater in his _Plato and Platonism_ which Fisher has subsequently loaned me. I think it beats _The Renaissance_ all hollow for style and ratiocination. What are you reading--and, more important, writing? I have been very lazy, but am growing more tight and particular--perhaps a favorable change after my somewhat flamboyant period in NY just before I left. I enclose the new version of “Recitative” (which may not be final, but which I think is really better than the original confession).[31] -- -- -- --
168: TO GORHAM MUNSON
_Woodstock_ _December 20th, ’23_
Dear Gorham: I had a kind of dirge all written to send you this morning before the mail came: fortunately I reconsidered sending it before one of us went into town, returning with your good news. I’m not worried about the _Fugitive_ prize because I had not been planning at all on it anyway, and I am enormously pleased at your news about _The Dial’s_ acceptance of you. IT WAS ABOUT TIME, however. What you have won there, too,--you may be sure--has been gained against a deal of prejudice against you, due mainly, of course, to your liaison with Waldo’s work, etc.
The folks at Cleveland have disappointed me much, not only by sending me only half as much money as I asked for and require, but by a great deal of wailing. I guess I told you before you left here that my mother has taken a position, since explained to me as helping a friend of hers in a very de luxe antique and what-not establishment just started. It involves nothing but standing around and talking to people, I’m sure, yet mother is reported to return home every night so exhausted and wrecked that she can hardly speak. She has not personally written me for a month now. All the reports and symptoms come from my grandmother. But would it have been so much different had I been at Thompson’s during these two months, I am tempted to ask. They won’t stop to think or plan,--either of them,--beyond the next day ahead. And woes continue indefinitely. --/--/
Brown tells me and Nagle so little about _Broom_ that I don’t know how well founded your report from Burke may be. Brown loves his little secrets (of all sorts) and it’s pleasant to leave his surface sobrieties unchallenged. Certainly Matty is not going to let go of his sheet until it is either so dead as to be hopeless or else so loaded with debts that his successor would be crushed under them. But there is much mail every week to B. from _Broom_, and Cowley, Matty and B. seem to have an enviable little love nest all to themselves.
Jean [Toomer] hasn’t written me for a long time, and I have the suspicion that he a little resents my not writing to Margaret Naumburg. The fact is--I’ve often thought of it and delayed because I somehow felt that I wasn’t ready to say the sort of things to her which would interest her. I have certainly, as far as that goes, no flattering chart of developments within myself to report to anyone. This sojourn has meant little more to me so far than a purely physical rehabilitation. That is something, but not a very absorbing topic to write about.
Fisher has been over a number of evenings since you left--for tea, too, several times. He has a great fondness for Brown and myself, too, I think. I certainly enjoy him most alone, as the other day when I came over to his place in the afternoon and stayed until nearly midnight. This poet, Greenberg, whom Fisher nursed until he died of consumption at a Jewish hospital in NY, was a Rimbaud in embryo. Did you ever see some of the hobbling yet really gorgeous attempts that boy made without any education or time except when he became confined to a cot? Fisher has shown me an amazing amount of material, some of which I am copying and will show you when I get back. No grammar, nor spelling, and scarcely any form, but a quality that is unspeakably eerie and the most convincing gusto. One little poem is as good as any of the consciously-conceived “Pierrots” of Laforgue. --/--/
169: TO HIS MOTHER
_Woodstock, NY_ _Dec. 21st, ’23_
Dear Grace: --/--/ We are, all of us, in something of a strained state this Christmas but I don’t think we need to be so much wrought up about it as you and Grandma apparently are. After all, Christmas is only one day in the year--and as a special day, I don’t get half so excited about it (and haven’t for some years) as I used to. It’s too bad that we can’t all be together, but that can’t be helped. It wouldn’t have made any difference so far as I could see, had I remained at Thompson’s during all this time--so far as [the] money side [of] it goes. I was just keeping things going as it was, and had nothing left over for travelling expense, and had I remained I might have incurred much more expense by this time by being flat on my back. I think you take my little rest and vacation a bit too strenuously. I’m going back to NY on the second or third of January (if I can get the carfare) and after that I won’t ask for any more money. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I can probably wash dishes or work on the docks or something to keep skin and bone together. I shall keep my old room at 45 Grove Street (which is as cheap as any that can be found anywhere) as long as I can bamboozle the landlady. After that I’ll have to depend on my good coat, or the kindness of friends. I’ve been able to store up a sufficient reserve of physical and nervous force while out here in the country to last me quite awhile, I think. I am not at all discouraged about anything, and I think that if you and Grandma will use your natural wits at a little better planning--you’ll be able to get along fairly comfortably without working so hard. One can live happily on very little, I have found, if the mind and spirit have some definite objective in view. I expect I’ll always have to drudge for my living, and I’m quite willing to always do it, but I am no more fooling myself that the mental bondage and spiritual bondage of the more remunerative sorts of work is worth the sacrifices inevitably involved. If I can’t continue to create the sort of poetry that is my intensest and deepest component in life--then it all means very little to me, and then I might as well tie myself up to some smug ambition and “success” (the common idol that every Tom, Dick and Harry is bowing to everywhere). But so far, as you know, I only grow more and more convinced that what I naturally have to give the world in my own terms--is worth giving, and I’ll go through a number of ordeals yet to pursue a natural course. I’m telling you all this now, dear, because I don’t want you to suffer any more than inevitable from misunderstandings--for once we see a thing clearly, usually nine tenths of our confusion and apprehension is removed. Surely you and I have no quarrels, and I think you understand me well enough to know that I want to save you as much suffering from Life’s obstacles as can be done without hypocrisy, silliness or sentimentality. You may have to take me on faith for some things, because I don’t know whether it is possible for all people to understand certain ardours that I have, and perhaps there is no special reason why you, as my mother, should understand that side of me any better than most people. As I have said, I am perfectly willing to be misunderstood, but I don’t want to put up any subterfuges before _your_ understanding of me if I can help it. You have often spoken to me about how you lamented the fact that you didn’t follow certain convictions that you had when you were my age because it wasn’t easy enough; and I know what strong obstacles were put in your way. I, too, have had to fight a great deal just to _be myself_ and _know myself_ at all, and I think I have been doing and am doing a great deal in following out certain natural and innate directions in myself. By Jove--I don’t know of much else that is worth the having in our lives. Look around you and see the numbers and numbers of so-called “successful” people, successful in the worldly sense of the word. I wonder how many of them are happy in the sense that you and I know what real happiness means! I’m glad we aren’t so dumb as all that, even though we do have to suffer a great deal. Suffering is a real purification, and the worst thing I have always had to say against Christian Science is that it wilfully avoided suffering, without a certain measure of which any true happiness cannot be fully realized.
If you will even partially see these facts as I see them it will make me very happy--and we can be much closer and more “together” that way than merely just living in the same house and seeing each other every day would ever bring about alone. I have been thinking much about you and about dear Grandma--and I shall have you with me much on Christmas day. We’ll be dancing a little, and are invited around to a couple of celebrations at other houses here, but there will be no such pretentious preparations as for Thanksgiving and no extra guests here. --/--/
1924
170: TO CHARLOTTE RYCHTARIK
_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.
There has been one bright afternoon, however--last Sat. when I went out to Brandywine valley (between here and Akron) and revisited Bill Sommer. The old baldpate was asleep on a sofa when I looked through the screen door and knocked. Arose a great bulk in white undershirt and loose white duck pants--the black eyes revolving in the pallid or rather, dusty-white miller face like a sardonic Pierrot’s. The few hours I was there were spent with him out in the old school-house studio, surrounded by a flower garden and filled with plentiful new wonders of line and color. I wish you could have seen several of the oil children’s portraits that he has been doing! And there is a line drawing of a head and hand that I am bringing back to New York that you will greatly care for. While we were both chewing, smoking and listening to the crickets I finally found out why Sommer has been so remiss about joining in with me in my several efforts to expose him to fame and “fortune.” He hates to let his pictures leave him. Against that impasse, I guess, nobody’s efforts will be of much avail. It’s just as well, of course, if he has triumphed over certain kinds of hope. I admit that I haven’t, at least not entirely. I still feel the need of some kind of audience.
By the way--do you know if O’Neill is at present a resident anywhere on Nantucket? He has promised to write some kind of notice for my book, and I should like to get in touch with him. He wrote me from Bermuda, but where he has settled since returning from there I don’t yet know. If he has been near you I hope that you have got together.
I am enclosing an improved version of “Passage,”--the poem I wrote in the country this summer. It should replace the version that is in the mss. you have. To me it is still the most interesting and conjectural thing I have written--being merely the latest, I suppose. I’m
## particularly anxious to know what you think of its form. On sending it
to _The Dial_ I recently got this comment from Miss Moore:
“We could not but be moved, as you must know, by the rich imagination and the sensibility in your poem, Passage. Its multiform content accounts I suppose, for what seems to us a lack of simplicity and cumulative force. We are sorry to return it.”
It seems almost as though Miss Moore might be rather speaking of her own poems with such terms.... Allen Tate is writing a short essay (he intends a longer one later) on my work to appear along with four of the “Voyages” in the next copy of _The Guardian_. You will probably see it. It does hearten me somewhat that you and a few others have been so
## actively interested in what I’m trying to do. Certainly I have never
done anything to personally deserve it, but I think my personal and economic embarrassments and frustrations have curtailed a good many of my intentions. --/--/
214: TO CHARLOTTE AND RICHARD RYCHTARIK
_New York_ _Sept. 15th, ’25_
Dear Charlotte! dear Richard! --/--/ I am ready to send you one of the Light masks (from last year’s production of _The Ancient Mariner_). Jimmie promised me one of them, and I can think of no one better to send it to than you. I’ll get a box tomorrow, pack it and send it along. You can have some great fun playing with it in pantomime around the house. The effect is unearthly--the mask belonged to one of the angels, in fact, that are described as standing on the deck of the ship as it reaches the harbor in Coleridge’s poem. --/--/
I am so afraid that the land up there will get away from me before I get there that I can hardly sleep nights. I find that O’Neill is not in town and the other person, the publisher, from whom I had planned to possibly borrow the money is away also. Would it strain your pocketbook at this time to lend me the amount, so that I can at once clinch the bargain? It was so good of you to make the offer in the first place that I feel [I] am possibly taking advantage of your friendship. But if I could just settle the matter there before it is too late, I could later borrow the money from O’Neill, or someone else and return you at once the money borrowed. I will need a little over two hundred dollars as otherwise I shall not have anything to pay the lawyer’s fees with for looking up the deed, etc. Would $25.00 extra be too much? You must allow me to pay 6% interest on the loan--and to send you a regular note for the money. I would like the time stipulation about 5 years, but I would repay it as soon as possible before that. I know you trust me, but I also want to assure you of protection in the matter. --/--/
215: TO CHARLOTTE AND RICHARD RYCHTARIK
_Patterson, New York_ _Sunday_
Dear Charlotte and Richard: I think I have found an even better solution for the “land problem” than the first proposition offered. A friend of Brown’s, Miss Bina Flynn, has just bought a lovely place within a half mile from Brown’s place, wonderful old Dutch house in good condition and built about the time of the American Revolution and with 160 acres of land around it. She needs money to help pay for it and has offered me 20 acres of the best of her land for $200.00. The piece that I have picked to buy is on the top slopes of a hill that overlooks the valley and it contains several open fields and a great deal of forest land. As it is much more convenient (within better access from the main road), and as it contains no useless swamps or wasteland as the other property included, I think I am getting as much of a bargain, if not more. Twenty acres is plenty to spread out in anyway, and there will be plenty of room on it for whatever place you would want, too.
Miss Flynn is out here today transacting the purchase of her property and I expect to settle with her very soon. More and more I become convinced that this is the only way for me to live, that is, when I can make arrangements to afford it as a permanent way of living, and I am sort of planning to come out here next summer and put up a temporary cabin which will at least do during the warm weather. I shall roll in the grass with prayers and pleasure when I really get this tract of land for my very own. And such beautiful country you will not find in many sections of this vast continent. Enclosed is my note for the $225.00 which I intend to pay _much before_ the stipulated time. I shall, in fact, probably take a job in New York or on the sea this winter which will enable me to pay it back before a year is over--at the latest.
Today it is raining, but the ten days before it have been as divine as anyone could wish for. We have had big fires in the evenings, long walks, big meals almost entirely of lettuce, carrots, beets, turnips, squash, etc., just taken from the garden. Sue [Jenkins] seems to be very contented out here and is busy every moment making jellies, jams, pickles, etc. The hills are covered with wild grapes, elderberries and apple orchards. Don’t you think the quince is a beautiful fruit? There are about a dozen quince trees on Brown’s property--all loaded with their sort of kid glove golden fruit. Yesterday we had a great time making six gallons of ale. It must ripen for about five days in a warm corner of the chimney in a huge crock, and then we can begin to drink it. Brown also has a complete distilling outfit out in the shed. He makes wonderful apple jack from cider. But this is a forbidden drink for me these days!
All my furniture and things arrived in perfect condition. In addition I have been making tables and cupboards from old loose wood that has been lying around for years. They really look like antiques, all right! But I do love the weather stains and silver streaks on the surfaces. Most of the wood is oak and quite strong.
So you see how the days go.... In addition I am getting back to enough poise to read a good deal. It’s funny! Here I’ve been for over two weeks, now, and without a cent of money to my name. But I haven’t felt uncomfortable by any means. I know I can go back to a job now with a much better feeling of independence than before. --/--/
216: TO SLATER BROWN
[_Brooklyn_] _Oct. 21st, ’25_
Dear Tories: There have been numerous “celebrations” besides the already recounted one (by Bina) on the great transaction, and the Punch Palazzo has had due patronage. The engrossing female [Laura Riding] at most of these has been “Rideshalk-Godding,” as I have come to call her, and thus far the earnest ghost of acidosis has been kept well hence. My real regret, however, is that I just missed getting the pick of jobs of the S. Am. line, last steamer--said occupation being deck yeoman at 20 minutes work a day, all freedom of ship, mess with officers or any first class passengers that seemed colloquial, white uniform, brass buttons, cap, meditation on the sun deck all day long, and seventy-five dollars a month clear sailing! The chief officer had already approved me, but before I could get over to the offices for final approbation they had already sent someone else over to the ship. We must have passed under the river. However, I noticed that my questionnaire (filled last June) had won an OK sign in the upper right corner, and I have been told to come around again on the 26th when the next boat arrives. I’m not waiting for that, however, as I need instant cash and there is not one chance in a hundred of a similar vacancy soon. Otherwise I have finished “The Wine Menagerie” and have sent it off, along with “Passage,” to _The Criterion_. Since the last (yesterday) _Guardian_ has come out _without_ the “Voyages” I am thinking of trying to become a literary ex-patriot. It’s just as tiresome as ever. This issue contains a lot of tommy-rot by Seaver and an “announcement” in the bargain that reads unforgivably: “Voyages, four remarkable poems by Allen Tate” will appear in the next issue! --/--/
Am on my way to _The Dial_ to have lunch with K. B[urke] and shall try to bag a review or briefers from the Rt. Rev. Miss Mountjoy [Moore]. A momentous morning: Frank is going to try to corner Liveright on my vol., also. --/--/
217: TO WALDO FRANK
[_Brooklyn_] _Oct. 26th_
Dear Waldo: Your advice and stimulation are still with me. Your solidity and conviction seemed never more firm or luminous than during our last talk.--I was glad to see you looking so well. I wrote this out this morning, thinking it might go well in the book.[39] No other news yet.
218: TO WILLIAM SOMMER
_Brooklyn, N. Y._ _Oct. 27th, ’25_
Dear Bill: --/--/ I know you’ll be glad to know that there is a good chance of my first book of poems, _White Buildings_, being published by next spring. In fact Boni & Liveright (at Waldo Frank’s persuasion) have practically agreed to bring it out if Eugene O’Neill will consent to write a short foreword. They have lost so much money on the better kind of poetry (which simply _doesn’t_ sell these days) that they want to hook the book up with an illustrious name and catch the public that way as much as possible. Gene is a good friend of mine and admires my work--I know that--but whether or not he feels like performing this favor I haven’t yet heard. Frank thinks he can engineer the matter anyway--in time, but I don’t know. He would gladly write the foreword himself if he thought his name would count sufficiently, and at any rate will write a whole page of praise for it in _The New Republic_ when it comes out. This and other favorable reviews that I am sure to get from friends of mine ought to make quite a sensation for the book. I’m a little up in the air with the uncertainty and excitement of the present situation. It would be fine for me in so many ways if the thing did go through!
Have been reading Ernest Hemingway’s _In Our Time_, a new book that is full of startlingly simple and vivid description. --/--/
219: TO HIS FATHER
[_Brooklyn_] [_November 21, 1925_]
Dear Father: I was very glad to hear from you and it was generous of you to thus come to my aid.[40] The only pity is that artificial theories and principles have to come so much between us in what is, after all, a natural relationship of confidence and affection.
You may not believe it, Father, but in spite of what opinions you may hear that I have against you (and, not knowing what is told you, I still refuse to acknowledge them, either way), I still resent the fate that has seemed to justify them and God knows how much we all are secretly suffering from the alienations that have been somehow forced upon us. If we were all suddenly called to a kind of Universal Judgment, I’m sure that we would see a lot of social defenses and disguises fall from each other, and we would begin from that instant onward to really know and love each other.
I feel rather strange these days. The old house sold in Cleveland; Grandmother ill in Florida; Mother somewhere in Cuba or the Isle of Pines; and I not hearing from either of them for the past month. Altogether, it’s enough to make one feel a little foot-loose in the world. But I’ll have a job soon, and will probably be reassured in the mail that everything’s all right. At such times, though, I realize how few we are and what a pity it is that we don’t mean a little more to each other.
Please let me hear from you when the spirit moves you.
220: TO CHARLOTTE AND RICHARD RYCHTARIK
_Brooklyn, NY_ _Dec. 1st ’25_
Dear Charlotte and Richard: --/--/ The facts are hard, but true, I have not yet succeeded in finding myself a job, and even after trying every sort of position, like selling books in stores during the Christmas rush, ship jobs, etc., etc., and I have just been kept going by the charity of my friends. The nervous strain of it all has about floored me, and I feel as though the skin of my knees were quite worn off from bowing to so many people, being sniffed at (to see whether I had “personality” or not), etc. How I shall love it when, some day, I shall have a little hut built on my place in the country to live in--and get out of all this filthy mess!
Even the publication matter of my book of poems has not come through the way I had expected. O’Neill is writing the Foreword, after all, but he took so long to notify Liveright (the publisher) about it that I must now try to place it somewhere else. This may not be so hard, but it probably means that it will not come out until next autumn, and I had so hoped to have it printed before that....
So you see how it’s been! I don’t mean to wail, but it is hard to keep up and going sometimes. --/--/
--/--/ I have an appointment tomorrow with a possible job. I certainly hope to get it, and begin paying back what you were so kind in lending me. _The Dial_ bought my “Wine Menagerie” poem--but insisted (Marianne Moore did it) on changing it around and cutting it up until you would not even recognize it. She even changed the title to “Again.” What it all means now I can’t make out, and I would never have consented to such an outrageous joke if I had not so desperately needed the twenty dollars.--Just one more reason for getting my book published as soon as possible!
221: TO HIS FATHER
_Brooklyn, N. Y._ _Dec. 3rd, ’25_
Dear Father: Your letter was appreciated in many respects and I don’t want you to think that I wasn’t glad to hear from you. But there were recriminations in it which assumed a basis for apologies and regrets on my part which I don’t feel I at all suggested in my last letter and which I certainly cannot acknowledge now or later. In fact, you always seem to assume some dire kind of repentance whenever I write you or call on you, and so far as I know I have nothing in particular to repent. I simply said I was sorry that you could not see me in a clearer light, and it seems I shall have to go on lamenting that to some degree for the rest of my life. If I began to make recriminations on my behalf there wouldn’t be any use writing at all, for though I have plenty to mention, I don’t see what good it would be to either one of us to embark on a correspondence of that sort. My only complaint right now is that you seem determined to pursue such a course, and I can only say that if you persist I have no answers to offer. You and I could never restore our natural relationship of father and son by continually harping on all the unnatural and painful episodes that life has put between us via not only ourselves but other people during the last ten years, and if you are not willing to bury such hatchets and allow me, also, to do so, then I’ll have to give up.
For the last six weeks I’ve been tramping the streets and being questioned, smelled and refused in various offices. Most places didn’t have any work to offer. I’ve stepped even out of my line as advertising copywriter, down to jobs as low as twenty-five per week, but to no avail. My shoes are leaky, and my pockets are empty; I have helped to empty several other pockets, also. In fact I am a little discouraged. This afternoon I am stooping to do something that I know plenty of others have done whom I respect, but which I have somehow always edged away from. I am writing a certain internationally known banker who recently gave a friend of mine five thousand dollars to study painting in Paris, and I’m asking him to lend me enough money to spend the winter in the country where it is cheap to live and where I can produce some creative work without grinding my brains through six sausage machines a day beforehand. If he refuses me I shall either ask Eugene O’Neill who is now writing the Foreword to my book and won’t refuse me for some help to that end, or I’ll take to the sea for awhile--for I’m certainly tired of the desolating mechanics of this office business, and it’s only a matter of time, anyway, until I finish with it for good. I can live for ten dollars a week in the country and have decent sleep, sound health and a clear mind. I have already bought ten acres near here in Connecticut and it’s just a matter of time until I have a cabin on it and have a garden and chickens. You see I have a plan for my life, after all. You probably don’t think it’s very ambitious, but I do. As Dr. Lytle said to me when I was last in Cleveland, “What does it all amount to if you aren’t happy?” And I never yet have spent a happy day cooped up in an office having to calculate everything I said to please or flatter people that I seldom respected.
I wish you would write me something about yourself these days. Let’s not argue any more.
222: TO OTTO H. KAHN
_Brooklyn, N.Y._ _December 3, 1925_
Dear Mr. Kahn: Yesterday I telephoned Mr. Sharpp, your secretary, to request an interview with you regarding some temporary assistance which I felt you might possibly care to render me under the pressure of my present circumstances. Mr. Sharpp advised that I write you first, explaining the exigencies of the situation and the application I wished to make. I shall try to be as definite and as brief as possible.
My first collected poems are about to be published (probably next spring) with a Foreword by Eugene O’Neill. Although my poems have appeared from time to time in various magazines such as _The Dial_ and _The Little Review_, I am not yet well enough known to reap any substantial benefits from what I have written. I am twenty-six years of age, and for the last seven years I have been entirely dependent on my efforts as an advertising copywriter for my living. What real writing I have done has had to be accomplished after office hours and sometimes at the risk of losing my position. Last June, as a result of ill health and nervous exhaustion, I had to resign my position with Sweet’s Catalogue, regardless of my dependence on my salary there, and live in the country until my health recovered.
For the past eight weeks I have been back in New York, endeavoring by every means to secure work again as a copywriter. As I have been unfortunate in not finding any openings I have recently attempted to get any other kind of work available, but as I find myself now completely without funds, my circumstances seem to be rather acute. One of my friends has suggested that you might be sufficiently interested in the creation of an indigenous American poetry to possibly assist me at this time. As I have never before asked for such assistance I run the risk of writing you quite presumptuously, and I certainly wish to beg your pardon if my letter seems so.
Besides the poems collected into my forthcoming volume I have partially written a long poem, the conception of which has been in my mind for some years. I have had to work at it very intermittently, between night and morning, and while shorter efforts can be more successfully completed under such crippling circumstances, a larger conception such as this poem, _The Bridge_, aiming as it does to enunciate a new cultural synthesis of values in terms of our America, requires a more steady application and less interruption than my circumstances have yet granted me to give to it.
If the suggestion seems worthy and feasible to you I should like to borrow the sum of a thousand dollars, at any rate of interest within six percent. With this amount I could live in retirement and cheaply in the country for at least a year and not only complete this poem, but also work on a drama which I have in mind. As security I can only offer an unconditional sum, amounting to five thousand dollars, which by the terms of my deceased grandparent’s will, I inherit on the death of his widow. I do not know whether such bequests are open to outside inquiry, but the proper reference, in case you are interested, is Mr. Stockwell, Trust Department, Guardian Savings & Trust Co., Cleveland; estate of C. O. Hart.
As to the estimation my work deserves, I naturally do not feel free to do more than quote a few statements from critics who have seen my poems in print and read my mss. I include these on a separate sheet herewith. Let me say in concluding that I should appreciate an interview with you at your offices, Mr. Kahn, and that I honestly feel that my artistic integrity and present circumstances merit the attention of one like yourself, who is and has been so notably constructive in the contemporary and future art and letters of America.
_Statements on my writings_--
“It is time that your poetry should appear in a volume. You know what I think of it. I have done my best these years to spread my recognition of your genius not alone here but abroad. But it has been hard, without a volume of your work to go on. WHITE BUILDINGS will be an event in American poetry--a major event. Not the sort of event that journalists make paragraphs about, three times a week. But the sort of event that literary historians make chapters about--years later. You are a real poet.
“I promise you, that when your volume appears, I shall devote a long article to your work, in one of our leading literary magazines.” WALDO FRANK
“The publication of WHITE BUILDINGS is one of the five or six events of the first order in the history of American poetry. It is doubtful if any other first volume since Whitman’s, in 1855, has so definitely exceeded promise and reached distinction on its own account. Hart Crane’s poetry, even in its beginnings, is one of the finest achievements of this age. So one must predict the reviewer’s protest--‘Incomprehensible!’” ALLEN TATE--Reviewer for _Nation_, _New Republic_, _etc._
“Many thanks for sending me copies of your recent poems. I have taken them with me on my brief vacation and I have greatly enjoyed reading them. They have refreshed my conviction that you are writing the most highly energized and the most picturesquely emotionalized poetry in ‘These United States.’ ‘Voyages’ is the finest love suite composed by any living American.” GORHAM B. MUNSON--Managing editor of _Psychology_, and critic; contributor to _Dial_, _New Republic_, _Criterion_, _New Age_, _Europe_, _etc._
* * * * *
_Other references_--Eugene O’Neill, Greenwich Village Theatre, or Ridgefield, Conn.; James Light, Provincetown Theatre; Miss Eleanor Fitzgerald, Provincetown Theatre; Waldo Frank, 150 East 54th St., N.Y.C. Telephone: Plaza 2342; Marianne Moore; Jane Heap; Harrison Smith; Paul Rosenfeld.
223: TO HIS MOTHER
[_Brooklyn_] _Dec. 9th, ’25_
My dear Mother: For almost six weeks, now, I have not heard from you or Grandma. Though Mr. Curtis was thoughtful enough to notify me that you have been taken ill, the circumstances did not seem to describe a situation so severe that you could not have taken pen in hand and at least have written me once yourself during that time--especially, it seems to me, since you knew by my several letters that I was having a difficult time and was without funds entirely. I have put off writing you under these conditions; there was enough reason to so do simply on the basis of your own indifference, or possible disgust with me. And I admit that it was a shock for me to realize that you needed me so little. I have gone through a good many realizations of various sorts during the last six months and they are not without echoes of certain things you said to me last summer, trying as I may have been.
I don’t know where you may be at this time, but in case you may for any reason wish to write to me I am writing to say that I shall be probably for the next year at the following address: c/o Mrs. Addie Turner, Patterson, New York, R.F.D. I am unusually well provided for and shall leave for the country next Saturday. Yesterday afternoon I had the pleasure of being rewarded in some measure for some of the work I have been doing. You have probably heard of the banker, Mr. Otto H. Kahn, who has kept the Metropolitan Opera and various other artistic ventures endowed for years. After an interview with Mr. Kahn at his home at 1100 Fifth Ave., I was given the sum of two thousand dollars to expend on my living expenses during the next year, which time is to be spent in writing the most creative message I have to give, regardless of whether it is profitable in dollars & cents or not.
Mr. Kahn was keenly interested in what Waldo Frank and Eugene O’Neill had said about my work, and it makes me very happy indeed to have this recognition from a man who is not only extremely wealthy and renowned on that account, but who is also very astute and intelligent. I am very tired now--with all the strain and effort of the last two months, but I shall probably pick up as never before when I get into the quiet of the country and have the first real opportunity of my life to use my talents unhampered by fear and worry for the morrow.
If you are not too prejudiced about me by this time, you may also be interested in this turn of affairs.
Let me hear from you sometime soon.
I certainly hope you and Grandmother are feeling better.
224: TO CHARLOTTE AND RICHARD RYCHTARIK
[_Patterson, New York_] _New Year’s Eve ‘26 [25]_
Dear Charlotte & Ricardo: Here I am at this date and sixty-six miles from a drink. Isn’t it tragic! And there will not be a whistle or a shout to tell me it is a new year. I shall probably be fast asleep, unless I get scared and stay up blinking over a book--for it must be a bad omen to be asleep at the switch of the new twelvemonth. But tomorrow night I shall make up for it. That is, if certain friends come out from New York with all their bottles on them.
Life out here so far has been ideal--even if it has been below zero much of the time. But I came prepared for all kinds of weather and dress every morning in boots, woolens, and furs. I shall have my picture taken and you shall see how very impolite I look.
Imagine paying only ten dollars a month for the rent of a whole house (8 rooms)! I share it with Allen Tate and his wife and have a suite all to myself on the second floor--1 room I do not use at all, a bedroom with a fine old “sleigh bed” and a study, spacious and light, in which the sun streams every morning. My pictures and nick-knacks look wonderfully jolly on the simple kalsomined walls and the books fairly glisten on the shelves. This room is kept well heated by two oil stoves. Downstairs we cook and heat with wood-burning stoves which means enough daily exercise to keep us glowing.
Otherwise all I have to do is wash dishes. Mrs. Tate cooks lunch and dinner and Allen gets breakfast! This routine plan is the only way for all of us to get each his work done--I mean our writing. Mrs. Tate is writing a novel (her second) and Allen is _supposed_ to be writing reviews, etc. Nothing much _yet_, however, has been done by any of us. There have been food supplies, appliances and sundries of all sorts to order--and then came Christmas with flocks of people visiting Brown’s place (about 1/2 mile away) and drinking and talking day and night. Allen also has dissipated terribly with a gun he bought (called “_The White Powder Wonder_”)! and has so far spent most of his time ranging over the hills shooting at sparrows. He did get a squirrel one day, however, and we had an exclamatory time over the stew it made. -- -- -- -- There are all kinds of game around here, even deer, and it’s a temptation to hunt, of course.
Well, the expected results have already been noticed on my family! Long and ardurous letters from uncles, aunts, etc. (not Zell [Hart Deming], but she’s in Europe anyway), and a fat check from my father for Christmas. They all want me to come out and visit again--which I see no reason for doing at this time. I want to get into my work. My God, it’s the first time anyone paid me to do it or even encouraged it in any substantial way! Of course--to them the $2,000 seems like some kind of shower bath without any connection with any conceivable responsibilities. You can have responsibilities toward your time clock, your cow or your maiden aunt, but you can’t mean to say that poems or pictures demand anything but aimless dreaming! No. I’m not coming until spring--unless there is serious need of me.
Mother, it seems, has been terribly ill in Miami, and did not even go to the Isle of Pines. As she was scheduled to leave for there on a certain day and, failing to, did not inform me I went on writing her there and as I got no word of her from _anywhere_ I finally gave up writing at all. Finally I got word through Mr. Curtis that he had been called to Miami to take care of them both--but I still didn’t understand her not writing me in all that time, and thought she must be angry about something.
Everything was all mixed up. And I finally had a long letter from her rejoicing in my good luck and full of the harrowing details of how very ill she had been with all sorts of complications. Miami turned out to be more terrible than even I had predicted--and what this folly has cost those women in pain and in expense God only knows. Both in bed for weeks. Six doctors, nurses, compartments on trains, etc., etc., Grandma got back about 2 weeks before Grace was able to leave. The latter joined her finally and they are living at the Manor--where they should have been all the time, of course. I’m sure they would love to see you both, and believe me, there were no complications, as I had thought, between us.
I’m expecting you both to visit me here next summer. Plenty of room for you--and you’ll be sure to relax. I bought some wonderful snow shoes with some of Otto’s money and so I pray for heavy storms. --/--/