Chapter XIII: Part II: is, of course, the DANCE and sensual culmination. It is also an (4)

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_