Chapter VII: Part ONE: Ohio (6)

I like the admonitions you offered on Macy, etc., in _The New Republic_. You are developing a tightened hold on criticism that is a favorable opposite to Mr. Rosenfeld’s rapturous Turner-sunset technique.

118: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Thanksgiving Day ’22_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ I have not seen Sommer for weeks and weeks. He is very peculiar, never looks you up, never phones or manifests the slightest interest. I have got tired of ever-lastingly tagging after him and shall wait until I have some important news for him before I crash into his cosmos again. I don’t think he ever so much as replied with a note of thanks to Williams for his purchase and beautiful, generous tribute of praise. I can’t understand it. But it is perhaps good to become impersonal in the admiration of art.

Poor -- -- -- --! I feared you would not like him very much. My affection for him is based on a certain community of taste and pursuit we have which you will understand. Because he has been mewed up so long with unpleasant work -- -- -- -- in a city where conversation and letters never existed--he has, out of sheer ennui, been forced to find entertainment in ways which have taken the best of him to feed what has become a sort of obsession. His creative impulse was never very strong, but in his letters and on his favorite topic you get as strong a satire as Petronius! Life has tamed him terribly,--yet he has lived a great deal if the senses mean anything.

I haven’t had time to read all of #3.[25] But I can well understand your dismay at Matty. With all his boasted time and leisure he ought to have made a better job of it. And that silly slant at Joyce--putting him along with Cabell! Matty’s “gay intellectualism” will eventually expose him to the jibes of a psychoanalyst if he continues in such loose estimates as his article in _Broom_ on advertising displays. Some things he says may be true,--but how damned vulgar his rhapsodies become! I would rather be on the side of “sacred art” with Underwood than admit that a great art is inherent in the tinsel of the billboards. Technique there is, of course, but such gross materialism has nothing to do with art. Artistry and fancy will be Matty’s limit as long as he is not willing to admit the power and beauty of emotional intensity--which he has proved he hasn’t got.

Burke has an Egyptian quality of hard and solid speculation. Egyptian literature is, of course, not my comparison,--but in looking at the sculpture of that nation one gets the same impression, the same austerity. I have decided, perhaps I repeat myself, that no advance in sculpture has been made since the Egyptians so far as essential plastique is concerned. This after looking at the 200 or so photographs in a modern German book on the subject that I got recently.

Sam Loveman didn’t like your Saltus review. Said it was scattered, etc. I haven’t read it. His book on the man and his works is progressing, he says. I think it will probably be very bad. He is the kind of “critic” that feels it needful to damn every one else in order to praise. He made the terrible assertion that “while Saltus was steadily working, neglected in obscurity, Henry James was applauded in two countries for his _puking_.” James never did that, whatever else you may say about him. Ridiculous. Of course I don’t take Sam seriously in any criticism. The man _Rychtarik_ and his wife are really the best company I have now. (Note the spelling of his name, correct this time.) His initials are W. R. I mention this because it would be sad to get his name wrong for that cover. He was pleased greatly by your acceptance and praise. --/--/

119: TO WALDO FRANK

[_Cleveland_] _Nov. 30th ’22_

Dear Waldo Frank: I have heard through Munson that you care for some of my poems. Let me take the occasion of _Secession_ #3 to tell you how powerfully I think you can write in such a story or episode as “Hope.” This is so fine that I cannot keep [from] writing you.

I never read prose before that flowed with such lyricism and intensity.--I suppose there are sure to be shocked cries, but the beautiful manipulation of symbolism in the thing has made your daring (if it took any) infinitely worth while. Writing like this is a real legacy, and nothing could be cleaner!

You may be interested in seeing six reproductions of work by Wm. Sommer that I sent Gorham today. In that case, anyway, this outburst may have served some purpose.

120: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Dec. 7th, ’22_

Dear Gorham: Frank’s “Hope” struck me so strongly that I wrote him a few encomiums. I also wrote Fisher, ordering a copy of the Kuniyoshi monograph. His reply included mention that he failed to get to New York last week but expected to see you this week; that he would not be able to publish anything of Sommer’s for some time in any case until he got some monetary returns from his recent collections, etc. I hope Stieglitz likes them.

I haven’t heard anything whatever from Tate, not even a rumor. He must be quite ill, deranged or something. If, by any chance, he is sore at me, I cannot account for a reason.

Untermeyer’s article was at least decent, it was a non-insulting sort of bulletin and one of the better sort of things that could happen to _Secession_ and its group. I was quite surprised that this parodist and facile assessor could so gracefully rise to the occasion of a new attitude. Whether we like him or not, his “position” in the American scene carries some weight, so I rather hope to see him continue his interest. --/--/

121: TO ----

_Cleveland_ _December 10th, ’22_

My dear ----: My mother will not tolerate wine at the house--so I am rebelling. I am thinking seriously of moving into permanent private quarters where one need not be questioned about every detail of life and where one can be free of the description of one’s food and its contents and manner of preparation while it is eaten at the table. To this end I am at present staying for a few days at a hotel. Maybe I shall move out as above indicated, or maybe I shall go back; it all depends on the course she takes. Because I dread to leave her on account of the position it puts her in I hope she will be more lenient with me. I don’t ask much, and the little wine I succeed in getting has never resulted in embarrassing her. I never “carry on” at the house or annoy her. The fact of wine, alone, is what infuriates her puritanical instincts. All this is tedious and maudlin stuff to write, but that very fact makes it in some measure an excuse for my present dull outlook on things. Life is hard enough, God knows, without having to put up with a hundred extra restrictions in order to just have a room and a bed! --/--/

How _do_ you manage such exquisite delights every time you journey to the Metropolis?! Your letter was superb. I can understand, also, how you failed to “mix” with Munson and his friends. You are so much of the Nineties that it was scarcely to be expected. You had the same reactions as H---- would have had to such a meeting. I am not saying that there is any single attitude toward art that is final. I do contend, however, that Munson, Burke, Cummings and Waldo Frank all have something new and fine to offer. And whether or not you agree with their critical “lingo” you will nevertheless find their creative results interesting and vital. In last week’s _New Republic_ there was an article on the group by Louis Untermeyer, non-committal but intelligent, on _Secession_ and its contributors in which I was mentioned casually. We are all of us quite different. Our differences from the attitude of the present generation-in-power are in each case individual. I shall probably never amount to anything--but the others that I have just mentioned will do things of considerable importance. Frank, in _Rahab_, and Burke in his criticisms and in a number of short ideographic stories, have already established places in contemporary letters. --/--/

I am quite disrupted. Family affairs and “fusses” have been my destruction since I was eight years old when my father and mother began to quarrel. That phase only ended recently, and the slightest disturbance now tends to recall with consummate force all the past and its horrid memories on pretext of the slightest derangement of equilibrium. As I write I am ensconced at my office. Everybody else is away, for it is Sunday. Yet, in forgetfulness someone was very kind in leaving a gallon of delicious sherry. I have already had two good glasses of it without permission. I shall probably have two more before I go to see Isadora Duncan this evening and go back to the uninteresting room at the hotel. For without my books around me and my pictures and my Victrola with its Ravel, Debussy, Strauss and Wagner records--I am desolate, I find. I have grown accustomed to an “ivory tower” sort of existence. I am succeeding very well in my advertising writing. Salary raised and promises of more and decent people to work with who enjoy Joyce, Cabell, Pater and the best things of life. Yet even so--Life is meagre with me. I am unsatisfied and left always begging for beauty. I am tied to the stake--a little more wastefully burnt every day of my life while all America is saying, “every day I am growing better and better in every way,” and Dr. Coué makes his millions!

I am just enough filled with wine at the time of this letter to make confessions that will bore you. Yet, oddly enough, it is at such times that I feel most like writing you and H----. He is floating under the shades of bamboos up the rivers of China under the dragon stars. You and I are in offices--seeking the same things--but my gift of humor has left me today. --/--/

122: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Tuesday, Dec. 12th_

Dear Gorham: You, as well as some of my local friends, must share in my excitement at seeing Isadora Duncan dance on Sunday night. She gave the same program (All Tschaikowsky) that she gave in Moscow for the Soviet celebration and, I think, you saw it in New York recently. It was glorious beyond words, and sad beyond words too, from the rude and careless reception she got here. It was like a wave of life, a flaming gale that passed over the heads of the nine thousand in the audience without evoking response other than silence and some maddening cat-calls. After the first movement of the _Pathétique_ she came to the fore of the stage, her hands extended. Silence,--the most awful silence! I started clapping furiously until she disappeared behind the draperies. At least one tiny sound should follow her from all that audience. She continued through the performance with utter indifference for the audience and with such intensity of gesture and such plastique grace as I have never seen, although the music was sometimes almost drowned out by the noises from the hall. I felt like rushing to the stage, but I was stimulated almost beyond the power to walk straight. When it was all over she came to the fore-stage again in the little red dress that had so shocked Boston, as she stated, and among other things told the people to go home and take from the bookshelf the works of Walt Whitman, and turn to the section called “Calamus.” Ninety-nine percent of them had never heard of Whitman, of course, but that was part of the beauty of her gesture. Glorious to see her there with her right breast and nipple quite exposed, telling the audience that the truth was not pretty, that it was really indecent, and telling them (boobs!) about Beethoven, Tschaikowsky, and Scriabin. She is now on her way back to Moscow, so I understand, where someone will give her some roses for her pains.

I am in great ferment, and have been staying at a hotel for several days until I talk to my mother about some things that will determine whether or not I shall continue to live out at the house any more. They are little things, mostly, but such little things accumulate almost into a complex that [is] too much for me to work under. There is no use in discussing them here, but just the constant restraint necessary in living with others, you may appreciate, is a deadening thing. Unless something happens to release me from such annoyances I give up hope of doing any satisfactory writing. -- -- -- --

123: TO WILLIAM WRIGHT

_Cleveland, O._ _December 24, 1922_

Dear William: However much boredom you may find in Warren--I assure you, it will not be as strenuous as the hot water I am stewing in. The Pittsburgh Water Heater surely has been on my mind the last three weeks, and the burden is still unshifted. I am growing bald trying to scratch up new ideas in housekeeping and personal hygiene--to tell people why they need more and quicker hot water. Last night I got drunk on some sherry. Even in that wild orgy my mind was still enchained by the hot water complex,--and I sat down and reeled off the best lines written so far in my handling of the campaign. All of my poems in the future will attest this sterilizing influence of HOT WATER!

Nothing happens here, either. I am grateful only for wine. I have neither women or song. Cleveland street car rides twice a day take out all hope of these latter elements. I think of New York and next summer when the present is too sharp (or is it dull!). But the main faults are not of our city, alone. They are of the age. A period that is loose at all ends, without apparent direction of any sort. In some ways the most amazing age there ever was. Appalling and dull at the same time. --/--/