Chapter IV: Part ONE: Ohio (3)

What think you of this Aldous Huxley’s “Leda” poems? They strike me as dry and very clever,--but is real poetry so obviously clever? Modern life and its vacuity seems to me to be responsible for such work. There is only a lime or a lemon to squeeze or a pepper-pot left to shake. All the same I admire his work very much. He comes in the line of Eliot and Sitwell. Eliot’s influence threatens to predominate the new English.

50: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Washington, D.C._ _Oct. 20th,--’20_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ Your letter that arrived this morning had the true rage of the celibate unwilling in it. I sympathize with you.... My nights are uneasy also. But you ought to pity me more than yourself,--my satisfactions are far more remote and dangerous than yours, and my temptations frequent, alas!

I have just been reading your Pollard article, and on bringing it to the attention of my friend Wilbur Underwood here, was delighted to find that U. knew Pollard very well, the latter having been enthusiastic about the two vols. of verse that Underwood brought out in England a long time ago. What pathos there is in these sudden flashes on forgotten people, forgotten achievements and encounters! Here is this man, Underwood, with the beauty and promise of his life all dried and withered by the daily grind he has had to go through year after year in the State Dept. with a meagre salary. A better critic and more interesting person one seldom meets, yet the routine of uninteresting work has probably killed forever his creative predispositions. A very few friends is all that life holds for him. Yes, Pound is right in what he says in his “The Rest,”--“O helpless few in my country, O remnant enslaved!... You who cannot wear yourselves out by persisting to successes.”

U. has a very fine collection of rare translations, etc., from antiquity, and I have just been enjoying to the full his copy of the _Satyricon_ of Petronius (Arbiter), a rare and completely unexpurgated Paris edition, purported to have been translated by Oscar Wilde, although it seems to me too fine a job for what I imagine Wilde’s scholarship to have been. Also, I am enjoying _The Golden Asse_ of Apuleius, and some Saltus vols. that he has.

I went to see Hampden in _The Merchant of Venice_ recently here. The way it was done, setting, costumes, speech, gestures,--everything was sickening. Hampden, in one scene only,--the tantrum with Tubal,--was good, everywhere else his acting was indifferent. I cannot understand how a man of his intelligence,--for I remember his Hamlet as being quite good,--will venture forth with such a cast of burlesque queens, (his Portia!!!) and bitches. The worst examples of antiquated theatricality, and mouthing of words! And the audience was ample and enthusiastic,--a true barometer of the American stage at present. --/--/

I shall be glad to get back to Cleveland for a while, if only to see the copies of Vildrac, Rimbaud, and Laforgue that have arrived from Paris since my leaving. I expect to return to W. later, in Jan. when the “season” here is on. I find agreement from my father that my lack of results here has not been so much a matter of personal inadequacy as the weather and general slowness of business here at this particular time.... I shall certainly be in an ungodly rush, though, all the time I am at the factory, as the holiday season orders will be coming in and things become perfectly maddening there for two months. However, anything will be better than the maddening experience I have been having here of clawing the air day after day without getting any but the most meagre results. --/--/

51: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland,_ _Nov. 9th--’20_

Dear Gorham: -- -- -- -- Yes, “Jurgen” has been breathing his _native_ Ohio air for two weeks now, and is elbow and knee-deep in shipping and packing at the factory. The Christmas rush has already begun and I’m tired to death tonight after a rush since five this morning. But in spite of all it has been better to get out of the ghostly time I was having in Washington, back into the usual smoky and tawdry thoroughfares. Does one really get so used to such things as, in time, to miss them, if absent? I am sure I should not miss factory whistles in Pisa or Morocco, but I frankly did miss them in Washington. Anyway, they were more enlivening (and the people they claim) than anything or anyone that I saw in W., which seemed to me the most elegantly restricted and bigoted community I ever ventured into. They say it has changed a lot since the war, and prohibition, of course, smothered its last way out.--I almost hope I will not have the opportunity of returning there in Jan., as expected. But you’ve heard most of this before.--

I have written Margaret Anderson to find out the _L.R._ situation. Probably what you have heard is only too true. There is no use expressing familiar resentments about such proceedings, and anyway one grows rather calloused and numb in time. There is that danger with me,--of relaxing into an indifference more comfortable than an interest in the arts nowadays and here, allows. I suppose the Minns pictures, my poems, etc., are smothered,--at least I’ve reconciled myself to it peacefully. I’m sorrier about the Minns pictures than anything else, as it meant a great deal of trouble to bring their reproduction about. Perhaps they’ll print them again, I don’t know yet. My great wonder is that M.C.A. and j.h. keep persisting as they do.

When you get a chance see the new monograph on Jacob Epstein including fifty photos of his works. He seems to be much better than most of Rodin, and I’m enthusiastic almost to the point of silliness. I’m reading _The Possessed_ at your suggestion. Dostoievsky is a stranger to me beyond _Crime and Punishment_ which caught me by the throat. He _does_ give one more life than my mundane world supplies,--and stimulates. He makes you forget yourself (should I better say, lose) in the life of his characters for days at a time. And how few writers can do that! You see this record of my temper at present,--I’m tired, with every evidence of it. -- -- -- --

52: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _11/23/20_

My dear Gorham: Your letter has just come, and I’m sorry to know you are having such an ordeal of “nerves.” Of course, being thrown back violently again on celibacy after your Woodstock freedom would naturally tend to bring about such a result, and it is only a pity that you cannot find anything near you of sufficient temporary interest to relieve your situation. Of course, I realize, that the puritanical taboos of a typical boys’ school are what stands in the way most of all, and then you might possibly resent and refuse sheer sensuality after having experienced what I imagine has been offered you. I don’t believe in the “sublimation” theory at all so far as it applies to my own experience. Beauty has most often appeared to me in moments of penitence and even sometimes, distraction and worry. Lately my continence has brought me nothing in the creative way,--it has tended to create a confidence in me along lines of action,--business, execution, etc. There is not love enough in me at present to do a thing. This sounds romantic and silly,--you understand that I mean and refer to the strongest incentive to the imagination, or, at least, the strongest in my particular case. So I have nothing to offer you for reading and judgment. Mart Anderson writes me that the next _L.R._ will be out the twenty-fifth,--96 pgs., and will contain my poem, etc., and a publication of the J. Joyce trial and proceedings which she says are interesting. It ought to be a rich number with John Quinn and Burleson throwing epithets at each other. I stopped in the middle of _The Possessed_ to read _Poor White_, but am again on the Russian trail. What marvelous psychology!!! A careful reading of “Dosty” ought to prepare one’s mind to handle any human situation comfortably that ever might arise.... You will like the Anderson book. It fascinated me as much as _Winesburg_ and this in spite of a great fear I had of disappointment. There is a woman in it something like jh although too removed to do anything but suggest her. I wish, after you have read it, that we could have a fireside hour over the book. We might agree perhaps on the exquisite work of such scenes as the description of the murderer-saddlemaker sitting by the pond and rocking gently to and fro (the simplicity of A’s great power of suggestion is most mocking to the analyst)--and the scene where the sex awakening girl hears the men in the barn in speaking of her, say,--“the sap is mounting into the tree.” Nature is so strong in all the work of Anderson--and he describes it as one so willingly and happily surrendered to it, that it colors his work with the most surprising grasp of what “innocence” and “holiness” ought to mean. Also, his uncanny intuition into the feelings of women (a number of women have remarked to me about this) is very unusual. I have an absurd prejudice against Frank’s _Dark Mother_ merely on account of what I read of it in a copy of _The Dial_. There it seemed to me too exclamatory, Semitic, and too much in the style of David Pinski, whose stuff I somehow am terribly bored with. So I probably shall never read it, as I probably shall never read more than the three pages of W. D. Howells that I once attempted. Frankly, you see, I admit to a taste for certain affectations and ornamental commissions. I wish I could follow your finger guide to the advice of Brooks in _The Freeman_ about “outside interests” for the fallow seasons between poems. I had read the article and agree with it in many ways. But with me, there are no poems for “doldrums” to lag between, and no time, literally, for poems, to say nothing of energy. The fact is last week I ran gait at the factory at the rate of fourteen hours straight per day of rushed and heavy and confusing labor, and as it will probably continue that way until very near Christmas, I have all I can do to think of getting enough sleep to begin the rush again next day. Of course I am becoming very morose and irritable under this pressure of exertion, not to mention disgust and boredom, and yesterday, my first day of a chance to sit down and think a minute, I found myself in a rather serious state of indigestion and neurotic fever. So it goes. Our age tries hard enough to kill us, but I begin to feel a pleasure in sheer stubbornness, and will possibly turn in time into some sort of a beautiful crank. Pax vobiscum!!!!

53: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Sunday, Dec. 5th,--’20_

Dear Gorham: Your article in _The Plowshare_ was so late as to have arrived only a few days ago,--the “Pascal” came yesterday. In almost every way, I think, the latter work is superior, and to me, more suggestive, but this is probably because we agreed pretty well over most of the contents of “Cafe St. Beuve” last summer in my parlours at the Prince George and so it was familiar material to me. I have never read Pascal and so can’t speak beyond telling you that I like your handling of the theme and it seemed to me that your style was richer than I have noticed before. I am filled with a kind of bleakness of mind and spirit lately, so that even this answer to your appreciated interest in my bland career is somehow an unsatisfactory effort. I should like to be able to see and talk to you,--the mere technical mechanics of writing have become so foreign to me from long neglect, that I feel awkward at best. Again I am very much at sea about everything that personally concerns me. --/--/ I am not sure about remaining in Cleveland much after the first of the year, as there is a possibility of my being sent out on the road again as salesman. On the other hand, it seems to me that it will be about as much as I can endure to remain at my present work in the shipping dept. until Christmas is over without a clean and final break with my father and his company, owing to various humiliations he seems interested in either forcing or countenancing others about the place to force, on me. As soon as my mother is off the scene I shall feel freer to do more as I please. I have practically no money and as employment is hard to find now, she is very much worried for fear I shall do something rash and suffer for it. About the only course I see is to save for all I am worth for two years or so, and then embark once and for all for foreign lands, Italy or Russia or Paris, and not come back until I want to. Literature and art be hanged!--even ordinary existence isn’t worth the candle in these States now. I enclose Matty Josephson’s last letter to me with his plans. They make my mouth water.

I wish I had three poems to send to _The Nation_, but I shall have to desist from a lack of “numbers.” _The Possessed_ was one of the most tremendous books I’ve ever read, I think, and I am planning on reading _The Brothers Karamazov_ as soon as time permits. At present I dip into Seutonius’ _History of the Caesars_, which is easy to recognize as one of Saltus’ principal authorities and sources for his _Imperial Purple_. -- -- -- --

54: TO SHERWOOD ANDERSON

[_Cleveland_] _12/8/20_

Dear Anderson: Your mention of a possible trip East soon makes me hope very much that you will care to stop off at Cleveland here (a few hours at least) and see me. I shall not be living at home at the time as my mother expects to leave for her place in Cuba very soon, closing the house, but if you come alone I can accommodate you at my room wherever it may be. I want very much to talk with you and hope you can “make it” this time. Better look me up at the factory at 208 St. Clair Ave. if you arrive between 8 A.M. and 5 P.M. You don’t know how much I appreciate the encouragement your letters give me. Although I am not at present doing anything creatively, I have not sunk too much into despair or indifference to hope.

Do come,--won’t you!

55: TO ----

[_Cleveland_] [_Dec. 22, 1920_]

Dear ----: NEWS! News! NEWS!--The “golden halo” has widened,--descended upon me (or “us”) and I’ve been blind with happiness and beauty for the last full week! Joking aside, I am too happy not to fear a great deal, but I believe in, or have found God again. It seems vulgar to rush out with my feelings to anyone so, but you know by this time whether I am vulgar or not (I don’t) and it may please you, as it often might have helped me so, to know that something beautiful can be found or can “occur” once in awhile, and so unexpectedly. Not the brief and limited sensual thing alone, but something infinitely more thrilling and inclusive. I foolishly keep wondering,--“How can this be?--How did it occur?” How my life might be changed could this continue, but I scarcely dare to hope. I feel like weeping most of the time, and I have become reconciled, strangely reconciled, to many aggravations. Of course it is the return of devotion which astounds me so, and the real certainty that, at least for the time, it is perfectly honest. It makes me feel very unworthy,--and yet what pleasure the emotion under such circumstances provides. I have so much now to reverence, discovering more and more beauty every day,--beauty of character, manner, and body, that I am for the time, completely changed.--But why aren’t you here to talk with me about it! How I wish you were here.

I have written you this way (typewriter) because, as you have discovered, my writing is hard deciphering. I have given up trying to improve it, and don’t try any more. You have probably got the candy and hymn by this time,--neither amount to much, but I wanted to send them. I don’t understand -- -- -- --’s silence,--but certainly hope that I have not been relinquished as one of Akron’s temporary “makeshifts” or “reliefs.” It would really hurt. I have told you all that has happened. This rest would merely be to mention details of ungodly strain and hours of “Christmas rush” at the factory,--seventeen hours a stretch sometimes. When I have had time I have spent it with Dostoievsky’s _Les Freres Karamazov_ which I like even better than _The Possessed_. The beautiful young Alyosha, and Father Zossima! Dostoievsky seems to me to represent the nearest type to the “return of Christ” that there is record of,--I think the greatest of novelists. But I am forgetting Frank Harris, who, you know, comes second to the “woman taken in adultery.” --/--/

1921

56: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _1/14/21_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ I’m slightly disabled today with a touch of la grippe and am remaining away from the factory. A talk with my father last week settled things more definitely for me than many months have afforded. I shall remain in my present capacity at the factory indefinitely until I find a job at some more “literary” work, when my father and I will more-or-less conclusively part hands so far as a business connection is concerned. At last he seems, after questioning various mutual friends as to my interests, etc., to have been forced into this much recognition of my persistence in artistic directions,--and it was gratifying to observe as gracious a surrender as he offered me. You see I have not said anything to him about my personal interests for almost two years, leaving him only what details of indifference to business as naturally revealed themselves throughout my association with him, to judge from. I long ago “gave up” talking over such sores with him,--and it has amused me vastly to find that at last the attitude aroused him to seek such indirect solutions to the “enigma.” Now I can hope to get a little reading and writing done before spring here in some sort of tranquillity. Before the summer is over I may have found me a journalistic job,--but the main point under either drudgery is that I accomplish some real writing. But this is the usual ante-room soliloquy, and I won’t bore you further with more of it.

I am just as glad for you that you didn’t start your magazine,--and with the same considerations in mind that you gave as your reasons against it. Italy will do you infinitely more good,--why waste your good money on what is, after all, an indifferent public. It is bad enough to waste brains and time--but not money!!! I haven’t seen _Contact_ yet, but will try to get ’round to send for a copy soon. Williams has a very fine poem in the last _Poetry_ and also there is a beauty by Padraic Colum. By the way, I hope you saw Colum’s write-up of Ezra Pound’s _Instigations_ in a not very recent _New Republic_. It was the best appreciation of Pound on his own grounds that I’ve ever read.

Your last letter, although very brief and fragmentary, did bring a whiff from you of revived sensibilities. N.Y. does that to one always after any period of provincial stiffness. What are you writing now? Of course I shall send you whatever I do,--but the waiting is longer, by far, for me than for you. I’m caught dead tight in a new affair de coeur that at least keeps me stirred up in some ways. I don’t know how much blood I pay for these predicaments,--but I seem to live more during them than otherwise. They give the ego a rest. I may sound like an utter profligate,--but there is much sincerity, too painfully much, for me to laugh.

57: TO MATTHEW JOSEPHSON

_Cleveland, O._ _1/14/21_

Dear Matty: --/--/ What you say about the Akron suite is very true. I have only one point of disagreement with you,--crudeness of form. This was deliberate, and you have got to convince me that such a treatment of such a mood and subject is inconsistent before we can pick asphodels together again on the slopes of Parnassus. By the way,--do you care for my “Garden Abstract” in its final form in _The L.R._? I think that the version I sent you was an earlier and poorer experiment. I must bestir myself soon and write something new. My main difficulty is at present a kind of critical structure that won’t permit me the expression of the old asininities, _and_ (as you say) the poverty of society in these “provinces.” Your suggestion about the trade paper work is alluring. However, I am bound not to break away from my father’s concern until spring, when there may be a little striving and stirring up of the dust,--I hope.

Are you still planning on Italy? Why not the island of Capri? I hear there is interesting company about there,--D. H. Lawrence and Mackenzie musing and moping around the baths and arcades of Tiberius.... I don’t long so much for change of surroundings as time, TIME which I never seem to get to read or write or amuse myself. I hear [that] “New York” has gone mad about “Dada” and that a most exotic and worthless review is being concocted by Man Ray and Duchamp, billets in a bag printed backwards, on rubber deluxe, etc. What next! This is worse than The Baroness [Freytag-Loringhoven]. By the way I like the way the discovery has suddenly been made that she has all along been, unconsciously, a Dadaist. I cannot figure out just what Dadaism is beyond an insane jumble of the four winds, the six senses, and plum pudding. But if the Baroness is to be a keystone for it,--then I think I can possibly know when it is coming and avoid it.

58: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _1/28/21_

Dear Gorham: Your N.Y. bulletin interested me immensely. Last Sunday I went down to Akron to see Minns after a four months’ separation. I read him the opinions of Man Ray, whereat he flew into a holy rage. “There is no sense in the theory of interesting ‘accidents,’” and I am with Minns in that. There is little to [be] gained in any art so far as I can see, except with much _conscious_ effort. If he doesn’t watch his lenses, M. Ray will allow the Dada theories and other flamdoodle of his section run him off his track. He seems to have done much good work so far, but it has been in spite of his ideas. If he is just recently infected, it’s too bad, because there is less chance of him containing his qualities under such theories--But so much for photography.

--/--/ When I get “Dosty” more cleared out of the way, I intend to get more poetry reading again, but just now he is all-absorbing, and somehow his offering is such a distinct type of itself that one doesn’t want to mix any other kind of reading with it. Here is my sum poetic output for the last three months--two lines--

“The everlasting eyes of Pierrot
And of Gargantua,--the laughter.”

Maybe it is my epitaph, it is contradictory and wide enough to be. But I hope soon to turn it into a poem and thereby, like Lazarus, return.

59: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _2/11/21_

Dear Gorham: Yes, my writing is quite Dada,--very Dada (I like the term as applied) and yet you must put up with it again as my machine has suffered another relapse.

I was very much amused and interested by the _Contact_ that arrived about a week ago. Thank you, as always, dear old bean, for being so thoughtful. You are always sending me something to make my eyes blink delightedly and arouse me from the general stupor of these parts. How fine the Wallace Stevens were! And some of Williams’ talk was good--but how horrid that the room had to be splashed with the wet-dream explosions of Virgil Jordan and McAlmon. Their talk is all right--but what is true of it has been said adequately before,--and all they can seem to add is a putrid remnant or two. Perhaps I am on the downward grade, but when I come to such stuff as theirs I can only say “Excuse me.” I will be glad to receive stimulation from the sky or a foetid chamber or maybe a piss-pot but as far as I can make out they have wound their _phalli_ around their throats in a frantic and vain effort to squeeze out an idea. In fact they seem very “Dada” in more sense than one. But enough!!!

Don’t disown me,--but I have done literally no writing to give you. The fact is that I am entirely engrossed in personal erotic experience lately that nothing seems possible in that way. O if you had ever seen the very Soul of Pierrot (in soul and incarnate) you would at least admire. Never, though, has such beauty and happy-pain been given me before--which is to say that my love is at least somewhat requited. You and one other are the only ones to know now or later of this, so do not think me vulgar or silly to tell you. Well, you have felt the fire somewhat yourself so you may appreciate my mood. Never have I suffered so, or reached such moods of ecstasy....

What do you think of _Poor White_? It certainly has made Anderson one of the most talked-of artists there are. I wrote you my opinion some time past. I’m still on “Dosty”--a very fine biography and estimate and analysis by J. Middleton Murry.

You will please forgive this letter. I have been perhaps a little too personal,--perhaps vulgar. But if anything’s to blame it’s the Subconscious rioting out through gates that only alcohol has the power to open. --/--/

60: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _2/24_

Dear Gorham: Your article on education, etc., in the last _Freeman_ delights me. Remarkably courageous and true. I hope it may do at least a little good concretely,--but at least it will serve as an accentuation mark in the minds of a good many like myself who have felt with you along that line for some time.

Two new pictures just arrived from Minns that I wish you could see. One,--an old man’s head that is as good as a Rembrandt, and at the opposite pole, a young girl’s head that brings Pound’s sonnet lines persistently into my head,--“No, go from me. I have left her lately. I will not spoil my shield with lesser brightness.--” You know how it goes. I intend to send the old man’s head to _The Dial_ for publication, but scarcely hope they will accept it after the mediocrities they have lately staged there. Really,--I flatter myself, you see,--I have more doubts about their accepting a poem I recently wrote and sent them, which I enclose.[13] You see, my present job allows me more time while “at work,” and I may even do more,--for better or worse, according as you feel about it.

This is all now until I hear from you and have more to build on. You know there is precious little for me to build on here, and so you must not too much mind if my letters have a predominance of what must seem banality to you. If so, forgive me,--and when you get tired of vainly tugging at your end of the line, let me know, and I’ll take it philosophically.

61: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _April 10th_

Dear Gorham: -- -- -- -- For me here--the same old jog-trot except that I have lately run across an artist here whose work seems to carry the most astonishing marks of genius that have passed before my eyes in original form, that is,--I mean present-day work. And I am saying much I think when I say that I prefer Sommer’s work to most of Brzeska and Boardman Robinson. A man of 55 or so--works in a lithograph factory--spent most of his life until the last seven years in the rut of conventional forms--liberated suddenly by sparks from Gauguin, Van Gogh, Picasso and Wyndham Lewis, etc. I have taken it upon myself to send out some of his work for publication, an idea that seems oddly, never to have occurred to him. --/-- I enclose an incipient effort of mine of recent date.[14]

62: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _April 20th_

Dear Gorham: Your letter did me good, and has left a good hangover for me for the last few ungenerous days. I left my father’s employ yesterday _for good_--nothing, I think, will ever bring me back. The last insult was too much. I’ve been treated like a dog now for two years,--and only am sorry that it took me so long to find out the simple impossibility of ever doing anything with him or for him.

It will take me many months, I fear, to erase from my memory the image of his overbearing head leaning over me like a gargoyle. I think he had got to think I couldn’t live without his aid. At least he was, I am told, furious at my departure. Whatever comes now is much better than the past. I shall learn to be somewhere near free again,--at least free from the hatred that has corroded me into illness.

Of course I won’t be able to get to N.Y. now for any summer vacation. You know what a privation that means to me. I have nothing in sight in the way of employment,--and as times are so bad,--I don’t know when I shall. A job as copy-writer for an advertising house will probably be open to me about June 1st. And there is a newspaper opening out here soon,--perhaps that may yield me something. I have a roof over my head and food, anyway--here at home--and maybe I shall write something. The best thing is that [the] cloud of my father is beginning to move from the horizon now, you have never known me when it has not been there--and in time we _both_ may discover some new things in me. _Bridges burn’t behind!_

Glad you like “Estador.” I’m beginning to myself. I cannot quite accept your word changes although I’m far from satisfied with it. But the more I work over it the less I seem likely to be,--so I’m going to try it on _The Dial_.--Anything for some money now.

63: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _May 3rd 21_

My dear Gorham: --/--/ I feel sure S[ommer]’s work is as important as any contemporary work anywhere, and I’m very interested to hear what you will think. I wish I were better trained for analysis of this kind of work,--but as it is I can only “feel” the power of it. I may send you a few of his drawings at any time,--and later if you have time around N.Y. after school is out, you might care to show some of them to people who could give him a chance perhaps, of exhibition somewhere. --/--/

I agree with you about your distinction between the earlier and later Anderson. I have never got hold of _Windy McPherson’s Son_, but I never could clap very loudly for _Marching Men_, although I imagine that it is an improvement on the former. He, I understand, is anxious for these two books’ extinction. They will probably never be issued by the publisher again. I’m anxious to read his “Out of Nowhere into Nothing” that _The Dial_ announces for three summer issues. By the way, a new book of essays by my acquaintance, Charles S. Brooks, has a chapter in it, “A Modern Poet,” which is a burlesque on me, the Baroness, and my rooms over _The Little Review_ on 16th Street. His effort is all the funnier for the especial lack of comprehension he has for _The L.R._ and “modern poetry.” I promise you a laugh or two anyway. The Yale Press has just got it out,--its title is _Hints to Pilgrims_. Brooks lives a few houses down the street from me here, but at that time he was a New Yorker, and used to be very hospitable to me with theatres and dinner at his apartment on 10th St. --/--/

64: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _May 16th, ’21_

Dear Gorham: I am delighted that you have found so much to hold your interest in Sommer’s work. Some later things that he had recently shown me only confirm my convictions the more. I’ll send you more of his work as soon as I can assemble what I want to. Sent two watercolours to _The Dial_ again last week, which I don’t see how they can let pass by--but all things are possible to them. --/--/ There is a French-Swiss artist here just eight months from Paris,--doing very interesting work with a peculiar sharp diabolism in it. Willy E. Lescaze. His work at a local exhibition here recently caused a terrible furor, being in company with Burchfield’s, the only work worth looking at. It amuses me to see Lescaze praise Sommer’s work--there [are] all the differences between them that distinguish Baudelaire from Rabelais. I recently sent some of L’s work to _The Little Review_ along with S’s--but what ever keeps Margaret Anderson so impolitely silent I cannot figure out. Do what I will, I can’t seem to get a word out of her. I begin to despair. At least I hope she will return the drawings someday. If you want more to take about with you, you might call on her when you next are in town and find out if she wants them. If not you will find some interesting additions to add to your bundle. I cannot but feel that there is an audience in N.Y. ready for such work. Sommer has tried Cleveland people and found them so indifferent that he didn’t even send one canvas or sheet to this last exhibition here. In one way, a mistake, I think. Before I forget your request,--_William Sommer_ is as completely as he signs himself.

Went yesterday to see the first movie for a long time. Did you see it--_Deception_--the foreign picture of the affairs of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn? It really was stimulating. I could wish for more of such fare, even though it should (horrid thought!) impoverish our native celluloid manufactories. There were mob scenes in it, perfect in every detail, that only the screen can produce. And the old sensualist king was well acted.

I am still without work. There is absolutely nothing doing here. Things are at such a standstill that I hate to think of it. I am practically on my mother’s hands here at home,--and you can believe me that such a situation is far from a pleasant one for me who have been used to paying my own way now for some time. If only that promise I have for a job with a local advertising house fulfills itself next month I shall be all right. But most friends and friendly offers have proved themselves such slippery fish! Two years thrown away at the feet of my father without the gain of a jot of experience at anything but peon duties in a shipping room! I can never forgive him, nor my own foolishness. Just now I am too uneasy to concentrate on any writing. Have got to prepare myself for some kind of practical activity--and so I do not even read much but advertising books and business folders! Roger Fry’s _Vision and Design_, a large tome beautifully illustrated, is good to unloosen one’s tongue about such work as Sommer’s. He brought it around one evening, and I have enjoyed it. Haven’t read _Main Street_ or _Moon Calf_ yet, nor _Miss Lulu Bett_. I am beginning to feel rather distinguished about it all.

65: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland_ _May 21st_

Dear Gorham: I’m glad to say that my tension is less acute at present than when I last wrote you. An improvement of the weather with opportunities for tennis and getting out and around more helps me work off surplus energies generated by my “change of life.” And you are, of course, very much right in urging me not to be ridiculously bourgeois in accepting bourgeois standards.

I’m very glad you liked “A Persuasion.” Perhaps it seems a bit tame to me on account of having used several phrases coined some years ago in it. I was much pleased this week to get word from _Double Dealer_ accepting “Black Tambourine” for publication and urging me to send them some prose. They claim they are much in need of some. Haven’t you some to offer them? I might write something on Joyce or Anderson--but I don’t know. I always feel singularly lacking in ideas about these people excepting to blindly enthuse or refute some ridiculous criticism of them. Their (“_D.D’s_”) check has not arrived yet but they promise it soon--before the June number when they expect to use the poem. It surprises me to find such a Baudelairesque thing acceptable _anywhere_ in U.S. I sent it out as a kind of hopeless protest--not expecting to see it printed at all. I’m beginning to lose interest in it now--it cannot be as good as I had thought it. --/--/

66: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland_, _Friday_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ Excuse my apparent evasion of your request for an explanation about “Black Tambourine.” The Word “midkingdom” is perhaps the key word to what ideas there are in it. The poem is a description and bundle of insinuations, suggestions bearing on the Negro’s place somewhere between man and beast. That is why Aesop is brought in, etc.,--the popular conception of Negro romance, the tambourine on the wall. The value of the poem is only, to me, in what a painter would call its “tactile” quality,--an entirely aesthetic feature. A propagandist for either side of the Negro question could find anything he wanted to in it. My only declaration in it is that I find the Negro (in the popular mind) sentimentally or brutally “placed” in this midkingdom, etc. Tell me if I have made it plain or not to you.

67: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland_, _June 12th ’21_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ Sommer said you had something in a very recent _Freeman_ which I’ve been trying to get, but guess I’m too late. Sometimes I get so exasperated with the “intellectual” attitudes of these papers like _The Freeman_, _New Rep._, _Nation_, etc., where everything is all jumbled together,--politics, literature, painting, birth control, etc., etc., etc., that I ignore them for a time and probably miss some good things. It’s the way they are served that I object to. I’m beginning to be somewhat pained by this “Intelligentsia” mood when it comes upon me. This probably indicates that I am not a very responsible individual--and truth is--I’m not. How tired I am of the perpetual ferment of _The New Rep_. Those fellows are playing a canster game nonsense. Does anything they ever say have any concrete effect? Old Washington goes on just the same on the old rotten paths. These gentlemen are merely clever at earning their livelihood in clean cuffs. But hear me rant on!!! I don’t care two-pence for the whole earth & heavens and least of all for politics. It’s only when the political gentlemen (Irish potatobeds) obstruct my view of my petunias and hollyhocks that I’m thus aroused,--and even that is a small complaint in the long list of larger ones I have. --/--/

No job in sight even now! I’m about convinced of the hopelessness of the advertising plan. Business gets worse and worse and they don’t have enough to do to keep a new man busy.

Oh well!--I manage to get drunk once a week on delicious wine served out by a friend of mine here and I have an evening a week with Sommer when we do all kinds of stunts from Chopin Ballades and Heine lyrics to sparring with an old set of gloves I have. Wish I could think of something entertaining to write--but, at present I’m mostly trying to regain a mental and spiritual status that has been lost to me for over a year. What I want to do is gather up the threads again and go on, to put it stale-ly.

I have reached such blind alleys and found no way out of them that there is nothing at present for me to do but laugh a little and _endure_--which I hope to do. --/--/

Did I tell you I’d been drawing and painting some? I find it a tremendous stimulation--and you begin to see so many more things than before wherever you look. My drawings are original, at least, and Sommer professes to see much in ’em. --/--/

68: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland_ _June 16th ’21_

Hail! Citizen of the world! --/--/No work here except what I’ve lately been making myself. This has all been occasioned by a very cordial letter from the editor of _The Double-Dealer_, Basil Thompson, who urged me to write something for them on Anderson. This has been done (to the extent of 2000 words which, if taken, means $20.00) and dispatched. In my present mood it seems to have been a good job. Also, I got up courage and erudition enough to “do” a Vildrac translation for them which in the original at least is fine.

I was very disappointed to find quite a bad typographical error in “Black Tambourine.” “Mingle” instead of “mingl_ing_”--last line 2nd verse. How foolish it makes me feel that way! It quite destroys the sense of the thing.

They pay .30 per line of verse & 1 cent per prose word and want prose badly. As I need money worse, I may do something in the short story way for them if they fancy the Anderson thing. This last little effort has rewarded me much already merely in getting my mind to working a little again. I don’t dare hope for an ultimate success as a “free lance” but am beginning to think that this writing game offers a chance to augment one’s savings a little now and then at least.

69: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Saturday midnight_

Dear Gorham: Well. It has been a day I shall not soon forget. I have just a little time since returned from my first visit to the Sommer farm and studio--about half way between here and Akron in a beautiful untrodden valley. He has an old old-fashioned schoolhouse for his studio--the walls are white and hung with such an array of things as you never have seen. Forgive my enthusiasm--I have been so dazzled for the last 8 hours that I may seem somewhat incoherent in my expression. I have brought home with me a considerable number of water-colours and drawings which I am going to send on to you within a few days. These are representative of his _best_ in this medium and I think you will be enthusiastic about them. I could picture a dozen N.Y. picture dealers in that studio today--radical or pedantical--all tearing [each] other’s hair for the first chance of exhibiting such stuff. I feel convinced now that all that needs be done is to get some samples of this work before them,--and if they have any sense at all--either artistic or commercial--they will seize upon it. --/--/

“Dynamism” is the splendid & fitting word for Sommer--the word I had been looking for and got only as far as the adjectival use. --/--/

70: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland,_ _July 8th_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ The weather has been terrifically hot here, making action and thought alike impossible,--but I am slowly trying to labor out in the suitable style for _Shadowland_ an article on Ezra [Pound] which may bring me in a little money. This magazine is popular and in some ways becoming more interesting than _Vanity Fair_. I would like a foothold in it if it is possible. It seems evident enough that I have accomplished something in the estimation of the editors of _The D.D._ as they have incorporated me in their list of contributors on their stationery. I got word the other day that they will bring out my Anderson article in this July issue. I haven’t got my check yet but it ought to be twenty dollars or so.

I have a query for you. What would you think of a play on or around the figure of John Brown? There is plenty of material, but the only trouble I see is the issue of slavery, North and South, etc., which might kill it. I am reading a fine biography of the man by Villard. As I am principally interested in this idea for mere commercial reasons the possibility of popularity is the largest factor. I tend to think the subject, in this light, too forbidding.

-- -- -- -- I always seem to choose the wrong moment for my letters, when the ice-man is hammering at the door or the family is waiting to be driven to town, so my letters are more like bulletins and telegrams than anything else. Things pan out the same way when I start on an essay, article or poem,--but I hope for better days. --/--/

71: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland_, _July 14th, ’21_

Dear Gorham: This is the kind of note I got yesterday from JH of _The Little Review_, returning some mss.,--“Found this as I was going through Mart’s files. She’s crazy. The drawings are fine but we haven’t any hope of printing them for ages, so I sent them back.--jh.” So it looks as though _The L.R._ was done for, and perhaps poor Mart. Doesn’t the way jh puts it makes you feel rather uneasy. I wish I knew more details,--whether it is a mere -- -- -- -- rumpus that is all the matter, or whether Mart Anderson has worn herself out in vain assaults against the decision against her in the Joyce trial. I wish I could get in touch with her direct, but as she hasn’t answered any letter for the last six weeks she probably cannot write. I happen to know from Mart’s friends too much inside information on the two women’s mutual relationships to feel certain of any direct truth about Mart from jh. If you hear anything about them or their plans please let me know. You know my admiration and (yes) affection for Margaret Anderson is very strong, and I detest nothing more than such a brutal squib as this thing that jh just sent. --/--/

The cover for the July _Double Dealer_ gives me the shivers, but my Anderson article is all there. Write me what you think of it now that you have read him more or less completely. I enclose a letter of introduction [to Anderson]. My Pound article is a far more difficult thing and progresses slowly, but I am bent now on making as much money writing as I can, and I’m going to get it published one place or another. Your encouragement anent the John Brown adventure is very gratifying. This is a long winded matter, but I think I shall go ahead with it, hoping by the time you get back from Europe to have something to show you. By the way, when you are in Paris there is one place you must go. Joyce’s _Ulysses_ is to be brought out complete in Paris this fall. I enclose a subscription blank with address, etc. I have already subscribed for it. --/--/

72: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland_ _July 22nd, ’21_

Dear Gorham: The “march of events” has brought upon me Cleveland’s 125th anniversary with all its fussy & futile inanities and advertisements to make hideous the streets. Blocked, and obliged to wait while the initial “pee-rade” went by today, I spent two hours of painful rumination ending with such disgust at America and everything in it, that I more than ever envy you your egress to foreign parts. No place but America could relish & applaud anything so stupid & drab as that parade--led by the most notable and richest grafter of the place decked out in Colonial rags as the founder of the city Moses C. Ah--the Baroness, lunatic that she is, is right. Our people have no _atom_ of a conception of beauty--and don’t want it. One thing almost brought tears to my eyes (and I hope you do not think me too silly in mentioning it)--the handful of Chinese who came along in some native and antique vestments & liveries to prostitute themselves in the medley of trash around them. To see them passing the (inevitable) Soldier’s Monument ablaze with their aristocratic barbarity of silk, gold and embroideries _was_ an anachronism that could occur _only_ in America. And the last of their “section” brought a float with a large “melting pot”--its significance was blazoned in letters _on_ it!! All I can say is--it’s a gay old world! If ever I felt alone it has been today. But I must encounter fireworks, bawling “choruses” and more “pee-rades” for 7 more days--as the community believes in celebrations that are productive of business.

Your letter came this morning, and I agree largely with what you have to say about the Anderson article. A friend of mine here, Lescaze the painter, who is an excellent literary critic as well, told me that reading it gave him the impression of a young man inflating and playing with a series of variously-colored balloons in the boredom of his chambre--which in an imagistic way singularly seems to agree with the substance of your opinion on it. Well,--this is true & rather painfully so--I must admit. My only justification is the singularly inadequate surroundings I have here for any kind of concentration. My one hope is to do better with more practice at such work and relieved somewhat of the haste that the pressing necessities for money presently force upon me. I struggle with the Pound article still,--but the subject itself is so complex and (I fancy) the audience interested so small, that I may be forced to give it up.

You are right about _The D.D.’s_ exceedingly uneven quality. To my mind almost every issue has been largely filled with utter weakness and banality. Will some one tell me how an (often) good poet like Haniel Long can bring himself to allow to be printed such _stuff_ as he has signed himself to in _The D.D._? As a matter of fact I am continually being more and more horrified at what names we had always been accustomed to hoping rather much of,--are rushing into print with, and obviously out of the urgent need or desire of more money. _Shadowland_, especially the August number with Babette Deutsch’s list of American poets! Alas--what Fletcher wrote on the artist’s conscience in _The Freeman_ (July 12th or so) makes me think a good deal. Living _is_ at last becoming quite impossible, at least here,--when you get to Italy I advise a permanent residence there for you. Later, perhaps I’ll come over and join you. In time there may be only D. H. Lawrence, the rainbow, and Capri left. I shall (with my millions acquired by that time in flattering biographies of rich businessmen)--I shall rejuvenate the baths and temple there of Tiberius and we shall live in state,--waited on by the only fair and unsullied youths & maidens then procurable in Europe. --/--/

73: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland, O._ _Aug. 9th ’21_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ My unemployment lingers. I learn a Scriabin Prelude,--make a drawing,--stroke my black cat (a recent acquisition) and read intermittently. Lately I had a good letter from Colum, who likes my “Black Tambourine,” and yesterday a long letter from Matthew Josephson, the first word for almost a year. He is up in Maine with Carl Springhorn and Kenneth Burke in a kind of camp. (Also his wife.) They both expect to sail for Italy six weeks from now, to stay two years or more. I don’t know their proposed localities, but hope you will meet. -- -- -- --

74: TO CHARMION WIEGAND

_Cleveland, Ohio_ _August 13, ’21_