Chapter V: Part ONE: Ohio (4)

Dear Charmion: --/--/ I am very glad to know that you have been keeping up the writing,--whether prose, poetry, or drama doesn’t so much matter. The point about it all is that it serves to keep you alert and alive much more than any other activity I know of,--and especially anything as warm as a “Byzantine drama of blood” sounds interesting. The historical drama seems to me as legitimate as any other provided it has enough organic life of its own and doesn’t depend merely on the fame, etc., of the protagonists for effect. Have you read Stendhal’s _Chartreuse de Parma_? So far as I know it has never been dramatized, and there is much good material in it. I find Stendhal, incidentally, one of the few men who wear deeper with familiarity. You probably have read his _Rouge et Noir_. --/--/

75: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland, Ohio_ _Sept. 19th ’21_

My dear Gorham: --/--/ _The L. R._, I was informed on a card from j.h. the other day, is recovering, will shortly re-appear as a quarterly under Pound, Picabia, etc., 24 illustrations and 96 pgs! Mart Anderson also recovering “sanity,” etc. -- -- -- -- I sold them [_The Dial_] the poem you read just before leaving, “Pastorale”--which will come out soon. I also sold one, “Persuasion,” to _The Measure_--and “Porphyro in Akron” came out in the last _Double Dealer_ in first place.

The result of all this is that I am “sold out” and will have to rush rhymes and rhythms together to supply my enthusiastic “public” as fast as I can. But the family is all upset about my unemployment and money _is_ needed. I am too uneasy to accomplish a thing, but hammer out a translation of de Gourmont’s marginalia on Poe & Baudelaire for _The D.D._ I have projects and a few lines started on poems,--but nothing “comes through”--it is at times discouraging. I do not expect to hear from Josephson again. He wrote me several letters full of brilliant criticism and suggestions--but we do not exactly agree on theory and he has become so complex--that the lack of sympathy my last letter offered him will bring no response from [him] I’m quite sure--especially now after an unusually long interstice. But this extremity of hair splitting palls on one after awhile. A little is interesting--but goes a long ways. He seems afraid to use any emotion in his poetry,--merely observation and sensation,--and because I call such work apt to become thin, he thinks me sloppy and stupid,--as no doubt I am. But after all,--I recognize him as in many ways the most _acute_ critic of poetry I know of--the only trouble is that he tries to force his theories into the creative process,--and the result, to me, is too tame a thing. --/--/

76: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland_ _Oct. 1, ’21_

Dear Gorham: My terrible hay fever days are over, and the fine autumn weather that I like the best of the year has arrived to console me. My mood is neither happy nor desperately sad. It will best be conveyed to you by the quotation of a new poem, “Chaplinesque”--only started (if I can help it) as yet: --/--/[15]

And I must tell you that my greatest dramatic treat since seeing Garden in _The Love of Three Kings_ two winters ago, was recently enjoyed when Charlie Chaplin’s _The Kid_ was shown here. Comedy, I may say, has never reached a higher level in this country before. We have (I cannot be too sure of this for my own satisfaction) in Chaplin a dramatic genius that truly approaches the fabulous sort. I could write pages on the overtones and brilliant subtleties of this picture, for which nobody but Chaplin can be responsible, as he wrote it, directed it,--and I am quite sure had much to do with the settings which are unusually fine. If you have not already seen it in N. Y., it may now be in Paris. It was a year late in arriving in Cleveland, I understand, on account of objections from the state board of censors!!!! What they could have possibly objected to, I cannot imagine. It must have been some superstition aroused against good acting! But they will always release any sickening and false melodrama of high life and sex, lost virginities, etc., at the first glance. Well, I am thankful to get even what their paws have mauled of the Chaplin and _Caligari_ sort. My poem is a sympathetic attempt to put in words some of the Chaplin pantomime, so beautiful, and so full of eloquence, and so modern.

--/--/ It will be time for me to raise my voice in praise of Anderson soon, as his new book _The Triumph of the Egg_, and other stories, is on the market. This also includes the serial “Out of Nowhere into Nothing,” recently completed in _The Dial_. I would lay a bet on it that long after Zona Gale, Lewis, etc., are forgotten, Sherwood will hold his own. There are lots of things I want to read but haven’t the money to buy, like Hecht’s first novel, a great success they say, _Erik Dorn_, recently out. I wrote you how much I enjoyed Shaw’s _Back to Methuselah_, a review of which I wrote for _The D.D._

I am taking a course in advertising two nights of every week until next May which is very good and ought to help me get started. It has the advantage, at any rate, of giving one a diploma which, I understand, has a real value. I am now pretty sure of making advertising my real route to bread and butter, and have a strong notion that as a copy writer I will eventually make a “whiz.” --/--/

77: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland_, _Oct. 6th, ’21_

Dear Gorham: Here you are with the rest of the Chaplin poem. I know not if you will like it,--but to me it has a real appeal. I have made that “infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing” of Eliot’s into the symbol of the kitten. I feel that, from my standpoint, the pantomime of Charlie represents fairly well the futile gesture of the poet in U.S.A. today, perhaps elsewhere too. And yet, the heart lives on....

Maybe this is because I myself feel so particularly futile just now that I feel this pathos, (or is it bathos?). Je ne sais pas.

Yesterday I worked my first day foreman-ing three men on a distribution job, and walked untold miles of city blocks. I am stiff,--but the exercise did me much good. No work today,--perhaps tomorrow. At this work the most I can hope to get before spring is $30.00 per week. Yesterday brought me $2.50. Needless to say, I will look for something better as soon as I can get hands on it.

A new light and friend of my friend, the Swiss-French painter, Willy Lescaze, has arrived in town,--Jean Binet, teacher of Eurythmics in our very alive Cleveland School of Music which Ernest Bloch heads. I am to meet him tonight and with some anticipations, as I am told he is a remarkable and inspired amateur pianist, playing Erik Satie, Ravel, etc., to perfection. Lescaze has proved an inspiration to me. Knowing intimately the work of Marcel Proust, Salmon, Gide, and a host of other French moderns, he is able to see so much better than anyone else around here, the aims I have in my own work. We have had great times discussing the merits of mutual favorites like Joyce, Donne, Eliot, Pound, de Gourmont, Gordon Craig, Nietzsche, etc., ad infinitum. After this it goes without saying that I never found a more stimulating individual in N. Y.

78: TO WILLIAM WRIGHT

_Cleveland, O._ _Oct. 17, 1921_

Dear William: I can come half way with you about Edna Millay,--but I fear not much further. She really has genius in a limited sense, and is much better than Sara Teasdale, Marguerite Wilkinson, Lady Speyer, etc., to mention a few drops in the bucket of feminine lushness that forms a kind of milky way in the poetic firmament of the time (likewise all times);--indeed I think she is every bit as good as Elizabeth Browning. And here it will be probably evident that most of her most earnest devotees could not ask for more. I can only say that I also do not greatly care for Mme. Browning. And on top of my dislike for this lady, Tennyson, Thompson, Chatterton, Byron, Moore, Milton, and several more, I have the apparent brassiness to call myself a person of rather catholic admirations. But you will also notice that I _do_ run joyfully toward Messrs. Poe, Whitman, Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, John Donne!!!, John Webster!!!, Marlowe, Baudelaire, Laforgue, Dante, Cavalcanti, Li Po, and a host of others. Oh I wish we had an evening to talk over poetic creeds,--it is ridiculous to attempt it in a letter. I can only apologize by saying that if my work seems needlessly sophisticated it is because I am only interested in adding what seems to me something really _new_ to what _has_ been written. Unless one has some new, intensely personal viewpoint to record, say on the eternal feelings of love, and the suitable personal idiom to employ in the act, I say, why write about it? Nine chances out of ten, if you know where in the past to look, you will find words already written in the more-or-less exact tongue of your soul. And the complaint to be made against nine out of ten poets is just this,--that you are apt to find their sentiments much better expressed perhaps four hundred years past. And it is not that Miss Millay fails entirely, but that I often am made to hear too many echoes in her things, that I cannot like her as well as you do. With her equipment Edna Millay is bound to succeed to the appreciative applause of a fairly large audience. And for you, who I rather suppose have not gone into this branch of literature with as much enthusiasm as myself, she is a creditable heroine.

I admit to a slight leaning toward the esoteric, and am perhaps not to be taken seriously. I am fond of things of great fragility, and also and especially of the kind of poetry John Donne represents, a dark musky, brooding, speculative vintage, at once sensual and spiritual, and singing rather the beauty of experience than innocence.

As you did not “get” my idiom in “Chaplinesque,” I feel rather like doing my best to explain myself. I am moved to put Chaplin with the poets (of today); hence the “we.” In other words, he, especially in _The Kid_, made me feel myself, as a poet, as being “in the same boat” with him. Poetry, the human feelings, “the kitten,” is so crowded out of the humdrum, rushing, mechanical scramble of today that the man who would preserve them must duck and camouflage for dear life to keep them or keep himself from annihilation. I have since learned that I am by no means alone in seeing these things in the buffooneries of the tragedian, Chaplin, (if you want to read the opinions of the London and Paris presses, see _Literary Digest_, Oct. 8th) and in the poem I have tried to express these “social sympathies” in words corresponding somewhat to the antics of the actor. I may have failed, as only a small number of those I have shown it to have responded with any clear answer,--but on the other hand, I realize that the audience for my work will always be quite small. I freely admit to a liking for the thing, myself,--in fact I have to like something of my own once in a while being so hard to please anyway.

The job I mentioned lasted just one day. I took the men out and carried the thing through to success, sore feet, and numb limbses,--but,--there was no work to be done next day, nor the next,--and I got tired of trailing around hoping for only $2.50 for a fortune, and don’t care whether there is little or much awaiting me there now, having hit the employment trail again toward other fields. When I once get pastured again, I’ll praise even Edna Millay--may even buy her _Second April_ (if it is in Season) and not bore you so much with long diatribes on Poetry. Just now, though, that is all I have. Can’t even buy the books I long to read, like _Three Soldiers_, _Erik Dorn_, and the new _Little Review_ (Quarterly--AND $2.00). Write me soon and cheer me up. Just for fun, look up the poems of Donne in the Library and read some of the short lyrics like “The Apparition,” “A Jet Ring Sent,” “The Prohibition,” “The Ecstasy,” and some of the longer things like “The Progress of the Soul,” etc., if you feel intrigued.

79: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland_ _Nov. 1st, ’21_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ Yes,--I much wish I could share your horizons,--instead of retracing day after day a few familiar circles of routine & thought. Keep on writing me your bright kindly letters. They are a lantern of hope and a warmth to the heart. I sometimes wonder if, without you, I should have kept writing so long.

Just read _Erik Dorn_ and am shy a little of criticizing it. Undoubtedly it is a fine piece of work,--and an odd addition to Am. literature. Almost European in viewpoint. I cannot, though, yet make sure whether Hecht has his tongue in his cheek part of the time or not. Hecht is a virtuoso, and arouses suspicions that one would never feel for Dreiser or Anderson. One sees an influence of Joyce in the book,--diluted or “rationalized” just enough to be more pleasing to the public taste. Carl Sandburg and Anderson are given parts in the scenery in an interesting way. --/--/

80: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Nov. 3_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ You are very much right about the poems. I can’t blame you for not seeing as much in “Chaplinesque” as myself because I realize that the technique of the thing is virtuosic and open to all kinds of misinterpretations. Maybe, though, since you have seen _The Kid_ which “inspired” it, you have got nearer to my meaning. For me, it holds double the interest of “Pastorale” which is more perfectly done, but to me, not so rich. Chaplin may be a sentimentalist, after all, but he carries the theme with such power and universal portent that sentimentality is made to transcend itself into a new kind of tragedy, eccentric, homely and yet brilliant. It is because I feel that I have captured the arrested climaxes and evasive victories of his gestures in words, somehow, that I like the poem as much as anything I have done. But we will see. My mind changes sometimes sooner than I plan. I was much surprised that Sherwood Anderson should like it, who is not prone to care for complicated expressions. He was, further, more or less in agreement with you about the sea poem.[16] --/--/

Further time and thought on _Erik Dorn_ lessen my opinion of it. It hangs somewhere between the prose symphonies of Huysmans and the poetic symphonies of Aiken. Impressionistic. However, there is little character. As long as we have _Ulysses_ and _Tarr_ to praise we need not spend too much breath on it, recognizing it, nevertheless, as a hopeful sign, not much more. One misses any actual sincerity,--and somehow the issue or accusation of meretriciousness creeps in. It brings back to me something about Hecht that Saphier once told me:--“A brilliant fellow,” he said. “He can sit down to a typewriter and reel off that stuff by the yard. Has three or four of them (short stories) on hand at once.” This was apropos of the really fine little things of his that were appearing in _The L.R._ then. In fact I am moved into sympathy with Seldes’ review of it in the Oct. _Dial_ which you will have read by this time. --/--/

Tonight I attend the weekly “salon” that Lescaze gives to his friends. There will be banter and chatter enough to be tiresome. Somehow, when there are women present (the kind one has around here) no conversation can be had uninterrupted by little compliments, concessions to them, etc. They insist upon being the center of attention irrespective of their ability to take part in any argument. Consequently there are interminable innuendoes and clucking and puffings that never terminate anywhere. One of the few women who would carefully avoid this kind of thing is Margaret Anderson. Hommage to Margaret!!

The Dada dramas are tres amusant,--but--well--alright56789--*!!

81: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland_, _Nov. 21st._

Your letter about the _Gargoyle_ plan has just come and as I haven’t written you for some time, I’m giving some kind of answer, however unworthy. These enclosed poems you are welcome to use if you care to. -- -- -- -- _The L. R._ has it [“Chaplinesque”] in hand now, but I shall probably not hear from them about it for months and should they decide to take it,--I cannot see that its publication in France should complicate matters any. The same applies to “Black Tambourine” which came out misprinted in _The D.D._ last July. I would like to see it printed right sometime and it occurs to me that this may be an opportunity. I am doing nothing new worth while, so I can’t send you anything else. If you get the names your letter mentions together as contributors you will have something worth while. Burke’s contribution to the new _L.R._ quarterly just out is about the only good thing in it. I don’t need to go on about it, as you have probably seen it in Paris by this time. About the only thing to be gathered from Pound’s article on Brancusi is that Pound wishes to avoid being obvious at the cost of no matter what else. For myself--I [have] just finished a week’s trial at selling real estate--of which, of course, I didn’t sell any. Trying now to get into a bookstore to help out during the Christmas rush.

There is nothing but gall and disgust in me,--and there is nothing more for me to tell you but familiar, all-too-familiar complaints. I wish I could cultivate a more graceful mask against all this. --/--/

82: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland_ _Nov. 26th, ’21_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ I’ve been having a wonderful time diving into Ben Jonson, so you see I haven’t been so far off, after all. After one has read _Bartholomew Fair_ it isn’t so hard to see where Synge got his start,--a start toward a husky folk-element in the drama. I can see myself from now rapidly joining Josephson in a kind of Elizabethan fanaticism. You have doubtless known my long-standing friendship with Donne, Webster, and Marlowe. Now I have another Mermaid “conjugal” to strengthen the tie. The fact is, I can find nothing in modern work to come up to the verbal richness, irony and emotion of these folks, and I would like to let them influence me as much as they can in the interpretation of modern moods,--somewhat as Eliot has so beautifully done. There are parts of his “Gerontion” that you can find almost bodily in Webster and Jonson. Certain Elizabethans and Laforgue have played a tremendous part in Eliot’s work, and you catch hints of his great study of these writers in his _Sacred Grove_. I don’t want to imitate Eliot, of course,--but I have come to the stage now where I want to carefully choose my most congenial influences and, in a way, “cultivate” their influence. I can say with J[osephson] that the problem of form becomes harder and harder for me every day. I am not at all satisfied with anything I have thus far done, mere shadowings, and too slight to satisfy me. I have never, so far, been able to present a vital, living and tangible,--a positive emotion to my satisfaction. For as soon as I attempt such an act I either grow obvious or ordinary, and abandon the thing at the second line. Oh! it is hard! One must be drenched in words, literally soaked with them to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment. When they come, as they did in “Pastorale” (thin, but rather good), they come as things in themselves; it is a matter of felicitous juggling!; and no amount of will or emotion can help the thing a bit. So you see I believe with Sommer that the “Ding an Sich” method is ultimately the only satisfactory creative principle to follow. But I also find that J[osephson] stirred up a hornet’s nest in me this summer with his words about getting away from current formulae, from Heine to Wallace Stevens, by experimentation in original models, etc., and my reaction to this stimulation is to work away from the current impressionism as much as possible. I mean such “impressionism” as the Cocteau poem (trans.) in _The Little Review_, which you have probably seen. Dada (maybe I am wrong, but you will correct me) is nothing more to me than the dying agonies of this movement, maladie moderne. I may be even carried back into “rime and rhythm” before I get through, provided I can carry these encumbrances as deftly and un-selfconsciously as, say, Edward Thomas sometimes did. I grow to like my “Black Tambourine” more, for this reason, than before. It becomes to my mind a kind of diminutive model of ambition, simply pointing a direction. S’much for this endless tirade, but write as usual and keep me cheered and momentarily thrilled.

Maybe J[osephson] has already started on his novel, burlesquing the Americans in the Quartier, that he intended. Tell him to send me some poetry, anything he is writing. It’s sure to be better than anything the magazines offer here.

83: TO GORHAM MUNSON

_Cleveland_ _December the tenth_

Dear Gorham: Your letter in French (which innovation I like) reached me yesterday, a welcome evening stimulant after the day’s work. For I am, in a way, very glad to announce that I’ve been busy for the last two weeks at selling books in a store here during the seasonal “rush.” This is, in all probability, entirely a temporary tent for me,--but it has enabled me, though intensely occupied, to get free of the money complex that had simply reduced me to ashes. This item added to a total lack of any sex life for a long period had left me so empty that I gave up insulting you with a mere heap of stones for a letter, and though I haven’t more to offer you now, I have sufficient interest again in the activity of writing to make my meagreness seem less obvious. Erotic experience is stumbled upon occasionally by accident, and the other evening I was quite nicely entertained, in _my_ usual way, of course. And thus the spell is broken! I can’t help remarking also that this “breaker of the spell” is one very familiar with your present haunts, “La Rotonde,” etc., etc., only of a few years back. You see, then, that one may enjoy a few Parisian sophistications even in Cleveland!

The _Ulysses_ situation is terrible to think on. I shall be eternally grateful to you if you can manage to smuggle my already-subscribed-for copy home with you. If this will in any chance be possible, please let me send you the cash for purchase, etc., at the proper time. I _must_ have this book!

De Gourmont’s _Une Coeur Virginal_ has just been published here, (trans. by Aldous Huxley), and I have snatched it up against its imminent suppression along with _Jurgen_ and other masterpieces. If this is a fair sample of its author, and it’s supposed to be, I cannot see how his _Physique d’Amour_, translated by Pound and to be published by Boni & Liveright, will ever get beyond the printers’ hands. Yet how mellow and kindly is the light from de Gourmont! One hates to see him on the tables with Zane Grey and Rex Beach. Maybe, after all (and since I have procured my volume), it will not be so heart-rending to see the destruction of the jealous Puritan at work again. Two weeks of book-service to the “demands of the public” in a store have bred curious changes of attitude toward the value of popularity (of the slightest sort) in my mind. The curious “unread” that slumber lengthily on the shelves, and whose names are never called, are much nearer my envy than I had once thought they might be from the mere standpoint of neglect. This pawing over of gift-book classics in tooled leather bindings, etc., etc., is a sight to never forget. Poor dear Emerson must slumber badly. Aristocratic is Whitman, though--no one ever calls for that “democrat” any more than for Landor or Donne. And Edgar Guest and Service, death heads both, are rampant.

Of course you have heard of Anderson’s winning of _The Dial_ prize. I was quite certain of it anyway, but intensely gratified at the fact now he has. He will probably go to Mexico now as money was all he needed. He wrote me an answer recently to my criticism of _Erik Dorn_, praising parts of it much and damning others. The book still puzzles me, which makes me dislike it a little more than ever. As a whole it is deficient, but I have always admitted certain parts good. But when one compares it with such a book as Anderson’s _Triumph of the Egg_, it fades out terribly. This latter is an anthology of recent short stories of Anderson and re-reading them together I get the most violent reaction. He has written of ghastly desolations which are only too evident in my own experience and on every hand. I am more enthusiastic than ever in my praise for him although I feel in an odd way, that he has, like a diver, touched bottom in a certain sense, and that his future work must manifest certain changes of a more positive character than the bare statement of reality, or conclude his promise. --/--/

84: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Dec. 25th, ’21_

Dear Gorham: Your letter arriving a few days ago, of the 5th, and the note of the seventh announcing my presence on the boulevards (in Chaplinesque attire) have provided me with rich materials for a kind of Christmas tree, at least as thrilling as any of remotest childhood memories. Names and presences glitter and fascinate with all kinds of exotic suggestions on the branches. I can be grateful to you for the best of Christmas donations, as I can thank you for the main part of my mental and imaginative sustenance of the last six months, weary and tormented as they have been. And now things seem, at least, to look a little better for me. I have been asked to remain on for a brief period in the capacity of book-clerk, and there is a possibility in sight of my gaining a very promising position soon in a very high-class advertising house here that has the attraction of the best connections with the largest agencies in New York and elsewhere. At least my interview with the “authorities” there today proved favorable to me, and if I can only manage to write them the proper kind of letter and “sell myself” as they ridiculously put it, I may secure myself something profitable. Leastwise, however, I have paid off an obligation that worried me and had a little change to spend during the last few weeks which has worked unbelievable miracles on my spirit. My work has been so hectic during the last month that I have not had time to write you, much less poems, but I have a feeling that now that the rush is over and the New Year started, I shall again do something. You see I am promising again.

You cannot imagine how interesting to me have been your opinions of the personalities you have come in contact with. Your opportunities in this direction have far exceeded my happiest anticipations for you. It strikes me that you have met about all the personalities in the younger left-wing at all worth while. --/--/

It has been very gratifying, also, to hear of your amiable progress with Josephson. His “tightening and hardening” effect on one is exactly the compliment I owe to him. In a way he is cold as ice, having a most astonishing faculty for depersonization,--and on the other hand, you have no doubt found a certain affectionate propensity in his nature that is doubly pleasant against the rather frigidly intellectual relief of the rest of him. He likes you much, and wrote me so, also sending me some poems to submit to _The D.D._ which I cannot fancy as having a ghost of a show in such an uneven corner. But he needs money, and I shall be glad to do anything in my power to help him along,--not worrying, however, very, very much, as he has a flexibility and resourcefulness that I envy.

--/--/ If I were only in N.Y. I would see to it that S[ommer]’s work were given its due,--but that time will have to wait. Meanwhile he shows not the slightest inclination to wilt. As I said, his achievements present one gorgeous surprise after another. A mutual friend of ours here recently died, a Nietzschean and thorough appreciator of all the best, who has pursued his lonely way in America since the age of fifteen when he left his family in Norway on account of religious differences. Bill and I were among the pallbearers at this funeral, where there were only a few others present, although all appreciative of what the man was. I can’t go into detail, but the affair was tremendous, especially the finale at the crematorium. It was beautiful, but left me emotionally bankrupt last Sunday, the day following. That funeral was one of the few beautiful things that have happened to me in Cleveland.

Now for a brief résumé of American literature. It is, in a way, hopefully significant that Anderson’s _Winesburg_ has been issued by Boni and Liveright in their Modern Library with a very fine introduction by Ernest Boyd which gives much praise to _The L. R._ for having had the acumen to introduce Anderson to the world. --/--/

_The Dial_ for December has a fine article in it on American painting by Rosenfeld, singling out Hartley for extra and very intelligent praise. It also includes a fairly good poem by Malcolm Cowley, a rather disappointing article on Flaubert by Middleton Murry, and an atrocious piece of dull nonsense by Bodenheim. The new _Shadowland_ is [as] far from thrilling as those tepid baths it did offer last summer, and the _Ladies Home Journal_ and the _Atlantic_ are as bouncing as ever.

This is all for tonight. We have a houseful of indiscriminate relatives and it has been hard to collect myself for even this potpourri, but I have more to say when I can get to it. I need time (a natural requirement with me for all writing or thought) to sit Buddha-like for a couple of hours every day and let things sift themselves into some semblance of order in my brain. But I haven’t had the opportunity for such operations for weeks, and may never,--until which time I pray you to be contented as you can by such thrusts in haste as this letter.

Your figure haunts me like a kind of affectionate caress through all sorts of difficulties. You are always my final and satisfactory “court of appeal,” and it is useless to attempt to tell you how much this means to me. So believe me when I tell you that I love you, and plan and plan for the glorious day when we shall get knees under the table and talk, and talk, and talk. The inefficacy of my letters to you always troubles me.

1922

85: TO SHERWOOD ANDERSON

_Cleveland_ _Jan. 10th_

Dear Anderson: Waiting on shoppers in a book store during the holiday hurricane deferred my answer to your letter. I was glad to get any kind of work, however, after my empty-pocketed summer and fall. Now I am working as a copy-writer for the Corday and Gross Co. here which you may have heard of. I like this better than any bread-and-butter work I’ve ever done. You were right about the real estate job. Ogling poor people for small investments against their will didn’t appeal to me very long. I had given it up before you wrote.

If I can satisfy the requirements of my position here, I shall feel a little hope returning for the satisfaction of a few aims again. I mean, of course, to turn out a little verse or prose this winter. When out of work I am not able to rid myself of worries enough to accomplish anything. Some pecuniary assurances seem necessary to me to any opening of the creative channels. Now things begin to look a little better for me.

I saw your story “The Contract” in the last _Broom_, and would like to offer a criticism. It may be an infraction, but if it is I want to ask your forgiveness. This story in some ways strikes me as inferior to the intensity and beauty of your other recent work, and I have an idea that it is something you wrote quite a while ago. Coming from anyone else, I would think, “This is good; but this fellow is trying to imitate Anderson and can’t quite do it.”

I wouldn’t attempt any suggestions nor try to point out any places. Your work is always too much a composite whole for that critical sort of prodding to yield anything. I only felt this story as somehow an anti-climax to the amazing sense of beauty I recently got in re-reading the short stories you have done during the last few years that are collected together in the _Egg_ volume. Please pardon me for this doubtless unnecessary comment. It is only in the light of my own desires and feeling in such circumstances that I have ventured it.

In my own work I find the problem of style and form becoming more and more difficult as time goes on. I imagine that I am interested in this style of writing much more than you are. Perhaps, though, we include the same features under different terms. In verse this feature can become a preoccupation, to be enjoyed for its own sake. I do not think you will sympathize with me very strongly on this point, but, of course, if you got as much pleasure out of finding instances of it in other writers as I do, you would see what I mean. For instance, when I come to such a line as the following from John Donne,--I am thrilled -- -- -- -- [“Of the Progresse of the Soule, The Second Anniversary,” ll. 296-98]. Or take another, called “The Expiration”: --/--/ [ll. 1-12]. What I want to get is just what is so beautifully done in this poem,--an “interior” form, a form that is so thorough and intense as to dye the words themselves with a peculiarity of meaning, slightly different maybe from the ordinary definition of them separate from the poem. If you remember my “Black Tambourine” you will perhaps agree with me that I have at least accomplished this idea once. My aims make writing slow for me, and so far I have done practically nothing,--but I can wait for slow improvements rather more easily than I can let a lot of stuff loose that doesn’t satisfy me. There is plenty of that in the publishing houses and magazines every day to amuse the folks that like it. This may very well be a tiresome ranting for you, but I think you will like the quotation anyway.

What are you going to do this winter: go to Mexico as you had thought of? I was all ready to scrape around for money enough to start for Europe when this job came along, and I thought I had better take it. Two friends of mine, however, have been in Paris for some time, writing me letters that made me foam at my moorings, and the desire to break loose has been strong.

If you aren’t too busy write me. A friend of mine, Lescaze, was in N. Y. over Christmas and says he had a very pleasant talk with you one evening at Paul Rosenfeld’s.

86: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _Jan. 23rd, ’22_

Dear Gorham: I come to my first evening, free and alone, in some time, and recognize quite plainly that I have neglected you. There are so many rather interesting people around this winter that there is always something or other doing. A concert to go to, a soirée,--and then since I have been writing ads a certain amount of hangover work to be done evenings sometimes,--that altogether I don’t like it. But I like my work and am wonderfully treated at the office. Never guessed a commercial institution could be organized on such a decent basis. And they actually will come of their own accord and tell you that they are pleased with the work you are doing for them!!!!!!!!!! I pass my goggle-eyed father on the streets now without a tremor! I go on mad carouses with Bill Sommer wherein we begin with pigs’ feet and sauerkraut and end with Debussy’s “Gradus ad Parnassum” in the “ivory tower.” Around Ernest Bloch at the Institute of Music here are gathered some interesting folks from all over everywhere. There is even a French restaurant here where the proprietress stands at the cashier’s desk reading _La Nouvelle Revue Francaise_ and where wonderful steaks with mushrooms are served--alas, everything, including real garçons, except vin. The place looks like a sentence without any punctuation, or, if you prefer, this letter.

And now, mon cher, willy-nilly as it all may be, we come to your magazine. I don’t want to hurt you at all, but I must confess to little or no enthusiasm at the prospect of another small magazine, full of compressed dynamite as yours might well be. Unless one has half a million or so, what’s the use of adding to the other little repercussions that dwindle out after a few issues!? Don’t waste your time with it all, is my advice. Much better sit down and pound on your typewriter, or go toting mss. around to stolid editors. Listen,--there is now _some_ kind of magazine that will print one’s work however bad or good it is. The “arty” book stores bulge and sob with them all. I pray you invest your hard-earned money in neckties, theatre tickets or something else good for the belly or the soul,--but don’t throw it away in paper and inefficient typography. Don’t come home three months sooner for the prospects of that rainbow.

No one will especially appreciate it -- -- -- --. By all this you must not think that I have joined the Right Wing to such an extent that I am rollicking in F. Scott Fitzgerald. No,--but by the straight and narrow path swinging to the south of the village DADA I have arrived at a somewhat and abashed posture of reverence before the statues of Ben Jonson, Michael Drayton, Chaucer, sundry others already mentioned. The precious rages of dear Matty [Josephson] somehow don’t seem to swerve me from this position. He is, it strikes me, altogether unsteady. Of course, since Mallarmé and Huysmans were elegant weepers it is up to the following generation to haw-haw gloriously! Even dear old Buddha-face de Gourmont is passé. Well, I suppose it is up to one in Paris to do as the Romans do, but it all looks too easy to me from Cleveland, Cuyhoga County, God’s country. But Matty will always glitter when he walks provided the man in front of him has not sparkled,--which we hope he never does, of course,--and so I am happy to hear from him always about his latest change of mind. Quite seriously Matty is thrilling, in prose especially. His performance is always agreeable despite my inability to sympathize with his theories. Paris seems to be a good place for him to work and I suppose he will stay there at least until his contes are published. --/--/

87: TO WILLIAM WRIGHT

_Cleveland, O._ _February 11, 1922_

Dear Bill: Don’t let me keep on worrying. Your visit was a great pleasure to me, resulting in the renewal of old contacts and the discoveries of many new ones. I am so much interested in you now, that I am in danger of pestering you with all kinds of advice and admonitions. One of these is: not to let the caprices of any unmellow ladies result in your unbalance or extreme discomfiture. Even the best of them, at times, know not and care not what they do. They have the faculty of producing very debilitating and thoroughly unprofitable effects on gentlemen who put themselves too much in their hands. Woman was not meant to occupy this position. It was only the Roman Catholic Church who gave it to her. Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians knew better how to handle her. I suggest your reading De Gourmont’s _Virgin Heart_ for a delicate dissection of this kind of problem. De Gourmont was something more than a purely “literary critic,” you know. He was one of the most thorough students of physiology and psychology of the modern world. He was an adept scientist of the emotions. Stendhal was another, but less clear.

All this suffering is quite romantic and beautiful, you know, but you pay a stupid price for it. I can’t help saying these things because of my interest and because I saw you go away in ominous style. I hope you haven’t been ill, and that you have merely forgotten to write me.

I have been through two or three of these cataclysms myself, harder than yours because of their unusual and unsympathetic situations. Maybe I have gained something by them, I don’t know,--but it is certain that I lost a great deal too.

88: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland?_] _Feb. 25th --’22_

Dear Gorham: Arrived yesterday the new _Gargoyle_. Altogether not such a poor issue as Matty predicted in one of his letters of last month. Your translations amuse me without interesting me as thoroughly as your nicely administered spanking of McAlmon. Maybe your translations (or rather selections) would excite me somewhat if I weren’t somehow so hopelessly tired of Art and theories about Art lately. I can’t quite account for it--never having suffered from indigestion like this before. It is, after all, I suppose, because I have nothing of my own to “give,” and therefore feel so little at stake in all the deluge of production and argument that I grow either bewildered or else indifferent. I am going through a difficult readjustment right now, besides meeting a period in my so-called “creative life” where neither my conscious self nor my unconscious self can get enough “co-operation” from the other to do anything worth while. I wrote something recently which I thought, on the moment, was good. Today I have faced it as a hopeless failure, disjointed and ugly and vain. I am only momentarily depressed by these facts, however, as I am kept so busy with my ad writing that I haven’t time to think much about it. --/--/

89: TO WILLIAM WRIGHT

_Jamestown, New York_ _March 2, 1922_

Dear Bill: This is my second excursion to this place, no doubt somewhat familiar to you,--having been here part of last week. It’s a matter of business for the Co. (“investigation of the product,” in ad. lingo) and I rather enjoy getting out of Cleveland for a day or so. I’ve been getting out a catalog for the Art Metal folks here and puzzling my head over blue prints and figures until I have become somewhat dull. --/--/

By this time I suppose you are back again and full tilt in your customary carousels. I was glad to know that the trouble with you was only “physiological.” By this time you have probably read some of De Gourmont’s observations on that sort of thing, and, wise man!, were fully experienced to appreciate them. What an awful lot of novel forms there are! The novel is the most flexible literary form there is. It permits the freest and completest expression. Have you read Louis Hemon’s _Maria Chapdelaine_ yet? The young French emigrant who wrote it died shortly afterward, but for what it intends it is one of the most finished things one could hope for. Human emotion in it is like delicate pastel tinted flowers on a background of midnight black. The black terrific power of the forest and winter threatens continually behind every word in the action. But I am nowhere near so enthused about this book as I am about Gogol’s _Taras Bulba_ that I read on the train recently. I think someone has called it the Russian _Iliad_. It is certainly not secondary to _The Iliad_ in many ways. That sting and tang of those Cossack adventures are something I won’t forget, and the hero, old Taras, is altogether memorable. This is something you _must_ read.

I don’t want to go any further without thanking you for your “Ballade.” I find so much that is good in it that I am tempted beyond the proper respect for your very dégagé gesture of presentation in your letter, and want to risk the impropriety of some criticism of it. The main faults of it are faults inherent with the form you used. I do not, as you know, insist by any means on vers libre forms. But it is just when I see such a thing as your ballade with the (unavoidable) tiresome repetitions of sound or rhyme, that I am most moved to applaud even the slouchy vers libre work that seems to “get over” its meaning or lack of meaning at least without that mechanical insistence of certain formal patterns that can sometimes infuriate me. For instance, after “sweet, feet, deceit, conceit, and fleet” have all successively pecked at the ear, along comes “discreet retreat”!!, giving the whole poem at the point a tone of the neatest mean-ness. And that sort of tone is exactly what you do not want,--at least not along with some of your quite exquisite imagery that speaks in largeness of a full heart.

The first verse, the first four lines especially, is fine, and the idea behind that “discreet retreat behind sophistications of bread and meat” is good. It would be improved by using another and richer word than “sophistications” just to _improve_ the sophistication a little, however. I feel this way,--that however you wrote this poem,--in jest, literary exercise, or emotionally,--it proves distinct poetic possibilities in you, which, whether you care to follow or not, are still there. Why don’t you work this poem into an easier form or perhaps into a vers libre form? I could do it to show you what I mean, but that would take all the fun out of it for you. Forms as strict as the ballade, can, in my opinion, be used satisfactorily for only very artificial subjects, or abstract themes.

I’ve been doing something myself, but don’t feel satisfied enough with it yet to send it.

90: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _March 2, ’22_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ Just now, I apologize for it, I am so much worried by family finances that it’s hard for me to do anything more than my work. My mother’s alimony has reached its limited time and she is preparing (at 45 yrs. of age!) to go out into the world to learn to make her living!

I, naturally, shall henceforward be called upon not only to “keep” myself, but to lend as much of a helping hand as is possible in this predicament. So, it’s hard work for some time ahead for me, I guess. My present wages just suffice for my own limited requirements. My pater is too much of a cad to really do anything for his former wife except what the agreement between them says. The fact that this was made when she was partially out of mind and very ill, makes no difference to him.

However, I shall not resign myself to the proverbial and sentimental fate of the “might-have-been” artist without a few more strenuosities. I will have to expect a certain tardiness of gait, however.

I have just read Aldous Huxley’s latest, _Crome Yellow_, one of those things that evokes much quiet laughter and holds delightful savours, at least for a contemporary, between its covers. -- -- -- --

As no good plays ever get to Cleveland, and the Chicago opera not at all this year, my outside entertainment has been meagre. Only a symphony concert every other week, and little new there.

Ernest Bloch, however, conducted two weeks ago his _Trois Poèmes Juifs_ which were magnificent enough for Solomon to have marched & sung to. I occasionally pass him on the streets or in the aisles of the auditorium, and realize that genius, after all, may walk in Cleveland. -- -- -- --

91: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _March 24th_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ You know I shall talk it [_Secession_] up,--but the worst is that most of my acquaintances are totally unfitted for enthusiasms of this sort. The indifference you will encounter when you return to these States you must be prepared to face. Every one is suddenly and enormously _busy_--making money, attending teas, motoring, starving--God knows what all. It makes me reel! Life is too scattered for me to savor it any more. Probably this is only on account of my present work which demands the most frequent jerks of the imagination from one thing to another, still--the war certainly has changed things a bit here. The question in my mind is, how much less vertigo are we going to suffer in the latter whirl than we did in the first blows and commotion. If I am drifting into nonsense, it must be because I’m getting no time lately for anything but work.

If you come home in May--one of the first things you must do is to make me a good visit. You will be free to come, whereas there is a considerable doubt now about my coming east at all this summer. Here in my tower-study, rimmed with Sommer paintings and grey cracked paper, you will have a good chance to focus your recent observations -- -- -- --. Besides,--you have never seen any of the midwest, and it ought to be part of your education. --/--/

92: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _March 29th, ’22_

Dear Gorham: --/--/ With the banal arrival of spring and weeks of rain and cloudy skies, I have again fallen in love! I guess I might about as well take up quarters at La Rotonde--and be done with it. However, _something_ must be indulged in to make Cleveland interesting.

93: TO WILLIAM WRIGHT

_Cleveland, O._ _April 2nd_

Dear Bill: Your prose is much better than your verse. I don’t know how to explain--perhaps if I saw more of your poetry I might,--but certainly the story you recently sent me makes me quite certain of it. The poem has the tepid and pubescent steam in it that always seems to issue from the environs of a college campus. It is college adolescence in only a slight advance from the ordinary. It has enough in it to “get by” on the first reading with a rather pleasing effect. But the second discovers much to be criticized. It’s not in the technique but in the attitude that I blame you for this. You have a real flair for phrasing, and two years ago I should have probably praised you for the poem.

But now let’s turn to the story. It is vital and well told. Nobody can imitate Anderson, of course, but that is not what we want anyway. Your story stands on its own feet quite well. In some places it is too accented. I say this in spite of my realization of the intent of it and also via recommending the very effective literary device of under-accentuation in just the right place to produce “overtones” of overwhelming effect. Then you could afford to be more sparing of adjectives! But I won’t rail any further! You certainly are displaying evidence and promises of a hopeful career. If you don’t get too engrossed in commerce after you leave college the break will do you good, I think. No matter how “free” one may be in college, the campus world with its idols and codes is very different from the world outside. Don’t think, please, that I’m decrying education, it’s only a mention that things are somehow harder and a little “scarey.” “Practical people” suddenly surround one, and they have such an insistence about being listened to. --/--/

The more speed I develop in ad-writing the more occasion I’m given to use it, and I seem to need to keep in touch with so many people that the hours spent at home are too few. This hankering for continual conversational excitement is one of my weaknesses. What I _should_ be doing is working. Truly, on this gay Sunday afternoon, my conscience is weighted.

94: TO GORHAM MUNSON

[_Cleveland_] _April 19th --’22_