PART TWO New York (1923-1925)

1923

124: To Gorham Munson

[Cleveland] Jan. 5th, ’23

Dear Gorham: I cannot remember a more hectic month than the last unless I recall some of the old bivouacs of New York days, when I ricochet-ed “from roof to roof” without intermission. Two rush campaigns to write, gifts and remembrances to buy and send to far too many people—suppers, parties and evenings—much tossing of the pot,—“prison, palace and reverberation”! That is why I’ve been so slow in writing.

At present I’m flabbergasted and dull. But my carousing on New Year’s Eve had one good outcome; it started the third part of “Faustus and Helen” with more gusto than before. When I catch my next breath I hope to carry it on to the end. —/—/

Waldo Frank wrote me a very cordial letter in answer to my written praise of “Hope.” I should like to be in New York now and hear his lectures at the Rand School. I am hoping to make my visit along in May or June when the weather is mild and some of the shows are still going. I shall appear with a new cane that was given me for Christmas. Despite my objections to cane-carrying last summer, I find it very pleasant. Puce-colored gloves complete the proper touch.

I notice that Broom has been consistently weak in poetry. Cowley’s things have been by far the best—but (with all due modesty) I think that my “F. and H.” will be an improvement over their past offerings. Matty appears to rest in clover and periwinkles, what with the Guggenheim millions and the international sweep of editorial authority. (In accepting my poems he merely mentioned that he thought Loeb also liked them!) What do you think of his Broom ad in the Dec. number? He asked my opinion on the grounds that literary ads were generally the flattest in the world. It seems “attractive” enough to me—but the prize-subscription offer I balk at as a matter of policy in such a type of magazine.

Stieglitz voiced an old feeling of mine about Bill’s [Sommer] work—the lack of finish evident in so much of it. This has always pained me. As a whole, his comments seem very just. But I tend to differ with him on one point in common with other critics who are so obsessed with the importance of current developments in art that they fail to recognize certain positive and timeless qualities.

I refer to the quality of line in Sommer’s work. That has, in particular, nothing more to do with modern work than the draughtsmanship of Michelangelo. It is something that may not distinguish a man as a great innovator or personality—but it is, for all that, a rare and wondrous quality. From what you write Stieglitz has the sense to recognize this quality and to value it. But a person like Georgia O’Keeffe, who has so distinctly her own horn to play, is scornful of everything short of evolution and revolution.

It is a relief once in awhile to detach one’s judgment from such considerations as hers, and to look at a piece of work as totally detached from time and fashion, and then judge it entirely on its individual appeal. I think that in Sommer’s case, you, Williams and myself are appreciators of this kind. I can enjoy Bill’s things regardless of their descent, evident or otherwise, from French or German artists of the last generation. He has certain perfections which many of the most lauded were lacking in. God DAMN this constant nostalgia for something always “new.” This disdain for anything with a trace of the past in it!!! This kind of criticism is like a newspaper, always with its dernier cri. It breeds its own swift decay because its whole theory is built on an hysterical sort of evolution theory. I shall probably always enjoy El Greco and Goya. I still like to look at the things Sommer makes, because many of them are filled with a solid and clear beauty.

I have frequently wondered why you were so laggard in your interest in Eliot. Your recent announcement brings me much pleasure of anticipation. Please let [me] know what you find in Eliot. With your head knocked against Burke’s over such a topic there ought to be some fine illuminations. You already know, I think, that my work for the past two years (those meagre drops!) has been more influenced by Eliot than any other modern. He has been a very good counter-balance to Matty’s shifting morale and violent urgings. My amusement at Matty’s acceptance of “F and H” considerably heightened by the memory of several sly hints against Eliot which some of his more recent letters had contained.

There is no one writing in English who can command so much respect, to my mind, as Eliot. However, I take Eliot as a point of departure toward an almost complete reverse of direction. His pessimism is amply justified, in his own case. But I would apply as much of his erudition and technique as I can absorb and assemble toward a more positive, or (if [I] must put it so in a sceptical age) ecstatic goal. I should not think of this if a kind of rhythm and ecstasy were not (at odd moments, and rare!) a very real thing to me. I feel that Eliot ignores certain spiritual events and possibilities as real and powerful now as, say, in the time of Blake. Certainly the man has dug the ground and buried hope as deep and direfully as it can ever be done. He has outclassed Baudelaire with a devastating humor that the earlier poet lacked.

After this perfection of death—nothing is possible in motion but a resurrection of some kind. Or else, as everyone persists in announcing in the deep and dirgeful Dial, the fruits of civilization are entirely harvested. Everyone, of course, wants to die as soon and as painlessly as possible! Now is the time for humor, and the Dance of Death. All I know through very much suffering and dullness (somehow I seem to twinge more all the time) is that it interests me to still affirm certain things. That will be the persisting theme of the last part of “F and H” as it has been all along. —/—/

125: To Gorham Munson

[Cleveland] Jan. 10th, ’23

Dear Gorham: Your Study came day before yesterday. So far I have only had time for a single reading, but am ready to offer whole-hearted congratulations. It IS much improved from the fragment I read last summer, and I think you have made a criticism that, besides being quite exact and fair, is dramatic—and very constructive beyond the actual boundaries of the man and subject concerned. I shall go over it again this evening. By early next week I hope to have some words for the jacket written,—later a review for the Double-Skull. I’ll send them both to you as soon as they are ready, for suggestions or “corrections.” By this time, according to a recent letter of yours, you will be something of a “copy” critic also.

Sommer’s gratitude to you for your interest and success in helping him will never reach the frenzied pitch of a letter,—but I know that he feels quite deeply grateful. As I am his official and unofficial secretary in other matters I include mention of his sentiments here. I must admit that I personally got a greater “thrill” out of the news than any personal acceptances have given me for many a day.[26] — — — —

126: To Gorham Munson

[Cleveland] Jan. 14th, ’23

Dear Gorham: This (enclosed)[27] may, or may not yet be finished. Anyway, I think it is rounded enough as it is to be somewhat enjoyed.

Some things about it surprise and satisfy me. It has a bit of Dionysian splendor, perhaps an overtone of some of our evenings together last summer. It is so packed with tangential slants, interwoven symbolisms, that I’m not sure whether or not it will [be] understood. However, I am sure that it perfectly consorts with the other two parts of the poem as I intend them:

Part I Meditation, Evocation, Love, Beauty Part II Dance, Humor, Satisfaction Part III Tragedy, War (the eternal soldier), Résumé, Ecstasy, Final Declaration

There is an organization and symphonic rhythm to III that I did not think I could do. The last three evenings have been wonderful for me, anyway! A kind of ecstasy and power for WORK.

III doesn’t seem half long enough to me now—but I’m too much with and in it to know.

127: To Charmion Wiegand

[Cleveland] Jan. 20th, ’23

My dear Charmion: It didn’t take me long to decide that Buschor’s Graechische Vasenmalerei is a book that I shall always carry about with me, even though it has taken me an unforgivably long time to tell you so. You and Hermann [Habicht] have my sincerest gratitude for such an unexpected and beautiful holiday present.

With a few exceptions I prefer Egyptian sculpture to the Greek, and this book makes me feel that the Greeks had more to express in line and design than they had in the third dimension. In pottery you get the less ambitious and less “cosmopolitan” aspiration and expression of these people. There is an intimacy and rusticity to the pottery which especially appeals to the literary instinct. The famous Nike of Samothrace always left me somewhat cool. Lady Milo is a bit imposing (Jove’s too near around the corner) and these idealized human dolls all stand too much on their dignity. O I know how they prostrated Heine and Pater et al., and I do respect them—but give me these lovely vase intaglios and arabesques—and maids and naughty satyrs with their rank lustful lives and leaves and brine and wine!

—/—/ I think it is a credit to Munson’s platform and writing that so much attention has already been proffered Secession. I was very lukewarm in the beginning and urged him not to “waste his time” on any magazine project. But after his visit here last summer I quickly switched about, especially as S has contained such new and suggestive material as the last 2 numbers included. Secession gets away from the “temperamental” editorial attitude of The Little Review (good in many ways as this has been) and bases its judgment on more tradition while at the same time being far more daring in its experiments than such magazines as The Dial. It has been discouraging to see how very “safe” The Dial plays sometimes, despite its protests to the contrary.

I find that I have derived considerable stimulation from Secession. Without it there would be only the vague hope that the steady pessimism which pervades The Dial since Eliot and others have announced that happiness and beauty dwell only in memory—might sometimes lift. I cry for a positive attitude! When you see the first two parts of my “Faustus & Helen” that comes out in Broom in Feb. or March, you will see better what I mean. I’ve about finished the third and last part now, and am pleased at the finale. —/—/

I’m rather worn out with the incessant activities of the last two weeks—last month, in fact. I can’t stand much “society” even with interesting people, and my acquaintance in Cleveland has somehow increased so extensively during the last two years that with work, reading, writing, etc., things are becoming entirely too febrile. You’ll excuse my mention of such “ailments” I hope, as part of my excuse for delay in writing. But I have already probably exhausted you beyond “resentments” of such nature by this lengthy gust. — — — —

128: To Gorham Munson

[Cleveland] Jan. 24, ’23

Dear Gorham: I’ll wait for your next letter before sending any other versions of “F. & H. III” The last two days have been occupied with the enclosed strange psychoanalytic thing. I can’t quite justify the title in words, but it came to me quite freely as the right thing. Let me know how you like it.[28] —/—/

129: To Gorham Munson

[Cleveland] Feb. 6th, ’23

Dear Gorham: Everyone writes me such encouraging notes about “F and H” that I am doubly sorry that I ever sent any to Broom for publication. Frank wrote me a very shrewd appreciation of Part II which he probably repeated to you. Untermeyer’s mention of me among the New Patricians prompted me to send him a copy after reading his article on Eliot in a recent Freeman. I disagreed with him openly on many points, but the substance of his last paragraph made me think he would be interested in reading the poem. I was rather foolish to follow such an impulse, but his answer was quite decent. He made the charge of a new type of “rhetoric,” however, which is just what Frank took pains to mention as fully absent. Untermeyer comes here for a lecture on March 11th and says he wants to have a talk with me if possible. This is all right, but I am not keen about argument. Allen Tate writes me the most glowing praises possible, calls me the greatest contemporary American poet, etc., etc., so I feel about ready to deliver myself of my memoirs and expire in roses. And then, your appreciation has especially been enjoyed. You “get” the form and arrangement of the “Stark Major” poem much better than Frank does, but he is right about the second paragraph being too complicated and vague and you are wrong about the last verse being redundant. When I get the second verse worked out to suit me I’ll send you another copy. In the meantime I am ruminating on a new longish poem under the title of The Bridge which carries on further the tendencies manifest in “F and H.” It will be exceedingly difficult to accomplish it as I see it now, so much time will be wasted in thinking about it. Your news about Broom is discouraging in view of the fact that I had just sent part III of “F and H” to Matty last week. Everything has been bungled all the way through. I hope I can get enough material together during the next few months for a small volume where things can be arranged in proper order. I am so deadly sick of manipulating things with magazines, The Dial included. This latter refuses my “F and H” and then takes such a silly thing as that Apleton or what’s-’ername woman contained this month in its covers. I have been so rushed around with too much society that I have not yet got at the review for your study, but it will be done within two weeks anyway. It was much easier to rap out this enclosed review for Fitts. Let me know what you like or don’t like about it. I am very awkward at reviews, mainly, I suppose, because the procedure is strange to me. I am through doing things for Sommer until he cooperates better. He has received notice and photographs from The Dial I learn from second hand. Ten days ago this was. I had especially asked him to phone me as soon as he heard anything definite from them, certainly a small task, but he never peeps or comes near. I shall not send back the photographs to you to show to anyone until he returns them to me. He knows I paid twenty dollars for them and that I want to keep them circulating, etc. He knew that I would be the one to write to The Dial and blow ’em up if they failed to keep their word on the reproductions, and naturally want to know the facts of the situation, yet he keeps his stolid distance. What’s the use? It’s too much trouble with all the rest I have to do, though I’d be only too glad to keep it up indefinitely if he’d show a little interest. —/—/

130: To Allen Tate

[Cleveland] Feb. 6th, ’23

Dear Allen: I can’t seem to get around to write you a decent consideration of your recent poems, “Yellow River,” etc. When I get time to write, as now at the office, they are not by me, and you have already had evidence of my state of mind at other odd moments. Meanwhile, do not think me indifferent, please.

I’m afraid you will have to postpone your kind proclamations in regard to “F and H” until the three parts appear in book form and in proper sequence. The inadvertency of “The Springs of Guilty Song” in the Broom is too complicated to explain fully. Josephson is most unscrupulous in his editorship, and it takes so long to get word back and forth that I shall probably not send anything more to Broom even if they finish “F and H” with the other two parts. This is quite unlikely as Munson writes me doleful presages about its financial straits. Two more issues and it will probably expire. However, in case they do print the third part which I sent about two weeks ago, it will include a note at the bottom of the page explaining the sequence, etc., and correcting the misnomer “The Springs of Guilty Song.” In regard to this latter I had a very fine appreciation from Waldo Frank who was quite astonished at it. Then with your fine praise and Munson’s I feel more encouraged than ever about my work. I’m already started on a new poem, The Bridge, which continues the tendencies that are evident in “Faustus and Helen,” but it’s too vague and nebulous yet to talk about.

In the next S4N I have an amusing parody of Cummings and have asked Fitts, the editor, to send you a copy. Don’t be puzzled by the name of this magazine, it’s taken from the insignia of a mosquito fleet during the war, I think. I wish I could partake of the genuine Tatian Theory, but it’s not so universal in its application, I fear, as it used to be. Sherry and bad Port are about all one succeeds in safely absorbing around here. When am I to expect that promised portrait of you?

131: To Waldo Frank

Cleveland, Ohio Feb. 7th, ’23

Dear Waldo Frank: I have not been so stimulated for a long time as I was with your letter and its exact appreciation of the very things I wanted to put into the second part of “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” or its misnomer, “The Springs of Guilty Song.” The fact that its intention was completely evident to you without any explanations or “notes” from me, has renewed my confidence and made me quite happy. It has also made me doubly anxious that you should have a copy of the entire poem to read. This is enclosed, and, of course, is yours to keep if you want it. It has been very discouraging the way Broom has handled the publication of this poem. The mails are slow and unreliable, and Josephson is hasty, to say the least, in his methods. At best now, it will come out in broken sequence, and a final Note with part III cannot much repair the situation. I want at least a few of my friends to have the thing in decent shape.

A few planks of the scaffolding may interest you, so I’ll roughly indicate a few of my intentions. Part I starts out from the quotidian, rises to evocation, ecstasy and statement. The whole poem is a kind of fusion of our own time with the past. Almost every symbol of current significance is matched by a correlative, suggested or actually stated, “of ancient days.” Helen, the symbol of this abstract “sense of beauty,” Faustus the symbol of myself, the poetic or imaginative man of all times. The street car device is the most concrete symbol I could find for the transition of the imagination from quotidian details to the universal consideration of beauty,—the body still “centered in traffic,” the imagination eluding its daily nets and self consciousness. Symbolically, also, and in relation to Homer, this first part has significance of the rape of Helen by Paris. In one word, however, Part I stands simply for the EVOCATION of beauty.

Part II is, of course, the DANCE and sensual culmination. It is also an acceleration of the ecstasy of PART III. This last part begins with catharsis, the acceptance of tragedy through destruction (The Fall of Troy, etc., also in it). It is Dionysian in its attitude, the creator and the eternal destroyer dance arm in arm, etc., all ending in a restatement of the imagination as in Part I. You would probably get all these things without my crude and hasty mention of them, but to me, the entire poem is so packed with cross-currents and multiple suggestions that I am anxious that you should see the thing as I do, even though I have perhaps not succeeded in “putting over” all the points which I think I have. If you feel like severe criticism in any cases I shall certainly welcome it. Certainly I was not “hurt” by the very accurate criticisms you offered in your last letter.

“Nuances” in Part II takes the American pronunciation, that is, the “es” is voiced. You were quite right about the second verse in “Stark Major.” I have never been satisfied with it as to clarity, and it will undergo revision before publication anywhere. —/—/

132: To Gorham Munson

[Cleveland] Feb. 9th, ’23

Dear Gorham: You don’t deserve my pains in copying these two charming things of Allen Tate’s until you send back that much belabored poem of Harris’s, but these being yours to keep or throw away, I submit them casually, as possible material for Secession. Tate sent them to me this week, and seems to have written them in a mood of amusement with no idea of their publication anywhere. I shall not say anything at all to him about above considerations unless you should happen to want one or both of them. Tate has a whole lot to offer when he finds his way out of the Eliot idiom, which as you know, is natural to him, and was before he ever heard of Eliot. These things are certainly not imitative of anyone to [any] noticeable extent. They certainly beat Gerty Stein on her own ground—that is from the standpoint of her announced desire to break up poetry into an idiom corresponding to cubism, etc. Tate has much more precision, while giving the same broken effect. Not that I care a damn about such theories beyond their being merely interesting, but that may be because from now on I feel that personal problems of my own, extenuating from the experience in writing “F and H,” will be enough to interest myself.

I am in a very unfavorable mood, and just after having congratulated myself strongly on security against future outbreaks of the affections. You see, for two or three years I have not been attacked in this way. A recent evening at a concert some glances of such a very stirring response and beauty threw me into such an hour of agony as I supposed I was beyond feeling ever again. The mere senses can be handled without such effects, but I discover I am as powerless as ever against those higher and certainly hopeless manifestations of the flesh. O God that I should have to live within these American restrictions forever, where one cannot whisper a word, not at least exchange a few words! In such cases they almost suffice, you know. Passions of this kind completely derail me from anything creative for days,—and that’s the worst of it.

Tate wrote me a charming old fashioned sonnet on my picture that I recently sent him. Because, in a loose way, it is so clairvoyant, I confide it to you, an act which would be almost immodest in other circumstances.

133: To Allen Tate

[Cleveland] Feb. 12th ’23

Dear Allen: Let me congratulate you on the “Tercets of the Triad,” however mockingly intended. It is among your very best results, as is, also, the “Pins and Needles.” O I shall not soon forget “grandfather’s knees,” etc., etc. The interweaving of the lines is very cunning. I think you display a great amount of cleverness also in the “Pins and Needles”—although I’m not sure that I applaud the name for this. There might be others more apropos. To my mind you beat “Gerty” Stein on her own race track. That is, you succeed much better than she in accomplishing what is her avowed aim—to split up lyrical or picture-word sequences into pieces in the same way that Cubists do in painting. She is entertaining only at the expense of all coherence, whereas you break things up into sharp impressions and also preserve the outlines of the scattered pieces. This comparison, now that I see it written, is aimless, because your directions and temperaments are so entirely different. Yet its record here may amuse you as an idea that immediately came to my mind when I read your poem.

Odd paradoxes occur. These things which you claim to have written for amusement only, seem to carry through so far as completeness of form is concerned better than “Yellow River” and “Quality of Mercy” where your “seriousness” was, if anything, too evident. You won’t misunderstand me on this, I hope. I simply mean that your satirical leanings are very strong ... that their astringency frequently breaks up your lyrical passages and at other times overloads them to the point of obscurity. In an indifferent or gay mood you escape these encumbrances, as well as [the] slight tendency that such endowments always carry with them—the danger of occasional lapses into sentimentality. Do not be abashed. The same was true of no less a man than Jules Laforgue, who was like you in many ways and who naturally had far less temptations in Paris and Berlin than you and I, Allen and Hart in Kentucky and Ohio (U.S.A.) respectively. If I can find it I’ll send you a scrap of De Gourmont’s essay on Laforgue that I translated last summer. This is more illuminating than anything I could offer.

I think you need to cultivate greater simplicity of statement in your more emotional things,—however well your present facility suits the more ornamented and artificial congruities of satire or brilliant impressionism. In “Yellow River” there are many lines that are too noble to be wasted,—some of great penetration and beauty. So all this makes me wish you would devote some extra effort into perfecting this poem, willfully extracting the more obvious echoes of Eliot. You are certainly rich enough to get along without them. Don’t let your interest in The Fugitive woo too many things into too sudden print. Forgive my pedantic bass and lifted finger, but I think you are inclined to too hasty mss. dispatches sometimes.

The ads are calling, so Addios. I feel like quoting the first verse of The Bridge for a snappy close:—

134: To Allen Tate

[Cleveland] Feb. 15th, ’23

Dear Allen: —/—/ I enclose a note from James Daly, whose poetry you may have sampled in Broom. He was here last Fall visiting a mutual friend, and I think I showed him some of your verse. After you have seen what “some others” think of you, please return the enclosed. Broom, by the way, has busted; N. Y. office closed last Saturday; March issue, the last, to be distributed from Berlin while the tent-stakes are being pulled up. I rejoice in a way. At least they won’t get a chance to murder my “F and H” any more. Secession will publish the three parts together probably sometime next summer. (There is no use in my sending anything more to The Dial; they just rejected my “Stark Major,” and it is plain that their interest in helping American letters is very incidental. Note the predominance given to translations of the older generation of Germans, etc., who have absolutely nothing to give us but a certain ante-bellum “refinement.” They aren’t printing the younger crowd of any country.) All this should convince you, as well as myself, of the real place and necessity for Secession. Of course I’m sorry now that I fooled around sending “F and H” anywhere else at all. Dial had a chance at that, too, you know.

You may be indisposed to Waldo Frank, but I must recommend to you City Block as the richest in content of any “fiction” that has appeared in the American 20th century. Frank has the real mystic’s vision. His apprehensions astonish one. I have also enjoyed reading Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum lately. Its corroboration of several experiences in consciousness that I have had gave it particular interest.

135: To Gorham Munson

[Cleveland] Feb. 18th, ’23

Dear Gorham: — — — — Your summary of praises for “F and H” was such a fine tribute that it might account for my backache and confinement to the bed yesterday. But the more probable cause for that, however, is liquor and the cogitations and cerebral excitements it threw me into regarding my new enterprise, The Bridge, on the evening precedent. I am too much interested in this Bridge thing lately to write letters, ads, or anything. It is just beginning to take the least outline,—and the more outline the conception of the thing takes,—the more its final difficulties appal me. All this preliminary thought has to result, of course, in some channel forms or mould into which I throw myself at white heat. Very roughly, it concerns a mystical synthesis of “America.” History and fact, location, etc., all have to be transfigured into abstract form that would almost function independently of its subject matter. The initial impulses of “our people” will have to be gathered up toward the climax of the bridge, symbol of our constructive future, our unique identity, in which is included also our scientific hopes and achievements of the future. The mystic portent of all this is already flocking through my mind (when I say this I should say “the mystic possibilities,” but that is all that’s worth announcing, anyway) but the actual statement of the thing, the marshalling of the forces, will take me months, at best; and I may have to give it up entirely before that; it may be too impossible an ambition. But if I do succeed, such a waving of banners, such ascent of towers, such dancing, etc., will never before have been put down on paper! The form will be symphonic, something like “F and H” with its treatment of varied content, and it will probably approximate the same length in lines. It is perhaps rather silly to go on this way before more than a dozen lines have been written, but at any rate it serves to excuse my possible deficiencies in correspondence in the near future, should the obsession carry me much further. I hate to have to go to work every day! When I get The Bridge done, or something of equal length, I think it will be time to try Liveright or Huebsch or Knopf for a collected publication. Just now I have hardly enough of even quality and tone to satisfy me. Of course I’m glad to know that Wheeler and Wescott are interested in me, especially as I am led to respect their standards, but I might as well relinquish my mss. to the desk drawer as to offer its publication to Wheeler, at least so far as I know. Did he publish Turbyfill in Chicago? or was it Berlin? You will naturally see my reasons for at least attempting the more standard publishers first, I’m sure. And until I have the extra and necessary amount to add, there is no use committing myself to any arrangements at all. In passing I do want to thank you, Gorham, for your constant interest in interpreting me to others whose added interest all makes me confident that I have more to offer than I once supposed. And I am even more grateful for your very rich suggestions best stated in your Frank Study on the treatment of mechanical manifestations of today as subject for lyrical, dramatic, and even epic poetry. You must already notice that influence in “F and H.” It is to figure even larger in The Bridge. The field of possibilities literally glitters all around one with the perception and vocabulary to pick out significant details and digest them into something emotional.

Your visit to Amy Lowell was a characteristic literary experience in American letters of the day, a baptism, as it were, from the Episcopal font, endowing you with the proper blessing and chastisement necessary for the younger generation. All hail to Amy’s poetry propaganda! but I should not enjoy talking to her.

I think you discovered the weak points in my review pretty well. However, I think Wheelwright’s recent letter about Secession in The Freeman displayed very little evidence as prose workmanship, even of the most fundamental nature. He certainly sustained himself much better as “Dorian Abbott.” In the letter his partis pris emotionalism was too evident to convince his readers properly. In this sense, a course in advertising would be good for him, which reminds me that I’ll soon send you one of my campaigns that not only “went over big” but is theoretically a good piece of work. Are you still studying this modern science?

It must be rather hellish reading through so many books every week that your eyes pop out. Truly, you must look for some editorial post, copywriting job, or something that will relieve you of such strains. I think you will probably find things much smoother in your new apartment which I’m delighted to think of. Is it in the Village? I can’t quite place it. When I come down in June, I’ll probably plan on staying with you and Elizabeth [Mrs. Munson].

Just now, it’s Vulcan back to the Furnace! The “bowels” poem comes out in the next S4N, which bunch Tate writes that he has just joined through my communications. He has submitted “Pins and Needles,” which I imagine Fitts will use. I’m waiting now for The Dial to send back my “Stark Major.” Just sent a caricature of Paul Rosenfeld to The Little Review, telling them to publish it, if they cared to, “along with the rest of my inadvertent correspondence.” It is called “Anointment of our Well Dressed Critic,” or “Why Waste the Eggs?”—Three-dimensional Vista, by Hart Crane. Allons!

136: To ——

[Cleveland] [Feb. 20]

Dear ——: Those who have wept in the darkness sometimes are rewarded with stray leaves blown inadvertently. Since your last I have [had] one of those few experiences that come,—ever, but which are almost sufficient in their very incompleteness. This was only last evening in a vaudeville show with — — — —. — — — — has manifested charming traits before, but there has always been an older brother around. Last night—it sounds silly enough to tell (but not in view of his real beauty)—O, it was only a matter of light affectionate stray touches—and half-hinted speech. But these were genuine and in that sense among the few things I can remember happily. With — — — — you must think of someone mildly sober, with a face not too thin, but with faun precision of line and feature. Crisp ears, a little pointed, fine and docile hair almost golden, yet darker,—eyes that are a little heavy—but wide apart and usually a little narrowed,—aristocratic (English) jaws, and a mouth that [is] just mobile enough to suggest voluptuousness. A strong rather slender figure, negligently carried, that is perfect from flanks that hold an easy persistence to shoulders that are soft yet full and hard. A smooth and rather olive skin that is cool—at first.

Excuse this long catalog—I admit it is mainly for my own satisfaction, and I am drunk now and in such state my satisfactions are always lengthy. When I see you ask me to tell you more about him for he is worth more and better words, I assure you. O yes, I shall see him again soon. The climax will be all too easily reached,—But my gratitude is enduring—if only for that once, at least, something beautiful approached me and as though it were the most natural thing in the world, enclosed me in his arm and pulled me to him without my slightest bid. And we who create must endure—must hold to spirit not by the mind, the intellect alone. These have no mystic possibilities. O flesh damned to hate and scorn! I have felt my cheek pressed on the desert these days and months too much. How old I am! Yet, oddly now this sense [of] age—not at all in my senses—is gaining me altogether unique love and happiness. I feel I have been thru much of this again and again before. I long to go to India and stay always. Meditation on the sun is all there is. Not that this isn’t enough! I mean I find my imagination more sufficient all the time. The work of the workaday world is what I dislike. I spend my evenings in music and sometimes ecstasy. I’ve been writing a lot lately. —/—/ I’m bringing much into contemporary verse that is new. I’m on a synthesis of America and its structural identity now, called The Bridge. —/—/

137: To Waldo Frank

Cleveland, O. Feb. 27th, ’23

Dear Waldo Frank: Such major criticism as both you and Gorham have given my “Faustus and Helen” is the most sensitizing influence I have ever encountered. It is a new feeling, and a glorious one, to have one’s inmost delicate intentions so fully recognized as your last letter to me attested. I can feel a calmness on the sidewalk—where before I felt a defiance only. And better than all—I am certain that a number of us at last have some kind of community of interest. And with this communion will come something better than a mere clique. It is a consciousness of something more vital than stylistic questions and “taste,” it is vision, and a vision alone that not only America needs, but the whole world. We are not sure where this will lead, but after the complete renunciation symbolized in The Wasteland and, though less, in Ulysses we have sensed some new vitality. Whether I am in that current remains to be seen,—but I am enough in it at least to be sure that you are definitely in it already. What delights me almost beyond words is that my natural idiom (which I have unavoidably stuck to in spite of nearly everybody’s nodding, querulous head) has reached and carried to you so completely the very blood and bone of me. There is only one way of saying what comes to one in ecstasy. One works and works over it to finish and organize it perfectly—but fundamentally that doesn’t affect one’s way of saying it. The enclosed poem will evidence enough meaning of that, I fear, in certain flaws and weaknesses that, so far, I’ve not had the grace to change. The norm of accuracy in such things is, however, at best so far from second-reader penetration, that bad as it is, I can’t resist sending it to you now.

Please do not feel it necessary to answer me until you are perfectly free from other preoccupations. I know what such things cost, and knew before your last letter exactly why you delayed. (Now that I see this written, it sounds all-too presumptuous; however, my appreciation was “prematurely ripe,” for that idea did occur.)

Munson’s Study came to me today. I think Liveright did a very good job, better than I expected. The photograph seconded an impression I remembered of you several years ago in New York. I may be repeating myself when I mention that you came into Brown’s Chop House one evening and greeted some friends near a table where Harrison Smith and myself were dining;—only, of course this Stieglitz portrait gives me a much deeper impression. —/—/

138: To Gorham Munson

[Cleveland] March 2nd, ’23

Dear Gorham: —/—/ The last several days have been equally among the most intense in my life. The annoyance comes in only on the swing of a repressive fate. To be stimulated to the nth degree with your head burgeoning with ideas and conceptions of the most baffling interest and lure—and then to have to munch ideas on water heaters (I am writing another book for house fraus!) has been a real cruelty this time, however temporary. The more I think about my Bridge poem the more thrilling its symbolical possibilities become, and since my reading of you and Frank (I recently bought City Block) I begin to feel myself directly connected with Whitman. I feel myself in currents that are positively awesome in their extent and possibilities. “Faustus and Helen” was only a beginning—but in it I struck new timbres that suggest dozens more, all unique, yet poignant and expressive of our epoch. Modern music almost drives me crazy! I went to hear D’Indy’s II Symphony last night and my hair stood on end at its revelations. To get those, and others of men like Strauss, Ravel, Scriabin, and Bloch into words, one needs to ransack the vocabularies of Shakespeare, Jonson, Webster (for theirs were the richest) and add on scientific, street and counter, and psychological terms, etc. Yet I claim such things can be done! The modern artist needs gigantic assimilative capacities, emotion,—and the greatest of all—vision. “Striated with nuances, nervosities, that we are heir to”—is more than a casual observation for me. And then—structure! What pleased me greatly about Frank’s comment was the notice of great structural evidence in “F. and H.” Potentially I feel myself quite fit to become a suitable Pindar for the dawn of the machine age, so called. I have lost the last shreds of philosophical pessimism during the last few months. O yes, the “background of life”—and all that is still there, but that is only three-dimensional. It is to the pulse of a greater dynamism that my work must revolve. Something terribly fierce and yet gentle.

You have no doubt wondered why I have behaved so strangely about the review for your Study. It is coming sometime. At present I have developed a chronic hesitation against it which must seem almost pathological. I am so enthused about it that I can’t seem to adopt a level-headed, conventionally-critical attitude about it. Also, the space for such considerations as I would [get?] into is too restricted in the Double-Skull to permit much more than either a screed, ineffective or broken, or mere jacket type of advertisement. I hope you won’t misinterpret my delay at any rate. As I said in my last note, the typography, paper, cover, photograph—everything in fact, is of the best taste and distinction. This book is bound to do you as much good as Frank. The latter is shown by Stieglitz’s picture to be an extremely mystic type. Don’t think me silly when I call the head and the eyes extremely beautiful. Frank has done me a world of good by his last letter (which promised another soon including further points on “F. & H.”) and, as I wrote him, now I feel I can walk calmly along the sidewalk whereas before I felt only defiance. He gripped the mystical content of the poem so thoroughly that I despair of ever finding a more satisfying enthusiast.

And now to your question about passing the good word along. I discover that I have been all-too-easy all along in letting out announcements of my sexual predilections. Not that anything unpleasant has happened or is imminent. But it does put me into obligatory relations to a certain extent with “those who know,” and this irks me to think of sometimes. After all, when you’re dead it doesn’t matter, and this statement alone proves my immunity from any “shame” about it. But I find the ordinary business of earning a living entirely too stringent to want to add any prejudices against me of that nature in the minds of any publicans and sinners. Such things have such a wholesale way of leaking out! Everyone knows now about B——, H—— and others—the list too long to bother with. I am all-too-free with my tongue and doubtless always shall be—but I’m going to ask you to advise and work me better with a more discreet behavior. —/—/

139: To Charlotte and Richard Rychtarik

[New York City] Sunday [March]

Dear Lotte and Richard: —/—/ I am quite happy. A long walk this afternoon in salt air and clear sunlight. Everyone carrying canes and wearing bright clothes. Lunch tomorrow with Waldo Frank. Munson is enthusiastic about my staying with them. They have a fresh and charming apartment with room enough for me, so everything is FINE.

I sat a long while thinking about how beautiful you both were when I left you last night. Yes,—of course, Life is very beautiful when there are such people to meet and love as I love you both. Be very happy. Along with me. I never felt better before.

140: To Waldo Frank

[New York City] Easter

Dear Waldo: —/—/ I don’t need to mention that it was great to shake hands and talk with you. This I must mention, however,—that we have not yet had a real meeting. My mind has been packed with things that must be talked over with you when conditions are opportune. I am not intending mysterious words. But I am looking forward to the time—perhaps the times—that we shall get together and (in the wonderful slang phrase) “spark.” Since reading City Block I have not wavered in an enthusiastic conviction that yours is the most vital consciousness in America, and that potentially I have responses which might prove interesting, even valuable to us both. My statements are awkward, and I really do not know how to proceed about such conversations: they “usually,” as you know, “just happen.” All this leads to a very simple suggestion, however,—and that is that I hope you will let me know when you are next in town when we can lunch or dine together. — — — —

141: To Charlotte Rychtarik

New York City April 13th, ’23

Dear Lotte: I am glad that you can use the smock. Richard’s illustration of you using it is very effective, and the “covers the earth” drawing is exemplary and inspirational indeed. —/—/

I am glad that you like Our America. Frank says some very wonderful things in that book. It is coming out again next year and with new additions. This time, as I understand him, he intends to mention my work in it. Meeting some of the older poets and writers down here is an odd experience. Most of them are very disagreeable, and don’t talk the same language as we do, they are not concerned with the same problems. I read “Faustus and Helen” to a group of people last evening, and very few of them, of course understood anything that I was talking about. If it weren’t for the praise and understanding I have received from people like Frank and Munson and Allen Tate, etc., I would begin to feel that I might be to blame. But this “new consciousness” is something that takes a long while to “put across.” I want Richard to meet my friends, the Habichts, who have their apartment filled with lovely things to touch and look at, and who serve wonderful sherry and Benedictine. I have too many invitations to really enjoy. Your friends quickly turn into enemies here, unless you limit the time you give for social affairs. —/—/

142: To Alfred Stieglitz

[New York City] April 15th, ’23

Dear great and good man, Alfred Stieglitz: I don’t know whether or not I mentioned to you yesterday that I intend to include my short verbal definition of your work and aims in a fairly comprehensive essay on your work. I had not thought of doing this until you so thoroughly confirmed my conjectures as being the only absolutely correct statement that you had thus far heard concerning your photographs. That moment was a tremendous one in my life because I was able to share all the truth toward which I am working in my own medium, poetry, with another man who had manifestly taken many steps in that same direction in his work. Since we seem, then, already so well acquainted I have a request to make of you regarding the kernel of my essay, which I am quoting below as you requested. Until I can get the rest of my essay on your work into form, I would prefer that you keep my statement in strict confidence. I would like to give it a fresh presentation with other amplifications and details concerning what I consider your position as a scientist, philosopher or whatever wonder you are. You know the world better than I do, but we probably would agree on certain reticences and their safe-guarding from inaccurate hands. I shall be up to see you probably very soon, and we can talk again. The reason for my not accompanying Mr. Munson this afternoon, however, is that I want to get into certain explanations of your photographs about which, now, I feel a certain proud responsibility.

* * *

“The camera has been well proved the instrument of personal perception in a number of living hands, but in the hands of Alfred Stieglitz it becomes the instrument of something more specially vital—apprehension. The eerie speed of the shutter is more adequate than the human eye to remember, catching even the transition of the mist-mote into the cloud, the thought that is jetted from the eye to leave it instantly forever. Speed is at the bottom of it all—the hundredth of a second caught so precisely that the motion is continued from the picture infinitely: the moment made eternal.

“This baffling capture is an end in itself. It even seems to get at the motion and emotion of so-called inanimate life. It is the passivity of the camera coupled with the unbounded respect of this photographer for its mechanical perfectibility which permits nature and all life to mirror itself so intimately and so unexpectedly that we are thrown into ultimate harmonies by looking at these stationary, yet strangely moving pictures.

“If the essences of things were in their mass and bulk we should not need the clairvoyance of Stieglitz’s photography to arrest them for examination and appreciation. But they are suspended on the invisible dimension whose vibrance has been denied the human eye at all times save in the intuition of ecstasy. Alfred Stieglitz can say to us today what William Blake said to as baffled a world more than a hundred years ago in his ‘To the Christians’:

143: To Charlotte Rychtarik

[New York City] [ca. May 7]

My dear Lotte: —/—/ R[ichard Rychtarik] wanted me to ask Frank about the privilege of translating some of the stories in City Block. I got an answer from Frank this morning, suggesting that Richard translate the book if I thought him able. Well,—translating is difficult, and especially Waldo Frank is hard to translate, I am sure. I think it would be fine if Richard went ahead with the stories. But before any are published I think it would be wise to try them out on some other people who do Czech trans. from Czech into English and see how true the original style has been preserved. You are going to be angry with me for all this fuss, I am sure, but you see I have no way of judging how well Richard understands English as a literary language. I don’t want to misrepresent Richard to Frank either. Please let me know what you think of my plan. I shall send you back the copy of City Block that R. brought. It is your copy to keep; Frank is going to send me another for myself.

I am going over to the office of The Dial now to leave Richard’s drawings, etc., for their consideration. We can’t expect to hear anything about them for two or three weeks. I’ll let you know as soon as I do. —/—/

144: To William Sommer

N. Y. C. May 9th, ’23

Dear Bill: At LAST a letter from you!!! And let me mention that it was one of the most beautiful I ever got from anyone. AND I am expecting more. I read it the second and third times during my meal last night down in one of the Italian restaurants on the lower East Side. There you get a bottle of wine (fine, too!) and a good meal (that delights the eyes as well as the stomach) for about $1. And such service! The waiters all beam and are really interested in pleasing you. As Rychtarik said when he was here last week, it’s just like Europe. I don’t know where I should have been by this time, however, had it not been for three or four fine people,—Gorham and his wife, and Slater Brown (the friend of Cummings, “B” in The Enormous Room) who, in spite of knowing me only a couple of weeks, has put me up nights in his room during the recent spell of grippe in the Munson household, and who has kept me in funds, poured wine into me, and taken me to the greatest burlesque shows down on the lower east side that you ever imagined. We went to one last night, and I so wished you were along. (They do everything but the Act itself right on the stage, marvelous jazz songs, jokes, etc., and really the best entertainment there is in N. Y. at present.) I have bids in for jobs at two very good agencies. The thing is a farce, however, the way you are kept waiting to know the outcome of one interview after another with various executives. J. Walter Thompson have had me on the string for three weeks, and a letter this morning tells me that within the next few days I must drag myself up there again for another interview with one more Thompson executive. It is the same way at Batten’s. I shall have to cast about for anything available from stevedoring to table-waiting pretty soon if they don’t get a move on.

Of course I have been rushing around to a lot of other agencies, too, but the ones I just mentioned are the only ones who have anything to offer me at the present time. I am very glad that you reminded me about the cost of the photographs as I certainly can use as much of that money as you can afford to send me at the present time. Hill charged me $20.00 for the six reproductions. I can’t cash any check here, so if you can send me whatever portion of this amount in currency through the mail (I enclose an addressed envelope) I’ll be immensely grateful. There is, you realize, no use whatever in my thinking about returning to Cleveland. I should simply have to go through the same process there of looking around for work, and under embarrassing conditions. You need me HERE, now, more than there, too, Bill, as I want to do everything I can to get your pictures shown around and maybe bought. And also, in almost every way, N.Y. is getting to be a really stupendous place. It is the center of the world today, as Alexandria became the nucleus of another older civilization. The wealthier and upper parts of the city have their own beauty, but I prefer as a steady thing the wonderful streets of this lower section, crowded with life, packed with movement and drama, children, kind and drab-looking women, elbows braced on window ledges, and rows of vegetables lining the streets that you would love to paint. Life is possible here at greater intensity than probably any other place in the world today, and I hope and pray that you will be able to slip down here for a week or so during the summer. You must plan on it. Later on I shall probably take a small apartment with Brown, and then there will be plenty of room for you to stay with us at no expense at all. —/—/

145: To Charlotte and Richard Rychtarik

[New York City] June 5th, ’23

Dear Charlotte and Richard: If you have seen or heard from my mother lately you know already that I am all fixed up in my own room and as happy as a bug in a rug! I wish you could see it for it is very pleasant. Two windows opposite each other so there is almost always a breeze, square high ceiling, newly-painted light-grey walls, black floor and white ceiling, and all black furniture very plain but plentiful. I have a fine large table to write on. When my luck turned it seemed to turn equally favorably in every direction. I am not having to live in any rooming house with an inquisitive landlady always looking through the keyhole. A friend of my friend, Slater Brown, who has just left for a long trip in Europe, has let me take his room with all his own furniture and all for a very low price in comparison with the high rents everywhere around here. It’s also right in the neighborhood where most of my friends are living. Add to this good fortune a fine new Victrola, and you see I am all ready to begin on The Bridge again. It would not have been possible to have done this if you had not been so generous and helped me out so much,—but I can’t tell you how fine I feel to get my feet on the ground again and put my nose up into the sky again for a few minutes with the Meistersinger Overture.

New York has been like a blazing furnace for the last two days, but I shall be glad to stay here all summer working at my job and writing. I feel that I am getting now just where I have longed to be for so long. I can have absolute quiet and seclusion when I want it, wine when I need it, and the intense and interesting spectacle of the streets and all the various people. —/—/

146: To His Mother

[New York City] June 10th ’23

Dear Grace: —/—/ Really, I’m having the finest time in my life. There’s no use trying to describe the people I go round with. Not that there are so many—there could easily be, but I’m always cutting down on all but the few I like the most. Last night marketing with Sue [Jenkins] and Bill Brown down in the Italian section (where everyone looks so happy!) was a perfect circus. We carried pots and pans, spinach, asparagus, etc., etc., from place to place—only buying one kind of thing in each store—jostling with the crowds, etc. I’ve never been with young people I enjoyed so much, and they, of course, have had real lives. Then there is Kenneth Burke up at the Dial office, Matty Josephson (who has suddenly been moved to value me highly), Edward Nagle, Gaston Lachaise, Malcolm Cowley—but what’s the use going on with so many mere names. You can see how much fun I am having—and all the more because I have a job and a totally different world to live in half the time. Did I write you that I am getting quite a reputation with my “Faustus & Helen” poem? Although it is only now being printed in Florence, those critics and writers who have seen it are acclaiming me with real gusto. Waldo Frank asked me to luncheon with him recently and said I was the greatest contemporary American poet with that piece alone. And John Cowper Powys, whose Suspended Judgments and Visions and Revisions you have read, is very enthusiastic. Since I got presented with my Victrola I am ready to start again on The Bridge. Waldo Frank is very anxious for me to have that finished, as he intends to take me up to his publisher (Boni & Liveright), and have me published in volume form. But, of course, such things can’t be rushed as he understands.

I have not seen or heard from Miss Spencer since I made her my initial bow. She spoke of finding me something but evidently didn’t sprain herself in the attempt. That’s all right, however. There was little reason why she should have. I didn’t ask her, anyway. I shan’t see her again, as she is your friend and we have nothing special in common anyway. Waldo Frank, Alyse Gregory & others used some influence in getting me my job with J. Walter Thompson (get the name right this time!), but I never would have got it if my samples and conversation had not convinced them. I begin to see N. Y. very much more intimately since I’ve been working. It makes living here far more pleasant than ever before. Such color and style (on men, too) I’ve never seen before—no two alike. That’s what is so interesting—the perfect freedom of wearing what you want to, walking the gait you like (I have a much less hurried gait than you’re familiar with) and nobody bothering you.

I don’t know many at the office yet. It’s too immense and I’m confined to a highly specializing dept., but I’ve already been invited out to tea by the personnel secretary. They employ a lot of real writers as copywriters at Thompson’s, and have an entirely different feeling about art & business than you encounter any place west of N.Y. In fact it’s a feather in your cap if you know a little more than you’re “supposed to” here. I think I’ve gained immeasurably by coming here now instead of dragging along in Cleveland month after month. —/—/

147: To Richard Rychtarik

[New York City] June 21st, ’23

Dear Richard: —/—/ Dr. Watson, President of The Dial (Magazine), has seen your drawings, etc., and wants me to ask you if you would care to sell him “one” of them, and the rights for reproduction for two others in The Dial. He is offering the same price and terms to you that he made to Sommer,—$25.00 for the original, and the reproduction rights without any payment. So will you kindly let me know what you think about the matter very soon?

I don’t know what selections he has made yet, and will probably have no time to see him for weeks, as I have office hours and he is seldom at The Dial offices,—but regardless of these details, I think that it would be wisdom for you to accept the terms, however modest, in view of the amount of prestige it will possibly give you, in the first place to be “hanging in his house,” and in the second place to have your work shown to about 18,000 people through the pages of the magazine. Of course, I am very happy that he has liked your work so well. This makes Two artists’ work that I have had a hand in getting exhibited,—both from my “home town.” —/—/

148: To Alfred Stieglitz

[New York City] Fourth of July

Dear STIEGLITZ: Your letter was the most welcome thing that has come to me in these last two weeks since you left, however late and partial my response may seem to be. You should have heard from me much before this if I hadn’t been neck high in writing some climacterics for my Bridge poem. That simply carried me out of myself and all personal interests from the dot of five until two in the morning sometimes—for several days during which I was extremely happy. Those were also the very days when I wanted most to write you,—paradoxically as it sounds, I was, of course, for you and I meet on the same platform in our best and most impersonal moods,—SO, I’ve been with you very much. The thing which hurts me now that I have the time to write letters, is that I not only have left the creative currents that would have prompted me to better statements than I am usually equal to,—but also that I’m in a low state of reactions towards everything, following an evening with Mr. J——. Malice seems to settle inertly but very positively in some people, and as he is somehow attached to several really fine friends of mine whose company I would hate to forego on such account, I suppose I must learn to face this little clown with better results. So far, I can only say that wine is no ally against such odds. It even turns to vinegar! and that is much less pleasing than pure water. I don’t need to say any more to you about this man, his vacant mind, vague eyes and empty hands. We’ve given that enough attention. I rant here merely because I have been cheated (willy-nilly) of pouring out a clearer cup today, as I had planned. I, in the end, am really the one to blame.

When I say that I welcomed your letter it doesn’t mean that I was unconcerned enough with its testament of pain and accident not to think about you and your situation many hours. What the details of those matters were certainly would not help me to realize any the better that you have been going through a very tumultuous period and that it has been very fortunate that you should arrive in the country when you did, not that you escaped them,—but that you were able to see them more tranquilly. The city is a place of “brokenness,” of drama; but when a certain development in this intensity is reached a new stage is created, or must be, arbitrarily, or there is a foreshortening, a loss and a premature disintegration of experience. You are setting the keynote now for a higher tranquillity than ever. It is an even wider intensity, also. You see, I am writing to you perhaps very egoistically, but you will understand that I am always seeing your life and experience very solidly as a part of my own because I feel our identities so much alike in spiritual direction. When it comes to action we diverge in several ways,—but I’m sure we center in common devotions, in a kind of timeless vision.

In the above sense I feel you as entering very strongly into certain developments in The Bridge. May I say it, and not seem absurd, that you are the first, or rather the purest living indice of a new order of consciousness that I have met? We are accomplices in many ways that we don’t yet fully understand. “What is now proved was once only imagined,” said Blake. I have to combat every day those really sincere people, but limited, who deny the superior logic of metaphor in favor of their perfect sums, divisions and subtractions. They cannot go a foot unless to merely catch up with some predetermined and set boundaries, nor can they realize that they do nothing but walk ably over an old track bedecked with all kinds of signposts and “championship records.” Nobody minds their efforts, which frequently amount to a great deal,—but I object to their system of judgment being so regally applied to what I’m interested in doing. Such a cramping cannot be reconciled with the work which you have done, and which I feel myself a little beginning to do. The great energies about us cannot be transformed that way into a higher quality of life, and by perfecting our sensibilities, response and actions, we are always contributing more than we can realize (rationalize) at the time. We answer them a little vaguely, first, because our ends are forever unaccomplished, and because, secondly, our work is self-explanatory enough, if they could “see” it. I nearly go mad with the intense but always misty realization of what can be done if potentialities are fully freed, released. I know you to feel the same way about your camera,—despite all that you actually have done with it already. In that sense I hope to make it the one memorable thing to you in this letter that I think you should go on with your photographic synthesis of life this summer and fall, gathering together those dangerous interests outside of yourself into that purer projection of yourself. It is really not a projection in any but a loose sense, for I feel more and more that in the absolute sense the artist identifies himself with life. Because he has always had so much surrounding indifference and resistance such “action” takes on a more relative and limited term which has been abused and misunderstood by several generations,—this same “projecting.” But in the true mystical sense as well as in the sense which Aristotle meant by the “imitation of nature,” I feel that I’m right.

I shall go on thinking of you, the apples and the gable, and writing you whenever I can get a moment. So much has to be crammed into my narrow evenings and holidays, that I am becoming a poor correspondent with everyone, I fear. You will realize how much I am with you, I feel sure, by other signs. I am sending you a roughly typed sheet containing some lines from The Bridge.[29] They symbolize its main intentions. However, as they are fragmentary and not in entirely finished form, please don’t show them around. I only want you to get a better idea of what I’m saying than could be “said” in prose. Some of the lines will be clear enough to give a glimpse of some of my ideas whether or not the Whole can be grasped from such fragments or not. — — — —

149: To Charlotte Rychtarik

[New York City] July 21st ’23

Dear Charlotte: Your lovely letter came to me this morning ... I read it on the way to work. And I am full of happiness that you think of me as you do,—both you and Richard. Yes, it is my birthday and I must be a little sentimental,—especially as all my friends have recently left the city for places more cool and green and watery. It has been a frightful day, torrid and frying. And I have just come back from a lonely meal in Prince Street,—the place where Richard ate with me, and where I have been many times since he left. Ah, yes, there is wine, but what is wine when you drink it alone! Yet, I am happy here in my room with the Victrola playing Ravel,—the Faery Garden piece which you and I heard so often together up in my room in Cleveland. When I think of that room, it is almost to give way to tears, because I shall never find my way back to it. It is not necessary, of course, that I should, but just the same it was the center and beginning of all that I am and ever will be, the center of such pain as would tear me to pieces to tell you about, and equally the center of great joys. The Bridge seems to me so beautiful,—and it was there that I first thought about it, and it was there that I wrote “Faustus and Helen,” which Waldo Frank says is so good that I will be remembered by that, whether or not I write more or not. And all this is, of course, connected very intimately with my Mother, my beautiful mother whom I am so glad you love and speak about. Indeed it was fine of you to go over and see her as I asked you to do, Charlotte and Richard! And may I also say, in the same breath, that your letter was very painful? It really was,—because I have known all the things you said about her unhappiness for many, many months. And there is really nothing that can be done: that is the worst of it. I am sure if you think a minute about my Grandmother’s age you will realize from that alone that my Mother could not possibly leave her to come here or anywhere else. And my Grandmother, at her age, cannot move. My mother has had her full share of suffering and I have had much, also. I have had enough, anyway, to realize that it is all very beautiful in the end if you will pierce through to the center of it and see it in relation to the real emotions and values of Life. Do not think I am entirely happy here,—or ever will be, for that matter, except for a few moments at a time when I am perhaps writing or receiving a return of love. The true idea of God is the only thing that can give happiness,—and that is the identification of yourself with all of life. It is a fierce and humble happiness, both at the same time, and I am hoping that my Mother will find that feeling (for it need not be a conscious thought) at some time or other. She must accept everything and as it comes (as we all must) before she can come to such happiness, glorious sorrow, or whatever you want to call it. You must never think that I am not doing all I can to make my Mother’s life as bright as possible, even though I do not always succeed. I am doing work of a kind which I should not choose to do at all except that it makes me (or will make me) more money in the end than the simpler things which would satisfy my own single requirements—and just because I want to provide for my mother’s future as much as I can. We shall be together more and more as time goes on, and this separation at present is only temporary. You don’t know how grateful I am that you have given her your sympathy and love, and that has been real or she would not have confided in you the way she has. —/—/

I hope that I have not put you and Richard to too much trouble about those books. They will be fine here with me in my room. Mother sent me my trunk (that much debated question which you will remember!) this week, and it was full of all kinds of dear familiar things that you have seen and touched in my room. There is that ivory Chinese box, for instance, which is here before me as I write. It looks very charming on the black table next to the jade Buddha that Harry [Candee] brought me from China.

I have not written much this last week,—too hot for one thing,—and then there are always people dropping in in the evening. But I am sending you a copy (to keep) of the last part of The Bridge which is all that I have done so far, that is, in a lump.[30] You will remember enough of what I told you a long time ago about my general ideas and the plan of the entire poem to understand it fairly well anyway. It is sheer ecstasy here,—that is, all my friends who have seen it, say that. It was written verse by verse in the most tremendous emotional exaltations I have ever felt. I may change a few words in it here and there before the entire poem is finished, but there will be practically the same arrangement as what you see. If I only had more time away from office work I should have made much faster progress,—but I am perfectly sure that it will be finished within a year,—and as it is to be about four or five times as long as the enclosed fragment when it is complete,—I shall have been working about as fast on it as I have ever worked in the past. I am especially anxious to finish it, however, because than I shall have all my best things brought out in book form, and with a jacket or cover by Richard Rychtarik, I hope. Waldo Frank is anxious to introduce me to his publisher when the right time comes, and so there is no doubt but that the book will come out eventually. In the meantime there is a long essay that I hope to write on the photography of Alfred Stieglitz. I ought to have about two weeks for that away from everything, when I could shut myself up somewhere and not have my mind taken away from it for a moment. In it I shall have to go very deep,—into, perhaps, some of the most delicate problems of art in the future. You see, I too, have my moments of despair,—for there is so little time for me to think about such things. I am succeeding in my position with the advertising agency quite well,—but all that means more work there, and even less time for what I want to do. I am forced to be ambitious in two directions, you see, and in many ways it is like being put up on a cross and divided. I hope to succeed in them both,—the reasons you will easily understand. This last week I got promoted to the copy department, and on Tuesday night I shall take the train for Chicago. Business of the company, of course, which will keep me out of New York for probably about ten days or two weeks. Being with the largest advertising agency in the world is giving me fine experience that will get me higher-paid positions in other places after awhile. In many ways I have been very lucky to get placed so well at my age, so I complain about nothing except that I would like to have the days twice as long as they are—for all I want to do. —/—/

150: To Alfred Stieglitz

[New York City] Aug 11th ’23

Dear Stieglitz: The imagination dwells on frangible boughs! For ten days now I’ve been travelling through the middle west on business for the company. Investigating certain sales facts and figures among hardware and paint dealers on “Barrelled Sunlight,” a kind of white paint! My mind is like dough and The Bridge is far away. Your card was a warm signal to me on the morning of my joyful return. I never saw the Venus in her sphere before—looking on the world with the wind from Delphos in her hair! How do you do it? You have the distinction of being classic and realistic at once. That, of course, is what real classicism means. You don’t know how much I think about my essay on you and your work! Please don’t think me faithless. I fly in a rage when I think of the sacrifices I pay just to feed myself in the hope of time—a rightful heritage of all of us—and it takes time to say and think out the things I feel in your photographs. I’ll try and write you more soon, but don’t misunderstand any silences from me. I am your brother always—

151: To His Mother

[New York City] Aug 11 ’23

Dear Grace and Grandma: —/—/ I came near a collapse near the middle of the week—the trip, hot weather, etc., certainly tested me and worries kept me from much sleep—as things are. N.Y. is bad in the summer anyway—takes all the vitality you have to give and gives you back nothing to build with or repair. I hope things are going better now. I’ll write maybe during next week—but worry about correspondence is a burden sometimes when I have so much new work to think about. You’ll understand me, I hope, in any case. I enjoyed your letter, Grandma, and it wasn’t too long. You write extraordinarily well!

152: To Charlotte and Richard Rychtarik

[New York City] Sunday, Aug. 19th

Dear Lotte and Richard: Not much has happened since I got back, but it will interest you to know that —— came around for lunch one day last week—and we had a talk about the book, Ulysses! I didn’t openly accuse him of stealing it, just “borrowing” it,—but he certainly revealed a very weak position, leaving me to think more than ever that he is dishonest. He denied that he had been up to my room at all until I reminded him that he had told me so himself just a few weeks before, and that, anyway, my Mother had mentioned that he had been up there and had spoken about “borrowing” the book himself. This seemed to throw him into great confusion. He said he would look around among his things in his trunk, then, and “see” if he had taken it and forgotten to mention it to me. Imagine! Anybody who takes a book of such a size and value DOES NOT FORGET ABOUT IT SO EASILY. It seems to me that in admitting a thing like that he has practically admitted all I suspected. I told him to go ahead and look for it,—but he has probably sold it, and he will also probably keep away from me until I go after him in earnest. It would not have been tactful of me to accuse him of stealing right away,—but if he has done that I think he is going to be sorry for it. Isn’t it hard to believe!!!!

I also talked to him about the way he acted about your pictures—and told him that I had agreed with you both in your attitude. It seemed to make him furious that you had spoken to me about it, and he said he was going to write you—evidently an angry letter. Maybe you have got it by this time. It is all too bad—it has really shocked me enormously to have discovered such crooked hypocrisy in such a good mind. I was anxious that you should know about my conversation with —— because, if he does write you as he said he would, you will know that I have tried to be as honest as I know how to be. —/—/

It is a beautiful day here, but as usual, I am sitting in, reading and writing. Just had breakfast with Gorham Munson and Liza, his wife. You would really like Liza, Charlotte. She teaches dancing and is dark and quiet and beautiful. The Munsons are about the only friends of mine who are now in town—all the rest being away in the country. —/—/

153: To His Mother

[New York City] Aug. 24th, ’23

Dear Grace: —/—/ But I didn’t accuse him of anything further at the time—and haven’t since,—hoping that he would possibly be able to get hold of the book and return it to me somehow, if he got frightened enough. However, I have a letter all written to him. It will be sent just as soon as I get time to type it out; probably this week-end. There’s nothing doubtful about what I say in it either. I’m only sorry that no action can be taken against him. We are both out of the state where the theft occurred—and the book has been banned by the mails, anyway, so I wouldn’t get much favor in the courts on that account. — — — — had the brass to come here the other day (this makes me think him almost nutty) and instead of having himself announced at the outer reception room—comes ranging around among the people in the office, inquiring for me, and then comes up and stands and chats at my desk without the least concern! AND—what do you suppose he wants of me. —/—/ Just think of such an idiotic project—to say nothing of assuming that I would care to risk my standing around here for such a project! Then he keeps asking me out to the — — — — with a kind of desperate insistence, as though he thought I could be recompensed for his defaulting by satisfying some “social aspirations.” He certainly is terrible, silly as well.

I feel one hundred per cent better since I got back to copy work. I’m up on the fourteenth floor now with a wonderful view out over the Murray Hill section and the East River right off the edge of my desk. I’m far from being dissatisfied, as you suggested. The plain fact was, and still is—that New York takes such a lot from you that you have to save all you can of yourself or you simply give out. I need a good bed, but it will be a long time before I can get one unless you feel like shipping that little brass bed on the third floor down here to me sometime. That would be fine, and could serve me always here, but you’ll probably think it is out of the question to send it. It doesn’t make much difference how early you go to bed if you can’t get to sleep—you know that. And that has been the state of things with me for some time here. However, I’m really feeling all right. It’s just tiredness—and worry that you are very, very unhappy—what to do—etc.

I don’t know what is wrong with Charlotte and Richard. They haven’t sent my books to me on the date they said they would, nor have I had a word from them since Cleveland. If they are going to get upset and offended about something that I don’t even guess having said to injure them—then, they, like a whole lot of other people who go around just aching to cut their own heads off, will have to do it. Perhaps they’ve just been very busy, though; it’s certainly too early yet to make any definite assumptions. —/—/

154: To Alfred Stieglitz

New York City Aug. 25th, ’23

Dear Stieglitz: I am hoping that you have seen Waldo, as you mentioned in your letter, by this time. The idea seemed so sensible to me, knowing as I have, the uneasy frictions that have bothered both of you and having regretted so much the evident misunderstandings all around. It is very important for us all—that is, all who are trying to establish an honest basis for what work we get a chance to do. It isn’t, as you say, a matter of politics,—but something akin to our spiritual bread and butter. Not all our manna comes from the skies. And we suffer all-too-much from social malnutrition once we try to live entirely with the ghostly past. We must somehow touch the clearest veins of eternity flowing through the crowds around us—or risk being the kind of glorious cripples that have missed some vital part of their inheritance.

It’s good to hear that you have been “at the camera” again and that you are recovering, with physical and nervous rest, that extremity of delicate equilibrium that goes into your best activities. I know what it is to be exiled for months at a time. They’re the usual things with me, and lately it has been especially hard to be cut up between the necessities of a readjustment at the office (they’ve put me into a new department and I enjoy writing copy again to some extent) and the more natural propulsion toward such things as The Bridge. I’ve been in such despair about this latter for some time!—not seeing my way to introduce it in the way I want (the end and climax, what you have seen, is all that’s done so far) and not getting the needful hours to ripen anything in myself. If I can once get certain obligations disposed of in my family, I shall certainly break loose and do only such simple labor for my room and board as will not come into my consciousness after “working hours.” Streams of “copy” and ad layouts course through my head all night sometimes until I feel like a thread singed and twisted in the morning. This has been, very likely, as strenuous [a] year and as wasteful a one as I shall encounter for a long time, although you can never foretell such things as long as you have a family and connections. But I am looking forward to a more equable program when winter comes, when people’s windows are shut, cats are quieter and the air more bracing.

Every once in a while I [get] a statement or so noted down in regard to my interpretation of you and your photographs. There are still many things in the lucid explanation of them that simply baffle me. To use a modern simile that occurred to me in that connection—it’s like trying to locate “the wires of the Acropolis”; indeed, I may call my essay by that name before I get through. A little recent study of Picasso and his Harlequins has been illuminating on the inner realities and spiritual quantities that both of you possess, and perhaps by the time you get back to town I’ll have some other comparisons ready for you to deny or substantiate. I certainly miss seeing you, now, and wish you might send me one or two of those prints that are otherwise committed to the waste basket sometime soon.

155: To His Mother

[New York City] Sept. 8th, ’23

Dear Grace and Grandma: Both of your last letters have been so sweet and gratifying that I am very grateful. I am glad to think of you as located for the winter, putting in coal, and assured of the comforts that I know you ought to have. They have raised the rent on Gorham and Liza,—and they have been trying to locate a new place at a more reasonable figure, but they may not move at all—so discouraging is the search. That’s one of the banes of New York—one is on a moving cloud here most of the time, for, either the house you live in is being torn down for an apartment, or else the landlord is gouging you constantly for your last cent. I never want to have any of us without some property of our own—land and building—whether we live in it or not, but just so that “we have it” and are not entirely subject to the whims of fortune. If I ever get any money, I know that I shall attend to that investment before I travel or anything else. You’ve got to have an anchorage somewhere if you are ever to have any repose of mind.

Of this latter-mentioned article—I can’t say I have had much recently. Of all the abominable snakes I ever heard of — — — — is the worst. I got a letter on Wednesday from — — — —. He had evidently feared my exposure of him to them—and to ward it off he took the pains to tell her that I was a venomous person, upset by the heat of the City, and trying to torture him for mere pleasure. She recommended a dose of pills, a swim, etc., as a means of clearing up my head—and otherwise insulted me. The next morn—comes a letter from — — — — himself—in which he denies that his letter constituted a confession at all, said that the money was sent merely out of consideration for my loss, etc., and other kinds of weak trashy statements. I shall not reply to him, but I wrote — — — — that if she had any interest in the truth or cared to alleviate her own responsibilities in imposing such opinions on me—she might come into town someday next week and take lunch with me. I mentioned that I hadn’t the time to write out the extensive evidence that I had, but that I should be glad to discuss them with her viva voce. The whole matter made me ill the next day—but the worst now is over, whether I ever get anything out of — — — — or not. I shall not press the claim further than the telling of the story to — — — —; it isn’t worth it. There is absolutely no doubt about the confession in the letter, however, and I am keeping it well out of reach in my trunk.

—/—/ By the end of a summer in New York everybody is at the limit of endurance; there is no place to rest, get away from the constant noise and vibrations of trucks, etc., and there’s a kind of insidious impurity in the air that seems to seep from sweaty walls and subways. Next year I shall have at least a month in the open country or by the sea—I haven’t had a real vacation now for several years, you know. The time spent in idleness when out of a job was always a worse strain than the hardest kind of labor, so that hasn’t counted for much with me.

—/—/ I see much of Gorham and Liza—they are restful to me and always kind. I don’t think I should care to stay in New York long if they weren’t here. —/—/

156: To Charlotte Rychtarik

New York City Sept. 23rd, ’23

Dear Charlotte: —/—/ I am planning to move myself, and shall probably share with the Munsons in their [new] apartment. That would enable them to get a better place and I should have hot water and good heat for the winter which the place I am in now does not provide. I am wondering if you and Richard could spare me a loan of fifteen dollars to help me over the expenses of moving my things. I have not yet received a raise in salary at the office, and I have been getting so little that I am kept down to the bare necessities of life all the time. When something extra is demanded I have nothing to fall back upon and the situation is really far from pleasant. If you could do this I shall be able to pay you sometime soon, I think, and I would be a thousand times obliged.

I am getting along very well at the office, but I intend to speak up for an advance in pay very soon. The wages they have been paying me have been much less than my capabilities are worth, and I don’t think I shall have much trouble in getting that raise if I speak about it to them. They are putting new responsibilities upon me all the time, and I am learning quite a good deal. But there is something necessary in life besides learning, as we all know. It is quite a stylish and almost snobbish set of educated people at J. Walter Thompson’s—they are very lofty and certainly seem to think that the social superiority of the place is enough to make up for low salaries. When they can pay one of their art directors 30,000 a year they can afford to pay some of their copywriters more than they do.