LINCOLN KIRSTEIN

130 WEST 56TH STREET
NEW YORK 19, N.Y.

April 8 1947

Dear Matty,

Thank you so much for your thoughtfulness in sending me the Cheney book. It is something I wanted very much to have, and I was absorbed in reading it. It is one of the most fascinating positions of the creative impulse that I have ever read. I wish there was much more to it; it brings up so many unexplained problems. It will be an important document in American art-history, in detailing the effect of early Twentieth century French painting on American art. It is interesting to see what he liked and made use of, and what, at the time, did not seem to affect him.

Although I never met him, I feel as if I had, from the very able way in which you have arranged the letters and notes. When I was first at Harvard in 1926 and '27, I adored "Trino", and I think Hound & Horn gave it its first, and perhaps most serious review. Much younger than any of those people, nevertheless, it was an epoch I felt very closely; I never realized it had any but a literary expression.

I just spoke to Jay Leyda; he has come back from Washington and has found a day by day record of two years of Melville's life in the South Seas from the logs of the boats he was on, filed away in some Government Bureau. The Reynal & Hitchcock situation is very confusing, and I am trying to find him another publisher and some additional security. Mina is having a wonderful time surrounded by Proust's old friends and servants. I guess she knows everything and has seen everyone by this time.

Donny Windham has started revising his Billy Budd play. I think it is sensationally good; it will never get a Broadway production with its all male cast, and maybe does not belong on Broadway, but its a natural for a college, and I am sure it will get done somewhere. When I am in Boston, I'll call you, and perhaps you can lead me to the proper man in the dramatic organizations ? For next Spring?

I'm sending you a book of letters of a boy I knew in the Army; they are self-conscious and too ambitious from a literary point of view, but underneath the self-consciousness there is a certain (I think) ineradicable sweetness, which was part of his split nature. I don't regret his death, but I like to remember him alive. He was a little out of the very Trine thing. His name was Caleb Milne.