East Lodge,
Worth Priory,
Near Crawley.
Sussex.

10th November, 1953.

Turner Hill 241.

Dear Baroness Freytag von Loringhoven,

Thank you so much for your letter in reference to my recent note in *The Times Literary Supplement*. Let me say at once that I should be only too glad if you were ever in this part of the world and near enough perhaps to come over for tea one afternoon with my wife and myself. In the meantime I shall write to the Baron Freytag von Loringhoven at the address you mention, in the hopes that he may be able to provide me with some of the biographical details I need for my memoir. Please forgive my not replying sooner but I have been away from home for a few days.

Else Freytag was born in 1874 and died on Dec. 14th 1927 in Paris. Before the first world war she went to New York with her husband, a member of your family. They stayed at the Ritz, presumably well-off. But on his return to fight for his country she fell into the most appallingly poverty, finding work at one time in a cigarette factory, at another as an artist's model. She moved among the then active Dada group of writers & artists. She knew Marcel Duchamp well, & was 'discovered' by the two editors of *The Little Review* - Margaret Anderson & Jane Heap, who opened their pages to the strange and extraordinarily beautiful poems she was writing at that time. After the war she returned to Europe and to her family in Berlin, whom I have so far been unable to trace. Her death in Paris was, I believe, the result of an almost criminal practical joke. She was found dead in a gas-filled room.

Her work has hitherto seen print only in *The Little Review & Transition*. There is a great deal of unpublished material; but I am unwilling to print this matter without some sort of editorial assessment. Although she had a brilliant intellect and was a woman of the utmost sensibility her work is stamped throughout with what one might call a daemon of disorganisation, such as rendered her own life so tragically & consistently destructive of herself and *the* was the cause of such havoc among her friends. From the little I

have said you can see that an understanding of her
character will help me greatly to an appreciation of
her work. I have written to her friends, but even at the
time they were not many; and since then two world wars
have blown on the art circles of Paris and New York; and
as for Berlön....

In conclusion may I thank you once again for
troubling to write to me? Needless to say I shall be
most grateful indeed for any information you may in the
future happen to uncover - particularly as regards her
own family and the possibility of my communicating with
them. My wife and I both hope very much that you will
be able to pay us a visit some time soon. If our address
doesn't prove convenient we are only an hour's train
journey from London, and perhaps could meet you there?

P.S. From her letters I have always inferred that her
husband was killed in the '14-'18 war. I have not been able
to discover his Christian name.