Flaxman 7714.
Sloane Square Station.

19 Glebe Place
Chelsea S.W.3

6th June, 1935.

Dear Rebecca,

Many thanks for your long letter of June 5th. We are so very pleased
that you and Henry will be able to come to the party on the 18th.

I was much interested in your criticisms of my article in the *Atlantic*, especially as I have not yet seen it myself! I don't doubt that many malicious things have been, and will be, said about me in the United States just as they doubtless are here, and I agree, too, that one meets with a great deal of physical inconsiderateness (though no American city that I went to came anywhere near Toronto in this respect) and also discourtesy - e.g. I remember arriving at Des Moines, ten minutes after my lecture should have been owing to a railway smash, and being literally persecuted by a woman reporter who stuck to me like a leech and questioned me in the most exasperating fashion while I tried to wash, change and get some supper in five minutes. I don't doubt she had some bitter things to say about my sharp and perfunctory replies to her questions.

But worse things have happened to me here, during the 150 lectures I have given in England since September 1933, than ever in the United States. I daresay I have a dog's name in Liverpool because I refused to go to a midnight supper, after a lecture, when I discovered that the people intended to manoeuvre me into giving a gratis half-hour speech without even consulting me beforehand.

But to reply to some of your criticisms. I am not being quite as venturesome as you suppose, for I should not have considered one three-months' lecture tour as sufficient foundation for some of the generalisations in my article. What it was really based on was my experience as a listener in America, not a lecturer. As you know, Gordon has lived there for six months of every year during the past eleven years and most of my facts about English lecturers come not from Americans but from him! After we were first married, before the children arrived, I was a good deal in America myself - I lived there for a year from 1925 to 1926, and again in 1927. My time was spent chiefly between New York and Cornell and this gave me the opportunity to become part of the small communities in which I lived and share their reactions in a way that is impossible when one is merely travelling round.