Italy 10th November, 1944

Dear Jim: Well, here we are alone again. You that sends me this long letter of his heart's thoughts, and I, half-way around the world, settled, it seems, for a good many months amidst the melancholy-eyes Italians who love life so ardently, but hate the results of their own follies and unconsciousness.

I have not reread your letter before beginning this. I read it two or three times last night so that I might understand your thoughts and feelings, and I would rather write in the consciousness of a day's unconscious analyses, than to read it again. Perhaps that sounds a little mad, but I am sure that you understand by now that the basis of our friendship is our mutual madness! Otherwise, O Black Boy, upon what grounds would we meet?

You ask me what is the matter with Harry? Are you wrong for suspecting Harry of Charlatanism? Have you any basis for accepting your own heart's counsel against that of your older friends who claim to be 'artists'? These are not simple things to answer, not because of their lack of complexity, but because it has been over two years that I last saw Harry, and nearly a year now since I last saw you. We are all such tender, facile things, we humans, that I wonder if I may say some things to you today which might offend you, that would not have offended you one year ago.

Of Harry I would not give any analyses of his character or motivations; and for yourself I would not tell you how to live or what to do. I do not believe such things would clarify the problem for either of us, but would, perhaps, because I am so close to both of you, and see you the less clearly in the blindness of love, only add more mud to an already muddy situation.

For you see, Jimmy, I have never trusted Harry because he does not laugh. Nor would I trust any human-being who does not have the magnimity and honesty to see himself as a fool and a knave half the hours of his days. We are all fools, and perhaps that is the path to wisdom and knowledge, so long as we are able to see ourselves as fools. But when the day comes that we are not able to

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see ourselves as the grandest fools, then I believe we should be beware of ourselves, and then it is that we become dangerous. It is not enough to be sincere, if sincerity means that you say always what you think. I believe a little more is needed than that. What else then is wisdom and integrity of purpose? Or what meaning has love or the terrible things we accept in our attempts, often in vain, to perceive beauty and truth?

Of the village I have little more to say than what I have felt of it about six months after I first became aware of its existence: it is the center of a circle of the mutual-admiration societies. It is the home of people who make pretensions of being artists out of their own feelings of meagerness and lack of depth. That is the village, I mean, as the people of the Waldorfs' and Georges' and Poetry Circles' represent it to be. I believe that is the village which you mean. It is the village of the economically comfortable 'artists' who have executive and 'creative' positions in the advertising houses up-town. Who daily paint and write for their stomach's ease and security and nightly talk about their souls and psyches and ambitions. It is the village of the people who believe in the transcience of truth, and make certain that each day has its sufficiency of evil. It is the place where people tell each other of their knowledge and culture and 'deeper feelings' in defence of their lack of these things.

How sick all these people are! How sick and weary of the hollowness of their own hearts they are! How pitifully weak and forlorn, mincing racing about, seeking the sustenance of each other's weaknesses, preying upon each other like talking-apes, and apeing each other of everything they half-suspicion is 'different' or 'new.' Out of this will come literature? Out of this will come the pure hearts which experience perception and articulation at the same precise moment? Out of this will come integrity of language, and the tone which is the mark of words of those thoughts which are felt as understood? Out of this pyramiding of symbols upon symbols, literatures upon literatures, cultures upon cultures,-- all held up to the sun-god of that analyses which knows no synthesis, what will come?

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Thoughts which are naught but paraphrasings of others' thoughts; vanities which are proffered as philosophies; 'Art' taught as the mighty mover and builder of civilisations and cultures: what are these things? — They are dreams of the sensual conquerings of the 'thought-world' by men who will remake the world in their own time. These are the 'fools of time' whom Shakespeare was so fond of because of their madnesses and vanities. These are the men who speak to the world of 'spiritual-worlds' while they stand miserably and forlorn of hope in the muck of their own misunderstandings and misapprehensions. These are most truly those 'scribes' who are said to be after the widow's purses in the New Testament.

How old: how horribly old and deseased the world is when that small phrase taken from the New Testament, still so aptly and completely defines these writers who call themselves 'Artists'. Who found 'new' religions, who institute 'new' philosophies, who provoke this 'dead' humanity with their barbed and bitter words! who reject half the world in a phrase and rebuild their own egos in two paragraphs. —"Beware of the scribes who are querelous after widow's purses."

What better definition can be found for these men? For what else are they after? Are they searching in their hearts for those glimmerings of truth and beauty which are hidden there? Do they seek to know life or do they seek to rule lives?

Are they after the praise of a moment's adulation, or do they seek the springs of action and laws of being upon which a life-time may be balanced and directed?

Do they hold themselves responsible for every word they utter and write as the sincerest and wisest and deepest word that they are then capable of uttering?

Or do they believe in the transcience of truth, and that each word is sufficient unto each moment and true unto each moment? For what do these men live, the satisfaction of their own egos or for the good of their brothers, for the beauty of truth that is shareable with their brothers, and the love that belongs to all?

Of course, we know, that it is all good, and that even the evil in their hearts and ways is also a step on the road toward the palaces of wisdom! But in the meanwhile, lives are wrecked, souls sent shrieking into the quietnesses of

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of the mad-houses, and we have the stage set for the writing of another 'De
Profundis' amidst the wreakage and misery of another ruined life and broken
lives.

My name is Legion and my voice is Tragedy. I am the untamed will of the
beast that lives in men's hearts. I am the selfishness of their eyes, the lust
of their hands, the rationalization of their reason: I am the Devil. I am the
tears of sentimentality, the complacency of boredom, the comforter of the com-
fortable, and the sneer-creased lips of the proud. I am happiest in cruelty,
the gleefullest in perversity, and the enemy of peace. I am the one who speaks
of beauty with my eyes and thoughts full of the softness of the breasts of the
woman to whom I am speaking. I am the innovator of religions, the discoverer
of philosophies, and the founder of cultures. But I am always the Devil, and
you do not believe in my existence! I am unhappiest alone, but always slain
in solitude. I am the hater of light, but light is my master. I am the joy
of the proud, but suffocate in the sorrow of sadness. I am the friend of the
man who believes he is truth, but the man who believes in truth will not know
me. I am Legion and my voice is Tragedy.

And of such, Jimmy, I am afraid our firneds will be found. It is always
sad and always regretful, but they are all human-beings and when we reject one
of them, we are only rejecting ourselves. Better by far for sure it is so,
than to be lukewarm and damn everything with faint praise. But it is all tragedy,
and still forms that captain good attending captain ill, and truth made tongue tied
by authority, and maiden-virtue rudely strumpeted, and tired with all these for
restful death I cry, but that to die I leave my love alone. We have the choice
of a 'safe' universe of sterile neutrality or a universe of passionate realizations
and madness. The latter is productive of gods, the former a breeding place of
abstractions and metaphysicians.

And so I don't believe I have yet answered your questions, but I shall wait
now for your answering letter of what questions remain, remember me to all our
friends, and write me back soon! Love, yr friend, Tom