70 bis, rue Notre Dame des Champs
Paris VI.

Dear Bodesheim :

It is a very noble assault on us
the forces of darkness. My acknowledgements herewith.
ONLY ... I don't much care a dam about Greek and
Roman habits as such. Humanity is an animal species
like the boll weevil or any other. It is not
only imbecile, but its imbecility follows a certain
orbit without much variation, like the line of
processional caterpillars on a tub's rim. In the
Propeirtius I not only wished to say "I....O"
but I wished to say "M....O" two thousand years
thick. The roman imbecility is the British imbecility,
I could not find, at the time, any synonym for
Augustus, he was not only the league of nations but
also the I. M. C. A. and the allied council of his day,
you couldn't introduce II. Geo. or Woody into an
emotional poem without bathos. The one is a smear
on the Empires pants, prominent if you will, the
other a sinister joke, a guffaw of the gods, wished
onto a tragic world.

Mauberley is surely not very much
cry, and not " personal ", it is a sliver, a
two dimensional presentation for those who can't
take the three dimensional presentation of the Homage
to S.P. Mauberley is merely any knot with a velleity
toward the arts. He burries me in the opening
poem, drifts about London and makes a decorative end
in the South Seas, leaving twelve lines of verse,
" Medallion ".

I don't know about " sneer ", one merely
tries to classify : mantis, arachnid, aphis formicarum
vacca. A thing that happens once may be an accident,

It becomes interesting when it continues
to happen century in century out. Human cycle
being slower and slightly more diversified that
the rabbit or hyena cycle. Hence the solicitude
for habits of past ages; not as accidents of
particular milieu but as indicative of permanent
characteristics of the species.

Thought the title modeled on "Trois Contes"
and the Classic, Mediaeval, Contemporary sequence
might have indicated that. However you have been
very patient, and I suppose I am still obски re
comite prodigious efforts toward clarity,
simplicity, utter flatness of statement. :
Gladstone was still respected. Much conversation
is as good as having a home. Heaven knows the
style is simple enough in parts.

Anthropologically yours

And have considered the Propertius personal, and
the Mauberley impersonal. Propertius, Ovid, any
intelligent contemporary of their time, whether
writer or not, up against subsequent sorts of
buncomb equivalent to bose shoved, still
shoved onto us. I merely decile to see much
difference between Pontus and the North Shore of
India
lake Michigan, or Lake Erie and India, Roman and
weekly journalists
British swank, rneteurs and pressagents. One can do
very little about it, but one can at least
refuse to be duped.