EDITORS
BRUCE BLIVEN
MALCOLM COWLEY
ROBERT MORSS LOVETT
GEORGE SOULE
STARK YOUNG

The New
REPUBLIC

40 East 49th Street
New York, N.Y.

BRUCE BLIVEN
PRESIDENT

DANIEL MEBANE
TREASURER

December 4, 1935

Dear Red:

Believe it or not, it wasn't till today--
December 4--that I read your letter suggesting an essay on
Hopkins' letters. It would have been an interesting job,
but now I suppose it is too, too late, and I'm still busy
trying to catch up with all the work that accumulated while
I was in the hospital. Imagine, Red, here was my summer
and autumn schedule: July 22, bust my left arm above the
elbow. September 1, get it out of the sling. September 2,
bust it again. October 3, get it out of the sling. October 5,
go to the hospital for an appendicitis operation, a baddish
one with a slow recovery. Now I'm beginning to get interested
in things again (though I haven't yet written a serious piece,
even for The New Republic, only a couple of little squibs).
If you have in the future any suggestion for a long piece that
will carry me out of the routine of reviewing--especially a
piece on Hopkins, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Byron or some other
author who suggests the problem of the artist and politics,
the artist and revolution--I think I could do it.

You have been getting out an interesting magazine. I
hope you and family are feeling fine. You ought to see the
Cowley baby.

Mr. Robert Penn Warren
The Southern Review
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, La.

MC:R

BRUCE BLIVEN
PRESIDENT

DANIEL MEBANE
TREASURER

February 3, 1936

Dear Red:

It seems like a deep editorial discourtesy when, after you invited me to write a longish piece for The Southern Review, I respond by sending you a little book for 150 words. But that isn't the idea at all. The book seems to be a "natural"--an account by a lawyer of the night riders in the dark-fired tobacco country. I thought you would like to read it to prove up your own memories of those childhood events. And, while we're talking about it, have you any ideas for a piece you might like to write for The New Republic?

I had lunch with Tom Wolfe Friday. He spoke highly of you and Cinnina--
to whom my best regards.

Mr. Robert Penn Warren
% The Southern Review
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, La.

MC:B

BRUCE BLIVEN
PRESIDENT

DANIEL MEBANE
TREASURER

May 29, 1936

Dear Red:

I was very slow in answering your letter because I was caught between conflicting impulses--my wish to write you was ground practically to nothing between the upper and nether millstones. The upper millstone in this case was the feeling that I should very much like to do a long piece for The Southern Review. To have 5,000 words in which to move around is practically the critic's paradise. But the nether millstone was the feeling that I am not particularly equipped to write an essay about New England literature--that isn't one of the articles kept on the shelves in my general store. I should think that an essay of that sort ought to be written by a genuine Yankee mechanic of words, and I can think of half a dozen--Newton Arvin, Granville Hicks, Jack Wheelwright, Foster Damon, R. P. Blackmur, Sidney Cox of Dartmouth, Ted Spencer, if you can swallow him without rubbing the edge of the glass with orange juice, Santayana, if you can get him, T. S. Eliot, under the same circumstances--but this ought to be plenty of names to work on. In the meantime, isn't there some article "just as good" I could sell you? Almost any of the reviews that I have written this spring for The New Republic--almost any review of a good book, that is--deals with a subject about which I have a lot more to say. For example, I should like sometime to do a careful piece on Baudelaire and his translators and try to answer the question why Baudelaire is so good and why most of his translators are so inexpressibly rotten. I'll shortly have a lot to say about Flaubert as a social novelist, on the basis of his correspondence and "The Sentimental Education." I have got very much steamed up about the French and German revolutions of 1848 and their effect on writers--Marx, Flaubert and Baudelaire in particular. The whole thing seems very much like the intellectual situation today. I am interested in almost all phases of the relation of literature and politics. It was the argument about propaganda and art that started me off, but very soon I found that this had little to do with the real problems involved, since most of the writers accused of writing "propaganda" weren't very good writers anyway and thus were ruled out of any serious discussion. A lot of this stuff is going into a book of essays that I am soon going to start work on, and just now I don't want to undertake anything that hasn't some relation to the book. If it happens that none of these ideas strikes you, I might write you in three weeks or so and suggest something else, after I have prepared an outline of the book.

We'll try to carry something on the fourth number of the Southern Review, which looks interesting.

Mr. Robert Penn Warren
% The Southern Review
Louisiana State U., Baton Rouge, La.

MC:B