(3) willfulness which, diverted from music and the things she liked, has been consistently destructive to her own happiness. She has everything where she is, including weekly library service and motor-rides to town. But she's tired of the place and the people. It is always thus. I only mind because such expensive calamities result. We are just hanging onto the studio--just. Can't bear to let it go. We haven't bought a theater ticket or a concert ticket since we came home from Paris. This monotony is hurtful to us, this trench-living. But it can't be helped now.

Roy's mother arrives for a visit in Sept. So I will have to get out to the West some time during the coming year. Roy had expected to go in Sept. I had so wanted him to visit you at Carmel. He was never intended to stay put. Then I had hoped he would see my mother and jazz her up But Roy's mother has got the wanderlust instead.

We keep reasonably well. We live so soberly we can't get sick.

I do hope you come along East when it is cool and endurable. My friend G.Tone was just here on another souse. I decided never to see her again. It is useless. Roy said "Gertrude doesn't need to drink herself to death. She is already dead." It is true. Her mind is as keen as ever. But when she feels it working she gathers up gigolos and gigolettes off Broadway, black and white, and drinks from 7 P.M. until she rolls in at 9. A.M. Meanwhile the gigs have all literally picked her pockets. She knows exactly what she is doing. The tragedy is that when she lets go she cries and complains that she is without friends. The whole thing could be cured, I believe, since it is deliberately produced, if Franchot were not so self-satisfied and self-centered. If he would only say "Mother don't. I care." her whole life would be changed. None of that can say it for him/. And he is not letting anything disturb his own pleasant life--such as it is. So far his movies have been bad. He is now featured in lights about twenty feet high on a Broadway sign'''

We saw Gertrude just once. We did not call her up again. She had taken a young street-walker in to live with her at the hotel. It was too much, making us dine with the dull creature.

I don't know when I have been more distressed. She is so beautiful to look at and by nature so truly fastidious.

Meanwhile--love from us both to you both.

Doesn't Mima finance Krishnamurti? I have heard so repeatedly from people who know her or Hindus who know him. Pretty pleasant for Krishna--by the way--does his name derive from Krishna? Is it his real name or did he take it from Krishna? The story of the real Krishna, the legends are very charming folk-stuff. Do you know them?

Dear Blanche;--

Just a hasty rough sketch--this letter.

First of all Roy may be cured of his facial trouble. He has
splendid teeth. Needed a tiny filling. Dentist found tooth infected
at base on the left side of his face and badly infected jaw of long
standing. Tooth extracted five days ago, general infection set in,
fever, chills, pain incessantly---like flu--but face less drawn. Daily
dressings and meanwhile shot to pieces. Just as well he has no work.
We are so hopeful.

I am, meanwhile, swirling around madly. I can't seem to get
into routine of cooking and also work on Persia. I have only an
cleaning-woman and I have never kept house on so many floors at once.
Blew up for several days and had to go to bed--just unpacking and
cleaning and shopping on foot to save the pennies. Partly
psychological. I feel so mentally confused trying to remember to
be domestic. Got my colored Jessie, who had been marking time waiting
for us, a fine Park Ave., full time job in a pent house with some
nice people we met in Paris, friends of friends.

Carl Carmer is bulging with some idea of which he is
going to write you. I didn't have your address with me. Since I
suspect it is some business venture I told him that I would
remain outside the whole thing. He seems bent upon just one
collaboration---with the Matthias-s. I hope it is not some foolish
and vague thing and suppose it is not. For he is pretty sound. He
went away immediately to some Yado Farm or something to finish his
book on the Deep South. He has "leave-of-absence for the summer"
from Theater Arts. He is fed up with a subsidized publication which,
he feels, is parasitical and therefore at core rather rotten.
Everybody is getting these "leaves". Max Aley is given one for three
months. Just another way of cutting-- a polite way. It is used by

employers who do not want to lose the prestige of having certain people
on their staffs. Max is with Doubleday Doran. The employer can then
say"Max is in New Mexico for his health and will be back at his
desk in the Fall". The last is the truth. He will be back.

I may take one of those 45 day cut-rate trips to
Calif, so soon as my teeth are looked after. My mother has got to
be readjusted. Has to have constant care of a companion. Aint that
something? I will have to dash down to San Diego and see Roy's mother
or there will be hurt feelings. How Roy is to manage to bach' I don't
know. Poor darling. We can't both leave the telephone at the same
time. Roosevelt might still get him a job, indirectly.

He is immersed in Guild affairs. Russell Patterson
and a few of the big men--big in that they own, like R.P., town
apartments, country estates and YACHTS! ---have been stooping to all
sorts of infamous practices such as dealing with art brokers who
derive commissions from the artists; take a second commission on the
sale from the advertising agency which is SPLIT with the art director
of the agency, who gets it and who sells it to clients for thrice what the artist
got. The men who agreed not to break down the ethics of the Guild
are these prosperous boys. The Guild has now a stinking name for dirty
dealing. La Gatta recently got a $1,000 order through the Guild and
resigned in order not to pay his $100 commission to his own protective
agency. Roy has been drawn into the struggle. He is determined to have
every non-paying member dropped at once. Some of the most prosperous
officers have not paid in years'!'!" Then to drop every man who
deals with speculative middle-men or speculative sellers of "second
rights". It may wipe out the Guild. But he believes it must go or
either stand for the rights of the little artists. Now it has become
the tool for self-exploitation of a small group manned by the president,
Mc Clelland Barclay. After several long sessions Roy has decided that
Barclay is an irresponsible moron. He has nearly killed the Guild.

(3) For the sake of the Ethics Committee he agreed with others not to patronize a certain dishonest group of middle-men and it was discovered that when all the little boys withdrew their pictures as promised, he took in fifty new ones. He has wives (two), divorces, yacht. Rolls Royce or some-such and pent house and Hecksher Tower studio. The Big Men have given the Guild such a name for dirty dealing that the new young illustrators won't join. You see these middle-men approach try to tie up the buying market (as before the Guild came into existence as a protest against Roger Fry and his cut-throat gang), and then in turn they tell the artists they must work on spec' or they will be prevented by middle-men from getting decent prices or even orders. It is the old fee-splitting game. Dirty as hell.

One of the Big Boys called me up--Chambers--to tell me how HAPPY the Guild was to have Roy back, so able, so fine, so noble etc. What he really wanted to do was to break my heart. Roy missed the new Pearl Buck serial in Cosmo by a week. This man got it. He said, "Tell Roy I am awfully sorry to be in on his Chinese field. But Mrs. Buck says that my drawings are so good that it seems as if I had lived in China." So mean, so small. Of course---the truth is, Blanche, that Roy is so content with so little and is so well known now as an able draughtsman on the basis of merit, (not dining art directors or buying yachts or trying to go Park Ave.,) and despite his lack of fame, has done so much traveling that they are inclined to hate him as well as admire him. They are unaware that the whole thing is based upon an unconscious jealousy of a man who has long since established ethical values for himself--if for no one else--from which he has never swerved, even in need.

Mind you--he was almost refusing to do the Nora When book on China because he detected so much lying in it. I assured him that he was being too quixotic and that the public would only be the more favorably impressed with China and the Chinese cause. I told him

the truth. The author is a psychopathic liar. Too many days in her house were made our suspicions. She has created a character for herself as a naive little Quaker. As a matter of fact she is shrewd of being the "poor" little Quaker of her book, has an income around $7,000 a year from Philadelphia properties. She drives hard bargains with her publishers. Says she is shy about writing and really never writes and then confessed that she was condensing 8 finished novels into five and had around her house nearly 1,000 Ms. She's just loony. Not vicious. Dramatizes every act in a queer fashion even in Etaples. Moves all the time to avoid paying income taxes to England as the wife of a retired English civil service man. Banks abroad--some in Germany. Very slick girl, doesn't read any contemporary lit for fear of becoming sophisticated. Though "This Brave World" which was forced upon her by a bro-in-law " a dirty book" until I explained it to her in one-syllable words. It was a mad week-end.

The world is so full of queer ones.

Had a nice party last night--not really our party--the Bolaffios have jobs now and had to pay off obligations and are living in a fearful slum and therefore gave a dinner on credit at an anti-Facist speak-easy in honor of Dr. Salvmini. Our only guests were Walter and Mrs. Pollak. He is the lawyer who carried one of the or all of the Scottsboro cases to the Supreme Court of the U.S.A. and got a retrial or something before we came back. He is one of the most sparkling people I have ever met. We have known them off and on for years. She is a biologist, hails I believe from Vienna originally--as does he, although of Polish-Austrian-Jewish origin. Told us an amusing story about Felix Frankfurter. It is said that F.F.--before the Nazi outbreaks--was offered the post as Ambassador to Germany. That country being essentially Jewish anyway he is reputed to have declined saying "I could not qualify. My wife is a Christian."

The whole crowd came here for coffee. How I wish you two had been here. Toscan Bennet and his wife, Paula Pogany, a Mrs. Suttix

(5) Sullivan who belongs to the Cosmpolitan Club and lives upon her family estate with its collection of fine paintings but which now lies in the middle of the Gas Tanks on the East River. She refused to sell or give up either house or vast garden. Seemed awfully nice.

The studio has been like the Grand Central on week-ends, seething with people day-long, night-long. Roy is exhibiting --a one-man show in a gallery opened in studio buildings on East River, very dignified, but really part of real estate promotion of two modernist studio buildings. You might prefer those buildings to a hotel some time. Two finished rooms by Lord and Taylor, very large, view of East River, free bus to Grand Central every 12 min., dining-room, hotel service with maids included in rent $200 per month. Pension $40 per month and rebate on every meal missed. Gymnasium and swimming-pool. Has all the privacy and service of a hotel and all the comforts of an apt. with very efficient service pantry. Roy couldn't afford the framing of his pictures and wobbly though he is has made beautiful mats and used cellophane!!

Our rent here is a problem. Roy has been in session with Preston's lawyer. Until the crash we paid her $150 per month as basic rent. That sum was supposed to be computed on the basis of cost--half hall-lights, heat, hall-service, takes, insurance etc. To our astonishment we learned that the costs had never exceeded $135. And so our FRIEND with her great fortune who wanted us to "take two floors off her hands at cost" was making $15 per month. Aside from that she had interest on our mortgage, our own cash investment of $2,585 in the place, plus the $5,000 investment. For the latter she exacted a mortgage on our Ossining property of $5,000 although the alterations were specified in her architect's contract and well covered by the actual bricks and mortar in this studio. In other words she had her $5,000 secured by $17,585. She has extra money.

(6) We were paying until just before we went away, $150 a month rent, 5 percent interest and our amortization to her. It did run $220 a month but that was always eased by our front apt's rent at $85 or $90. Before we left we forced the rent down to $125. On that she lost $10 per month (only made up for by her former overcharges. Meanwhile we rented at $175 per month and lost $8 per month for the overhead was really still $183---and is. Now we are asking for a whole readjustment---( she has decalred a 1933 moratorium at the last moment on interest and amortization). ---we want the mortgage on our one piece of land. We have amortized $1,000 of it. We want the basic rent stated legally to be $135 instead of $150. This year we will not be able to amortize. Moratorium or not. Our $85 apt. is priced at $35 or possibly $40 by the agents! That wont cover the interest because it is not renting. There is too much competition. If she wont see reason---we will borrow and hang on for another 1 and 1/2 years. Then she is obliged to buy us out at two-thirds of our investment. She will owe us money above the Ossining mortgage. The Slim Princess has the heart of Shylock. Too bad. It's what keeps her back in life. She wants so to be liked, to be surrounded by admiring friends. And thus she aligates people. For deeply ingrained is a curious and childlike greed which extends to very small things. She and her husband have separated. He refused to live like a prince on her money and try to remain a self-respecting Socialist and to work out the problems of the coal industry in Penn. She is now co-habiting unhappily with Roger Baldwin who has a wife and two other interests even if he is our prize reformer. He and Bertrand Russell. Bertie Russell, it was said in England, has several new young children which came to him via Dora Black from un-named sources. They'll need to run a modern nursery school for some time to come.

Dear Blance and Russell;

It was such fun getting a package---our total being four this year. Yours, a jar of jam, a bottle of 1914 champagne and a bottle of Bordeaux. Obviously yours filled a real need. And we are both terribly sentimental about the tie. Not only because you sent it but because--a spossibly you recalled--it is the same color as the one he wore when you met him and which I had chosen for him in Marseilles when he was a half-in half-a-half soldier and civilian, sarcastically. (That word doesn't look right) The stockings fit perfectly and are a lovely color.

We had a pleasant Christmas---breakfast in the studio of Eric Gugler and his Italian wife. He is the architect who won half the award for the soldier's lake-front memorial in Chicago. He has a beautiful studio. He and his wife were up from TERN West Va. where he is doing a village of 250 houses for laborers for the P.O. dept. He is to make adequate working-men's dwellings, streets--all. The gov't is then building a factory for P.O. furniture. The purpose is to begin an absorption and reconditioning of soft-coal miners who will never find room in the mines again. The houses are to be sold to the workers on long-time payments.

Roy is busy--not at art. He is Nat'l head of the N.R.A. association for framing a code for artists which will be a code-of-fair-practice—including design protection—for free-lance artists and also an hours-and-wage code for employed artists. He held a convention and delegates came from the Middle West. Among them was an art-director—Strous—an ex-artist from Chicago and a swell person. He is a close friend of the first Mrs. Barclay and also Barclay. The latter as Guild

president was a flop. He didn't know how to conduct a meeting. He tried a Dictatorship and failed. He tried to force his vice-president to rejoin because he didn't want a woman!"""" He tried to use the office for personal publicity but the committee withdrew the posters printed for lectures by Guild members in which his name was featured while the Guild appeared at the bottom in small type. He then dropped out of sight. He came to no more meetings. He never came to a Code meeting. He never resigned. He never communicated with anybody save to demand that thesec'y get him work and let the other artists go to hell. Roy has been re-elected. Barclay did not appear at the final meeting. A very amusing situation. Roy will fill out the term he left unfinished by going away. He is also Commander of his Amer. Legion Post which is fighting to get back into the Legion through the courts, free speech being the issue. His Post has got very lively-- had Arthur Garfield Hayes speak about the Nazi trial; had Maurice Hindus on Russia; will have Elmer Carter next time, the Negro editor who will speak on housing in Harlem.

We cast up our accounts -- our income has been $3,000 since last March. BUT--we have been able to meet my mother's bills. We are nourished if not very snappy as to clothes. We have only been to three theaters. But we read and have the radio. And have no personal debts.

I forgot, in naming our Christmas pckges., to include a very touching one-- our Chinese laundryman brought us a box of Chinese candy and nuts and also a swell cannister of fine tea. That is something. H's name is Wing Lee. He's so cute. Has a Blue Eagle and irons about 24 hours a day under it.

Ethel Kawin was here, visiting Mrs. Polachek. The latter, she says, is living in "reduced circumstances in an enormously expensive Park Ave., apartment and at a rate which astonished Ethel, her cousin, mightily. Reduction ???? She says the P's are really very

(3) prosperous and well.

Last night we dined, as is our annual custom, with
George and Francine Baehr. The former is becoming more and more
of a power not only in medicine but in outside matters. He just
finished a survey of the Health Dept, of the city gov't, which has
resulted in a host of changes. Two of the public health men were
chosen for La Guardia by George. He has just re-written the compensa-
tion act to send to Albany to check racketeering by quack doctors and
unscrupulous shyster lawyers. The workers get practically nothing
after they have paid the bribes under the present system. He is
now examining the Public Works Administrations policy of insuring
workers and finds that IF the graft, permitted by the law, gets started
there that the costs will be higher than those of veteran's allowances.
He has such a fine, cool, critical mind that he is a constant joy.
Francine is sweet but futile. She paints, skates, dances, sings,
flutters, flirts and is worn out by it all. Her life is as active
as George's. But all she gets from it are sinus attacks.

Have gone to several holiday parties--quite large.
Find people of our age awfully dull. Also find writing people
curiously immune to political ideas, change or idealism. They are
defeatists---the new Mayor is fine but he wont last. Pres. Roosevelt
is fine but he can't make any of his plans work. Democracy is fine
but not feasible. Jews are fine but Germany does right in getting
rid of them. I had seven male writers on my hands at a New Year's
eve party--all well known. I never heard their beat--not only react-
ionary but so ill-informed about current affairs. This is no time
for intelligent people to remain in their ivory towers. The towers
will soon be tumbling down about their ears. And they lose so
much--"only use my radio for the Philharmonic etc." Oh, the tiresome
preciousness of writers and artists' ". Give me business men---

Dear Blanche;

There really isn't very much to tell you and therefore no
special reason to bang out a letter......save to shorten the distance
between Carmel and N.Y. for a brief second. We work--we play a little--
we pay our bills-- we work. That's our story. I do trust that you have
done with major operations in your family and are knowing some peace.
We've had a grand winter--heaps of blizzards with dry, crisp air.
I do dread these first signs of summer---sunshine and yawning and
a general prelude to general stuffiness and heat. Roy will probably have
to rush out to San Diego at some time. He must see his mother and must
try to starighten out some of her affairs.

I suppose I told you that our publisher "lay down" on us. The
portion of the book that is finished is now being experted by Bobbs
Merrill. We are told that their contracts have to be combed by a lawyer.
Roy has had miracles of work--nawsty jobs--but work. My article for
Ladies Home J.--presumably ordered---came back. I took a slap at infant
labor in the orient and it seems that the Curtis people are maintainging
a lobby, have always maintained a lobby against any restriction of child
labor, since very young children are used in country towns to peddle
their publications--in the subways here. We then packed the article off
to American Magazine which swears--after six weeks of ignoring communi-
cations--that it "never arrived." I can scarcely believe that. But
the Crowell publications are in a mess--all the editors have been shorn
of power by a woman super-editor who has acquired huge lumps of stock.

Meanwhile Roy is still struggling with an N.R.A. Code.
The details of that struggle will interest you. Roy submitted a Code
--an horizontal Code in behalf of a limited number of employers, wage-
earners( now on strike and whom he is addressing this noon) and free
lance--some 3,000 persons in all, numbers increasing daily. The

KILL major purpose of the Code was to do away with several evils and to establish design protection which does not exit(s). Macy pirates original designs within two weeks of their issuance. The Code provided for the abolition of a very common practice of getting ten well known artists--or many more--to submit "preliminary" sketches, free of charge. No man being told that others were competing. Each man supposing that he was working in behalf of an order. The Code provided that all sketches be paid for--a mere nothing, a minimum. Well--the N.R.A. suddenly said NO CODE. "NO horizontal codes any more." It is plain that the horizontal code paves the way for company unions; it practically delivers employes over to employers. Roy could see that, although it was not stated, BUT he was mad as hell because he had not been told three months ago. And he wrote a hot letter to the N.R.A.

Meanwhile, in Chicago and the Mid-West the artists organized under a notorious labor racketeer, named Admans, who is now bringing scab strike-breakers--artists--from Chicago to break the local strike of the mail-order catalogue men who have only season's work--three months, twice a year--work very long hours during those months and are specialists in a kind of work that few men can do. The employers--with Admans--are also trying to bring in photographers--who are utterly immoral in their art dealings--and retouchers, although photographs have not heretofore been effective in catalogues. Admans, meanwhile, submitted a Code, similiar to Roy's, (not collected $5,000! in dues.)

As I said Roy was framing a very violent letter. And--this will astonish you--two deputies from the N.R.A. arrived to see him, sent up by Wash! They had done away with all the codes in order to eliminate Admans whom they investigated and found to be a racketeer. Formerly Admans (last summer) seems to be working with a sub-deputy and Roy had submitted incriminating correspondence--that sub-deputy was fired within a half-hour. Pretty KILL snappy work. The sub-deputy had written Roy, advising him--without authority--to join Adams!!"

(3) The deputies offered their services to Roy. They sat for 3 hours with his bunch, trying to devise a means of keeping the Code and yet having the Code properly filed by person who could be classed as employers. One of the deputies knows pictures and already knew Roy's work. That is rather startling to find men in government, qualified for their jobs. Anyway --peace is restored---the deputies have offered to assist in the lining up of art buyers and employers--such as ad' agencies and lithographing houses. We are all gasping over the prompt action in Wash. The gov't urges Roy to maintain, if possible m, the National Organization which he has started in order that there be some representative body upon which the Gov't can call for conferences if issues come up affecting the interests of artists.

Society---by that I mean groups of human beings in private houses--are congealing into three factions, as violently opposed as factions before we entered the World War. We have Tories who do not understand that their arguments --carried out to their logical end--- mean Facism. They talk of preserving the Democracy--but for their own class. We have people who want everything for labor and can be, ultimately, only Communists. Then we have the social-minded who see the N.R.A. as a form of revolution which will give us a middle-course, give us a changed social order without either the infamous violence of either a Hitler or a Lenin. Dinner-parties are riots. We went to the house of a Tory last night. He wanted to make conversation and so he said to Roy--the artist--"And what do you artists think of N.R.A.?" He nearly collapsed when he gazed got a fine, square blue-eyed look accompanied by, "I had better clear the air at once. I am for Roosevelt. I am 150 percent for the experiment of the N.R.A. I am for Roosevelt and the N.R.A. because I am a pacifist and do not want either Facism or Communism, either of which rely upon armed force to survive." Whew. Everybody had too many cocktails---but us. A regular riot ensued.

The arguments used against us was that every person in America has an equal chance; that the people who are down, belong down. And if we let them up they wont stay up because we--the superior class--will float to the top. They could not get our point that we didn't even mind a cream at the top so long as able-bodied men and women had jobs, and the unfit were not permitted to starve upon our sidewalks. The most bitter "down with the common people" was a female executive of a Foundation, actually only a sublime stenographer and watch-dog for the men executives. Daughter of Irish immigrants, educated in a State University, now wearing diamonds and enjoying a very soft job--held not entirely as the result of efficiency--she was most shrill in her contempt of people who did not belong to the "upper classes." I forced her into a definition of upper classes; and she did not mean to, but she did, admit that she meant people with money. It was a riot. We all but lynched out host and his guests before midnight. Such a party. Then the curious thing is that our host took me aside and whimpered that he was "by nature a Tory; by intellect a radical, had to keep a Tory job because he was suited to a conservative financial job; BUT really had had "no life. Would give anything to have lived our way instead of his own." He all but cried. The world is certainly mad.

The evening before, we dined with Jay Gould's kept woman, an English girl who is clever, charming and never looks very happy. With us was one of the "shooting Duryeas", a mural-photographer. They are called the "shooting" Duryeas because so many of the men have dissipated themselves into suicide. This fellow was delightful. But for him the depression has never really existed. He made wise-cracks about bums and down-and-outers Etc. Had just come back from a yachting cruise. Reeked of money. Jay Gould's girl-friend is former business partner of Mary Seymour in San Francisco.

I just ask you--is life dull? We may eat beans oftener than we like and may be obliged to remain away from theaters. But

(5) life is not dull.

Concerning Communists I want to say that a friend of Litvinoff's told us last night what a time he had to keep away from American Communists whom he considered not only a mess but a danger to Russia in their mis-interpretation and mis-application of discarded Russian theories. He heard that if he stayed in N.Y. (one of the several nights he was here) that the American C's were going to surround his hotel with mobs, acclaiming him as their hero. An investigation was made and the rumor proved to be fact. L. was so disgusted that he took a train to Wash. in the P.M. and slept on it and took a sleeper back from the Penn. Station in Wash. and returned to N.Y. to fill his next engagement, thus he evaded demonstrations in both cities. The Communists are doing firstful things in Harlem among the Negroes. Riots there last night.

**Carmel Negro**
The Carmel Lengro Communist, Langston Hughes, wrote me, I guess I must have told you, trying to pull me into a crowd with himself and Steffen's wife over the Scottsboro affair. Their Defense of the boys consists of trying to antagonize the South into lynching them. Then all Negroes could be rallied about the Communist cause.

I suppose you hear rumors of Hollywood being broken into parts and shipped here. It is current--and from good sources. The bankers are holding the bag and they are conferring about Hollywood, about the waste of money and the salaries out there. Since 90 percent of the shots are taken indoors and "canned" photographs used for backgrounds they argue that the industry might as well be brought to this climate where it can be watched and oragnized efficeintly.

I could ramble on with gossip of this and that---but
I'd bore you. Anyway--loved to you both from us-both--

Caroline

Did you see the armament article in
March "Fortune"? Do get it. Do.

Dear Blanche;

As to Bergner. You did send the money. So that is that. And as
to the seats. Probably we might have gotten the front front rows.
But we tried for the front of the balcony. I am not even sure of the
front, front rows. For the combined publicity drive and the announce-
ment that the show was closing brought everybody out in a big rush.
You see there had been a very lively controversy as to whether Bergner
was an actress or merely a trickster. Personally I don't know the
difference. I had thought that all acting was a trick, a mastery of
tricks.

Since writing last we have seen the film. I had read the novel
in Paris and was shocked that anybody who wrote The Constant Nymph
could have turned out anything so utterly theatrical and thin as a story.
We enjoyed Bergner in the film, enormously. Without her the screen play
would have been insufferable--sort of [ina] Victorian Sob Story stuff.
I liked her much better than [ina] Henry VIII or in Catherine. In each I
thought her implausible. Anyway the clowning in Henry was poor.
And the whole Catherine vehicle was such tripe.

Meanwhile, we had news of your purchase. Mrs. Clapp hears
frequently and fully from the Jeffers. And she had called up to tell
us how happy she was to think that you would be her neighbor forever
and aye. She was simply delighted beyond words. And of course we were
very happy to hear that you were to have a place of your own in such
a beautiful spot. As to the Baldridge Guest House--it is like the
Ginger-bread House of the fairy-tale, it seems so far away and unreal.
I think we had better call it the Ginger-bread House until we own a car
and can set foot on the door-step or come out by rail and bust a bottle
of champagne on its prow. We thank you for the beautiful thought and warn
you that if we ever arrive and find it occupied we will throw all the
guests into the sea.

In fact--knowing how people want to lean on you I suggest that you have a mediaeval system of trap doors in the floor of the house. Then you could pull a string in your house and let the guests roll into the sea.

Met Sanford Schlesser. He was at a Left Wing party. Looked very nice and quite happy but complained that he had not paid his hotel bill and never could. He was wondering if he could ever make his way West to Carmel. I do not know what his difficulties with the union are. But he should, I believe, make an effort to patch them up. For radio music is becoming increasingly better. And it is a pity that he may not perform. Meanwhile, if he loses his pupils and has to go on relief the musicians get as high as $30 per week. And a wonderful thing is happening for them. A musical society has made over a five-story house on Park Avenue to the Relief Administration of the city. That whole building is to be given over to musicians on relief for the purpose of letting them teach and rehearse and form orcehstras like the theatrical units which are playing in five or six places each day in the city. The former Yale economist (Kanuth) he is a member of Roy's Amer. Legion Post--- is in charge of Relief at the moment. He was formerly vice-president of Macy's. His wife is a dancing teacher and the daughter of some well-known artist. The Communists have been giving him a very rough time. They have organized the hopelessly crippled to demand jobs and preference in relief. Kanuth pointed out that he already had three badly crippled people as his personal staff. The Communists blithely denied that they were Reds--as usual. The hopeless cripples were finally carted off without violence but they bit the policemen badly. I can't understand the Communists hiding behind so many names--Artists in Action, Crippled Workers in Action, Unemployed Office Workers in Action, the League Against War and Facism etc. If I were a Russian Communist I would not be either afraid or ashamed. Their lying and sneaking etc. Is so Asiatic that it repels me.

(3) I can not believe that the end justifies the means if the means is a complete destruction of personal ethics. The League Against War and Facism is going to do the pacifists great harm. Their name is so intriguing that nobody stops to wonder what they are FOR. I am on the Board of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, founded in 1915 by Jane Addams. The League against War and Facism sent a very slick woman to Wash., and managed to get the majority of the chapters of the W.I.L. to back it!!! I had created so much disruption in the local Manhattan group that I had succeeded in keeping our group out. I had Roy get hold of the head of the League against War and Facism. He came here to supper and we third-degreed him. And we found out what I had suspected. So detestable!

Meanwhile, the Reds can annoy for the present. But they can not do much else. For there are at least three hostile groups if not five. And so many of the loud-mouthed, like Lamont and Dreiser, are not in any party. They play safe--like Strachey--whoop it up, I suspect, hoping that they will get publicity and also that IF there is a revolution they will be on the inside and not shot. They will be shot if the American Communists follow the Russians. These ardent dears might ask where all the old-timers have gone under Stalin?

However, the complete scuttling of the N.R.A. is going to give us a rough time. Golly! The collapse of the grocers' code has precipitated price-cutting here in our neighborhood. The grocers who were all making amends a moderate living are out with murder in their hearts. It can't keep up. My former grocer was in the habit of working three adolescent boys from 6 A.M. until 10 A.M. and a half-day on Sundays for something like $12 per week. When the Codes made him cut their hours down to a supposed eight( always ten or twelve) and put on five boys he simply raised hell. BUT--crying poverty to the heavens and screaming against Roosevelt he was able to keep five boys and rebuild his shop into a de lux establishment. The day the Codes were abolished he

went back to his three boys and back to the old 6 to ten day.

He began to cut prices--on the basis of his cut costs--
to bring trade away from the smaller stores. The only way that
grocers can give away a 23 cent can of something with every $1 order is
to raise other goods a penny here and a penny there and cut wages.
(Of course one can not really logically rail at Communists for any lack of
ethics or for being Asia-minded.)

Macy is cutting books below cost and cigarettes to cost
in order to bring trade to other departments. This wrecks the book busi-
ness for all the small stores which cater to clients. The small to-
bacco people will be put out of business. Macy is "governing itself".

I bought a summer dress at Kleins--the jobber's. I got a three piece
sheer for $10.52. Badly mawled but an expensive suit at some point
in its career and easily put in order. I was sorry to patronize Kleins
because I know they pay so poorly. But I felt less unhappy when I learned
that they pay precisely the same wages as Gimbles and Macy's which
pay the lowest wages in N.Y.City.

Tonight Lillian Symes is coming to dinner. She is
a S.F. liberal--not Communist and not Radical or Red. She wrote
Rebel America, a corking history of all the Utopian movements in
our country, including the Transcendentalists and Brook Farm. It was a
beautiful job of writing. She writes often for Harpers and had, last
month, a marvelous defense of California. We met the other day and
discovered that we had been friends twenty years ago when she was just
a rather collegiate Socialist and I was a most conservative cub.

You should listen to her on the subject of the Carmel Reds-- she is
very witty. Personally I am going to close the door of my heart and my
house to any Communists, to any people who believe they can produce order
and universal happiness by means of bloodshed and disorganization.

This program of producing chaos for the purpose of accelerating a Facist
regime in order to take over the Facist organization in the end is
a nightmare. Nobody will ever be able to get hold of a Facist

(5) government in the U.S.A. For once established it will last.
I hope to die before we lose our freedom to gossip by mail and to
talk back to the gov't. I simply don't want to live under any form
of oppression. And all these frustrated human lice who have been
frustrated want so badly to oppress. I don't mean the share-croppers or
the desperate. I mean the psychopathic intellectuals who exploit the woes
of the helpless. Roy and I dined the other night before the Golden Horn.
It has two little tables outside. We were having coffee and cigarettes.
A Communist rabble marched by. It was led by a poor, misshapen, ragged
white emigrant woman. Beside her a West Indian boy was carrying the
Russian flag. Behind them came about forty black and white people,
all middle-aged all destitute and wretched. All people who have missed
out and who have nothing to lose. They picked US out for a demonstration.
The white woman stopped her rabble and said, "Very fine. They sit here
and stuff themselves with food and smoke and have a good time while we
starve." There was just enough truth in it to break our hearts.

Enough of this--did you read that Henri Charpentier
failed? High rent and lack of table-space? I felt very sorry. For I read
the book which you gave me and discovered that the return of liquor
had cut into his country trade and that he had had to start over.
He started over with the aid of a very humble employee who pressed his
savings upon him. I am going to try to find out what has become of Henri.
There is an artist who ought to have his niche somewhere.

Dine with Clapps. Don't tell the Jeffers with whom they
keep in very close touch but I do think the dears are a pair of orchids
rather than people. It is as orchids that we must like them. Rootless
and living upon the branches of very old x civilizations. Owing to
a shift in the Clapp's plans were relinquished our opportunity to
aid in entertaining some British peer who has been teaching at Chi. U.
We did not care much. But the Clapps had invited two people to meet us.
My God--Blanche--those two --with whom I found the Clapps enchanted--
were none other than those awful Stokes with whom I was saddled at

the Moras' party last winter.'' The man--stuffed shirt--who wrote the Libretto for Merrymount. You know--xxx the St. Louis newspaper man who was EMM encouraged by friends of ours to come here and when he came married money and kicked all his friends down stairs. She was the red headed virago who had the stomachache and said that she must see more of me etc. Well--she did--not fault of hers or mine.

Early in the evening Roy died inside of his shirt. All he needed was a lily. Personally, I do not die easily. I was bleeding from burst blood-vessles and should have been laid on the floor with my feet elevated. Eventually we staggered out together and home. I am afraid the Clapp would shrink from us in well-bred horror if they really knew us.

I will not say who said which--but the conversation went about like this--without any aid from us!

The Good Old Constitution is what we need. Hoover was a fine president and we must have him back.

The upper classes are being bled to death to support the lower classes, who wouldn't work if they had jobs.

"Democracy is a flop. Democracy brings the "wrong" people to the top. (Roy and me and perhaps Mr. Frick who started the museum and perhaps Mr. Clapp's parents.)

"America is "scenically" the most beautiful country in the world. But because of the inferior people who inhabit it one shrinks from moving about in it.

"One can endure New York because in N.Y. there are a few sophisticated people. But in Europe, where cultivated Americans are spiritually at home, they have the super-sophisticated.

"The Negroes are being given too much latitude. Mrs. Stokes loves them as servants but because she was--Oh. God--raised by a Mammy'''' She wouldn't believe that a Negro could be educated.

Mrs. Clapp believes that if they are to be educated they should be sent to some "pretty spot in Africa". (Try and find one) because

7

MARGIE P. BURKE

we can't accept Negroes without running the risk of "becoming
a chocolate-colored race."

Art is a necessity, which Americans don't recognize.

Darling--I won't go into any details, but I want to say that on inside
of me. But I did ask myself where Mr. Stokes, the unheard-of and second-
rate music critic, would be if he had not lived where a man may rise
by chance in a democracy. I asked myself whether people who prided them-
selves upon living in the past and who shunned contemporary jazz lit' and
the historical and economic facts of the past and Radio City and radio
and taling-pictures were not the provincials of this world? For, is
provincialism merely geographical? Isn't intellectual provincialism
a setting of limits upon the mind, and aren't all such limitations
provincial? Is the artist more important than the creative scientist or
the creative political and social thinker? Is there something essentially
wrong with a chocolate-colored skin when dark skins have given us--as
in India-- such rich cultural contributions? Is radio city, built
to beautify and serve practical purpose, for some reason uglier than
the pyramids which may have been built to beautify but were also
built for very practical purposes in a superstitious age? ix

As I conversed inside of myself a great crevasse
opened across the middle of Mrs. Clapp's beautiful drawing-room. On
one side were the Stokes and the Clapps. On the other side were we.
Being frightfully mystical I saw the disinherited of the earth (who
can't eat art, can't eat Italian Primitives, or the words of Merrymount or poems
or tunes) falling in and pulling in with them the super-sophisticates.

And that is that. In Greenwich Village we are not even pale
pink. But on upper Fifth Avenue we are a flaming red.

"Everything is relative."

Blanche, darling;

Last Wed.--this is Sunday--- I had a ticket purchased for
Calif. having delivered an article to the Times. Roy had also just
delivered three excellent illustrations to the AMERICAN magazine.
The Times asked to xerox have the article red-done although it was
exactly according to specifications. The American art editor,
having accepted the large painting, rejected the other two and de-
manded that all three be done over. Roy and I are nearly insane
with work. I am doing all the cooking except three lunches prepared
by the cleaning-woman, meanwhile Santa Fe holds my tourist ticket
to S.F. meanwhile there is the Persian book to be done, and meanwhile
you are not in Carmel but down in that beastly Los. A and weighing
loo pounds--we can't bear it. I have to go to S.F. and place my
mother in some home or boardinghouse. Her bills are breaking us.
We are still living on the proceeds of the work done while away.
And that won't last much longer. This terror makes our work terrible--
the nuisance of the strain. We can last through the summer. Why in hell
is writing so laborious for me--except letter writing to those I
love. Damn and damn.

I don't even speculate upon God or Source or whatever. So
far as I am concerned this is an unreasonable world. If it has an
accidental source--O.K.-- it is run or runs itself without rythm or
reason. Nature is itself a lunatic. Roy's mother demands to be
visited by me. Therefore I am committed to the grand tour. I should
do the whole thing in five weeks. I have to write a book--Oh God.
Our basic rent has been dropped to $100. Our other obligations
remain stationary. The small apartment that brought not less than
$85 is rented now for $35 on a two-weeks basis to a charming
middle-aged aristocrat, hit by the crash, and obliged to come out
of some gentle retirement and take up the business from which he

long since retired. My mind is filled with things to write. But as
always--between myself and those things are chores, cook-stove etc.
my own inarticulateness when confronted with paper, also the
absolute task of a given job. Life is too swift. Much too swift.

Roy and I are happy. How long I can remain from under
the personal supervision of my mother which will smash everything
for him and me--it did before-- is questionable. She is 71. She has
a multiplicity of diseases or believes she has which is about the same.
Anyway she still has a daily attendant, still refuses to climb even
one stair. Should I bring her here to some small hotel? God help
me--you-us and everybody --I don't know. She knocks Roy flat,

My plan is to leave for S.F. in at least 48 hours.
My address will be Hotel Spaulding, O'Farrell and Powell Sts. S.F.
Of Mrs. E. J. Singer,
And that is that.

I do wish that you could get nurses who would carry the
responsibility and carry it right. I can't afford them. But can't
you afford one of the better rest-cure places in S.F.? The weather will
be harsh but--after all-- what is weather if one has steam heat,
glassed-in porches and all the rest? You must not have your life
taken away from you like this, just seeped out. We depend upon you too
much. I just can't be. I wish I could turn on my sense of humor and be
amusing for your benefit. If you "sat at my feet" all you would here
would be a continual ominous muttering like Vesuvius. Possibly there
might be an eruption or hot lava in the end. At least THAT would be
dramatic to witness.

Meanwhile our poverty-stricken landlady is --she writes--
cool and sunny on her new Cape Cod estate. She didn't even offer her
N.J. acres except "in return for painting her house interior there."
So far as I know a week-end cottage on a river is vacant.
Aren't people sometimes queer?

(3) Roy says so soon as I get done with my mother then he is certain his mother will need attention. Of course she should not live alone in San Diego in a house. But she wouldn't when we begged her long ago, get rid of it and move about and enjoy herself. So far as we know her health is good. But and out--her loneliness and deploration is evodenced in every letter. She has, however, been good enough to cut down her income tax by paying Roy's insurance and taxes for which I am required--with him--to sign notes against any possible imneritane inheritance, I suppose. Or possiblly it is to estanlish an income loss. I don't know--I don't know. I simply sign and give thanks for the money when it comes.

Roy had six weeks of acute misery with his jaw--now well. Certain however that he is not, can never be an illustrantor. I guess he may be right. He needs a background of art school formulae for illustrating. He is considered too individualistic. What editors want is work like somebody else.

Hear Russell or whatever Patterson is having a struggle to keep up town studio in the Beaux Arts, country estate and YACHT. Gosh. Of 400 artists only 49 have agreed to sign a pledge to abide by estabashed ethics and keep away from crooked brokers. Evidently artists can't work together during a depression. Roy thinks the Guild is done and will have nothing to do with a mean-spirited little bunch of secessionists, back-biting. He says either it is the Guild for him, raised from the ashes of the old, or Nothing. Thinks secessionists will have no standing and no power.

Jim and Nancy Pott are motoring to S.F. and sail from there July 28--don't know what boat. They are now in Wash. D.C. Haven't been in N.Y.

Bill Hollingsworth--who never worries, I may say, about ethics--is getting business plenty. But he needs it. They live without inside plumbing or water system on their farm near Nyack. She has thyroid derangement farr. The doctor who treated her--not Baehr--charged her treixx terrifically, not results, wanted her to sign notes each time. She looks like hell. And now Bill's so plus mother, half-blind is living with them permanently! She came in--a nervous little ghost.

Roy's face continues to improve. When I'm away he is to sleep and breakfast with Hwley Truax in their big house on W. 47. Three days the cleaning-woman will cook up stuff and fill the refrig'. Poor lad--it can't be helped. I hope my singing "Stormy Weather" may deafen you to your immediate troubles, deafen you to Russell's quite understandable stamping. How can one hang on to spiritual tranquility--I ask you--and rush through life this way, a life all cluttered up with traffic and devoid of traffic signals or kindly cops?

My darling Gerturde Tone was here. She is--and this is one thing that has hit me wrong-- become apparently a dipsomaniac. Her father was. One younger brother has always been. And G. the patrician has been drunk nightly on boot-leg from Harlem dives and in Harlem dives, preyed upon by a blackmailing gigolo--former movie actor-- I blew up and cried and she quite coming here. I told her that we were so wounded that I would rather not see her, or seeing her would rather not be told what she was doing. I think she is trying a form of suicide. But I told her that if that was it, the process is slow and nasty. I do hope the thing is a phase. There are three women of her age, a trio of old friends from Niagara, who are all going to same way at the same time. Isn't it ugly? But I suppose it isn't only men who crack in this peculiar fashion. Wjy should it be confined to men.

Anyway we love you. I'll gladly sit at your feet instead.

Dears;

Are you still a pink rabbit or rather a white rabbit with pink
eyes? We trust NOT. But on the other hand rabbits are very nice.

Now for some cock-eyed news. You know we hankered after
New Mexico. Also you know we were broke and are--for that matter.
Well--coming back from Calif. I had two delightful, past middle-
age traveling companions whose names I can not at the moment recall.
They were first residents of Taos--many moons before Ufer and the rest.
They were returning from cremating and scattering the ashes upon
the sea of their dead daughter, a suicide and were forlorn but very
reasonable. She was a laboratory technician, young, had a major
operation which made her work almost impossible, was facing a second
complicated operation and taking Ruper Brooke's poems went to a park
and gave herself cyanide. Meanwhile the parents who very much needed
somebody not associated with them to talk to, talked it all out to me--
somewhat devastating looking at the pictures etc. The trip had given
me back the loo temp; which I still retain. Anyhow I made all sorts
of inquiries concerning New Mexico. They were wildly enthusiastic
about new recruits. Offered to buy our logs ahead from the C.C.C. and
season them. But when they began unconsciously to reveal the WAY
artists without incomes live---I cooled and cooled and cooled towards
New Mexico. Wiggins is kept by a rich young buddy. Ufer is drinking
himself to death and beating Mrs. Ufer regularly and she was destitute
in N.Y. and had to be shipped back by friends last Winter. The rest of
the artists seem to exist thus---when tourists come they rush down
and quarreling hang their pictures in the main hotel, then they eat
there( a la Santa Barbara) in proper artistic disarray hoping to pick
up wealthy suckers. During other lulls they lecture--tongues in cheeks--
to a summer school of southern school-marms. In the Winter they all
contemptuously tour the southern states lecturing to Philistines.

The rest of the time they seem to shift from clique to clique, fall in,
fall out like an bourgeois suburb. Meanwhile they--these nice folk--
seemed to me to be OUT of life, to have been OUT for many years.
Roy and I need life--city life. And although it can't be said that
we are making a living exactly, at least he doesn't have to sneer
around at people and lecture to them or peddle pictures to tourists.
Therefore--No New Mexico for us.

But when I got back I found Roy pretty well sunk by heat.
Both of us have been chorically sunk this summer. But Roy has less
reason. Naturally he is distressed about the persistent lack of work
The jobs he does pick up could be done by a beginner. And he began
to develop a yen for traveling--money or no money--inorder to "get
away from it all" and get back to some reason for work. He can't paint
or etch with one ear listening for calls from art-directors. I am
stuck with the Persian book--stuck. I can't possibly consider moving
on until I have that done and get control of my sinuses. Therefore--

I got Roy reluctantly interested in looking at Conn,
woodland. As a sequel to my San Diego visit I got an outright gift of
$1,000 from his mother who has really very little cash. I arranged
it all without consulting Roy. We found five acres priced $1800. We
offered $1,000 and got them. I am crazy to have you see the place.
It is at Westport--or rather, in the Weston district--taxes $20. Although
it is on a road with electricity and telephone, it is a dirt dead-end
road, our nearest neighbor will be the permanently located psychologist,
Watson. The piece is utterly wild--dogwood--woodbine--birches. Some
might unkindly call an acre of it swamp. It is under water. Six mallards
and one white heron were visiting when we bought. We took it because
of the swamp and the fact that the back of the property is a miniature
palisade of rock, quite high, so high that a studio will over-look
the swamp, the trees and catch the prevailing breeze from the sea,
25 minutes away. SEA BATHING and clean. It lies 15 min., inland from

(3) Geroge Baehr's place.

As to the swamp--the previous owner lives in a farm-house at the road's end, is a local legislator, a Conn. Yankee and a very swell person. He will loan us his BULL and scoop. Our first step will be to drain our swamp through a culvert into a pasture and dig out the center. We do not know whether it is accumulated rain-water or the result of springs. Anyway having dug out the center we will have a small pool instead of a swamp. This we will encircle with willows and iris. That much we can do. But meanwhile we must earn some sort of car. I have a Ladies Home Journal order for next Jan. which will probably do for that IF Roy has luck enough to cover our living expenses. Then we must earn a well. Then we must earn a large one-room studio of stucco.

Roy has already cleared the studio site himself and measured and staked it. He has already made the floor-plan. It's all great fun--building a paste-board house costs no money and is very thrilling. It will be one large room, the main space 17 by 20, then it will drop down to a fireplace, giving a smaller rectangle for dining, off which will be a minimum kitchenette. Aboe this drop will be a low balcony for two beds and a future bath. Meanwhile -- a well will do us and a back-house and a tin tub. But having earned car, well and some sort of home-made drive, we must then wangle the studio. We hope to build THAT for $2,000 as prices in Conn., with farm-laborers and Italians have always been exceedingly low, -- even the organized labor prices are much less than elsewhere.

To this refuge we will hike when N.Y. becomes unbearable. Our plan is to build a studio that is a unit to which other rooms could be added IF we had to sell. Roy expects to do much of the labor himself.

It is so maddening to have to wait for a car. We so want to rush out and see the place. It is a sweet jungle, remote, tranquil and yet

only a half-mile from a main high-way. The legislator is determined to
keep the road a dead-end road because of his own house. He looked us
up before he consented to sell. He is determined to sell only to people
who are compatible--that is--wont start a tea-room or any fake
Bohemian nonsense. There is another piece beside us--slightly higher--
with a real spring and no swamp. I do wish--but then--perhaps you
don't. We like the idea of Weston. One mile away is the new out-door
summer stadium with three symphony concerts weekly--the very best.
Also there is a top-notch summer stock company and good art shows
given by the local painters and craftsmen. The settlement is so
scattered and wild on the whole that if one does not join either of the
two country clubs one is safe from visitors. There is now a musical
settlement growing up--called Music Hill. Marie Rosanoff, the celliest
is now located there. So we can have what we like or not--as we like.
If we don't give cocktail parties we will be asked to none. The Baehrs
have practically isolated themselves without hurting any
feelings after a grand fling of social gadding last year.

Francine's men are getting younger and sillier year
by year. I could weep. But I suppose a diet of compliments is what she
thrives on. BUT her men--golly, adolescents this year. But we love her
and love George.

Meanwhile-- a tidbit of gossip-- my train companions
are old friends of Dodge's and older friends of Tony's and Tony's squaw.
In discussing Taos they spoke of all three. It seems that not long ago
Dodge fell in love--if you can call her eogtistic antics THAT--with a
young Japanese. She proposed to have him. Told the Taos populace that
for the sake of international sex relations she must have him. BUT
the Federal Indian Agent stepped in and stepped hard. He pointed out to
Dodge that she had taken a Gov't ward as her ward, taken a man away from
a tribe which does not yet acknowledge his divorce, taken him away from
his squaw and family. By the way-- when Dodge goes out the front door

(5) Tony hikes out the back to his squaw for whom he has built a fine house in the pueblo with Dodge's money. He has just finished another fine house for his eldest son. Squalid--I calls the whole business--rather thin than romantic. Anyway Dodge has tired of Tony long since, and Tony tells. But she can't wriggle out of the affair so long as the Federal Indian Agent insists upon knowing what her plans are for her ward and for the Gov't's ward. He has not, I believe, applied for citizenship. Therefore Tony's affairs--off the reservation--are therefore Dodge's are the affair of our Govt. A swept anti-climax. Just as ordinary as having a cop come in and run your home business. They told ME about Jeffers. Everybody in Taos whom they know, is betting that he will tumble into her lap because they all do. Now, I have met Dodge and not found her too exhilarating. By the way she is still paying--reluctantly-- an anhuity to the painter--Stern or Sterner?--- which he demanded as the price of her freedom--this she tells herself. I wonder if she isn't to be called a sort of intellectual Catherine of Russia? Catherine did what she liked because of her position and wealth. Dodge is--in our economic scheme--something of a Queen by virtue of her money. She seems to take 'em and leave 'em because those tooken and leaved can't resist the temptation of her money. These traveling companions of mine had a friend, a promising young woman artist, with whom Dodge became infatuated. Promised to tide the girl over the latter's period of struggle and experimentation. After a few weeks in an excellent guest-house Dodge came in IATE one night with servants and moved the girl into a far from habitable barn, saying she had an "important" guest who was arriving that night. The girl--completely broken--and not supplied with funds fell back upon the local community for help and eventually got out of the mess. Regular Catherine of Russia stuff. Anyway the bets are on Dodge who apparently always gets her prey. I hope to heaven Jeffers has the dignity to withstand the exploitation of his personality by this

this ego-centric.

copy about herself.

For mix her he would only be just so much

Now--are you coming here for Christmas or Thanksgiving with
uw? Just ourselves? Or are you coming on and have a magic party?

If you are in S.F. do see Mary Seymour and her beau--
both visited us here during the heat wave. Get them to tell you about
their mad motor trip.

My mother is getting restless--gave me notice--but
she is gaining and I refused to permit her to resume the folly
of her old vagabondage in cheap hotels with expensive nurses. She has
raised the ante on me now--moved to a better room. But she doesn't
like her nurses because they are Roman Catholics--well--there is
always a fly somewhere. Anyway I'm being firm concerning our money.
I've driven it home that so long as she is sheltered, fed, bathed,
waited upon, radioed, sunned, vitamined in these lean days she can survive
scarcely kick. I thus stave off the inevitable private revolution
but I live in dread of the telegram which says "Moved by taxi to
St. Andrews San Francisco. Letter later." It will come.

Darlings;

We actually arrive on April 4 th.

George and Francine Baehr have agreed to meet us with their car and tote us to the studio. I think they will get in touch with you. Or you get in touch with them. They are making some sort of mysterious plan for that day.

I think you are quite wise not to come abpr. Europe is suddenly a mess--war in the air--revolutionary meetings in Paris at the same time. Here in London the spirit is "do the American" and spit in his eye at the same time. We are in a most disagreeable English boarding-house by the British museum. Paris prices are up and up. Americans seem to be getting out.

The other night--by the way--my neighbor--Mrs, ex-
Ford Madox Ford called me thus"And old friend'""" of yours is dying
to see you." I went into the studio and looked about and saw
several strangers, among them a rather aggressive young woman who
pounced upon me as if we had ever been friends, gushed, wrabled and
what-not----Mrs. LLona or Yona or Ylona. She wanted to see me--
had heard from somebody, in a cafe that we were around---in order to
write to Russell at once. She also wanted the studio we were leaving
but was unable to have it, she and her husband have been up against
it since before the depression and owe a great deal of money to people
who can not afford to have them owe it. Apparently she was ready to
ask Russell for a loan--she almost said as much, having been advised
"by somebody else whom knows you both to write him c/ Stock Exchange."
I did suggest that perhaps you two were not in a position to make me an

loans. I did not say you were broke. I said that you had had the usual reverses and were adapting yourselves with the minimum of groaning but that I thought that you were both carrying burdens. Was that right? Anyway her ardor about writing seemed to weaken. Her child is with her people in Paris. Chicago. She still hates the child quite frankly. Mrs. Ford had the child come to a children's' party but the youngster was so frightened and shy that she became hysterical with excitement. All Paris seems to know about the situation. Mrs. LLona or Ylona or whatever looks well. Hates their country; living. I think they are having a beastly time. He seems to have had a very successful period as literary agent and then got into some obscure mess and gone out of business even before the depression. Nobody knows how they live. He didn't appear. Waited in a hotel lobby across the street. Evidently the address was all that was wanted. I gave it and am warning you that you may get a letter. YOU wont, darling Blanche. She made that plain to a room full of strangers. But tell Russell she "adores" him. The minx. Tell Russell I wont have him being adored at large that way.

I'm so glad for Bill Hollingsworth. There is a kind of very loose and colorful painting that he does beautifully. I do hope he is doing that. His color is usually beautiful. A Mrs. Bill Hollingsworth has been around Paris. But I made no enquiries as we were living so secretly and silently and workishly. Cheers for the hat. Had your brown Peck and Peck dyed grey in Paris.

Mar. 13.

Dear Blanche;

We are waiting for a Belgian boat here at Kinshasha,
a sprawling, ugly modern city in the Congo, just above
Stanley Falls. The place looks like the edges of Los. A. for
with their great perspicacity the white races are building brick
one-story bungalows with tin tops in an equatorial climate.

However it is cool enough for me to wear a jersey on the veranda of
this A.B.C. hotel, which is an ugly step-sister of the Child's
restaurant system. Africa is often exactly like something else.
Despite the howl about climate it has its moments of perfection.
All this Congo country is, at this season, a country of rolling
brown hills. The sight of a crocodile is enough to frighten the
pilots, and on the filthy Italian tramper, to which we transhipped
at sea from a German boat, sleeping, my dear on the floor of the
bridge where I got a nasty cold from the dusty in our tarpaulin
bed-quilt) when one was seen the officers fought for the glasses.
That iron boat had been out 5 months from Trieste. When it
started from there it had the rust and dirt and vermin of
26 years of sea-life. The African voyage had not improved her. No
ice. No fresh meat and scarcely any water except that which was
in the red wine. You see how far away one gets from the nice-
ties of life after awhile. I would have refused, ten months ago, to
step aboard her. I ate my meals, however, with a Facist captain
and a portrait of Mussolini, unmoved by a procession on the
woodwork of the usual cockroaches. Roy was hilarious because I
have at times made his simple life over-complicated when, in
strange places, I have insisted upon establishing a minimum of
cleanliness and order.

At Matadi, where we landed, we rec'd the distressing
news that Roy's stepfather was dead. So many letters have been
lost or missed that we do not know exactly the time of this
event. Although he was altogether a STEP-father Roy was shocked,
mostly by the incessant plea of his mother to hurry home and be
at her side. Of course she wants him but it is just as well
that we can't hurry, for did he show up, the crochety executor and
the step-relatives would fancy he desired to profit from the
estate. What he left we do not know but he had sons of his own.

All we do know is, that whatever he had he left nothing whatever to Roy to compensate for the years that he benefitted because a pro(du) small boy and young man earned his own living, even worked for his meals as if he had no moral right to the food. As he consulted no lawyer about his will things may be a mess and we may inherit two mothers instead of one. It does double our responsibility, though, for even with a small income Mrs. B. will not know how to handle life, so idle has she been for years. God grant we never taste that sort of idleness for it is ruinous.

Having turned forty we have had many moments together of introspection and swapped our charges against life in general. We are mis-spent lives. Mine is rather worse than Roy's but we are doing what we can to over-come the vacuum in which we grew up. Roy's was the vacuum and mine and emotional mae(k)strom. However, that's that and if I continue to set such matters down you'll doubtless burst into tears. It is too late, we find, for weeping. Perhaps we are more serious because we are so thin, so utterly and completely bloodless.

The main point of my letter I have not arrived at. It is this--with more than a little arrogance we wish to state that we will probably not need your $500 unless it is to succor us after arriving homeless in N.Y. where I will have to hunt a studio in Jan. while Roy goes home to his Ma. We will just squeeze through to Old Lady Liberty, the trip costing less than $6,000, probably $5,000. This will be possible IF our Harmon tenants have actually paid up in our absence on the second mortgage. We have had our moments of high finance and we have not yet traveled except second class and whatever class we could get on ten different cargo boats. What we have observed may be of no value to the world but to ourselves it is of immense interest.

We want to come back here--not to the West--but I will tell you of that later. I think you'd love the interior travel. It can be such a clean, beautiful, simple way of living.

And now I must get to work on the book. I am simply in a funk. Have I after all got anything to say--have I? God knows.

PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY: ORIGINAL MATERIAL IS RESTRICTED

My Dear;

Since we never knew whether Boomba got to you I surmise that
you owed us a letter or that some letter was lost.

Boomba had a magnificent notice in the Times--it made me
weep with gratitude. Meanwhile, the Oxford Press wants the Persian
book for spring and we are working about ten hours a day. I am in
a panic, a prisoner chained to the leg of a desk.

As to Christmas--it would be marvellous to have you
here. You haven't any idea how jolly we think it would be. These
are our plans. Dorothy Glaser is coming down from Boston with
her superior daughter of 15 (writes music and plays the flute with
Harvard orchestra, only girl thus honored) and Derwent Lockhard,
a charming young archaeologist whom we met in Persia where he was
being kicked around by Schmidt. Lockhard has a Harvard Fellowship.
Cammy Glaser will come up from Washington, just out of Harvard--
cum laude--and working for Tugewael. Cammy or Comstock will stay
around the corner at the Basque hotel. The rest will drape themselves
in the studio. Everybody arrives on the 24th and leaves on the
26th. As soon as you know your plans let me have a postal
and we'll add a couple of pies and a few pounds of Turkey.

Dorothy is bringing a New England bird with her in the rumble. This plan
has a number of reasons. Dorothy and her son could not otherwise
be together. Also we are extremely fond of the kids, have known
them since their childhood. Lockhard is having a genuine moral
struggle (and also psychological) Schmidt nearly sunk him.

Meanwhile, his nice but dull middle-class parents are determined to
keep a boy with more than a usual gift in the sewer-contracting
business. His contacts with his family are, therefore, pretty

to snuff out his interest in antique and modern art, in everything which he really loves, is begun again. Dorothy is, meanwhile, having something of a struggle. Her Germanic biologist husband of Amherst left her two years ago on less than a middle-aged whim.

Pretty unsettling for her and the kids. She put up her chin and went to work. Papa remarried on a whim which he is probably regretting.

He married the expensive divorced wife of an Admiral. He acquired two step-daughters. With it all Dorothy is not always able to get anything like adequate financial aid because she failed to get the divorce her-shef, plus a court settlement upon the children. She left everything to Otto's judgment--not very good since he remarried. Commy is a magnificent lad. We have always had him with us quite a bit, week-ends and holidays.

If you should arrive on Dec. first we are giving a cocktail party--our first--for Therese Wolfson, a coming-out party. She has just returned from Reno and is feeling socially low.

No matter how much reason there is for a divorce the actual surgery of one is unsettling. Therese is on her Sabbatical year from City College and teaching economics at Sarah Lawrence in Bronxville. We are asking only about twenty people who will be congenial.

Last word we had from you was a card from the Pendelton ? Round-up.

Am sending on the autographed Boomba to Carmel.

Dear Blanche;

The stockings were gorgeous, and God knows I needed them. Gosh. Thanks something awful.

Blanche I've a jewelry for you, to match the Chinese ring, something crude and silver. And when you've a fairly permanent station in Calif. I want to send it on. If you don't fancy it on your chest then use it as a paper weight. It is A byssinian and primitive.

Roy loved being with you and when he came I had found a studio at 263 West 11--telephone 8447. We have two gigantic rooms of an old residence. A nd Evelyn Preston who has purchased three brick tenements across the street is going to sublet two floors to us, to alter as we please, on a 20 year lease. This will give Roy a 20 x 20 working space, a 15 foot dining alcove, and a wee roof garden, a bed-room on the floor below. The houses are part of a lot of 14 on Perry, Bleecker, and 11th and so arranged that the gardens, thrown into one unit will be perfectly gorgeous. "Our" house has been a rather decent old thing--once. Today it is a tenement, has no bath-tubs, no electricity, and the W.C. in the backyard. 86888. In N.Y. We simply can't credit the primitive life before our eyes.

A scheme like this means that we will never have to search frantically for floor space and north light again.

Meanwhile that tropical disease is beastly. I've negative <u>hex</u> results to lab tests. But my eyes have simply blown up, or <u>THE</u> eye. One docotr says I must never read again. The other--equally distinguished--says I must read to keep the thing alive and healthy. I'm doing he latter and starting the book. Too infernally akward.

There isn't much news here for we have been busy sorting
the stuff from the warehouse and doing chores. Between doctor-
oculist-dentist- I've little leisure. I'm about like our
old Dodge for which we were offered nothing except $125 credit
on a new car. I'd bring even less.

I'm so sorry your faces are turned Westward.
And will be glad when you face this way again. Has Carmel
been runied by cultists? I hear that Orage and followers
were there. Don't forget nice Kennedy Brogden Owne. She's
got a cubby hole in a shop on Mason st., in San
Francisco.

Find we live two houses away from Kirk and Hollingsworth.
Their baby is walking. Haven't seen it yet. Everybody
went and had a baby in our absence. Four of our friends.
Dined with Bob and Ruth Wiseman. Bob has started out for
himself. I suspect--and this suspicion shows me a mean,
'ooman--that they heard of this 11 St. development, But our
architect is a real guy. Eric Gugler, known in Chicago too.
He's a Wis., German who got the Prix de Rome. This I did not
know. I met him just once and liked him. Therefore when I
was asked if I had a preference in architects I named him.
He accepted the Preston job on the phone and bid us come and
call. Only then did we discover that he is a designer with
McKim Mead and White'''' and that he and Paul Manship do
monuments and sculptural detail. He's been a perfect darling
and turned us over to a builder who will work from drawings and
not blue-prints. He isn't stuffy. He isn't superior.
He isn't top or high hat.

Keep out $500 on hand Old Thing. Roy has no
job yet, Don't you dare spend it on shoes and a coat. I'll com-
plain to the police. That's embezzlement. Love to you both,

Aquitania first class-- April 6--Can you beat THAT and broke?

This is merely another wild bulletin. I wrote a small note to Pope because we really wanted news from Persia. He asked us to call. We put it off for three weeks. Called this P.M. Pope in London to tea indefinitely. Ackerman in--she took us to an expensive TEA place, and ROY paid. Wow and whoops.

Anyway she has not been to Persia. He has not been there very many times yet. She has been taking out of the library the same books--becoming an authority--that I have. That I now know as they have been drawn out under my nose and all the parts about textiles and enamels etc. MARKED! Not very nice for public books. Some are on my desk now. And today she quoted--QUOTED at length as original a paragraph which a Mrs. Bishop wrote in 1903 and swiped from a U.S. Minister who wrote in 1885 for Harpers and Scribners and I read yesterday in the two books. Oh 'Blanche.

She is so pro-Persian that she is a propagandist. Was very angry--exceedinly umbrageous because we call them up spams. She said, "Of course you haven't the advantages that Dr. Pope has when traveling. He isn't interested in journalism'"" WOW. She is living very comfortably and well, if everybody pays for her teas. I kept waiting and waiting for her to mention you. She said of our going home, "I have lived abroad so much that I have no longer any home." Say Girl and Boy she never saw the borderline of Calif, until the Great War. She says "I have my own select circle here of cultivated French" HE doesn't speak French well enough to direct his stereoptican man at the museum lecture. She simply hates the English. Is a pro-Persian propagandist now against the ENGLISH. Oxford Press is publishing her "popular review of the history of tapestry."

Asked me why I didn't give up the book since we had not had the
right entrance to Persian life and didn't like Persia. With tears
in his eyes one of Persia's leading scholars said to me "Do write
the truth about us. We need the truth. All this praise is a disaster
for our young people."

Said that the German archaeologist working for Univ. of
Chicago had accused Pope of being a rug dealer which he never was
and is not, claimed --she said--that he was still doing business in
Paris.

And of course he
is, as she later said she knew all the dealers here. And one dealer--
a Jew in Persia was not only working for Pope but writing a chapter when
we met him for Pope's book.

Told us all about their BIG house in England and their
servant troubles there.

Didn't mention you. Finally I ventured that you might be
over. Now what did she say? I will bluntly tell you the truth as is
my way with you because I know you'll laugh. " Have they any money? "
was the first question in answer to my little announcement. I said
I didn't know. That I thought you and Russell must have suffered
with all the other investors in the U.S.A. but didn't know. She
said "Celotex failed. That must have finished them off." I said that
you had been having a beautiful time, whatever there was else. That
you had been leading the simple life in Carmel and loving it, that
you had been living an out-door life and that Russell had a swell
time gardening and doing chores in that idyllic spot. "That would
be the best thing in the world for them" said she, and that was all
and all and all she said. Roy threw out sparks in every direction.

She then spoke of her rich friends in England and here and how
they were not like the people of the u.S.A. who immediately that they

(3) were hit reduced their living standards. She said that her friends kept up the same front, lived the same old way as best they could and refused to alter their status they were so much braver than Americans. She never asked another word about you. I would not tell you all this if we had not conversed so frankly about Dr. A. before. She talked down to us from a vasty distance up somewhere--I don't know where, looks very well, lives in a good hotel, has sharpened into a very hawk-nosed hard-mouthed woman. Persia is their career. They have to work the truhip for its last drop. We said it was an anti-climax after China and India. Say why don't you guys go to Peking? I'll give you letters to my English friend Mrs. Jowett, a grand, grand person. You'd have more fun than Paris and the dollar is four to one over there. You could have a Chinese house and 8 or ten rascally and darling servants and all the amusing Legation life. It would be sport.

Pope has just got some money out of the Shah for his book--to finance at least half the color-plates. Oh aint it wonderful? And aint we the impotent mugs. When I said that Insull had been our salvation she curled up her lip and laughed gayly and said "Nice friends you have", not "What a fine thing it was that Fisk got Roy's pictures." Oh, Human critters---

The trouble is--my darlings--we have been 8 whole months in Persia, avoiding officials, seeing Persian life. He is going to write, she says, about the wonderful feudal system. So will I. There aren't six wonderful landlords in the whole country. She is all for Sir Arnold Wilson's book which is really a British propaganda book, praising Persia because that is the British line against Russia. Roy says "She aint go no mind. She can't think." Perhaps he is right. I don't know, Anyway she politely gave us hell for our own

Dear Blanche;

So near and yet so far. Your note from the train came
this morning. My dear p--how we do sympathize with you. How
we do. I do hope your mother is not simply cut down by this
loss. We have been having something of a struggle to get
going without a maid etc. And Roy went to the dentist--I wrote
you that and the letter has missed you--with the result that
he is nursing an infected jaw where a badly infected tooth
has been all unknown for possibly years.

Meanwhile he has got a chance at a big job. That is--
Women's Home Companion has never liked his work but has given
him one other chance. If he goes over-- there may be work
enough to pull us through this year. He is so pleased.

He is to make complete preliminary sketches this time.
The editor is difficult. Doesn't always--hann't always known
his own mind. And Roy's difficulty is mottx having a mind. Some
of the Guild artists have been dropping in--mostly curious--
and what nitwits they are. Just dumb, dumb. That's what one
should be to be a successful illustrator and perhaps mottx a
successful artist, immunized to ideas and egotistical.

So soon as my teeth are fixed a little I must
make that awful dash that you are always making. I will have
to buy one of the tourist round-trip tickets--11 days I believe--
on the coast and fix up my mother and somehow drop in on Roy's.
He can not come. One of us must stay by the 'phone for possible
orders. He may make the dash later. I don't see how I can
bring my mother East but may have to. She will have to live
elsewhere in town with a companion. We can not take her here
because of the stairs. I will have to get a specialist in S.F.
to make a new examination. That damn fool doctor out there told

her that she has angina and arthritis. He might have spared her.
For angina people sometimes never have a second attack and die
finally of other causes entirely. She is evidently committed,
rightly or wrongly, to complete invalidism and perpetual personal
care. She has a liking for that. And I must find out whether
the situation is psychological or physical or both or what.

How I do wish we could live all of our four troubled lives
somewhere together--hailing distance over a back fence. But
we have got to stick in this place in order to recover two-
thirds of our original investment which Miss Preston is obliged
to pay in less than 18 months. We discovered through her lawyer
that instead of giving us the place--as stated--at cost she has,
in the past, made 15 per month above all carrying charges which
include half of taxes, hallservice, garden care and REXX insurance
In addition to this she has had 5 percent a year on her loaned
$5,000. Not toobad, Therefore at $125 that we are paying as a basic
rent without alterations( there is added overhead amounting to
$177 plus) she is not losing a cent--thank goodness. Now we will
ask her to take the sticks and stones in the studio as guarantee
and lift the mortgage, now reduced to $4,000, from our Ossining
property so that in the event of a buyer or a need to borrow we
have that free. Not very complicated. She is well secured by the
studio and plumbing--darn her soul--as well as the 15 year lease.
So little does she trust her human beings that she had inserted
in the lease that it was to be renewed after discussion every five
years. A good thing for us because it works in our favor this time
rather than in hers and she had expected to raise the rent

But why bother you with all this? Anyway-- you are
family and just have to take the good and the bad and the amusing
and boresome together.

(3) After Pope stepped on Roy in Paris and Phyllis stepped on us both with nails, trod, stamped—the Persian Institute which finances him( and seems to mistrust him heartily now in its office) became interested in Roy's exhibit. For there is talk of taking the pictures to the Penn. Museum later to give color to the show of relics from the Damghan excavation. I wish Russell could have a year out there in Persia—it is perfect, heaven, paradise for sinuses. The archaeologist who is responsible for booming Roy is from the Penn Museum and is going back for 5 years to open, he hopes, three large excavations and work all three simultaneously including Rhei of the Book of Tobit. He has come to grips with Pope and told him privately that he must not attempt to pose any longer as a scientific man or to insert himself into the political differences between museums in this work, that he must no longer play politics within universities( he loathes Breasted and Phyllis is most incautious in denouncing both Breasted and son and also the French archaeologist in the Persian gov't and connected with the Sorbonne—Goddard. Matters shaped thus: themselves without any move from Roy so that Pope asked to see the pictures in order that he might notify the members of the Institute—two of the richest we happen to know personally.

Roy kept the appointment carrying a crate of framed pictures with him. Pope did not arrive and, after an hour 'phoned that he was awfully sorry but that with dinners and lectures and so much he had stayed abed and would Mr. Baldridge go away and bring back his pictures at four instead of ten A.M. Roy swallowed his pride and returned at four and came away certain that Pope does not possess aesthetic reactions but is a good all'round medicine man. At Institute headquarters he is Mister Pope. The paid Sec't told Roy not to call him Dr. again as he was not only not a doctor but

investigation had shown that he was not even a full professor
at any time in his career. Nevertheless--such a man is needed to
mulct the rich or there would not be any Persian expeditions.
Since Schmidt talked to him he has promised to mind his step
and keep out or refrain from making controversies lest the
museums, now in the mood to combine with universities, withdraw
their support which, last week, amounted to $78,000 raised by
Schmidt in one day. He sailed for England. However, Schmidt
is mad about the pictures which he had not seen except for the
quick sketches made at his own excavation and they will probably
go to the Penn. Museum for several weeks later this summer.

Meanwhile out publishing house is hanging by a thread.
However, the book is to be done this summer and published next
Feb. So far as we know. I've a long up-hill summer before me.

I am so glad--we are so often glad--that you and Russell
are safe--even if it is only a quiet Carmel safety and not
a world cruise. Do be good to yourselves. And do try not to
spend your energy too lavishly at this time. We must have
you radiant and lovely in our lives.

I am glad you liked my affection for my friends. Do
be sure it is always there. I love my friends. I have an
affection for humanity in the large--abstract. But Friends and
People--they are very different and will--I fear--remain so
to my very vitriolic end.

We both regret that you should carry so many burdens of
sorrow this last year. And how we hated not seeing you both.

Wish I could travel West with you. But I am trying
to sell two ideas for articles and make my expenses before I leave.
And then there are my damned teeth.

Love,

(5)

Naturally all peace organizations have this service for their members. But the lady is very nice and she will waste a lot of money. If she had real sense she would go to work with her money and try to combine several feeble and struggling organizations into one. Perhaps though she doesn't want to play with Jews. But it seemed to me all so unreal. Heywood Broun, her personal friends, made a splendid talk. But what was the use of talking to any of us? We were already convinced. And what on earth good does it do to sit in an Italian ball-room when ladies who have ball-rooms wont go to war and are too old to have sons in the war and all my lower West side is teeming with unemployed young men and with half-grown Irish boys, getting tougher every day. I am very fond --theoretically-- of the rough-neck kids on our street. We have a bowing acquaintance. When they were younger Roy used to have them in to do their grammar school maps. They were ruffians. But they behaved like very noisy angels. They are grown up now and hardly to be recognized. Yet when we passed a gang the other night I was so touched to hear one of the boys say, "There goes that classy fellow who lives on eleventh street. I know him." Last year they broke our windows with their balls. But they got together and insisted upon paying out of their nickels and pennies which I think is pretty decent.

I am working harder than every. I have an order with Roy for a children's book to be delivered by the end of May. And so I will go and make myself some good strong coffee and start the night under a strong daylight bulb. Roy has just complete a spectacular

ad for Warner Bros. "Oil for the Lamps of China." It was ordered per
a very complete preliminary sketch. Roy made the provision that the
drawing should be like the sketch. Okay. He had models every day. He
worked both day and night for a week on the figures. AND he delivered
it today. Then the art editor told him that he was not the final
judge, that there were about 14 people who would have to look at it.
The picture came back because one of the fourteen had decided that the
eight or ten figures in the foreground should be re-drawn smaller
so as to give the effect of a great distance in the scene. Roy was foaming. This commercial game is a riot. If we had twenty cents a month income he would stop it. And paint American pictures and Americans. That is his desire. When we get through with Africa and Persia I am going to start to work on a Manhattan cook-book --I hope. My plan is to collect menus from all of the exotic places. To print a menu on one page and follow it with the recipes. Both to be embellished with from life sketches done in N.Y. inns and taverns. What do you think of this idea?

I wonder if we will ever get through with
Africa or Persia or both.

Anyway we had lots of fun on my birthday.
We went at it in a gala spirit which not even the second act could
destroy. And my dear--many thanks. I went Robes in my --our--blue and
black dress. Altogether it was a Matthias evening without Blanche and
Russell whom we would rather have any time than a Petrified Forest.

Dear Blanche:

Here we are--Christmas in Calcutta. Roy has another job from Fortune. But everything is in such a mess, awaiting Gandhi's return, that it is almost impossible for him to line up even the Indian Princes with whom Fortune is concerned. I think everybody is hoping that Gandhi can check violence which, one feels, is likely to break out anywhere, any time. The Govt's Lady is accompanied by soldiers when she goes to a movie, the streets are cleared and policed from Govt house to the Fox Movitone!!! And such a picture "Women of All Nations".

Roy is better but not well. His mouth is still quite stiff. Whether he is ever to be better, we do not know. My massage doesn't seem to accomplish all that we could wish.

I am enclosing a hadkf. It doesn't come up to any one of those that you gave me. But it is a Swadeshi hadkf. That means, as you know, that it was woven by Indian villagers of Indian silk, dyed and hand-blocked by them also. That accounts for its crudity. But stick it into your purse.

Yesterday I cut over the brown Peck and Peck hat that I wore, just one year ago, traveling day-coach to California.

My mother has bravely taken herself in hand and entered for a six-month trial, a new "relief home" for "ladies." It is very sporting of her. She is trying, by this means, to lessen our worries concerning the immediate future.

We wanted very much to see G's arrival in Bombay. But the Fortune job interferes. Also we want to hear the music and see the art exhibition of the Tagore Septuagenary which begins on Christmas Day. I would like to be serving dinner on that day to you and Russell. We never make anything, as you know, of Christmas except when you are about.

II.

Into the building of the Taj Mahal he had poured the life
and whole wealth of a mighty empire and now the <u>King of Earth</u>
lay imprisoned by his own son within the strong keep of Agra.
The Shah Jehan smiled to himself in his bleak cell the whole
of seven years. . . . Could he not understand, that son of his,
that the soul of Shah Jehan dwelt over there, across the Jumna,
in that pale marble cloud held upon an endless sward of black
velvet. . . .

WITH THE THUNDER of the rising sun came also the voices
of the mullahs over the water from the four towers. " Love is
the law both for the sleeper and the wakener," they cried.
Now pleaded the Shah Jehan, and not in vain, to be carried into
the gallery of the <u>Jasmine Tower</u> , even as the sun smoothe the
white fullness of the dome. "Love is the law both for the slee-
per and the wakener,"came again the voice of the mullah, quite
plain, across the Jumna. He heard, but even as he would remove
the veil of tears from before his eyes he found the Lotus near
his heart to have opened. In the white marble keep, across the
Jumna, the soul of Shah Jehan sought, and not in vain, his
beloved Arjumand. Time ripens and dissolves being into its
@reater Self.

* * * * *

USTAD ISA was his name. We are told that he was
spawned from a questionable ancestry by those very historians
who then hasten to inform us that he was a Persian, by which
last appendage they offer an apology to their own conscience

I2

for being under necessity of accreditino
work as the Taj Mahal to the mental capacity of a menial.

Ustad Isa was spawned from a questionable ancestry
in that land which lies under the vision of the white crown
of Mount Arrarat. We are told that upon those cruel crags
Prometheus suffered his heart to be torn by the sharp beaks
of eagles in expbation of having given the divine fire to
man. Within the shadow of this magic mountain came Jason
to seek that Golden Fleeze which would be the crowning
glory for the land of Hellas. Up to the summit of this
mountain pointed also the Hebraic tradition to the landing
place and tomb of that progenitor of the second dispensa-
tion of men,Noah. Stretching out from this mountain lay
the ruins of empires in all directions like bleached bones
among the green hills and the yellow sand dunes. Here had
been worshipped the mad deities of the Moon and here first
kindled the sacred fire of Zoroaster. Within this land
of Persia the Sufi recited their negations in the melancholy
groves of past splendors. In time Bagdad the fabulous seated
herself across the highways of the world and out of the
neighboring wilderness came Islam to sweep like a backwash
of the Great Deluge upon the tottering nations of the West.
To this nation of Persia the historians have assigned the
nativity of the architect of the Taj Mahal, spawned there
from a questionable ancestry. Ustad Isa was his name.

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Ustad Isa was his name and he followed the caravan through the Khyber Pass into the fabled land of India. Imagination rested upon his shoulders like the white snow mantle upon the ledges of Mount Arrarat. From the irrigating rivers of his mind the cold rock was spurred into germinating exotic forms strangely beautiful even to the natural mental fecundity of India. The soul which comprehended a mountain knew also how to make stone grow upon stone into unities of grandeur and solidity. The City of Agra was being built and Ustad Isa became in time the architect in chief for the King of Earth.

The Royal Architect kept the secret of the subterranean chambers where the royal treasures were stored as well as that of the donjons where languished the royal prisoners. To his mind belonged also the Jasmine Tower; that sweet melody which crowns the walls of Agra.

Ustad Isa was his name. Many years he toiled within the heat and verdure of India. Each year the vision of his native land became more and more remote. Snowcapped Mount Arrarat proceeded further into the distances beyond the Khyber Pass along the chimerical caravan routes of the mind. The caleidoscopic changes of tropical fecundity overwhelmed relentlessly the mental tracery of greening hills mounting upwards against the breast of that white mountain which was so solid and yet seemed suspended against the mighty void of the sky. In India life seemed so temporary and yet so relentless. The jungle planted its seeds in the wall before the masons had finished the facing of the stone and removed their sledges.

HOMAGE TO ISA

I4

The works of man seemed doomed to oblivion even before they were begun. To himself Ustad Isa the Persian seemed old; he had laboured too long on the walls of Agra.

Ustad Isa was called early in the morning into the presence of the *King of Earth*. Terrible was the face of Shah Jehan; terrible, yet lordly. "Build me a tomb for the Princess Arjumand!" he commanded. "Make it lovely as she was; lovely; delicate as she was delicate!"

Ustad Isa received the command of the *King of Earth* even on the day when he was feeling old. Being a Persian, so the historians infer, he straightway had a dream, and lo! the Taj Mahal stood complete before his mental eye like a bride upon a dais. This could not have been, for Ustad Isa was weary. His soul longed for those cool hills where he had received life at the hands of a questionable ancestry. Ustad Isa wanted escape; his soul was upon the caravan route which goes through Khyber Pass. . . and then he knew it could not be, because he had laboured too long on the walls of Agra. Idly he moved the charcoal over the paper which was to hold the plan and the picture began to show a snow-white mountain summit suspended high above the tracery of greening hills silhouetted against the sky. The hand of Ustad Isa moved more rapidly. He drew the plan and commenced the building of the Taj Mahal.

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Ustad Isa laboured for forty years after he had thought himself old upon the building of that white mountain by the walls of Agra. The blinding whiteness of its beauty and the cool dignity of its proud head seared itself into the collective soul of a sorely stricken and oppressed people. Never will this monument be given to the jungle, though Ustad Isa, because the people of this land will allways need the symbol of its pale fingers to carry their mute voices up to the stars.

In amazement the _King of Earth_ watched the building from his Jasmine Tower until one day when it stood finished the blinding truth drove his soul to madness. The conqueror of an invincible though gentle race came to tremle before the visible unfoldment of this challenge in stone.

"May never the mind of man conceive again a dream at once so unescapable and so unatainable," said Shah Jehan. "Stronger than the walls of Agra are the walls behind which I will confine this arch rebel."

Ustad Isa was called early in the morning into the presense of the Shah Jehan. Even there in the Jasmine Tower which he had built upon the walls of Agra the _King of Earth_ caused the eyes to be removed from the architect of the Taj Mahal.

Ustad Isa was his name; Ustad Isa, the Persian.