Jan 13, 1921

Head. Americana Roma

Dear Family:

My spheres of interest in Rome are so various that my left hand has no longer time to know what my right hand is doing, and when I sit down to write a letter I fumble among the many contrasting enthusiasms that have smitten me of late, and end by choosing not the most significant, but the most recent. I am perfectly conscious though, that my social thrills and exploits amuse and disquiet you most, so I will begin my telling you of a little dance the other evening, and finish the letter on more edifying matters.

It was an elegant little private dance, beginning at 10:30 and closing at 3:00. The best idea of its chicness I can give you is by affirming that our two secretaries at the Embassy, bored, spoiled curled darlings of Rome, Messers Riggs and Southgate, consented to be present. At supper a long elaborate function with heraldic crockery, Venetian glass etc, I found myself between the girl whose 21st Birthday ( coming in with the midnight) the party celebrated, and my old friend the daughter of the Duke of Lante. ( So highly, is your inference, do the Romans rate the gift of rapid facile conversation ). Suddenly before my fascinated eyes was opened the following glimpse into high life.

**Thornton** An architect friend of mine has been "measuring up" this little villa in the Garibaldi Park called the Villa Lante. How long has it been out of your family, do you know?

**Donna Elena** Oh, a hundred years at least. I believe we exchanged for something else.

**Thornton** You don't know :

**Donna Elena** Oh, I forget everything I know about such things.

Every old family has a priest who does nothing but study up the records of the family, and we have one at Bagnaia who's supposed to teach us all the history, but I forget it right away.

**Thornton** Does your brother remember such things?

**Donna Elena** No. Why should he?

**Thornton** Can you at least tell me which Popes were della Roveres?

**Donna Elena** No. ( after a pause, in French ) Yes, I can:- Sixtus IV and Julius II.

**Thornton** Well, I should hope so !!

( And just then my eye fell on her signet ring, where were engraved the oak trees, under whose patronage the Sixtine Chapel was built, and later decorated, The Vatican Library, my little Ponte Sisto, and under whose boughs Raphael, Michaelangelo and Bramante found shelter. )

I have another formidable dinner party in sight for Saturday evening at the Rev. Lowrie's, for which Barbara Armour herself telephoned me this morning evening in the loviest silvery voice that immediately recalls her exquisite Dresden-China face/ Mr. Riggs ( who never forgets discomforting facts ) told me more about them than they would care to have me know, or that even I like to carry to their table. His cleverness, learning and wealth put him in a rather difficult position for a minister of the gospel and I can hear Father this minute telling me to appraise him charitably, and in the light of his very special temptations

(Dear Family, I carry on this letter almost a month later.

Jan 13, 1921*2

(This continuation of the letter is almost
a month later, J.W.D.)

It has been lying in the drawer of my bedside table, while my corres-
pondance has been restricted to impassioned notes to Father! I just
received a darling letter from Mother- to say nothing of previous ones
from her and absorbing narratives from Isabel - which leaves me ashamed
and contrite.)

My latest adopted aunt is Mrs. Cagidti- otherwise the American
novelist Marie Van Vorst. She is a bright handsome middle-aged lady,
a little vain and mannered like all our ladies who write, lives in a
beautiful palace and gives the most impressive teas, from which she
absents herself at intervals and going into the next room picks up a
book and does a little reading. She keeps making appointments for
me to come, and while I sit eating exquisite pastries she walks about
the room talking about the "literary life", her adopted son (age 8),
the philosophy of William James, what the Princess Ludovisi-Buoncampa-
gnia said to her servants, her experiences in the theatre-production etc.
Then she sits down and proceeds to draw me out. Next time I am to read
my play to her (only two acts are ready for reading, since it is being
rewritten for the fifth time.) She talks vaguely of collaboration, -
Marie Doro wants her to dramatize some of her (Mvan Vorst's) novels.

The American Academy group increases daily almost. There are
dozens of us now. Soon I am going to be moved out of my delightful
little suite of rooms into a little tiny monastic cell of a room, be-
cause an art-professor and his wife and two children are coming to in-
habit most of the upper floor of the Villino Ballacci. I rather like
the change; I embrace the Spartan.

I met the widow of Augustus Saint- Gaudens yesterday and had a
long talk with her in spite of her deafness. She is travelling with
two other ladies from the Comish Colony. Rome is perfectly full of
celebrities, whose brief stays come to you in someone's casual remarks.
I almost met the Kenneth Grahames ( of The Golden Age and The Wind in
the Willows ) the other day. Jascha Heifitz will be here in a day or
two with a special letter to a fellow-Academician.

I was invited to hear the Russian Ballet twice. I saw Retrouche* ka both times, and I love it. Also invited to Strauss' Salome- The opera here is very fine, and now that I am a confirmed little brother of the rich it only costs me car-fare, cloak-room tips, and laundry.

I have just heard about the fires in New Haven and Worester.
No one ever tried to train a social conscience in me ( though the
"broader principles" I am certainly familiar with ) but opera-going
has a wicked heedless air in a world humming with revolution and fires
in Bohm-Landorf's store!

In festo S.Lincolni!

I resist to send off that letter all-wordly and have retired to the most
umbratile place I know, to finish it. I have taken out the special
Academia permesse for entrance to the grounds of the Villa Pamplidi-
Doria, one of the famous Renaissance garden villas that lies just out-
side our Porta San Pancrazio/. I am sitting in the sun on the long
semi-circular bench that half encloses the principle fountain in the
water-garden. It is a long ways getting here; one passes the deer park,
the Casino itself ( with a prospect of St. Peter's dome the finest in
Rome. the whole church set to all appearances in the center of emerald
fields ), the sunken gardens with their geometrical # tortuous beds
their heraldic devices worked out in primroses, their poised astronomical
instruments, and everywhere fountains and multlated statues. Then the
open lawns where presently a company of theological will gather and
#

Jan. 13, 1921 - 3

In festo S. Lincoln -2

hoisting up their cassocks play a form of football that is noiseless; then the *pineta* with its thousand of sheep and it's endearing din of lambs. Then this worn ugly fountain, late baroque, but with a generous basin and a musical fall. The sunlight is not very positive today, but it will presently put me to sleep (the sun and the fountain) whereupon the woodcutters who are doing some distressing things to some beautiful willows over the lagoon and are approaching some stone pine, will wake me. I have brought along a novel (holiday today) of Anne Douglas Sedgwick The Shadow of Life in which I see scarcely a spark of the author of Tante and The Encounter, and a deal of bad writing.

I am being made to move out of my beautiful suite. A Professor with a wife and two children is coming to live in the three large upstairs rooms of the Villino Bellacci and another boy and I are driven into the two tiny ex-servants rooms. There is hardly enough room to turn around and the marble top of my bureau is not long enough to support my books which pile up in the corners; but all this suits my aesthetic ideal; just as I am pleased when one of our waitors urges me anxiously to eat more, or when people warn me against going bareheaded and coatless to my Campagna walks.

These books I have such wonderful times with. The collection of post-revolutionary drama in German that my Jewish friend sent me (of Cocumella days) sent me from Frankfort- My plays from the repertoir of the Vieux-Columbier. And now Miss Péroglou has made me a present of three rich things Monsieur le Curé d'Ozeron by Francis Jamnes Trois Hommes ( Pascal, Ibsen, Dostoiewski) by André Suaris, and Axel by Villiers de l'Isle Adam. Now all reading is held up until I finish Voyage en Italie, grand sensible, witty and sensitive; its two volumes a good opponent to Stendhal's two Promenades en Rome, petulant, mannered febrishly gifted. I found some tiny little booklets of Florio's translation of Montaigne which give me a most loving delight last thing before I go to sleep, and have driven me to Montaigne pilgrimages here in Rome. I have found the corner where stood the English hospice where Milton and Crashaw stayed; the three spots connected with Dante's visit, if he ever was here! and the Shelley and Keats memorials, of course. The Michelangelo story distresses me as though he were my best, most worshiped friend and lived around the corner. With Raphael I am not so sympathetic, though I love these great dramatic frescos full of intelligent faces and beautiful garments and generous spacing. There is an understanding between Perugino and me that certain pupils (who may be nameless) may surpass their masters in many ways and gain reputations that keep a world in awe, and yet lose an elegant and tender grace that will find its lovers even in a Sala Raffaello.

In festo S. Valentini

Yesterday morning I unexpectedly strayed toward John Lateran, mother of churches, and found a high mass forward under the gracious mosaics. The large free pavement of the apse, so bright-colored with its rare marbles, was being crossed and recrossed by officiants in every ecclesiastical shade of red and purple. And from the musician's gallery came the true and just Palestrina, the bewildering entries, the long ascending reitterations of the Benedictus, and a Sanctus so rich and concentrated, a mere page or two, that it hung all about the vast

Jan.13,1921-4

In festo S, Lincoln -3

In festo S. Valentini-2

silence that follows - an almost terrifying moment when Mass is read in a Basilica and a great crowd hold it to its very heart-beat, The Elevation of the Host. He was maestro in turn to the choirs of the Lateranp Santa Maria Maggiore and St. Peter's; he married twice; lost three promising sons and had only a worthless one left; had to live on very little for a long while; yet wrote such music as binds your will, hand and foot, and hands it over to your nobler nature and leaves you capable only of good,

17 th (Feb. probably J.W.D.)

Last night I wasn't very well and found myself awake listening to the hours. The churches of Rome have a special set of chimes for the night, and at three and four all Rome seems to stir and murmur gracious devote sentences; from near by will suddenly arise a low intimate quickly repeated note, the monastery bell calling the brothers to their Offices before Dawn: "Come quickly and softly, Brother Leo and Brother Egidio; slip into your sandals and tie your cord; Brother Bentivoglia, Brother Currado. Brother Giovanio will read Bonaventure's Meditations on the Wounds in the feet of Christ; and Brother Masseo will repeat his own Response on Peter's Second Denial. Come quickly so as to save the candle-light, for our allowance in candles is to be cut down." Then from further off - perhaps my loved Santa Maria in Grastexere. A grave infrequent note that would wake no sleeper but is as penetrating as rain. "Those of you who lie awake ... The forty days have begun ... what do they mean to you?... Those of you who lie awake ... these forty days ..." Nowhere is the profound middle of the night more significant than in Rome, the dust that stirs in the windowsill is of that strange grand race that had no nonsense about it; and of that later race all excess and studious nonsense. All about us are the Catacombs of the Martyrs, and if Heaven is interested in the bones of its saints there must be towards us a blaze of loving attentiveness. All over the city are shrines of Perpetual Adoration, and all night long the silent figures kneeling in almost importunate prayer, so that Sodom, that could be saved for five righteous men, is no name for Rome that makes holy living a contagion.

Today I received a great deal of money by wire, two thousand lire of which I have put in the safe keeping of the Academy trust; waiting accompanying instructions as to whether I am to start off to France with it or buy myself a few clothes to befit my station, or just hold it against my frugal needs. I am going to buy a pair of pajamas, however, for about seventy-five lire; for one of my suits has suddenly started to tear itself in a hundred places, and I sit up late at night and sew up as best I can the long vertical rents up my back and down the legs. But when it comes back from the wash the thing has been scrubbed to ribbons and repair must be done over. Four hundred lire I owe my generous unbeknown who helped me pay my January bill on February first and so walk by the office without assumed confidence. They have now changed my room from the Villino Bellacci to 31 in the real Academy overlooking the Cortile and within sound of another parlant fountain. Such a nice room though I have lost my dressing-room and bath of the first location, and my ascetic atmosphere of the second.

I love you all, above everything. Italy is a pictorial illusion, a crumbling fresco compared to the reality of your faces; and the orange tree and the broken statues in the gardens efface themselves before the bare trees, the frozen streams, and the impassable roads where I would love to be going today, returning from Doolittle's Ponds. Solove to all

Thornton

Jan 22 1921

Dear Father:-

I called day before yesterday at the Credito Italians, and
drew the 1571.45 that you sent me. Of this I owed:

Bill for December ( enclosed ) 554
Advanced by the Academy 250
Lent by Walter Abel 100
---
£ 904

and in attention several smaller sums, like ten lire for my dues toward
Monday tes, ditto to Marietta for pressing my trousers, etc.

But within a week the bill for January will be in. And it will
be more than 554 because room-rent has mounted from £7 to £10 - an in-
crease of 90 a month. What'll I do February first? put mysself in sub-
jection to this odious Da Vico-Wilkins combination again? Even though
I don't spend a centesmo these days ( and its almost too degrading to
expect me to live in Rome without incidentals; there are too many
people who like me and too many profitable occasions for me to go about
without haircuts, shoe-repairs, occasional museum-fees, and joining
groups at lunch in a downtown restaurant, to say nothing of unrivalled
musical and theatre opportunities, French magazines etc. I shall still
be unable to give them their approximate 650 for January.

I have signed out from the Academy for 2 1/2 days and am going
down to Anzio, about 28 miles from Rome on the seashore. to live(even
more cheaply than here) at a little Italian inn, read on the beach,
and get away from this wretched dull acadeny life. The table con-
versation is uniformly about drink, the hips of the artist models or the
price of overcoats; and although I love Rome, as though she were a per-
son, there is something waering about enjoying these beauties in a high
solitude. To whom can I communicate my pleasures of discovery and re-
cognition? These little East side painters and sculptors with their
limited talents; these Harvard architects with their conceit and phlegm?

Won't you let me go to Paris? I was never so restless and torn
between high ideas and peevish discontents. Anyway if you will only
send me twenty-five dollars it would swell in the exchange and let me
hold up my head in the halts. Seven hundred lire! But please bear in
mind March first, "those Ides of March remember, did not great Edmund
in Genius name? What villain lent him cash, that lent him cash, and not
for Genius? And shall we now- who place high hopes in me, yes, for pro-
ducing drams! - Shall we shall we now retrench our half a hundred ?
and shadow the golden hours of an Italian trip, for so much thrift as
may be taught me so? I'd rather be a dog and bay the moon than such
a Roman."

You know what I'm parodying; in the name of all the splendid
ghosts that walk Rome with equally grand lines in their mouths, please
forgive me my abject reduction to figures and appeals and let me come
out into the serener air of subsidy; I wouldn't ask it if I weren't
confident of the real economy of my living. Spare dignifyed yet ?

Love ( and shame that my letters to you must be this way )

Thornton

Academia Americana

Porta San Pancrazia,Rome

Feb 1,1921

Dear Papa:

I have been shamefully conscious all these last few weeks that you were just about to receive, or had received, an ugly-toned letter from me. I would give the world to recall it, especially now that your beautiful grave reply has come. Now I am conscious that you are receiving two more "financial" letters, not bad-spirited I hope, but violent and despairing- You see the date on my letter and will be glad to hear that I have paid my January bill with a little hlp form a discreet unexpected source, and can now live weeks and weeks without raising my voice. The whole original trouble lay in the fact that I did not realize that my mouthly Academy bill was 500 ( now 600) and that my original Express checks gave out soon after I arrived in Rome and could no longer eke out the transoceanic remittances. I think I have now learnt how not to spend life; and am out of danger of ever exhibiting myself in such a disgusting uncontrolled state as you've had to look at lately.

Just the same I'd like to go away from this crowd about Easter time. My two courses in Epigraphy and Roman Private Life will be finished by then, and I think the new one, Numismatics. They are full Post-Graduate School courses, and although I have groped, and scrambled and lagged behind the PhD fellow-students I think I can get the professors to sign a little document to the effect that I passed the courses.

Teas and dinners increase, and I hope it can be said that I have improved those opportunities too, but I would be glad to leave that. There is only one friend I shall greatly miss. The dim churches, the pines, the yellow sunlight you will see in my eyes for years - it doesn't matter when I leave them. I should like to leave for a week or two in Florence and the hill towns about the middle of April - Then up to Paris until sailing home in June, - either by the Fabre Line again from Marseilles or if I can find one cheaper from Northern France.

In imagination I can hear you quite clearly wondering why re-
proachfully why Thornton - in the middle of great natural beauties,
amid masterpieces, with a great deal of free time, well-housed and fed,
among friends - shouldn't at least be docile and simply grateful. My
only answer is that the very complexity of things flays one's peace of
mind to the point of torment, You are haunted by the great vistas of
learning to which you are unequal; continuous gazing at masterpieces
leaves you torn by ineffectual conflictings aspirations; the social
and cheap successes bring ( against this antique and Rennaisance back-
ground ) more immediate revulsions and satiety. A snowy walk in Mt.
Carmel, Mother's sewing and you with your pipe hold for me now all I
hold of order and peace. Your queer "aesthetic" over-cerebral son
may yet turn out to be your most fundamental New Englander and most
appreciative of the sentiment of group; when Amos and Charlotte have
set up independent, self-centered institutions, I shall turn out to be
a sort of male Cordelia!

Your enclosures give me the keenest pleasure. I miss only one
sort; the"Alumni" and newspaper reports of your recent speeches. I
am very pleased and proud of all these menu-cards and the letters that

Feb.1, 1921-2

come in to your I can't have too many of these, and am jealous of every
one you sort out into Amos' or Charlotte's mail: if I can't claim a
great part of the inheritance of your patience and sublime endurance
(virtues you have consigned to my light-haired fellows) I can at least
rush forward and stake out reflections of your animation and vitality
and (hear,ye Heavens!) your eloquence. You will always turn to find
my eyes bright with delight and admiration at your wit and charm, even
if I am occasionally (Oh, for the last time!?) thoughtless of your
sacrifices. And I can already see Amos and I, whithaired at the age
of eighty, disputing amicably as to which of us knew you best, Amos
who could not take his eyes off your labors, so beautifully and quietly
sustained, or I who was always after cajoling you into those moods of
quickness and inspiration that you were allowing to grow less frequent-
Either aspect alone could make the reputation of a great father, but
with both we have aright to feel a little bewildered and hide ourselves
from the responsibility of standing up to so much privilege and love.
Here I am a sort of Arthur Pendennis, breaking down in front of you,
and wishing old words unsaid and old silences forgotten, and remem-
bering you so intensely as you were when you came to Lichfield, or
to Mount Hermon, or to the Duttons. I hope this letter will get to
you at about your birthday and if you sit down on that day to think
us all over, I hope it may lift from my record some of the discredit
left there by my last three letters.

Much love

Thornton

Academia Americana
Rome.

Feb.25. 1921

Dear Father:

When I returned to the Academy yesterday evening after a day's wandering I was stopped by all my friends with the news that there had been a man hunting for me all day. A man from the Bank. With money. He had waited a long while, and had finally left it for me in the office. But, I thought to myself, I have just got two large installments from Father last week. I hoped that the extremity of appeal in my last letters had not moved you to conjuring still more money of an unyielding Possibly. How was I relieved this morning to find that this money had come for me in the end of December, but being directed to a Mr. Thornton ( the Italians always expect to read a name reversed, -retrograde like their Etruscan fathers ) at an American School, it had been finding its owner all this time. So those weeks when I lived on debts and stayed at home for fear of being forced to expend my last lire on so much as postage stamps, were in reality subsidized quite usually. and the envelope was circulating between the Embassy, the Consulate and the two American girls' schools, and the American Church.

My plan is to come back quite early summer, July perhaps, and to make this year after all, merely my Italian Journey. Unless I hear from you with advice to go up into France. I am going up to Florence next Monday for two weeks. Then back to Rome through Holy Week; then a few weeks at Assisi and Perugia, then ready to come home. Venice I may not get in at all, or will make it a footnote to Florence.

Doesn't this make things better; so that if my late penitence moved you to forgive what appeared to be my extravagance this further enlightenment removes even some of my extravagance?

When I arrive this summer in New York I shall stop in the United Plays office and see what they can offer me still. When I started work for them before they were surprised that I wanted to be paid by the piece instead of working by the week. Then I shall call on Mr. Canby, and at least get books to review, if not a weekly column, as he once suggested; and see of Mr. ______ will renew his offer that I do all important New York openings for him- an inovation for the Transcript. If these do not look promising, I know Clare Mendel can put me in a school, no questions asked.

I am going to be at a frightful disadvantage for some years, sheepish and put-upon, but when I am discovered things will be vulgarly resplendant; I vend a cake Americans will hug- it has none of the kid-crude enthusiasm of their Anspachers, the bad writing of Augustus Thomas. A literary conscious that takes care every moment, the artistic anxiety of the European with a new abundance and rage of America.

"Frightfully American", is the charge that the pictures and buildings of Rome shout at me, enviously, friendly.

love

Thornton

Assizi. March 3

Dear Family:

My happiness seems incredible; that nothing should exceed
one's greatest expectation; that every minute of my impassioned re-
turn to the Franciscan study should bear overwhelming fruit in this
long Umbrian valley, with its grey-green firs and grey-green mists
and its iron hill-towns; that after systematic training among the
primitives of the Perugian gallery I should be able to cope with and
rise to the almond eyes and groping gestures and impassioned gazing
in these frescoes of the Upper and Lower Churches.

The little hotel we are in -- clean ugly German affair with
a dinning room full of an English colonel and two maiden daughters,
some Norwegian girls and some American ladies on annuities, all soft
speaking -- is our reaction against the hotel we passes two days at
in Perygia; a hotel that tried for an air, with its salons and bur-
eaux and bell boys and turnstile front doors, and over all its re-
moseless tiptoeing pursuit of the tip and the "extra" lita and pro-
fessional ingratitation.

I am travelling with Bill Bissell of Farmington I told you
about. The last person to chose for a pilgrimage of course, but we
had planned some smaller week-end for a long time while and his
mother kept urging it, and the very point of the Franciscan idea
is that there is no discrimination in air or training or intelli-
gence, and that even spiritual adventurers are not reserved hieratic
sickbed functions, but experiences (?J.W.D.) astir with the same
air that courses with health and humor in the room of daily living.
So Bill and I have been having a more usual, not to say boisterous
time than I would have foreseen my visit here. Only at times his
argumentativeness and literalness and kiddishness get beyond my
patience and we have a quarrel of a long vindictive argument.

Perugia was rich; my only regret is that not travelling alone
I was unable to get more snatched conversations alone with citizens
in my new painful Italian. Bill, being so young and touchy and dependent
couldn't possibly be sent sightseeing half a day to himself even though
I threw paroxysms of tact in suggesting it/ Today, however, I will
say he went for a long walk on the Monte Subasio and left me to watch
a complicated funeral service in the darkening Lower Church and all
those earnest-faced Franciscan monks in the light of the candles
intoning the psalms.

I wish you could be seeing this beautiful countryside again
with me, Mother. I try to imagine you and Mrs. Hobart Johnson wal-
king down the Square at Perugia fifteen years ago and I barely get
the two goodlooking girls imagined than I lose it again. Why di-
dn't you get yourselves photograped against the fountain emerging
from Municipio with the reflection of that heavenly Fra Angelico
in your eyes.

Going back to Rome Sunday, - six day trip. A bientot. Love,

Thorny

( J.W.D.'S note: This letter was copied from a copy probably by
A.P.W. from the original, I have not seen the original )

March 10, 1921

My darling Mother:

Of course you have a right to " call us down", but our
delight in all the manifestations of your mercurial self is so keen
that we run in danger of losing the moral. When I came back from my
Umbrian week and found your elegant little letters with its almost
concealed paragraph of protest, I felt very rueful and chastened, of
course, but I was wickedly in love with the rod that was brandished
with such gentle ire. The first result was that I attached my poor
play that has been lying all these months in a state of perpetual
rewriting. Two acts ( of four) are now absolutely finished and - with
you in mind - I am going to pull my sketches of the remaining two to-
gether, and finish it. The next thing I did was to announce next
Wednesday afternoon as the occasion of its Public Reading. The thing
in its unfinished state has already been read aloud to the Stevens,
the Wilkins, and lots of ladies about here. Everybody professes to
be thrilled and fascinated by its rather exciting subject-matter;
" they can't wait to hear how it ends ". So Wednesday afternoon late,
March 16, Villa Rhabani, will be finished and exhibited. Then, what's
more to the point, I am going to wrap it up for mailing and give it
to one of our faculty wives who is returning to America the following
Saturday. This Mrs. McGoffin promises to mail it to you from New York
at the day of her landing.

I don't know how you'll like it. It's about my American mi-
lionairess at Capri with her fatal disease, who falls into the toils
of a beautiful Italian adventurer. Au fond there seems to be much in
(it) of Wings of a Dove" and your anecdote of the Dobbs girl who be-
came infatuated with the Neapolitan boatman. The play is a long hymn
of love, Profane love, of course, most pagan. It fairly limps along
until it comes to a love-scene, Helen and Dario, or the Baroness and
Dario, and then it develops some of the most exquisite and tender con-
versations ...etc. Strange to say Flora Hypatia Story and Mrs. Helen
Darrall have much in common, they are both more in love than beloved,
they are both deceived, and find the same resource. But they both have
that inner beauty and simplicity; and Helen's adorable frankness is
something quite new in the psychology of women, at least as you find
it in the portrait galleries of Pinero, Bataille, Porto-Rich etc.

But I've wandered away from my accounting to you. You are per-
fectly right about my carrying tea-going to a limit. I had already
begun to wean myself away, and the ladies had already begun to hunt
for more decorative material. Now that the chapter is closed wherein
Five O'Clock compliments amounted almost to a vice, we might say -in
obituary- that I never paid a more than languid attention to the girls-
though half the invitations came in the form of " Oh, Mr. Wilder, I
have some charming American girls staying with me next week, won't
you ....?" It was the blackwardly old women I was after, with their
malicious stories, and their wise disillusioned comments and their be-
mused pseudo-motherly conversion to my ingenuousness. And if they *
weren't game old reprobates like that, they were refined stiff cold
Englishwomen with platitudes in their mouths - and so. It was an
awful waste of time, you're right as always ( I didn't even get much
from it to write up ) but I do want(to) refute the charge that it was ex-
pensive. It didn't cost even one necktie, for I think the old birds
rather liked the fact that the awfully attentive tireless flattering

March 10, 1921-2

Mr. Wildermans wasn't like their own sons) so perfect and shiny and elegant
And weren't other people paying for your tea and pastries, and an occasional lunch and dinner?

Besides I find to my joy that those weeks when my funds were
so low were not due to my extravagance ( though I was ready to believe it, and was mortified and brokenly penitent) but to the fact
that the check from Father covering the period, was hunting for me all
over Rome under the name of Mr. W. Thornton. The Italians in a business document always reverse the names as they do on a theatrical poster, Miss Adams Maudé, Mr. P. Lyon William. I got the check about two
months after I had received some dazzling remittances from Father and
was facing the world with an honest face again.

I never dreamed that you and Isabel had a regard for picture
postcards, but on your hint I am sending off a few to you. Very soon
I will begin mailing some books home too, and you will be shocked at
the number of them, only remeemb that most of the French ones are the
gift of Miss Perroglou, who gives them because she wants to see them
fect on my mind and character, and swears that she has duplicates of
them all back in her library at Athens. And all the German books, but
one were sent me by the son of the Jewish profit I met at the Com-
cumella, from Frankfort-am-Main.

If I hear from you encouraging me to go up into France, I
will be able to gladden your heart with the confirmed rumor that the
French Gov't has done away with the passport tax, which was ten dollars. I am discussing this trip with Father, too, and the burden of
my case is that he is to feel sure that if it is too great a sacrifice
at this time, Isshall not feel the loss at all, having been perfectly
happy in my Italian year, happy beyond all thought of other countries,
unvisited, in fact almost angry at any other land that dares to put
in a claim against or above Italy. Italians here joke me about my
partisanship, telling me that there isn't a drop of Angl-Saxon in me
anyway, that my rapid changes of mood, my nervousness, my high spirits,
my rapid speech and gestures disclose me an anima naturalita italica,
and only my sodden walk and portentous spectacles show in me the forestiere.

Tell me the news first thing about Isabel's novel. Could I
dramatize it with her? She must have begun another by now and is suffering the experience of spurning the old and exulting in the new. Let
there me some MSS for me to read when I get back.

The ladies ( faculty) keep showing each other great bargains
in embroidered linen; do you want a bureau slip or table cover, Sicilian point work quite beautiful for twenty lire? Or some collar and
cuff sets for less. I don't dare get them without instruction and be
reviled later for expense and bad taste! Instruct me quick. Your
scolds you see are very good for me; you are perfectly right in everything; je l'avoue

love, love, love

Thornton

Accademia Americana Roma

March 21, 1921

Dear Pape,

I found your long letter of Febr. 11-13 waiting for me when I got back from Perugia and Assisi, along with letters from Mother, Amos and Charlotte. Your list of remittances sent checks up exactly now that the roaming check has found me. I have no memorandum of each check as it came, but each one of the four (two came the same day) is identified with certain crisis it was able to relieve, in a very lively way! From now on I shall keep a strict notation. (This"from now on " reminds me of a popular Italian catchphrase. Procrastination and good intentions deferred are a national vive, as in all Southern countries, and the Italian quick and unsentimental in self analysis, quoye mockingly "la vita commincia domani"- "Yes, yes, life begins tomorrow!")

I refuse, my dear patron, to take any of the responsibility of asking for a return through France. As I have said: it was not so nominated in the bond: it is an adjunct but not an indispensable element of my pleasure in my Italian year, and there wouldn'tbbe the slightest sense of incompleteness or reproach should we forego it. If I get rumors of your so desiring this trip for me that you are tossing the whole foundation of the Wilder Gens into a meat-grinder for producing the Golden Sausage of Solvency I shall veil my face and sit still. I want you to be more judicious than kind; the passes of the Alps, the crowd on the Linden, the very spires of Oxford, I would resist to visit if the milage is deducted from your lunches and conveniences and new clothes. I am happy in Italian, and if those qualities have not been added to me that you sent me to Europe for, by my happiness here, no amount of eager gazing-about and applying historic quotations further can add them to me.

So do not be distressed on second thoughts to limit my stay. But if without tightening to anguish the bonds of substance about you you can project with me such a return, I am ready any day to pick up my suitcase and go, third class to Florence, and thence by night-flittings and a handful of olives imperceptibly North. The only thing I should like to ask is that most of the money should be with me in, say, express-checks when I start, so I do not find myself arriving in Paris or London and calling at the appointed Agent for a check that sank in the Atlantic or was mispelt in cabling. Here in Rome through thick and thin I have had the administration of the Academy ( however unpleasant :) that I could borrow from in extremis and food and board continuing automatically, but the silent reproach of a Swiss or French or Cockney lodgings-lady or the expostulations of the hotel -, I shudder.

I promise to travel with great economy; ( There are the seeds of extravagance in me as Mother noted, but it is not in expenditure on indulgence - I am so far indifferent to rich dinners and thick beds-but that of pleasing and being able to accompany friends,- the temptation only arises with the social setting.) But to go provisioned as though for inexplicable sudden panicky contingencies.-expectation of which is wrought into the nature of my mind, and as individual and dramatist figures in my weltanschauung. Very likely this desire to

March 21, 1921 - 2

have so large amount of travel-expense in hand at the start, brings
more clearly home the impracticability of trying the whole venture.
Remember, if it's a decision you have to make with groans and re-
sorting to ultimate long-deferred last-resources, I think best not.

In the meantime the littler wants are supplied. I am back from
my trip and some bills of sewing with little less than a thousand lire.
Something over 600 of this pays my bill at the end of this month.
The remainder carries me over until the end of April when I will be
looking for something to pay that bill, and perhaps the installment
on my ticket home. Theodore Wilder is coming to Rome day after to-
morrow; I am finding him a room, a desperate task.

I am (at) a loss to furnish estimates for travelling. A cheap
Florentine pension is 25 lire a day. An average meal 6-7 lire. Mifage
to Florence 3rd Cl about 70 lire; in France a little less in Francs^
but more in-exchange of course per exchange.- The thing that attracts
me north more than architecture or galleries or mountains or birth-
places is streetscenes and languages. I have a passion for languages,
and despair, of course!

Lots of love, and ____ acknowledgement of your long fine
letter.

Thornton

The bills for sewing means that the seamstress of the Academy, makes
us underwaer and pajamas ( buying cloth and copying our models ) at
about 1/4 American prices.

Accademia American Roma

March 21, 1921

Dear Mother:

Who do you think my new friends are? Mrs and Mrs, Kenneth Craghame - of " The Golden Age" and "Pagan Papers" a large red English face with a roaming blue eye, shocks of long white hair with a great hand to stroke them; an elderly bright gone-talkative wife wearing knitted sweaters and bonnets and mufflers. They are in Italy - one hears-avoiding England where their only son, about twenty, six feet tall was run over a year ago! a crossing of the trains. The story was told me by a silly woman whose nuance of insinuation was: the only thing they have to go on is that he was shortsighted. They are a dear de-vasted people, who are out to tea everywhere, I think he goes because he thinks it distracts her mind, and she goes because she thinks it preoccupies his attention. There is so little about him still that speaks the author of those chapters the Roman Road or the Olympians - or " The Wind in the Willows"- a fancy as light and permanent as Lamb-but I take it on faith and I talk to the blue eye that occasionally brightens. Anyway they keep urging me to come in- The new Trastevere-Piazza di Spragna bus, they remind me leaves me no excuse for staying away- I lend him a book from our library and that reminds his wife im-mediately, that that will soon bring me back to fetch it. And soon we are going for a walk on the Campagna together. Do get Janet out "The Wind in the Willows" in token of this new fortune.

As for Marie van Vorst Cagiati our acquaintanced languished
for a while, when she had twice changed the day and hour of our great
rendezvous over Villa Rhabani, I suddenly found myself unavoidably
forced to change it again. She murmured to herself: imitation is the
sincerest form of insult, and weeks went by and in spite of my mol-
lifying note I heard nothing. Suddenly I am visited with a letter
and invitation both in the same mail. I enclose the letter for Isa-
bel's autograph collection- or was it Charlotte's? She used to belong
to a group that actually produced *p*alys, and she can be frightfully
valuable to me, as Becky Sharp would say. This letter took two weeks
coming through the Roman mail so I was unable to take Mr. Smith, but
I have now a card for March 30, a precautionary three weeks in advance!

As for my MSS - of course you knew something would happen to
break up all those good intentions - the sailings of Mrs. McGoffin's
boat has been postponed until April 2- so I took more time to finish
off the text so it isn't still lying about in chunks and showing towards
the end I fear evidences of hasty composition.

Did I tell you about our trip to Horace's Farm and tea under
the Temple of the Sybil and the falls that cured Maecenas' insomnia
and never failed to stimulate Horace stylus. Horace's (supposed)
farm- there are a dozen that claim the title- is way up in the Sabine
Hills by the rushing Arno, so beautiful and atmospheric that our hi-
deous camion full of twenty spectacled travellers, high-school teachers
most of us- full of our mental attitude that Latin is a dead but
teachable language and Horace a witty but manageable old bird made
the angels weep. The bundle of qualities that would lead you to the
most sympathetic insight in the life of antiquity is the very selection
that would repel you from burying your young life in the alcoves of
acholastic equipment. And vise versa. At intervals of tire-trouble
Miss Elizabeth Haight, head of the Latin Dept. would rise from her
seat and give us sympathetic little talks on the Heration associations;

March 21, 1921 -2

only here efforts to be literary and charming were so ambitious that
she floundered in; no one else noticed this.

I got such a lovely letter from Charlotte the other day. I couldn't help wondering who has been being so good to her that she should be so good to me. She wants me badly to come and see her and says she is buying clothes expressly for my visit.

Suddenly my pajamas and underwear have started going to shred
and our Accademia sarta has been making new, coving my models -
very nice work, I think, although Italian shoe-repairing is ghastly, the
leather peeling off like flaked pastry.

Although following our new ruling I have cut down on teas, I accepted for dinner the other night. The Prefect of Rome was there and I sat next to his wife, nice talkative little soul, generally regarded as "not" grand"enough for her position. I hope she sends me specially bids for the Vatican functions of Holy Week. Or asks me to meet Benedetto Croce.

I was at the meeting of the Pontifical Archaeological Society the other day when Herr Dr. Amelung announced to the world the discovery of the lost head of Discobolus, in the basement of the Vatican, the proper head of the Boy Plucking the Thorn out of his Foot, a bit of the Parthenon Frieze, and a new good copy of the Aridian Venus.

More soon and love to all

Thornton

Accad. Amer. April 7,1921

Dear Mother:

It seems as though I must write you a series of letters des-
cribing the pleasure I take in the gardens of the Villa Pamphili.
Yesterday morning even by ten o'clock the air was warm with a touch
of spring unquiet in it, the knolls were blue and white with wild-
flowers and the shadows of the pinetrees so profound and misty that
one could scarcely see under the shepard boys sitting circles-wise and
playing molo. I was carrying George Moore's Héloïse and Abélard, a
long grave narrative conducted in an undertone en sorduie. He has
begun to lose in vitality, but he gains in sweetness, a style without
emphases, dangerous for commencing writers. I must commemorate this
happy morning with some such note as this before it is forgotten, or
faded undistinguishably into the warp or woof of my inertia.

Now I must get up and go down to my Blessed Santa Maria Tra-
atevere. There is a memorial mass this morning for Card. Gibbons
whose titular church it was. The choir of the Capella Paolina (St.
Peter's) will sing, and I must learn to find my way in the Breviary
through Requems and everything. The great thing my Italian trip lacks
is: that I cannot take one of youI love so through these great dim
golden churches. All this ground that is so treasurable to me I
must tread day by day alone, or with indifferent or stupid people.

There is in town a Mrs. Jackson, foster mother of the Academy
in that she heads a Boston committee for collecting our subsidy. She
is very savante having chosen for detailed study a certain hundred
years in the history of Naples. She has been very nice to me and when
I read her my play ( 2 acts ) she was deeply interested. She became
aware lately that there was another act written and the whole recast
and begged me to come and read it to a friend of hers. This friend
Signora De Bosis, is the wife of a prominent Italian man of letters,
Italy's standard translator of Shelley, for example. There is a large
family living in an old house an hour from Rome on plain living and
high thinking. I had met one of the daughters, a sort of Charlotte,
awkward, intellectual, plainer than C., a student of Arabic, Aramaic
and so on, and precently (?) I met one of the sons, elegante, deli-
cately nurtured mustachioed, only nineteen, but conversant even pas-
sioné over higher philosophies, anxious to know if I accepted so-and-
so's pluralism, or clung to the Neo-Hegelian realism; urging me to
read Plato with a small group of his in the Greek. The mother too is
stern stuff. The family has known D'Annunzio since his youth, Duse
is an old friend, and Bossi and Benedette Groce and Layson and Casella
are to be found often at the end of the long pine alley that removes
the De Bossis from the more superficial stream of Roman life.

It seems that years ago when American Rome was all in the stu-
dios and not in the Palaces when Storey and Elihu Vedder were putting
a talent into their work and agenius into their living, there lived an
American sculpture Ezekiel. He had a vast studio in the baths of Dio-
cletian where the Terme Museum is now. For twenty five or thirty years
everybody interesting in Rome went there at least one night a week.
They were great days. Liszt and Joachim and Fay Davis and Bossi played

April 7, 1921-2

to his informal requests as they never played in concert; poets and dramatists recited and artists exhibited. Finally at the 50th Anni. of Italian Unity the government decided to turn the Baths of Diocletian into the large permanent museum it is now. Bureaucratic Home was overturned in an attempt to allow Ezekial to keep his studio but in vain. The government begged him to ask for another place in the whole city. And finally he and Sig, and Mrs. De Bossis ( whom he always regarded as son and daughter ) found a little suite actually in the wall of Home, close to the Puician Gate. It was very tiny, but it was reminiscently cold and damp and antique, so some of the brocades and herms (?) and watercolours were moved, and the new studio was opened. He didn't live long to enjoy or regreat the move, and in dying left the key to his beloved fosterchildren. And it was in this studio, seldom opened, that I was invited ( if the day was sunny ) to read. There were three bright-eyed intellectual De Boses, a Mrs. Taylor and Mrs. Jackson. Che placere! There was a white-lower cake and tea.- I am going to lunch at the BeB's Sunday and will tell more next time

love

Thornton

Accad. Ameri. April 13, 1921

Dear Family:

If any more friends come to Rome, or strangers recommended
by friends, I shall turn a bear. It's a matter of course that for
weeks before and after Holy Week Rome is full to bursting, unpro-
vided visitors have been known to return to Florence the same night
because it is more respectable to pass the night sleeping upright in
a train than sleeping upright in a station; wealthy and esteemed gentle-
men, it is said, have been known to sleep in the Colosseum those days;
and Dukes and Oxford Dons pass the nights in the elevators of the
Hotel Excelsior. Then think of me with a peculiar reputation-left
over from last Xmas- for finding rooms in a city "completa", me
being descended upon by dozens with the gentle trust that I will find
them clean, sunny, fresh, cheap rooms from Holy Thursday to Sunday's "in
Albis". Theodore Wilder came, Mrs. McDaniel's approached me for a certain
Mr. Chase; two more Oxford boys; The Kenneth Grahames brought some
babes-in-the-wood named Purvis, of Philadelphia. I found places for
them, very hasty and provisional: no amount of tourists' sufferings were
going to rob me of the magnificent functions that were going forward
in my dearer churches. Easter Monday we reshuffled them, ttok them out
of bathrooms and hotel cloakrooms and found them more likely quarters.
I have been brought up by Father and the Ministers to believe ( without)
enthusiasm oneself out for the convenience of others is a sweet and
warming office, wins one the regard of those benefited and in one's self
a silent contentment. But I now charge the Fathers of the Church (and
it is an echo of Nietzsche's criticism of Christianity) to set off a
dignified and an undignified kindess. Most people have secret con-
tempt for the busy friend who does them great favors free; they see him
spending a whole morning tearing about on trams and a whole afternoon
taking them to a located diggings ("he has nothing else to do".) In ore
der to prevent them thanking him he maintains a flow of high spirits
and indicates many rich and curious associations along the way ("ner-
vous eccentric fellow") Tells them where they may assist at some of the
great services; showing them little restauants in their nieighborhood;
argues with the Padrona about an immediate disposition of their laundry;
invites them to dinner at the American Academy - and then comes: "Oh,
Wilder, there are two boys we met in Florence whom we've met again at
Cook's and we told 'em that you'd probably be able to find some rooms
for 'em,- nothing special, see, only fairly cheap and near the station,
and -".

But, mind you, when I find them a fifteen lire room ( cheap, now)
they run off to the Vipia or Marinese and get a forty lire dinner and
pay thrifty lire at the Opera and bring home a twenty-five lire bottle of
Champagne - and the only human beings I can ever fancy myself loving
again are you - who have done so many sweet unrecognized things for me-

Thornton

Accad. Americana

Roma: April 13, 1921

Dear Mother:

I have just sent off letters to Father and Amos, and feel so virtuous that I must write you too. I left you after my last hung up in suspense over my luncheon at the De Bosis. It fell out almost as I had anticipated, only twice as delightful. The reddish-yellow villa, hung with flowering wisteria at the end of a long avenue of trees; choked garden plots with various statues of Ezekial glimpsed through foliage; the rooms of the house furnished in rather ugly Victorian manner - all modern Italian taste in music and art being deplorable, perhaps because they are so discriminating in literature. Some guests, a young Englishman named James; Miss Steinman; the young Marchese di Viti whose sisters I had met, a beautiful discreet medical student. Signor de Bosis himself has a sort of abstracted gentle humorous air, silent, that sits agreeably upon one having so many over-intelligent children doesn't have to descend into the arena of conversation very often, and then only to kill. These days -perhaps I told you - he is revising his verse translation of Shelley's The Cenci for immediate performance by Italy's formmost company now in Rome. He is one of the best Italian poets ( conservative) and as such made an address in the Protestant Cemetery on the anniversary of Keat's death last month. ( Upstairs he showed me his recent discovery of the meaning of the first two lines of the Epipsychidion, and if you turn to the lines you will be glad to find that the Emilia Vivians' sister spirit is not ( as she herself though and Ed. Garnett ) Mary Wollenflock craft (????), but Shelley who puns here on his name Percy -in Italian "lost" - as Signor De B. found in a few casual lines where Shelley had begun translating his poem into Italian.

At table things went merrily in and out of both languages. Lauro -my friend- and the Arabic-Aramaic sister I admire, so began my throwing at each other in latin and from memory the ridiculous list of books which Rabelais says Pantagruel found at the library of Saint-Victor.

April 14, 1921

I went with some of them last night to the last Symphony Concert conducted by Arthur Nikisch; the program was "popularissimno" Beethoven's Egmont and 5th; Lohengrin and Tristan and Tannhauser Overtures and the Liebstod, but I have never heard such conducting in my life.

Signor de Bosis has sent me a book of his verses inscribed.

I have found an Italian playwrite whose plays I adore, the Sicilian Luigi Pirandello. Philosophical farces, actually, -strange contorted domestic situations illustrating some metaphysical pro-position with one eccentric raissoneur in the caste to point out the strangely suggestive implications of the action. The very titles evoke an idea of his method: " Se Non Così" "Così è" (se vi pare)" "Il Piacere dell' Onesta" " Ma non è" una cosa seria."

One of our boys here is developing such serious hallucinations that he may have to be treated for madness. He is insanely in love with a lady more clever than considerate, and although she is away fancies her arrival momentarily, prepares imaginary teas under the

April 13-14,1921-2

delusion that she is arriving, rushes out as each street car
climbs the hill. He fancies also that she is just around the corner
but refuses to come in, that she stands evening-long under the arc
light opposite gazing at his window, or prowling about the iron fence
of the Villino Bellacci. By an impossible chain of logic he fancies
me in league with her, dictating letters for her to have smiled
from Sienna ( where she is in fact) while she obscurely fixes her
gaze upon him in Rome. I no longer try to reasin with him;
( as Freud will tell you ) the idee fixe is only aggravated by con-
tradiction. The woman is a pure adventuress, - like the woman in
my play strangely anough, a Bohemian countess.

I had myself a strange little sentimental experience that made
concrete the warnings that Continental women however impersonal,
comraddy and full of goodsense they seem, cannot understand friendship
that is without romantic concomittants, cannot, cannot. Queer!

Love

Thornton

Accad. Americ. Roma

May 1, 1921

Dear Family:

I have received my sailing orders to go North and I expect the bank will notify me tomorrow that the money has arrived. It's quite a pull to live Rome, my friends, my dear room and all these books. I shall try and get away in a little less than two weeks. I have to finish my little paper on the Mechanical Devices of the Pompeian Stage (an invaluable brochure compiled from hundreds of books in all languages, with all the contemptible camifages of professional archaeology) and look into passports etc. Then I will go for a week and a half to Florence, where the Bissells will insist on my staying at their villa. It will mean dressing for dinner every evening etc., but I know them well enough to sightsee all day alone without thier feeling anxiously that they are lacking in duty. I shall probably go to Sienne in their motorcar too, so you see - Then a day or two with Charlotte, and a standup two nights in the train to Paris. A funny little recommended hotel, passionate study of French at the Vieux-Columbier, a search for Bruce Simmonds, but an avoidance of Steve Benet, a patriotic seeking out for Italians and Italian restaurants - even there, Oh Italy! -

I interrupt my letter (the same evening) to describe some of the events of the day. May Day is the pressure point for socialistic outbreak in Italy but today I have heard of no attempts at violence except those in the American Academy on me. In my last letter under the rose, I told you about the mental derangement of our friend Rolfe of Ansonia. He's been getting a little bit worse and Abel is bringing him home on May 10th. Until then he wanders about smiting the piano strawinskily, and developing certain passionate antagonisms. He fancied Cesare, our headwaiter was poisoning his coffee. He suddenly called the luncheon table to order, and leaning over towards me with purple face, cried: Wilder, come out in the open. I saw you following me at the morning. And you Cecere, stop taking cigarettes out of my pocket. See? Then a little later: Look here, Griswold, Wilder, and Keach, Mr Stevens gave me power to tell you you can leave the Academy. You can get your things and go today. I am his special aversian, and there is no recrimination for anyone else in which I am not presently included. His glances and his remarks keep returning to me, and I - unable to "kid" him back, infuriate him more by my indifferent silence. He fancies me the successful rival, you remember, of his Contessa Palo, though now he never mentions her. Early this afternoon I heard he was in the common-room exhorting Bryan, Abel and Blanke to throw me into the Tiber. His mind-like that of all depressed Romans - is always returning to the Tiber and the astonishing number of people that throw themselves into it every month, it's depth and it's swiftness. Bryan Abel and Blanke must have appeared unresponsive for presently he found me out in the Periodical Room quietly reading. He is followed everywhere by his little cat-like guard or a trained-nurse, but they do not like to cross him much in his vagueries, because it increases his obstinacy. They stood at the door together and with inflamed eyes Rolfe warned me: "You're going into the Tiber this afternoon, see. This is no joke!" He then went back to where the boys were gathering for tea, gave almost all of them permission to pack their trunks and go, and retired into a deep chair to smoulder long hymns of hate.

May 1, 1921 -2

Monday morning

Ce
Cecere knocked at my door and whispered that Rolfe had come
up from the Bellacci and was hunting the very lives of Finkler,
Leon Keach and me, and advised me to go to the dining-room through
the kitchen since Rolfe was laying for us in the common-room.

Yesterday seemed so strange. No cars or cabs ran, few auto-
mobiles were out. Rome seemed a great quiet Italian village. The
streets up the Janicola were black with families climbing up to en-
joy the parks. Since I was de trop at the Academy I went downtown
and attended a symphoy concert, conducted at the Augustee by Fere
ruccio Busoni the great pianist. I went high up into the Antifestro
for exactly 8 and 1/2 lire. A stunning Second Symphony by Sibelius.

I am at the Library today, laboriously breasting the waves
of redundant jargon that sweep a subject of which so little is known
that only ninnies would discuss it. The archeological architects
draw up "restorations" of the stage of a certain Greek theatre set for
a specified play- Their designs are based on special research and
long study - and the results are as different as Poli's Palace set for
an acrobat and Shubert's Theatre set for The Trumpet Shall Sound. I
fear my little chef-d'oeuvre will be more a malicious discursus on
learned methods that ( as it should be) an example of elaborate
quesswork delivered in a tone of violent assurance with a wealth
of misleading footnote references as bolster.

To my panic Mother says nothing of the English trip in her
letter and I won't be happy in America - I exaggerate - unless you are
happy in England. Go, then, if only for Janet's sake, that great miracle
of sweetness and intelligence that with concentrated effort we are
launching out into a world where radiant dispositions are rare. For
Amos' sake, that he may - paramount importance for his work - become
accustomed to inviting to tea or sald supper, various sympathetic
men and women, the habit of hospitality. For your sakes, twin
Isabels, accept suddenly this opportunity to live among charming
people with subdued voices and refined religious cultivated tastes.

Write me now c/o American Express Co. Rue Scribe, Paris
(Adstt Onen)

Love to all

Thornybush

Accademia Americans. Roma

May 10, 1921

Dear Family:

I have received these letters three thousand seventy three, centesimi seventy five. It came just in time to pay for some of the bill I am enclosing (The red-ink warning was found on every boy's bill and is not a personal direction to me).

So now I must arise and go. And just as I assemble my things and revisit my favorite shrines and whispering galleries, I become suddenly aware that it is of all times the most injudious to leave Rome. I have been saying for months that I stand just on the verge of knowing Italian, -false dawns, they were; now, now it is that I enter the delicious airs of that plesaunce. Night before last I went to the theatre to see an exquisite comedy, ("Un Sogno d'un Notte d'Augusto" from the Spanish of Martinez Serra) and I found myself understanding everything, even the jokes; to understand high comedy blague in a foreign language is very nearly to have been born intotit.

There are other aspects of Roman life, too, in which I seem to be mounting with Cortez through the brambles of the hill beyond which lies a Pacific. Let me describe two teas.

On the Providence was a plain clever little woman, Mrs. McCormick of Dayton. She was travelling with her husband a genial business man who must once have played splendid football, and now quite contentedly lets Anne support the brains of the partnership. Several years ago in a national election, Ohio politicians were taking an important part and she happened to know the half-dozen of them personally. On a impulse she sent a series of sketches to the Saturday Evening Post. They were published with all the evidences of success, controversy, contradiction and insulting retort, and she has rested from her labors. Now again, on this trip abroad, it has occurred to her to describe what she sees, and her papers have been appearing in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, "The European Capitais by night," French Women at Work" and in the Atlantic Monthly a study of "Corsica". They are what they are, since, after all, she is no more that what she is. But she's a gifted person at a tea; I'll hand it to her. Well, she asked afew people to the Hotel Regina*Carlton, the other afternoon. There was Mrs. Lee-Smith; a handsome blonde English giantess. who says she has a son thirty-three years old, which is absurd. She is a sister of Mrs. Strong, the sybil of the British School, whose archaeological books, popular and scholarly are everyone's quide through the distressing ennuies of forum and Palatine. There was the Princess Yusupoff- one of our Russian refugees, whom I had already met at the Countess Faersen's; and her friend a Madame M- This Princess, white-haired and with one of the sweetest faces one could wear without compromising one's air of unapproachable high birth. It was her son who killed the arch fiend Rasputin at that treacherous banquet to the glory of Russia. They shot at him five times, and while he seemed unhurt a religious terror fell upon them that he was divinely shielded, and defying even a protecting divinity, they emptied their repeating revolvers and riddled his body with bullets. The Princess was not impoverished, like our other friends, and Mr. Wilkins - who has even more than I the soul of a lackey * mentioned the other day that she was one of the

May 10, 1921-2

great swells of Europe." Mrs. Gay was there ( How many times must I
tell you that of the seven heavens of Anglo-American society in
Rome, the Empyrean is held by three ladies, Mrs. Hurlburt, Mrs. Wurts
and Mrs. Gay. There is the primum mobile ) there was a Mrs. McClure
publicity secretary for British Embassies of the Mediterranean, or
something like that, a huge man, ( afflicted ( Ishudder) with that
giantism, that from the lair of the pineal pituitary body ruled
Beethoven and Dr. Johnson.) And a charming little English lady, Mrs.
Lancelot Wood, with a bright little pursed up face, slightly Mongolian.
Mrs. McCormick was making the frightful social blunder in Rome of
mixing herabsets. Mrs. Gay noticed it at once, and raised her head
as a house purchaser sniffling suspiciously for sewage drainage;
however the arrival of the Princess sweetened the air, and with the
very hem of her celestial garments even Mrs. Wood and I were clothed.
I found myself ( sinking a fork into a great meringue pastries )
between the Princess and Mrs. Lancelot. A vague awkward chair hovered
behind me under the tree-ferns, Distinctly an impractical chair. But
one saw in Mrs. Lee-Smith's eye the light which only crown-jewels
resemble, she was about to kove Heaven and Hell to sit in that chair
and warm her hungry hands at the fire of unshakable position. For a
moment one had the impression of mountain-climbing; she bestrode the
tea-tables, she lifted great boots over intervening knees ( her socks
are woolen ). She won, and the memory of her triumph was still in our
ears when left alone afterwards with our hostess she drawled: " I love
Russians. And the Princess is so kind and sweet; there isn't a touch
of snobbishness about her .... she's as simpe as any of us ... "

There is a stage arrived at in Roman teas when guests are seen
unobstrusively exchanging cards, and a little murmur arises " could
you come in Friday afternoon ..... just a few friends ... ?"
Fountain pens are borrowed, and addresses are pencilled.

(Continuation follows in another envelope)

Friday the thirteenth
I had no space ( dear Family) at the end of my last letter to apol-
Ogize for writing at such length; and if I am spared to mail this with-
in a few days, I shall be embarrassing you, not only with extent, but
with frequency. There comes a stage in the relations between a protegé
and his patrons ( whether they be of his own family, or of a more in-
timate connection) when a brisk correspondence may be considered as
the expression of a finer form of gratitude/ Should you be resentful
still, delicately may I remind you that in an economical age the bye-
products of a literary correspondence are curlpapers and spills? I my
last I had begun to ennunerate the specific regrets I entertained at
the thought of leaving Rome. I was not specific enough. I might have
added my regrets at lwaving my high white fountain-echoing room; my
hours of passionate reding; my mode of life, so conducive to literary
composition. The half had not been told you; and there remained seven
halves. I am in love with an Italian lady, with Virginia De Bosis.
With her amzing mind, I must add, so difficult and complex that to d
discover it at all is ungalantly to have embarrassed her. Come, Paris!

Thornton