PENSIÓN LONDON

PELAYO, 62, 2.º, 1.ª

TELÉFONO 12801

BARCELONA

Oct. 31, 1932

Dear Bill:

Too many tourists and Am. bars were arriving in Palma, so I came here to spend the winter, and have a fine place for work, at little expense. If a new Contact is out, have copies sent me here.

Might get my novel on Carnevali, 'Too Quick for Life' and see what you think of it, and if Contact is going on, use it, cont'd. Mexican Interval is out in the Crosby Editions in Paris along with other things and I'll try getting through a copy to you. Also might see if the Dragon(?) press (the one you did your 'Knife of the Times') would do too qyucik for life. In any case I end it sooner, or completely redo the last third, leaving out the character which is me completely. End it on Fortuno Carraciali's arrival and rhapsody in and on Italy. (Ms. at 'Virginia Rice' 18 East. 41st St.)

I haven't seen a copy of Pagany for a year, and don't hear from or of Johns. Is he annoyed about Contact? If you see him and he isn't, tell him to send me the last several copies of Pagany, the above address. If he is, it doesn't matter.

K A Porter has T B and doesn't get into a state of mind to polish up any story. She's in a hell of a state. I liked her *Xxx* 'Cracked Mirror' which came out in Scribner's, and sorry it didn't get the prize, along with John Herrman, rather than Tom Woolf. She had more sensitive qualities and originality and reality.

Hope you're all well. Best to Florence. I have been listless, but this town is

Lloyds Bank,
43 Blvd des Capucines,
Paris France Jan. 9/39

Dear Bill:

Use the bank address. I think I will stay where I
am but someone is urging me to come to aix-en-provence and
the idea of sunlight may make me move, except that I am well
fired where I am.

Certainly everything I have ever heard of the Laura
Riding individual makes me think her pretentious, stupid, a
bitch, going in for being 'individual' temperamental, and
just too mad, you know. She was in Mallorca when I was there
and both she and her husband Robert Graves seemed to be bad
news, by report. However, if Time if proving her a POET
they certainly used poor examples of her work to prove it
by. She talks and writes about what poetry is, but does not
appear to produce any poetry. There are masses of the boys
and girls who write about what they think it is, but less who
produce it. In quoting the one of yours Time did you no
less justice than they did her --- except that I, knowing your
work --- could pick poems of yours to show your capacity to
evoke, to be passionate in a manner stirring to the emotions,
the intellect and the sensibilities, but whoever wrote the
review wanted to pick one of your slighter works. In the
same way they handled my 'Not Alone Lost', most of which, as
you know, were written years ago, not at all new work, as
Laughlin's blurb said. But they had me a Paris Exile of the
1920's, when the Plain Tales of the Open Prairie certainly
came thousands of miles and years before Paris ever occurred
to me, as did some of the Chinese influenced poems. It is
not these trick reviewers who finally place one.

Katherine Anne Porter, moving about restlessly and now
finally re-married to the Managing Edt. of The Southern Review
of the Univ. of La., Baton Rouge, says she failed to get you r
White Mule, and Blames herself for moving so much at the time.
She says she will do a long article on it, my Geniuses, and
a few other things, and she liked you personally and had before
liked your work. Having had a tendency to TB and in the midst
of a divorce at the time she met you she was a bit de-tracked.

Ezra is damned awful with his Fascism, etc. He can
go on being a boor, a hick, a ham, a backwoodsman, longer than
most in history, and still he does turn out lines and passages
of poetry. As an economic and political brain he should resign
but the situation is hopeless. I think he probably dislikes
my book. Joyce, to whom I read it, does, and it riles me that
he should take four years of backstairs thinking to come through
with a bad wisecrack about it. He asked me to read not only
the bits about him, but all of it, to him, and I did through
several days. He might then have commented, but he had not
the honesty or courage or wit. Perhaps he has been as JH used
to say 'crucified as no other on his sensibilties.' I suspect
that no man of letters has ever been so pampered, petted,
solaced, and financed, with 40,000 pounds outright from Harriet
Weaver, aid and acclaim from the Little Review,

Ezra, Sylvia Beach, myself, and a mob of people writing to
explain --- oh altogether too much --- his Work in Progress.
HH grows constantly dimmer in my appreciation.

I have no great amount of news to tell as I live in
the country and go to town for one night every week or fortnight
and may or may not encounter Bill and Sally Bird, or a few
others, but mainly younger or newer people about whom you know
nothing and of whom there is little to say except that they
may be likeable. The present crop of arriving or arrived
young English poets fail to excite me, but what is there to
say. Auden, Spender, Cecil Day Lewis, and now Laughlin's
new discovery --- Dylan Thomas, who looks like a foetus
and acts as unborn --- simply don't interest me in any way.
As intellects they are non-existent, for the capacity to
express authentic emotions to even create pictures and images
they seem feeble, and as sur-reallists --- somebody else can
have them. The times are too mucked up with the impending
war and political situation for anyone to have much but a feeling
of shit and corruption loose in the world, and sur-reallism
does not help out, particularly when one feels that it is
manufactured and snobbish. De Lautremont and Blake and
Rimbaud did it more naturally. But probably I ought not
comment because I write only when I think I have something to
say, and consciously, and my dream and subconscious life I
don't try to analyze or display in public, consciously.

As I have said to you before I hope you have gone on with
White Mule. I have loaned it to several people, one keen
English-Scotch boy in the English Foreign Office and Embassy
Service. He liked it much, for the way it got into character
and social situation without propaganda or self-conscious
messages, but he felt as I do, that it is a portion of what
should be a series of books, a trilogy, or quintupology, of
whatever. His remark was that you could do, and more
sensitively, what Galsworthy did dully with his Forsyte sage,
in the way of tracing the lives of some people and families.
I hope you have been going on, because I think it the strongest
work you have done, and I like many of your poems and much
resent any reviewer not mentioning some of your poems that have
a real force. For whatever reason, you, and I, and some others,
seem selected to be quoted always at our weakest, perhaps
because they hate our guts. Still that is better than the
English Auden-Spender-Lewis, etc. group who write love letters
to each other and publish them in book form and then write
reviews each of the other's book. It won't make them last but
it seems to sell them for the moment.

My hotel address is Auberge Chateaux, Dampierre,
Valee de Chevreuse, Seine et Oise, France. If you answer soon
use it, and if Higgins or anybody you think should meet me,
give them that address. It is only one hour by bus out of
Paris and a very charming town and country, for weekends or
staying and working. I don't have any suggestions about

newspaper work for Paul in Paris. There is only the one
American paper, a combine New York Herald-Chicago Tribune.
And the English (Paris Edt) of the daily mail. It is the
idea of every youngster out of college who arrives in Paris
that he may get a job on the first, and newspaper men ---
namely Vincent Sheean --- have arrived in that way, but
Paul will be only one of many wanting to get a job on that
paper. I don't think Bill Bird can help out any more than
I can as both of us, as well as many others, know quantities
of bright lads who want to try the newspaper game for a while.
It is the adjustment period, and no editor is sufficiently
soft-boiled to take seriously a recommendation from a friend
about a young man who is the son of a friend. I should say
that Paul ought to try and get experience in New York or
on some newspaperwork there, a smaller town perhaps, and
find out if he could do special articles and place them or
syndicate them. That game is so much chance. One stupid
lad I know was in Spain about three years back and being in
on the thick of it all was able to send dispatches that then,
factually, were startling. It gave him a start, so he seems
to be on his way as a success, but that was a break. Certainly,
not knowing whether Paul has what is called the newspaper sense,
don't strand him in Paris on his own because he will be only
one of about 50 or more youngsters out of college trying to
find himself, and personally I would never make a good
newspaper man, and don't think you would, and rather hope that
your son Paul is not quite so lacking in spirit as to turn out
the tripe that the various Hearts, MacCormicks, etc., want
in the way of newspaper reporting. I say that knowing
several people who have to write what TIME wants them to
write. Sherry Mangan is one. And what one writes for
Time apparently is never let to be as written. It is so
altered that it makes the writer sick to the stomach.

Whether there is news in this letter or not I can't
judge. Anyway it is longish. Haven't received your book of
poems yet, but probably will. Anyway, I think probably I
know most of your poetry and will be glad to have it in
a one volume form and hope you have not left out some of your
best things, as I see it. It's an error to include nice
little things that one likes mildly. The bastardly reviewers,
if they want to knife you, will always quote the trivia and
overlook the stronger work. Best to Flossie and let's hear from
you before too long a period.

As always,

Bob McAlmon

HOTEL SAINT-PIERRE

Déjeuners - Thés - Dîners

Chambres Confortables - Eau Courante - Garage

Maillebourc

ROCHEFORT-EN-YVELINES (Seine-et-Oise)

Mar. 18/39

TÉLÉPHONE 10

R. C. Rambouillet 1013

Rochefort-en-Yvelines, le

Dear Bill:

Have moved about 15 ks. as my old place changed manage-
ment and was in a state of disorganization and this gives me new
country walks, and villages to visit, with equal comforts.

See Anne France Bird has a child about March 16th. Tell
Florence I never got het up about either conventions, that of marrying
or not marrying, but the Birds have a lovely converted Mill, did a
grand show of the 25th wedding anniversary, and also of their child's
wedding, to establish bride and groom as of the newspaper world, for
newspaper people's attention. Don't think any of the lot, parent
or child generation, will be intellectuals, bohemians, ascists, or
communists. They work at the jobs they can get, preferring of course
political attitude, they can feel sympathetic towards. Bill hasn't
been permitted that freedom in the struggle of supporting wife and
child and Sally's growing taste for the cup, generally whiskey.
He consorts with a bridge playing, cross word and erudite-question
answering crowd. Who said so and so, etc. I can't stick that sort
but retain my fondness and respect for Bill and he does not inflict
them or their ideas on me.

Glad you are getting around with lectures and you get, from
here and people who speak of you, more attention than you may know.
I may put in for the G. scholarship, but think that I need some
college profs. or presidents or staid old line critics of the type
none of us like to recommend us. Ezra insults them in his supposedly
commendatory letters, I gather. I will, if I can get her address,
write Mary and Padria Colum and ask if they will sponsor-letter me,
and Morris Werner. But the staid old boys of whom one never hears,
I don't know. The judges for 1938-39 were people I had never heard
of. It's hard to know who does do the deciding.

With what has now happened in Czecko, you must be sicker
than ever. I can't comment I am so disgusted and at Eng and Chamber-
lain, not to speak of the non-interventionist liars (Spain) of all
countries.

Is it true that Anthiel has died? I hear that
he has but have seen no notice in any paper, but I don't see Eng.
or Amer. papers regularly.

With Spring and all on again write
me before too long. Love to Florence, and her letter was very pleasing.
I'll write her later but someone if yelling for me to come and take
a walk to the next village. Best always,

Hotel Saint Pierre,
Maintenon, Eure et Loire,
France, April, 17, 1939

Dear Bill:

Notice I have moved, to this town where there is a beautiful, famous, moat-surrounded, swan-decorated chateau on the river Eure. Bill Bird has his old mill house about three miles away and my books and his own, so it being the same rate as pension with hourly trains to and from Paris I decided to stay here and be able to commute to Paris more easily, and find I don't care to go in any oftener than before.

You are getting into print and attention now. The pages given you by rosewater benet in the American Oxford anthology will have established you as one now to be accepted by the stodgies. Kenyon Review and Twice a Year arrived, and your Lorca article interested me. I find as I always have found it difficult to get enthusiastic on you, or anybody, on art and the artists, but as you turn out plenty of original work, have those meanderings. They lost by my reading at the same time the tripe of John Marin's, and I have never been able to get excired about him as a painter, and find his notes and letters about as stimulating as boiled potatoes watered down.

You might show the person to whom Bryher wrote this letter. Bird asks and so do I was Bryher then lying too when she told me and others, suggested to you and Florence, her tales on her family. I didn't invent the interior of the household as various people who visited it with me and Bryher can testify. Bryher in her own writing testifies that she believes it well to be an accomplished liar. It was she who wanted to marry an American because she was afraid her father might have her locked up as unbalanced; it was she who made dire threats of suicide always and when I wanted to leave that unromantic relationship. She hollers like a stuck pig because I cleared out of a bad business relationship, in which I was never anything but a cover-up for her and her girl friend. From her holler I might have betrayed her great love, but she saw to it that her father never made any protecting settlement on me while I was leading a cramped life to 'protect' her. She would have sued had she dared and if she did not know very well that my picture of the household was truthful, failing only to reveal some of the deeper horror of the situation.

Too bad about these people who 'did what they could for me.'
If one of them is Ford I believe you can remember I always thought
him messy. He wrote against me as a sloppy writer, over-producing,
and in the Sat. Review, when Village was on the publishing market,
and it was rejected. He has quoted me on things I never said, and
in no way even 'tried to help me.' His 'better than Wells, more
readers' 'his recalled to the radio' accounts in my book are
true and he told these stories of his great fame before several
people, so necessarily I did not invent them, had I wished to, or

dared. I have a perfect right to return in kind his attack on me. From Douglas Goldring, H.D. and Richard Murphy, who at various times have been his 'secretary' I have many stories much harsher than those I used. He dictates; using the 'as I was saying' or 'I mean to say' style of writing that goes fuzzily long, trying to conceal by obscurity and a pseudo-Jamesian manner that he was not saying, did know what he meant to say, and isn't saying very much. He had to print a long withdrawal of statements made about Daudet, and in a French paper. He is a sloppy writer, pouring out book after book of socalled memoirs, telling tales about people he did not know, or inventing tales about some he has. He again likes 'the lie' as does Bryher, but his tales don't even sound convincing.

Wyndham Lewis also attacked me in his magazine and books, as MacAlimony, Bud MacSalmon, etc. I don't and didn't ever care for his writing or mind and my tales on him are facts and not over-caricatured. He writes about his 'friends' in attack.

If Ezra objects, he has a right to; and if you object you have a right to, but I deal out Ezra praise and in any American edition should enlarge greatly on it, but would also express my disgust with his fascist politics, and state that I don't think him very sound in the head about either economics or politics, but that doesn't detract from his poetry. You and he have helped me. The others; hell, many that I hardly know or speak to 'Bob' me, and the grieved tone of 'helping Bob 'as much as he could' comes from who I don't know.

In any case the book is not a turning on anyone. It tries to be a picture of the times with which it deals, and as seen then, in 1934. A re-editing of it for now and for America will make it much completer put back to 1917 and brought up to 1940, to force them to consider it as about others than the expatriates and the 1920's of Paris. It will probably be colder and harder and 'crueller', and I am not out to get anybody;

I merely see no reason for making white cows and heroes and great minds and artists and geniuses out of mortals no brighter more likeable honest or talented than many a professional man or worker outside the arts. I certainly shall give more space to architects and engineers and sculptors, and express my distaste for the religious holy to art attitude, more than I have done. I always had that attitude from the time you first knew me.

Don't forget to send me the printed and typed sections of the continuation of the White Mule. Also a copy of Poetry and the New Yorker with your new lyrics, if not the lot. I'd return them if you sent me the script. And you can say to any wounded souls who quiver with hurt sensbilities over the cruelty of my book to anybody that they don't know me by half and should have seen the book before the publishers and attorneys cut it. I have the guts to say out but the publishers in England don't dare take the chance. Another lad had it read to see if he could not get at me for criminal libel and was also advised not to make a bigger ass of himself than he was revealed in the book. I judge he thinks I bought of his attorney, but I never even saw the attorney and

got the story from somebody else, but authentically. Oh now,
Bryher and some of these people would not be vengeful and cruel
at all! No, no, Bryher hasn't written and said definite lies
about me here and there. She should utter a prayer of thanks that
I let her down so easily.

Roosevelt's offer has just appeared. We'll see how Hitler
and Mussolini reject it and so prove what sane people have known
for at least three years that they are beyond Machieavelli, the
aggressors, etc. But I don't forgive the so-called democracies
for their attitudes and treatments of Spain, Austria, Czeckoslakia,
etc.

Enjoyed your last letter I am better than any of yours for
a long time, and they have been few and short. I do remember though
that you always have a Spring awakening and go rather fed-uppish
during the winter months, the old latin temperament having its
way. Write me soon and give me news and comments on what goes on
there in the way of thoughts about this that and the other thing.
It would please me to know you tell me of what one of 'my dear
friends' say so and so and when and how they are wounded. Certainly
neither Ford nor Lewis even helped or tried to help me in any way
whatever and Lewis did get money from me. I'm sorry that Ford
has started his society on you. You don't need it, and that poor
old crutch does it only for himself, to keep in touch with the
young, to appear still to be among them. You may recall that he
betrayed no keen enthusiasm about you in the early days of the
transatlantic and he's too old to keep on being a promising
young man when he pours out so many volumes of sloppy writing, and
if it isn't sloppy, ask someone who has been his secretary how
he turns it out.

I'd like to see Ezra's Culture, but am not going to
buy it. Wonder if the American edition is different than the
English where he called it 'Kulchur'. Too bad. He should
have reversed the thing, because the hack reviewers in London,
always out to disparage him, commented mainly on his hick quality,
his invented yankee argot and his new-rich Kulchur
self consciousness. Best to Flossie and thanks to her for
sending on the book to Miss Boyd.

As always,

AU
PANIER FLEURI

Hôtel- Pension de Famille

Boulevard de la République
(Face au Parc du Casino)

CHATELAILLON

TÉLÉPHONE 40

Chatelaillon, le July 6th, 1939 193

(Charente-Inférieure)

Dear Bill;

I am at this hotel and will be here
perhaps for two months, so that if
you write soon you may address me
here, but on the other hand the
Lloyd's Bank, 43 Blvd Des Capucines
Paris is surer. Your last

A. DUPUY
PROPRIÉTAIRE

EAU COURANTE - ÉLECTRICITÉ

CUISINE BOURGEOISE RENOMMÉE

R. C. LA ROCHELLE 5221

Letter was fine, long and informative and I wish
you'd come through with more like them. Just had a
fistula cut off my behind. Started as a boil or an abcess and
the damn fool doctor told me it would go away with
antiphlogistine and it seemed too, but it should have been
lanced long ago. If it isn't finished now I'll go to Paris
and the Am. Hospital where I can understand what they say or
swear at them in English. So use the Bank address.

Your prediction about Ford's end was timely, but for
the last several years he hasn't looked too well. The English
papers gave him patronizing and small obituaries and the
New York Herald didn't do much better. For good notices he
should better have popped off when he had a near best seller
on the market, but I can't now and never could see him as other
than an also-ranner.
Tell me more of Ezra in America
if you have seen him again or have heard more. When I was
there and from all the young 'uns in France and Eng., I know
he has done himself in badly by his fascist declarations, anti-
jew, etc. He was born sticking his neck out and I don't think
he is a shit, as I do think Eliot. Maybe EP's got too many
biases but fundamentally he has a wide range or interests and
intends to be stimulating and helpful. Certainly I think he
has influenced poetry as much as anybody in the last hundred
years, and his interest in social credit, ecomomics, etc.,
is no more dub-headed than that of many a well street specialist.

Finnegan's Wake may be Joyce's wake and he hasn't
influenced the young nearly so much as it was thought he would.
During the early 20's he did for a time, but now they are all
going causes or social message or proletariat, or whatnot.
Anyway I find most people agree with me that it isn't worth
the effort to try to go through all of F's Wake, to whatever
larger in pattern there is behind it other than a playing with
words and languages. I find it too much Irish Tenor prose, a
thousand Irish twilight songs all in the same quality of tone,
to a monotonous degree.
Glad to hear that Katherine

TÉLÉPHONE 40

AU
PANIER FLEURI

Hôtel- Pension de Famille

Boulevard de la République

(Face au Parc du Casino)

CHATELAILLON

Chatelaillon, le 193

(Charente-Inférieure)

A. DUPUY

PROPRIÉTAIRE

EAU COURANTE - ÉLECTRICITÉ

CUISINE BOURGEOISE RENOMMÉE

R. C. LA ROCHELLE 5221

Anne is having success with Pale Horse Pale Rider, and think if you do get out another vol. of White Mule you are slated for much bigger recognition. The boards are all set for you now. You never did send me on what new portions you have done or your new poetry or any mags. I can use them down here, utterly out of touch with Eng. and America, for the time being because Eng-Am. publications cost too damn much in France.

Bill Bird told me about Jim Higgins' letter. I dunno Bill what you can do about the American crop of lost youth. There is just as large a crop in Eng. and France, and Bill Bird was once scared as hell about his own position in the newspaper world, and oldtimers like Ernestine Evans and many others fail to locate well. Maybe it's just as well to admit to youth that you can't life-safe all of it, your having seen your own sons damn well through their educations, but Paris, certainly these days, is no answer for American youth and their sex lives young men will always have to solve for themselves.

Write me about the $160,000 suit, or was that a typewriter slip. You can boast that at least someone thinks you got $160,000. Has Jimmie Stern, an English Irish writer, friend of Kay Boyle's too, looked you up? Wish I had more news to write you but I haven't and it's useless sounding off on what one feels about the present state of affairs politically, to you anyway, who agree more or less with the things I think about Eng. Chamberlain, Germ. et al. You have more news to write me from there, particularly about the friends of WGW party which was slated to come off soon in your last letter.

Wish you and Flossie could be here for a while where there are oysters, crabs, clams, muscles, lobsters, langoustine, exrivisse and the most marvelous fish served as only one of several course, and the iodine wind off the sea, but it's the

August 5th, 1939

C/o Lloyds Bank,
43 Blvd des Capucines,
Paris, France.

Dear Bill:

Your last letter was good and I do save them when they are good, but sometime I'll send it back if Flossie wants it. But your description of Ezra sprawling and stating, etc. was good. It was as I felt about him before I knew him and after, when I would not notice him for about a year. I never have felt comfortable with him; never have written to him except when something came up in a more or less purpose way. I haven't seen him for nearly ten years, or heard of from him for about seven; and I have for long thoroughly disliked his self-defensive becoming fascist, etc. He, I apologize for him, feels more a master, more accepted in Italy, i.e. 'sage of Rapallo.'' I never have thought him a strong character; always an escapist, and his letters with their yankee drawl yarn, his refusal to make a clear statement, his affectation of superiority and erudition, at first riled me. But I have known him to be decent in cases where others weren't; and he, after our first encounter, never tackled me too hard. He was cautious with Carnevali too. Perhaps Carnevali and I are more savage (were, for C.) and ironic and doubtful.

But your letter reminded me of how I have felt and would feel again about Ezra, present. Then his mixture of cheap 1890ish posing, his charlantanism, his real 'hick' professorism, impress one as greater than his capacities. But he did realize, and hasn't lived up to, the power of words, as image, clipped, cut, the melo-onomato-logeio, etc.-poetic value of words. He got it from the Chinese and the Provencal. He has floundered away at economic questions that had he expressed himself in a natural way would have interested and been important to a more sizeable public. He hasn't turned back to the church; or to the even more easy contemporary way, the now popular way of being popular front, for Spain, etc. I am for those things, but I know too many who talk and write and act for these causes who are snitty opportunists, and who, with money, change, unless they feel that it gains them more reclame and money to remain 'proletariat.' For example, I know an rough aviator who has been in five wars and he tells me of the men who do the piloting and the dangerous work for the literary men who are heroes of the air. He, the pilot, doesn't say it, but I get it. Andre Malraux, Gide,-- oh many of them -- leave me highly distrustful. The previous ones, Gorky, Romaine Rolland, etc., I think were genuine, and that rather mythical quality, sincere. But reports one hears of the Auden-Spender, new English communist or botherhood of mankindness school, doesn't incline one to admiration for them and as thought their poetry isn't much, as evocation they have much to learn from

Sept. 11th, 1939

You may see by the date that the first page was written about a month ago and it doesn't appear that EP or poetry are going to be anybody's primary interests for a time, at this moment. I am in the country, where I will leave my bags, Ms., and am going to join up somewhere, in a non military way. Have ideas but perhaps lots of others with more influence have the same. Liason, Intelligence Dept., Propoganda, Ambulance, etc., doesn't matter much what. Would certainly not feel well about anything by returning to America, and think we'll be in eventually. As I write in it is mist-raining and I am in the Valee de Chevreuse looking down a country road at a forest, much too Corot-like. Maybe it was that way before Corot. A small country Inn run by a Swiss man and his French wife, and I arranged their marriage note more than six months ago. He has to report to the Swiss army and she'll carry on. A completely white mother cat gave birth two months back to three completely black kittens, and the four lend grace and colour to the garden and terrace and dining hall. A black wolfish police dog is kept tied because he might be savage, and it is too bad because he is a beauty and is playful, but actually a wolf. The husband's child by first wife has a young cuckoo; a young pig grunts in a small pen; rabbits are in the hay in the hutches now unless they became stew for this evening. A playful pup is at the tearing-things to bits stage, and there are several families and youngsters about, here to be out of Paris and possible bombardments. But it is real country quiet just the same, and it always was quiet and dark by nine or ten o'clock, in peace time. Anyway, it's good until I get at some work. Sherry Mangan, writing for Time, has an apartment I found him in the little town a mile down the road, Dampierre. I know the history of every family in the town and here and may someday write a history of a year's sojourn, but not now. You might write me here, at

Auberge des Quartre Sonnettes,
Dampierre, Seine et Oise, France.

That is Mangan's town and my postoffice, although my commune is of another township, legally. No use discussing anything political, if there ever was. I never have been a prophet or able to analyze or explain that way, and the censor would certainly stop my letters to you, and perhaps yours to me. So stick to your writing and local gossip. My best to Flossie, and do write at once. The bank address is permanent and good yet, but might as well use the Auberge address. Have written several new poems which some day I'll type copies of and send to you to send to any mags there, POETRY, perhaps for some of them, but I don't know from here which are still extant.

H. R. MCALMON, PRESIDENT

GEO. A. MCALMON, SECRETARY

I hope you and bill do get to L.A. to see Charlotte and then stop off over here for a few days. With Juarez I can show you and good time and know you will find it, the various, jewelry, handicraft work, and types interesting. Let me know far enough ahead for me to get you hotel rooms, probably a double apartment room in my very clean and well conducted but not expensive home, and I want you to stay a while. Get well soon, and I will see you again very soon. Get well soon, and I want you to stay a while.

Southwestern Surgical Supply Co.

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January 27 1960

Dear Florence:

I had your good letter yesterday and this morning one from Bill about his trip to Washington and seeing Ezra, who I thought before was not suffering, and is being supported by the gov't. and by Dorothy. Somehow when I think of his cramp sides and remember always thinking him irritably exaltee, the memories come to me of things he did for other people. Getting --- forget the name of the poet (English) you and bill knew, --- out of jail, aiding Cheever Dunning during his opium obsessions and near starvation, aiding Tommy Earpe in a difficult situation, I must find that he had humanity and generosity along with his great errors and stupidids.

Wish you had read the origina Ms. of "Being Geniuses Together." The English publishers cut much of it as too vulgar, dangerous, or American. They even changed words from American to their English usage, and cut out great portions of more colourful bits, racey and amusing people have always told me. And they cut out bits on unknown people who were well drawn and depicted and in character of the time, --- such as Flossie Martin sounding off, Sylvia Gough, Blythe Daily, Nine Hamnett being drunk and in character ---. I didn't intend the book to be of the celebrities, real of self-appointed only. I intended it as a journal of those plagued years. Someone handed one copy of the script to Meline Boyd, and I have heard indirectly that she had nibbles for it but as she and I don't get on I haven't heard from her after three years. If you see her you might get the Ms., with my authorization. I have a copy and someday shall write a history of my times from 1914 --- harvest fields of South Dakota, when the 1st war broke, until the present of the time I am writing.

I knew the Jewish guys publishing the latter Contacts slipped in what they wanted. Don't recall off hand what I said of Bill, except that he was too busy with his doctoring and own writing to supervise the editing. I plan to get back to Europe the first of next year --- about March --- to get this years Christmas bonus and to save money to be able to stay over and even possibly sell my journal when written. I'll write Bill later and thank him for his fine letter, and as I collect them I'll send the 7 year old gransom stamps. They don't seem to be putting out so many new stamps this year as last, but I have a few now and will hold them till I can send a fair quantity.

Always my greatest affection for the lot of you,

Bob.

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Nov. 25, 1940

Dear Florence:

Here are some more stamps, ad I'd like to hear how you people
are, ad if by chance prospective grandparents yet. I am now working here
in Phoenix, the surgical supply business, a mfgd. job, through my brother
but I find there's plenty of work to do, and more interesting than one
I contemplated, starting a bookstore, where public demands tripe that has
no interest whatever to me. We fit trusses, sell innumerable diaphragm
inserters, X-rays, fleuroscopes, everything, and occasionally a story
occurs or an encounter that has a slightly more picturesque quality than
the commercially reading public or the too literary. Just been on the
job ten days, but thank god I am quick on the uptake so that already I
can handle most of the types of sales on the floor that occur daily, and
in other cases every one of us has to consult price lists, catalogues,
etc., because with the present war situation prices change steadily and
even American brands and products are getting difficult to obtain Often.

Phoenix is rather livelier than El Paso, and more beautiful.
It is still the SW and desert, but with more foliage and colour, and
English and Chinese cadets are at the air field nearby. As well as
American. And some nights in the nice swank little bars it is quite
fresh and gay, with some comely young gal playing the piano solovox.

Let me hear how you all are, and any news that you think
well to send on. Hope you are all feeling chipper.

Bob McAlmon,
Hotel St. James,
Phoenix, Arizona.

Use my hotel address, as I don't want personal mail arriving for me at
the shop, needlessly. My brothers are both in El Paso, and the manager
here is a very nice sort, and we get on well, but my personal correspondence is best at the hotel. Let me know if you still want stamps. We get masses of all sizes on packages and air mail letters and special deliveries, and occasionally from Mexico.

Dec. 19th, 1940

Dear Bill:

I got out to El Paso about three weeks back, not able to stay in NY and read poetry for the YMHA and Macleod. I have TB and a cavitation in the left lung and the beginning of the week I go to a sanatorium for three months. The Dr. hopes ~~I will~~ what will suffice, and that I may write and work in my room after the first two weeks, when the compression operations are finished. Looking for a sanatorium and room as near like a hotel as possible so that I won't be too aware of a hospital atmosphere, nurses, bedpans, etc. My brothers are being fine, so in spite of the fact that My money is mainly in England and France, what I have, I don't have to worry. Naturally I have no more news to relay you than you have me, because I was cut off completely for months in France, and saw few people we know in common in NY.

Got your book and liked it and hope you go on with it and someday gets its several vols. done as one. Hope and judge it is selling a little, as it is announced in most lists, and was generally well reviewed. Hope you get some money. But from Sylvia Beach, and around in New York, I got strong rumours the Laughlin, dynasty 4th, is tight as hell, up to thinking that 'prestige' will repay his authors, and he'd better remove some of said authors from his list if he's to establish 'prestige.' Hasr the Miller and Calas both got disgusted at his not wanting to pay, and surely, with his family, he has or can get plenty of money. However, I hope and think he does better by you and perhaps Ezra. Didn't do EP any good to publish the hick book Kulchur or Culture. That kind of art-nagging thing was never good and should have died with the 20's.

For the rest, I have lots of projects and have done articles on France and Europe. Harpers had set one up, or had started, but got one from Maurois, a French refugee, and hated to return my article, but they did, printer soiled and marked, with notes on it, so that I saw they had started to set it up. Atlantiv Monthly also was reluctant to return, but as both said, the market is flooded with such articles and they use the internationally known names. But I have a story for a book that is too personal and the experiences too much my own to be in competition with anybody else. And much re-write and clean-up work, sooner or later a collection of my poems, edited and in some cases revised. Let me hear from you, and my best to Flossie. I hope she is improving. Use my brothers office address for the timebeing. Best always,

Robert McAlmon
Southwestern Surgical Supply Co.
311 Mills Street,
El Paso, Texas.

Jan 5, 1941

Dear Bill:

I was glad to get your letter and know that you still
have the old, not-so-divine, discontent in you, and do hope
Flossie is improving steadily. I'm in a sanatorium now, having
had the pneumothorax gas five times and it will continue, but
my lung is compressing, no cohesions, and I have a beautiful
room, bath, view, and the T_xas air, and can work, when I have
the ideas or the hope, but have been trying to make myself do
some possible articles, for money and money only, and also
stories, but I have to drive myself to that. And may suddenly
get the spurt of energy and hope needed to plunge into the
new writing or re-writing of a long thing I have on hand, and
what the last few years will have done in the way of change of
attitude.

Laughlin surely gained more by having you to publish
than you got from him, and I don't think now that a commercial
publisher, Harcourt Brace, for example, would edit your work,
and you would get a contract, a downpayment before hand, and
percentage royalty. Don't think they edit Kay's or Katherine
Anne Porter's work, and the way your book is reviewed and
mentioned in every list it must be selling some so that you
should certainly get two or more thousand dollars from it.

Calas has a brain, but it doesn't impress me as it does
you. His Foyers d'Incendie was clever, prejudiced, hero-
worshipping in parts, and quite a bit just bright young man
thinking what Breton wanted him to think. Breton swung a heavy
cane on the arm of Pierre Massot, and Breton is a big brute for
size, with a heavy, handsomeish, vain, bullying looking face
and expression. The action may not have been 'characteristic'
but it was not 'accident'. It was a part of the 'I'll kill
him if he thinks differently than I want him," of the groups
and preciously smart rebels of the 20's. Now Breton and his
wife got in for looking like Dali, the sur-realist beings,
the wife blondined, with weird flower pots on her head, and
in the offing a five year old girl getting under people's feet
in the cafes. (Before the occupation.) The actually nutty
Else Von Frey etc. was funnier and before all of the French
lot. Afraid conditions today has dated that a sort of thing
into the more pre-historic.

See 'Decision" is to be reviewed over the radio lit.
hour next Sat., byt Stephen Rose Benet, Klaus Man, and perhaps
a Van Dorn. Old fogies and professional hacks. However if a
copy' out you might send me it. Nothing of that kind of
thing is available in El P so. Absolutely nothing in the
public or lending libraries of new or classic literature beyond
the once or the present best sellers. No Stendhal, no Mralraux,

Impossible to get even Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station. Books by or sympathetic to negroes, or radical things, rarely stocked. Newspaper stands don't know that The Masses, Va. Quaterly, So. Review, Partisan Review, Kenyon, etc. exist. If you have new copies of any of these or even of Poetry, (not to be had here except by special order,) I would like them and would mail them back to you if you say so.

Marsden sent me a copy of his new book, Androscoggin. Very Marsden, but with the force at moments of his sternly, or is it viciously, suppressed romanticism and sentimentality. I think he deserves more attention than he ever had for some of his poems. Among the French symbolists or even in the France of Paul Valery his mind would have got attention, and the new crop of English poets, being over praised by American reviewers and would be poets generally, leave me indifferent. Mediocre social-politic thinking, without the XEVOCATIVE 'beauty' quality of the ones of your younger years. You all maybe went too 'beautiful and lovely' but you felt and smelt the meaning and quality of words as poetry, and your minds were more individual. Except for some neatness of rhythmic and metric tricks, a mass of the present boys and girls could have their works published, without authors names, in a volume, and one would not suspect who did which. Mediocre as regards thought, theory, and way of statement. It's good that they think of the issues we have to confront in life, that they try to point out and analyze, but the newspaper men, the Pierre von Paaseens, Vincent Sheeans, Maurois, Constancia de la Moras, etc., show the lowdownnesses of strategies of the politicians and big business so much better, not concealed by the fogginess of attempted poetry.

About my restlessness. I wondered too. But I have stayed in my room, wrote letters, two articles, read, and eaten, and have left the room only for a walk to the veranda and sun, or to the clinic room to get gas. I don't feel restless much. Know I have to take it, don't miss drink, even wine, drink much fruit and veg. juice and take vitamin tablets. The world has been XEVOCATIVE enclosing on us anyway, so that despite Edna St.V. Millay, there are no more islands. I've felt that we were being imprisoned on an island for a long time. No, I am not fretting, about myself or my conditions. Do write me news and if you have articles or mags. that have interested you, clip the articles out, and send things on to me. I'll return them if you mark them for me to do so. Also gossip and news. I have none to relay you. All the best to you and Flossie and I hope the boys aren't caught up. Bill won't, as a doctor, be, at once, I don't suppose. I have a nephew just the age next year to be caught. He's already learned to be an air pilot and is taking engineering. Write when you can. Yours Bob McA.

Saint Joseph's Sanatarium,
El Pgs EL PASO, Texas.

March 8, 1941

Dear Bill:

Thanks much for sending me on the quantity of magazines, and let me know if you want me to mail them back. I was at a different hospital for a time, having a fistule, a complication of the diseases, cut off my behind, and so much as I could prop up in bed I read. Had a copy of Decision which I suppose you had sent me. The first number was pretty bad, and poor Anderson who was always childish has added a senile old woman memories to what little boys are like. The mag may improve, but they have a suspicious list of backers, hacks, and commercial writers, the professionals.

Saw you were to go to Porto Rico, and if you have gone, hope you found the trip interesting. Have struck a new realm of reading since the public library here is poorly stocked and not at all up to date, though good on the SW and mining. Reading about the various lesser famed Spanish and Portuguese explores, Quesada of Colombia, Valdivia of Chile, Bolivar --- that(s a life and a mind. He had more to cope with, inter-racially and as regards a melange of geography and types, and he had no Alexander Hamilton to do his social, economic, thinking. Strategy, social and political programm, and military adventure. Ever read his prose effusion "Delirium". I wonder if Rimbaud and Conte de Lautremont didn't get much from that --- Lautremont, at least. Needless to say it impressed me, thinking as I do that the contemporary "sur-reallists" are phonies, generally, trying by 'obfuscation' and pseudo-imagination to appear to pack a strength they don't possess.

Twice-a-Year interested me some, but more to make me want to see whole books of Kafka, --- I suspect he's not my line of country much though. Hartley praises much a Odo von Horwath, (Age of the Fish, Child of our Time.) Do you know anything of his? Some of the others, Stiegliitz and his idol worshippers, still seem in the grope and confusion, and isn't it a wonder, I am a man, what is life, stage, that maybe the main American quality for some. I thought it was mainly of the 1918-1930 period, as much of the Twice-a-Year lot might prove.

Anyway, I gave them all a good once over, and thanks much for sending them on. If you want them, say so and I can readily mail them to you. Otherwise will pass on to a nephew or a passable budd-ing young mind out here. I'm writing much poetry and getting it all sent back, but think I'll have enough for a sizeable new book soon. New things, not things that had been published in Paris as the New Directions thing was.

I do hope Florence is improving in her hearing and feeling better in every way. I wrote to Mina, but she began years ago to go into retreat, not wanting to see anybody. She hasn't answered, but I'd been forewarhed that she probably wouldn't. To look her up and take her out is different, for she then elaxes and livens up. It's a devilish period but there's no use trying to evade it. I have even read 'Out of the Night' and most war and refugees books as they come out. No solution, but there they are. Hope you feel like writing sometime. Best always,

Saint Joseph's Sanatorium,
El Paso, Texas.

March 17th, 1941

Dear Bill:

My condition is officially much better than it might have been. My left lung compressed easily. Two small adhesions, but they did not prevent complete compression of the lung. The cough is much better. Had a fistule cut of my behind. That is now nearly healed. I stay about the same weight, a pound of two variation between weighings, but the weight about what it has been for years. Good appetite, feel far too lively to stay in, and do go out occasionally and would go more but there isn't much incentive; there being no cafes with terraces, and no one to visit, as my brothers and families come to visit me, bringing mags and books and canned fruit juices. I'm writing a good deal of poetry and sending it out, and will get to a longer thing when I leave here and can concentrate without having nurse maids, cleaning woman, bell boy, and fellow patients in the hall, walking up and down, phoning, chattering. Can't work during rest hour because the others would object. Otherwise I'm very well situated, and if I stay or if I go to California --- for a job then --- I wouldn't want to be in California during the raining season.

The refugees in America are going to unsettle things in art and literature. The Thomas Maughams, Werfel's, Thomas Mann's, etc. aged, having said their say, will get by with publishing tripe because of their names. The artists will get shows, for pity, for refugee publicity, etc. There's nothing to be said or done, because the main lot of the refugees are poor haunted souls; but the govt. doesn't let in the really hounded ones. Far too many successful and wealthy and very wealthy are here, and ready to complicate the situation with money, aristocrat, and intellectual-class distinction. The magazines like the Nation, New Republic, Atlantic, will give far more space and attention to the Eton-Oxford Auden, English European crew, and overlook people of equal or more brain of at home. The same applies too generally with the socalled experimental magazines. I haven't sent them anything because I'm hoping to get something accepted where I get paid. Later I will. It's not for success I want the pay, but because I don't like living off my brother, who pays all my bills. He's fine and there's no attitude on his part to make me feel that way. It's in myself.

I hope you will have liked your trip to Porto Rico, which I gather has its misery, of classes and under-dogs. Suppose you will be seeing Macleish, who takes on the styles of Eliot, Pound, and now Steins. The Making of Americans "going on being" manner with his thoughts on "democracy -- some thing that a nation must be doing." Once a budding communist or fellow traveller, but always an opportunist and derivative, as I see him, I think he's bad news when he starts propagating his ideas about what his particular way of seeing how democracy is to be doing in action. We're caught, but when the war is over how much more will we be caught? My curses are not at Hitler but at the bloody hyperflies everywhere who created Hitler psychology and force, long before Ethiopia and the non-intervention lie in Spain. It wasn't Hitler alone by

a hell of a ways who made the dictators possible in South America.
Venezuela, -- (its present leaders more persuasive but perhaps
very dangerous) Chile, etc.

Don't know if Flossie wants American stamps, but I get some
air ones from Canada and America and will save them for her and
send them later. Haven't had any mail, as I suppose no one has
from France. Nor letters yet from Ireland or England.

No Decision is tripe. With the list of hacks as
sponsors and what a conglomeration I suspected it would be.
Knowing the lads on the English Horizon I can't follow
them as leaders of anything. They are English Oxford school
tie lads, pansified in essence out too for names. There's
far more primitive and original quality in this country, and
I see no use in trying to recall the past, which has failed.
Any more than calling on religion, as before standardized.

Have just written Bill Bird. And Christ, what an ever-
increasing ass Ezra makes of himself. His mania is a disease
for reclame, but perhaps having washed himself up so completely
in America, and needing money, he's frantic enough to tie up
with Mussolini, for money.

Wonder if HD is in the country or what has happened to
her, Bryher, child, etc. Do you ever hear? Hope psychoanalysis
may have released Bryher from some of her mental case phobias
and terrors, but if she frightens as the last war frightened
her she is in a mess.

Yours,

Saint Joseph's Sanatarium,
El Paso, Texas.

March 9 1942

Dear Bill:

The poetry disc arrived and I played it to a group of people at the music shop here, and then sent it on to my seventeen year old niece and 21 year old nephew, and think they'll get a kick out of it. Anyway I have no phonograph and they have, but I was glad to get it.

Today's birthday but apart from lifting an early shot to my lips this morning, it is no signpost to me. Here's some new stamps for Florence, the centenary one of Gaudalajara perhaps fairly rare? Hand them over to Flossie.

Our shipping clerk has landed in the army, medical corps, and I guess Peter, the nephew, will be in the air corps before long, and about everybody else of the males in the shop expect they will get in, as do a lot of doctors. With Jap doing what she is doing let's hope it won't be too late. We surely aided the Japs and the Germans to prepare to knock hell into existence. Your Bill is probably lucky that he is a doctor in this situation. Hope the prospective grandchild keep Paul from being called up.

Have been reading Celine's Death on the Installment Plan. Ever read it or Voyage to the End of the Night. In some way he has a manner that recalls yours, though the approach and attitude is entirely different. Might try him sometime.

Hotel Marx Palace,
Phoenix,
Arizona.

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June 24 1942

Dear Bill:

I was going to relax and read in my room, but with air cooler
and darkened room, except for the light, it felt like a turkish bath, so
I came down to the office and will enclose some stamps and a note. The
hot weather hasn't really began. It's only about 118. F. now, but in
July and through till September we'll began to unfreeze, I gather from
reports. Don't know as it's bad for the health. People look well
enough, and throughout daytimes are in their aircooled shops, and nights
in aircooled houses or rooms.

Course six of the Oxford-Camb ridge air cadets have departed for
Canada and England. One of the poor devils — all impulsive wild heavy
drinking lots — did as they all have done always, overstayed his leave.
When climbing over a fence to get in without having the guards know he was
late— two o'clock A.M. when he should have been in by 12 — fell 18 feet
into a cemen ted pit which had just been dug and cemented for a sewerage
basin. He broke his hos, and his knee cap, and slated to go with the rest
the next day, or rather two days later, last Sunday, was instead hospitalized,
andthe whole course was downcast. They were petted and pampered out here,
and know what they are going back too, and have not that cocksure quality
of thinking t he ruling classes or the school tie boys the most important
people in the world, slated by fate to be masters. Things haven't been going
too well for the Empire. By now a course ten has arrived, and it is an
interesting contrast in class <u>distinction</u> distinction, no one course caring
for any of the other courses, and in each course the lads being catty as
hell at each other, in the true English tradition that you aren't really
friends and pals until you can be and are rude as hell to each other. It
was amusing to observe. There are about ten army fields about here, well
over 100,000 soldiers, and over the weekend it is a much an cosmopolitan
madhouse as Washington D.C., only slightly smaller. But the Indians,
Mexicans, Chinese, what few japs who are not in C.Camps, South Americans,
and cadets, buck privates, young officers, and non-coms from every state in
the union, the variety of types languages and accents is something to observe.

I haven't for months written a line except notes, but intend when
it cools off some to take two or three months off and polish off a long peem
I have been smouldering at for years, and a book, going back to the last war
and up to date. I'll go to one of the high mountain towns about, small,
and do what I generally do, work hours a day when I get to it, and polish them
both off, and then wait and re-polish them. Sometimes I wake up and think I
have to get to the typewriter and start, but I jot down notes, and guess my
memory of the flash will be good.

Wonder what the army will do to Laughlin 4th, possibly make him

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better. In the camps out here there are some very intelligent young men,
from almost every school and university in the country, some of them writers
or aspiring to be, for Esquire, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, etc.,
And they think I'm too intellectual if I don't love their John O'Hara's
Saroyans, Thomas Wolfe's etc., as writers. They aren't old enough to be
critical and I was never young enough not to be analytical of qualities that
stuck me as phoney and synthetic. It's a damn different war, and type of
man in uniform than was the last, the very M.P.'s being decent, gentle,
gentle and well bred, except when called on by dire necessity to get tough,
which then they can be. To what extent this town is indicative of all
the American troops in training I don't know, as there are more officers
training camps, aviation cadet field, etc. around here than there are some
places, but I get on fine with some of the buck privates who hang out at my
bars. Some demoted, some who have twenty years service stripes and know
far more about military regulations than do their officers. Guys who have been
wounded in China and the Phillipines and Hawaii. Someday you and Florence ought to
get out to this part of the country, if only for the Indian quality, the hogans
(Indian dwelling places) and the entire quality of colour and light that is
unique to this part of the world, as unique as the same qualities are to
providence, but different.

This is a lousy typewriter that I am using and I am typing fast, with
the keys jumping, and so overlook my spellings. The damned machine is
used as a threshing, machine by everybody in the office. Now we can't buy
new typewriters and I damn well won't bring my portable here to be battered
by all the personelle, because when I do get to writing I want it in ship-
shape order.

Hope the heat there isn't as devastating as I always found New York
heat, worse than here for enervation. And have you had or are you having a
vacation this year. Perhaps you are a grandpa by now and if so, congratulations.
Let me hear from you occasionally, and my best to Flossie.

As always,

address me c/o of the shop.

H. P. WALKER, President
Cecil A. WALKER, Secretary

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December 15, 1942

Dear Bill and Florence:

Here are some more stamps and probably not much of a letter as I am stillling with a cold. Been taken gillette pills, bacterial antiseptic, carrot celery juice, lemon, etc. Hope to kill it. The town is barred to soldiers and for the last two weeks has been pretty dull, with nothing but the gamblers, politicians, and usual potbellied lot about, and as the soldiers are young, educated, clean cut, and well mannered, from all over the country it's a loss socially and economically to the town. This state and town have long been notorious for its rucksteering. Fortunately a girl who was at college when I was a student in town for a couple of weeks, now the wife of Hal St. Clair, once a topnotch movie director, now directing the Ion and Abner films and Laurel and Hardy, and possibly staging a comeback of her force of will to drive him off drink and on to satisfy her ambitions. She's a good sort, but God save the guy if he fails her. She has determination.

I was going to Hollywood for Kids but the S.P. advertises not to travel between De. 15, and Jan. 5 1943. Leave the buses and trains for the soldiers, and that's right. Anyway the train are also from three to twelve hours late and I don't relish the trip coming and going, though I could do with a bust with Biller and a few other once Parkes-ites who are in Hollywood. Read the New Directions book Bill sent me, so much of it as interested me. Must say the over analytical mental and critical boys never have been so line, and make me feel that they're sparring with words to find out what to think, and among the younger ones there appears little evidence of any "new" direction. Think we have departed far from some of the ideas about breaking away with tradition that we were all having twenty years ago. Nowever, Bill's plays interested me, with some quality the screenwriters might claim as their kind of thing. With the proper types of persons and intelligence, and picked character types, I should think he'd act well. Sarrow gets by with things far talkier, and he goes a sort of Lord Dunaway, Waterlick, Irish twilight, Barrie, Whinsical, toasting a little wily Whitmanian with his eternal flirtation and adoration for this tricke and own temperament.

Had one letter from young Bill, who apparently isn't given what letters are sent him for ages. Get a few of the photostated copies from England, one from a Captain, a bombardier pilot. In 1938, or about there, he led an attack of 24 planes over Tokyo, and is now in his 7th year. Mexican, 1917 (Villa) 1st world, China 1937, Spain, China 1938, Finland, Poland, France, the Green Chance Affair, South America, and now this one. He should be a colonel being a great strategist and a thorough airman, with most several thousand hours in the air and in active combat. Probably leading so on of the attacks on the continent now, but of course he can't write me any news about that, although I know he gets to London now and then, but don't know where he is stationed.

AGENTS FOR

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DAVIS & GECK
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WILMOT CASTLE CO.
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February 22 1943

Dear Bill:

Djuna wrote that you had bought a copy of her Ladies' Almanac and that her Portrait of Alice was not for sale. All the others she left in London, where I guess the landlord has sold everything she had there for about $25.00, among them some valuable books of mine I left with her some time back. Sir Thomas Browne, Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, etc., but I never expected to see them again, although I do regret not having a lot of the Loeb and Bohn Latin and Greek classics I had. Athenaeus, the various historians, etc. Cost more money than I got to replace them, and I wouldn't in any case.

A long galooping but rather bright nephew of mine, very Texan, is at Princeton University. He's about 17 or 18 and went in for debate and a bit of writing, was publicity man for the high schools in El Paso, and seems to read intelligently what I send him. Surely he has some of your things, I ~~don't~~ keep them around my hotel room, and send them on to him for his basement den, so that he must have about 500 volumes by now. His address is

George McAlmon, Jr.,
11 Dickinson Place,
Princeton, New Jersey.

Don't know if you ever get down there, or how far from you it is, but should you, you might drop him a card before hand and look him up. I told him if he went abroad at all he might look in on you sometime. Don't know how the different climate and environment will effect him, but don't think He'll suffer too much from homesickness. Seems adaptable and easy to get on with.

Thought Kay Boyle was to stop off here, but she's going on to Salt Lake City, Utah, to meet and marry her Austrian, xanthaf father of her last girl child. If he gets a furlough. Kay certainly is productive in her various ways.

Here's some stamps, and best to you and Florence.

Ever

H. R. McCALMON, PRESIDENT
GEO. A. McCALMON, SECRETARY

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June 14 1943

Dear Bill!

The town and everybar is so crowded with soldiers that one
can't get foot space of even standing space anywhere so I've come to the
office and will pound out some letters. There are 18,000 soldiers at
Hider Field, in the middle of the desert, little water, tents, and no
bars whatever, just beer in bottles cooled in tubs full of water and ice.
Most of them are from New York, the 77th Div., and some are pretty rough,
but in the main they are a good lot, but you can imagine they break loose
after 6 weeks or so of total desert. Meanwhile the aviation cadets,
Chinese, Mexican, South American, En lish, from Falcon Field, the two
Thunderbirds, Williams, Luke, etc., throng the town, and when it's a
graduation weekend, this town does go to town. An amazing number of pretty
girls around, who stroll about holding hands with the soldiers, who mainly
are just hometown kids, or college boys, but in uniform. I wonder if New
York joints can be more packed than here.

I was in Los Angeles for a couple of weeks and a party was given. Hiler was there. He has a beautiful studio and grounds, and a new wife and is about to become a father. Man Ray was there too, with a beard, looking Jesus Christ as la Gaudier Brejzka, and Rene Clair and his Polish Jewish wife, whom I wrote about in Geniuses as the little gal who once had a romance with Radiguet. Several ex stars, Norman Kerry, etc., were there, and for what reason I can't gather, most of them were trying to act like John Barrymore did in his real life, and rather objectionably too, I thought. However the party was a good one, but I was glad to get out of LA after my mother's birthday. The food situation there is far worse than here, and waiters and waitresses hard to get so that restaurants where you can get anything are hard to find.

Here's some stamps. Write me when you feel the urge and my best to Florence.

Best always,

AGENTS FOR

AGENTS FOR

DAVIS & GECK
LIGATURES

WILMOT CASTLE CO.
STERILIZERS

October 18th 1944

Dear Bill:

Your book of poems arrived and I was interested in reading it to find that in some way you seem to strike Elizebethan and restoration timings, phrasing, and type of thinking-feelings. Possibly the philosopher in you. As of aging years I think it's too bad I didn't know Greek, and well, to read it apart from the lousy, over wordy and sing song translations of it. Feel that way about Dante, etc. too.

From a review of H.D.'s book of poems I gather it's not so good. I think she shot her one chord shot years ago and she should never began to worry about life or humanity. Marianne Moore on the other hand seems to remain disinvolved, de-personalized, but still capable of very eloquent passages. You know, I remember one night when Marsden Hartley --- at a Lola Ridge party --- and Marianne Moore, each read some of their poetry. I think Marianne's were the two we published in Contact, and Marsden's "The Crucifixion of Noel", and "There is singing on the hills of Calédonia." Strangely, --- having long ago thought Wallace Stevens light trivial or sentimental broody philosophic --- I remember those poems as striking something, and that I can't say in memory of Marsden's paintings, which s bitchy gal I knew said made her think of 'floating kidneys.'" But some types should remain in the shells and not emerge to emotion or symbolism of their frustrated desires, or lost emotional humanness. In a way that applies to both H.D. and Marsden, for except in a two or possible few other poems, he was no better as a writer than as a poet. He had to express himself as the bitter struggling sexual-emtoional being he was, rather than as the oberservative wit he was capable of, but still, considering what has gone on and goes on with some of the others he hasn't and didn't get as much credit as he deserved, and Jesus no man could get on my nerves or rile me more with rage at his insolence that was a stupidity of avaricious selfishness. Both he and Chas. Demuth could be used in a novel Jamesian-Proustian, slowly revealed, but these days I don't feel for struggling for that kind of thing. I always did prefer to say outright and bluntly rather than revealing throughout a long process so that the final realization of the character comes late in the book.

It's a between hpt and cold seasons here, --- various cadet camps closing down, the town duller than it was, and I wondering about when mail will get through to France, etc. Wish you and Flossie would get out here and leave the old homestead to the sons and their offspring. If you could wangle gasoline to get here, there's interesting country enough to explore, but the times are difficult. Write me anyway and thanks for the book.

Best always,

GEO. E. SEYMOUR
MANAGER PHOENIX BRANCH

WILMOT CASTLE CO.
STERILIZERS

October 19 1946

Dear Bill:

Glad to hear of Buffalo U's making you and LLD, but
does that make you a lawyer, and why, and why not a Ph. D. But
here's to it anyway. Here's some stamps.

Did a publisher return to you a manuscript of mine.
About two years ago I sent in a collection of more or less
autobiographic stories and Doubleday Doran nibbled but the war
was on, and I had told them to return to you, not to me. Let
me know right away please. Vivian Macleod is going to try and
place them. I have been letting our Spanish secretary read them
and other Ms. and from her chatter I gather they have big r eading
appeal are very human and funny. If you have them I'll just
have you turn them over to Mrs. Macleod. If you haven't them I
don't know where to hell the Ms. is, the only complete copy I
have.

Hope you all are feeling your oats and that you
aren't working your head off at doctoring. If you have an extra
copy of "A Companion Volume" wish you'd send it to

Mr. Richard Meyer Robbin,
Palo Alto, California.

Have a hell of a head cold that I'm getting rid of,
I guess, by taking anti-cold tablets, Squibbs. At least my nose
doesn't flow like a faucet today as it did yesterday. Let's hear
from you.

as always,

January 2, 1947

Dear Bill:

Nothing would please me more than to have you send me PATERSON I graced with an
inscription and your signature. You are more than kind to offer this. Last time
I was at the Satyr Bookshop in Hollywood sometime ago it hadn't yet come in and
I'm anxious to read it. Reports have it that it is your best poetry to date, which
makes it tops with me; have read Episode 17 from it and liked that very much.

Life in California is quite pleasant and we have a small cottage on a mountain-
side and are surrounded with a veritable jungle of semi-tropical flowers and shrubs
and citrus trees and at this point I'm a novice horticulturist trying to keep it
up. We hope that if and when you and Mrs Williams make a trip to the coast you will
stop off and visit with us—we have a spare room—and you are more than welcome.

Soon I hope to be making good medicine again in selling the books I think should be
sold instead of the commercial crap that's flooding the market. However, it takes a
good bit of moola to get a business, even a small one, started in these times. Maybe
I'll have it in Texas, or even somewhere in the east and that will be a wonderful change
from this rather grim cost-accounting job I have at the moment. Another year, or so
of this and then the real thing, I hope!

Happy New Year to you and Mrs Williams and keep on writing that really good poetry
and prose.

AGENTS FOR

DAVIS & GECK
LIGATURES

WILMOT CASTLE CO.
STERILIZERS

October 25 1948

Dear Bill:

Got your card from Washington, and see you have met Eliot at last. As I wrote in *Being Geniuses Together* he has some kind of charm, but I don't like his poetry or his criticism or his "INTELLIGENCE". But it was a sure thing you'd like him personally because that charm overrides his Britishy snobbisms and his high churc English. Howsomever he certainly never was a good editor and didn't do right by you, or me and he did publish a lot of tripe.

On my list of books I never mentioned letters to me but three men of the Yale Library are hollering for letters, of yours, H.D.'s, Ezra, etc. I never was a letter saver in a big way and probably it's too bad I didn't save more. But I did keep a good share of yours, mainly ones that were less personal, to me, but ones in which you discussed poetry or technique, or approach, or whatever. A Donald Wing, along with Gallup, and Pearson, of the Yale Library, say they have all of your books, first editions, and want to buy your letters to me. Naturally I won't sell them unless you say to, but in the end it appears to me that Yale Library is a good place for them to be. And certainly I will copy all of them that I find of more than just personal greetings. But you say, I wrote Ezra, care of you, and H.D., to see what they think. If you all don't want them sold, okay. I'll deed them to some library, probably Yale, later, but as the three Yale men seem to be strongly interested in getting a complete record of the lit. of the times I don't know why they shouldn't get them now, and I'd use the dough --- whatever it is --- to get to New York for a time next year. Let's hear what you think.

Thanksgiving day and I'm just back from a family turkey dinner. Going over to Juarez shortly to drink some tequila as I have a stiff neck, but I'd drink the t. if I didn't have even a horses neck. Hope young Bill finds some of these stamps of interest. Wonder if the faint print envelope stamp isn't of some value as a miss run stamp. Dunnoo. Not up on the stamp regime. Best to all of you, and let me hear about your letters. The Yale guy's intense interest in them prove that you have a very devoted following, more than you have ever thought I surmise. As everybody bidding on the books have written, poetry does not sell or have the book value of prose or fiction, but when the poet is dead boy they add up. I'd rather you got it while you're alive.

Affectionately, Bob McAlmon

H. R. MCALMON PRESIDENT
GEO. A. MCALMON, SECRETARY

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March 11 1950

Dear Bill:

I saw a long review on your new Paterson and on Vivienne Kock's book on you in the Herald Tribune and after many years it does look as though you were beginning to get the proper attention. Had a letter from your daughter in law and grandson Paul, with a water colour painting by Paul. It look as if he had been seeing some desert cactus flowers. I'll keep on sending him stamps as I collect them, but they don't seem to be putting out so many new ones this year as last.

It has been consistently beautiful weather here almost all winter, with just one light snow storm and cold spell. Now the March winds and texas rain (dust storms) are due for a spell. Young George, a newphew, is flying down to Mexico City for about ten months after receiving a scholarship for $200. a month. On that with the exchange he can life magnificently and perfect his spanish which already is rather good. With an AB from Princeton and a law degree from Texas and with his study of Mexicaon law he hopes to get located in Venezuela or some South American country. I may just take a jaunt to mexico in the fall while he is still there but may instead decide to conserve the expense money for getting to Europe late Spring 1951?

Good of you to suggest me for the Bollinger prize but there is not the shadow of a chance I'll get it, although at Yale several of them know me as they have all my books and other books I had collected as well as letters. From Joyce, Stein, Lewis, etc.

Hope you are all in fine fettle.

H. R. McALMON, PRESIDENT
GEO. A. McALMON, SECRETARY

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DAVIS & GECK, INC.
SUTURES

April 15, 1950

Dear Bill:

Glad to see that you got the publishers award for Paterson III. As far as that goes you should have gotten the Bollinger award, but suppose your being on the committee prevented that. I haven't cared for Wallace Stevens poetry for a long time. Once did but it seems slick and tricky without any wallop.

The weather is magnificent now and I wish you were here having some of it. Hope it's good there too as it can be, but I never want to spend another late summer in New York. That heat gets one down. About this time next year I hope to be in France, and will stay at a little Auberge in the beautiful valley of the Chevreuse where the food is wonderful and the smell of the clover fields intoxicating. I stayed there for two years, bussing the twenty minutes into Paris weekends when I wanted, and got as much of Paris as I needed. It cost me less than a dollar a day pension, with fine food and ample wine.

Vivianne Kock seems to have developed into a discerning, intelligent and sensitive critic, and I see she has taken to criticism seriously, doing a book on Yeats and others. Hope she did well by you and I am pretty sure she did as she admired you much, as a person and a writerx.

Hope you are taking your doctoring easy and concentrating on your writing. You are old enough to semi- if not completely, retire from the grind of doctoring. And with the honours you are getting mor money should come in from your writing and lecturing. Too bad you aren't coming out west but I'll look to seeing you early next year although I won't spend much time in New York before sailing for France. Best to Florence and I hope you are all in good health and spirits.

As always,

Bob

GEO. E. SEYMOUR
MANAGER, PHOENIX BRANCH

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DAVIS & GECK, INC.
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Sept. 17 1950

Dear Bill:

Got your pahmplet on the short story and the Times
Lit. Supplement. I read at the Hemingway thing in the Cosmopolitan
but it was too dull to read except to note his bitterness against
surely Martha Gellhorn, his ex-wife, quite a gal, and the only one
who left him. The passage where he and the Italian countess keep
wishing the "conceited bitch" dead surely gives the lie to Hem's
statement that he is bitter at no one. Otherwise the love story and
dialogue is unbelievably false and dull and his identification of the
brutal, rough, but also heroic, noble here (as in all of his books)
is pretty bad. O'Hara surely must owe Hem something to have written
such a review of what a good many critics have found dull, vulgar and
cheap, Time, News Week, New Yorker, etc.

You sound on top of the world and I hope you remain there.
How'd you talks with the Italian xmn who printed your "Knife of the
Times." Hope you didn't pay him anything, and that you eventually
get free of Laughlin. Your letter from Uaddo sounded hard-working but
relaxed and pleased. Trust you and Flossie enjoyed your whole stay
there and that you got lots of work done.

H D writes that she may be in New York this fall, sometime
in Oct. Hope you do get to El Paso and that she is still around in
New York when you return. She probaby will stay some time as her
daughter is married to John Schaffner, the literary agent.

Let's hear when you are geading towards Seattle and then when
you'll come through here, andto saty a few days, I hope. Think we can
make things interesting for you, as Jaurez has its points, and good
food and good night clubs and bars. One of my sisters-in law wants to
give a party for you two and invite what local talent or brains there
are about. As one of the B D salesmen, Bill something or other, at
the schoolsin Rutherford the same time as your boys were, says,
"In Rutherford they don't seem to realize that Williams is anything but
good doctor and a nice fellow, but out on the road when they hesr
I am from Rutherford I begin to understand what a big name and reputation
he has." Well, that just means you don't throw out the old doggy stuff
in you home town. Let's hear from you anyway, and

As always,

Bob

Oct. 1 1951

Dear Bill:

I amsettled in, keeping house and cooking my
own meals. This is a budding desert resort like the well
known Palm Springs, hot as hell in summer, but just now
getting a reasonable, healthy, but sunshiny, winter weather.
My sister Grace has bought a furnished house, with Servel
refrigerator, gas stove, etc., and plenty of fruit and
vegetables and juices are easy to get, and some meats.
A steak is $4.00 at a restaurant, so I don't cook many
steaks, but with Frankfurters, sausages, tripe --- does
Flossie know a way to cook it, French or Spanish style.
If so have her send me a recipe. I'll get on, and
eat more oatmeal and breakfast foods, ham or bacon and
eggs, than I have heretofore.

Saw Charlote In Los Angeles and had dinner with
her. Eyvkind and wife turned up, and all was merry except
the L.A. smog got me down. Saw and dined with Wetterau
too, who greatly admires you. But a few days there were
enough for me.

Wish you and Floss would come out here. A maxx climate, dry, clear, sweet. You'd have no trouble locating a nicely furnished apartment or house, furnished with all accessories, and can get out in several months later when summer approached. Wetterau, Charlotte, and others, would be sure to drive down here. Only a three hour drive and with Hot Spring baths supposed to be a cure-all many people flock here just for a weekend treatment, but still the town does not have the overrun tourist quality. Too spread out in the vastness of desert. Damned sure it would be good for you liver, kidneys, or whatever, to spend a winter away from that Eastern cold and overheated house, freezing outside.

Anyway, let's hear from you. And hope you
have sent me your autobiography which I glanced at at
Wetteraus. If you have one of my sisters will bring it down
to me. Otherwise send me one here, or rather, make Random
House do so.

As Always,
Bob McAlmon
P.O.Box No. 107,
Desert Hot Springs,
California.

Oct. 8 1951

Dear Bill:

I have written the hotel in Cupeyavaca about packages
and mail but it was at the end of July when I left there, and
I doubt that the woman kept them or forwarded them, as she didn't
other things. Dumb and didn't give a damn. Pregnant also. I
did get the typed poem you read at Harvard, but you must have
sent the books at the same time. Got the poem only after six
weeks, and don't know what book "Desert Music" is. Hope anyway to
get your autobiography soon.

Very fine here, and will someday be a great hot springs
center, property going up leaps and bounds. My sister has bought
a furnished house and I am living in it, completely equipped
with Servel frigidaire, gas stove, etc., and the various home
canned fruits, vegs, etc. my sisters bring along. One was here
last weekend with 2 elderly women friends, and I don't encourage
her in the habit of bringing them along for me to put up, even
if she does the cooking and buys the foods. Another comes for
just a day tomorrow. (Victoria). Grace, who bought the place comes
down Saturday with the husband for just the night, as she's a
working gal. Her husband paints church murals, various signs of
the crosses, and thinks he has arthritis and goes heavy on the
hot spring baths here, about which I don't bother. Hope he does
not get the idea of staying here often or any lengths of time,
and rather think he won't as Grace pampers him and feeds him
dishes he wants, so he doesn't stay away long from her.

A fine hotel here, a wonderful restaurant, and
reasonably priced too. Far less than Tucson or Los Angeles
prices, not to mention New York. I had an apartment, beautiful
view, sun porch, kitchen fully equipped with all utensiles and
dishes, at $50. a month, huge double bed. Certainly good for
two peoples. House, furnished to be bad for $50. and $75. a
month, and beautiful markets, the 5 & 10 store stocking a
large assorted line, the markets having everything, Russian
caviare if you want it. I'm sure you and Flossie would like
it, find it healthy and restful and not dull. Sure you could
rent a place and on top of that your food would cost you less
than in the east. Figs, dates, grapefruit juice, Orange,
bananas, aguacate, all native here, to be had at roadside stands
in the nearby country, for very little, and will keep in ice
boxes many days. Meat dear as elsewhere, vegetables not. I
and writing and will continue to work at it, now that I am
settled. Sure you would too. Palm Springs, about ten miles
from here, is a great resort town, as is Indio, and other places,
but none have the draw of the hot water baths of here, so this
place will grow fast, and a nice type of people. Generally
intelligent and amiable with writers, musicians, and painters,
strewn about. Hope you come out.

Let's hear from you.

As always

Mail address
P.O. Box 107
Desert Hot Springs, California.

Dear Bill:

Grace brought down your autobiography and I read with interest, doubts, and skepticism as to the exactness of your memory. You seem to imply that I, that H.D., the villain of my marriage, and it was always the E's and finally Fryer, when I realized how she meant to keep me hog tied, who was the hard one, and was she hard. But I hope I never talked much about any of it.

Brancusi Page 196 Won't say my memory is better than you but surely I never said Brancusi ATTEMPTED to attract American women. I brought several to his place and it was they who made the passes, and two of them I believe he had to do with. One, I know, and she was the aggressor.

Page 257. Never heard your story of the man about the pajamas. Certainly nothing I ever used as my Highly Prized Pajamas was about a beautiful and icey bitch whose rich American lover begged to let him have pajamas he had bought her and which she had wore. He had given her thousands of francs and a pearl necklace. Plot and characters as reverse the one you tell of as such things can be.

Surely the story about the big party given to a lot of people and my toast is wrong. I said "Here is to crime and Christianity," and not "Here's to sin." Joyce did say "I can't drink to that, and I muttered to Sylvia Beach, "He certainly knows that the two go together very apparently", in this social order of ours." I think I had a point of possible irony in my toast. "here's to sin" sounds pretty dumb.

It's difficult to quote remarks people have made and I try to avoid it saying that so and so said something like, or such as, and not making it a quote. I hope I do anyway.

But the book is packed with interest, much of it best when it's about nobody famous or celebrated, but just as a being. But the Pajama story was published and somebody might have read it and would wonder how I got your story that way. I know you never met the man or girl in my story and I don't remember ever telling of them excpt in the story.

Do you ever see Wyndham Lewis and how does he live. I recall in thetwenties when he used to -- leg pulling, I thought, -- say he was born in America and was an American. For a time he and I were very friendly but is dropped off because of some idea of his that I prevented Ethel Moorehead and him from paying him a huge sum of money for some of his writing. They didn't have the money, didn't pay contributos except perhaps Ford, or Joyce or Hemingway, and then not much. Don't know how Lewis thought I stopped their payin him, but he did. Then, like Ezra I decided he was rather nuts, full of persecution mania, but I wonder how he is now. I'd like to see The River but it will have to be later, perhaps at some small theatre in L.A. Hope your book is selling enough to bring you in some money, but think you could retire from doctoring and live somewhere on what you have, and that perhaps away from Rutherford, in a New place, you'd begin to get your old feel for writing in a lively manner,

["and anyway, I think the mood of your letter, about not being\nable to loosen up is just a mood and a moment that comes to\nsny writer, painter, or creator of any sort. You autob. shows\nyou are still full of stuff to write about, with ideas and vital-\nity and alert imagination. It's getting incr asingly beautiful", "d'tw here as the days get always warm, and still hot --- are cooling.", "two The evenings and mornings with their sunsets and, dawns make one f\nvm to feel like Francis of Assisi, wakening to the sweet clarity of\nI need a light bright day. The distances of the mountains far away,\neno but the stretches of sand and desert vegetation, dry, and not bounteous,\nif to have a cleansing soothing quality that I could see would make a\nD.H. Lawrence strike off into mysticism.", "and then at twomorrow vm yas t'now. I fed the faneons\n-From a journal of WATTS-TAYLOR, a woman in her forties, who in 1928 left her home in England to live with a group of other women who were also looking for a place to start a new life together.\n\nOne of the women was a woman in her forties, and the other women were all women, and so was the group.\n\nOne of the women was a woman in her forties, and the other women

C/o Thomas Cooks & Son,
Promenade des Abglais,
Nice A.M. France.

Dear Bill:

After two weeks in Paris I'm back south again, in
Nice, in rooms better than we had at the Villa St. Donat, for
less money, much better food, and Nice being sizeable enough for
amusements and only 20 minutes away to the main part. It was a
lucky find. The patroness used to live in Mexico, likes artists
and writers, and turned over the apt. of a Dutch writer who has
gone to the Indias for several mos. to me and two other fellows,
young Canadian writers.

The Politics of Existence goes on -- 150,000 words now.
It won't be done when I said however, as I get more ideas, and
re-write, deciding more and more to go the complete limit,
objectively, with mystical and subconscious run passgges,
phobes, mania, dementias, dementia praecoxes, complexes, damn fools
and geniuses. Naturally I can't get a bid from the printer until
I know how long the book is, but Sylvia Beach read some of it.
Said she was impressed, but I don't know and it doesn't matter.
I know it's got stuff nobody else dares tackle and it's by no
means "decadent". A bit comes out in This Quarter but it isn't
indicative. The thing is impossible to extract from and the
main situations -- my former ex-one --- I would not extract from
for magazine publication. If, as I may, I began to have a
considerable portion of it retyped, I'll send some on to you, but
I want to see what this spell of work brings up. It hasn't the
kind of "form" that I can see ahead always to what it will be

Dear Bill:

I had a lock the other day, in Rome, as I was entering the
read to go and see the catacombs. There you stood, ten years younger,
in a priests "kimera". The same self-conscious, hunted, trusting,
ever-searching look across the eyes; a little challenge, defiance,
and a little shyness, with some "to hell with you" look. I looked
so directly, or stared so hard that the young priest answered with
a look, expectant, but a little resentful. If I could have spoken
Italian I'd have talked to him, but I couldn't. With a few words
I'd have made him understand the "psychologic curiosity". As a
consequence I'm doing a story on you; if I finish it, and think
it any good I'll send you a copy. Christ, I'm wanting to get
out a magazine, but I want to talk to you. The people about know
too damned much; uncreatively, unprotestantly; they're sophistic-
ated. Anything you say, they -- the knowable ones say -- "Ah yes"
in a tone that so completely agrees and confirms you, that you
know how damnably ordinary the emotion or experience you speak of
is to anybody of slight sensibility, sex, or desire, sensual, or
intellectual. You, and I too, a little, are younger. We sense,
but we have to talk about it. Civilization hasn't quite yet
put yescrve into us -- you particularly. But time's doing things
to us. That's why we get "Cummings" new. I understand Proust;
appreciate objective, and narrative writing as I did not through
the period you and I were together. I had during college. I'm
reading -- Van Leen's History of Mankind. Jacapone di Tedi -- a
13th century mystic who wrote erotic religious and rhapsodic tragic
belly aching poetry. Reading also James, Proust, George Moore,
Trollope, Smollet, Benedetto Croce -- etc. Croce says of form,
and art, what we were saying more rawly, or thinking at least when
we had our Contact idea at first. We'll have to go on. But you,
Marsden, Mina, never send stuff to me, so I can get out a magazine.
I know the emotion that stops you too. That's why it'd be a good
thing for us to get together again. We will too, by gerd. I've
reams of things on hand. So damned "worldly, in subject matter;
objective, raw, of night life, a dissapated world, off characters;
people I know so much more of, and think wuite differently of than
I once did. Do you want books. I'll send you any I've been
reading if you want them, but hell, I know you haven't time to read
much. You and Lewis would get on together. We do. He has guts,
realization, imagination, as Pound and Eliot do not have. He
doesn't get it across in his writing, but it's in him. A funny
thing England does to him. I hate even analyzing it or describing
it in letters. May in stories. Takes too much thought for a letter
while I like splashing through.

I've an autobiographic novel on hand with good parts; the
novel I started before I left America, and finished in England, with
you, Marianne, Mina, Marsden, and self in it. Some short stories;
enough things for a book of "worse"; and what? Don't know what
to get out. None of it quite satisfies me. But still I'll plunge
on one of them before long. A dream autobiography I'm doing has

some quite "unprintable passages" in it, because my dreams have
been incestuous, man and woman, and animal; cats, horses, indians,
and what to hell not. I've written the dreams just as they were
or as I remembered them. Some amazing long narratives ones;
about the crown Prince of Japan, and the Crown Princess of
Sweden, being married at the Palace in Peking; one long novel
longh dream about Andy Gump and family of the newspaper cartoons;
funny one that. Another long circus dream. The thing's an
interesting enough "experiment".

Have you submitted you Ms. to publishers there? And will
you send it to me. You surely could see proofs if I get it out?
It'd take longer, but what if it took six months. It surely would
not hold you up as Brown didk, say Improvisations. I haven't
that much wait in me. I wish I'd get more letters from you, but
don't write you many. I know how one doesn't feel like writing,
as long as life exists as it does whether you write letters
about it or not. The more I see of writers and "personalities"
ever here -- English, French, Italian, the more I respect those
I knew and know in America. Definite, and clear personalities;
Mina, Marsden, You, even Djuna -- as a person, rather than as a
writer -- Marianne -- though she's dimming in association with
her mother, and with her "austerities" and moralities. Still,
more vitality, something more there than one gets ever here.
Intelligence is too common here; too much is known, accepted, and
consequently not spoken of any more.

If you send me Ms. send it to Shakespear and Co. 12 Rue de
L'Odeon, Paris. And do it, if you've submitted elsewhere. Then
I'll get out three or four books, and get them distributed some-
how. Here's to seeing you within a year at least. We'll have
a month somewhere -- Capri -- or some quiet place anyway -- and
get things going again when you come over -- not to go on, because
spasmodic efforts are better than continued ones that get stale.

Yours

Hotel Paradise,
Anacapri, Isle di Capri,
Italia. Hadn't better use this address though as I'll only be
here two or three weeks more. Regards to you and Flossie from
Bryker. You know Flossie has a directness and honesty of
perceiving what she does perceive that we in our chaos can't touch.

Dear Bill:

I got the picture of you and the kids, and you're all looking great with health and goodnature for the moment. So am I at this moment. I don't write often Bill because regardless of the fact that events seemed to have become more international and cosmopolitan for me, seeing me in Germany, France, Denmark and perhaps elsewhere, people haven't changed, and neither has much of the time which passes in irritated moods and unrests and discontents. No use pouring that forth on you. Two books of mine will soon be out, one that I publish privately in France, and another by the Egoist Press in England. The novel is held up and another novel being written. I write much -- aber the quality -- well, I don't know -- I guess it's up to a little beyond the average.

Berlin is colorful, with much modern art about. on streets, in theatres, on billboards, in amusement parks, but flaringly in the open probably where much of it belongs rather than in a museum or a private home. Price are tremendous, so cheap here with the exchange.

Today I bought three wonderfully tinted french flannel shift shirts, for very little. And a tailor made suit of clothes -- fine cloth, finely made, for about 25 dollars. In the theatres, which I'm not much interested in at the best, interesting things go on. Djuna Barnes and Jimmie Light tell me about it, and naively and more unsophisticated and sentimental than myself, they do much gooing. Djuna's a good skate, soft in the center, feminine, and over kind actually, beneath a rather rough front, which I suspected all the time was more front than anything else.

I find my interest in magazines all gone -- my and yours, or anybody else's, because I don't think that periodicals put artists and writers on their feet. They need a public, a publishing house, a place to appear so as to earn a living by appearing. Of course the momentary stimulus of a magazine may start something in the ever oncoming younger generation -- about the only generation that can be broken open -- the ones already broken open are cynical, or tired, or not caring much -- just going ahead and working.

When your stuff arrives I'll go ever it and with a bunch
of stuff I like that I have here I'll get out a
number of Contact and finish it up for the time being.
Can't say what time will do, or when my interest will
flare up again, because I go by starts and jerks.

The only reason I'd like to see you in Paris, or
Berlin is -- I'd like to see you for one thing, and
then it'd be a break away for you, new atmosphere, and
a looking on at the scene to see how little free one
ever can be to actually spin on their heel, except
in the mind. Because some of the most eminent
writers and artists, internationally known, face the
wolf pretty constantly. Joyce, -- the scientist writer
Havelock Ellis, Wyndham Lewis, Eliot, Pound -- I guess
his wife saves him -- but there -- all one wants is
a little understanding, and response, so that one's
personality does not seem a monstrosity in the
universe of ones fellowmen.

I'd like to write you long letters Bill, and
give you much news, but things don't occur in me that
way. I'll send you copies of the books as soon as they
are out and think perhaps you'll be a bit surprised to
see how I've developed, or changed, or became more my-
self with less bitterness and protest in my work.
They tell me from England that a shipment of magazines
from you have arrived and I'm having them sent on to
me.

You're really situated as well as anybody for
writing Bill, because life in all it's warm bloody
mediocrity and teeming stupidity goes on about
you constantly, from the womb to the coffin. All
a trip to Europe could do for you would be to bring
into clarity your understanding of that situation.

Write me when you're not fagged, and when you are
I understand not writing. I'm glad you had a fine
summer -- need some nature, lakes, forests, and outdoors
myself -- but an inside drive keeps me away from them, or
drives me away from them. Love to everybody I have
ever given to, and who wants it.