PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY: ORIGINAL MATERIAL RESTRICTED

Thursday, July 25, '17

Dear Kenneth;

After you left that meeting, there were interesting developments which I must tell you about. They bear strongly on our attitude toward the social problems.

One member--the car conductor--attacked the Executive committee as being for the most self-appointed, undemocratic and intending to coerce the club to its aims, without depending on it for authority to action etc. A three hour fight ensued. Secrets must be kept, there was the necessity for swift action, and implicit trust in inside members. It was confessed that they did not intend to be democratic for the sake of "effectiveness," Autocracy was extolled as a necessity for the time being. One man got up and said "I am willing to give up privileges to secure Democracy."

But I said; those whose sole motive it is to make democracy possible and practicable, in a real pinch assume autocracy. The socialist rulers of Russia did this the other night by making Kerensky Dictator. The U.S. adopts that course in time of war. Then if its very believers, the Socialists disavow it, democracy is not a reality. Thus one concludes that the revolutionary socialists are not striving for democracy; they are a class and are fighting another class with its own tools, autocracy if necessary. The Call admitted this veiledly in Wednesday's editorial on Kerensky as Dictator.

My final conclusion was that the members should not appose the Committee since the aim was not to conduct the club democratically but to resist the powers that be successfully. It is which class do you believe in? The proletarian? Then knock all ideals of democracy on the head and fight the enemy by all means fair or foul.

They spoke of the underground struggle that was to come, of the futility of protesting in the open. The official socialist party and the People's council must be aboveboard. And so it was for the Guillotine and its ilk to take the active revolutionary part.

Now as to myself---I admire the honest stand you took, and I know that many others do not belong there. Looking at the whole thing unflinchingly, I see that I came when the aims were not formulated and the structure had not taken shape. AS it formed I did not think that my beliefs were in union with its progression. And I say now that in a pinch if I am asked to do that which I do not believe in my individuality has not been submerged enough to submit for the sake of the cause, and I must refuse in such a case. Thus I am a weak cog in the machine. I shall write to the Committee and inform them of this. They may decide whether I shall leave or no. That will be as honest as I can be.

As for you ---There was really an impulse which led you to get Jaures' book. You need not stifle that because of what happened I shall go on letting my social consciousness develop. I think that what we really want is an educational socialist society like The Fabians of London. That is for us. I don't think revolutionary

N.B. 1970

Example

of "anti-log-rolling"

style we used in 1920 in
criticism of each other's unpublished
writings. M.J.

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Saturday Night

Dear Kenneth,

I was very glad to hear that you had landed that position with World's Market. I think you're in a good place and can easily hold on to your job. Just keep a sharp eye peeled on your copy and be steady.

You will find that your magazine work will fit you for all kinds of positions that give regular pay and meet the rent, and are not necessarily very taxing.

As for me, I am working very hard and doing all kinds of writing--also an asset. The other day I wrote a color story that was so degraded and cheap that when I saw it the next morning I could not believe my eyes. Of course it went very well. But normally I plug at financial stories and write up "trades".

I am living at 447 W.22nd. and my telephone is Chelsea 5178, in case you want to see me. I am home every evening after 9 p.M.

Matty.

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Dear Kenneth,

One of the bright spots in my rather dogged existence came
along the other day--about one day of the week I devote to interview-
a Jersey author---and I picked Wm. Carlos Williams this time. He lives
in Rutherford about twelve miles from Newark, a successful suburban
physician.

 Liked him a good deal, however. He is very simple, unaffected, boyish.
 But he has good instincts, and innate taste. He is a bit Spanish, but es-
 pecially notable are his faun's ears, small triangular, the most uncanny
 ears you ever saw. He and I make a great pair of ears. And therein is
 also your one.

He remembered you, for your "virgin," in Others years ago, and
expressed desire to meet you. He is very much alive and vigorous, pub-
lishing a little magazine of his own"contact". His new book Improvisa-
tions with its voluminous and luxurious notes is rather worthwhile. I
got to him by meeting Margaret Anderson, one morning this week. She told me that she was keeping two of my poems, but the L.R. was in trouble and she didn't know when she would publish. La France accepted my Jules Ro-
mains disquisition and will publish it shortly. But I am not writing
very much now.

The Ledger book review is now in my hands, Luis Ginsberg sacked.
You ought to see some of the things we have been doing. Devoted one issue
to Evening Post favorites, McFee and Stephen Benet. No kid gloves. Why
don't you contribute.

Sunday, Jan. 10, 1921

My dear Kenneth,

This is to inform you that I have just made arrangements
for our stag-erring across the Jersey hills to Rutherford, on next
Sunday, the 23. I have just received a very cordial invitation
from W.C.W., whom I misunderstood by the way, and who assured me
that he had nothing but the most charming wishes for me.

I now enter the ranks of well-starred human beings again.
My relations with the LEDGER are terminated since Friday, and on Monday
I begin to work for a weekly magazine at a somewhat higher basis of
compensation. My business address hereafter will be 100 William St.,
after this, and all my responsibility ceases at 5 o'clock every
day.

For these days of depression I had some rather good luck,
finding my job after an hour or two of rounds for three days. Daily
news work had begun to deaden my brain for the last month or so.
I would grind copy till about 2 A.M. and then wind up in the lower
floor of a whorehouse on Market St. with the city-editor and the
rewrite man, where we would absorb all the till about 5 A.M. At 6x I would
be in 22nd. St., consoling and conciliating rather woeful wife, with
a man who would be a gracious as one feasibility can with a man who
dears the aura of a beer factory... That, at least, could not remain a
satisfactory program of existence very long.

Besides, newspaper work really becomes fascinating after a
while, and before you know it.... But it is all over. I have a hunch
that I shall begin writing again. In the two day vacation I have had

-2-

between jobs, I have peacefully finished half of your bedraggled copy of
A Rebours. I thirst for literary shop-talk again. I believe that
I shall begin to take up Latin again under the wise guidance, read
sagas and produce an epic. There is no reason to think that a small
weekly dribble of chemical and petroleum market writing will obstruct
such projects.

The horizon of effort is rather narrow and desolate, lying as it
does between canby and seides. I think we can take hold of Williams'
venture and really make something of it. It is a hope. But you must
be more tractable.

Let me know where and when you can meet me for next Sunday's
peregrinations. in the meanwhile I can have lunch with you downtown
the latter part of this week. My phone is Beekman 5063.

Matty

85 Boulevard de Port Royal,
Paris, 14, 4, Novembre

Dear K.

Have been here about two weeks, for the last week in this semi-
pension, within an enclosed square full of chestnut trees... But let me
first describe the W.O. which is rather backward in these older houses
and requires precise and elaborate gestures: first you open the creaky
door, press a button to turn on the light, close the door, fill a pitcher
of water, lift the cover, repose, sigh, mmx pluck off a leaf of let us say
le Petit Parisien, read a fragment of a feuilleton, consign it, jerk a
little handle fixed in the bench beside you violently and the bottom
of the bowl falls away to infinity...

On the other hand the little hotels in the Montparnasse and the
modern apartments have every convenience. The French are a very clean
people. We have a large cheerful room a little off the Boulevard mont-
parnasse. In the cheap cafes around there the lavabos are for both
men and women.

The first evening in Paris, we bumped into P. Winner at the door of
our hotel on the rue de Rennes. The next morning he acted as our Tom
Cook and we saw all the palaces and gardens for the paltry cost of
one lunch at 5 francs. Otherwise the weather is very depressing. I
have never seen so much rain. It is very conducive to frequent apopitifs,
at anywhere from .60 to 1.75 for Chartreuse or Bendictine. Your
Rotonde, alas, which thrives on the corner where the Bd. Raspail cuts
the Bd. Montparnasse, is enlarging its quarters. I have been there about
twice and retired in disgust. No one gets drunk. It is not the habit.
All the Americans are there. I met Light, who had just come back from
Berlin on his way through, all sorts of New Yorkers, Californians, Ohio
Staters. The Americans are so thick that the tendency is to forget all
the French one has learned in the United States. At the half dozen
cafes which they infest all day long in the Montparnasse they group
as Lesbians, as Fairies, ( at the huge Salon d'Autonne which I saw the
other day at the Grand Palais on the Champs Elysées, pictures of two
nudes rubbing each others bellies and bosoms were predominant subject.)
There seem to be lots of good painters among them, and the usual ratio
of dabblers in every conceivable pursuit, -- jobs are very scarce therefor.

I met Gorham B. Munson, a young American who is here with his wife.
He writes...I have retired to this place, where one meets loads of
Chattering French people. At one of the genialesst pensions in the
world, you get soup, fish, meat, wine, dessert and coffee, for 4 francs.
And it is very good for my French. I can practically say anything I want
to regardless of syntax after a month of French environment, Paris,
seems the best place to starve in. If you get an apartment for about
300 f per month and cook at home, I am sure that people like Lily and
you could manage on about 700 f. quite easily. You can do even better
if you get a farm in Brittany or in the Midid. I like the South.
Our boat hit Vigo in the North of Spain, and I got off for a while, and
saw streets which reminded me of your Eleventh City. Freinds on the
boat who knew Spain almost convinced us that the mountains there are
the place to retire to. You get more yellow and pink in the landscapes,
red mountains and pink clouds. However, the part of Normandy that I
traversed on the way up to Paris was utterly charming too.

And so the greasy little American colony drags along here. I was sitting this afternoon in the Cafe Dome opposite the Rotonde with a bunch who are interested in the "Gargoyle" which you can see in Arens' Bookshop. I was asked to write for it. The redacteur is a little Greenwich Village hund, named Morse who used to run the quill. On the other hand, as Munson and I were saying, it might be possible to get control of him, and head him off. But those probabilities always are.

I understand that the Opera and music and drama in Paris will be rotten this year. Everybody says Berlin. Of course there is literature left, and you know who they are. I am told that it is very easy to gain access to any of the well known writers, and that they are courteous to their admirers. My literary contacts shall begin soon, then. I shall tramp around to see Gide, and Benda and Vildrac, and others. But frankly I see no great figures draped about the hroizon. All that remains is to become a Harold Stearns (I have met him already) and aggrandize the Self. The situation at least encourages the use of one own standards of understanding.

The dominant note is depressing. Much gathers on the Paris streets. The tobacco is bad. The diurnal necessities confront me. Ah well, it is whatever one moulds of it...Sometime, within the duration of this journey I intended to commit my literary suicide. When that takes place I shall disappear from the firmament, you shall not be able to find me. in the meantime you may write me care of the Brooklyn Eagle, 55 r.Cambon.

Matty.

P.S. The quais along the Seine are filled with trash. I got a Huysmanns there for .60c. Lots of Latin books, however. There are few good books out this year, and 7 or 8 francs loom up as trop cher on this side, for a doubtful volume. I recommend to you, the right bank, with its practiced air of luxe. It is really worth promenading among the crowds on the grand boulevards. I reserve all opinion as to the French for many many months to come. At any rate they are far from the last word in human nature. 4 francs for a bath, Blah----!!!

2)

As for myself, I have struck a strong pace. I am writing stories; have written three or four already, which I shall send you later, each about 3,000 words. I began to write these about three weeks ago. I have tried to make them intensely individual, a little grotesque, a little naive, wistful, cerebral. But they have held together; one especially the PRECIOUS RAGE has made feel that I have found a medium. People here have enjoyed them, and I have been made happy writing them. They begin like a golf-game, teeing off and then taking flight, the fun of the match depending on jolly strokes. When I have run through the string, there may be a book, which will be at least amusing and exhilarating.

For your further information, the writers who seem absorbing when seen from this perspective are Breton, Soupault, Aragon, Ribemont-Dessaigne (Dada plays), Paul Eluard, Blaise Cendrars, and I have almost neglected Andre Salmon, and Paul Morand. Save for Salmon, they are all rather young, and all the kick here is concentrated in them. George Gabory, whose "Nez de Cleopatre" is soon to appear is a new man who is following closely the lines of Les Champs Magn. The worth-while publications, are Litterature, Les Feuilles Libres, and Les Ecrits Nouveaux, pub. by Emile Paul freres.

Dec. 15

I saw Aragon yesterday afternoon at the Hopital Broussais where he is an interne. All this touches you closely. Aragon is a prince. His mind is all afire. He is absolutely on the square, and he and his friends are in the midst of a bitter fight. My views change constantly as I go further into the thing, after a four hour conversation with Aragon, for instance. When I think of your miserable piece of hack on Dadaism, I weep for you. DADA was an etiquette for a group of writers not a formula, but it was also a challenge to the Right, the N.R.F., the Deux Mondes, etc. It has not quite been beaten to the ground by ignorance, prejudice, chauvinism. It has survived through a sense of humor. I discovered Tzara through reading his poems with Aragon. A long story,-- these men make rigid restrictions in the pursuit of their peculiarities, they jettison everything that they cannot use, they make no bones about it--the story will have to be written some day in the near future to combat the inebrieties of Pound, Cocteau, the L.R. and The Dial ("We should only be doing while the work if we excluded these men"; a feminine voice cackles behind stage) I find Pound the most dangerous influence at work here for Americana, and I discover through facts that Cocteau is a scoundrelly cochon. Read his poetry discriminatingly.

Aragon's genius may lance itself in any of a number of directions. I feel that he is at a crossing, although he had already made himself felt. I feel, from the rich and brilliant material he is made of, his splendid background, that he is the most potent artist I have ever met; I mean his brain functions beautifully, his intelligence is baffling, restless, old. Write me, tell me what you are doing now, where you are at. I should like to see you win a prize and then spit on the donors. Then again I should be sorry for you, and possibly slink down a side street, every time I saw you.

There are other interesting issues which we should consider in a cool frame of mind. There is a young man, with a waxed moustache, named Gorham Munson, who has a fearful case of editorial nostalgia. He wants to run a magazine for les jeunes. He wants people like Cowley, Damon, Snow, Donald Clark, Hart Crane, you, me, to compose it. None of the other kind. He may start it as a quarterly in a handsome format gotten out in Berlin and thus have time to shift back to the States, and run it as a more frequent periodical. The Little Review is a botched thing of darkness, the Broom, from its first two issues, is Kreymborg flirting with the Drama-League let us say; The Dial is---. And so why not. If the thing pans out (M. has about 10,000 francs or 200,000 marks left still) I have been promised stuff by Aragon, Breton, Soupault, Eluard. A. told me that the Dial bought ms. of him, paid him handsomely, and never published it, while constantly asking him for critiques. You might weep on his shoulder. On the other hand you might send me some ms. that you know you cannot sell, for the spring issue of this affair. But if you should send me any cat-offs, I should proceed to make things unpleasant for you. Gargoyle and its Quill-ish owners expire with the December issue, which contains drawings by Picasso and Wyndham Lewis, prose by Cuthbert Wright, Gorham Munson, Waldemar George and myself, on modern subjects, poems by Crane and myself, along with those two usual snappy chatty features provided for your divertissement by the former luminaries of Greenwich Village, Arthur Moss and Florence Gilliam appearing in Entr'Acte and Promenade respectively. If it comes thru to New York you might glance at it profitably, after discounting my stuff, written thirteen and ten years ago, in December 1919 and October 1921.

Matty

2)

For your further information, the writers who seem absorbing when seen from this perspective are Breton, Soupault, Aragon, Ribemont-Descaigne (Dada plays), Paul Eluard, Blaise Cendrars, and I have almost neglected Andre Salmon, and Paul Morand. Save for Salmon, they are all rather young, and all the kick here is concentrated in them. George Gabory, whose "Nez de Cleopatre" is soon to appear is a new man who is following closely the lines of Les Champs Magn. The worth-while publications, are Litterature, Les Feuilles Libres, and Les Ecrits Nouveaux, pub. by Emile Paul freres.

Dec. 15

an interne. All this touches you closely. Aragon is a prince. His mind is all afire. He is absolutely on the square, and he and his friends are in the midst of a bitter fight. My views change constantly as I go further into the thing, after a four hour conversation with Aragon, for instance. When I think of your miserable piece of hack on Dadaism, I weep for you. DADA was an etiquette for a group of writers not a formula, but it was also a challenge to the Right, the N.R.F., the Deux Mondes, etc. It has not quite been beaten to the ground by ignorance, prejudice, chauvinism. It has survived through a sense of humor. I discovered Tzara through reading his poems with Aragon. A long story,-- these men make rigid restrictions in the pursuit of their peculiarity,-- they jettison everything that they cannot use, they make no bones about it--the story will have to be written some day in the near future to combat the imbecilities of Pound, Cocteau, the L.R. and The Dial ("We should only be doing what the work if we excluded these men"; a feminine voice cackles behind stage) I find Pound the most dangerous influence at work here for Americaxx, and I discover through facts that Cocteau is a scoundrelly cochon. Read his poetry discriminately.

50 Charles Street,
New York City,
December 27, 1921.

Dear Matty,

For some time you have been heading the list for the next letter, but Gadi I am at last truly occupied. At highschool, Cowley was supposed never to be busy, Jake Davis -- now a diamond salesman -- always tremendously busy, and I as un-busy as Cowley while trying to seem as busy as Davis. Hacking, however, with me is a process of giving fifty dollars worth of time for something which nets at the most half as much; and I hack on, faute de mieux.

What you say of the morbus Parisiensis is very interesting; but perhaps you will have to renounce me again, for I must insist that it is not convincing. In other words, you have failed to sell me the Dadaistes, in spite of your unmistakable enthusiasm. Indeed, just now I am much nearer to your poor lost Spenserian sequence than to the humblest Dada. By a strange twist I find myself with many a view now which can fit without alteration in the New York Times. What you say of the present apostasy away from de Gourmont does not surprise me, however; for the few numbers I have seen of Litterature had already convinced me that de Gourmont was completely absent from these men. (As to your incrimination against my explanation of the Dadaistes, by the way, I do not think that that twenty-dollarworth is in any way destroyed by what you say in your letter; my article was a wager, in which, in so many words, I announced that I would find laws where there were none.) But I am scandalized by this: That words, of all things, are used in a way which denies their essential property, the property of ideological clarity. No other art but letters has the least capacity for ideological clarity; ergo, I, who insist that first of all things remain in its own place within their genre, believe that the very first step in writing involves the preserving of this clarity. One can build upon this to whatever extent he pleases, but in the process he must be careful never to run counter to this beginning. How blatantly, for instance, your own letter belies the whole Dadaiste regime; for, when being moved by an authentic anxiety to express yourself, your first concern was with lucidity ... it never even occurred to you to write it all Dadaistically.

Well, here is a violent statement of divergences: I, the undersigned, do here avow and maintain that there is infinitely less to be gotten out of Rimbaud than Racine. Just now, in fact, I am even meditating a defense of Matthew Arnold; although I confess in secret that this is more of a gesture than it should be, a first broad move to clear away the lice of H. L. Mencken. (I, you see, must talk in terms of my own Gods and my own devils, especially since contemporary Frenchmen touch me so faintly.) Then -- and here is another move which you will not approve of -- I wish to talk of a Euclidean, anti-musical literature, a literature of solids rather than of functions. (Thus you see me becoming even more emboldened in my pre-dilection for the block-like structure). Philosophically, I turn to Spinoza; critically, to the dogmatism of Aristotle. In its essential, therefore, I demand an insistence on contours. Specifically, I wish to war against impressionism and subjectivism, Contact and emotion. (On this latter point, I have written an essay on Pater, in which I plead that he both exemplified impressionism beautifully, and exhausted it; that we must now turn to another field of reactions; that the fear of the academic has become merely a mechanical repetition.)

2

Quite naturally, then, I turn to the Golden Ages of European literature, both for form and subject. The story I am working on at present -- it is all laid out, but for two months I have not been able to afford to write it -- is to be called significantly First Pastoral. Unfortunately, it involves a couple of weeks reading of the early schismatists and the neo-Platonists of the type of Bembo. It is, perhaps, not quite what I want, but I accept it as a transition. As to the nature of the technique, I leave that blank at present, but shall certainly send you a copy of the story when it is finished.

In the meantime, life is not at all satisfactory. My detest of the metropolis has grown so egregiously that it now -- as you have seen -- involves even a detest of metropolitan art. Strangely enough, the one bright spot in my intellectual life is McKeoh, whom I see once every couple of weeks, and who is a consolation to me because he knows things, True, this may wear off when he finally leaves school; but for the present, at least, it is still with him and vitally operating. Christ! with all the wishy-wash of modern mouthing, it is positively invigorating to discuss what this man maintains and that man rebuts, wherein so-and-so is differentiated from so-and-so, how one thing can be divided and other things grouped. Williams and his damned Contact ... who in the hell cares what the noumenon is? ... the remarkable thing is the intricacy of the dance around it. Or, to borrow a point from a review I wrote of Williams's new book; Given a warm fire and the wind howling outside, Kant sits down and works out the categorical imperative; but Williams would never get over the delight in how warm he was and how ineffectually the wind was raging outside. And I, personally, vote for the categorical imperative, although Williams is obviously right in his simplicity and Kant is obviously wrong in his intricacy.

When Spinoza writes -- I quote from memory, but I think I have it correctly -- "effectus, qui passio est, cessit esse passio simulatque adaequatam formamus ideam," he is writing in a manner which I find delightful. Or when he defines love as "laetitia concomitante idea m causae externae." Love nailed down as "joy, with a concomitant idea of an external cause!" That sort of thing seems to me positively triumphant.

Since returning to New York my passion for reading has been most unusual. Indeed, I have been a highschool sophomore again. Never before was I quite so impressed with the real magnitude of European accomplishment. I am even, by heavens, now saving up my review books to purchase a complete set of Goethe from Schulte. To write my Pater essay I read his complete works. I find at times that in looking forward to the future I am looking forward to nothing other than the reading of two thousand books. I do not approve of vibrations, but even so I must admit that I am thrilled at the idea of how much remarkable stuff there is which I as yet know not even a word of. But I grow maudlin, and like Edna St. Vincent, can not hold it close enough. Best luck to you and yours.

Sincerely,