YALE UNIVERSITY
NEW HAVEN CONNECTICUT
1492 PIERSON COLLEGE

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
ARTHUR MIZENER

January 20, 1938

Dear Mr Warren;

I am so pleased that you feel the essay on Shakespeare's imagery comes
pat to the purpose ('like the clown in the old play' isn't it?); if familiarity
breeds indifference, it is probable that you can hardly know what it feels like
to be accepted by THE SOUTHERN REVIEW, which means something to you, instead of
by the PMLA, which you respectbecause you think its standards high, but do not
admire because you think its standards high in respect to things which do not
matter very much.

I am glad to accept your suggestion that I broaden the base of the essay
a little; let Ransom's essay be the jumping-off place for it and then take up the
subject in general and for its own sake. I wanted originally to work in evi-
dence from other sonnets to show how characteristic the method of the sonnet
I have analyzed is; I think that can be done without increasing the length of
the essay and will certainly give greater scope to it. If I have until next
winter I can find time for doing that. I hope that doesn't sound like a silly
remark -- I do all work of this kind over week-ends only during term time, thanks
to the need of making a living in this profession of ours.

I have a notebook full of Shakespeare topics which I want to do some day,
but I do not know that they would appeal to other people. Hy IV Pt 1, for example
needs doing; there are hints toward a solution in Empson's "Pastoral" and in a
footnote of L C Knights's "How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?" The sun and corrup-
tion imagery of Hamlet (touched on in one of my footnotes) needs careful working
out -- it comes up in the queerest way in such different places as the history
plays and Homeo and Juliet. Love's Labour's Lost needs to be done as poem;
practically all the work on it so far has treated it as a crossword puzzle. There
ought to be somewhere -- and isn't -- an essay on the way innocently concrete ob-
jects of no apparent importance or grandeur are made to have such a powerful
effect in Shakespeare. I think it is Mr Ransom who is so impervious to violets
in Shakespeare that he supposes a violet to appear in one of the sonnets because
of exigencies of meter. That, in the face of

but it is I

That, lying by the violet in the sun,
Do as the carrion does, not as the flower,
Corrupt with vittuous season.

and

Lay her i'th'earth,
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring.'

(unpolluted flesh. . . O that this too too sullied flesh. . . Dost thou think
Alexander looked o' this fashion i'th'earth?).

I think myself that Empson is far the most interesting person writing
on Shakespeare now, with L C Knights too little heard from and G W Knight too
little appreciated. But I suppose you mean do I know anyone not heard of who

might be worth looking into. Certainly the best person I know without a
reputation is William Sale Jr at Cornell. You'd never suspect him because
his published work consists of a very learned and dull bibliography of
Samuel Richardson, but I have heard him talk fascinatingly about Hy IV Pt 1
and Romeo and Juliet and I know he is a first-rate mind. There is also a
very good man at Princeton named Edward Hubler; most of his work has been
done on textual matters, I think.

Thanks for the additional books for my current criticism piece; I've
glanced at the Elliot and it looks interesting; I haven't had a chance even
to glance at Parks.

May 17, 1938

Robert Penn Warren
The Southern Review
Baton Rouge, La

Dear Mr Warren;

Thank you very much for your letter of the tenth. It was, in the
end, better that I didn't have the essay I sent you when the *Partisan*
*Review's* deadline approached. Its absence forced me to sit down and write
a review instead of patching together a set of disconnected paragraphs
from the essay.

I should be delighted to do a review of critical books for you.
I think I do not quite understand from your letter whether you will want
me to do a survey of the books published during the period my review
will be intended to cover, or whether you will expect me to elaborate
the thesis of the essay on Knights and Empson with reference to a larger
number of books selected rather for their relevance to the thesis than
for the period in which they were published.

I myself prefer the former alternative; I think it would make the
more interesting essay. At least it is true that for a long time now
criticism has been elaborating, on the one hand, the complex-metaphor
explanation of literature and, on the other, the sociological, and that
most people are troubled by this dichotomy (Kenneth Burke has the part of
Everyman in this morality). If, then, the thesis of the essay I sent you
were set forth, with reference to a larger number of critics, the problem
would at least be brought into sharp focus.

Well, I shall be glad to do either of these things if you will just
let me know which of them you want. Thank you.

December 19, 1938.

Dear Mr Warren;

I have been working up a list of critical books to be covered in
my piece for the spring number of the Southern Review, and I think I ought
to send them to you for comments and additions. I have noted five books
which it seems to me ought unquestionably to be covered by such a piece:
The World's Body, The Triple Thinker,vor Winter's Maule's Curse,
Christopher Caudwell's Reality and Illusion (or is it the other way around?),
and Herbert Read's Literature and Anarchy; I thought of including also two
books not strictly in this category as I think you define it: Richards'
Interpretation in Teaching and your book. Finally, there are two books
I have not read which perhaps ought to be included: J M Murry's Heroes of
Thought, about which I hesitate because it does not apparently belong in such
a group, and J C Powys' Enjoyment of Literature, about which I hesitate be-
cause I don't know that it is worth bothering about. I will be glad to exclude
or include any of these last four about which you have strong feelings one
way or the other.

I am sending you under separate cover an article on The Figurative
Language of Shakespeare's Sonnets which is in effect an attempt at a reply to
Mr Ransom's Shakespeare at Sonnets which you published last winter and which
is now in The World's Body.

March 21, 1939

Dear Mr Warren;

A group of us here have been conducting a campaign to get the Bergen Lecture Foundation to bring Mr. Ransom here for a lecture. The Bergen Foundation is the biggest -- or at least the richest -- we have here; I do not know exactly what it runs to, but I believe the stipend runs to several hundred dollars for a single lecture.

Our campaign has succeed, at least to the point where we have persuaded the man who controls the invitations to invite Mr. Ransom. Our problem now appears to be to persuade Mr. Ransom to answer the invitation. Nearly a month, I believe, has passed since he was written and nothing has been heard from him. It occurred to us that it might be the fact that the man who does the inviting is Billy Phelps that lies behind Mr. Ransom's silence.

In any event, it seemed to us possible that you might be able to tell us if there was any cause in nature that made this hard heart or if there was anything we could do to persuade Mr. Ransom to come; is there?

I have been reading Nightrider and am deeply impressed. How do you suppose reviewers make up their minds what they will talk about in reviewing a book? The remarks, for example, about Mr. Munn's not being well defined remind you of the female correspondent who told Henry James that the nursemaid in The Turn of the Screw was incompletely realized.

If you can help us with Mr. Ransom we shall be very grateful to you.

May 25, 1939.

Dear Mr. Warren;

I'm afraid this piece ran on four or five pages longer than I intended it should, but I think it is probably better for me to send it to you and let you cut it; obviously the sections on Parks's book or Read's can come out easily if you wish them to. For cutting in the other parts, I'd rather you did it than that I tried at this stage.

If you will send back the Ms of the essay on Shakespeare's sonnets I shall get to work on the revisions we spoke of; it would be just as well if I got it done well ahead of time.

Mrs Mizener tells me she sent you a short story several months ago and has heard nothing from you and I promised to mention it to you

August 1, 1939

Dear Mr. Warren;

I have tried to follow your advice as regards the reference
of this paper to Mr. Ransom. Whether my attempt to general the
reference to the critical view of the sonnets which I wish to
disagree with is carried as far as you meant I do not know. I con-
fess that Mr. Ransom's formulations of whatever position he takes
are always so fine that it is difficult to resist quoting him.

I have added one or two minor points which seemed to me to
clarify the argument or to reenforce it and I have tried to clarify
the exposition at several points where it seemed to me my own
sentences were of a poorer quality than even critics' sentences
should be permitted to be. The net result of this tampering is, I
think, to shorten the paper slightly.

I am perfectly willing that you should edit the references
to Mr. Ransom if you feel that either your editorial purposes or
I would benefit from it.

October 14, 1939

Dear Mr. Brooks;

I have just been reading _Modern Poetry and the Tradition_, and I cannot
resist the impulse to write you to tell you how exciting a book I have found it.
I was "Yes, yes, but-ing" all the way through. For instance, in the chapter on
"The Death of Elizabethan Tragedy", I wonder if you haven't slighted Restoration
Comedy more than you need to? It seems to me the metaphysical impulse which was
excluded by definition from tragedy found a home in comedy (what, incidentally,
do you do with Ben Jonson?). To be sure the quarters are rather exclusive, limit-
ed to the special group of people with whom comedy was allowed to deal. But isn't
it part of the argument that such limitation has at least the advantage of making
cultural unity easier to achieve? And making allowance for that limitation, it
seems to me a play like _The Country Wife_ manages to synthesize at a pretty serious
level the two apparently most exclusive attitudes toward its subject. I think
this can be shown in detail. And even Etherege's relatively uncritical comedy
certainly depends for many of its effects on a conscious reference to a quite
different attitude from the one explicit within the play. If that other standard
weren't powerful and in a sense included in the play, almost all Etherege's best
effects would be lost; example: Sir Oliver Cockwood in _She Wou'd If She Cou'd_
crying gaily to his wife and the two young ladies of the play "come, come, march
to your several quarters: go, we have sent for a civil person or two, and are
resolved to fornicate in private." Perhaps Etherege is mainly interested in the
shock of surprise for its own sake, but there would be no surprise if it were not
for the view to which "civil" and "fornicate" so carefully appeal. Etherege is not
a case such as Mr Ransom argues Dr. Johnson was, a writer who, not consciously

metaphysical, was living off his inheritance from the metaphysicals. In spite of
the fact that the whole society and attitude on which the Restoration comedy and
lyric rested was a kind of historical accident -- all its short life an antique --
the metaphysical sensibility and technique endured, after a fashion, in them.
Rochester, who devoured Hobbes, also digested him. And Pope and Gay and Swift
a generation later all wrote some poetry of inclusion.

And your chapter on the Wasteland. It is so much the finest thing of its
kind in print that I think you ought to have noticed the smaller effects as well
as the larger; that would be one way to suggest how much richer the poem is than
any analysis. E.g., the linkage of the first two passages through the shower of
rain which comes over the Starnbergersee, which must also connect with that other
shower of rain which comes with equal surprise and suddenness, bringing another
kind of summer, at 11.393-4. And the "Jug, Jug" business in II specifically
refers to the song in Lyly's Campaspe, 5.1.32-5; something might be made of this.
And isn't it Ariel's song which is being swung in 1. 128? Then the wind under the
door in this section; it is the wind which blows through Gerontion and the Chapel
Perilous, the wind which means that "our lot crawls between dry ribs/ To keep our
metaphysics warm."; and taken with "Frisch weht der Wind" it is one more example of
what you call the obverse of irony. In 1. 138 do we not press "lidless" eyes
(untransmuted to pearls) because we are subjects of death's dream kingdom, waiting
for a knock on the door by the messenger from death's other Kingdom -- and hearing
instead only that terrible wind -- a knock which will come only when and when the
key of 1. 411 is turned? And should not the Ophelia reference at 1. 172 include the
recollection that Ophelia's was a death by water, and that the imagery of Ger-

trude's description of that death makes it a kind of triumph, in spite of its
acute renaissance sense that physical death is a humiliation ("Pull'd the poor
wretch from her melodious lay to muddy death")? What about the washing of the
disciples' feet also at 1. 201, and the fact that in section V the sterile thunder
becomes "a murmur of maternal lamentation" before it speaks? Is it possible that
there is a reference in 1. 384 to the medieval legend repeated by Chaucer's
Prioress? And I wonder if behind the crowing cock of 1. 392 there is not a
parallel like -- though of course with somewhat different purposes -- the parallel
which Lawrence exploits in *The Escaped Cock*? Such a parallel would pull together
at this crucial point the salvation theme, the Hanged God and the various fruition
symbols (at least the sexual ones).

Well; I hope this overgrown letter will seem to you as much of a tribute
to _Modern Poetry and the Tradition_ as it is intended to be. You have avoided the
great fault of so many of those who put this time's case for poetry, the inability
to speak directly. Eliot Ransom, Empson have in common at least this constitution-
al inability. It means that what they say misfires most of the time with everyone
but those who already know what they are about. Irony, for all its splendor, is
a damned bad device for exposition. It is good that some one has come along who
has himself achieved a sufficiently stable synthesis so that he can write at least
exposition without ambiguity. Perhaps I ought also to add: and the courage.

Arthur Mizever.

October 31, 1939

Dear Mr Brooks;

It is very good of you to say that I suggested things in my letter which you had not thought of, and to speak of them as if they mattered very much. I sure they dont; but as I wrote you I got so excited as I read that the most minute details seemed to me to be full of significance. I am firm in my belief that your method of attack on the *Wasteland* is far too effective for you to be justified in sacrificing any of its possible results to compression. And both the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century so badly need their metaphysical aspects advertised. Welter Watkins does the right thing by Swift in the last *Southern Review*, though I am no great believer in these comparisons between humans and fictional beings; but we need more. Surely it's a little hard that the only serious contemporary critical dealing with Restoration Comedy should be L. C. Knights' queer display of bad temper in *Scrutiny*.

It is very kind of you to suggest a meeting during the M. L. A. As a matter of fact Mrs. Mizener and I have been planning -- as much as you can thus far ahead -- to come down. We shall drive if we can manage the time -- barring accidents we should be able to get away around the twentieth. I can think of nothing pleasanter than to meet you and Mrs. Brooks and to see Louisiana as no ignorant tourist does. Perhaps we can let you know as soon as we are able to get our schedule worked out in detail?

November 24, 1939

Dear Mr. Brooks;

We have just got our plans for coming to the MLA meeting more or less
straightened out and I thought I ought to drop you a line about them. I ought
to be back here in New Haven for January 4th, but can at a stretch hold off
till the 8th; at the other end of the vacation I can get away any time with-
in reason -- provided I finish my article on Hardy, which, as I suppose is
always the case, is turning out to be a much more difficult proposition than
I had at first supposed it would be: I knew all about Hardy until I began
reading him over carefully.

Mrs. Mizener and I have decided definitely to drive, which means that
we must allow at least four days at each end for the trip. We have tried to
arrange it so that we are free to come to you either before or after the
meeting, whichever is the more convenient for you. We shall be at the head-
quarters hotel -- I have forgotten its name -- during the meeting, since it
is imperative for me to find another job for next fall and I must flex my
muscles as publicly and shamelessly as I can during those three days.

Do you think there is anything to be said for a little piece on Allen
Tate's "The Fathers" and perhaps Mr. Warren's "Nightriders" as a new kind of
two-dimensional novel? Tate wrote me about the footnote in my *Southern Review*
article which referred to the Posey-Langton affair and seemed to feel, when
I replied, that very few people had grasped the fact that I tried to make the
whole structure of incident symbolic in terms of realistic detail." I had
supposed that must be obvious enough, but if it isn't, surely something ought
to be done about it?

Have you seen Mr. Eliot's latest -- "The Idea of a Christain Society"?
It's incredible the way that men can mix profundity and naivete.

December 7, 1939

Dear Mr. Brooks;

In many ways it is more convenient for us to come to you after
the meeting rather than before; best of all, it leaves me the maximum
time to finish my Hardy article, which I must bring with me if I am to
meet a January deadline, as Mr. Erskine says I must. Incidentally, if
Mr. Erskine is interested, I shall be writing on "Jude the Obscure" as a
tragedy.

I suppose my question about THE FATHERS and NIGHT RIDER must
have sounded as if it were addressed to you as an editor; I was really
thinking of you simply as a critic when I asked it, and was not sounding you
out with a view to publication. What I had in mind was a shorter and simpler
piece than the kind of thing you usually carry -- something of about the
scope of the usual Kenyon Review article. I want to try my hand at some-
thing for them anyway. Incidentally, after two years of steady dripping
on the adamantine stupidity of Billy Phelps -- who controls the funds for
these things -- we have worn him away to the point where he has asked Mr.
Ransom to give the Bergen Lecture here in February. This is our biggest
plum, both in prestige and in cash value.

We look forward to seeing you and Mrs. Brooks with a great deal of
pleasure.

February 13, 1940.

Dear Albert;

I cannot tell you with what pleasure I found you emerging,
on galley 6, from behind the perfect disguise of that fine Italian
hand. I am amazed and yet full of admiration at the number of mis-
takes you caught me out in -- how did you know it was "The En-
cylopedia of the Social Sciences"? I've looked at those damned
volumes a hundred times and never noticed it until I checked your
correction. I am a little horrified too at the amount of trouble I
am making for you on these proofs but I take comfort in the fact
that Cleanth is a little to blame for it. You cannot let an idea,
uncured by irretrievable print, fester in the mind so long as
this one has without the imposthume's not only breaking inward
but oozing out all over the margins of the galleys. Indeed, it
was only by a heroic effort of self-discipline that I kept my-
self from making even more extensive changes (the discipline con-
sists mainly in the thought that I can load all these other hand-
some thoughts into a couple of other pieces which are now mining
all within).

I trust Cleanth will have passed on to you all our news,
as of the trip back with the Schwartzes, the Tate visit (a great
moment in our lives), etc. I should add that Cornell has failed
us and we have settled for next year on an assistant professorship
at Wells College in Aurora New York. We had Bishop here last week,
rehashing his SR piece on Joyce and reading some of his own poems,
and next week Ransom is to give us his lecture and -- we hope --
some of his imitations of Knickerbocker. All these visits are
very exciting to us exiles from culture in this desert of scholar-
ship.

This occasion gives me a good excuse for what I could not
quite do without feeling fatuous heretofore, which is to tell you
and Katherine Ann how very much we (Rosemary and I mean) appreciated
all your kindness to us when we were south. That was the most
exciting and wonderful week of our lives and you were to a con-
siderable extent responsible for making it so. Rosemary has been
writing like a demon with Katherine Ann -- to mix the figure --
the good angel of conscience and quality who whispers in her ear,
from memory, now, as well as from the printed page. Each story, as
it is finished, is weighed carefully to see if we dast send it to
the SR; so far we have had nothing which entirely satisfies us of
its deserving that honor, but the time will come. Jay threatens to
take our "Dark Night" for New Directions 1940.

Our best to Katherine Ann and Tinkum and Cleanth and you,

February 26, 1940

Dear Albert;

I have just discovered that I must teach a section of a survey course
next year, and it occurred to me I might be able to use that book Cleanth,
Warren and Purser got out a few years ago. Didnt Cleanth tell me there had
been a revised edition? But I cant find a copy of it in the Yale Library
(they have one but it seems to be lost). Would it be possible for me to dun
the University Press for an examination copy?

We're just back from a week-end visit to Aurora, to look for homes
(Aurora is the metropolis -- 600 pop -- in which Wells is situated) and I
got filled with dope about next year's courses; hence my stirring around
about it. Northern New York is quite unbelievable in the matter of rents.
We found a palatial joint (unusual combination of beautiful natural wood
panelling and modern plumbing) for $40 a month. It looks out on Lake
Cayuga, and the nearest house is a full mile away and in short we are
going to be gentry next year and I am trying to think if I shouldn't go out
and invest in some tweeds. I shall get up on the war of 1812 and draw me a
map and make Cleanth on the Sherman campaign look like an amateur.

This in haste as I have got behind schedule fooling around Lake
Cayuga; do use your influence and get me a copy of that there now book.

Love to Katherine Ann and best to you,

March 13, 1940

Dear Albert:

Just a note to tell you the MS has come and along with it your long and
damned fascinating letter; why the hell arent you writing a piece for the Hardy
Number? Right at the moment I am in the throes of revising a piece for Modern
Philology which was accepted and returned to me with a set of first-class reader
suggestions in just this same way. I have been on it for a week steadily now
and, though this may be only that kind of self-infatuation which all people who
write anything suffer from at least temporarily after writing, I think it is far
far better for the revision done under the stimulus of these suggestions. I ought
to finish with this piece in a couple of days more, and I shall then tackle the
Jude piece. In due time I shall return you am much revised MS or a fighting
letter, or -- more probably -- both.

I have not studied your remarks with care, as I intend to, but at a glance
there is that little matter of page seven note 7 (the quot from Hardy about the
bible narratives). It is just my point here that Hardy seems to think the whole end
and object of perfect art is verisimilitude. At first these narratives persuade
him that they are true to nature in the historical and scientific sense; but on
second thought he realizes that all they prove in this sense is the "reality" of
the skilful artist who produced them. Now my point all through here is that to write
tragedy you have to believe in the reality, not simply of a scientific and historical
Nature, but of a Nature which is meaningful and significant in a moral and spiritual
sense. It is surely in this sense that we say a work of art is an imitation of
Nature; and it is in this sense that Plato -- I hope it was Plato -- claimed that
a great poem was truer than history; hisotry is verisimular; art is true. But the
fact that you did not understand me to mean this indicates that the point is not
well made, even if it is, as I think, just; it therefore be rehandled. Well, as I
say, you shall be more from me on all these points.

I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your going to the trouble of a critical
reading of my piece. A person is always too close to his own arguments either to
see very clearly their faults or, worse from his point of view, to see where he is
taking their course too much for granted, leaving out too many links. I'm sure that
the piece will be far better for your making me wrestle with it in this way, and I
promise to be a good boy about the proofs. I am really ashamed of myself about the
Shakespeare piece, and if there is any way I can make that up to you you must tell
me (but the corrections were improvement s, werent they?)

Thanks for the dope about the books; I accidentally discovered the fact about
Crofts and wrote them for the "Approach" which I am going to use in the composition
course next year -- Leider Lovett and Root for the survey (how I do hate survey
courses) which is going to be an expanded version of Cleanth's chapter -- "Notes
for a revised history of English Poetry". Incidentally, is "pleasure" quite the
right word for the way Hardy contemplated the conditions described in "In Time of
the Breaking of Nations"? Ha!

Love to Katherine Ann and many thanks to you,

Friday

Dear Albert;

Here is the revised essay, and here is the fighting letter. To begin with you will observe that I have substantially rewritten the foxtnotes on pp. 6 & 7 and the passages in the text which lead up to them. I have not consciously changed the argument but I have sought to clarify it; it is a hellish business to write about because you are always either splitting meanings of words like history, nature, truth etc, which people either do not think of as separable, or have never thought of us joined. You will tell me if you think I have improved matters -- so far as the clarity of the argument is concerned if not its convincingness to you -- or only made confusion worse confounded. You will also notice that I have tampered with the phrasing here and there in the hope of removing possible ambiguities which I did not see when I first wrote the essay. One other minor matter: kind of matter. On p. 5 you have 1. c.'d two words which you will find cap'd in The Later Years; is this intentional? On p. 14 you have taken me down for using "different to" instead of "different from". Fowler says this refusal to take "different to" is pedantry (come, come, Albert); I always, by now almost instinctively, use "different to" when I am thinking of "sharply in contrast to" instead of merely "varying from". But maybe the distinction's not worth preserving. On p. 20 you have queried my "only"; I mean, as remarked in the margin, "nothing better than"; if you think that phrase clearer stick it in. Now to the main business.

I am the last one who wishes to deny that Hardy, in his guts, believed that
that life's conditions, the fundamentally evil and tragic circumstances of existence,
were ingrained. That is the common light in which all the events of the great novels
are seen and which gives to those novels a uniformity of feeling which constitutes
their "coherence" as Hardy calls it. But the fact remained that he could not subor-
dinate his intellect to this "intuition" of the nature of reality. And his intel-
lect told him what all Nineteenth Century intellects told their possessors -- that
the universe was consistent. For Hardy that meant that it was to be deluded to rest
in any sense on the Grace of God, that Man's Hope was for an earthly paradise, a
gradually reformed world. Now, as you say, there are certain institutional aspects
of life which are obviously capable of change and, if you will, improvement; Hardy
seemed constantly to be talking about them (e.g., the marriage question in Jude).
But you will notice that he was always annoyed when people supposed that his main
object was to urge reform of such institutions (see The Later Years, p. 41). In-
tellectually Hardy placed his hope in these reforms; but at bottom he felt that the
more institutions changed the more they remained the same. And in the final ana-
lysis, as a consequence, there was a contradiction between the only paradise Hardy's
intellect would let him believe in, a reformed world, and his very deep feeling
of the element of incurable evil in human life.

The reason I dragged in the section on the tendency in Hardy, as in all
tragic writers, toward pastoral idealization was because the point you raise about

CHARLES W. PIPKIN, Editor · CLEANTH BROOKS, JR. · ROBERT PENN WARREN, Managing Editors 32

THE SOUTHERN REVIEW

Published Quarterly by LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

ALBERT RUSSEL ERSKINE, JR., Business Manager

University,
Louisiana,

March 6, 1940

Dear Arthur,

Thanks for the letters, but damned if I'll thank
you for all the revisions in the galleys. _Must_ you always
add things in the middle of paragraphs? So we have to reset,
and of course recheck, the whole paragraph? Well, this time
I'm letting you play with your MS before the printer gets it;
speak now or forever hold etc. And please shoot it back as
soon as possible. I have a few questions, but first....

That book by Warren and Brooks: Title, *An Approach to Literature*. Published by F.S. Crofts & Co. (41 Union Square West, N.Y.C.) who will no doubt be willing to send you a sample copy. The University Press sold it to Crofts about two years ago, and the new edition is revised and enlarged. If the course you have in mind is the usual kind of "survey" course (from Beowulf to Thomas Hardy, and suchlike), this book will be no good. It was intended to fill the need that the *College Omnibus* pretended to fill in the so-called "appreciation" courses. It is not chronological; it is divided into sections: Novel, Short Story, Essay, Drama, Poetry; and the treatment is similar to that in *Understanding Poetry*. The samples in each section are drawn from all periods. Damned good book, too.

About the MS. I have been through twice, and be-
tween the two trips I read *Jude* (for the first time, he admitted,
ashamed), which was worse than I had expected. Also I have
checked your quotations against the Mod. Lib. edition (with some
rather interesting results, as you will note). The University's
set of Mrs. Hardy's *Life* is at home and I can't remember to
bring it out here; so maybe you'd better check your quotes from
that--if convenient.

I wish you'd think about footnote seven: it seems
to me to indicate just the opposite from what it is offered
as evidence of--i.e., "All that the narrative *that* which was a
perfect artifice ever proved, according to Hardy, was the ac-
tuality of its author...." For Hardy is talking about a very
special case, the Bible, which purports to be history, presenting
acutal events. But Hardy regards it as imaginative writing
which is so convincingly presented that readers are deceived; and
he says that the presentation of the events does not prove that
they were real but proves that there was a great artist (not *author*)
who was not content to be merely a historian.

3

I hope you don't get the impression from all this that I don't like the essay, or that I don't agree with by far the major part of it. Or that I think that it proves anything much that I don't agree with some of it. You right well you can send it back just as it stands, with a word that you still think it is just that way, and that I'll take it down and have the printer set it up. But there seem to me to be a few places where you have left your guard down, or have not been quite clear; and I thought I might as well argue about them before printing as after. My chief reason for sending the MS back at all is my having seen what you did to the galleys of the other article: I want you to indulge all your passion for insertion and revision before the type is cast. And, since it is going to you, why not argue a bit? I only wish we could sit in two easy chairs and argue across a table, instead of under these unsatisfactory conditions.

The real argument, of course, would be about what are Earth's ingrained conditions (that could go on forever), but especially what Hardy meant by the phrase. Some of those conditions Hardy could contemplate with pleasure (as in "In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'") as compared with the noningrained (Dynasties, wars, etc.); as for other ingrained conditions, resignation is the only healthy attitude possible. I am not sure how clearly Hardy saw the distinction, but I don't think he considered his meliorism (not perfectionism, by the way) as applying to such ingrained conditions as mortality or that "terrestrial flew" mentioned above, or indeed, to Evil--though he would no doubt have argued, perhaps mistakenly, that we might find more and more ways of checking and weakening the power of Evil.

Well, as you can see by the date at the head of this, I have been writing this letter off and on at odd moments (so several days). It probably isn't very clear--partly because of the conditions of composition, partly because I'm pretty much confused myself on some of the questions. Don't bother to answer my arguments if you don't have time; but if you do have time, I should not object to being convinced.

With best regards to you and Rosemary,

April 12, 1940

Dear Arthur:

I am far behind in my correspondence, and I have intended
again and again to get at least a brief note to you. Life in
Baton Rouge, however, has been most strenuous. We have been
on tenterhooks over the department situation. We still have
not appointment of the new head, but I think that a temporary
choice has been made. At least the enemy has been beaten to
a standstill, though I don't think that the new reorganization
of the department is going to do much more than gain common
honesty and strict academic standards for the department. I
don't think, that is, that the ideas that you and I believe in
about what English teaching should be are going to find any
stronger foothold here.

Tinkum and I have rather suddenly built a little cottage
and so will have plenty of room for you and R semay on your
next visit here -- a visit which we hope won't be postponed
too long.

By the way, I am to read a paper on Modern Criticism
at the English Institute at Columbia early in September.
I don't know where Wells College is, but I hope that it is
not too far from New York. It would be awfully nice if we
could get to see you for a little more talk.

We are brooding over a little project now which may
call for your enlistment in terms of an article for THE
REVIEW -- more of this in a few days, however, after we
have cogitated a little further on it. Meantime, I wonder
whether you have thought further about the article on THE
NEW REPUBLIC and THE NATION which we talked about at the
first of the year? I think that it is a fine idea, and I
wish that you or Delmore would do it, or perhaps that both
of you would collaborate on it.

38

April 24, 1940.

Dear Albert:

I do not want to be constantly importuning you, but I do not, on
the other hand, want to miss out on a handful of off-prints through a
failure to ask for them. In other words: may I have some off-prints of
"The Structure of Figurative Language etc"?

Who is John Kelly of New Haven? How can we have a Kafka man right
on our doorstep without ever having seen him? Some one has blundered.

As ever,
Anton.

April 30, 1940.

Dear Albert:

Thanks loads for the trouble about the off-prints, but what on earth
would I ever do with fifty? and where do I find ten bucks, for all of that?
I think the best thing forme to do is to buy from you about half a dozen
copies of the magazine; if I remember correctly you bharged me fifty cents
a copy for them the last time, and I enclose my check on that assumption; if
I am wrong just let me know and I'll send whatelse is necessary.

Dont think Allen wasnt fun for us. The Yale Lit has just come off
thepress with a well meant if not very well written elaboration of Allen's
talk. SAMXXX I see that all the boys are getting together at Columbia in
September at the English Institute. Now there's an organization Cleanth
would really do well to muscle in on; let his battle cry be 'capture the
machinery! St. George for England!'

Best to Katherine Ann and You,

WELLS COLLEGE
AURORA-ON-CAYUGA, NEW YORK

January 12, 1941.

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

Dear Warren:

Well, I wouldn't have come to Boston either, had I been in your place; but had you foreseen Cleanth running back and forth between rostrum and platform chair and snatching his false moustache on and off, you would have come for very pity of it. Cleanth and was very eloquent on the subject of the Christmas present you bought yourself in anticipation of the profits from the Hemingway piece, and I do not want to in any way complicate things for you; I don't feel strongly about our pieces' going to the American Scholar, you know; but if you really do agree with me that it is worth a try, I am of course for it. Might it not be well to send them together with a note to describe their relationship? On the assumption that it might, I shall mail my piece to you. It suffered some slight changes after I had sent the carbon on to you, and this is my only copy of its final form. You can then use your discretion about sending them and the covering note. Anything you do will be all right with me. A Yeats issue of the SR is a wonderful idea and I am flattered and excited by the idea of doing something for it. Please count on me. I hope you will not be offended if I nosey-parker a little and suggest that along about the middle of things, before the writing has been done and after the reading, you find out what is being written about, so that we don't duplicate subjects or make any important ones. My one feeling about the Hardy issue -- in the way of dissatisfaction I mean -- was a feeling that it lacked the kind of coordination that might be got this way. Not that any such number ever has had such coordination: the James Hound & Horn was very

WELLS COLLEGE

AURORA-ON-CAYUGA, NEW YORK

Dear Cleanth:

I think Bald and the rest, despite their British
accents (Bald is an Australian), must have been wrong
about homely in the Ode. Nothing could be clearer than
the following:

It is for homely features to keep home,
They had their name thence; coarse complexions
And cheeks of sorry grain will serve to ply
The sampler, and to tease the housewife's wool.

-- Comus (1634), ll. 747-50.

Milton can still have Comus show a certain delight
in his dialectics by pointing out the neatness of the
play on _homely_ (I must say the young lady does not
strike one as the kind of person who would get this sort
of thing without some help), and that may indicate that
the secondary meaning, of ugly, is fairly recent, or
at least not habitual; I notice the NED puts its first
instance in the 1590s. I wish I'd known this in New
York. I hate to have those bibliographers put it over
us, as if they were the ones who always had the accurate
information.

Dear Cleanth:

Here, at last, it is, and I do not know how to apologize enough for being
so late as this with it. I shall never try again to do a wholly serious piece of
work in term time. You need at least ten days of complete and monomaniacal devotion
for a thing of this kind. I got it by dropping, in effect, my courses altogether --
but even at that I had to appear in the classroom and talk about something 14
hours a week and it was a great hindrance.

The piece turns out to be, in Rosemary's fair copy, somewhat longer than
I had supposed it was when I checked it over in my final, rather messy, draft. I
figured it at around 27 or 28 typed pages, but, as you see, it comes to something
more. If it is too long for your purposes I will cut it, but rather than to delay
further in order to cut and retype it I am sending it along as it stands. But be
sure to call for cuts if you wish them. I have a carbon which I can get to work on
at once in case you want a shorter version.

You will find, pp. 17ff, that I have picked a little quarrel with you.
I hope this will seem really right and proper to you (I mean not just to your
southern gentleman self). If we can do this sort of thing among ourself and
still retain our mutual confidence and good will, we may get some way toward
refuting the vicious and political cracks such as the one Pearson made at
the English Institute last year. Actually, as I read myself over and read you
over in checking the quotations, it seems to me that the disagreement amounts
to a not very large difference in emphasis. You are bent in showing in what
respects symbolist and metaphysical poetry are alike, and so you notice that
"even [something like] the syllogistic framework, etc" exists in Yeats' poem.
Certainly this is true. I, on the other hand, am bent on marking the distinct ions
between Yeats kind of poetry and the metaphysicals, and so I notice that 'some-
thing like' is not identity: I insist on the differences which you are concerned
to ignore in favor of the similarities, which I, in turn, am concerned to ignore.
This does not amount, at bottom, to so much of a difference as it seems on the
surface, nor so much of a one as I supposed it was going to turn out to be when
I first set out to define it for myself. Nonetheless, it is a difference, and
-- I hope you will think too -- a healthy one. I hope John will not think that
I am lining up with Sparrow, a possible misunderstanding which has haunted me
for a week and which I have tried to obviate by making all my references to
Winters, the legalist, as Delmore wants us to call him -- which is a wonderful name,
since it exposes the problem so beautifully; law, says the romanticist (speaking
to unawakened earth through the lips of W H Auden), is love; no, says the humanist,
you cant flout statuary law in favor of humanitarianism like that, law is the
codification of the substantial moral fact of the universe, a significant artifice.
God may be merciful as well as just, but it is equally true that he is just as well
as merciful; a paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox.

December 21, 1941

Dear Arthur,

This will have to be a short note, one which I wish could be expanded by long conversation with you in Indianapolis. I'm sorry that I can't make it to that city. One little group of brave spirits from here are going to drive it. But I'm not quite up to that, and anyway I've missed the last two Christmases by being away from home.

The news is that the Southern Review will breath its last with the Spring issue--that is, unless something quite unforeseen occurs. But we hardly expect that. This is a bad time to try to scare up an opulent angel. The University, because of the need for economy, is having to drop subsidization of the Southern Review along with that of another magazine or so. The president of the University, I believe, quite genuinely regrets the necessity for suspending it. At any rate, you will see our formal notice of suspension which will be included in the Yeats issue--which issue, by the way, I am forwarding to you at Indianapolis. It's a good number.

Merry Christmas from both of
us to all three of you.