MACINTYRE
BLUERIDGE
BEVERLY HILLS
CALIFORNIA

October 16, 1936

Mr. Robert Penn Warren
The Southern Review
Baton Rouge
Louisiana

Dear Sir

William Elliott sent you a group of poems
without my knowledge. They were only half-worked out.
He has suggested that I forward something new.

The present booklet is in three parts. Mr.
Untermeyer and WYE have encouraged me about the third,
the political section, and the better portions of it are
now, I believe, with Rockwell Kent. I wish you had it.

I shall be very happy to have certain
poems, particularly the Family Album, read by a Southern-
er. I am attempting to get material for a follow-up
with the Macmillan Company...if it seems necessary. They
were instructed a month ago to send you a copy of a book
they are publishing for me on Oct. 27th, for a possible
review.

I am with the English Department of UCLA,
and the mess of term papers I have to read has almost
ruined my vision. Please bear with any faulty typing and
bad punctuation. I've worn myself out on proof-reading
of late.

The MS could be returned by express, collect.

CARLYLE F. MAC INTYRE
BLUERIDGE
BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA

October 19, 1936

Mr. Robert Penn Warren
The Southern Review
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Dear Mr. Warren

Apparently our letters passed each other.
When I sent the additional material, I had no idea
you had definite intentions. But I shall try to be
helpful in supplying what you want to build up the
group you purpose using.

I am somewhat dubious what you expect
of me in the way of the critical and biographical
note. The latter I do horribly deplore. Facts and
dates aren't, I hope, what you want.

I am in hopes that any critical material will be
supplied from the distinguished pens of John Ransom,
Allen Tate, or yourself. Perhaps when my book arrives,
the matter will clarify itself. I fear I may have
many bones to pick with the Saturday Review, the
Van Dorens, Morleys, etcetera, ad nauseum. Mr. Unter-
meyer and Rockwell Kent have written me good letters
and seem to want to be helpful. I'm rather green at
all this.

I am sorry I have no long poem, save
an epic. If you care for any particular style in
the selections you now have, I could send on more
in the same vein.

November 30, 1936

Dear Mr. Warren

It has now been a month since your last letter; I hope your illness has not become serious. Maybe a letter has gone a-stray, or you haven't received my book from the Macmillan Company. Or maybe you didn't like it or the additional poems I sent.

I have been asked to submit another manuscript for consideration, and I should very much appreciate your advice concerning what I should avoid in a possible second volume. I suppose it is futile for me to hope for any definitive reviews before so doing.

I have had several good ones, but everyone complains about my words. I just happened to get my vocabulary from apprentice translation from Greek, Latin, French, and German poetry. I am annoyed. Shall I root the more scholarly words out and substitute simpler ones? One reviewer, a person signing himself Frank A. Culver, laments; 'He is not the type of poet that appeals to the common man.' Are duels out of date?

Perhaps your letter is on the way.

January 7, 1937

Dear Mr. Warren:

The Macmillan Company has asked me to submit, as soon as possible, the manuscript for another book. This should contain better stuff than the one already published, which you have, I hope, received.

I wanted all available advice from the reviews, friends, and editors before assembling this. I will be greatly obliged to you if you can give me any information concerning what types (from the material I sent you last) you intend to use. I hope this is not an unreasonable request.

There is a slight interval now between semesters, during which I shall have time to revise and type the stuff...Jan. 20th to Feb. 10th...and I shall appreciate having any material from the second batch you are not interested in.

Some good reviews have been sent me but none which give me any real guidance about what I should avoid. I suppose it's necessary to consider the possible audience.

Jan. 15, 1937

Mr. C. F. MacIntyre
Blueridge
Beverly Hills, Calif.

Dear Mr. MacIntyre:

We are enclosing your poems complete for your own reference. The
poems on the loose sheets which we should like to publish are those
marked at the top with a cross. From the group in the folder we would
like to add "Before a Certain Dionysus," and perhaps "Woman Traveling
in Mirage." After your book came in, it was sent out so quickly for
review that I, being extremely busy at that time, did not have the
opportunity of checking through to see if any of these poems were in
that volume. I assume that they were not, since on rereading your
letters I find no mention of the fact. If I am mistaken, please let
us know. And have you any new pieces from which we might select to
swell your general exhibit? The pieces which we have taken will
probably indicate to you the aspect of your work which pleases us
most.

We hope to publish your group in our Summer issue, or failing that,
in our Fall issue at the latest. How would that fit in with your
other plans of publication?

I hope that your book has been having great success, and from
the fact that Macmillan wishes you to submit another manuscript, I
assume that it has been very good.

P. S. We have not kept copies of the poems we hope to be able to use.
Will you send them back to us if the arrangement suggested is satis-
factory to you.

Titles of poems selected for possible publication: "Remanded," "Arion,"
"Eastern Winter," and "Museum Piece."

January 22, 1937

Dear Mr. Warren:

I am sorry to have bothered you with the
return of material of which I should have kept copies.
I am now sending you the pieces you specifically ment-
ion, others you marked with bits of paper, and some new
poems. Much of this material is to be submitted to the
Macmillan Company in a prospectus for another book.

Of course, I can't foretell what will
happen to a possible second book, but I hope anything
you select will be printed before other publication
forestalls it. I have retained a few poems you checked;
they were included in the first book. I suppose W. Y. E. sent them.

I am interested in the critical and biograph-
ical article you once mentioned. Who will do it? If he cares
for any information, I shall gladly communicate with him. X

The copy I asked to have sent you ~~was for~~
your particular consumption. I had rather hoped to engineer
a return of your book. I should be glad to have notice of
any reviews accruing therefrom.

Jan. 25

P.S.

Thank you for the additional poems, tho I didn't
need them. I am ashamed at the thought that an
editor saw them. But it was kindly conceived by
W.Y.E.

So far you have selected Before a Certain Dionysus,
Woman Traveling in Mirage, Arion, and Hope Was Listen-
ing Mightily. The others you mentioned, or several of
them, are now stale.

I have added a score of others done in the last two
years. I don't want to overwhelm you with stuff to
wade thru, but I do want you to have the chance to
please yourselves and get as many as--what other word
can I say but possible?

When you have decided, will you let me know, please?
The Macmillan Company really seemed pleased when I
told them you were considering 'an exhibit.' It might
help my cause against them.

March 3, 1937

Dear Mr. Warren:

I am willing to take my stand on the poems
you have selected, but 'Attis' is one of the best I've
ever done. In fact, in rhyme, rhythm, shock of classical
and modern elements it's highly representative of a
medium I'm attempting to fashion for myself.

If you care to have me do it, I could place
a review of your book somewhere in California: *The Times,*
*Saturday Night*, or elsewhere. I should be glad to submit
the review to you first. May I add that Ida Lou Walton
took us both for a ride? I have a letter from John Holmes
of Tufts, who does the Boston Transcript reviews.
"About Eda Lou Walton: she teaches poetry at Columbia, is
an old-timer on the Times, and has, I suspect, lately
substituted conversion to Communism for the change of
life; very painful anyway." I have forgiven her for sug-
gesting that I have 'a fine command of form...am very
clever...but have little that is actually original to say."

Could your magazine by any chance use a sort
of western representative who, without salary, would be
glad to be a slight wedge in his spare time?

13

NOTES FOR AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The irony of the thing annoys me. Trickling down from General Francis Marion on one side and from Commodore Preble on the other, I did my stint in the war, despite my protests, as a teacher of mathematics. Bred in Kentucky, I was unluckily born in the middle west, on a train somewhere between Covington and San Pedro. I have never been able to get a proper birth certificate, and I sometimes doubt my existence.

I was engaged in reconstructive work after the war in Germany, and I made my Ph.D. in Marburg an der Lahn in the Faculty of Arts and Letters. Since then I have stumbled into the cul de sac of an excessively stunted assistant professorship in English at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Concerning the important episodes: I have been an oyster-fisherman in the Gulf, have ranched and run cowboy races in Texas; I have felled timber in northern California, and I have bummed 10,000 miles thru the United States on the best trains.

My best friends are Sappho, Catullus, Hafiz, Villon, and Rilke. I have never read "Gone with the Wind." When I was eighteen I was a singing waiter in a Saint Paul beer-garden and an amateur boxer.

I live now on a tall arid Beverly Hill, gazing with delicate disdain across Sodom of the Angels into the cleaner eyes of the Pacific Ocean. And just to-day my six-year old blacked a guy's eye and played "America" on the xylophone. This made me very happy.

May 23, 1937

Dear Mr. Warren:

I am sending a sample review of a book
Covici Friede was good enough to give me. Naturally, I
hope to get it printed. If you can't use it, I'll try it
on Poetry which is also printing some poems for me this
summer. I hope to get a chance to do two or three reviews
a year, for the fun of it.

When you get out the June issue, will
you please send me three copies and enter my subscription
for a year? Why don't you send a copy (not the issue with
my poems, necessarily) to the Library of the University
of California at Los Angeles? I've tried to talk up all
of the quarterlies, with slight success.

I hope my biographical notes weren't too
flippant. I can't abide dry factual material.

Don't be fooled about our climate. I have
had a fire all day and several whiskies. The fog has a
spongy consistency, and the birds have gone to Mexico
again.

Please may I have the review as soon as it is rejected?

June 14, 1937

Mr. Albert R. Erskine, Jr.
The Southern Review
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Dear Mr. Erskine:

I am returning the proof received to-day. It looks
right pretty. I caught a few minor corrections and changed
the title, please, of one poem to a more suitable one.
It was Crane who inspired the piece, and I thought at first
to conceal it.

I hope Mr. Warren got the book review and the order
for three copies of the issue and a year's subscription.

The spacing is satisfactory.

July 8, 1937

Mr. Cleanth Brooks, Jr.
The Southern Review,
Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Dear Mr. Brooks:

I am sorry that just yesterday I
sent off a too small check and an untimely in-
quiry about my little review. This letter will
not involve you in any more correspondence dur-
ing a sticky summer. Here is a check for the
additional $.75.

If my poems please you, their
particular style is due in part to some of the articles
in the earlier numbers of your review. These were
called to my attention by Yandell Elliott. And
I have been stimulated somewhat by other members
of the Fugitives, tho I believe we all drank from
a common earlier source.

The Walton poem wasn't intended for
publication. I work off all homicidal ideas in
this fashion.

I am annoyed that I can find no one
here who sells your magazine. Have you an agent here?
I could try to build it up among the local literati
(who are a mess).

18 January 1938

Dear Mr. Brooks,

You will never forgive me, but you will, I hope, advise me about the enclosed manuscript. I don't know what to do with it, and I'm sure it's nothing to send to a New York publisher. Maybe you could suggest cuttings, changes, or you might even care to print a section, if any of them can stand alone.

William Elliott thinks it's the 'best long poem out of America.' Rockwell Kent said that it is 'am amazingly intimate record of your state of mind or being, rather than of what I guess is your essential self: a record of what life has done to you rather than of what God made you.' They are both wrong. Your analysis of The Waste Land made me hope that you will give me the benefit of your criticism.

I started out to take a rap at Eliot and others; but my hero ran away with me. His damned affected polyglotism annoys me, and I've probably overdone my satire. (That 'his' is faulty reference.)

Would I be amused if I came to the Mardi gras? I don't know anyone there, and am well aware of the isolation one can feel in a foreign city.

I hope soon to be able to send you my translations from Rilke.

Box 661

ROBERT G. SPROUL
PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
AT LOS ANGELES

ERNEST C. MOORE
VICE-PRESIDENT AND PROVOST

February 23, 1938

Dear Mr. Brooks:

Please thank My. Erskine for the information forwarded me
and tell Mr. Warren that I did not violate his confidence, the I used
some of the material. I am having all data available drawn up into a
mighty mess for presentation to the president. I have just come from
an interview with him, and he said he would consider the proposition
with great interest, and if the money can be found it may work out.
He even encouraged me in the hope that I might get to go east and
get additional help and suggestions. I deeply appreciate the cooperation
you all have lent me. Maybe someday I can reciprocate.

Just now a trip doesn't seem possible. I am selling my
house preparing for my move to Berkeley; I am waiting daily for per-
mission to print the Rilke book, and the Germans are slow. Our press
manager doesn't want me to go away; and I'm working on Faust with
great enthusiasm. I have been getting various types of people to read
my samples aloud to me: professors, students, movie producers and their
daughters. It seems to read well, even at first sight, and that's
what I want. I am a very out-spoken person myself and nobody ever feels
that he has to 'yes' me, yet everyone appears eager to read more. So
I'm happy and could sit in a chair right here thru my sabbatical.

I told my father: 'There's nothing like work!' He said:
'God, boy, has it taken half your life to make you know that?'

My trip east is merely postponed, and my anticipation
will grow the keener--if all my projects begin to shape. In the mean-
time I'm excited about what you think should be done with 'Sodom.'
Your taking 'The Wasteland' apart was very enlightening and made me hope
you could help me fix mine. I doubt if any commercial house would
undertake it; but I still feel it needs to be said.

I have added a dozen more letters to the young poet.
I see now that eventually I'll have enough for a book, I hope.
Did I make it clear that if any Faust is used, I want to retain all rights,
because I may be able to get a whack at the movies, the I despise them.

Box 661
Beverly Hills

April 7, 1938

Dear Mr. Warren:

I'm going to Germany on a Guggenheim Fellowship soon, and I want to set my house in order. Of course I want to see some of the Faust in print here and there, and maybe get some criticism on it. So if you aren't going to use the 'Prologue' (which I want to retouch in any case), please let me have it as soon as possible. It takes editors so long!

As a matter of fact, Kent, Millay, Huxley and the rest of my few less celebrated acquaintances who have seen what I've got done are enthusiastic. Mr. Kent, in fact, has sent me his drawings for it. Maybe—?

Concerning the epic: if I can manage to get round the world, I'll want to touch it up with descriptions of China, India, Egypt, etc. Couldn't change the skeleton. If you aren't interested in it either, I'd like it back.

I believe I sent some of the 'Letters to a Young Poet.' That series has grown vastly since then, almost book size, and I want to have them to send about.

My 'Rilke' is being held up for German copyright arrangements. Shall send you one sometime.

Hope you saw 'Stag Party' in Sat. Rev. for March 26th.

Cagnes-sur-Mer

February 2, 1939

Dear Mr. Warren:

If editors have consciences, I must have
been on yours; for I wrote you in November, I
believe, about poems which you've had for six
months. You've probably answered and the letter
has strayed. The poems are now so old that I
would want to disown them. I've even forgotten
what I sent and I brought no past records along.

Never go to Italy in the winter. Theocritus
and Archimedes must have been plenty tough.
The modern Italian, stuffed with starch and
ballyhoo, regimented and taxed as he is, is a
pathetic creature. The little megalomaniac 'M'
has given them vainly a puffed-up feeling
which must in the long run finish as it began:
in wind. However, I got a proper set of poems
on Greek ruins, Venice, etc., and shan't comp-
lain. And Faust keeps on.

The American Express, Paris, is good for
a month or so.

Strasbourg

March 21, 1939

Dear Mr. Warren:

Your letters have just reached me before I go into Germ-
any: it seems like an act of Providence, for I hate taking MSS
along as I know that anyone writing anything is suspect. I got
investigated in Tunisia for doing cafe sketches. I have been
reluctant about trying out this new stuff on magazines. The
enclosed constitute about half of what I've done so far. Others
I've sent off home or parked with David McCord, Lambert Davis,
etc., hpping for criticism.

I feel guilty about sending off such an unsorted heap,
but I can't cull out when I'm such a constant hurry. I run about
all day and much of the night; I can never find a decently warm
place with adequate lighting for any work, and I have been consistent-
ly underfed all over Europe. But tonight, between foie gras and
something like real German beer (which was, I might say, the milk
of my alma mater) I can't sleep anyhow, so I'll peck away under
this miserable five candle-power lamp and drink Quetsch: distilled
from plums and better than most fruit brandies. Snow fell on me
while I prowled around the black cathedral tonight. It has only
one tower...sort of a maimed giant. San Marco's, Chartres, and
the Greek temples have been the best so far, with a mosque thrown
in.

Africa was very amusing. I hit it off with the Arabs, as I
do with most very simple people. Only college professors arouse
my nasty nature. Everything in the Tunisian suite happened as I
have written it. We spoke a very mixed French-Italian, plus gestures
and profanity; these last two I'm not bad at. No matter what the
Koran says, they drink very well, some of them. I even ate couscous
in a Bedouin tent, and lots of Arabs invited me to coffee--maybe
because I laced it with cognac against germs. I liked them as I liked
a negro nurse I once had, and when it comes to buying stuff from them,
they love a row about a bargain; it can go on at times for days.
(I looked swell in a burnous on a camel in the Sahara: at least I
felt that I did. I thought I could ride anything, but the six way
motion is an experience.)

I hoped to do more in Sicily, but the weather and food were
so bad that I came away convinced that Theocritus was a liar and
that the Tyrant put Plato in prison so he wouldn't be able to report
how dirty the country was. I decided to skip Greece, which has given
me its best long ago, and try Africa.

/sure/ If you can find material for a group, I'll be delighted. I'm
such this way does a writer much more good than occasional appear-
ances in monthly magazines. At any rate, please don't try to send
them back until I know where I'll be. Then I'll send postage.

(over)

This is the last of my paper, except the onion-skin I
brought because it's light.

I've done Part I of Faust four times now, and it keeps
getting at least different. Part II I've almost done a rough
draft, but it's very difficult (as for me anyhow) and godawful
dull, full of repetitions, outgrown scientific theories,
hybrid mythologies. There's no woman for the first hundred
pages, and that would kill any piece. I'm trying to get people
to advise me to cut and condense it and try to make it 2/3s
of its present length. I wonder how many people really ever
wade thru it in German. And certainly the English versions
are bad because they strain the sense and natural word-order
for sake of a bad rhyme. Faust says: I want to go. This appears
as 'I will away and hence return no more.' 'I think now I would
like to go away,' etc.

By the way, I asked the O.U.P. to send you a copy of the
Romantic Period thing, last summer. I'll look forward to your
novel later. I read that you had a fellowship somewhere to do
it. And don't we work hardest when we're supposed to be having
sort of a vacation?

The American Express, Paris, will reach me until June
15th. I'll be in New York around the first of July and shall
visit Elliott. I may send along a few more poems later, tho
I hate to risk your good nature's getting cloyed.

Thanks for your letter. I was very low when it arrived.

Box 661
Beverly Hills
California

May 15, 1938

Dear Mr. Warren:

For sometime I've been living on an alley in order to be next door to a W.P.A. office. I've got a lot of political and sociological stuff done. I doubt if it's poetry and am not sending you any. But I follow my urges.

This blessed alley has become a symbol to me. I met all sorts of people and ideas in it. I can see that it has somewhat contaminated even the Letters to a Young Poet in Hollywood which have been another project, and one without benefit of Rilke who also did a similar thing but in prose.

In these other samples from the group I've included the two poems you mentioned, hoping that maybe you can select a group 'up to my level.' I've overworked this last year: the Rilke which is still waiting for proper German sanction (Rilke was half-Jewish; maybe this is holding me down. They walled up Heine's statue in Hamburg in 1924!) I don't think too much of Spender or Leishman, and if you're fluent at the tongue you don't either. They use too many circumlocutions; the first is brash, the second is a don.

Thanks for your good word about the Fellowship. My trouble now is that I got so god-damned excited with the project of Faust that I've got Part I finished, and I suppose Mr. Kent is fishing around for a publisher. Please don't talk about that, for it might fall thru. I wish you could have a squint at his drawings. It's by no means a sure thing that he'll care to collaborate with me. I've got to tell someone, and only a poet can understand such tall hopes.

The project of the quarterly will have to wait until 1939.

O, yes, and I got the Oxford book of Prose of the Romantic Period done. I asked them to send you a copy, not at all with any notion of expecting a review. That's not done for such books. I did this thing for prestige, whatever that means. But it was fun, altho I almost ruined my eyes for a while.

I've also been piddling along at sort of a prelude for the 40's; but I will probably be sixty before I get it to suit me. Maybe if you don't like the Letters, I'll send it along later. Working with Goethe has made me mislead everything I've done, and I'm awfully miserable about style, etc.

I hope to hear from Mr. Brooks about the Sodom which I'll rework if I can get enough money to go round the world.

Would you care to see an essay on the Translations of Faust? But I'm afraid I'd better not crystalize it yet.

If you don't answer before I leave for the north (ca. June 15th), I'll send another address.

C. F. MACINTYRE

1315 WALNUT STREET
BERKELEY
CALIFORNIA

November 7, 1939

Dear Mr. Brooks:

Once your director of the University Press
said he'd be interested in my Faust. In Germany I
saw the six best Goethe critics and they helped
me with advice and approbation. Huxley, Millay, Kent,
Untermeyer, Dillon, etc. have criticized, suggested
and ratified various scenes. Now I'm trying
the enclosed essay and scene on you--I may have sent
that scene before, but it is riper now and backed up.
It ought to stir up some sentiment one way or the other,
if it gets printed. I meant to be flippantly serious and
hope it doesn't sound cocky. I'm sick of stuffed-shirt
pedantry in the universities.

Warren said he'd send me his novel. Can you do
it? I hope he's having as much fun as I did. He left
many friends here: tell him this.

1431 Spruce
Berkeley

January 1, 1942

Editors of the Southern Review

Gentlemen:

You'd better return the poems
you accepted two years ago. There's no
use in puttering about them longer.
Incidentally, it is no way to do business.
And I probably wouldn't want to see them
printed now—if I could remember what
they were.

I asked that you be sent my recent
translation of _Faust_. Don't have it re-
viewed by a stuffy prof. of German.
It was not intended for such fry.

## RESIDENCE FOR POSTHUMOUS E.A.POE

...and up the 'L' and down the stairs and round the corner, past the pawn shop and the cleaner's-- Christ, should I know numbers? You can find it.

You go until you come where all is ruined, and you hear a lousy radio with crooners, and a dame rehearsing who forgot to fan it... /r

then suddenly you are in his room--the shades of window, like a guy with cataract: one darker, looking, and one gray-blind, kept

an inch a-tilt (like malice). He put skids under himself and sloshed down death and wrecked past Pulitzer. That bed--despair has slept...

RUNNER COMING IN THIRD

Between the deep-spiked stride of forward going
and the starting line of the past (with its implications)
he has got nowhere fast and is evilly growing
soft as a cut Tom swooning in sofa cushions.

Were life the foot-free course,
with grass on the cinders...towards the goal!
But the thinly dipped bronze medal, the coach's curse
and the rabble's appraisal fester in his gall.

He limps with the prong of pain
plunged in the intimate bellows of his breath.
Brown shoulders of his betters pass. Ah, bright

Artemis, sustain him, prop upon
your aegis-pad his fall--else, let be brought
the stretcher to hustle ignominious death.

Tho your window face the brick-walled alley,
or widely embrace the pewter breast of sea,
tho your threshold spring you, desolate, into Sahara,
you have got identity, tight-wrapped, to rally
round your assault at tomorrow; permanently
it hides in your shirt to fend and assist you (thorough

and Spartan-lean with lacking) to fight and live
your small life in a dream towards the enduring
epitome of meaning, towards the daring
brain-flung brunt at matter's bas-relief...

O, taller than hate's sky-tossed foam-combs, fierce
with the suns malice on incandescent dunes,
deeper into truth than hang-over dawns
thru chinks in the alley's emptiness can pierce.