Writing Is My Life

IN the fall of 1920 a hulking young Southerner, Thomas Clayton Wolfe, of Asheville, North Carolina, then in his twenty-first year, came to Harvard to study for his master’s degree. The work was engrossing, particularly his devotion to “47 Workshop,” the famous course in playwriting and production under Professor George Pierce Baker. But Cambridge can be a lonely place for the unknown, and so it was for Thomas Wolfe. In his moments of self-doubt or exaltation his thoughts went back to the woman who had taught him in Asheville, Mrs. J. M. Roberts.

Thomas Wolfe’s father was a stonecutter, his mother the keeper of a boardinghouse. He was early on his own, “a vagabond since I was seven, with two roofs and no home,” and what Mrs. Roberts meant to his eager mind is clearly expressed in these words which he wrote from Cambridge to Mr. Frank Wells, Superintendent of Schools in Asheville: —

My friend and former teacher, Mrs. J. M. Roberts, has lately written me, explaining that some testimonial is desired as to her quality as a teacher, and asking me if I would care to record any opinion I have on that subject. I esteem it an honor and a privilege to do this, although I find myself in constant difficulties when I try to keep my pen from leaping away with a red-hot panegyric.

But — with all the moderation and temperance and earnestness at my command I can do no less than consider Mrs. Roberts as one of the three great teachers who have ever taught me, — this with all honor to Harvard, who has not yet succeeded in adding a fourth name to my own Hall of Fame.

More than anyone else I have ever known, Mrs. Roberts succeeded in getting under my skull with an appreciation of what is fine and altogether worth while in literature. That, in my opinion, is the vital quality. That is the essential thing — the mark of a real teacher.

I didn’t know, until Mrs. Roberts wrote me, that she had no University degree, but that is a matter of not the slightest consequence to me. So far does she surpass certain college graduates I know, who are teaching, in respect to actual knowledge, appreciation, and the ability to stimulate and inspire, that any difficulty as to a degree would be negligible, I think.

I have spoken of Mrs. Roberts merely as a teacher. This is perhaps the only testimonial you want. But I cannot stop before I speak of another matter that has been of the highest importance to me. During the years Mrs. Roberts taught me she exercised an influence that is inestimable on almost every particular of my life and thought.

With the other boys of my age I know she did the same. We turned instinctively to this lady for her advice and direction and we trusted to it unfalteringly.

I think that kind of relation is one of the profoundest experiences of anyone’s life, — I put the relation of a fine teacher to a student just below the relation of a mother to her son and I don’t think I could say more than this.

You can readily understand that the intimacy of such a relation is much more important in those formative years at grammar school or high school than afterwards at college. At college you don’t get it but you don’t need it so much. The point is that I did get it at a time when it was supremely important that I get it. It is, therefore, impossible that I ever forget the influence of Mrs. Roberts. She is one of my great people, and happy are those who can claim her as their teacher!

Tom Wolfe’s letters to Mrs. Roberts arc the buoyant and magnetic record of a young writer finding his feet. The Atlantic is proud to publish them in this and the two following issues. — THE EDITOR

My DEAR FRIENDS
I have worked almost to exhaustion and I welcome the respite of the holidays which started today. I’m writing you a long letter to make up. Coming here was the greatest thing I could do. I have written a one-act play for the great Baker which will be put on, I think. I have gone through my silent moments of self-doubt in this lonely place, but I know myself now.

God bless you and a happy Christmas be yours.

During the most inventive and mature years of his genius G.B.S. expended his great powers of satire on the one thing he thought worthy of drama — the thesis —

Then a war comes along that kills twenty million people and destroys nations and suddenly we can’t convince ourselves that Mrs. Warrens Profession and Widowers’ Houses deal with the biggest things in the world after all. If I were Shaw now, I think I should feel as if I had been equipped with a mighty bludgeon but had spent my life braining gnats.

I agree with you about Eugene O’Neill. He’s the beacon light in our own drama today; he’s kept his ideals and now seems in a fair way to prosper by them. Two new plays of his are shortly to come to New York; Anna Christie is there now, enjoying a popular success. I saw Beyond the Horizon not long ago. It is a fine play. O’Neill is still a young man, c. 35, I think. I don’t believe he has reached his greatest development yet. When it comes! There’s one thing that worries me: in a forecast of his new play, The Hairy Ape, which is to be produced soon, I see the subject is to be a stoker on an ocean liner. During the successive stages we will see him go back steadily to the primitive man. I hope O’Neill won’t let this tendency run away with him. You see, he was “looking backward” in The Emperor Jones and, to a degree, we find this in other plays. Tragedy, if continued in this vein, will become sordid and brutal. Surely this does not represent his outlook on life. Great tragedy, I think, must look ahead.

J. S. Mill, whose autobiography I was reading the other night, said the greatest lesson the Greeks taught him was to dissect an argument, as did Socrates, and find its weak spot. If men ever needed to use that method, now is the time. There is so much claptrap, so much nonsense veiled behind intricacies, that we need all our sanity and common sense to tear the arguments of these buffoons to pieces. Oh, for a Swift to flay the freeversers!

I am still paving the infernal road with my good intentions. Yet, failure to answer promptly letters from one who never fails to send hope and to invigorate me with new strength is not merely bad manners but bad judgment. If the press of work and examinations recently ended cannot come to my aid by way of excuse, nothing else can.

Yesterday the Secretary of the Graduate School sent me a note saying he was “happy to inform” me I would get my M.A. with distinction upon removing the French requirement. I am sure his happiness cannot equal mine. I have heard from only one course — but that is the one course I need. By their generosity my grade was “A,” although I would hardly have dared to mark myself so well. So far I have made but one “B” and that was “B— ” last year in the Workshop. The rest have been “A’s.” When the year is over I shall not only have completed the four courses required for the degree but shall have received credit for two more as well. Six in all. This does not include the French.

My second year in the Workshop didn’t count for the degree, since not more than one composition course may be counted and, of course, “47” last year went down for that.

I am reading heavily. I will give you some idea of my labor, for I take a great delight in counting the victims of my insatiable bookishness, though I despair at ever really knowing anything. Today is Sunday. This morning I finished Wells’s Undying Fire, which I began last night. This is one of the few moderns I have had time for, but rarely have I been more stimulated. He’s not a profound man, but he’s a very sound man ... a living proof of the benefits of a broad and intensive education applied to the training of a first-class mind. But to go on with the talking: This afternoon I took a walk and read half through Swift’s Tale of a Tub. Tonight I have read two essays of Emerson’s and will finish Leslie Stephen’s excellent life of Pope before I retire. I suppose I make a mistake in trying to eat all the plums at once, for instead of peace it has awakened a good-sized volcano in me. I wander throughout the stacks of that great library there like some damned soul; never at rest — even leaping ahead from the pages I read to thoughts of those I want to read. I tell you this in all its monotonous detail because it is illustrative of the war that is being waged within me now — between what forces? For it brings me acute discomfort even in my writing. Still, as ever, I am seized with these desires to scribble, but this thing wiggles at me like some demon and says, “Not yet, not yet. In two, three, or five years! Then you’ll be ready.” But this is folly! If it continues, the weight of my ignorance will fall on me like a stone, to crush me. [Page lost.]

The interesting thing about Liliom is that this play gets off to a new start in interest after the hero kills himself. The next scene is the suicide court in Heaven (as he thought it would be). But I will tell you no more. There is humor, even comedy, while he dies; there is comedy almost of a slapstick variety in the Heaven scene; but all the time one says, “Why not?” For if we look at life intelligently we realize what a curiously woven fabric it is. The calloused police officers in Liliom drag the body of the dying man out to an open place, and while he lies there groaning his life away, talk about the beat, curse the mosquitoes, the new wage scale, etc.

Let me add a gruesome touch of my own: When my brother died a few years ago, I went around to the undertaker’s with Fred to see him. The particular undertaker who met us, a pious, mealy-mouthed man, took us back, asked us to wait a moment, as an artist would ask his friends to wait until he got the light adjusted on his picture. Then he called us back and showed us Ben’s body. As we stood there watching, filled with emotions and recollections of indescribable pain, the man began to talk. He was proud of his job. It was one of the best he had ever done. No other undertaker could do a better one. Then, with true artistic pride, he began to point out the little excellencies in his finished work that showed the hand of the master. It was too much for me. I went into howls of uncontrollable laughter. It was no doubt a reflex of my condition at the time, but to this day I think of the incident with a smile.

That is one reason I defend Sir J. M. Carrie whenever he is criticized. I think Barrie is the most significant dramatist in the English-speaking world today because he really is carrying on the great tradition of our drama. This is an arch-heresy here where some of my young critical friends consider him “sentimental.” Is it not strange how the academic, critical point of view shrinks nervously away from the sympathetic? I have never read a play of Barrie’s that didn’t give me this curious “mixed” feeling. He is not trying to “prove” anything (thank Heaven) but, like Shakespeare and other old fogies, is more interested in the stories of human beings than in the labor problem. That’s why I believe his plays will outlast those of his contemporaries, because people at all times can understand and appreciate the emotion of other people. Skeptics are referred to The Trojan Women. This is the universal, eternal element in drama. After all, the conditions of which John Galsworthy wrote in Strife arc becoming changed already; in twenty years we will still have a labor problem. [Rest lost.]

Coming home this last time I have gathered enough additional material to write a new play, — the second fusillade of the battle. This thing that I had thought naïve and simple is as old and as evil as Hell; there is a spirit of world-old evil that broods about us, with all the subtle sophistication of Satan. Greed, greed,greed — deliberate, crafty, motivated — masking under the guise of civic associations for municipal betterment. The disgusting spectacle of thousands of industrious and accomplished liars, engaged in the mutual and systematic pursuit of their profession, salting their editorials and sermons and advertisements with the religious and philosophic platitudes of Dr. Frank Crane, Edgar A. Guest, and the American Magazine. The standards of national greatness are Henry Ford, who made automobiles cheap enough for us all, and money, money, money!! And Thomas A. Edison, who gave us body ease and comfort. The knave, the toady, and the boyrich flourish. There are three ways, and only three, to gain distinction: (1) money, (2) more money, (3) a great deal of money. And the matter of getting it is immaterial.

Moral turpitude on the physical basis does not offend me deeply — perhaps I should be sorry to confess it — but my attitude toward life has become, somehow or other, one of alertness; one which sustains and never loses interest, but which is very rarely shocked or surprised by what people do. Really I am unmoral enough not to care greatly how the animal behaves, so long as it checks its behavior within its meadow. The great men of the Renaissance — both in Italy and England — seem to me an amazing mixture of God and Beast. But “there were giants in the earth in those days” — and they are soon forgiven. What do their vices matter now? They have left us Mona Lisa. But what of this dull dross that leaves us only bitterness and mediocrity? Let pigs . . . [Page lost.]

And, it is by no means certain that a long life, whether for man or nation, is the best one. Perhaps our claim to glory, when our page is written in the world’s history, will rest on some such achievement as this: “The Americans were powerful organizers and had a great talent for practical scientific achievement. They made tremendous advances in the field of public health, and increased the average scope of human life twelve years. Their cities, although extremely ugly, were models of sanitation; their nation at length was submerged and destroyed beneath the pernicious and sentimental political theory of human equality.”

I do not say that this is utterly base or mean, or worthless. It will be a very great achievement, but it has left no room for the poets. And when the poets die, the death of the nation is assured.

I am writing at length to answer your last heartening letter, which was written after I left home, and which has grown old, but more precious.
I have seen a great many people, witnessed a number of events, and, like Satan, have grown, for the moment, weary of my goings to and fro and up and down the earth. It seems now that I will be fastened for several months in this great madhouse of a city — for good or ill, who can say? — but I think I have chosen wisely.

Briefly — since I saw you I have been in New York for six weeks, when I was busy with the Graham Memorial Fund at the University; later I went to Boston and Cambridge for the holidays and remained a little more than a month. The Guild held my play for three or four months, as you perhaps know, — held it until I was on the verge of madness and collapse, — and finally returned it, after wining and dining me, telling me I was “a coming figure,” and so on, and trying to extract a promise that all my future work would be submitted to the Guild for consideration before any other producer got hold of it. Of course, I made no such promise.

Before I left the city, however, one of the Guild directors had me in to his apartment. He wanted me to cut the play thirty minutes — a reduction I concede it needs. He wanted me, also, to cut the list of characters — this means cheaper production — and to revise — he insisted it needed no rewriting — with a view to “tightening”; that is, to develop a central plot which will run through each scene, and which would revolve around a small group of central figures — Rutledge, the Negro, the girl, etc.

Of course this would mean a more conventional type of play. I told him I had deliberately tried to avoid writing such a play; that I had written a play with a plot which centered about the life and destiny of an entire civilization, not about a few people. If I consented to this revision, he promised his support and added that he was fairly certain he could place the play. He observed, cheerfully, that he had really asked for very little; that I could make all necessary changes in a week. This was a bit of optimism in which I did not share. However, I promised to make the effort, and departed for Cambridge.

Professor Baker was properly horrified when I communicated the evil tidings. Not only, he said, would the proposed revision greatly cheapen the play, but it was also impossible, since my play had been hailed and praised as a new departure in American drama; its fate was on the rails. Thereupon, he read to me from a book on the American Theater just published, by Oliver Sayler, in which my play is described at some length as “the most radical and successful experiment ever made in the American Theater.” The Workshop comes in for its share of praise for doing my play.

This is, of course, sweet music to my ears, but my heart is assuming a flinty cast, and the sound of the shekel is not unpleasing. I told Professor Baker as much, as gently as I could, and he accused me of having allowed New York to “commercialize” me in my six weeks’ stay. This opened the floodgates; I had heard enough of such talk. All the old and cruel sentimentality of the world, in its relation to the artistic, struck me with a bitter blow. It was not a question of desiring cake and wine, I told him; it was a question of naked need: Bread! Bread! Bread! Was this commercialism? Then, indeed, was Christ a materialist when he multiplied the loaves. Christ, by the way, unlike many of his present followers, was base enough to recognize that men and women must be fed.

I broached the question of my future again. What must I do? The answer came, as always: Write! Write! Do nothing else. Yes, but how? I had been told this for three years; it was all, no doubt, very true, but not very helpful. I suggested teaching. At the suggestion, he looked as if he were being rent limb from limb. Of all possible suggestions, this was the worst — and he seemed to think that all of mine were incredibly bad. Finally — supremest irony of all! — he confided that, after mature consideration, it seemed to him that a year abroad was the very thing I needed most. The full humor of this is apparent when I tell you that no later than August he had descended on me in his wrath when I suggested this very thing, and he had told me this would be colossal stupidity at the time. Now, plainly, he has forgotten he ever made such a statement; the wind, for unknown reasons, has veered from another corner, and he has tacked.

At any rate I began to understand — a bitter draught it was — that Professor Baker was an excellent friend, a true critic, but a bad counselor. I knew that, from this time on, the disposition of my life was mainly in my own hands; that one profits, no matter how good the intention, not by the experience of others, but only by such experience as touches him. At that time I heard that New York University needed several new instructors for the February term, and I directed the Harvard Appointment Bureau to forward my letters, grades, and papers. I applied; I had friends in New York speak for me. In two days I had their answer. An instructorship was mine if I wanted it. I came to New York on a flying trip. I liked the men. The offer was more than reasonable: $1800 for seven months over an eight-hours-a-week teaching schedule; my work was to be concerned entirely with English composition. The men here at the University assure me that I should easily complete my work, in and out of class, with three hours a day. If this is true, I should have time to write.

There is one other advantage — a decided one. The college — this branch of it — is but eight years old, and has no traditions. I am given great liberty; personal idiosyncrasy is recognized and allowed. The students, moreover, mainly Jewish and Italian, have come up from the East Side; many are making sacrifices of a very considerable nature in order to get an education. They are, accordingly, not at all the conventional type of college student. I expect to establish contacts here, to get material in my seven months’ stay that may prove invaluable. I am here until September; I must teach through the summer. I am here where the theater is — the theater I love — and if I can’t write plays, at least I can see ‘em. What Professor Baker will say, or has said, I don’t know. I never told him my decision.

But I have taught for two days now, and I am living; and nothing about me, so far as I know, has “suffered a sea change.”

And this is all that I have to tell you for the time — over that which you know already: that you wax immensely in my affections. . . .

P.S. And — glory of glories — I’m free. The world is mine, and I, at present, own a very small, but satisfying, portion of it — Room 2220, at the Hotel Albert, where I hope presently to have the joy of reading one of your letters.
The new play comes; I read it to a friend in New Hampshire, who also writes ‘em. He said I would sell it in spite of “hell and high water.” The words are mine. And, by the way, I was in New Hampshire for four days and fished through the ice of the lake. This is the history.

You speak of Harvard. That’s most difficult. I don’t know what to say. But I’m sure of this: —

If I had gone to Cambridge instead of to Chapel Hill — when I was sixteen — the result would have been catastrophic. Of course, Munsey is a big, line, strapping fellow — well-grown, mature in appearance, with associations with wealthy boys which may have given him a kind of balance. But this, I think, is now true of Harvard. No boy should go there now until he is ready to mine his own ore. If he is still in need of dependence on someone or something — a very real and honest need, by the way — Harvard is not the place, I think.

A sensitive young Southerner, fond of companionship and warmth, will find the sledding rough, I’m afraid. Of course, with a student of one of the great academies — Andover or Exeter — the situation is different, I believe. He is graduated with his class and accompanies them to Cambridge. This occurs as naturally as the transition, say, from Asheville High to Chapel Hill.

But I have seen hundreds of boys submerged in the student life of Harvard. Unknown they enter — are swiftly appalled by the vastness of the system, and its impersonality —— and unknown they leave, at the end of four years, with a feeling of disenchantment and futility.

The quality of Harvard instruction is very high — the highest, I believe — but, again, many succeed in evading all attempts at education on the part of the University faculty. It is not difficult to slide through; and, in addition, you must prepare to calculate the probable effects of a metropolitan community of over one million people upon a fascinated young stranger thrust suddenly in from the provinces.

A change of climate and geography might be intensely valuable to him now. Remember, there are a number of first-rate small colleges in New England, beautifully located, with admirable scholastic standards. There is Amherst, for example, which still demands Greek, I’m told. And Williams, a lovely place, walled in by mountains not. unlike our own. And Bowdoin — and, of course, Dartmouth, — one of the best. In all these places a young fellow might assert himself, and grow.

As for me, I work and am fairly happy. Really, I’m having a wonderful experience. This place — particularly the University — swarms with life, Jewish, Italian, Polish. My little devils like me. I tell them every week that I’m no teacher. I suppose they can see that for themselves; and perhaps that is why they like me. The head of the department has asked me to come back next year, but i have given him no answer. The desire to write — to create — has, for the first time, become almost a crude animal appetite. And this is because of the obstacles thrown in the path of creation. During the few hours left to me I write like a fiend on one of the finest plays you ever saw. My first term is almost over — two weeks more, in fact. Gone like a flash!

And did you know that I’m going to Heaven in September. That is, to England. From September 1, six months’ pay will be due me, September through February. This is $900. With economy I can stay over five or six months. I’m going down to Cornwall first — it’s very beautiful, I’m told — and bury myself in a country village for two months. There I shall write my heart out. Then over the country, into London for a few days, Scotland, and France.

This is all for the present. I’ve snatched Time to write this. But, during the examination period, you shall have greater detail. The Provincetown Theatre has had my play five months. I can hear nothing.

One of the editors of D. Appleton left a note at the hotel this morning. He wants my play — the Theatre Guild suggested it — to read for publication. I shall let him read it; I doubt that I shall let him publish — even if he wants to. Certainly, not as long as someone may produce it.

The new play is an epic. I believe in it with all my heart. Dear God! If I but had the time to write.

Professor Koch of Chapel Hill bounded into town a week or so ago, and looked me up. lie wants to put one of my juvenile one-acts — the Buck Gavin thing — into his new book which Holt is bringing out soon. He is insistent, and has just sent me a copy of the thing. I’m not ashamed of the play, but I wrote it on a rainy night, when I was seventeen, in three hours. Something tells me I should hate to see my name attached now. Of course I couldn’t tell Koch that.

Besides, he had his chance two or three years ago, when he brought his first book out. Please don’t publish — but I’ll give you my honest opinion: I believe his eagerness to publish the little play now comes from a suspicion that I’m going to get famous in a hurry now — God knows why! — and he wants to ticket me, so to speak. This is a rotten thing to say, but it’s my honest opinion.

I sent Koch an act or two of my new play — you heard the prologue — and he did everything but break down and weep. It was the greatest thing ever; I was the American Bernard Shaw, etc.

Everyone, you see, is enthusiastic, but I notice that I earn my own living. The Theatre Guild is cordial. When am I going to bring my new play in? Their officials want to know me. Will I have lunch? Their play reader trumpets my name abroad. He told me recently he had spoken of me at the banquet of some dramatic association. I am grateful, but how I wish someone would produce one of my plays. The Guild, by the way, recommended my play to Appleton.

But — I learn. I am acquiring patience. And I’m quite willing to wait a year or two for the unveiling exercises. Do you know, all that really matters right now is the knowledge that I am twenty-three, and a golden May is here.

The feeling of immortality in youth is upon me. I am young, and I can never die. Don’t tell me that I can. Wait until I’m thirty. Then I’ll believe you.

I never hear from you but my respect for your intelligence waxes. You are a lovely, beautiful woman. Other women I have known — young and old — who wanted to mother me, to ruffle my hair when it’s curly, or to feed me. But you mother the minds and spirits of young men until they grow incandescent. That is a noble, finer thing.

So, it seems, you are a great woman.
To you all, as ever, my deepest love.

My only plea for my tardiness is that my own life has had a little private Hell and Heaven of its own and I have been involved in my own wonder, my own emotion, my first bewilderment at a new civilization, at a new tongue, which is now beginning to unfold magically as I take hold.

I am wandering across France like a ghost, alone and glorious in loneliness, knowing not at all my next step — only vaguely; trusting to miraculous accident to find the enchanted harbor for me — and at times it does.

My play was finished long ago in Paris — in the little Latin Quarter hotel where Oscar Wilde died, where I wandered one night, after having been robbed of an old suitcase containing the manuscript of the old play. For a month I shut myself in, wrote madly, and finished the new play — a much better one, I believe.

There followed a month in which I had an experience so filled with burlesque horror that I jerk a little in my sleep even now; I began to write again. I have an enormous manuscript of my voyage — enormous notes. I do not know where to peddle it — my one impulse is to write — and to send it to you. If you care to — you, mind, are my only literary executor and censor — you may give it to George McCoy for the Citizen, with this one condition which I make absolute: my name is not to be mentioned or published under anything I write. This is the one binding restriction, and I insist on it.

A few days ago, from Paris, the day I departed for Lyons, I entrusted the prologue of the Passage to England to a lady, a friend, giving her your address and requesting that she send it at once.

In that prologue, about 10,000 words I judge, I said nothing of my actual voyage; I indulged, under a rather fantastic plot-work, certain speculations of mine on voyages — the true voyages. The idea came to me when, on going over the notes of the actual voyage, it occurred to me that the account I gave of events and people, if ever published, might get the author and the publisher into trouble. 1 had honestly made these notes while at sea, and while feeling none too gay; but I wanted even then to do what, to my knowledge, had never been done: to isolate a transatlantic voyage, beginning and ending abruptly the moment the ship docks or sails, acting upon the belief that the sea and a ship disorganize the whole social scheme for a few days, and that the social scheme reorganizes a new pattern before the voyage is over. I did this absolutely without malice; you may accept the whole when you get it as a melange of fact and fiction, with fiction emphasizing the truth of the business as I saw it.

That explains the subtitle: “Log of a Voyage That Was Never Made.” This occurred to me at first purely as a device to escape libel; I changed the name of the ship and the characters. Then 1 remembered that I had not sailed on the day I had originally planned — that I had remained in Asheville a week longer, and that during that time I had had a queer feeling that I was or should be on the Atlantic. This led to the fantastic prologue, and my own growing conviction in the spiritual need of true voyages.

The whole, when you get it, will amount I believe to 40,000 or 50,000 words — a short novel. It is queer journalism, I know, but since I give it, I feel that I am able to do and speak as I please. You may tell George that I have amusing and interesting notes on England (I believe they are), and a story of Orleans, France — a true one — about the town and a genuine countess who drinks horse’s blood for anemia, and an old villain of a Marquise, which, if I told it well, would make my future.

I think, also, I may say things about people, about politics, about social differences, which may be superior to the banalities of the greater part of foreign correspondence, which, nevertheless, earns its authors a good living. The reason for all this is simply that I am tired of writing for the four winds; I realize the desperate lack and hypocrisy of pure expression. We are children — we must have an audience; and if my audience may be the people of a little North Carolina town, well and good. That is my whole desire for the present — perhaps there is a tiny feeling that if any of it is at all good it may reach the ears of the gods.

I shall send you lots of manuscripts. I want to write — nothing else — and I have neither the patience nor the time nor the inclination to pull wires with literary agents, and so on. And honestly, I know of no one who would publish my account now; because, as I said, I shall write this once as I please. Let him put it all in print, if he wants, but my name must be absent. Some of it may be fiction; most of it may be fact seen imaginatively — it should have the same relation to reality as most autobiographical novels, as Childe Harold if you like. I appoint you censor: I have not been careful of myself in what I have said or am going to say — careful, that is, of what the townsfolk may think. That would be too petty, too dishonest. You must not be careful of that either in going over the manuscripts — it is not at all important. I think the sole thing — the principal thing — is the relation any of it may have to my family, to their position in the community. I shall never be too “advanced” to respect that.

It may be before I am done that I shall say something important — that in the mad rush to get it down, something of high worth may come out.
A letter has come — a very flattering and friendly letter — which asks me to return to N.Y.U. in September at $2000 — Composition and Soph. Lit. I shall accept, hoping that the heavens may rain manna before, or that a syndicate of county newspapers will appoint me representative at the councils of the League of Nations. For God’s sake, say a word to my people, and get them to extend sustenance as long as my period of sufferance lasts.

I am reading French like mad — I came here alone, ignorant of the language, and for two months wretchedly unhappy. Now I am jabbering villainously but adequately, and the world is brightening again.

The duty I impose on you is arduous and long — but I turn to you in trust and hope in this, as in all things. Do not hesitate to deny the responsibility if it’s too heavy. I’ll understand that, and if the paper doesn’t care for the stuff, keep it for me. After all, I’m embalming the moments for future exhumation.
To you all my deepest love. Forgive me again if I send no cards, no letters. I’ll give them to you on my return. Meanwhile, read and accept my chroniclings as for yourself. It has been mad, bold, unhappy, lonely, glorious!

Here are just a few lines — a short record of my doings since I left you. I was in Paris ten days, in Chartres two days. I am on my way to the North of England — to Lincoln and York for a few days, and finally to the Lake District, where I settle down to work.

I have begun work on a book, a novel, to which I may give the title of The Building of a Wall — perhaps not; but because I am a tall man, you know perhaps my fidelity to walls and to secret places. All the passion of my heart and of my life I am pouring into this book — it will swarm with life, be peopled by a city, and if ever read, may seem in places terrible, brutal, Rabelaisian, bawdy; its unity is simply this: I am telling the story of a powerful creative clement trying to work its way toward an essential isolation; a creative solitude; a secret life — its fierce struggles to wall this part of its life away from birth, first against the public and savage glare of an unbalanced, nervous brawling family group; later against school, society, all the barbarous invasions of the world. In a way, the book marks a progression toward freedom; in a way toward bondage — but this does not matter: to me one is as beautiful as the other. Just subordinate and leading up to this main theme is as desperate and bitter a story of a contest between two people as you ever knew — a man and his wife — the one with an inbred, and also an instinctive, terror and hatred of property; the other with a growing mounting lust for ownership that finally is tinged with mania — a struggle that ends in decay, death, desolation.

You say that no one outside my family loves me more than Margaret Roberts. Let me rather say the exact truth: that no one inside my family loves me as much, and only one other person, I think, in all the world loves me as much. My book is full of ugliness and terrible pain — and I think moments of a great and soaring beauty. In it (will you forgive me?) I have told the story of one of the most beautiful people I have ever known as it touched on my own life. I am calling that person Margaret Leonard. I was without a home — a vagabond since I was seven, with two roofs and no home; I moved inward on that house of death and tumult from room to little room, as the boarders came with their dollar a day, and their constant rocking on the porch; my overloaded heart was bursting with its packed weight of loneliness and terror; I was strangling without speech, without articulation, in my own secretions — groping like a blind sea-thing with no eyes and a thousand feelers toward light, toward life, toward beauty and order, out of that hell of chaos, greed, and cheap ugliness — and then I found you, when else I should have died, you mother of my spirit who fed me with light. Do you think that I have forgotten? Do you think I ever will? You are entombed in my flesh, you are in the pulses of my blood, the thought of you makes a great music in me — and before I come to death, I shall use the last thrust of my talent — whatever it is — to put your beauty into words.

Good-bye for the present. This is Decoration Day. I am decorated with weariness, but I am going to try to get it all down on paper in the next few weeks and then I may go abroad for a short time. My attic is getting hot — my friend, Olin Dows (almost as great a saint as you are) came down from his 80 rooms and 2000 acres on the Hudson Saturday and asked me to finish the book in the country. Rut I’m afraid of the big house and all the swells — he’s had it alone all winter — but now his mother’s coming from Washington (with all the legations) and his sister from Sweden; they re in for a big summer. But there’s a lovely little cottage of two rooms, with a bath, deep in the woods, by the bathing pool, and he’s offered this to me, together with as many acres of land as I need, forever, if I should care to stay there near him. lie paints, lives like a Spartan on vegetables, and is a Bertrand Russell Socialist. . . .
P.S. If you write again here and your letter s returned, write me care of Aline Bernstein, 333 West 77th St., New York City. (I’m in good standing, however, and really paid up.)

(To be continued)