When the exiles of art came straggling home by twos and threes, year after year, there were no official committees to welcome them. No cameramen invited them to pose against the ship's rail with the Statue of Liberty in the background; no reporters asked what they thought of economic conditions in Europe and wasn't it true that America had the most beautiful girls in the world. The police launch lay moored to its dock when they arrived and pigeons fed undisturbed in City Hall Park. Broadway was empty of tickertape. At best, as they drove toward their anonymous lodgings, a dozen old newspapers flapped like banners of greeting in the tired summer wind.
It was early in August 1923, just before my twenty-fifth birthday, that I landed in New York after a sultry night at anchor in the Lower -Bay. The boat was crowded with Good Will Girls returning after a tour of the battlefields that had resulted from the success of Ray Johnson's latest venture in money-raising. That last night they gathered on deck to give a sort of college yell:
One, two, three, four,
Who are we for?
America, America, America!
Two, four, six, eight,
Who do we appreciate?
France! France!
The bar was closed and the Cowleys went down to Ramon Guthrie's cabin to drink the last of the prunelle that he had carried with him from his brother-in-law's farm near Nancy. Ramon had been an ambulance driver, then a flyer and then a student; he was a tall, angular, square-shouldered man who made abrupt gestures, as if he had been put together with metal plates and wires. The surgeons had done something like that after his plane crashed in 1918; it was a lumbering biplane of a type that Germans shot down like pen-raised pheasants. Once a new major, eager to distinguish himself, had ordered the squadron to make a mass flight over the German lines, and Ramon was the only survivor. He had studied in France after the war and now he was coming home with a dark-eyed wife from Lorraine and a doctorate from the University of Toulouse; he wanted to write novels just as I wanted to write essays and poems. We knew a great deal more about France than did the Good Will Girls, but we were just as hopeful and innocent.
We said good-by to the Guthries at the French Line pier. There was nobody to meet us, and I didn't even know where to send our big trunk, for I had only five dollars in my pocket and couldn't afford a hotel. While the customs man was hastily glancing through our baggage---it hadn't the look of containing anything dutiable---I made several telephone calls, as a result of which our difficulties were solved for the moment. Our two trunks would go to the house of a friend far downtown, almost in the shadow of the Woolworth Building. We ourselves would spend the morning in the apartment of Matthew Josephson, who had recently come home from Berlin and was trying to publish Broom in Greenwich Village.
We took a taxicab and rode east on Fourteenth Street, passing a row of wholesale meat markets in front of which a few torn newspapers fluttered weakly, passing the Elevated station at Ninth Avenue, with its look of being a Chinese pagoda, passing two rows of high brownstone houses, and the Convent of Our Lady of Guadalupe, marked only by a cross, and the Ninth Regiment Armory, and turning south on Sixth Avenue under the El pillars. Everything was strange to me: the exhausting and dispiriting heat, the colors of the houses, the straightaway vistas, the girls on the sidewalk in their bright frocks, so different from the drab ones that French shopgirls wore, and most of all the lack of anything green to break the monotony of the square streets, the glass, brick and iron. The next year---the next three years, in fact---would be spent in readjusting myself to this once familiar environment.
The first problem I had to face was how to earn a living. Before me was a choice that in those days, when jobs and literary markets both were plentiful, had to be made by every apprentice writer without an independent income---the choice between freelance authorship and working in an office. In the first case, I should be living by my own profession, yet everything I wrote would inevitably be molded by the need for carrying it to market. In the second case, four-fifths of my time would be wasted, yet the remaining fifth could be devoted to writing for its own sake, to the disinterested practice of the art of letters. That was my justification for taking a job---that and the fact that a job was offered me. Not until two years later did I realize that when one's writing ceases to have a functional relationship to one's life, when it becomes a way of spending otherwise idle evenings, it loses a part of its substance. At best it has an unreality that can usually be recognized, an after-hours atmosphere of rhetoric, fantasy and melodrama to be explained by the situation that produced it: the writer is seeking compensation for the qualities missing in his business career. More often there are no idle evenings; writing disappears from his life, giving way to the unhealthy feeling that he is better than his vocation, by which he is frustrated, from which he must violently escape to write a novel, a drama, an epic. But the fear persists that his great work will be a failure: isn't it better to be paid each Saturday and talk drunkenly each Saturday night about the unwritten novel? . . .
I escaped that mood by failing into a different error, almost as fatal: I assumed too many obligations. My job, for the first month at least, meant working nine or ten hours a day under pressure; but that was only the beginning of my duties. In addition to being proofreader, copywriter and general utility man for Sweet's Architectural Catalogue, I also became an associate editor of Broom, a position without pay or honor that involved reading manuscripts and proofs, writing letters and articles, too, when I had an hour to spare---pacifying subscribers, insulting contributors and raising money. With my wife I tried to redecorate our flat in Dominick Street, the most battered and primitive lodging to be found in New York. I attended literary teas that lasted all night. I composed an open letter to the Postmaster General and another to the editor of the Dial, both very insolent in tone. I intrigued for a higher salary. I wrote book reviews for Dr. Canby's Literary Review and poems for nobody in particular.
Meanwhile, with Josephson, Guthrie and a few others, I tried to solve a second problem, that of reproducing in New York the conditions that had seemed so congenial to us abroad, and of continuing to appreciate and praise the picturesque American qualities of the Machine Age and the New Economic Era while living under their shadow.
Coolidge was President now; the New Era was beginning. on August 2, the day I left Paris, Harding had died in San Francisco, and his place in history had already been assigned to him by the newspapers before my voyage ended: he was to be known throughout the ages as the great apostle of peace. French troops were bivouacked in the Ruhr. Hugo Stinnes, said to be richer than Rockefeller, was treating with France as an independent monarch. Lenin was living in seclusion: some asserted that his brain was drying up and others that he was being eaten by worms as God's punishment. The New Economic Policy was reported to be partly effective in Russia---to the degree, that is, in which it represented a departure from the, strict monstrosities of communism. People were getting tired of hearing "Yes, We Have No Bananas." Prohibition and the Ku Klux Klan were now the commonest front-page topics of American newspapers, though some attention was being paid to the bumper wheat harvest and the low prices resulting from it. Factories were busy again, except in New England; construction was booming everywhere. The stock market, after declining in the spring, was slowly rising toward dizzier heights; and American literature, too, was entering a period of excitement and inflation. It was possible for young writers, myself included, to disregard the Ruhr, fascismo, reparations, the New Economic Policy, the birth of prosperity, as they bedazzled themselves with the future of their art.
New geniuses were being discovered every week in the leading critical reviews, usually a different one by each review: there was an appalling overproduction of genius. Old writers had suddenly become old fogies, querulous and absurd. The modern novel, the essay, the drama, all seemed incomparably rich, and lyric poetry was about to enter its golden age. "Coming out in the train," wrote Burton Rascoe, "I had been counting up our lyric poets of the first order since Poe"; and he compiled a list that the Elizabethan or the Romantic period could scarcely equal---certainly not in lyric poets of the first order:
Emily Dickinson, yes, on the evidence of two or three lyrics alone ---Sara Teasdale, darn near it, darn near first rank anyhow. . . . Edna St. Vincent Millay, absolutely, because she is one of the few poets who have been able to breathe life into the sonnet since Shakespeare; Arthur Davison Ficke is another, and Cummings! But we'll come to him---Wallace Stevens for a certainty . . . and there's Conrad Aiken, ecstatically and imperishably lyrical when you excavate---and T. S. Eliot, poet laureate and elegist of the jazz age . . . Ezra Pound; now Pound's a talent, but has he written more than one lyric? ... Put him down anyway--- Comes then who? Sandburg? Bodenheim, Lindsay, Masters, Lowell (Amy), Kreymborg?---let's keep Kreymborg in ... Robinson, Wheelock....
Who remains? Who indeed, but the chap we're to meet this afternoon. If there is a finer lyricist since Keats and Swinburne (I include them both), forgetting Yeats, in the English language, I wish you would introduce me to him. Uneven? Yes, I grant you! So was God.
E. E. Cummings, the subject of this paragraph, is an extremely gifted poet, and Rascoe showed perspicuity in recognizing his talent at a time when most critics were merely ridiculing his use of the lower-case "i." But Cummings must have been embarrassed at being glorified like Miss Universe, placed on a level with Keats and Swinburne, and practically left standing at the right hand of God.
If I quote from Burton Rascoe, it is because his weekly book page in the New York Herald Tribune---selected passages from which were later reprinted, without textual changes, as A Bookman's Daybook---gave a better picture of that frenzied age than any historian could hope to equal. He was distinguished among literary journalists by really loving his profession, by speaking with hasty candor and being absolutely unself-protective in his hates and enthusiasms. He attacked the men of swollen reputation, in spite of the pain to them and danger to himself (and eventually at the cost of his job). He tried to discover and glorify the work of writers and artists then unknown to the public---the good, bad and indifferent ones, Cabell and Proust, Eliot, Mencken, Szymanowski ("the greatest musical apparition that has arisen since Wagner"), Henry Blake Fuller ("certainly more readable" than Stendhal, "more carefully constructed, richer in overtones of suaver irony"). Like any good journalist, he saw everything bigger than life size. Meeting the new and incomparable celebrities who appeared from week to week at the Coffee House Club or at the round table in the Hotel Algonquin, he lived in an atmosphere of feverish glamour and reported their conversations as if he were describing a banquet at which Plato had jested with Alcibiades.
"Only very young writers," he said, "or writers who talk a great deal more (and better) than they write, discuss Art and Style and Culture; the others give themselves over in conversation to gossip and anecdote (if art and artists form the topic of conversation)." He might have reflected that people usually talk about whatever interests them most. If the celebrities he met rarely discussed art or style, perhaps it was because those subjects had ceased to concern them; writing had become a job like any other. Gossip and anecdote---who ran off with whose wife, and who served good cocktails, and who got the biggest royalties---were the topics closest to their hearts.
Carl Sandburg [he continued] plays a jew's-harp and a guitar and sings barroom songs. Robert Nathan plays a cello; Ben Hecht plays the violin; H. L. Mencken plays the bass in four-handed arrangements for piano and small orchestra; Edmund Wilson is a sleight-of-hand performer; George Jean Nathan is an expert clog-dancer, having taken innumerable first prizes (incognito) on amateur nights at the burlesque houses; John Dos Passos is a juggler; Alfred Kreymborg plays the mandolute; Maxwell Bodenheim is an exhibition dancer; Carl Van Vechten is a spirit medium; Ernest Boyd is very deft with the musical glasses; Elinor Wylie can throw her thumbs out of joint; Scott Fitzgerald is a high diver and sometimes leaps from great heights into a bathtub only partially filled with water; Samuel Hoffenstein is a ventriloquist; F. P. Adams plays the harmonica; Robert Benchley is good at charades and impersonations; Percy Hammond does the sailor's hornpipe; Wallace Smith and Achmed Abdullah are sword swallowers; Florence Kiper Frank is a toe dancer; Will Cuppy plays "The Maiden's Prayer" on the piano; Floyd Dell can do a Russian Cossack dance; James Branch Cabell gives a fascinating exhibition in shadow swordsmanship; Rupert Hughes is a yodeler; Joseph Hergesheimer likes pillow and post office; Charles Hanson Towne and George Chappell are a perfect scream in a burlesque of the opera....
The literary business was booming like General Motors, like the better night clubs in the Roaring Forties, like the subdivision racket, and yet. . . . In this distinguished vaudeville there wasn't much place for angry young men without parlor tricks, who talked seriously about the problems of their craft and boasted of having no sense of humor. They were laying plans for new ventures to entertain themselves and advance the cause of fine letters. But their only real hope, not of success, but merely of keeping their heads above water, depended on their remaining united among themselves and quarreling only with the public.
About the first of October, Sweet's Architectural Catalogue went to press and tension at the office instantly slackened; instead of working ten or twelve hours a day under pressure, I had merely to preserve the appearance of vague industry for six or seven. There was time to think of literary matters, and particularly of my connection with Broom. Matty Josephson had just assembled the October issue, originally planned as a collection of political manifestoes: it was a sad affair and proved, if nothing else, that we and the writers we published were innocent of political ideas. Slater Brown, our colleague, planned to spend the winter in somebody's summer studio near Woodstock. Gilbert Seldes had returned from Paris to resume the managing editorship of the Dial, and Kenneth Burke, who had taken his place during the summer, was living in his New Jersey farmhouse, to which I soon addressed an urgent letter:
"Can you come into town next Friday (October 19)? Me, I place great importance on your coming. Broom is perhaps near its end, which must not be ignoble. To die gently on an ebb tide is not my idea of death. Munson is meditating new plans for Secession. When they are ripe, I suppose he will present them to us and ask us to contribute to his magazine. Everybody else seems content to settle down to a winter of occasional drunks and conversation about living conditions. The greatest American writers are George Moore and Arthur Schnitzler. ... The situation would be less discouraging if anybody retained the capacity for indignation. But if you hate a person violently, the strongest expression you are permitted to employ is, 'I take no interest in him.'
"Kenneth, I decided with Matty to call a meeting of everybody who has worked for Broom or Secession, a catholic meeting with Brown, Burke, Coates, Cowley, Crane, Frank, Guthrie, Josephson, Munson, Sanborn, Schneider, Toomer, Wescott, Williams, or such of them as are beyond taking-no-interest-in the immediate future. If we can get together in one room, we can at least define our separate positions, whether or not we can make plans to go ahead. Eternal Jesus. The people who can be content with art-for-art, three issues of a harmless little magazine and an occasional glass of synthetic gin will continue to be content. For God's sake let's brew some stronger liquor."
The liquor we planned to brew was not dangerously potent stuff. We planned, for example, to hire a theater some afternoon and give a literary entertainment, with violent and profane attacks on the most famous contemporary writers, courts-martial of the more prominent critics, burlesques of Sherwood Anderson, Floyd Dell, Paul Rosenfeld and others--all this interspersed with card tricks, solos on the jew's-harp, meaningless dialogues and whatever else would show our contempt for the audience and the sanctity of American letters. We planned to pass out handbills in the theatrical district and make defamatory soapbox orations in Union Square. We planned to continue Broom as, long as its capital or credit lasted; we hoped to make it an organ for good prose, experimental verse and violent polemics. We were willing to plan anything that would add to the excitement of living or writing. And, as a beginning, we had convoked this meeting in an Italian restaurant on Prince Street, under the shadow of the Elevated.
Most of the writers mentioned in my letter were present, as were the wives of some and a few non-literary acquaintances; in all there must have been thirty persons. Waldo Frank, Jean Toomer and William Carlos Williams did not appear. Gorham B. Munson was in the Catskills recuperating from an illness. At my request he sent a statement to be read at the meeting; it surprised me by consisting largely of a vehement attack on Josephson. I had known of a quarrel between them, based on a conflict of personalities: Munson was wax-mustached and a little solemn, while Josephson was addicted to practical jokes that weren't always funny to the victim. When they were editing Secession in uneasy collaboration, Munson had accepted a very long and bad romantic poem for the fourth issue. Josephson, who was having the issue printed in Berlin, had omitted all but the last two lines of the poem:
To me you are no more than Chinese, O moon,
Are no more than Chinese.
---"I think the two lines standing alone have a certain value in themselves," he explained unwinkingly. Munson was a friend of the author-and didn't see the joke. Moreover, Josephson and I were friends of Jack Wheelwright and it may be that Munson held us partly to blame for the fantastic errors in the two issues of Secession that Wheelwright had had printed in Italy. Other grievances accumulated between the two editors; I hadn't known how many, nor had I realized that they were leading Munson to extremes of feeling.
Unfortunately I have lost his statement, but the burden of it is easy to remember. Matthew Josephson, it said in effect, was self-seeking, irresponsible, inconsistent, apt to exhibit (I quote from another letter) "the fallacious mental mechanisms of Paul Rosenfeld, Upton Sinclair and F.P.A." His writings did not lead toward "a more passionate apprehension of life." In short he was "an intellectual faker" and therefore the magazine he helped to edit and the literary activities he proposed were unworthy of cooperation from all respectable authors and critics, including the. undersigned Gorham B. Munson.
Because his feelings were intense, Munson was betrayed into using a pompous style. His rhetoric was as noble as Cicero's; his phrases scanned; I have the impression that his statement was written more in blank verse than in prose. I began to read it seriously to my audience, but halfway through I was overcome by a sense of absurdity and began to declaim it like a blue-jawed actor reciting Hamlet's soliloquy. The effect was unfortunate. Munson's friends, of whom several were present, declared that I was doing him an injustice (and they were right about it). His opponents retorted that the statement deserved less respectful treatment than it was receiving. Fifteen minutes after the meeting began it. had already dissolved in monologues and squabbles.
I tried to start a general discussion of our problems; nobody would listen. Jimmy Light, fresh from a cocktail party, had a thesis of his own, which he expounded in a passionate low voice to his neighbor. "They're treading us under their heels," he said. "They're stamping us down. They're pressing us into the dirt. They're walking on us." Hart Crane, shaking his finger like an angry lawyer, was exploding into argument with Josephson on the subject of Munson's letter. Bottles appeared; somebody spilled a glass of red wine on the tablecloth. Burke, with his shock of blue-black hair standing on end, was telling a hilarious story about his neighbor's dog. Hannah Josephson rapped vainly for order. "We've come here to talk business," she murmured hopelessly. Somebody told Jimmy Light to change his tune. The general hubbub increased. Isidor Schneider, the most amiable and pacific of rebel poets, sat overwhelmed by the thought that people could be so disagreeable to one another. Glenway Wescott rose from the table, very pale and stern. "How can, you people expect to accomplish anything," he said precisely, "when you can't even preserve ordinary parlor decorum?" He swept out of the restaurant with the air of one gathering an invisible cloak about him. I was too depressed to laugh at him; indeed, I was tempted to follow his example. For the first time I realized the pathos and absurdity of the fierce individualism preserved by American writers in the midst of the most unified civilization now existing. "Politicians unite to share the boodle," I thought, "and businessmen to plan a sales campaign: why can't we come together for ten minutes in the cause of literature?" Hart Crane, with red face and bristling hair, stamped up and down the room, repeating "Parlor, hell, parlor." More bottles appeared on the table. "They're pressing us into the dirt," Jimmy Light said with conviction.
"Aw, shut up," yelled half a dozen apprentice gangsters, natives of Prince Street, emerging suddenly from the rear door that led into a dirt-paved bowling alley. A moment later they reappeared at the front door and cried more loudly, "Aw, shut up."
Our long table grew quiet, not in obedience or fear, but simply from the consciousness that its proceedings were being watched by people from another world. Hart Crane poured himself a glass of wine and drank it rapidly. "The question," Josephson said, "is what we are going to print in the next issue of Broom." We discussed the question dispiritedly, having received a tacit answer to the other question, whether we should engage in more flamboyant activities. Somebody recited a limerick. About half-past eleven the meeting dispersed.
Our departure was attended by our friends the apprentice gangsters; by now they must have numbered twenty or thirty. They offered to get us taxicabs for a quarter or fight us at the drop of a hat. In harried silence we plodded homeward, feeling like Napoleon's grenadiers on the retreat from Moscow. In the struggle we had lately undertaken we were beaten almost before we began. We should have realized that there was no chance of imposing our ideas on others when we couldn't agree among ourselves, or even preserve the decorum customary in an Italian speakeasy.
A different sort of fight resulted from the meeting in Prince Street; it happened ten days later and a hundred miles from New York. Josephson made a flying trip to Woodstock, ostensibly to enjoy the October weather and confer with his editorial colleague, Slater Brown. Munson was spending the autumn with his friend Murrell Fisher, the art historian, whose cabin was only a mile away. Josephson paid him a visit one afternoon and suggested that their differences, being personal, could best be settled with their fists. Munson demurred. Finally his host entered the discussion, voted for fisticuffs and led both warriors to a marshy pasture, where, as Fisher afterward explained, he thought that neither of them would be damaged much by falling. The battle began.
It continued in an autumn drizzle. Nobody would talk much about it, but I gathered that it was a dull spectacle, a war fought horizontally more than vertically, a series of slips and wallows that ended when both heroes were too stiff with mud and bruises to battle on; separately they limped away from the battlefield. It was not until eight months later that the war of Secession was celebrated in song and story. Then, on Independence Day, Slater Brown, Jack Wheelwright and I determined to follow the great example set by Abraham Lincoln sixty years before and dedicate a battlefield monument. It consisted of a heap of stones tumbled together in the pasture lot. We marched around it in procession, chanting an Introit that Wheelwright, a high churchman, had composed for the occasion. Brown gave the Gettysburg speech in doubletalk. My contribution was an ode that began, as all such odes should do, with an invocation to the Muse of history:
O Muse, that Homer's winged quill,
Plucked from an eagle's wing, invoked---
Clio, I think, whose spirit still
Is that which Pindarus unyoked
For flights beyond our mortal seeing---
Bright Clio, virgin, obsolescent being,Seize me, soar up with me inspired
To thine heroic melancholy
That I may sing of mortals fired
To deeds of more than mortal folly
Whom worship of the Muse is leading
To fields where Munson bleeds and Fame lies bleeding.Know, Muse, that heroes yet exist
Whose anger brooks no intercession,
And tooth meets tooth and fist meets fist
And "Up," cries Munson, "with Secession!
Down Broom," he snarls, and warriors pant
Each to defend his literary slant.All afternoon the battle wavers;
Now fortune smiles on Josephson,
Now frowns, and now stout Munson quavers,
"Broom is unswept. I've almost won."
The other sneers, "Almost how splendid!"
As deep in mud both heroes lie up-ended,Yet battling on, till strength and light
Together failed. Then Fisher rose,
Grimly dividing weary wight
From bleary knight and fist from nose:
So, on another fateful day,
Half-dead Achilles by half-living Hector lay.Stout Hector like a featherbed,
Stuffed with the down from geese's tails,
Is leaking feathers dyed with red;
Achilles' gore fills waterpails,
The while he gasps, "I blacked his eye."
Sighs Hector, "'Twas a moral victory."And now, the furious carnage ending,
Darkness has veiled the wallowed fields
And Stygian rays of night descending:
Where heroes would not yield, day yields,
And all is quiet on the hill
And vale and copse forevermore are still.
The November 1923 issue of Broom, the one assembled after the disastrous meeting in Prince Street, was the best of the five published in New York, the nearest to our elastic ideal of what a magazine should be. Together with poems by E. E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, translations from the French of Roger Vitrac and Louis Aragon, and a Wall Street fantasy by Slater Brown, it contained an extraordinary story entitled "An Awful Storming Fire, or Her and I on a Journey to the Secret of the Sun, by the author who solved the mysterious riddle." The author was Charles L. Durboraw, a Chicago paperhanger whose gifts included a talent for writing in the vernacular and a vast ingenuousness. With more admirers, he might have reached a place in literature approaching that of le Douanier Rousseau in painting. "An Awful Storming Fire" is the story of a street-corner pickup. "Standing on a busy corner waiting for a street car and smoking a cigarette in one of the world's largest cities," the hero is accosted by a woman who soon confesses that "I used to be kind of sporty, but cut it out." She takes him to her empty apartment, explains that she "can read men like a book," shows him the parlor, the kitchen, the bedroom; and the story abruptly transforms itself into an enormous dream, an account of black shining forms like alligators and storms of fire into which the woman is engulfed. It ends with a moral: "I do know that man's laws punish us for our sins and that man gets these laws of his from the principle of nature's laws, and so it stands to reason that nature punishes us in different ways for our sins the same as man's laws." Unfortunately for the editors of Broom, the story, moral and all, was extremely readable. The postal censorship was rigorous toward little magazines, but often their mild indecency was too abstract or involved to be understood by the authorities. "An Awful Storming Fire" was simple enough to be exactly on the level of the censor's comprehension. He warned us indirectly that we had better mend our ways.
In those days the acting post-office censor was known in New York magazine offices as "Mr. Smith"; I have forgotten his real name. He received a comfortable salary from the government and a larger one from several of the sex magazines then at the height of their popularity. His duty toward them consisted in reading each issue before publication and making changes to meet the postal standards. The chief standard, perhaps, was anatomical. That every woman has one breast was Mr. Smith's professional conviction: he was willing to. permit any number of seductions in print as long as the willing victim was not a two-breasted woman. Naturally he was most considerate of the magazines that paid him the largest retainers. He barred occasional issues from the mails, as a matter of form, but was always careful to see that the suppression was not financially harmful---that it did not take place until the issue had been distributed to subscribers. For this obligingness he atoned by his severity toward little unpopular magazines. He was very angry about "An Awful Storming Fire," even -though it complied with the single-breasted standard. He discussed it with a sex-magazine editor of our acquaintance, explaining that he hadn't read the story until it was too late to take action. "But those guys better watch out. I'll read the next issue before it's mailed, and if I find anything the least bit off-color, I'll stop it like that---"
The threat disturbed us. We were experienced enough to know that postal censorship, though it sometimes helps the powerful magazines with money enough to publicize the event and thereby increase their circulation, is disastrous for periodicals that must struggle from month to month without resources. The total resources of Broom had lately vanished. They had consisted, since August, of a printer sufficiently interested in modern art to stand a loss on each successive issue. But the loss had proved greater than his literary enthusiasm: he had just informed us that the November number of Broom was the last he would print, except for cash paid in advance.
In the life of every magazine published for art's sake, there is a moment when the subvention is definitely withdrawn. The editors assemble dolefully; they review their exploits in the cause of letters; they assure one another that a place and a public undoubtedly exist for a magazine such as theirs; they decide whether to struggle on or expire gently in the parched wind. Usually they decide to struggle on. They issue appeals to which their readers are infallibly deaf. They search for new benefactors, for those with thousands to give, for those with hundreds, for any kind soul, at last, who will contribute five or ten dollars toward the printer's bill. They begin subscription campaigns that are doomed to failure; successful campaigns cost money. They reduce costs by ceasing to pay their contributors, by printing smaller issues.
Usually the history of a little magazine is summarized in its format. The first issue consists, let us say, of sixty-four pages, with half-tone illustrations printed on coated paper. The second issue has sixty-four pages, illustrated with line cuts. The third has only forty-eight pages; the fourth has thirty-two, without illustrations; the fifth never appears. Broom had surpassed this formula: it could boast of twenty issues, extending over three years; after being published in Rome (under the editorship of Harold Loeb and Alfred Kreymborg), it had reappeared in Berlin (under Loeb and Matthew Josephson); it had been reborn in New York; but in dying it followed the established pattern. Its size was of course reduced; its contributors were to go unpaid. Josephson, who had been receiving a small salary for his editorial work, took a job in Wall Street, pimping, as I expressed it, for a brokerage house. The two of us agreed to edit the magazine in our spare time, with such help as Slater Brown could give us from Woodstock. We found a new printer, cheaper if less charitably inclined: Our next issue of thirty-two pages would cost only two hundred and fifty dollars. All that remained was to raise two hundred and fifty dollars.
Part of this sum we contributed ourselves. The rest had to be begged from acquaintances none of whom was wealthy. I can remember the month of December as a series of luncheons with this man or that, a continued exposition of our plans, a long plea that resulted sometimes in a check for five or ten dollars, sometimes in an embarrassed refusal. There was no time for reflection. We consoled ourselves, as we neared the goal, by saying that the next month would be easier, that new subscriptions would be received and money from bookshops, that the deficit would be no greater than we could cover from our white-collar salaries.
In the mornings I sometimes dozed at my desk, but the idle season had ended and office duties were rapidly piling up. In the evenings, working till we fell asleep over unread manuscripts, Josephson and I prepared the January issue, that for December having been tacitly omitted. The issue wouldn't be one of our best, but we set great store by a philosophical narrative that Kenneth Burke had just completed, an "ethical masque" into which he had ingeniously condensed all his theories of art and living. "Prince Llan," it is true, was in places too outspoken to meet the requirements of the postal authorities, but it. was the sort of thing that Broom existed to publish---and if we couldn't publish it, what was the use of our continuing the struggle? We reassured ourselves by saying that it was too abstruse for Mr. Smith. In our weariness we failed to notice that, on the first page, in the third paragraph, it referred to plural-breasted women.
As we continued raising money; writing letters, editing manuscripts, our minds grew weary and our nerves uncertain. We quarreled with each other, with the world in general. Crowds, whistles, skidding taxicabs, all the discomforts of the city were a personal affront. In my uneasy sleep I trembled when a subway local passed underneath me, gathering speed as it left the Canal Street station. I had nightmares in which I suffered from the malice directed against contemporary art. Was there a general conspiracy of slander? Emerson Hough, in a statement issued just after his death, had accused the young intellectuals of being unpatriotic by conviction, East European by descent, unclean morally and physically, adenoidal, garlicky and syphilitic. All this was too violent to be dangerous, but other critics adopted subtler methods of attack. I came to believe that a general offensive was about to be made against modern art, an offensive based on the theory that all modern writers, painters and musicians were homosexual. The Broom offices at 45 King Street received letters that mentioned Oscar Wilde. Envelopes were addressed to Broom at "45 Queer Street." I began to feel harried and combative, like Aubrey Beardsley forced to defend his masculinity against whispers. When the first issue of the American Mercury appeared, with Ernest Boyd's portrait of a modern aesthete, I was prepared to find in it slanders that the article did not set forth.
Slanders it really contained, but of a different type. "Aesthete: Model 1924" was a composite portrait, based on the early careers of Gilbert Seldes, Kenneth Burke, Edmund Wilson and Matthew Josephson, with touches borrowed, I should say, from John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, myself, Gorham B. Munson and John Farrar. The resulting hero, a spraddling, disproportionate creature, was endowed by his author with a name, a history and several pansylike gestures. His associates were those who avowed their "intention of not being he-men"; his dreams were "haunted by fears of Sodom and Gomorrah"; but I can see, on rereading the article after ten years, that Mr. Boyd made these remarks with innocence; he did not mean to descend beneath the standards of ordinary pamphleteering.
The ordinary methods of pamphleteering are not at all lofty: they chiefly involve an appeal to the settled prejudices of the reader. Thus, to say that your opponent carries a cane, went to Harvard and is of dubiously Nordic ancestry is a means of attacking his literary standing, at least in the minds of those who are prejudiced against Harvard men, cane carriers and Jews. Mr. Boyd's Aesthete had all those unpopular characteristics... and, in addition, he had been a slacker during the war, one who "by luck or cunning . . . succeeded in getting out of the actual trenches." He now lived in Greenwich Village, wrote free verse, drank synthetic gin, edited a little magazine and was obsessed with sex. Moreover---and here we approach a more serious accusation, offered as no sop to the groundlings, but sincerely as a heartfelt plaint---"the Aesthete seeks to monopolize the field of contemporary foreign art."
It was in developing this theme that Mr. Boyd invented real slanders, which were, it should be added, of a purely commercial type. As critic, translator and editorial adviser, he himself had prospered in the field of contemporary foreign art. He was faced with competition from new sources. The best defense of his economic position would be to attack the scholarship of his competitors. This he did by citing their real or imaginary mistranslations, by exaggerating the errors they actually committed, by creating others where none existed---in brief, by a series of petty and exasperating misrepresentations. He was like a cigarette manufacturer spreading the rumor that another cigarette manufacturer mixed alfalfa with his product.
So the article impresses me as I read it today with some curiosity and an occasional yawn. But when it first appeared I failed to perceive these economic issues, in my absorption with the moral-artistic standards I had carried with me from Paris. It seemed to me, simply, that a critic of some distinction was taking sides with the philistines against his natural allies, was appealing to dangerous forms of prejudice, was making implications about the personal lives of people many of whom were my friends. "He ought to be punched in the jaw," I said. And the remark, being overheard, was repeated to Mr. Boyd with elaborations that concerned my character as a gangster and triggerman of letters: I was not merely going to punch his jaw, with my own horny and bloodstained fist; I was going to kneel on his, chest and one by one pluck out the hairs of his beard. Mr. Boyd, who describes his character as timid and bookish, did not attempt to conceal his apprehension.
Knowing that "Aesthete: Model 1924" was directed against others, that my own part in the composite portrait was negligible, a matter of two or three details, I had a feeling of noble disinterestedness in my anger. I regarded myself as a sort of West Texas sheriff sworn to uphold a code of literary conduct. I determined, in ignorance of the bloodthirsty rumors carried toward Gramercy Park from the Lower West Side, to see Mr. Boyd, explain my objections to his article, and request a private apology for certain passages. I telephoned to ask for an appointment. Mr. Boyd, after some hesitation, said that he could see no occasion for the visit I suggested. There was a note of terror in his voice that puzzled and amazed me. I assured him that the interview would be entirely peaceful; still he demurred. "Then you won't see me?" I said.
"No, I can only repeat that really; I mean we have nothing whatever to discuss."
His voice was shrill and unsteady: it somehow suggested my last evening at the Rotonde, the scurrying waiters, the proprietor with his dirty white face and frightened eyes. Seized with the same quick rage that swept over me before, I cursed over the telephone, delivering three round oaths before hanging up the receiver. The next day, still furious, I wrote Mr. Boyd a note in which I apologized for my profanity, saying that I had merely wished to imply that he was a sneak, a liar and a coward.
This incident, reflecting little glory on either side, was the beginning of the Battle of the Aesthetes and, simultaneously, of Mr. Boyd's well-advertised martyrdom. For a time he must really have suffered discomfort, although his opponents were only partially responsible. They sent him a telegram which they thought to be funny; once, in the midst of a party, they telephoned his residence and held a pompous, leg-pulling conversation in which they found that he was their master at repartee. I rather discouraged those activities, holding that there was nothing more to be said; indeed, for my own part, I said nothing more. But Mr. Boyd's malicious friends refused to let the battle die so abruptly: it was too precious a subject for gossip. Trading on his known timidity, they assured him that his person was really endangered by hard-boiled, furious, blackjack-toting aesthetes; they advised him to ask for police protection, then went about saying that he had followed their advice. He hesitated to leave his apartment. Burton Rascoe, in an amusing and hyperbolic attack on Boyd's enemies, pictured him as "barricaded behind his books, subsisting on depleted rations and grown wan and weary under the assaults and harassments." Once, in the street, he encountered Gilbert Seldes, a writer whose features were included in the portrait of the imaginary Aesthete. Seldes harbored no grudge and raised his walking stick in friendly greeting. Mr. Boyd, however, interpreted this gesture as a threat and walked hurriedly away. Seldes followed him, having a message to deliver. Mr. Boyd walked faster. Seldes shouted and quickened his pace. It is easy to imagine the spectacle of these two prominent critics, both of them sedentary and peaceful by disposition, one fleeing with terror dogging his footsteps, the other pursuing with an uplifted cane and the most amicable intentions.
Mr. Boyd doubtless retired into his book-barricaded study, there to fulminate against the two-fisted, hairy-chested aesthetes who were threatening his days. He wrote vehemently; he abounded in diatribes against Greenwich Village and little magazines and myself; he poured forth abuse and ridicule in the best eighteenth-century manner; he was Voltaire at Ferney annihilating his rivals with sledgehammer blows of wit. Like Voltaire, he sometimes presented the truth in a revised version. He announced, with a who-is-this-person air adopted from his great models, that he had never even heard of his opponents until they came bursting into his life. This purely tactical misstatement led him fatally into making another: how else could he explain his terror. He therefore asserted that I, over the telephone, had explicitly offered to beat him up.
Both these misstatements, I think, were tactical blunders. There is no use misrepresenting your opponents if the truth in itself is sufficiently damaging; and the truth in this case was damaging enough. I had made myself ridiculous by applying standards of ethics to a situation that called for standards of salesmanship. I had behaved much as I did on July 14, in Paris, but all my favorite catchwords could now be turned against me. New York had catchwords of its own, which I had deliberately forgotten. My disinterestedness was interpreted there as a meddlesome effort to push myself forward, to break the front page.
My significant gesture was a silly touchiness, an offense taken where none was intended. My manifestation was a flop. I had been violent, arbitrary, indiscreet: what more need be said to cover me with confusion? My witnesses and allies were no longer des gens très bien; they could be dismissed as Greenwich Village rowdies. And my opponents, cultivating their advantage, were about to flourish exceedingly.
Mr. Boyd, that year, was a literary hero and a commercial success. There was no list of distinguished critics that did not mention his name. No magazine was complete without one of his imaginary portraits.(6) The American Mercury, having published the first of these, was launched on a profitable career: copies of the January issue, exhausted on the newsstands, were already selling at a premium. The Battle of the Aesthetes was monopolizing literary gossip; the aesthetes themselves were covered with ridicule, and silent. Even had they wished to fight back, they no longer possessed a magazine in which to print their rejoinders. For, on January 14, in the midst of the tumult aroused by the battle, another blow had fallen. Broom had been suppressed under Section 480 of the Postal Laws, which prohibits the mailing of contraceptives and other obscene matter.
I learned of the event that morning before setting out for the office. A mail truck stopped in front of the house on Dominick Street; two postal employees jumped from the seat, asked for me by name, held a short consultation, and struggled into the cellar with six heavy bags containing our January issue. I telephoned Josephson, who had already been notified of the suppression. We conferred hastily with a lawyer; he gave us no encouragement whatever. Coming when it did, the blow was fatal. Had we possessed the money with which to continue, it would have meant no more than the loss of a single issue; at present it meant the loss of all the resources on which we depended for the future. We might of course repeat our labors of the preceding month; we might somehow assemble money enough to pay the printer and publish another number under the hostile supervision of Mr. Smith, but we were utterly tired and discouraged. We did what we could under the circumstances. We tried for the first time to get newspaper publicity, thinking it might help the magazine; we telephoned prominent people to ask for statements; we examined our files of accepted manuscripts, planned statements and editorials; but this was done almost mechanically; the spirit had gone out of it; we were tired and beaten.
We had tried on Manhattan Island to re-create the atmosphere of intellectual excitement and moral indignation that had stimulated us in Paris among the Dadaists. We had tried to prove that it was worth while fighting and making oneself ridiculous and getting one's head broken for purely aesthetic motives. We had tried to write and publish a new sort of literature celebrating the picturesque qualities of American machinery and our business civilization, and we found that American businessmen in the age of machines were not interested in reading poems about them. The American Mercury, with its easy incredulity, its middle-agedness, its belligerent philistinism, was the expression of a prevailing mood. Broom was dead, with all the activities planned to surround it. "We'll stick it out," I said. But five months after my return from Europe I was dispirited, exhausted, licked by Mr. Smith and Mr. Boyd and the quarrels among my friends, but most of all by myself, by my efforts to apply in one country the standards I had brought from another.
Washington's birthday would fall on a Friday. Work was slackening again at the office; there was no need to punch the time clock Saturday morning. On Thursday afternoon I left for Woodstock to spend the rest of the week in the Catskills, carrying with me a sheaf of blank paper, a bottle of gin and a little bundle of manuscripts which would compose a new issue of Broom, if we ever got round to printing it.
William Slater Brown was to be my host. He was living alone, in a shack built hastily as a summer studio, with a high ceiling and porous walls and a vast north window that rattled in the wind. Bill had practically abandoned the attempt to keep it warm. He made the gesture of having a fire in the stove, a smoldering heap of chestnut branches, but he had learned to work when the temperature in the room was well below freezing, and work he did, twelve hours a day, writing stories, tearing them up and beginning them over again, addressing a long monologue to his typewriter. He ate his meals with a copy of Tristram Shandy or a translation of Aeschylus propped against the coffee pot. Once a week he trudged to Woodstock through the snow to buy whatever provisions he could afford and ex-change a few words with the grocer. About as often he entertained a guest---Henry Billings the painter or Murrell Fisher the art critic; one or the other would come stumbling through the woods at dusk, bearing a jug of cider and a lantern. Both of them appeared during my visit. Bill saw more people that week-end than he would see again till the snow melted and the summer artists began to blossom on the landscape like mullein stalks.
On Thursday night we drank most of the gin, mixed with cider. On Friday morning we ran hastily through the manuscripts assembled for the new issue of Broom, and decided that most of them were undistinguished. We were appalled at the expense involved in printing them and, though we talked bravely of plans for the future, both of us felt that nothing would be done. In the afternoon, after lunching on salt pork and stewed lentils, we each sat down with three pencils and thirty sheets of blank paper, to try our hand at automatic writing, a tiring exercise. One simply writes at top speed, for three hours by the dock, on any subject that pops into the head. The first hour is generally wasted; but during the second and third hours, when the conscious mind is thoroughly fatigued, one is likely to produce interesting phrases and fancies, and sometimes whole stories in the manner of our Dada friends, with whom the exercise was popular. Bill and I had never tried it before, and we were disappointed with the results, which would. be of interest only to a psychologist. The sun was setting as the three hours ended; it was time for our dinner of salt pork and lentils.
In the evening we walked along the Bearsville road between high banks of snow. Bill was bent on expounding a theory of aesthetics that he had derived from staring at a pine tree outside his studio window. Art, he said, should resemble a tree rather than a machine. The perfect machine is one to which any added part is useless and from which no part can be subtracted without impairing its efficiency. Trees, on the other hand, have any number of excess branches; and art should resemble them, should have a higher factor of safety than the machine. Art is the superfluous.... I disagreed with him so vehemently that I slipped and plunged head foremost into a snowbank.
The nights were still and cold, with skies the color of oiled steel. We slept under blankets, overcoats, rugs pulled from the floor, and rose in the morning stiffly, as if stones had been piled on our chests. All day the yellow sun shone in a blue sky, melting the snow on the roof until two-foot icicles hung from the eaves. We cooked, chopped wood, went for long walks and talked incessantly, without ever mentioning office work, or magazines (after the first unhappy morning) or the world of literary quarrels. On Saturday night josh Billings came, and Murrell Fisher, each with a jug of hard cider. On Sunday afternoon, after carrying my valise through the deep snow to Woodstock, I caught the bus that would take me to the Kingston station, from which a train would take me to the terminal at Weehawken, from which in its turn a ferry would take me to snowless Manhattan.
It was ten o'clock when I reached the house in Dominick Street. I dropped my valise and looked at the windows under the roof, where we occupied three rooms. There was no light visible in the house, or in the house next door; the street slept in shadow between the arc lights. My latchkey was upstairs in the bureau drawer: would I have to spend the night in a hotel? I rang the bell twice and waited; there was no answer. I pounded my fists on the door and waited again; there was no sound of footsteps on the stairs. I put my ear to the keyhole. Faintly, from the rear of the house, I thought I could distinguish voices; they died away. I pounded on the door again, waited, lost patience and threw my weight against it; the lock yielded and let me go plunging forward into the hall.
"Here we are, Frances," said a voice from the darkness. "Come on upstairs and have a drink."
On the second story, in a back room furnished with a cot, a bureau and one chair, I found Jimmy Dwyer, a classmate of mine who worked intermittently in Wall Street, and Terry Carlin, a hobo philosopher and mystic who boasted of never having worked at all. Jimmy was twenty-six and Terry was sixty-nine. That evening they looked alike, both being singularly pale and both wearing a vague expression that was not so much unfriendly as inaccessible: after three days of steady drinking they had entered a cosmos of their own. The air of it was warm and moist and dead., the air of a closed room in which a gas stove has burned steadily since morning. There were little drops of water on the green-painted walls. On the bureau were eight empty bottles, one bottle half-full of gin and three empty glasses. The blinds, tightly drawn that morning against the sun, continued to be drawn against the night.
"Have a drink, Frances," said Jimmy Dwyer. "Oh, you're not Frances, are you? That's funny. Well, have a drink."
"Thanks, I've had one. Where's Peggy?"
"Oh"---with a broad gesture---"she went out. Frances insulted Peggy and went out, too. She went out last Monday."
"How long ago was that?" I asked curiously.
"Let me see ... Monday, Tuesday---it's Wednesday night now, isn't it, Terry?"
Terry finished rolling a cigarette with long muscular fingers that hardly shook with age. He swept the flakes of Bull Durham from the blanket beside him and put them neatly back into the bag. "Time is relative," he said. "Time in the abstract doesn't exist. On Mars it may be Wednesday, on Venus Thursday, on Jupiter Friday. I live in a world beyond time, that embraces all time. On the earth, I think it is Tuesday morning."
"It's Wednesday night," said Jimmy Dwyer positively.
I left them, climbed another flight of stairs and lit the gaslight over my desk. The room was cold, not like Bill's shack in the country, but like a sealed tomb. To kindle a fire in the grate would be a waste of time: in ten minutes I would be in bed. I found my notebook, filled a fountain pen, and began to write a letter:
"My dear Malcolm," I wrote, addressing myself as a distant acquaintance, "it would be wise to admit that you were mistaken, and that you cannot, while working for Sweet's Catalogue Service, Inc., be editor, free lance, boon companion, literary polemist. Instead you must confine yourself to essentials: thinking, reading, conversation, writing, livelihood, in about the order named. At this moment you must strip yourself of everything inessential to these aims; and especially of the functions of editor, free lance, drinking companion and literary polemist. You must arrange your life against interruptions; you must sleep, exercise, earn your living and pass the other moments beneath a lamp or talking. Too many excitements: at this moment you are tired and discouraged.... You have left the stage and you did not even bow."
New York, inhabited by six million strangers, is the metropolis of curiosity and suspicion. It is the city without landmarks, the home of lasting impermanence, of dynamic immobility. It is the seat of violent emotions, hate, desire, envy, contempt, all changing from moment to moment, all existing at the tips of the nerves. It is the city of anger ... but underneath the anger is another mood, a feeling of timeless melancholy, dry, reckless, defeated and perverse.
New York, to one returning from Paris or London, seems the least human of all the babylons. Its life is expressed in terms of geometry and mechanics: the height and cubical content of its buildings, the pressure that squeezes them upward like clay squeezed out between the fingers, the suction that empties one district to overcrowd another, the lines of force radiating from subway stations, the density of traffic. Its people have a purely numerical function: they are counted as units that daily pass a given point. Their emotions are coefficients used in calculating the probability of trade. Thus, by applying the coefficient of thirst to the numbered crowds on Broadway, one decides where to place a tavern or an orange-drink stand. The coefficient of vanity determines the location of beauty parlors. Just what is the coefficient of art? How many geniuses should we compute to each million shares of stock or billion dollars of assessable real estate?
When the exiles returned from Europe, their normal instinct was to remake the environment, to substitute moral for mechanical values, to create a background that would render their own lives more exciting or rewarding, Having failed in this attempt, they sought to adjust themselves to the existing environment as best they could. Some were already trying to escape from it by moving to farms in Connecticut or New Jersey; Among these country dwellers was Kenneth Burke. From the letters I wrote him during the winter of 1923-24, it is easy to reconstruct my own state of mind:
"I live by clocks that mislead me. I rise at 8:45 and reach the office at 8:45. 1 rise at 9:05 and reach the office at 9:20. 1 rise at 8:00 and reach the office at 9:30. I never keep engagements, but on no principle. I have time for nothing." And again: "It frightens me how my life is episodic. What I lay down is never picked up again. To find any personality for myself, I have to reread my own letters. . . . Let us estimate that I can think for a maximum of two hours per day. Every day the topic changes, my interests change, I am less downhearted, or more, I plan different futures. To read seriously. To construct an aesthetic. To write a novel. To be financially independent. One aim conflicts with another, and our lives are held together only by the calendar, the daily papers, the chain of Saturdays, the Sundays like empty brackets. People who live in cities have bright eyes like squirrels.... Mr. Cowley you write don't you question mark. No comma Mrs. Smith comma I can take it or leave it alone. The function of poetry is to make the world inhabitable period. Three dots. Suddenly I had a hysterical desire to read Plato and rushed to-the library."
Plato was a symbol of escape: to read him was not to understand the innateness of the Idea, but merely to place oneself at a distance of four thousand miles and half as many years from Broadway. I felt, for the only time and for reasons inacceptable to them, a curious sympathy for the American Humanists. "From Paul Elmer More," I wrote to Kenneth, "one derives a statement of the great truth that the aim of philosophy is to attain ataraxy, which the Oxford Concise Dictionary defines as free security or, more vulgarly, stoical indifference, from a, not, and tarasso, disturb. Philosophy is the power of not being disturbed. After six months in New York, one takes refuge in such preoccupations, and the atmosphere of New York is a hysterical classicism, to be distinguished from the classicism of the Mediterranean, which results from sympathy with one's environment instead of rebellion against it. Let us repeat that I am not disturbed, am not disturbed, not disturbed."
Sometimes there were outbursts of moral indignation. "I utterly hate and despise the trade and the tradesmen of letters. Your typical writer-beg pardon, your creator, for hacks have usurped the principal attribute of God---is a child spoiled by his audience, a vanity parading before comic mirrors, a soloist begging for another curtain call. . . ." I sometimes had pleasant nightmares in which I fancied that New York was being destroyed by an earthquake: its towers snapped like pine trees in a storm, a tidal wave poured through its streets and swept them clean of lice. But slowly, in spite of these rebellions, I was adjusting myself to an old situation.
"One afternoon last week," I wrote, "there was a party at the office, much dancing, pretty stenographers; my head still buzzes with jazz (rings with rag?). Afterward I went to Ridgefield with Gene O'Neill and Agnes and Hart Crane. I wrote a jazz poem in jazzy prose and swore I should write no more verse. Matty is publishing The Poet Assassinated to clear off some of the Broom deficit or pile it on---one becomes so confused. Apparently Munson has Broken Off Relations with me. Mr. Eugene O'Neill speaks a language so different from ours that we seem to converse from distant worlds. Cummings' book has appeared. The beer is getting poorer. New York has enveloped itself in a haze of ragtime tunes, a sort of poetry that leads to a melancholy happiness."
Ten days later I returned to the same theme. "The function of poetry is to make life tolerable. New York was becoming more than I could bear. During my few moments alone I found myself miserable to a degree that you would never credit. The dance at our office was a partial salvation: it filled my head with jazz, impossibilities and pretty girls, all of which is the strong and vulgar poetry peculiar to Manhattan. Afterward the irregular red-brick landscapes took on a different meaning. . . ." I was relearning a forgotten lesson, that New York had its folklore, its proper music, that the city was less inhuman than it seemed.
In fact, once the returning exiles had been stripped, of their ambitions, once they surrendered to the city and lived the common life of its peasants, they found abundant compensations in their lot. During the winter there were dancing parties in Harlem, drinking parties in the Village, invasions of Second Avenue to sip white wine and applaud Mr. Moscowitz's interpretation of "Hearts and Flowers" on the cymbalon, perhaps after a visit to the National Winter Garden Burlesque; there were concerts and bridge and incursions into the Roaring Forties. In summer there were trips to Coney Island, extended weekends in the country; and at all seasons there were the speakeasies where the returning exiles congregated, always in larger numbers---where, over a Tom Collins, they exchanged news from Montparnasse and impressions of the Tyrol; where even the bartender had spent his Paris year; he said, "How'd you like to be up in Montmartre tonight, at Zelli's?"---and Flossie Martin answered, "Or just sitting outside the Select with a good long drink and nothing to do but drink it"---all this had a sort of reminiscent charm, but it seemed, to the returning exiles, farther and farther away. They were learning that New York had another life, too---subterranean, like almost everything that was human in the city---a life of writers meeting in restaurants at lunchtime or in coffeehouses after business hours to talk of work just started or magazines unpublished, and even to lay modest plans for the future. Modestly they were beginning to write poems worth the trouble of reading to their friends over the coffee cups. Modestly they were rebelling once more. They hadn't time to be very unhappy; most of their hours were given over to the simple business of earning a livelihood; yet there grew on them the desire to escape and the hope of living somewhere under more favorable conditions, perhaps in their own countryside, of which they still dreamed, perhaps on a Connecticut farm.