And how about your book? I asked.
It's coming ... coming fast.
Are you still collecting notes?
Notes?... O! you are remembering what I was doing in Paris. That was only an experiment.... I was on the wrong track.... I threw them all away! I couldn't do anything with that.... I'm done with such nonsense.
I couldn't be astonished any more.
What are you doing now?
I've told you. I'm living. O! I'm full of it: I know what art is now; I know what real literature is. It has nothing to do with style or form or manner. George Moore, not my cat but the other one, has said that Christianity is not a stranger religion than the cult of the inevitable word. The matter is what counts. I think it was Theodore Dreiser....
Here I did interrupt:
I know him. When I first came to New York in 1906, I wrote a paper about Richard Strauss's Salome for the Broadway Magazine. He was the editor.
You know Theodore Dreiser!