I had hoped, I said, to lay my tired head on her breasts. To tell the truth I had become drunken with words and now, how glad I am that I did. Mr. George Moore, Clive Bell, Paul Rosenfeld, and others of the most skillful writers of our English speech, have written a great deal about painters and, as I have already explained, there was not a book or magazine article in English and concerning painters, their lives and works, procurable in Chicago, I had not read.
What I am now striving to convey to you is something of my own pride in my literary effort in the hotel at Madison, Wisconsin, and surely, if I was, at that moment an artist, no other artist has ever had such quick and wholehearted recognition.
Having spoken of putting my tired head on my aunt’s breasts (poor woman, she died, never having seen me) I went on to give the general impression—which by the way was quite honest and correct—of a somewhat boyish figure, rather puzzled, wandering in a confused way through life. The imaginary but correct enough figure of myself, born at the moment in my imagination, had made its way through dismal swamps of gloom, over the rough hills of adversity and through the dry deserts of loneliness, toward the one spot in all this world where it had hoped to find rest and peace—that is to say upon the bosom of its aunt. However, as I have already explained, being a thorough modern and full of the modern boldness, I did not use the word bosom, as an old-fashioned writer might have done. I used the word breasts. When I had finished writing tears were in my eyes.
The letter I wrote on that day covered some seven sheets of hotel paper—finely written to the margins—and cost four cents to mail.
“Shall I mail it or shall I not?” I said to myself as I came out of the hotel office and stood before a mail box. The letter was balanced between my finger and thumb.
“Eeny, meeny, miny, mo,
Catch a nigger by the toe.”
The forefinger of my left hand—I was holding the letter in my right hand—touched my nose, mouth, forehead, eyes, chin, neck, shoulder, arm, hand and then tapped the letter itself. No doubt I fully intended, from the first, to drop it. I had been doing the work of an artist. Well, artists are always talking of destroying their own work but few do it, and those who do are perhaps the real heroes of life.
And so down into the mail box it went with a thud and my fortune was made. The letter was received by my aunt, who was lying abed of an illness that was to destroy her—she had, it seems, other things beside hay-fever the matter with her—and she altered her will in my favor. She had intended leaving her money, a tidy sum yielding an income of five thousand a year, to a fund to be established for the study of methods for the cure of hay-fever—that is to say, really you see, to her fellow sufferers—but instead left it to me. My aunt could not find her spectacles and a nurse—may the gods bring her bright days and a good husband—read the letter aloud. Both women were deeply touched and my aunt wept. I am only telling you the facts, you understand, but I would like to suggest that this whole incident might well be taken as proof of the power of modern art. From the first I have been a firm believer in the moderns. I am one who, as an art critic might word it, has been right down through the movements. At first I was an impressionist and later a cubist, a post-impressionist, and even a vorticist. Time after time, in my imaginary life, as a painter, I have been quite swept off my feet. For example I remember Picasso’s blue period ... but we’ll not go into that.
What I am trying to say is that, having this faith in modernity, if one may use the word thus, I did find within myself a peculiar boldness as I sat in the hotel writing room at Madison, Wisconsin. I used the word breasts (in the plural, you understand) and everyone will admit that it is a bold and modern word to use in a letter to an aunt one has never seen. It brought my aunt and me into one family. Her modesty never could have admitted anything else.