I believe that the hope of the modern drama lies in the artist who can learn to look upon himself as a builder ... a maker and not a writer of plays.
And so again I thank your critic whose charity has made me feel that I am on the road which leads to “Somewhere.” Even though at the end of my journey I may not yet have reached the first mile stone.
Virginia York, Washington, D. C.:
It is published in windy Chicago, The Little Review. Claimed by management, editors and its readers to be the very, very last, last word in prose and poetry; it is sold at fifteen cents a copy. Normal-minded, healthy folk will find it cheap at that price, because normal-minded, healthy folk will find in it fifteen laughs for fifteen cents, despite the fact that it is entirely a serious publication.
Years ago an editor sent me to the government hospital for the insane just outside Washington, to interview a certain man. As I passed into the building an elderly gentleman of profoundly respectful manner presented me with a neatly-bound pamphlet which he said he had written, edited and illustrated entirely by himself. Examining it later, the cover-page proved to be a mass of meaningless, whirling lines labeled in carefully printed letters, “The Croucher At The Door.” The reading matter was wholly unintelligible.
A poet-friend has given me the October number of The Little Review. The vers libre poetry in the small magazine might easily be called “The Croucher At The Door” for all the sense to be made of it. In fear and trembling that my own unworthy brain might finally have addled, relatives and friends were invited to peruse the contents of the volume. I thank heaven they could make nothing of it.
One contribution entitled Cafe Sketches, by Arthur Davison Ficke, is herewith reprinted for the benefit of readers of this page who are denied access, and accompanying the laugh, to The Little Review. Mr. Ficke, after telling in the first verse that he is in a cafe, surrounded by a “cortege of seven waiters,” mourning for a “boundlessly curious lady,” recites in mournful meanderings:
Presently persons will come out
And shake legs.
I do not want legs shaken.