How I envy him this distinction of having read Havelock Ellis instead of James Huneker, of being subtle enough to prefer the deep, metaphysical didactics concerning Life (with a capital L, Miss Editor) to the contemplation of that most seductive of literary signposts—Huneker. But it is so foolish to quibble about books.... If I had anything else to do I wouldn’t read them....
Puritan, indeed! That is too much. I suspect it is only a withering retort, a ferocious counter to the “academic charges.” But what of Dreiser—poor, little, smug, banal, and illiterate Dreiser? You should have spared him. You remember on the elevated going home one night how I pleaded with you to spare him, how I argued, defended, fought? Ah, I am shamed. I feel somehow responsible for this annihilation of a man, aye a good writer, who was fast becoming one of the great men of America....
When you speak of music everything becomes clear to me. Here am I who like music well enough to have studied it for ten years, who can improvise as well on the violin as on the typewriter, but who nevertheless have been denied the capacity for experiencing the critical disorganization of the soul at the sound of bad music, and nervous exaltations at the sound of good. I suffer and gloat—but subjectively. To me music is a background.... It is not my natural form of self-expression. Neither are rugs.
And I haven’t time to be a connoisseur. Later—perhaps. But now I reduce all such differences of attitude as yours and mine to the everlasting wrangle between the connoisseur and the improviser. Yes?
Puritan! That is nothing. Later you will call me charlatan because I sometimes compose paradoxes and even epigrams. Culture abhors an epigram.
Ho! ho! the devil take you and all critics. We ride the crests—Miss Editor and I. Once my friend the Incurable rode the crests and they washed him up on a foreign shore, and now he calls the crests “foam” or “emotion for emotion’s sake” or a lot of other rather true things. To ride on the crests as long as you can—that’s the life (a small “l,” Miss Editor); to think one thing today and another tomorrow, to have lots of fun, to yell while you’re young, to believe Havelock Ellis a bearded old lady—in short, “klushnik,” to follow the care-free, tortuous path of improvisation, self-expression, instead of pursuing the lugubrious catacombs of criticism and connoisseurship.
As for my article, “The Dionysian Dreiser,” I will not defend that. Your abuse of that writing coupled with your smug praise of Ben Hecht’s atrocious poetry (concerning which I agree with my friend “Bubble” Bodenheim, who told me it was so bad on the whole that he couldn’t get it out of his mind) is inconsistent.
Ah, friend, may my death and Dreiser’s be forever on your conscience.
“The Scavenger.”