BOOKS
ANDERSON, MILLAY AND CRANE IN THEIR LETTERS
LETTERS OF SHERWOOD ANDERSON, Little, Brown. $5.00.
LETTERS OF EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY.
H~rper.
$5.00.
THE LETTERS OF HART CRANE.
Hermit~ge
House. $5.00.
Many people believe letters the most personal and revealing
form of communication. In them we expect to find the charmer at his
nap, slumped, open-mouthed, profoundly himself without thought for
appearances. Yet, this is not quite true. Letters are above all useful as
a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of commu–
nication is quite so good for this purpose. In conversation, those uneasy
eyes upon you, those lips ready with an emendation before you have
begun to speak, are a powerful deterrent to unreality, even to hope, In
art it is not often possible to make direct use of your dreams of tomor–
row and your excuses for yesterday.
In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation,
snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own
desires-this is a benevolent form. The ideal self expressed in letters is
not a crudely sugary affair except in stunted personalities; in any case it
is very much a part of the character, having its twenty-four hours a day
to get through, and being no less unique in its combinations than one's
fingerprints.
In the letters of artists and public figures we may not find literary
charm, but we do invariably get a good notion of how the person saw
himself over the years. This vision does not always strike us as "acute";
we are often tempted to put some poor fellow wise on the subject of
his own character, to explain that we are a lot more impressed by his
dying on the gallows than by his last "God bless you"
to
his wife.
It
is difficult to think of a man except as the sum of his remarkable deeds,
a statue surrounded by selected objects and symbols. Private letters are
disturbing to this belief. What they most often show is that people
do not live their biographies.
In the last year or so the correspondence of quite a number of our
writers has been published- Pound, Sinclair Lewis, Hart Crane, Ger–
trude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Edna Millay-and we have had mem-
