Emotions on a Tip to new Orleans
man, Max East
Emotions on a Tip to new Orleans By Max East man CHANCE brings emotions. These mere then whet you see ere the values of travel. Change makes you conscious of life. The fear ia Frosting s eyt s as...
...Pan AMERICAN AIRWAYS are most courteous, but offer little hope of our getting a plane to Guatemali before ten daya...
...Eliena ia more robust...
...And in the present state of rush and tussle a seat is, next to gas, rubber, and a thoughtful mind, the hardest thing to come by...
...Firry tassels dangling at their tkreete...
...Dormio bien...
...She was a princess in a castle on West Hill in Elmira when I was a church mouse fourteen years old...
...Pat O'Donnel, author of Grten Mat gin...
...You will lose your .seat...
...It is a sin to travel in wartime, aa*d atj Puritan conscience begins to remind me ef it...
...Of course I can," and I proceed to do it in a sufficiently foreign manner by translating the phrase from French...
...How gallantly Bolshevik we hatj been about turning the world ever) But while I write, the legitimate offspring of that turning is crossing the Polish border with hia horde of regimented oppressors, carrying into "bourgeois" Europe a more violent death to ureams use ours man me "capitalise system...
...it is hard to get used to such deaths...
...And the house was simp1...
...His mother-in Isw and hei eister, Mrs...
...Hia calm novelist friend, Mary King, whom we looked' forward to so much, haa gone to California...
...chewing their aidewise cad Till, preaently, with pretty mincing pace They seek the mountain and the tumbling Hood...
...He takes them now in plain costume, and will probably never aend them to us—a charming genius, really so devoted to taking pictures that he forgets to sell them...
...Sicilian Goats •y CHARIM fffSKINf SCOTT WOOD WhAT I liked beet in Sicily Was net chad-making Aetna, nor the fanes Of eld Greek geda, silent in majesty Of death, bat the early fresh-milk trains That came while borage leaves bold dew Asm the starry flowers ef lapie Mao Are wet with Night: herds ef whimsical Black, brown and spotted grave she-goats...
...Can you say 'Did you sleep well?' in Spanish...
...I noticed that when Mrs...
...How do you aay 'did you sleep well...
...We began to think that Louisiana's "Ozone Belt" is something to travel to after all-It all amelled so evergreeny, and a peacock walked about, sedately gleaming, under the trees...
...who showed u* the Delta last time we were down here, ia dead...
...Since 1939 when I published my acknowledgment of the failure of the socialist experiment, Art had ceased even to send me his famous New Year's card, annulling with that negative token the friendship of a lifetime...
...I did some work on Plato for the Reader'i Digett—a difficult assignment—and on "Morals six Politics," promised for the anniversary number of Tlx New deader...
...Indeed iu two rivers, Chefuncte and Bogue Falaya, carry whitt aand with them in all their windings through a gruesome jungle, keeping their channels firm as porcelain and spreading little piles of it out on the bank hen and there to make a beach for those who want to wadi or swim...
...It's part of your job...
...And besides, what would you do if you stayed at home enlist la* the army...
...And then, on Sunday, we got a telephone call fro* friends of our friend, Maude Moore, in New Orleans...
...The conversation travela far,, and by the end of the meal we learn that Betty grew up in Yucatan and specialised in Spanish at the University of Alabama...
...Moaea, live in a littli cottage not wholly lost in the jungle, and she drove ui over to hate tea with them...
...We call on genial, mussy-haired, untidy and artistic old Wood Whitsell, who took our pictures in Mardi Gras costume in 1940 and never sent them to us...
...They have nothing to say, and for that reason wrap themselves in clouds called "intellectual...
...I admit that I'm no soldier, but disconcert her t>j falling back on aesthetics...
...Might they come in and drive us1 out to their place...
...It evokes an admiring laugh from Betty as well aa Eliena...
...The familiar cocksure rebel feeling echoed through me from Old if asses daya: the jailed are better than the jailers, the world ia upside down...
...We cannot take you," I explained...
...but she had failed completely, for one of them i* alwaya telling, and the other asking...
...a stair Of atone one climbs to feed the sick, looking back to smile A sly Satiric grin ef goaty gaile...
...But there is nq getting off a train these days, once you get on...
...They have traveled all over the world together sinct their husbands died, and made a great go of it, for there is nothing like the division of labor...
...Moaea paid very little attention, and by adopting the same course I had a very happy time with then both...
...What do they believe in...
...Shall we give it up and...
...i 1...
...Well, shall we go back...
...t Wf pause in Atlanta at 9 a. m , long enough for a mood of regret that I cannot get off and see my very oldest friend who lives there...
...Ha listed bien dormido...
...I would rather die with the truth, however sad...
...After his head was white, he fefl in love with another gifted poet, Sara Bard Field, and they built a home at the top of a steep hill above Loe Gates, overlooking the Santa Clara Valley below San Francisco...
...Be* there ia no plane u Tucson either...
...By the dripping fountain ef the public square Women wait for them, chatting the while They squirt white Jets through bottle necks...
...Allen Tate, Louise Bogan, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stephens (even Joyce with his indubitable genius...
...We would if we could...
...Led back along these steps, I was dwelling with my companion-editors In the gsy false-paradisal days of tke Old Masses as I unfolded a copy of the .Veto York Timet...
...It is a region with all the mystic rank fertility and dark dread levelness of everlastini swamps, and yet it does not wet your feet...
...fn the dining car I find Eliena sitting beside a pretty girl named Betty, brown-eyed, brown-curled, and almost as full of laughter as Eliena or a brook...
...The telling elf is Mrs...
...Moaea what to do, Mrs...
...It's rather bed taste to be 'roving' when others art dying in battle...
...Sari Field haa written exquisite lyrics, and her dramatic poem Ban aba t portrays with original vigor, both of nusjc and metaphor, the turmoil which she believes filled Palestine during the life of Jesus...
...1 could do it better if I saw something great-hearted, or deeply thoughtful, or even emotionally elevated, in those who have taken their place in the forefront of art and poetry...
...The asking elf is Mrs...
...Two immense white cats in atone guarded the gate to the road up the •hill—"los gatos...
...It was an idyllic home to visit in...
...and Tkt Pott in tht Detert...
...New Orleans does little to lighten these shadewa on our trip...
...Moses, and what she asks you most often is what you would like to do...
...What with Higgina boat factories and army camps and embarcations, it haa .become a noisier and more crasy- racing town than New York...
...Nonchalantly sauntering to town, They bite the wayaide weed With dainty lip selecting greed, Skipping lightly te a Wall, Or even a boasc top, looking dewa To mock with wag ef beard the herder's calL Through narrow streets they paae from deer to door ] And, fall of sympathy for motherhood, FBI frothing bowls for babies af the peer From bulging adders, soft and round and good...
...There's a country hotel there, not wholly rustic, and two riven that coil through a jungle of pine and cypress and sycamore and vast live-oaks draped sadly in grey Spanish moss...
...With store indifferent and eeixxical...
...She calls it "Louisiana Pur chase...
...I thought of Freda Utley's book, Tht Dream We Loti —one ef the beat books, and the beat title for a book, en the Botshevik experiment And I thought of Art Young, Poor old mild-hearted Art Young, not tough enough to face the bitter facts, had died in the arms of "the Comrades," deceived and deceiving...
...invented at its peak of cruelty and greed...
...In Philadelphia three eloee companiona took the compartment nest to ours, two large-bellied, cigar-puffing politicians—well-fed, I thought, on graft—and a alim trim young Negro with beautiful but sullen eyes...
...Betty is going home after sending a husband overseas, and is not, perhaps for some good reason, weeping over it...
...Samuels told Mrs...
...Two affable and very little old ladies—they must have started little, but I feel sure they have shrunk considerably—came to the door to greet us...
...So we decide to put in our ten days at Covington ovei on the other side of Lake Ponchartrain...
...You could be sure to find love dwelling there, and reason, snd the peace that rests on a firm belief in rectitude and freedom...
...Wei), he died happy—he died with his dream...
...C. E. S. Wood waa not a great poet any more than they, but he was an all-sided, lusty man, who lived 94 years of life in America with an Elizabethan gusto that eeema almost (one from the earth...
...Eliena asks me, for I've been poring over the grammar in preparation for Guatemala...
...Eliena painted a pictun of one of those jungle-hidden beaches, and put in it i little shaggy rascal of a southern pony all dressed ui in a big Mexican saddle...
...He ia putting on "Dark Eyes," and we go over there one evening to coach the actors in their Russian phrases...
...It is another book belter worth thinking about than most of what passes today for great poetry...
...she answera with a grin...
...Such polite rivers, I am told, and so clean in spite of their color of well-brewed tea, are not to bt found elsewhere on the globe...
...go to Tucson and south through Mexico...
...They took us to see a beautiful estate that has been created by tea ring a vast hole in the jungle to let ia the sky and the sunshine and enable the slim gigantic pines to stand forth and*** seen...
...Animals get a terrific power over the emotions, as God does, by aaying nothing...
...You were aent on this trip...
...S. Army, n corporation lawyer in Portland, Oregon, an anarchist the while, champion of free love and atheistic humanism, a jovial connoisseur of wines and of famous dishes of food, a humorist, a poet, a romantic lover and philosopher of love, he aeems to me infinitely better worth writing essays about than those who occupy the poetic limelight of the moment...
...Not till I get rid of this cold...
...What do they celebrate that is worth a vigorous mind's attention...
...White animals, particularly, awaken in me a mystic-echoed love...
...Then all lie down to rest in a shadow place Against a wall...
...Betty got off at Mobile, and so did our involuntary traveling companion, lowering hia eyes and trying to hold hia hands together aa though he chose to...
...Another artesisa fountain, or "flowing well" as Louisiana calls theet, poured a column of water two feet in cireu inference, and heated by the earth to exactly 70 degree Fahrenheit, into a swimming pool...
...The fear ia Frosting s eyt s as we packed our hags for Guatemala— the sadness that comes down from eternity into a parting ef friends—were the first emotions...
...But he, too, with his delight-felly Bohemian studio, begins to seem washed up t, me a relic, a bundle of drifting sticks in a back aad] of a stream that ia flowing boa rapidly/ somewhere else 1 wonder where it ia flowing...
...Which we agreed to eagerly, and found ourselves m dreamland...
...A lawn bordered with innumerable shelllike camellias of every color, and fragrant with newly opening azaleas, sloped down under monumental live-oaks, not too mossy, to another silver-bottomed river winding through a forest glade...
...Renee Bowie, who give us a room in her house, is in the hospital with a broken back, and her house ia rented...
...What do they stand for...
...My friend Charles Meredith from the old days in Hollywood ia director at the Little Theatre, but his mood aaya that the Little Theatre movement ia "washed up...
...and" they were not too solemn...
...I ask...
...That and some dining on "oysters Rockefeller" at Antoine's and Gallatoire'a—there are que us in the street before both these famous restaurants—is about all the Vieux Carre has to give us of its famous) "atmosphere...
...The confidential whisper runs like lightening among the passengers, their pitiful attempt to escape the pain of too much pity...
...This is put down boastfully, for it n hard to keep up a creative morale when you travel-above ail, when you thought you were traveling to ¦ mountain lake in Guatemala, and find yourself in i Louisiana jungle...
...Bat Frosting only cowered ty the floor and curved her muaale up toward me with pleading eyes, I am speaking of a white collie with hair that stands in firm light curves like frosting before you spread it on a cake...
...They were like two bright animated intellectual elvea whom nature had tried to make exactly alike...
...In the center of the clearing a fountain plays eternally, and its gushing waters are led off into shapely lakes and brooks, where swans and many-colored- docks, and nimble orange feathered Egyptian geese, display their price and perfect indolence...
...I wonder how much win be left, after the war effort, of what we used to call America...
...An old Indian fighter, a colonel in the II...
...Samuels and Mrs...
...Samuels, and what she likes beat to till you is what to do...
...It gave me news of the death of another friend of thoae days, another confident rebel who helped fill our magaxine with warm-hearted vision and witcheries Erskine Scott Wood, author of Heavenly Dialogue...
...He murdered a child...
...He confides that he rs winning prises everywhere, and is about to become the world's most famous photographer Perhaps so, and I hope so...
...A strange friendship," Etiena remarked, but I had caught the flash of steel from the young man's wrists...
...Our amiable proprietress, who must have seen the eigne of intellect upon us, asked us one morning if w< did not know Morris Ernst...
Vol. 27 • September 1944 • No. 40
