People will always differ about which part of your manuscript³ they like best; Mr. Ellis⁴ likes it best where I like it least, I notice. The whole thing is amazingly alive and has nearly all the qualities I care most about in writing. But the first part, through "Green Horses", seems to me to have gone through that undefinable process that makes a work of art, as distinct from rich material out of which such a work might be made. The rest is more or less dated and scheduled by your comings and goings, the accidents and incidents of your life. But all that first part seems to exist independently of you, is ever so much bigger and more important than any individual life can be. I don't know any picture of American life that tells so much about it, that is it to such an extent. Taking it all in all, with the grandparents and the aunts and uncles and friends and servants, town and country, manners and traditions, it is the whole picture and the whole story of a society and a period. It surrounds one and takes possession of one; everything is real and everything is important and there is no room for anything else in that world. Certainly your extraordinary visual memory would have made a good painter of you; when I finished this manuscript I was sore from the number of chins and noses and chh cheek-bones I had come up against. But a writer's memory has to be much more many-sided than a painter's, and I honestly think you got them all, all the sides. And memory, in this sense, is only the mass of scars that perceptions leave behind when every ⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩ when every perception is intense enough to be an actual experience. This vitality in presentation never flags throughout the narrative, but when applied to a succession of uprooted people who flitted through your villa in Italy⁵, it can't be as interesting as when it is expended upon a group of people in one society, all inter-rooted and acting upon one another.

The chapters which follow Green Horses are more personal, in a sense, and yet less personal. I never get Parmenter⁶ as I do Uncle Carlos⁷ or Grandfather Cook.⁸ A good deal of the richness dies out of the writing; it's vivid enough, but somehow the appeal to the imagination is vastly less.

I wonder if this is not because a child, the right child, has toward the world a purely artistic attitude, which peole can't have after individual life begins to run away with them? Children aren't undeveloped, they are 'all there', but not too much there; they are in that beautiful state of being able to live the life of all the people round them, and to feel every physical thing, grass and trees and flowers and fabrics and even iron stags on the lawn, as they never can feel things afterward. Certainly that's the time when every artist and every imaginative man or woman gets his magical perception, his richest experience of the world about him. There is that same quality in some of the early French chapters, but certainly you do make Buffalo⁹ much more thrilling and fuller of extraordinary shades and mysteries of life than Italy or the Riveriiera. You've not done it as a 'background', you've done it as a world, and I like it that ⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩way. When I read, it was the world for the time being, surrounded me on every side. I loved the feeling of their there being enough of you to go round, as there always was in those old American houses, enough food and clothes and money and furniture and vitality; cream and strawberries and sleep and warmth for everybody. A kind of sumptuousness without purpose, a lack of design, a lack of economy and therefore of elegance, but such an opulence! People did queer things behind this front of well-being? Yes, but they do queer things anyhow, anywhere, and I happen to like this front. It was like that, and I doubt if it will ever be like that in the world again. That whole Buffalo section, with New York² and the country caught in its fringes, is complete in itself, it's a creation. I 'hand it to you' with a sigh of admiration and envy; a double edged envy. I'd like to have lived there and had all those things and people rub against me. And I'd like to have been able to pour it onto paper with all its sights and sounds and smells and the feeling that is it,—the thing one can't name but can only taste with the tongue.