Nonsense. I am a writer and will never be anything else. In which case it is impossible to find the word. But to have a novel one must progress with the words. The words must become real, they must take the place of wife and sweet-heart. They must be church--Wife. It must be your wife. It must be a thing of adamant with the texture of wind. Wife. Am I a word? Words, words, words-- And approaching the end of the novel in his mind as he sat there with his wife sleeping alone in the next room he could feel that something unusual had happened. Something had grown up in his life dearer than--It, as the end. The words from long practice had come to be leaves, trees, the corners of his house--such was the end. He had progressed leaving the others far behind him. Alone in that air with the words of his brain he had breathed again the pure mountain air of joy--there night after night in his poor room. And now he must leave her. She the--He had written the last word and getting up he understood the fog as it billowed before the lights. That which had been impossible for him at first had become possible. Everything had been removed that other men had tied to the words to secure them to themselves. Clean, clean he had taken each word and made it new for himself so that at last it was new, free from the world for himself--never to touch it--dreams of his babyhood--poetic sweet-heart. No. He went in to his wife with exalted mind, his breath coming in pleasant surges. I come to tell you that the book is finished. I have added a new chapter to the art of writing. I feel sincerely that all they say of me is true, that I am truly a great man and a great poet. What did you say, dear, I have been asleep? CHAPTER III [Illustration] It is Joyce with a difference. The difference being greater opacity, less erudition, reduced power of perception--Si la sol fa mi re do. Aside from that simple, rather stupid derivation, forced to a ridiculous extreme. No excuse for this sort of thing. Amounts to a total occlusion of intelligence. Substitution of something else. What? Well, nonsense. Since you drive me to it. Take the improvisations: What the French reader would say is: _Oui, ça; j'ai déjà vu ça; ça c'est de Rimbaud._ Finis. Representative American verse will be that which will appear new to the French . . . . prose the same. Infertile Joyce laments the failure of his sterile pen. Siegfried Wagner runs to his Mama crying: Mutti, Mutti, listen, I have just composed a beautiful Cantata on a theme I discovered in one of father's operas. In other words it comes after Joyce, therefore it is no good, of no use but a secondary local usefulness like the Madison Square Garden tower copied from Seville--It is of no absolute good. It is not NEW. It is not an invention.