The last night went flying back to Brooklyn with a wild Irish red-headed sailor of the Coast Guard, who introduced me to a lot of coffee dens and cousys on Sand Street, and then took me to some kind of opium den way off, God knows where. Whereat I got angry and left him, or rather Mike Drayton did. Returning here to the home roost I found six cards from J---- the Incomparable with much more than the usual brief greetings, so Caramba! Mrs. Turner was laid up all day Monday from an excess of oatmeal eaten at breakfast in celebration of my return. Went up to Tory Hill yesterday and found everything just as I left it. Encountered Mrs. Powitzki at the Jennings and think she is marvelous. Did you ever talk to her? I never heard such locutions. I should love to tickle her. Since which I’ve been reading the Cock also Rises (sent me by a Cleveland friend) and have developed a perfect case of acidosis. No wonder the book sold; there isn’t a sentence without a highball or a martini in it to satisfy all the suppressed desires of the public. It’s a brilliant and a terrible book. The fiesta and bullfight best. No warmth, no charm in it whatever, but of course Hemingway doesn’t want such. 274: TO ISIDOR SCHNEIDER _Patterson, NY_ _Feb 19th, ’27_ Dear Isidor: I like your _Anthony_ very much. The theme is as basic as the best of Anderson, by which I don’t mean that it’s derivative in any sense whatever,--only that Anderson has thrusts toward a similar hygiene of the local soul, though never with such control and comprehensiveness. Forgive me too, for bringing in Jeffers, whom it seems to me you’ve got beat on a number of counts. He has poignance, but little of the sustained intensity and still less of the metrical ingenuity that I marvel at--the way you interweave action and emotion with precepts and generalities, and manage to make what is, after all, a simple plot,--a glowing canvas alive with irony and illumination. The rugged-smooth drive of your lines is quite novel. I venture to say that your previous struggles with prose in _Dr. Transit_ have helped you here, for many of the best passages have all the weight and definition of fine prose with the additional sharp, leaping movement of the liveliest hexameters in Chapman’s _Homer_.