All your bits of criticism of my book are true—but didn’t I say them first? Don’t I say I have a conscience? Don’t I say it’s an exasperating book—don’t I say it’s all incongruous? Don’t I tacitly tell you fifty times it is not creative but photographic? I call it a diary of human days: just that. Not artist days nor poet days. Human days must include the teakettle, the smoking chimney and the word Refined. Refined is not my word at all. In my bright lexicon there’s no such word. I use it because I am living human days and perforce encountering such words now and again. Have you the courage, jh, to tell me I am too subtle, too sub-analytic, for you? I set apart the word Refined to show it’s “their” word, not mine. Yet you solemnly take me to task for questioning the “refinement”, the “sincerity,” of my mountain shower-bath emotions. I don’t question anything. I’m saying what “they” do: In “someway the Lesbian” chapter I maintain I doubly prove, not “refute,” my analytic freedom. The book being human days includes the domestic thing. I live in a house and like it. I write as a human being not as an artist. You can’t get away from your tooth-brush. “Human days” includes satyrs and sisters looked at from exactly the same vantage—unless you’re a Christian Endeavor. You write justly, jh, but why label me with that “sexual”? I wrote also of my shoes: I contributed also the theory of Shoes. [Dear “I Mary MacLane”: All you have to say about my “criticism” of your book sounds just to me. Yes, you said them first and fifty times at least; that’s why I mentioned them at all. I thought perhaps the reason you said them so often was because you hoped it otherwise. Perhaps you are too “subtle,” too “sub-analytic,” too educated for me. I am just a painter. While I know, from the aching of the heart to the sickness of the stomach, what human days must include, I haven’t yet got to the point where I am willing to believe that writing a book doesn’t come under the same laws as painting a picture, sculping, or making music. If subject is not transformed into design by some inevitable quality in the artist then you have not made a book; you have merely helped to clutter up the place. I may be narrow-minded but I can’t quite see any art as a common activity or a household duty, indulged in or performed as an either=or. “I will clean off the snow or paint a picture; I will milk the cow or do a little modelling.” I haven’t been about enough to have found it so in any families; nor have I read enough to have found it so in many families, except perhaps the Da Vinci family. “Refined is not my word,” you say. I think the book exonerates you; but why your concern with it at all was my point, not my criticism. As to the label “sexual,” I meant shoes and all,—the whole hereditary attitude, in your case intriguing because neurasthenic. Sorry: but I did not solemnly take you to task. One must even criticize with joy.—_jh._] From “The Dial”