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Dear Mr. S.A.- writing is the most frightful chore to me always. But I really enjoyed this little shot. The article referred to is in Nov. Atlantic. Unless you want to keep this (which of course you wont) please return to me. B.E.
November 12, 1926
Dear Al: I wouldn't have missed C. Wells' polemic diatribe against collectors for worlds. Thanks. But I like her stuff just exactly as well as any person put in a false and unpleasant position would, and no better. I'd be pounding the table for fair if we were talking; but a letter is inadequate-- even if one had time to write completely. 1. She is a freak -- always anything for a "dare", touching her tongue to cold steel, etc., etc. She says, "Never did I have the sense of moderation". 2. She judges and condemns others by her own freak standards. A yard is not a yard when measured by a warped rule. 3. She never found out what "collecting" means. In each and every experience it was to "show 'em", to "try anything once". to "prove her point", always, again, to try a "dare". Not once was she moved by a love or an enthusiasm for the things collected. Not once did she learn that the fun is, not in the acquiring, but in the intellectual pleasure of learning, of improving one's taste, of being thrilled by new adventures in appreciation. The nearest to this was a reference to the old glass. She said, "I do not begrude an hour or a dollar spent in learning to be letter perfect. " But later she says, "Taste and discrimination don't count -- all that is in the catalogues". (Damned wilful lie.) And her total blindness to good taste is shown in her plunging just as wildly after hideous silver toys, souvenir spoons, and trick paper weights as after the world's greatest literature. Also by bothering people, as she admits, by sending them books to autograph. 4. She shifts her ground covertly. Part of the time her point is to prove that collectors are not scholarly (as if anyone ever said they are), and part of the time it is something else. 5. She deliberately makes sweeping misstatements. For example, "Collected books are not read". Many books (as