I've told you. I'm living. O! I'm full of it: I know what art is now; I know what real literature is. It has nothing to do with style or form or man-: ner. George Moore, not my cat but the other one, has said that Christianity is not a stranger religion than the cult of the inevitable word. The matter is what counts. I think it was Theodore Dreiser. . . .
Here I did interrupt:
I know him. When I first came to New York in 1906, I wrote a paper about Richard Strauss's Salome for the Broadway Magazine. He was the editor.
You know Theodore Dreiser!
There was awe in his tone.
Very slightly. I saw something of him then. Principally, I remember his habit, when he was talking, of folding his handkerchief into small squares, then unfolding it. He repeated this process indefinitely.
Show me.
I showed him.
Well, I'm glad I met you tonight. . . . It was Sister Carrie that set me right; at least I think it was Sister Carrie. What a book! What a masterpiece! No style, no form, just subject. The devils flogged St. Jerome in the fifth century because he was rather a Ciceronian than a Christian in his beautiful writing, but they never will flog Theodore Dreiser! He had an idea, he knew life, and he just wrote what
