BR TO DORA RUSSELL, 1 MAY 1924
BRACERS 19954. ALS. McMaster
Proofread by K. Blackwell

<letterhead>
THE HOLLENDEN HERMAN MACK,
CLEVELAND
1st May 1924.

My Darling Treasure1 —

I wrote in a hurry yesterday but I dare say this will catch the same mail. I keep thinking about your brother. Can’t you get hold of him (without his wife) and get him out of the tangled jangled mood he must have been in? I wonder whether he likes her? Probably now that he has failed they hate each other; if so, they ought to separate. I imagine he would be all right on the Halls, but business is so silly. If he stayed with you a little while without his wife he would probably grow quite sensible. My advice would be — chuck business and take to comic acting. But not of course if the A.P. really keeps him on. All this is so out of date, though. By now you know what has become of him and everything is decided. I do hope it has not turned to tragedy. And I hope your father is recovering all right.

I had to talk to a women’s club here and dine with them first — ghastly people, snobs about English society people. I have 3 types of audience; academic, open forums, and women’s clubs. I like the academic audiences best — I always get on with the students. The Open Forums are rather admirable; they always have very lively questions and discussions afterwards, and they are gradually teaching Yanks to keep their tempers when they hear opinions they don’t agree with. But the women’s clubs are utterly horrible. I doubt if the human race produces anything more repulsive than the American rich woman of middle age, very fat, very ugly, very expensively dressed, telling you that the pearls she is wearing are imitation, the real ones being at the Bank on account of recent robberies, boasting that her most intimate friend married a Serbian prince, and at intervals maintaining that pure American womanhood does wonders for morals. If I ever come again, I shall tell Feakins to charge the women’s clubs extra.

Today I go to Pittsburgh and return to New York by a night train. Feakins has been getting May filled up, and except the last week it will be as busy as April. I keep very fit. The governing classes here are horrible, as elsewhere, but not the proletariat. I find university teachers excellent people, ground under the heel of the College President, who is Lord High Executioner to the Trustees, who are what Upton Sinclair calls the Inter-Locking Directorate. Americans are mostly very ignorant about economic power.

This place, they tell me, has 1,000,000 inhabitants; so had our bed at Chang-sha — both equally regrettable. I am all the time in the mood one is in at the dentist’s. I think the lack of sincerity and truth is what is most trying. Everybody wants to be flattered, and is willing to flatter. I don’t know in the least whether they like my lectures or hate them, they are so polite.

Now I must go to my train. Darling, I do wish I were with you to bear some of your burdens. And I do hope they will lessen. I wonder if you have gone to Cornwall and if you have let Sydney Str. Better lend it than leave it empty — if empty, the insurance fails.

Goodbye sweet Love. In a month I shall be on the Atlantic and then you will soon be in my arms. O western wind when wilt thou blow!

B.

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  My Darling Treasure Russell enclosed a spare sheet of letterhead, labelling a picture of the hotel “DADA’S HOUSE” and a stick figure of himself “DADA”.