In my (Tr. Note l.) room. No. 13 on the fifth floor of the Hotel Carcassonne at 24 Rue Mouffetard, to the right of the entrance door, between the stove and the sink, stands a table that VERA painted blue one day to surprise me. I have set out here to sec what the objects on a section of this table (which I could have made into a snare-picture) (see Appendix II) might suggest to me, what they might spontaneously awaken in me in describing them: the way SHERLOCK HOLMES, starting out with a single object, could solve a crime; (see Appendix III) or historians, after centuries, were able to reconstitute a whole epoch from the most famous fixation in history, Pompeii.

(ticket to St. Louis and return in a first class room for two people who is the third that walks beside you?) After a parenthesis of more than 40 years I met my old neighbor. Rives Skinker Mathews, in Tangier. I was born 4664 Berlin Avenue changed it to Pershing during the war. The Mathews family lived next door at 4660—red brick three-story houses separated by a gangway large back yard where I could generally see a rat one time or another from my bedroom window on the top floor. Well we get to talking St. Louis and “what happened to so and so” sets in and Rives Mathews really knows what happened to any so and so in St. Louis.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline was born and died near Paris (May 27, 1894-July 1, 1961). Of his books and pamphlets, some eighteen appeared in his lifetime, some six remained unpublished. His principal works were ‘Journey to the End of Night’ (1932), ‘Death on the Installment Plan’ (1936) and 'One Chateau from Another' (1957).

Collecting material on Celine for L’HERNE, Miss Lucia Evans wrote to Henry Miller & Jack Kerouac (who responded handsomely, with the letter reproduced opposite). Henry Miller, courteous as ever, sent the following reply; while apparently declining, it is relevant both to Celine & to Miller's own work.

Louis Ferdinand-Céline was a general practitioner in the poor quarters of Paris. He was also highly sensitive and actually a kindly doctor according to my instinct as I read his angry accounts of the senseless suffering of some of his clientele. The sweet little boy coughing to death...the beautiful young girl bleeding to death...the old landladies long dead. 

Thoughts on American Economy. I wash my own shirts and rub and rub, leaning over the wash-stand or the bathtub and dirt wont come off—an off-white, off-blue, off-tan line remains along the collar and the cuffs, and my back hurts and my shoulder blades hurt, and my time passes without writing or reading. 

Mid-July 1955, 889 years after the Battle of Hastings, the townspeople of Auvers, a one-steepled, overgrown tarry town near Paris, woke up to a spanking, hand lettered, red-white-and-blue poster festooned across the front of the café A Van Gogh.

The themes of Lunar Caustic, like unreliable demons, pursued Malcolm Lowry for most of his writing life. He first undertook the story in 1934, during his particularly black discovery of New York in his youth. The city, he once wrote a friend, “favours brief and furious outbursts, but not the long haul. Moreover for all its drama and existential fury, or perhaps because of it, it’s a city where it can be remarkably hard—or so it seems to me—to get on the right side of one’s despair...”

I was born 27th February, 1912, at one o’clock of the morning. The Indian blood must have been a mistake. I’m Irish mother, English father. God-fearing, lusty, chapelgoing Mutiny stock.