China and the West

Letter from Marianne Moore to Elizabeth Bishop ; Norfolk, Virginia, August 28, 1936
With regard to Virginia, although I think I tend to overdraw beauty that my friends are not present to verify, the Cape Henry sand-dunes, the beach and its follies, the Chinese strangeness of the waterbirds, would be hard to exaggerate.

Letter from Marianne Moore to Elizabeth Bishop ; October 1, 1936.
Respecting your theatre-engagement, without knowing about it, the impression left on me was that you did just right, sorry as I was not to see more of you and have Mother see you both. It is a pleasure to have the Chinese art longer.

Moore, Marianne. Perspicuous opacity. In : The Nation ; no 143 (24 Oct. 1936). [Review of The Geographical History of America, or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind, by Gertrude Stein, with an introduction by Thornton Wilder (Random House).]
To like reading and writing is to like words. The root meaning, as contrasted with the meaning in use, is like the triple painting on projecting lamellae, which – according as one stands in front, at the right, or at the left – shows a different picture. "In China china is not china it is an earthen ware. In China there is no need of China because in china china is china."

Moore, Marianne. Courage, right and wrong. In : The Nation ; no 143 (5 Dec. 1936). [Review of New Directions in Prose and Poetry, edited by James Laughlin IV (New Directions).
Marsden Hartley, chivalrous and shrewd – a painter writing about painters – has in two reminiscences given us what one hopes is part of a book. He speaks of the hands of Charles Demuth, "Chinese in character", that seemed "to be living a life of their own" ; of his paintings, "harmonious, possibly to excess" but reflecting "a master of the comic insinuation".

Zhao, Jiabi. Xin chuan tong [ID D29670]. [Kapitel über William Faulkner].
Zhao compared Faulkner with writers of primitivism but remarked that he did not write about savages but about "the brutalities of the white people in a corrupted civilized society". He quoted articles by Waldman, Munson and Hicks to confirm that Faulkner was a pessimist and a writer of potential. Zhao divided Faulkner's novels into three groups : war novels, experimental fiction of psychoanalysis, and naturalistic depiction of brutalities in society. He believed that The sound and the fury and As I lay dying were not successful because Faulkner "followed Joyce's way of writing", that Sanctuary and, to some extent, Light in august caught the reader's need for sensation and sensual excitement. Zhao criticized Faulkner for his determinism and for offering heredity as the cause of social cruelties. The most important point is his remark that "both Sanctuary and Light in august have assured us that Faulkner is a more promising writer than Ernest Hemingway.

Letter from Julian Bell to Virginia Woolf.; Wuhan University (1936).
It's lovely country and the Chinese are charming ; lecturing on the Moderns, 1890-1914 ; 1914-36. I have to read the writers ; what is one to do ; we all write too much ; I shall make the Lighthouse I think, a set book.

Expedition von Derek Bryan, Julian Bell, Ye Junjian und Jack B. Hanson Lowe von West Sichuan nach Tibet.

Cheng Tianfang ist Botschafter der chinesischen Botschaft in Berlin.

Aufführung von Zui sheng meng si = 醉生梦死 unter der Regie von Zhang Min in Shanghai, nach O'Casey, Sean. Juno and the paycock. (London : Macmillan, 1925). [Erstaufführung Abbey Theatre, Dublin 1924].).

Fleming, Peter. News from Tartary : a journey from Peking to Kashmir [ID D3374].
Foreword :
There is not much to say about this book by way of introduction. It describes and undeservedly successful attempt to travel overland from Peking in China to Kashmir in India. The journey took seven months and covered about 355 miles.
Anyone familiar, even vicriousley, with the regions which we traversed will recognize the inadequacy of my description of them. For much of the time we were in country very little known – country where even the collated wisdom represented by our maps was sometimes at ault and seldom comprehensive ; and although at almost no point on our route could we have regareded ourselves as pioneers, there was hardly a stretch of it which did not offer great opportunieis to specialists – opportunities to amplify, confirm, or contradict the findings of their rare and distinguished predecessors.
We did not avail ourselves of these opportunities ; we were no specialists. The world's stock of knowledge – geographical, ethnological, meteorological, what you will – gained nothing from our journey. Nor did we mean that it should. Much as we should have liked to justify our existence by bringing back material which would have set the hive of learned men buzzing with confusion or complacency, we were not qualified to do so. We measured no skulls, we took no readings ; we would not have known how. We travelled for two reasons only.
One is implicit in the title of this book. We wanted (it was part of our job, even if it had not been part of our natures) to find out what was happening in Sinkiang, or Chinese Turkistan. It was eight years since a traveller had crossed this remote and turbulent province and reached India across country from Peking. In the interim a civil war had flared up and had (at least we hoped that it had) burnt itself out. There were dark rumours that a Foreign Power was making this area, the size of France, its own. Nobody could get in. Nobody could get out. In 1935 Sinkiang, if you substitute political for physical difficulties, shared with the peak of Everest the blue riband of inaccessibility.
The trouble about journeys nowadays is that they are easy to make but difficult to justify. The earth, which one danced and spun before us as alluringly as a celluloid ball on top of a fountain in a rifle-range, is now a dull and vulnerable target ; nor do we get, for hitting it in the right place, the manicure set or the packet of Edinburgh rock which formerly rewarded good marksmanship. All along the line we have been forestalled, and forestalled by better men than we. Only the born tourist – happy, goggling ruminant – can follow in their tracks with the conviction that he is not wasting his time.
But Sinkiang was, in 1935, a special case ; and the seemingly impossible journey through it could, at a pinch, qualify as political if not as geographical exploration. To the outside world the situation in the Province was as dark as Darkest Africa in the days when that Victorian superlative was current. So, although we brought back only News from Tartary when we might have brought back Knowledge, we at least had some excuse for going there ; our selfishness was in part disguised, our amateurishness in part condoned.
Our selfishness was of course the operative factor. I have said that we travelled for two reasons only, and I have tried to explain one of them. The second, which was far more cogent than the first, was because we wanted to travel – because we believed, in the light of previous experience, that we should enjoy it. It turned out that we were right. We enjoyed it very much indeed.
There is only one other thing. You will find in this book, if you stay the course, a good many statements which – had they not reference to a part of Asia which is almost as remote from the headlines as it is from the sea – would be classed as 'revelations'. The majority of these show the Government of the Soviet Union in what will probably seem to most a discreditable light. All these statements are based on what is, at is flimsiest, good second-hand evidence – i.e. the evidence of reliable people who thave themselves witnessed the events of tendencies recorded. I should perhaps add that these statements are made objectively. I know nothing, and care less, about political theory ; knavery, oppression and ineptitude, as perpetrated by government, interest me only in their concrete manifestations, in their impact on mankind : not in their nebulous doctrinal origins.
I have travelled fairly widely in 'Communist' Russia (where they supplied me with the inverted commas) : and I have seen a good deal of Japanese Imperialism on the Asiatic mainland. I like the Russians and the Japanese enormously ; and I have been equally rude to both. I say this because I know that to read a propagandist, a man with vested intellectual interests, is as dull as dining with a vegetarian.
I have never admired, and very seldom liked, anything that I have written ; and I can only hope that this book will commend itself more to you than it does to me. But it is at least honest in intention. I really have done my best – and it was difficult, because we led such a queer, remote, specialized kind of life – to describe the journey without even involuntary falsification, to tell what it felt like at the time, to give a true picture of a monotonous, unheroic, but strange existence. On paper it was a spectacular journey, but I have tried to reduce it to its true dimensions. The difficulties were potentially enormous, but in the event they never amounted to very much. We were never ill, never in immediate danger, and never seriously short of food. We had, by the only standards worth applying, and easy time of it.
Of the people who helped us, some are thanked in the pages that follow. But there were others, and I should like to take this opportunity of expressing my gratitude to Erik Norin for invaluable assistance in Peking ; to Nancy and Harold Caccia, under whose hospitable roof in the Legation my preparations, such as they were, were made ; to Owen and Eleanor Lattimore, for inspiration, advice, and a tin of saddle-soap which we never used ; to Sir Eric Teichman, for the loan of the.44 ; to John and Tony Keswick, who got the rook rifle for me ; and to Geoffrey Dawson, who gave me the run of Asia.
Finally, I should like to thank Kini Maillart. It is customary for the members of an expedition to pay each other elaborate compliments in print, though they may have done the opposite in the field ; but ours was more of an escapade than an expedition, and in this as in other respects I have not too closely followed precedent. Explicit praise of her courage, her endurance, her good-humour and her discretion would – were it adequate – strike at the opening of this prosaic and informal narrative a note at once too conventional and too flamboyant. Here and there in the text I have paid tributes to her which could not be whithheld ; but for the most part I have left you to form your own opinions of a girl who travelled for many hundreds of miles through country were no white woman has ever been before. I can hardly doubt that you will find her, as I did, a gallant traveller and a good companion.

Miller, Henry. Black spring. (Paris : Obelisk Press, 1936).
Walking up and down in China.
"In Paris, out of Paris, leaving Paris or coming back to Paris, it's always Paris and Paris is France and France is China. All that which is incomprehensible to me runs like a great wall over the hills and valleys through which I wander. Within this great wall I can live my Chinese life in peace and security.
I'm not a traveler, not an adventurer. This happen to me in my search for a way out. Up till now I had been working away in a blind tunnel, burrowing in the bowels of the earth for light and water. I could not believe, being a man of the American continent, that there was a place on earth where a man could be himself. By force of circumstance I became a Chinaman—a Chinaman in my own country! I took to the opium of dream in order to face the hideousness of a life in which I had no part. As quietly and naturally as a twig falling into the Mississippi I dropped out of the stream of American life. Everything that happened to me I remember, but I have no desire to recover the past, neither have I any longings or regrets. I am like a man who awakes from a long sleep to find that he is dreaming. A pre-natal condition—the born man living unborn, the unborn man dying born."

Ernst-Günther Mohr ist Botschafter in Nanjing.

Iulian Shchutskii wird Research Fellow am Hermitage Museum in Leningrad = St. Petersburg.

Second Sino-European University in Brüssel.

Ba, Jin. Yi. (Shanghai : Wen hua sheng shuo chu ban she, 1936). 憶
Ba Jin mentioned that he preferred Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Artzybashev to Shakespeare, Dante and Goethe, because the Russian writers have more admirable attitude to life.

Ba, Jin. Qian ye yi ben xu. In : Sheng zhi chan hui. (Shanghai : Shang wu yin shu guan, 1936). [Artikel über Kampf, Leopod. Am Vorabend : Drama in drei Akten [ID D37393].
"It is probably ten years ago that a fifteen year old youth was reading this little book. At that time he had just embraced the ideal of loving mankind and loving the world ; he had the childish illusion that a new society in which everybody shares happiness would rise with tomorrow's sun and that all evils would instantly vanish. Reading the little book in this frame of mind, he was indescribably stirred. That book opened for his a new vista and let him see the great tragedy of a generation of youth in another country striving for the liberty and happiness of the people. In that book the fifteen year old formed for the first time the hero of his dreams, found moreover his life's career. He introduced that book to his friends as a precious jewel. They even copied it down word by word, and because it was a play, they played it on stage several times. This child was myself, and the book was the Chinese translation of On the eve."

Cao Yu, the first president of Beijing People's Art Theater, wrote in the epilogue of his trademark work The Sunrise (Richu) in 1936: "I remember I was fascinated by Chekhov's profound art a few years ago when I read The three sisters. How I was moved by his story... There is no dramatic plot, the structure is smooth but the vivid roles and their souls catch me... I cannot breathe but was immersed in that gloomy atmosphere. I want to be formally apprenticed to the great master to learn from him."

Ba, Jin. Yi. (Shanghai : Wen hua sheng huo chu ban she, 1936). [Memory].
憶
Ba Jin singled out three great writers who had helped him become 'a real human being'. These were Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Mikhail Artsybashev.

Ilse Martin Fang studiert Sinologie, Japanologie und Anglistik an der Universität Berlin.

Michael Cavenagh Gillett ist Vize-Konsul und ab 1937 Konsul des britischen Konsulats in Kashgar.