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.

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. 

What follows are the authors’ discussions on the first stirrings, the germination of a poem, or a work of fiction. Any number of headings would be appropriate: Beginnings, The Starting Point, etc. Inspiration would be as good as any.

Why should that city, defenseless and pure as the wedding necklace of a forgotten tribe, keep offering itself to me? Like blue and red brown seeds beaded

The portraits that follow are from a large number of photographs recently recovered from sealed archives in Moscow, some—rumor has it—from a cache in the bottom of an elevator shaft. Five of those that follow, Akhmatova, Chekhov (with dog), Nabokov, Pasternak (with book), and Tolstoy (on horseback) are from a volume entitled The Russian Century, published early last year by Random House. Seven photographs from that research, which were not incorporated in The Russian Century, are published here for the first time: Bulgakov, Bunin , Eisenstein (in a group with Pasternak and Mayakovski), Gorki, Mayakovski, Nabokov (with mother and sister), Tolstoy (with Chekhov), and Yesenin. The photographs of Andreyev, Babel, and Kharms were supplied by the writers who did the texts on them. The photograph of Dostoyevsky is from the Bettmann archives. Writers who were thought to have an especial affinity with particular Russian authors were asked to provide the accompanying texts. We are immensely in their debt for their cooperation.

Little Tear-Vase

Other vessels hold wine, other vessels hold oil
inside the hollowed-out vault circumscribed by their clay.
I, as a smaller measure, and as the slimmest of all,

An “accelerated course” in French taste for tourists who are still in need of it ought to begin, in my opinion, with a visit to the Marché aux Puces and end with a visit to the studio of Georges Braque. On the one hand the odds and ends, coffee pots, cast-off rags, the second hand goods, in short, produced by several centuries of a unified and centralized culture; on the other, the same objects interpenetrated and flattened out in compositions that have little to do with the well-known genre of the nature morte, although they deserve the name much more legitimately than, for example, those by Chardin or Cézanne, which are so much more vives.

In 2016, at age ninety, the Welsh historian and essayist Jan Morris began keeping a ­diary for the first time. She composed an entry a day ­(occasionally two) for 188 days, ruminating on ­history, current affairs, art, and literature alongside matters of old age, love, fellowship, and creature comforts. The following is a selection.