Gertrude Stein writing to Sherwood Anderson

"It happened that your envelope having just come was lying on the table and Balthus, perhaps one of the most interesting of the young painters and who is also passing winters and summers not far from us had bicycled over, and he said, what a nice handwriting. It is Sherwood Anderson I said, well said Balthus meditatively he is the one I like and admire most of all the American writers, he is the only one that has the real America in him, I have read them all and perhaps I like Many Marriages best, and so we talked about you a long time and he hopes to meet you, you probably have heard of him."

~~ from a letter from Gertrude Stein to Sherwood Anderson a few months before Anderson passed on

Dear [Gertrude Stein]

Dear Friend--

I am roaming about the country lecturing--getting money to pay for my farm and build a house on it.

Mrs. A[nderson] came to Cincinnati and told me your book had come. I'm glad. Wish I were at home. Will write you when I do get there.

At Pittsburgh yesterday I heard of a young instructor who almost lost his job because he cares for your books.

My new novel is selling. We are coming to Paris next fall--sure.

Every place I go someone corners me and says--"For God sake explain Gertrude Stein." I grin and back away.

Love to Hemingways,

Sherwood Anderson.

~~ from Sherwood Anderson / Gertrude Stein: Correspondence and Personal Essays
     (edited by Ray Lewis White)

Le Jardin du Luxembourg

“If I walked down by different streets to the Jardin du Luxembourg in the afternoon I could walk through the gardens and then go to the Musée du Luxembourg where the great paintings were that have now mostly been transferred to the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume. I went there nearly every day for the Cézannes and to see the Manets and the Monets and the other Impressionists that I had first come to know about in the Art Institute at Chicago. I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them. I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides it was a secret. But if the light was gone in the Luxembourg I would walk up through the gardens and stop in at the studio apartment where Gertrude Stein lived at 27 rue de Fleurus.”

~~ from A Moveable Feast (The Restored Edition) by Ernest Hemingway