Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1647

Carbon of a letter from Heath to Arthur Cort Holden, 57 East 78^th Street, New York, New York.

September 25, 1957

 

 

Dear Mr. Holden:

     I have read your Sonnets for My City with a great deal of interest. It is extraordinary how you have made so much to fit the sonnet form.

     I have read your coordinated Interludes and Appendix with even greater interest. Clearly the artistic in you is stirred by mystic dreams of the grace and beauty potential in the great cities of today. The basic principle of the coming transformation is plain: the conversion of unrelated ownerships of particular properties into respectively equal but undivided interests in the whole. Your forecast of this kind of arrangement on a regional scale is the creative technology which any rational analysis of our present wholly empirical social processes is bound to disclose.

 

     The basic first mechanics for this rational technology I have set out in the leaflet which I enclose. With respect to finance becoming the handmaiden of art, I hope your reading of my Citadel, Market and Altar, especially chapters 23 to 26, may be as rewarding to you as your sonnet sequence and especially its sixth interlude have been to me. Many thanks for letting me have it so long.

 

                        Cordially,

 

 

I hope you will not mind my very light pencillings alongside some passages and lines I thought particularly fine.