Across the Spectrum:The Interdisciplinary Life and Letters of John G. Neihardt (‘Flaming Rainbow’)

I've been here five days. Lectured three times at the U. of Texas and once at the S.W State Teachers' College at San Marcos. Am going to Waco this P.M. to read at Baylor University tonight. July 1st I'll be at the College of Industrial Arts at Denton. Then I have to be at the U. of Nebraska July 7, 8 and 9.

Every time I go to a new Uni or College I am more impressed with the little with which most teachers of literature "get by". There is something fatally wrong with education. It isn't educating. It simply is not a few achieve something deserving the name and more; but it isn't the scholastic will that gives it to them. Few profs. of English are really rich. They have a set of cut and dried ideas which they dispense year after year. God damn it! Ambitious young fellows come to me hungry for a larger knowledge of literature & they do not even know the names of the great things in many instances yet they have "taken" this and that and the other. Their professors don't know enough, haven't spent their lives in growing with race consciousness. It is a pitiful thing.

It isn't necessary to say that, of course there are exceptions; but how damnably rare! I've had fine success here - they rose to me, both in readings and in lectures. The Death of Crazy Horse got them especially.

I wish I could see you. O damn it, Comrade, there is so much piffling and four-flushing! I sometimes wish I were in Heaven and through. One exchanges the gold of insight and sincerity for brass, and one wearies of such trading.

The poor old U. of N. is losing many good men - five in the past year. Something is very wrong there - I don't know what. Recently, Avery told Jones that he thought I'd be called if I cared to express a desire to be called. I have no desire; and I have asked the Regents to tell the public I am no longer Hon. Prof. of Poetry. God knows I could give something that is not and never has been there; but there'd be petty woman - fights and hair-pulling! Educators acting like Irish washer women - slyly knifing each other in the back!

You and I want to be out of all that sort of thing. I want to see your book well placed and you with Macmillans. You are too fine to be blown away on a school.

I met Ma Ferguson! Ma is a hard natured ignoramus, & her husband is a roughneck grafter of great audacity. I also met Mrs. Moody, wife of Ferguson's opponent.