"

"All Moore has done is to call his characters by their real names and
he has reported their conversations as he remembered them, but, mind
you, he has not put into the book all their conversations, or even all
the people he knew at that period. Arthur Symons, for instance, a
great friend of Moore's at that time, is scarcely mentioned, and with
reason: he has no part in the form of the book; its plot is not
concerned with him.

"All artists create only in the image of the things they have seen,
reduced to terms of art through their imagination. The paintings of
Mina Loy seem to the beholder the strange creations of a vagrant
fancy. I remember one picture of hers in which an Indian girl stands
poised before an oriental palace, the most fantastic of palaces, it
would seem. But the artist explained to me that it was simply the
facade of Hagenbeck's menagerie in Hamburg, seen with an imaginative
eye. The girl was a model.... One day on the beach at the Lido she saw
a young man in a bathing suit lying stretched on the sand with his
head in the lap of a beautiful woman. Other women surrounded the two.
The group immediately suggested a composition to her. She went home
and painted. She took the young man's bathing suit off and gave him
wings; the women she dressed in lovely floating robes, and she called
the picture, _l'Amour Dorlote par les Belles Dames_.

"And once I asked Frank Harris to explain to me the origin of his
vivid story, 'Montes the Matador.' 'It's too simple,' he said, 'the
model for Montes was a little Mexican greaser whom I met in Kansas. He
was one of many in charge of cattle shipped up from Mexico and down
from the States. All the white cattle men, the gringos, held him in
great contempt. But,' continued Harris, speaking deliberately with his
beautifully modulated voice, and his eyes twinkling with the memory of
the thing, 'I soon found that the greaser's contempt for the gringos
was immeasureably greater than their's for him. "Bah," he would say,
"they know nothing." And it was so. He could go into a cattle car on a
pitch dark night and make the bulls stand up, a feat that none of the
white men would have attempted. I asked him how he did this and he
told me the answer in three words, "I know them." He could go into a
herd of cattle just let loose together and pick out their leader
immediately, pick him out before the cattle themselves had! There was
the origin of "Montes the Matador." He was named, of