The long letter to Jessie Rittenhouse in August 1919 reads like Salomon de la Selva's final reckoning with his New York years and his pan-American project, although the break was never clean. He left the city for El Salvador in the last week of October and was in Central America long enough to fall in love with yet another teenager, a gifted young poet called Margarita del Carmen Brannon Vega, whose Irish-descended father was a Blavatskian theosophist. After a few months in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras, he returned to New York via Guatemala and New Orleans in late February 1920, moving quickly on to Washington, DC and Virginia where he spent the summer and autumn of 1920.3 By the autumn of 1921 he was living in Mexico City. In the process of moving south de la Selva cut his personal ties with New York: he frequently returned to the city but rarely sought out his old friends, in person or by letter. At the same time, though, he never dug up the roots he’d put down there: they remained part of his identity. He was always proud of his pan-American efforts.

Leaving New York

There are two indirect accounts of this period, both fed via writer acquaintances. The first, written by Prosper Buranelli—friend and ghostwriter of the broadcaster and impresario Lowell Thomas—appeared in The World Magazine in August 1920.4 With considerable journalistic licence, it reports de la Selva's arrival in the city as a newsworthy event: ‘Recently there has come to New York a young man of curious mien’, overlooking the fact that he had actually been living there for well over a decade. It rehearses his exotic background—half Spanish, quarter Indian, quarter English (though in fact he was one-eighth English). It tells of how his father sent him travelling alone to London, Paris, and New York (whereas he travelled to New York on a government scholarship under the protection of a family friend). Of how after overcoming all kinds of difficulties he managed to publish two volumes of verse (in fact just the one).