Dear Comrade:-

Hooray! Everything looks fine. The big ones all seem to be falling into line. All that is necessary is to get them started. They do what seems to be the thing to do. The New Republic can do us a whale of a lot of good. In fact, it alone could easily swing the whole rabble in our direction. I'm so glad you wrote Lovett. An appreciation of all my work! Bully!

And it does begin to look good for your article. The delay is certainly promising. Ridiculous for us to have to feel that way about your article, for yours will be the most knowing, in a deep way, of all of them. But so it is.

I believe there is every reason to think that the WARS will break through the clique walls and get over right.

The N.Y. Post is very powerful, too; and a few like that will get all the lesser wind-jammers to shooting off their mouths for us. God knows I have very little respect for "Criticism". It's free advertising, mostly - no more. I've often been praised in such a way that I could have caused, because I knew the praiser didn't know. The great thing is to win steadily among the finer spirits who pass the final judgment. I've surely been winning them in a quiet way, while dozens of immortal reputations have grown and died! If we could only see five hundred years off, Comrade! We'd go about glowing like lightning bugs! So little that is touted now has even a ghost of a show. Almost nothing. Robinson will live, but no one will love him, few will read him, and fewer will know what he means. He's powerful, and he has my admiration; but men will not much care for a man who tells them that men are what Robinson makes them appear

I've offered this to say that if the Sat. Review of Lit. should turn you down, it might be well to try the North American Review at once, giving briefly your reasons for believing yourself entitled to speak on the subject. Lesser periodicals can be tried later, if necessary
in the main. And it isn't true. It's a sort of parsimony of the soul, a New England stinginess working in a powerful mind. That's Robinson's note. Sterling sees one sort of beauty, and writes like an archangel; but there's no deep humanness in him. I admire him too, tremendously, and he'll live. There are others; but their harps have too few strings. Some day it will be generally known how far little old Johnny's stuff reaches. And, in a way, I've only begun. Perhaps next year, with the appearance of the COLLECTED POEMS, it will begin to be known, as it should be known. The growth of my reputation is peculiar. Little noise, and yet wherever you touch one who really knows poetry, you hear something of the sort you heard from Lovett. For instance, Le Galliene, who is certainly not a partisan of mine, and has never stood up for me in public, says a fine dignified thing of my work when I am mentioned in conversation. So many know and believe; so few make a noise that will carry above the howling of the cliques. But that is all as it should be. And the astonishing thing is that anything called epic could get even to first base in our time when, as someone has said, "It is sex o'clock in literature"! That's good, isn't it? It almost seems, sometimes, that to run around, so to speak, with one's unmentionable in one's hand and to tell people of one's exploits with it is to be a literary whale. Critics like Menckan write as though one who frequently says God damn in print and insinuates much about his whangdoodle adventures is a literary genius. It makes me sick. Not that I haven't had my adventures. I'll bet that in my 19 years of that sort of thing I was far more actually "bad" than nine-tenths of the people who write sex stuff. They write about it because they have never fully experienced it. They act as though no one else knew of it. Same people know that sex takes up a mighty small part of a real man or woman's life.

I'm so glad you begin to feel all set in your new place. Fine! I want to know you are happy there. I know you'll do an immense amount of good.

Lots of love, good comrade!

Jno.
I'm off for another spell of torture this week, and I'm all steamed up for creative work. I hope I can get back without to much loss of "virtue". Our society is a fool.