Are you continuing with the advertising instructions? What do you think of Eliot’s _The Wasteland_? I was rather disappointed. It was good, of course, but so damned dead. Neither does it, in my opinion, add anything important to Eliot’s achievement. I like the admonitions you offered on Macy, etc., in _The New Republic_. You are developing a tightened hold on criticism that is a favorable opposite to Mr. Rosenfeld’s rapturous Turner-sunset technique. 118: TO GORHAM MUNSON [_Cleveland_] _Thanksgiving Day ’22_ Dear Gorham: --/--/ I have not seen Sommer for weeks and weeks. He is very peculiar, never looks you up, never phones or manifests the slightest interest. I have got tired of ever-lastingly tagging after him and shall wait until I have some important news for him before I crash into his cosmos again. I don’t think he ever so much as replied with a note of thanks to Williams for his purchase and beautiful, generous tribute of praise. I can’t understand it. But it is perhaps good to become impersonal in the admiration of art. Poor -- -- -- --! I feared you would not like him very much. My affection for him is based on a certain community of taste and pursuit we have which you will understand. Because he has been mewed up so long with unpleasant work -- -- -- -- in a city where conversation and letters never existed--he has, out of sheer ennui, been forced to find entertainment in ways which have taken the best of him to feed what has become a sort of obsession. His creative impulse was never very strong, but in his letters and on his favorite topic you get as strong a satire as Petronius! Life has tamed him terribly,--yet he has lived a great deal if the senses mean anything. I haven’t had time to read all of #3.[25] But I can well understand your dismay at Matty. With all his boasted time and leisure he ought to have made a better job of it. And that silly slant at Joyce--putting him along with Cabell! Matty’s “gay intellectualism” will eventually expose him to the jibes of a psychoanalyst if he continues in such loose estimates as his article in _Broom_ on advertising displays. Some things he says may be true,--but how damned vulgar his rhapsodies become! I would rather be on the side of “sacred art” with Underwood than admit that a great art is inherent in the tinsel of the billboards. Technique there is, of course, but such gross materialism has nothing to do with art. Artistry and fancy will be Matty’s limit as long as he is not willing to admit the power and beauty of emotional intensity--which he has proved he hasn’t got.