However, I shall doubtless be able to turn my hand to something very humble and temporary as I have done before. I have many friends, some of whom will lend me small sums until I can repay them--and some sort of job always turns up sooner or later. What pleases me is that so many distinguished people have liked my poems (seen in magazines and mss.) and feel that I am making a real contribution to American literature. There is Eugene O’Neill, dramatist and author of _Anna Christie_, _Emperor Jones_, _The Hairy Ape_, etc.; Waldo Frank, probably the most distinguished contemporary novelist; and others like Alfred Stieglitz; Gaston Lachaise, the sculptor who did the famous Rockefeller tomb at Tarrytown and the stone frescoes in the Telephone Building; and Charlie Chaplin, who is a very well-read and cultured man in “real life.” I wish you could meet some of my friends, who are not the kind of “Greenwich Villagers” that you may have been thinking they were. If I am able to keep on in my present development, strenuous as it is, you may live to see the name “Crane” stand for something where literature is talked about, not only in New York but in London and abroad. You are a very busy man these days as I well appreciate from the details in your letter, and I have perhaps bored you with these explanations about myself, your sympathies engaged as they are--so much in other activities, and your mind filled with a thousand and one details and obligations which clamour to be fulfilled. Nevertheless, as I’ve said before, I couldn’t see any other way than to frankly tell you about myself and my interests so as not to leave any accidental afterthought in your mind that I had any “personal” reasons for not working in the Crane Company. And in closing I would like to just ask you to think some time,--try to imagine working for the pure love of simply making something beautiful,--something that maybe can’t be sold or used to help sell anything else, but that is simply a communication between man and man, a bond of understanding and human enlightenment--which is what a real work of art _is_. If you do that, then maybe you will see why I am not so foolish after all to have followed what seems sometimes only a faint star. I only ask to leave behind me something that the future may find valuable, and it takes a bit of sacrifice sometimes in order to give the thing that you know is in yourself and worth giving. I shall make every sacrifice toward that end. P.S. When you next write better address me care of G. B. Munson, 144 West 11th Street. I may not be able to hold on this room longer than the end of Jan. 174: TO HIS MOTHER [_New York City_] _Jan 24--’24_