Frank has been showing some of my work to several of the finest writers in France (most all of whom read English very well) and says there will even be a little audience there for my first book (when it comes out!). But that will be years from now, at my present rate. Even so it’s not so bad. Conrad and Anderson did not begin to write until they were over thirty-five. And Frank seems to think that I have written a few classics already. I can allow my best, and that only, whatever happens; there are too many others writing trash and near-trash these days for me to envy them. --/--/ 188: TO WALDO FRANK [_Brooklyn_] _9/6/24_ Dear Waldo: Your love and thought were so welcome! For I had wanted to see you; and I was afraid that I had proved not very encouraging of (perhaps) your ideas of myself--I refer to my doldrums when we met last. And now--I can’t tell you how glad I am that you know and realize me more firmly. And, I know, I can thank you for all this without apologizing for my real despair and torture at the time--and that still tracks me a good share of the time. The above[37] is an attempt at an approximation to the accompaniment of your own words--an “even so” and “All hail!” to a love that I have known. If it can give you anything like the illumination that the poem by Jimenez has given me--I shall not be sorry I copied it out for you. 189: TO HIS MOTHER [_Brooklyn_] _Sept. 14th, ’24_ Dear Grace and Grandma: I have just come back from a breakfast with Sam [Loveman], and he has left to spend the rest of the day with the widow of Edgar Saltus (whom you must have heard him talk about enough to identify). I have been greeted so far mostly by his coat tails, so occupied has Sambo been with numerous friends of his here ever since arriving; Miss Sonia Green and her piping-voiced husband, Howard Lovecraft (the man who visited Sam in Cleveland one summer when Galpin was also there), kept Sam traipsing around the slums and wharf streets until four this morning looking for Colonial specimens of architecture, and until Sam tells me he groaned with fatigue and begged for the subway! Well, Sam may have been improved before he left Cleveland, but skating around here has made him as hectic again as I ever remember him, and I think he is making the usual mistake of people visiting NY, of attempting too much, getting prematurely exhausted, and then railing against the place and wanting to get back home. This last alternative is really what I am expecting him to do, although he has not yet finally decided. But he does think that NY is too swift for him--and perhaps it is, I don’t know. Sam is so often in an unsettled state of mind, however, that it is hard to know in what direction to urge him. --/--/ So far, his most coherent and welcome conversation has been about you, Grace, and several matters that you seemed to think were inadvisable to put on paper to me.