Dear Gorham: I’m extremely sorry to have caused you such doubts and misunderstandings by what I said yesterday at lunch, and I’m further glad to say that I do not deserve all of them. In fact before your letter reached me I suddenly remembered my mention of the proposed attack on you and Waldo, and that I had given you a very incomplete account of it. When this came up at the coffee house a week since yesterday I at once interrupted it by offering to withdraw from any participation in the issue whatever. Allen Tate was there at the time, and as a fairly neutral party I think you can rely on him to check my statement as a fact. At any rate I hope you will ask him about it when you next see him. I have so consistently defended you and Waldo in that particular company that I have so far derived little from the meetings but an unnecessarily aggravated state of nerves and feelings. From your standpoint, I have long been aware, there is no excuse for my association with people whose activities are so questionable from several angles. And especially since I have been as strong in denunciations of them as anyone. (And let me add that I have taken no pains to conceal these opinions from anyone whatever.) Yet, at the same time, and whether fortunately or otherwise, I have not been so situated that I could possibly maintain the complete isolation which it has been your desired good fortune to maintain. While there is danger, and a good deal of it, I dare say, in my position, I have also felt that in yours, Gorham, lurked the possible blindfolding of certain recognitions, which, attached personalities being removed, you would have naturally found interesting and worthy. I can summon very little that is definite to support my feelings about this at the present time. Issues are not at all clear, and I am disgusted most of the time. You have set yourself to a rigorous program, part of which I subscribe to in action, a larger part of which I applaud you for as a critic, and another part of which I feel is unnecessarily unwieldy, limited and stolid. Perhaps all this assurance-plus is necessary in fighting as stringently as you have done and are doing, but so far I am not crystallized enough, as it were, to accept the whole lock-stock-and-barrel of it. To a certain extent, as Wyndham Lewis says, one must be broken up to live. Which I defend myself by interpreting--the artist must have a certain amount of “confusion” to bring into form. But that’s not the whole story, either. Regardless of these issues you will be assured, I hope, that I have so far found nothing in either your work or Waldo’s which I would wish to attack. Your generosity, meanwhile, certainly deserves my thanks for appreciating the sometimes necessary distinctions between a personal friendship with a man and one’s opinion of his work.