At any rate your sanguine hopes for _White Buildings_ warms me. It came back from Harcourt yesterday. They couldn’t make anything out of most of the poems. My “obscurity” is a mystery to me, and I can’t help thinking that publishers and their readers have never heard the mention of Sir Thomas [John?] Davies, Donne, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Valéry or even Emily Dickinson. Within a few days, probably, I’ll get time to make you a copy of the mss. It has been loutish of me not to have delivered the poems to you long before this, but hurry and general confusion have been mainly responsible. In looking over the selection I hope you will (when the leisurely moment arrives) have the impulse to make what comments and criticisms occur to you. I am dissatisfied with at least half the poems, but I realize that this will possibly always be so with regard to poems written more than two years back. Reason seems to dictate, then, a certain amount of necessary indifference, that is, if I’m ever to print any collection of poems before the grave. --/--/ 212: TO WALDO FRANK _New York_ _July 23rd_ Dear Waldo: --/--/ After the quiet and freshness of the country the New York or rather Manhattan mid-summer seems more than ever intolerable. Rather ghastly, in fact. But Cleveland won’t be much better. Gorham was thoughtful in writing me news of a possible position with Henry [Robert] McBride as publicity man. I am going to see them about it before leaving,--as it might be a decent sort of thing for me. Dos Passos has just come back from the hospital, after about two months of some influenza complication which has almost finished him. Cummings looks bilious and harried. His connections with _Vanity Fair_ are broken and like the rest of us he is looking for pennies. Jimmy Light has just sailed past Columbia Hts. for England where he expects to put on some O’Neill plays. He has sole direction of the Provincetown theatre (not Greenwich Village branch) when he comes back in September. Have you thought of sending your play to him? The repërtoire that is at present planned doesn’t sound any too brilliant to me. Haven’t seen Jean or Gorham yet,--but expect to tomorrow. Such is the news in a hasty batch.... --/--/ 213: TO WALDO FRANK _Cleveland_ _Aug. 19th_ Dear Waldo: I have been trying to get time and clarity to write you for the last two weeks--ever since I sent you the mss. of _White Buildings_--but the nightmare hurly-burly and confusion here intercepted me consistently. Three more weeks of it and I shall be able to get back to Brown’s place in the country and collect myself. Our old home will be rented by its new owner to a fraternity, my mother and grandmother will be leaving for Miami, and Cleveland will become for me, I hope, more a myth of remembrance than a reality, excepting that my “myth” of a father will still make chocolates here.