Dear Father: Your letter was appreciated in many respects and I don’t want you to think that I wasn’t glad to hear from you. But there were recriminations in it which assumed a basis for apologies and regrets on my part which I don’t feel I at all suggested in my last letter and which I certainly cannot acknowledge now or later. In fact, you always seem to assume some dire kind of repentance whenever I write you or call on you, and so far as I know I have nothing in particular to repent. I simply said I was sorry that you could not see me in a clearer light, and it seems I shall have to go on lamenting that to some degree for the rest of my life. If I began to make recriminations on my behalf there wouldn’t be any use writing at all, for though I have plenty to mention, I don’t see what good it would be to either one of us to embark on a correspondence of that sort. My only complaint right now is that you seem determined to pursue such a course, and I can only say that if you persist I have no answers to offer. You and I could never restore our natural relationship of father and son by continually harping on all the unnatural and painful episodes that life has put between us via not only ourselves but other people during the last ten years, and if you are not willing to bury such hatchets and allow me, also, to do so, then I’ll have to give up. For the last six weeks I’ve been tramping the streets and being questioned, smelled and refused in various offices. Most places didn’t have any work to offer. I’ve stepped even out of my line as advertising copywriter, down to jobs as low as twenty-five per week, but to no avail. My shoes are leaky, and my pockets are empty; I have helped to empty several other pockets, also. In fact I am a little discouraged. This afternoon I am stooping to do something that I know plenty of others have done whom I respect, but which I have somehow always edged away from. I am writing a certain internationally known banker who recently gave a friend of mine five thousand dollars to study painting in Paris, and I’m asking him to lend me enough money to spend the winter in the country where it is cheap to live and where I can produce some creative work without grinding my brains through six sausage machines a day beforehand. If he refuses me I shall either ask Eugene O’Neill who is now writing the Foreword to my book and won’t refuse me for some help to that end, or I’ll take to the sea for awhile--for I’m certainly tired of the desolating mechanics of this office business, and it’s only a matter of time, anyway, until I finish with it for good. I can live for ten dollars a week in the country and have decent sleep, sound health and a clear mind. I have already bought ten acres near here in Connecticut and it’s just a matter of time until I have a cabin on it and have a garden and chickens. You see I have a plan for my life, after all. You probably don’t think it’s very ambitious, but I do. As Dr.