I am still without work. There is absolutely nothing doing here. Things are at such a standstill that I hate to think of it. I am practically on my mother’s hands here at home,--and you can believe me that such a situation is far from a pleasant one for me who have been used to paying my own way now for some time. If only that promise I have for a job with a local advertising house fulfills itself next month I shall be all right. But most friends and friendly offers have proved themselves such slippery fish! Two years thrown away at the feet of my father without the gain of a jot of experience at anything but peon duties in a shipping room! I can never forgive him, nor my own foolishness. Just now I am too uneasy to concentrate on any writing. Have got to prepare myself for some kind of practical activity--and so I do not even read much but advertising books and business folders! Roger Fry’s _Vision and Design_, a large tome beautifully illustrated, is good to unloosen one’s tongue about such work as Sommer’s. He brought it around one evening, and I have enjoyed it. Haven’t read _Main Street_ or _Moon Calf_ yet, nor _Miss Lulu Bett_. I am beginning to feel rather distinguished about it all. 65: TO GORHAM MUNSON _Cleveland_ _May 21st_ Dear Gorham: I’m glad to say that my tension is less acute at present than when I last wrote you. An improvement of the weather with opportunities for tennis and getting out and around more helps me work off surplus energies generated by my “change of life.” And you are, of course, very much right in urging me not to be ridiculously bourgeois in accepting bourgeois standards. I’m very glad you liked “A Persuasion.” Perhaps it seems a bit tame to me on account of having used several phrases coined some years ago in it. I was much pleased this week to get word from _Double Dealer_ accepting “Black Tambourine” for publication and urging me to send them some prose. They claim they are much in need of some. Haven’t you some to offer them? I might write something on Joyce or Anderson--but I don’t know. I always feel singularly lacking in ideas about these people excepting to blindly enthuse or refute some ridiculous criticism of them. Their (“_D.D’s_”) check has not arrived yet but they promise it soon--before the June number when they expect to use the poem. It surprises me to find such a Baudelairesque thing acceptable _anywhere_ in U.S. I sent it out as a kind of hopeless protest--not expecting to see it printed at all. I’m beginning to lose interest in it now--it cannot be as good as I had thought it. --/--/ 66: TO GORHAM MUNSON _Cleveland_, _Friday_