The Luck of Friendship by James Laughlin

Author:James Laughlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

100. TL—1

April 11, 1953 [New York]

DEAR TENN:

Thanks for your very swell letter. I’m glad that you have been encouraged by lots of letters from people who liked Camino. They are right and the dopes are wrong. But it all takes time. You must just be patient. The world catches up with good things slowly. You’ve just got to develop a tough hide. I went through all this with New Directions. For years almost all the reviews of all the books were ridicule and scorn. You just have to sit tight and pay no attention and believe in yourself. It may be harder for you because you had a lot of success fairly early in the game. That makes you even more vulnerable for them because they really hate anybody who is truly creative. Most of these critics, I think, are thwarted writers anyway. But thousands of people want and need what only you can give them, so just you stick at it. Don’t compromise. Just write what wants to come out of the heart of you.

By all means send along the stories as soon as you can. But I don’t like the idea of a limited edition. No reason to keep the bulk of the stories from the wide public that would want them. Why not rather do a public volume and save the pieces that might cause trouble for a separate limited edition? Actually, I think that you may want to lengthen and extend “Two on a Party.” I know Audrey doesn’t like the piece, but I think it just makes her nervous. I think it is a terrific theme and you may want to develop it into a short novel, which could be the pièce de résistance of a limited edition which could also include “Hard Candy” and the one about the farmers in the South [“Kingdom of Earth”].

I hope you’ll be keeping along on the poems, too. I like that idea of matching volumes of poems and stories.

And PLEASE rush us the final version of Camino so that we can get it set up. Everybody is talking about the play and it’s a shame we don’t have the book out right now. I know you’ve had problems, but do try to let us get started.

Re Gadg, nobody who really had a “natural love of poetry” could have behaved the way he did over his former Communist friends. There are limits. Gadg loves money and fame. I hope they make him miserable.

Directing Donnie’s play sounds fine. I wish you would direct your own, so that people couldn’t keep changing what is in them.

And going to India sounds fine. That was for me the great revelation of a lifetime. When you get ready to go there I’ll make you up a list of places and things and people. Maybe you will settle down there. I could very easily, I think, except perhaps for the heat and the food problems.

Life moves along here like pieces of wood being pushed through a sawmill.

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