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if any? Really the rejection is a relief. I think McBride handled the last one as badly as it could well have been handled. A timid half-hearted advertising campaign which aimed at the wrong people by misdescribing the book, slowness, bad taste in jacket and blurb. Reviewers, after reading that it was an adventure story said, quite truly, that it was a hell of a bad adventure story. It was worse than that. It wasn’t an adventure story at all. Am I still held by that clause in the contract, to submit a third ms. to McBride, because I think I should attempt to break it if I were. I am not discouraged at all. Rather am I heartened. The Unknown God remains a pretty fair book and a very interesting book.
    Aren’t you rather sick of handling this stuff? You can turn it over to an agent any time you wish. When Day rejects it, I should like it to be submitted to Farrar and Rinehart. Miss Mirrielees of Stanford is a friend of Farrar and she recommended the firm to me very highly. Also Carl Wilhelmson who is here with us now, advises me to give them a try.
    I don’t think that John Day will accept this book. That firm has had such a tough time with beginners lately that they will probably be touchy. However this book has merits and should go fairly well in the right circles.
    Carol is well but very much broken up about Bruga. She never had a dog of her own before and she had become horribly fond of the little wretch.
    I solicit your attention.
    sincerely,
John

To Amasa Miller
    Eagle Rock
[1930]
    Dear Ted:
    I have just happened to think, if this God thing is ever published it will be in imitation of somebody or other. My chief reading has been pretty immaculate. I have re-read Xenophon and Herodotus and Plutarch and Marcus Aurelius and that is about all except Fielding, and yet I suppose I shall be imitating Hemingway whom I have never read. Both of us use the English language which is enough to draw down the wrath. And he started using it first too and I merely copied him.
    You ask about the new work. I have been gloating and sorrowing in my freedom. It seemed good to be without the curse of a literary foetus and at the same time I have had a feeling of lostness, much, I imagine, like that felt by an old soldier when he has been discharged from the army and has no one to tell him what time to brush his teeth. Bad as novels are, they do regulate our lives and give us a responsibility. While this book was being written I felt that I was responsible for someone. If I stopped, the characters died. But now it is finished and the words of it are being put down in nice black letters on nice white paper, and the words are spelled correctly and the punctuation is sitting about in proper places, and most of the foolishness has been left on other sheets with blue marks through it.
    There is something I have wanted to ask you. Did McBride’s sell enough of the Cup to pay for its publication? I know that during the holidays every store sold out completely and I wonder whether that had any effect. I hope they at least made a decent interest on their outlay.
    I’m twenty-eight years old now and I must have at least one book a year from now on if I can manage it. The next one will be short as can be and shouldn’t take as long as the last. This one [Dissonant Symphony] offered too many problems, not only psychological but anthropological, to be done quickly. I hope the thing doesn’t read like a case history in an insane asylum. My father was very funny about it or did I tell you this? He was terribly interested from the first but quite disgusted at the end. After my careful work in filling the book with hidden symptoms of paranoia and showing that the disease had such a hold as to be incurable, my father expected Andy to recover and live happily ever after.
    Carl Wilhelmson’s Wizard’s Farm is being published by Rinehart and Farrar this summer. I am very anxious to see it. It is a very good book. I think you saw