CROTON-ON-HUDSON
NEW YORK

Claude, I'm perfectly delighted with your book. So is Eliena as far as she has gone. I was waiting for her to finish, but I don't want to wait any longer.

Of course I endorse absolutely your impulse to bring in the Stalinists, and make the canvas as big and significant as it can be. Put in all "arlem and all you know and think about it".

I am vividly interested in your characters, and that's the main thing.

I've written in a little suggestion here and there. I have a difficulty, just as in Tolstoy, keeping track at the beginning of which is which. You might help me a little there by repeating in some way who they are the second time you mention them. But then I'm rather dumb as a novel reader, my interest wandering from persons to ideas so easily.

The only general suggestion I have is: Don't write it too fast. Don't work when your tired. Your style is fine on the whole, but occasionally it sags a little imaginatively. I want to encounter more brilliant visions like "a reddish person and so covered with freckles that he looked like a cinnamon sandwich." Or: "like children with tinted candies, each one hiding its candy in its fist and insisting it had the prettiest tint."

Claude you can make those up by the basketful, when you put your mind to it in idle energy. Your poetry was full of them. Sprinkle them more thickly in your prose. You would, if you were writing a little poetry on the side, as we both always ought to be. It keeps the color in your prose. I think