791 Lexington Avenue,
New York City, 21,
N.Y.

Dear Ruth,

I'm terribly sorry about this; I was just about to post it off to my bank when I realised that it hadn't got your signature! I hope you don't mind my bunging it back to you like this, but I'm afraid that on the strength of it I cashed a small cheque with a friend and it won't be good unless the cheque gets to my bank within a very short time. If you could send it back, to my bank, I'd be more than grateful; the bank is The Central Hanover Bank and Trust Co., Fifth Avenue at Sixtieth Street, New York.

I'm glad you liked Henry's poem; I like it myself. Eventually he's going to do marginal designs like Miro for it. I think Miro is to decorate the other poem today; we're helping make a colour film of him tonight.

Rather in haste,

All the best

in Edinburgh, Scotland

Ruthven Todd: born June 14, 1914; educated at Fettes College, more or less; started out as a painter, was a bad one, chucked it; two years as a farm laborer in Mull, one of the Inner Hebrides. Worked in Edinburgh as assistant-editor of the *Scottish Bookman*, for about six months; then went to London; lived by any means to hand - tutor, publisher's reader, copy-writer, ghost-writer, gallery-assistant, assistant-secretary International Surrealist Exhibition, 1936, manager of a pottery gallery, secretary to John Lehmann at Hogarth Press, worked on *Horizon* for first six months, stretcher bearer, assistant in Zwemmer's Bookstore, retired to country 1944 to write. Has been in USA since January 1947.

Books: POEMS: *Until Now*, 1941.

*The Acreage of the Heart*, 1943.

*The Planet in my Hand*, 1947.

*In Other Worlds* (in preparation)

NOVELS: *Over the Mountain*, 1939.

*The Lost Traveller*, 1942.

*The Ruins of Time*, (in preparation).

BIOGRAPHICAL: *William Blake: A Mental Prince* (in preparation).

ESSAYS &c.: *Tracks in the Snow*, 1947.

*Some Early American Painters in England*, (in preparation).

EDITED & COMPILED: Alexander Gilchrist's *Life of William Blake*, 1942, 1944.

*A Descriptive Catalogue of the Drawings and Paintings of William Blake* (been in preparation for ten years).

Children's Books: *A First Book of Beasts*, 1946. *The Extra Eye*, 1947.

There are lots more books in preparation - in fact I can't remember them all. Was married 1937-1946, divorced, one son. Wrote 10 detective novels in six months of 1946, under a false name - these are not very good. Hobbies; trying to think of a way of making a living.

APOLOGIA

A. In my head the questions knock:
What do you think of your decade?
Do you believe in what you've made?
Could a new saviour call your faith a rock?

My excuses are many and verbose;
I behaved as all my friends thought just,
I was liberal and loved, mostly without lust,
What I did I had to do, having no choice.

Along with the first million, I thought Spain
Might save us all; I swear my unready tears
Were hot and angry, independent of my fears
For myself. Yes, honestly, that stain

I did not spill upon my mind; but plead
Guilty on almost every other count;
And also, extenuate, that of the full amount
My failure is not vital.

B. No, but any weed
Spores across a country, so that no crop
Is rich with fruit; the thistle's spike
Protrudes, and excuse it how you like
You and your generation failed to stop.

Its thorny growth. You were too much afraid
Of commitments, thought destiny a joke
A thing of which superannuated playwrights spoke
Who were absolved from your decade.

A. Some of us died. Surely our lives
Were worth something? These gave their youth
For a freedom unconcerned with petty truth.

B. Pilate's last question still survives.

A. We could not claim that we were really gay,
Who saw our future mirrored in a waiting war.
Should we be blamed for shuddering before
A mirage to which we could not even pray?

B. Who spoke of blame? Your tawdry kind
Could not be positive enough to spoil
A virgin. Your fires would never boil
The cauldrons of the witches. Soft spined

You wandered where the wind of fashion blew;
Were desperate with friends, and trivial, trite
In your judgments; for you people, right
Had little concern with what was good or true.

2

Justly death plucked you from the fungoid tree,
Who had no will to grow split far apart
From the quick whim of the majority's heart.

A. You are not gentle who speak of me:
I funked the implication and my wish
Was to slide into the water; to be lost
In the horde of those swimming, at most
To be looked upon as just another fish.

... And yet, can I bear my time's disgrace?

B. If not you, who should shew its Mark?
You claimed that you were standing in the dark,
When all the time I stared you in the face.