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Dear Dorothy and Eddie:

Thanks for your letters. I expect to be leaving for New York soon and will call you when I arrive.  You can guess that I return with very mixed feelings. There will be much to talk over when I see you. For I am all too aware of the animosities and political power-plays that have been generating for the last two years to destroy my work and its influence in those areas where I frustrate gross ambitions. Thus the milieu proposes competition and combat in a realm which, for me, precludes such elementary reactions, if the values I respect are to be realized. And my contempt for the political machinery and technics which my erstwhile friends and "students" can use so effectively makes my position temporarily quite hopeless. I say "temporarily", because I know in the most profound way that what the work stands for will live infinitely beyond what the little ones can hope to achieve by their vicious journalism, and sterile mockeries in paint or print. This I hold to, for my life's work. If I have any complaint it is that it has proven too potent, too rich a "concept", too effective as a force and a vision. Insomuch as it is conceived as an absolute individual rigour, is born out of the passion of life, and achieves its stature only by the most intense clarification of values and purpose, I hope I can be forgiven some expression of outrage when I see these acts of the spirit used to effect the very patterns which had once to be shattered to make this work possible. 

I am reminded that just a few days ago I was talking to Dick White and Bill Morehouse, two of my several students who let Sweeney use their work for his recent "funeral" in Guggenheim Foundation of Modern Art. They expressed their disgust, as well as reporting that of other's, that Sweeney had chosen work of theirs which least contained their hopes and meanings - works which both felt a bit ashamed of because they were "so academic" and "feeble" and "let them down" in their own eyes. So the dilettante taste makes vitiate even the echo of the force, and in spite of it (or because) gains kudos for morbid compulsions. But, from this, one can still take heart, - just as long as one holds the fire, and can work with clear eyes, and has a friend who can remind him in his times of doubt that it was always thus for men who challenged their time and place.