I kind of had the feeling all along that I should tackle Benny, but I always had the feeling too that he was too big a coconut for this squirrel to handle. He probably is. But I don’t see any other squirrels around.

There will be some danger of course, but not more than there always is in doing something worth doing…

If Comrade Andrew Anderson ever tells funny stories I wonder if he is so rigid a zealot that he never tells one story that fails to have incorporated in it the theory of surplus value and the class struggle.

Someone should do a study of Ez’s mountains and hills. Like Joyce’s rivers, they bring things into a webwork of meaning. They come from the Bible (“cities on hills”), from Mediterranean myths (Olympos), from the East, and from the USA, California to New Hampshire.

I must write Harry Sylvester and tell him I am now a public enemy myself. I am referring to the clerical forces now allied against me on account of Father Burner. I suppose it’s a healthy sign. Joyce had the same trouble in Dublin with his stories.

The last few weeks here have been filled with peculiar adventures, all involving John Huston and Humphrey Bogart, who’ve nearly killed me with their dissipations…half-drunk all day and dead-drunk all night, and once, believe it or not, I came to around six in the morning to find King Farouk doing the hula-hula in the middle of Bogart’s bedroom.

This Spanish opera interpreted by a Negro cast as Spanish saints is too divine, both gay and devout and altogether lovely.

I had to sock him down in a poem to stop him from nibbling the eternal edge of my guts.

At times I despair. I see that I’m not fit for anything. They are things from 1921. From 1921, when I was a child. Perhaps someday I will be able to express the extraordinary real drawings that I dream. Now I have a long way to go. I’m far away.