well, the booklet had some good poems in a kind of blaring hard-stone sense that is really closer to feeling than the perfumed hanky drillwork of OUR contemporaries; but I remember your bedroom and you asleep in there like a sick frog, and pictures of Hem on your walls, pictures of Hem and maybe Faulk and so forth, well, this is better for a kid than Henry Ford and almost as good as ice hockey but look someday the pictures have to come down, the walls will have to be as bare as say the ass of your own reflections getting pinched by the light, and paeans to a minor poet c.b. must stop. It is pretty hard, as you must guess, not to die before the last Supper of your 30th. birthday in our American Society, and then you are never safe, you can go at any time like any Mailer or Jones, although I do not know their ages nor am I interested. The novel nowadays has become the guillotine. You can last longer growing inside and around the poem although it isn’t any news that you won’t make any money but you’ll live longer even if you sell papers on the corner than you will hustling The Book of the Month Club. This is stale advice from an old man to a young man, and much of the bad breath of old age is that the old tend to tell the young where the sun comes up. I think maybe it is time for the old to listen to the young but since I am at this moment handing it out, I will continue to slough it. Don’t ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out. You will know when this happens; it has not yet happened to me but it can happen to you. If you ever feel like pressing, get drunk or draw something on a piece of paper or a piece of ass. There are plenty of doors to go out of that breaks the place of yourself up but if there’s enough left when you get back maybe you got a hustle going. [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

October 1, 1963