While you’re left feeling like you’ve been shouting down a well and why in christ’s name didn’t they respond, share back, even interrupt with their own views? . . . They didn’t because they couldn’t. They haven’t any.

The lonely steam-roller.

And subconsciously you’re so used to this, so used to being too fast and too much and seeing more and so forth, that you really don’t take seriously any humble daisies offered to you. Other people have been stupid and wrong for too long.

Your doom is partial comradeship; any group will offer you companionship on only a portion of your perimeter, or heart. And you are going to have to learn to think with your mouth shut in those perilous moments when lesser mortals sidle up with a flower.

Further, you have to recognise that you are not, never, going to be “among your peers,” part of a real “sacred band.” You have to find your peers in this or that facet—as you really do—making a network of part-sharings serve the lonely need for a group of true fellows. It’s the fate of the over-intellectualised even on the barricades. In action you’re a Lenin, but your fate may be more like Trotsky’s.

Now that is all I know about that.

But I should add that crazy egotistical rampantly talkative Joanna is also perfectly sane, kindly, just, luminously compassionate, and I would have no hesitation in exposing my deepest soul-quandaries to you. Please emphasize this paragraph—I was so amused—being, you know, older and having seen geniuses trying to make out in a world of trained poodles—that I went on and on. I know the bull-dozer aspect for what it is, and I don’t for a minute confuse it with the core of you. I ache for you, Jo.

. . . The only real danger of your position is, like I said, that having had to learn to dismiss so much stupidity you get into the automatic habit of rejection.

Which brings up Ursula . . . I do think you reject too much there. You worry her work like a frantic puppy, and some of the pieces flying off the bones are real pieces. Of marrow, if we may carry this metaphor a bit unhappily longer. She’s writing mostly about good and evil and death, you know. Motives which are as yet peripheral in your own writings, your good and evil are incidental to the life, life, life in your stuff. She’s fundamentally an abstract thinker dressed in the characters of fiction—witness OMELAS. And then she had this biological idea—LEFT HAND. She has a few genuine images, dragons and ice-fields and forests and mad kings in drafty scrubby keeps. But her most personal, odd, writerly thing was LATHE OF HEAVEN, where her characters started to run themselves. Truly, Doctor Haber in that is a real, real villain. And the strange upwelling of quietist hope showed up, the thing she tried to do more with in ATLANTIS. In LATHE it’s a rather absurd but lovable salvation-through-aliens, and sea-images.