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we still make forays and dignified campaigns against the body of art. It is funny and a little sad (for the onlooker) and lots of fun (for us). We take our efforts to write with great seriousness, hammering away for two years on a novel and such things. I suppose in this respect we have changed less than any one you knew in Stanford. It is funny too. We have taken the ordinary number of beatings and I don’t think there is much strength in either of us, and still we go on butting our heads against the English Novel and nursing our bruises as though they were the wounds of honorable war. I don’t know one bit more about spelling and punctuation than I ever did, but I think I am learning a little bit about writing. The Morgan atrocity [Cup of Gold] pays enough for me to live quietly and with a good deal of comfort. In that far it was worth selling. I have a novel about finished [one of the versions of To a God Unknown] and Carl has finished two and is about a third through his third. It is an awful lot of work to write a novel. You know that because you have done it. I have been working on the present one nearly a year and have not completed it. The final draft will not be done before April I’m afraid. We don’t do much else nor think much else.
    That’s us. I know no news. Every once in a while I hear a bit of news about somebody I know but when I try to repeat it I find that I have either forgotten it or have mixed it up with something I have heard about some one else. I thought I would be getting to New York this winter, but that seems impossible. I won’t have enough money and in the second place I do not want to move before I have finished this piece of work. There was every excuse for the first being bad, because it was the first I ever did but I lack that excuse now.
    That seems to be all there is about me. It is such a simple life to tell about. Most of our tragedies we have to make up and pretend.
    But do write and tell me about the things which have happened to you.
    Sincerely,
John

To Amasa Miller
    [San Francisco]
[November 1929]
    Dear Ted;
    Your little note came the other day. It came, in fact the day of the big game. Such a game it was. The first half was enough to induce a sort of racial apoplexy in the stands. I think it was the most exciting football game I ever saw.
    Ted, I swear to God that if I ever finish this novel I shall take to writing the tritest kind of plot stories or even true confessions. This is so damned hard. I have never worked so hard in my life and I don’t seem to be getting ahead much. I don’t know when this will be finished. There are about three hundred and twenty-five pages done and about seventy-five to do, and I want to let it rest for a while when I get it finished so that I can stand off and get some perspective on it.
    You said in a former letter that I had some money coming on the first of November and here it is nearly the first of December and none has shown. I am ashamed to go home.
    Carol and I get on as well as always and are together much of the time. Fillmore Street has put red and green and yellow lights on the arches across the street and is very festive. There are mechanical toys in all the store windows. No rain, it is to be another dry year. I can never remember when we did not have a threat of a dry year. The natives cannot remember that this is not a wet country and so about Christmas every year they begin to moan about the dryness of the year and the possible damage to the crops. And the crops never seem to suffer very much, taking, as they do, most of their irrigation from the sea air. It is absurd. Everything is absurd. I wish I weren’t, but I think I am absurder than any of the rest.
    I learn from obscure sources that I have paresis, that I am a woman, a Jew, that I, in the Morgan, have written a book aimed at the Catholics, that I have given up writing and am frantically looking for a job so that I can get married. Many are