I did not answer when you wrote about the Sun etc. book as I could not help being angry and it is very foolish to write angry letters and more than foolish to do so to one's mother. It is quite natural for you not to like the book and I regret your reading any book that causes you pain or disgust.
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Thank you very much for sending me the catalogue of the Marshal Field exhibit with the reproduction of your painting of the Blacksmith Shop in it. It looks very lovely and I should have liked to see the original.
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On the other hand I am in no way ashamed of the book, except in as I may have failed in accurately portraying the people I wrote of, or in making them really come alive to the reader. I am sure the book is unpleasant. But it is not all unpleasant and I am sure is no more unpleasant than the real inner lives of some of our best Oak Park families. You must remember that in such a book all the worst of the people's lives is displayed while at home there is a very lovely side for the public and the sort of thing of which I have had some experience in observing behind closed doors. Besides you, as an artist, know that a writer shouldn't be forced to defend his choice of a subject but should be criticized on how he has treated that subject. The people I wrote of were certainly burned out, hollow and smashed -- and that is the way I have attempted to show them. I am only ashamed of the book in whatever way it fails to really give the people I wished to present. I have a long life to write other books and the subjects will not always be the same -- except as they will all, I hope, be human beings.
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Dear Mother,
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Gstaad, 5 February 1927
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As for Hadley, Bumby and myself -- although Hadley and I have not been living in the same house for some time (we have lived apart since last Sept. and by now Hadley may have divorced me) we are the very best of friends. She and Bumby are both well, healthy and happy and all the profits and royalties of The Sun Also Rises, by my order, are being paid directly to Hadley, both from America and England. The book has gone into, by the last ads I saw in January, 5 printings (15000) copies, and is still going strongly. It is published in England in the spring under the title of Fiesta. Hadley is coming to America in the spring so you can see Bumby on the profits of Sun Also Rises. I am not taking one cent of the royalties, which are already running into several thousand dollars, have been drinking nothing but my usual wine or beer with meals, have been leading a very monastic life and trying to write as well as I am able. We have different ideas about what constitutes good writing -- that is simply a fundamental disagreement -- but you really are deceiving yourself if you allow any Fanny Butchers to tell you that I am pandering to sensation-alism etc. I get letters from Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan etc. asking me for stories, articles, and serials, but am publishing nothing for six months or a year (a few stories sold to Scribner's the end of last year and one funny article out) because I know that now is a very crucial time and that it is much more important for me to write in tranquility, trying to write as well as I can, with no eye on any market, nor any thought of what the stuff will bring, or even if it can ever be published -- than to fall into the money making trap which handles American writers like the corn husking machine handled my noted relative's thumb.
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And if the good ladies of the book study club under the guidance of Miss Fanny Butcher, who is not an intelligent reviewer -- I would have felt very silly had she praised the book -- agree unanimously that I am prostituting a great talent etc. for the lowest ends -- why the good ladies are talking about something of which they know nothing and saying very foolish things.
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I'm sending this letter to both of you because I know you have been worried about me and I am always sorry to cause you worry. But you must not do that -- because, although my life may smashup in different ways, I will always do all that I can for the people I love (I don't write home a lot because I haven't time and because, writing, I find it very hard to write letters and have to restrict correspondence to the letters I have to write -- and my real friends know that I am just as fond of them whether I write or not) that I have never been a drunk nor even a steady drinker (You will hear legends that I am -- they are tacked on everyone that ever wrote about people who drink) and that all I want is tranquility and a chance to write. You may never like anything I write -- and then suddenly you might like something very much. But you must believe that I am sincere in what I write. Dad has been very loyal and while you, mother, have not been loyal at all I absolutely understand that it is because you believed you owed it to yourself to correct me in a path which seemed to you disastrous.
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Ernie
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Anyhow, best love to you both,
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So maybe we can drop that all. I am sure that, in the course of my life, you will find much cause to feel that I have disgraced you if you believe everything you hear. On the other hand with a little shot of loyalty as an anesthetic you may be able to get through all my obvious disreputability and find, in the end, that I have not disgraced you at all.
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