Record of a Friendship

show that I am not one. Also I have been honoured by being chosen
as one of 16 contributors to a memorial book of essays to celebrate
Bernard Shaw's ninetieth birthday. What with your honours too, we are
both becoming far too respectable. Does it mean we are both out-of­
date? I wonder..
Group of young men in London want to start a Sex Econ. journal.
I know two of them, Eastmond and Day. Day has been my maths
teacher and has a very wide craps+ of all your work including the
Orgone side. They want it to be independent of the U.S.A. work. They
are writing to you about it. I see the snags in it although I am all for
their getting to work. I hope you will let them work, for they are keen
and in Day's case very clever. Their journal might exchange articles
with yours.
Note: Mark + above. I meant to write "grasp." I wrote "craps" which
in slang means faeces! I hope the Freudian error doesn't betray my real
opinion of Mr. Day.
I don't quite grasp your fear that no one will bring the coal or sweep
the streets. Why not? Given short hours and good pay in a new
civilisation. I am spending most of the day making gravel paths, heavy
work wheeling barrows and using a pickaxe. I like it, and wouldn't mind
being a navvy every morning if I could do something else afternoons
and nights. No, the problem I can't solve is who is to direct the coal
heavers and post men. The desk blokes? Yet I feel that, given education
such as you and I demand, the Stimmung [mood] among people will do
much to solve all these questions. I feel that today there is a race
between socialism and the atomic bomb; that is the immediate question.
Another problem. You hold that Stalinism is no longer socialism.
Then why is the capitalist world so hostile to Stalinism? Why are so
many diehards openly anticipating the Russo-American war? Why the
fear that Russia is bolshevising central Europe? I don't know the
answers; am just puzzled. I'd hate to live in a Communist state as we
know it, yet I always find that my "feelings" are with Russia against
the Imperialist idea. And, Reich, whether we like it or not Communism
is the next step, and if we and the International Labour Party and the
Anarchists and the Social Democrats don't adapt ourselves we can do
nothing, for we are a small minority. And once Communism is set up
we won't be allowed to differ; we'll be liquidated. Most confusing and
perplexing. Certainly no Communist state would tolerate S'hill and my
work.
We have just celebrated the 25th birthday of S'hill with many old