Record of a Friendship

Forest Hills, New York

December 16, 1946

My dear Neill:

I don't understand why Barakan did not turn up at your place

yet. I heard from Constance that they are building accumulators in

London. It may be that he is very busy with his newly acquired practical

knowledge.

I hear that your baby develops marvellously and that you enjoy her.

Please accept my heartiest and best wishes for Christmas and the New

Year for yourself, your wife and your daughter. One could enjoy it

more that "peace" has returned, if one didn't have the sure feeling that,

due to lack of ability to fill peace with peaceful action, they are running

headlong, unconsciously, against their own will and intention into a new

and this time the highest type of war, atomic war. I am listening some­

times to the UN meetings. It is the deadliest kind of corpsy formalism.

I don't understand it and I am afraid of it. It is not the future of the

world.

Summerhill School

Leiston, Suffolk

My dear Reich,.

. I.

December 20, 1946

Yours today. I have not had a word from Barakan and can
only conjecture that for the moment he has some neurotic grudge against
or indifference to me. Sad, for I wanted to hear all about you from him.
I wrote to Allen and Unwin who are one of the best London firms,
telling them that you were the only original voice since Freud and they
would be fools if they didn't try to publish you. Your books should
come from a good firm of publishers who will sell them.
Your atomic pessimism is like my own. Humanity isn't evolved
enough to have atom bombs, and the stiff-stomached rulers of all
nations will use it and get the Church to tell them they are waging war
for truth. I have no confidence in U.S.A. which is ignorant, superficial
in its education, moral in the wrong way, outside world opinion. The
alternative, a Soviet world, is also unwelcome. How powerless you and
I are. A few military or political idiots can destroy our new children
and we can do nothing.