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Vienna, September 7, 1927
Dear Doctor,
To follow up your news that the publishers have not yet answered your question104 concerning the continuation of The Seeker of Souls I shall protest energetically to Storfer105, when I send him the drawings. I can only influence the matter by sympathetic words, the objective situation is known only to him. The drawings caused me a certain embarrassment. I would like to judge them as you do. (The page with the urinating lion seems to be anatomically wrong.) Yet I have repeatedly had the experience that cartoons like these neither give pleasure in themselves nor increase the pleasure in the text. I had it with the illustrations by Benikshank - I believe he is written like this - to Dickens, with the illustrations to the big Balzac edition which I possess, and most recently with the woodcuts for the posthumous edition of Anatole France which I receive from the French group since I turned 70. I would therefore prefer to declare myself quite incompetent.
In the story of the second Seeker of Souls I miss the continuation of a thread which sticks out of the first part: the relations of T. W.106 to his niece. Otherwise I am glad to see your creative vein flowing again, after having got yourself into a position of cancelling all distinctions and into an unsatisfactory monotony with regard to the It mythology. I cannot hide the fact that P. T.107, even though I borrowed something from him, seemed much less sympathetic to me than T. W.
I think you were missed at the congress108. Your warning about overestimating professional medical interests would have