Necessary distance: afterthoughts on becoming a writer.

People have a tendency to ask a writer, Why did you become a writer? How did you become a writer? Every writer hears such questions over and over. You ever hear anybody ask a butcher a question like that?

So, what's so special about being a writer? Maybe we are simply fascinated by people who are brave (or foolish) enough to go against - and lucky enough to beat - the odds.

We seem fascinated in the same way by the lives of people in show business, and probably for the sane reasons the lives of writers interest us.

It is also always amazing to see someone making a living doing something he or she actually enjoys.

I never seriously tried to deal with the questions till I was asked to write my life-story. If my autobiography were going to make sense, I thought I'd better try my best to answer both questions.

So, my speaking this way to you is an effort to answer these questions - for myself and possibly for others. I don't expect to succeed - but here goes.

It seems to me that the impulse to write, the need to write, is inseparable from one's educational process - which begins at the beginning and never ends.

In some sort of non-objective way, I can remember being an infant and some of the things I thought about and touched. I had a sister, but my sister didn't have a brother. I had no self because I was all self. Gradually, like any developing kid, I shed my self-centered view of the world: saw myself reflected in my mother's eyes, began to perceive the idea of a self. In a way it was at this point that my research as a writer, and as a painter, began. (For me, the two impulses were always inseparable.) The world was a place of magic, and everything I touched was excruciatingly new. Without knowing it, my career had begun.

In his meditation on the art of fiction, Being and Race, novelist Charles Johnson says, AU art points to others with whom the writer argues about what is. . . . He must have models with which to agree . . . or outright oppose . . . for Nature seems to remain silent. . . ." Reading this passage reminded me of Sherwood Anderson's short story "Death in the Woods," in which the narrator retells the story (we are reading) because his brother, who had told it first, hadn't told it the way it was supposed to be told. In a similar way, that early self of mine had already started its long battle with the history of literature and art.

In the early stages of that battle, some very primary things were going on. By this, I mean to say that a writer is usually a person who has to learn how to keep his ego - like his virginity - and lose it at the same time. In other words, he becomes a kind of twin of himself. He remains that self-centered infant while transcending him to become the observer of his own experience and, by extension, the observer of a wide range of experience within his cultural domain.

Without any rational self-consciousness at all, early on, my imagination was fed by the need to invent things. My older cousins taught me how to make my own toys - trucks, cars, houses, whole cities. We used old skate wheels for tires. Our parents couldn't afford such luxuries as toys - we were lucky if we got new clothes. Watching physical things like the toys we made take shape, I think, showed me some possibilities. (William Carlos Williams said a poem is like a machine. If I understand what he meant, I can see a connection between what I was making at age seven and poems and stories I tried to write later on.)

Plus the newness of everything - trees, plants, the sky - and the need to define everything on my own terms, were givens. At my grandparents' farm, my cousins and I climbed trees and named the trees we climbed. Painfully, I watched my uncle slaughter hogs and learned about death. I watched my grandmother gather eggs from the chicken nests and learned about birth. I watched her make lye soap and the clothes we wore. But I didn't fully trust the world I was watching. It seemed too full of danger, even while I dared to explore it and attempt to imprint the evidence of my presence upon it - by making things such as toys or drawing pictures in the sand.

Daydreaming - as a necessity in the early disposition of a writer - is not a new idea. Whether or not it was necessary in my case, I was a guilty practitioner. I say this because I had an almost mystical attachment to nature. looked at from my parents' point of view, it was not a good sign. I could examine a leaf for hours or spend hours on my knees watching the way ants lived. Behaving like a lazy kid, I followed the flights and landings of birds with spiritual devotion. The frame of mind that put me through these motions was, later, the same frame of mind from which I tried to write a poem or a story: daydreaming, letting it happen, connecting two or three previously unrelated things, making them mean something - together - entirely new. I was hopeless.

And dreams - in dreams I discovered a self going about its business with a mind of its own. I began to watch and to wonder. I was amazed by some of the things I had the nerve to dream about. Sex, for example. Or some wonderful, delicious food! One guilty pleasure after another! This other self often invented these wonderful ways for me to actually get something - even a horse once - that I knew I wanted, something no one seriously wanted to give me.

At times, waking up was the hard part. Dream activity was all invention - maybe even the rootbeds of all the conscious, willful invention I wanted to take charge of in the hard indifference of daylight. Unlike the daydreams I spent so much time giving myself to, these dreams were not under my control. Later, I started trying to write them down, but I discovered that it was impossible to capture their specific texture. They had to stay where they were. But I tried to imitate them, to make up stories that sounded like them. The pattern of these dreams became a model for the imaginative leaps I wanted to make (and couldn't - for a long time!) in my poetry and fiction.

My first novel written at the age of twelve, was twenty pages long. It was the story of a wild, free-spirited horse, leading a herd. Influenced by movies, I thought it would make a terrific movie, so I sent it to Hollywood. A man named William Self read it and sent it back with a letter of encouragement. I never forgot his kindness. It was the beginning of a long, long process of learning to live with rejection - not just rejection slips. And that experience too was necessary as a correlation to the writing process, necessary my because one of the most important things I was going to have to learn was how to detect my own failures and be the first to reject them.

Was there, then, a particular point when I said, Hey! I'm going to become a writer! I think there was, but it now seems irrelevant because I must have been evolving toward that conscious moment long, long before I had any idea what was going on. (I was going to have to find my way - with more imperfection than not - through many disciplines - such as painting, music, anthropology, history, philosophy, psychology, sociology - before such a consciousness would begin to emerge.)

I think I was in the fifth grade when a girl who sat behind me snuck a copy of Raymond Radiguet's Devil in the Flesh to me. This was adult fiction! And judging from the cover, the book was going to have some good parts. But as it turned out, the single good part was the writing itself. I was reading that book one day at home, and about halfway through, I stood up and went crazy with an important discovery: Writing had a life of its own! And I soon fell in love with the life of writing by way of this book - Kay Boyle's translation of Radiguet.

From that moment on, up to about the age of twenty, I set out to discover other books that might change my perception - forever. Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter showed me how gracefully a story could be told and how terrifying human affairs - and self-deception within those affairs - can be. Conrad's Heart of Darkness caught me in an aesthetic network of magic so powerful I never untangled myself. I then went on to read other nineteenth-century - and even earlier - works by Melville, Baudelaire, Emerson, Dostoyevsky, and the like.

But I always hung on - with more comfort - to the twentieth century. I read J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye early enough for it to have spoken profoundly and directly to me about what I was feeling and thinking about the adult world at the time that its agony affirmed my faith in life. Richard Wright's Native Son was an overwhelming experience, and so was Rimbaud's poetry. But the important thing about these discoveries is that each of them led to Cocteau and other French writers, going back to the nineteenth century; Salinger led me to a discovery of modern and contemporary American fiction - Hemingway, Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, and on and on. Wright led to Dos Passos, to James T. Farrell, to Jean Toomer, to Chester Himes, to William Gardner Smith, to Ann Petry, to Nella Larsen and other African-American writers; and Rimbaud led to the discovery of American poetry - which was not so much of a leap as it sounds - to Williams, to Marianne Moore, to Eliot, to cummings. This activity began roughly during the last year of grade school and took on full focused direction in high school. Now, none of these writers was being taught in school. I was reading them on my own. In school we had to read O'Henry and Joyce Kilmer.

But during all this time, it was hard to find books that came alive. I had to go through hundreds before hitting on the special ones, the ones with the power to shape or reshape perception, to deepen vision, to give me the means to understand myself and other things, to drive away fears and doubts. I found the possibilities of wedding the social and political self and the artistic self in the essays of James Baldwin. Autobiographies such as Billie Holiday's Lady Sings the Blues and Mezz Mezzrow's Really the Blues were profound reading experiences: These books, and books like them, taught me that even life, with more pain than one individual had any right to, was still worth spending some time trying to get through - and, like Billie's and Mezz's, with dignity and inventiveness.

Although I was learning to appreciate good writing, I had no command of the language myself. I had the need to write well, but that was about all. Only the most sensitive teacher - and there were two or three along the way - was able to detect some talent and imagination in my efforts. Every time I gathered enough courage to dream of writing seriously, the notion ended in frustration or, sometimes, despair. Not only did I not have command of the language, I didn't have the necessary distance on experience to have anything important to say about even the things I knew something about.

I daydreamed about a solution to these problems: I could learn to write, and I could go out and live it up in order to have experience. But this solution would take time. I was not willing to wait. In my sense of urgency, I didn't have that much time.

Meanwhile, there were a few adults I ventured to show my efforts to. One teacher told me I couldn't possibly have written the story I showed her. It was too good - which meant that it was a hell of lot better than I had thought. But rather than gaining more self-confidence, the experience became grounds for the loss of respect of her intelligence. Among the other adults who saw my early efforts were my mother - who encouraged me as much as her understanding permitted - and a young college-educated man who was a friend of the family's. He told me I was pretty good.

I was growing up in Chicago, and my life therefore had a particular social shape. The realities I was discovering in books didn't - at first - seem to correspond to the reality around me. At the time, I didn't have enough distance to see the connections.

The fact is, the writerly disposition that was then evolving was shaped by my life in Chicago - in the classroom and on the playground - as well as it was being shaped during the times I spent alone, with books, and anywhere else, for that matter. Which is only one way of saying that a writer doesn't make most of his or her own decisions about personal vision or outlook.

Jean Paul Sartre, in What is Literature?, makes the observation that Richard Wright's destiny as a writer was chosen for him by the circumstances of birth and social history. One can go even further and say that it's as difficult to draw the line between where a sensibility is influenced by the world around it and where it is asserting its own presence in that world, as it is to say whether or not essence precedes existence.

To put it another way, the educational process against which my would - be writerly disposition was taking formation was political. Political because I quickly had to learn how to survive - for example, on the playground. It was not easy since I had an instinctive dislike for violence. But the playground was a place where the dramas of life were acted out Radiguet's book (and Jean Paul Rossi's Awakening, too) had - to some extent - dealt with the same territory. As a microcosm of life, it was no doubt one of the first social locations in which I was forced to observe some of the ways people relate - or don't relate - to each other. Among a number of things, I learned how to survive the pecking-order rituals - with my wits rather than my fists. This was an area in which books and art could not save me. But later on, I was going to see how what I had to learn - in self-defense - carried over to the creative effort.

The classroom, too, was not a place where one wanted to let one's guard down for too long. To be liked and singled out by a teacher often meant getting smashed in the mouth or kicked in the stomach on the playground. If one demonstrated intelligence in school one could almost certainly expect to hear about it later, on the way home. It was simply not cool for boys to be smart in class. A smart boy was a sissy and deserved to get his butt kicked.

I had to be very quiet about my plans to become a writer. I couldn't talk with friends about what I read. I mean - why wasn't I out playing basketball?

All of this, in terms of education - or plans to become a writer -, meant that if you wanted to learn anything (or try to write something, for example) you had to do it without flaunting what you were doing. Naturally, some smart but less willful kids gave in, in the interest of survival - they were how to fail in order to live in the safety zone of the majority. And for those of us who didn't want to give in, it was hard to keep how well we were doing a secret because the teacher would tell the class who got the best grades.

I was also facing another crisis. If, for example, I wanted to write, eventually I had to face an even larger problem - publication. I thought that, if I were ever lucky enough to get anything published (say, in a school magazine or newspaper), that would be a success I would have to keep quiet about among most of my friends and certainly around those out to put me in my place. And God forbid that my first published work should be a poem. Only sissies wrote poetry.

But I couldn't go on like that. I remember once breaking down and saying to hell with it. I walked around the school building with a notebook, writing down everything I saw, trying to translate the life around me, minute by minute, into words. I must have filled twenty pages with very boring descriptions. A girl I liked, but didn't have the nerve to talk to, saw me. She thought I was doing homework. When I told her what I was up to, she gave me this strange, big-eyed look, then quickly disappeared - forever - from my life.

I now realize that I must have been a difficult student for teachers to understand. At times I was sort of smart, at other times I left a lot to be desired. One teacher thought I might be retarded, another called me a genius. Not knowing what else to do with me, the administrators - in frustration - appointed me art director of the whole school of 8,000 students, during my last year.

Why art director? Actually, as I implied, my first passion was for painted pictures rather than the realities I discovered in books. Before my first clear memories, I was drawing and painting while the writing started at a time within memory. So, I think it is important (in the context of "how" and "why," where the writing is concerned) to try to understand what this visual experience has meant for me.

About the age of twelve, I started taking private art lessons from a South Side painter, Gus Nall. I even won a few prizes. So, confidence in an ability to express myself visually came first But what I learned from painting I think carried over into the writing from the beginning.

My first articulate passion was for the works of Vincent van Gogh. This passion started with a big show of his work at the Art Institute of Chicago hung in the early fifties. There were about a hundred and fifty pieces.

I pushed my way through the crowded galleries - stunned every step of the way. I kept going back. I was not sophisticated enough to know how to articulate for myself what these things were doing to me, but I knew I was profoundly moved. So - on some level - I no doubt did sense the power of the painterliness of those pictures of winding country paths, working peasants, flower gardens, rooftops, the stillness of a summer day. They really got to me.

Something in me went out to the energy of Vincent's Sunflowers, for example. I saw him as one who broke the rules and transcended. Where I came from, no socially well-behaved person ever went out and gathered sunflowers for a vase in the home. No self-respecting grown man spent ten years painting pictures he could't sell. On the South Side of Chicago everything of value had a price tag.

Vincent, then, was at least one important model for my rebellion. The world I grew up in told me that the only proper goal was to make money and get an education and become a productive member of society and go to church and have a family - pretty much in that order. But I had found my alternative models, and it was too late for my world to get its hooks in me. I wasn't planning to do anything less than the greatest thing I could think of. I wanted to be like van Gogh, like Richard Wright, like Jean Toomer, like Rimbaud, like Bud Powell.

In the meantime, I went home from the van Gogh exhibition and tried to create the same effects from the life around me: I drew my stepfather soaking his feet in a pan of water, my older sister braiding my younger sister's hair, the bleak view of rooftops from my bedroom window, my mother in bed sick, anything that struck me as compositionally viable. In this rather haphazard way, I was learning to see. I suspect there was a certain music and innocence in Vincent's lines and colors that gave me a foundation for my own attempts at representing - first, through drawing and painting, and very soon after, in poetry I was writing. The poems I first tried to write were strongly imagistic in the Symbolist tradition.

I made thousands of sketches of this sort of everyday thing. I was responding to the things of my world. And I had already lived in two or three different worlds: in a Southern city, Atlanta; in a rural country setting; and now in Chicago, an urban, brutal, stark setting. We moved a lot - so much so that my sense of place was always changing. Home was where we happened to be. Given this situation, I think the fact that Vincent felt like an alien in his own land (and was actually an alien in France, and that this sense of being estranged carried over emotionally into his work) found a strong correlating response in me.

If there were disadvantages in being out of step, there were just as many advantages. I was beginning to engage myself passionately in painting and writing and this passion would carry me through a lot of difficulties and disappointments - simply because I had it. I saw many people with no passionate interest in anything. Too many of them perished for lack of a passionate dream long before I thought possible.

At fourteen, this passionate need to create (and apparently the need to share, too) caused me to try to go public - despite the fact that I knew I was doing something eccentric. One of my uncles ran a printing shop. I gathered enough confidence in my poetry to pay him ten dollars to print fifty copies of a little booklet of my own poetry. The poems reflect the influence of Rimbaud, van Gogh, and Impressionism generally - I even used French words I didn't understand.

Once I had the books in hand, I realized that I didn't know more than three people who might be interested in seeing a copy. I gave one to one of my English teachers. I gave my mother three copies. I gave my best poet friend a copy. I may have also given my art teacher Mr. Fouche a copy. The rest of the edition was stored in a closet. They stayed there till by chance, a year or two later, I discovered how bad the poems were and destroyed the remaining copies.

Shortly after the van Gogh exhibition, the Institute sponsored a large showing of the works of Paul Cezanne, whose work I knew a bit from the few pieces in the permanent collection. I went to the exhibition not so much because I was attracted to Cezanne but because it was there - and I felt that I should appreciate Cezanne. At fifteen that was not easy. And the reasons I found it difficult to appreciate Cezanne as much as I thought I should had (I later learned) to do with my inability to understand, at a gut level, what he was about, what his intentions were. Cezanne's figures looked stiff and ill-proportioned. His landscapes, like his still lifes, seemed made of stone or wood or metal. Everything in Cezanne was unbending, lifeless.

I looked at the apples and the oranges on the table and understood their weight and how important the sense of that weight was in understanding Cezanne's intentions. I wanted to say, yes, it's a great accomplishment. But why couldn't I like it? I was not yet sophisticated enough to realize that all great art - to the unsophisticated viewer - at first appears ugly, even repulsive. And I had yet to discover Gertrude Stein in any serious way, to discover her attempts to do with words what Cezanne was doing with lines and color.

It took many years to acquire an appreciation for Cezanne - but doing so, in its way, was as important to my development as a writer as was my passion for van Gogh. But the appreciation started, in its troubled way, with that big show. When I finally saw the working out of the sculpturing of a created reality (to paraphrase James Joyce), I experienced a breakthrough. Cezanne appealed to my rational side. I began going to Cezanne for a knowledge of the inner, mechanical foundation of art, and for an example of a self-conscious exploration of composition. AU of this effort slowly taught me how to see the significant aspects of writing and how they correspond to those in painting. Discovering how perspective corresponded to point of view, for example, was a real high point.

These two painters, van Gogh and Cezanne, were catalysts for me, but other painters were important for similar reasons: Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Bonnard, Cassatt, Munch - for intensely scrutinized private and public moments; Edward Hopper - for his ability to invest a view of a house or the interior of a room with a profound sense of mortality; Mattisse - for his play, his rhythm, his design. I was attracted by the intimacy of subject matter in their work.

I also had very strong responses to Gauguin. He excited and worried me at the same time. At first, I was suspicious of a European seeking purity among dark people. (And I placed D. H. Lawrence in the same category.) Later, I realized Gauguin's story was more complex than that (as was Lawrence's). But more important to me was the fact of Gauguin's work. paintings with flat, blunt areas of vivid colors. Their sumptuousness drew a profoundly romantic response in me. Not only did I try to paint that way for a period, I also thought I saw the possibility of creating simple, flat images with simple sentences or lines.

For a while I was especially attracted to painters who used paint thickly. Turner's seascapes were incredible. Up close they looked abstract. Utrillo's scenes of Paris, Rouault's bumpy people, Albert Ryder's horrible dreams, Kokoschka's profusion of layered effects - these rekindled feelings that had started with van Gogh. (Years later, I came to appreciate Beckman and Schiele for similar reasons.) To paint that way - expressively, and apparently fast - had a certain appeal. It was just a theory but worth playing with: In correlation, it might be possible to make words move with that kind of self-apparent urgency, that kind of reflexive brilliance. The expressionistic writers - Lawrence, Mansfield, Joyce, and others - had done it.

I kept moving from one fascination to another. Later, the opposite approach attracted me. The lightness of Picasso's touch was as remarkable as a pelican in flight If I could make a painting or poem move like that - like the naturalness of walking or sleeping - I would be lucky.

I was easily seduced. I got lost in the dreams of Chagall, in the summer laziness of Monet, in the waves of Winslow Homer, in the blood and passion of Orozco, in the bright, simple designs of Rivera, in the fury of Jackson Pollock, in the struggle of de Kooning in the selflessness of Vermeer, in the light and shadow of Rembrandt, in the plushness of Rubens, in the fantastic mystery of Bosch in the power of Michelangelo and Tintoretto, in the incredible sensitivity and intelligence of Leonardo da Vinci in the earthly dramas of Daumier and Millet (Later on, when I discovered African-American art, I got equally caught up in the works of Jacob Lawrence, Archibald Motley, Henry Tanner, Edward Bannister, and others. I was troubled from the beginning at the absence of African-American painters, novelists, poets, generally, I might turn to as models. I was seventeen before - on my own - I discovered the reason they were absent. The system had hidden them. It was that simple. They had existed since the beginning but were, for well-known reasons, made officially nonexistent.)

Although this learning process was a slow and very long one, and I wasn't always conscious of even the things I successfully managed to transfer into my own painting and writing I can now look back and realize that I must always have been more fascinated with technique - in painting and in writing - than I was by subject matter. The subject of a novel or a painting seemed irrelevant. a nude, a beach scene, a stand of trees, a story of an army officer and a seventeen-year-old girl in a foreign country, a lyrical view of a horrible accident. It didn't matter! What did matter was how the painter or storyteller or poet had seduced me into the story, into the picture, into the poem.

I also felt the need to submerge myself in the intellectual excitement of an artistic community - but I couldn't find one. just about every writer I'd ever heard of seemed to have had such nourishment: Hemingway in Paris among the other expatriates.... But I was not in touch with any sort of exciting literary or artistic life (outside of visits to the Institute) on the South Side. True, I had met a couple of writers - Willard Motley and Frank London Brown - and a few painters - Gus Nall, Archibald Motley, and a couple of others - but I felt pretty isolated. Plus these people were a lot older and didn't seem to have much time to spare. So, I had clumsily started my own little magazine - a thing called Coercion Review. It became my substitute for an artistic community and, as such, a means of connecting (across the country and even across the ocean) with a larger, cultural world-especially with other writers and poets.

I published the works of writers I corresponded with, and they published mine; and in a way this became our way of workshopping - as my students say - our manuscripts. When we found something acceptable, it meant - or so we thought - that the particular piece had succeeded. We were wrong more often than not. It was an expensive way to learn what not to publish (and how to live with what couldn't be unpublished).

Seeing my work in print increased my awareness of the many problems I still faced in my writing at, say, the age of eighteen. I wrote to William Carlos Williams for help. I wrote to Langston Hughes. They were generous. (In fact, Williams not only criticized the poetry but told me of his feelings of despair as a poet.)

Rushing into print was teaching me that I not only needed distance on approach (the selection of point of view, for example) and subject matter before starting a work, but I needed also to slow down, to let a manuscript wait, to see if it could stand up under my own developing ability to edit during future readings, when my head would be clear of manuscript birth fumes. As a result, my awareness of what I was doing - of its aesthetic value - increased. I became more selective about what I sent out.

During all this time, I was also listening to music. Critics of African-American writing often find reason to compare black writing to black music. Each of my novels, at one time or another, has been compared to either Blues songs or jazz compositions. I've never doubted that critics had a right to do this. But what was I to make of the fact that I had also grown up with Tin Pan Alley, Bluegrass, and European classical music? I loved Chopin and Beethoven.

Something was wrong. It seemed to me that Jack Kerouac, for example, had gotten as many jazz motifs into his work as had, say, James Baldwin. At a certain point, when I noticed that critics were beginning to see rhythms of music as a basis for my lines or sentences - to say nothing of content - I backed up and took a closer look. I had to argue - at least with myself - that all of the music I'd loved while growing up found its aesthetic way into my writing - or none of it did.

True, I had been overwhelmingly caught up in the Be-bop music of Bud Powell when I was a kid - I loved "Un Poco Loco," thought it was the most inventive piece of music I had ever heard, loved all of his original compositions ("Hallucinations," "I Remember Clifford," "Oblivion," "Glass Enclosure," and on and on - and, as I said before, I swore by the example of his devotion to his art).

But I soon moved on out, in a natural way, from Powell into an appreciation of the progressive music of other innovators - such as Thelonius Monk, Lester Young, Sonny Stitt, John Coltrane, Clifford Brown, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Dexter Gordon, and Ornette Coleman - and, at the same time, I was discovering Jimmy Rushing Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Joe Turner, Dinah Washington - singers of my father's generation and before.

My feeling, on this score, is that African-American music generally (along with other types of music I grew up hearing) had a pervasive cultural importance for me. I think I need to take this assumption into consideration in trying to trace in myself the shape of what I hope has become some sort of sensitivity not only to music but also to poetry, fiction, paintaing and the other arts - film photography, dance.

I've already mentioned the importance of other disciplines - anthropology, history, philosophy, psychology, sociology - in an attempt to lay some sort of intellectual foundation from which to write. Without going through the long, hopelessly confusing tangle of my own confusion and profoundly troubled questing I think I can sum up what I came away with (as it relates to themes I chose or the themes that chose me) in pretty simple terms.

I remember my excitement when I began to understand cultural patterns. Understanding the nature of kinship - family, clan, tribe - gave me insight into relationships in the context of my own family, community, country. I was also fascinated to discover, while reading about tribal people, something called a caste system. I immediately realized that I had grown up in communities, both in the South and the North, where one kind of caste system or another was practiced. For one to be extremely dark or extremely light often meant that one was penalized by the community, for example.

Totem practices also fascinated me because I was able to turn from the books and see examples in everyday life: There were people who wore good-luck charms and fetishes, such as rabbits' feet on keychains. I became aware, in deeper ways, of the significance of ritual and ceremony - and how to recognize examples when I saw them. It was a breakthrough for me to begin to understand how cultures - my own included - rationalized their own behavior.

The formation of myths - stories designed to explain why things were as they were - was of deep interest to me. Myths, I discovered, governed the behavior and customs I saw every day - customs concerning matters of birth, death, parents, grandparents, marriage, grief, luck, dances, husband-and-wife relationships, siblings, revenge, joking adopting sexual relations, murder, fights, food, toilet training, game playing. You name it.

Reading Freud (and other specialists of the mind) I thought would help me understand better how to make characters more convincing. At the same time I hoped to get a better insight into myself - which in the long run would also improve my writing. I read Freud's little study of Leonardo da Vinci. I was interested also in gaining a better understanding of the nature of creativity itself.

But even more than that, I was interested in the religious experience psychologists wrote about. I consciously sought ways to understand religious ft" and faith in rational terms. I was beginning to think how, as too much nationalism tends to lead to fascism, too much blind religion could be bad for one's mental health. To me, the human mind and the human heart began to look like very, very dangerously nebulous things. But at the same time, I kept on trying to accept the world and its institutions at face value, to understand them on their own terms. After all, who was I to come along and seriously question everything? The degree to which I did question was more from innocence than from arrogance.

I was actually optimistic because I thought knowledge might lead me somewhere refreshing might relieve the burden of ignorance. If I could only understand schizophrenia or hysteria, mass brainwashing and charisma, paganism, asceticism, brotherly love.... Why did some individuals feel called to preach and others feel overwhelmed with galloping demons? What was the function of dreaming? I skimmed the Kinsey reports and considered monastic life. I read Alan Watts and was a Buddhist for exactly one week.

I liked the gentle way Reich criticized Freud and, in the process, chiseled out his own psychoanalytical principles. If I ever thought psychoanalysis could help me personally, as not mad enough to think we could afford it. I did notice, though, how writers of fiction and poets too, from around the turn of the century on, were using the principles of psychoanalysis as a tool for exploring behavior in fiction and poetry. So I gave it a shot. But the real challenge, I soon learned, was to find a way to absorb some of this stuff and at the same time to keep the the of it out of my own writing.

Yet I kept hoping for some better - more suitable - approach to human experience. If a better one existed, I ha no idea. But there wasn't much to hold on to in psychoanalysis or psychology, and even less in sociology - where I soon discovered that statistics could be made to prove anything the researcher wanted to prove. If the very presence of the researcher were itself a contamination, what hope was there for this thing everybody called objectivity?

While I was able to make these connections between theory and reality, I was still seeking answers to questions I had asked since the beginning - Who and what am I? Questions we discover later in life are not so important. Everywhere I turned - to philosophy, to psychology - I was turned back upon myself and left with more questions than I'd had at the start.

Growing up in America when I did, while aiming to be a writer, was a disturbing experience. (Every generation is sure it is more disturbed than the previous one and less lucky dun the forthcoming one.) This troublesome feeling was real though; it wasn't just growing pains. There was something else, and I knew it. And I finally found part of the explanation. My mm of myself was hampered by my country's sense of itself. My country held an idealistic image of itself that was, in many aspects of its life, vastly different from its actual, unvarnished self. Examples: There were severe poverty, ignorance, disease, corruption, racism, sexism, and there was war - all-too-often undeclared.

But I, as a writer, could not afford the luxury of a vision of my own experience as sentimental as the one suggested by my country (of itself, of me). As I grew up, I was trying to learn how to see through the superficial and to touch, in my writing the essence of experience - in all of its possible wonderment, agony, or glory.

Despite the impossibility of complete success, I continue.

I want to be as forthright as possible with these after thoughts because I know that afterthoughts can never truly recapture the moments they try to touch back upon. Each moment, it seems to me, in which a thought occurs has more to do with that moment itself than with anything in the past. This, to my way of thinking, turns out to be more positive than negative, because it supports the continuous nature of life - and that of art, too. The creative memory, given expression, is no enemy of the past, nor does its self-focus diminish its authority.