I had more in common with Ulric than with any of my other friends. For me he represented Europe, its softening, civilizing influence. We would talk by the hour of this other world where art had some relation to life, where you could sit quietly in public watching the passing show and think your own thoughts. Would I ever get there? Would it be too late? How would I live? What language would I speak? When I thought about it realistically it seemed hopeless. Only hardy, adventurous spirits could realize such dreams. Ulric had done it—for a year— by dint of hard sacrifice. For ten years he had done the things he hated to do, in order to make his dream come true. Now the dreams was over and he was back where he had started. Farther back than ever, really, because he would never again be able to adapt, himself to the treadmill. For Ulric it had been a Sabbatical leave: a dream which turns to gall and wormwood as the years roll by. I could never do as Ulric had done. I could never make a sacrifice of that sort, nor could I be content with a mere vacation however long or short it might be. My policy has always been to burn my bridges behind me. My face is always set toward the future. If I make a mistake it is fatal. When I am flung back I fall all the way back—to the very bottom. My one safeguard is my resiliency. So far I have always bounced back. Sometimes the rebound has resembled a slow motion performance, but in the eyes of God speed has no particular significance.
It was in Ulric’s studio not so many months ago that I had finished my first book—the book about the twelve messengers. I used to work in his brother’s room where some short time previously a magazine editor, after reading a few pages of an unfinished story, informed me cold-bloodedly that I hadn’t an ounce of talent, that I didn’t know the first thing about writing—in short that I was a complete flop and the best thing to do, my lad, is to forget it, try to make an honest living. Another nincompoop who had written a highly successful book about Jesus-the-carpenter had told me the same thing. And if rejection slips mean anything there was simple corroboration to support the criticism of these discerning minds. «Who are these shits?» I used to say to Ulric. «Where do they get off to tell me these things? What have they done, except to prove that they know how to make money?»
Well, I was talking about Joey and Tony, my little friends. I was lying in the dark, a little twig floating in the Japanese current. I was getting back to simple abracadabra, the straw that makes bricks, the crude sketch, the temple which must take on flesh and blood and make itself manifest to all the world. I got up and put on a soft light. I felt calm and lucid, like a lotus opening up. No violent pacing back and forth, no tearing the hair out by the roots. I sank slowly into a chair by the table and with a pencil I began to write. I described in simple words how it felt to take my mother’s hand and walk across the sun-lit fields, how it felt to see Joey and Tony rushing towards me with arms open, their faces Learning with joy. I put one brick upon another like an honest brick-layer. Something of a vertical nature was happening—not blades of grass shooting up but something structural, something planned. I didn’t strain myself to finish it; I stopped when I had said all I could. I read it over quietly, what I had written. I was so moved that the tears came to my eyes. It wasn’t something to show an editor: it was something to put away in a drawer, to keep as a reminder of natural processes, as a promise of fulfillment.
Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heart-ache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.
What happened to me in writing about Joey and Tony was tantamount to revelation. It was revealed to me that I could say what I wanted to say—if I thought of nothing else, if I concentrated upon that exclusively—and if I were willing to bear the consequences which a pure act always involves.
2
Two or three days later I met Mara for the first time in broad daylight. I was waiting for her in the Long Island depot over in Brooklyn. It was about six in the afternoon, daylight saving time, which is a strange sun-lit rush hour that enlivens even such a gloomy crypt as the waiting room of the Long Island Railroad. I was standing near the door when I spotted her crossing the car tracks under the elevated line; the sunlight filtered through the hideous structure in shafts of powdered gold. She had on a dotted Swiss dress which made her full figure seem even more opulent; the breeze blew lightly through her glossy black hair, teasing the heavy chalk-white face like spray dashing against a cliff. In that quick lithe stride, so sure, so alert, I sensed the animal breaking through the flesh with flowery grace and fragile beauty. This was her daytime self, a fresh, healthy creature who dressed with utter simplicity, and talked almost like a child.
We had decided to spend the evening at the beach. I was afraid it would be too cool for her in that light dress but she said she never felt the cold. We were so frightfully happy that the words just babbled out of our mouths. We had crowded together in the motorman’s compartment, our faces almost touching and glowing with the fiery rays of the setting sun. How different this ride over the roof-tops from the lonely anxious one that Sunday morning when I set out for her home! Was it possible that in such a short span of time the world could take on such a different hue?
That fiery sun going down in the West—what a symbol of joy and warmth! It fired our hearts, illumined our thoughts, magnetized our souls. Its warmth would last far into the night, would flow back from below the curved horizon in defiance of the night. In this fiery blaze I handed her the manuscript to read. I couldn’t have chosen a more favorable moment or a more favorable critic. It had been conceived in darkness and it was being baptized in light. As I watched her expression I had such a strong feeling of exaltation that I felt as if I had handed her a message from the Creator himself. I didn’t need to know her opinion, I could read it on her face. For years I cherished this souvenir, reviving it in those dark moments when I had broken with every one, walking back and forth in a lonely attic in a foreign city, reading the freshly written pages and struggling to visualize on the faces of all my coming readers this expression of unreserved love and admiration. When people ask me if I have a definite audience in mind when I sit down to write I tell them no, I have no one in mind but, the truth is that I have before me the image of a great crowd, an anonymous crowd, in which perhaps I recognize here and there a friendly face: in that crowd I see accumulating the slow, burning warmth which was once a single image: I see it spread, take fire, rise into a great conflagration. (The only time a writer receives his due reward is when some one comes to him burning with this flame which he fanned in a moment of solitude. Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.)
When one is trying to do something beyond his known powers it is useless to seek the approval of friends. Friends are at their best in moments of defeat—at least that is my experience. Then they either fail you utterly or they surpass themselves. Sorrow is the great link—sorrow and misfortune. But when you are testing your powers, when you are trying to do something new,
