Somewhere near Villeneuve de Berg in the Ardèche is a hill I visited a number of times when I lived briefly in that region ten years ago. Not a knell or a cobble, but a good-sized hill, part of the system of foothills leading northwestward to the Massif Central. I don't remember its name.

At the base of the hill was a scattering of homes, the farthest fringe of the village, some of them old farmhouses, others more recently built. Gardens, cars, children's toys; the usual pleasant clutter. Farther up the slope were terraced orchards, mostly of polled mulberry trees, gnarled and ancient, with overgrown scrub oak, vines, and tall grasses; a grazing place for goats. A small broken-down magnanerie in a gully was evidence of the silk culture that had helped sustain the upland country of the Midi in the time before synthesized fabrics. The whole hill was strewn with jagged boulders of limestone, glacial detritus. Small hand-lettered wooden signs, the letters carved or charred, marked the boundaries of truffle-hunting grounds to which local people hold hereditary rights, not necessarily coinciding with other property lines.

At the top was a ruined village from the eighteenth century and earlier. Lines of sprawling, pale, angular stones marked the walls of buildings whose timbered parts had long since rotted away; longer lines marked a principal street and two or three secondary ones. There were larger rectangles too, which I took to be pens and corrals. It must have been a village inhabited by shepherds, perhaps only in summer.

Elsewhere indications of a still earlier culture remained. Toward its far end the village dispersed completely into rubble, reminding me of Old Oraibe and other ancient pueblos of the found fields of stone so dense that hardly any vegetation grew there, nothing but a few stunted junipers and oaks. At one place archaeologists had cleared the site of an Aurignacian dolmen, an impressive structure of huge flattish stones, three to form the walls and a fourth, still larger, laid over the top for a roof, what the French call une table. I believe the site of a menhir was also on that hill, though I may be confusing it with another I saw; menhirs, the upright columns we associate with Stonehenge, are less common than dolmens in southern France. When I walked farther, stepping from stone to stone--in this I had a certain skill from walking in my brook in Vermont--I found another dolmen, partly fallen, its site uncleared, and also the entrance to a cave, a black opening, two or three feet wide, down into the earth, so ringed by white, jagged stones that it could he called toothy. I nearly fell into it, but made no attempt to descend, being not partial to caves. Was it a big cave? Did it have paintings on its walls? Almost certainly not. The hole showed no sign of activity. My knowledge of archaeology and geology was--and is--slight. Did the Stone Age people live on top of that hill? At any rate they did something up there; no mistake about that. Then there were the moon-faces, as I called them, which I saw many times in that region, perfectly round, carved in half-relief on lintels, end-stones, herms, etc. I could learn nothing about them from the local people, but I presumed they were originally Celtic and late neolithic, a culture which in those hills might have lasted well into Roman times. Surrounded by all that history I felt my ignorance keenly. "Go read some books," I told myself.

But ruins were everywhere in that poor, devastated region. The village I lived in, Lagorce, was 80 per cent destroyed. All that remained of the old chateau were a few broken walls, a half-buried room, and signs of a moat. Many houses in the village were only broken walls. Most of the inhabitants were old people, or outsiders like myself.

Well, in a desultory way I did read a few books, mostly about the history and language of Occitania, but I am not a scholar. My curiosity is not the kind that can be satisfied by objective knowledge. Plato said that opinion is worthless and that only knowledge counts, which is a neat formulation, attractive to Mediterranean temperaments, including Yeats's (e.g., in "A Prayer for My Daughter"). But melancholy Danes from the northern mists understand that opinion is all there is. The great questions transcend fact, and discourse is a process of personality. Knowledge cannot respond to knowledge. And wisdom? Is it not opinion refined, opinion killed and resuscitated upward? Maybe Plato would have agreed with this.

I liked to sit in a particular spot at the top of that hill near Villeneuve de Berg, on a wall of the ruined village, looking out toward the terraced slopes of other hills in the distance. Over my shoulder I could see the dolmen in its mute significance, could almost see the ancient folk struggling to raise and move those stones weighing many tons. All about me lay the silent remains of a village that had once, to judge by the number and complexity of its walls, been a bustling community. Both inside and outside the village were shallow diggings, evidence that hunters of wild truffles were still at work, though surely theirs is a dying trade. Down below was the silk culture, already quite dead. A few miles farther into the Massif I had seen beautiful chestnut orchards and the villages, now poor as dirt, of the people who in past centuries had invented scores of ways to use the hulls, shells, and meats of le marron and had lived on their inventions. A few miles away in Largentière I could still overhear women gossiping in lo lenga doc in the churchyard of what had been an Albigensian cathedral. Thousands upon thousands of ghosts whispered in the air around me; many layers and levels of culture. Even the living were assimilated, a sound of hammering and radio music from the foot of the hill, a jet overhead signing the blue sky with its contrail. The earth itself, the stony wreckage and rickety vegetation, was as clear in its significance as any slaughtering ground. Every natural thing is transitory and contained in its own nonexistence. Every species, the human as well as the rest, is extinct. Why? What for?

I was reminded of the time many years earlier when my family had spent part of each summer at the place of a close friend in the remote countryside of Dutchess County in New York. This was in the twenties and early thirties. The town, named Dover Furnace after the old stone smelteries still to be seen there, which were said to have furnished iron for Revolutionary cannon, at that time had a railway station, store, and post office, now disappeared. Electric power was unavailable, so our friend had built a sizable dam, twenty-five feet high, across a stream on his property and had installed his own generator and transmission lines. I was a boy of eight or nine. The spot where I liked to sit then was on top of that dam between two spillways which controlled the flow of water and the level of the millpond; in other words I liked the roar of water in my ears, which effectively shut me off from the rest of the universe. It was a point of stillness, so to speak, in the immensity of action. The blade of grass being twitched by the current on the bank of the stream below me, the oriole flying across my field of vision to its nest in an elm a hundred feet beyond, were motions seeming vastly distant as I sat in the roar of eternity on either side. I was truly isolated. And what I thought about was: Why? What for!

The purposelessness of it all, of existence as such, had struck me at so early an age that I have no idea when it happened or how. Perhaps it came from a conjunction of my father's atheism and my mother's conventional Episcopalian faith. (I went to Sunday school because the other kids did. It seemed to me a strange place.) Or perhaps it came from some early, repressed encounter with personal death. More likely it was the result of many causes, too lost and intricate to be known. But I had always been aware that the Universe is sad; everything in it, animate or inanimate, the wild creatures, the stones, the stars, was enveloped in the great sadness, pervaded by it. Existence had no use. It was without end or reason. The most beautiful things in it, a flower or a song, as well as the most compelling, a desire or a thought, were pointless. So great a sorrow. And I knew that the only rest from my anxiety--for I had been trembling even in infancy--lay in acknowledging and absorbing this sadness, as I did when I sat on top of the dam, a boy at the deafening instant between the future and the past.

Never then or now have I been able to look at a cloudless sky at night and see beauty there. A kind of grandeur, yes--but not beauty. The profusion and variety of celestial lights have always frightened me. Why are they there? Why these instead of others? Why these instead of nothing? And no received faith or reason has ever helped me one iota in answering.

What is the difference between a "natural object" and a "man-made object?" None. In ultimate terms--and I've never been able to think otherwise than ultimately; no wonder my scholarship is paltry--all things in reality are part of reality, and hence are equal; they all plunge equally into transitoriness and nonexistence. The only meaning, such as men and women pretend to find in mathematical or poetic statements, is the meaning of obliteration. The only absolute value is value itself inverted, turned inside out--the void. And long before I came intellectually to the realization that the notion of relative value implies inescapably a hierarchical structure, which thus tends toward illegitimate triadism, dualism, monism--and it wasn't easy to give up my pragmatic Yankee view, my agreeable fondness for Mr. Peirce and W. James--I knew that everything is equivalent, every pebble and masterpiece, every atom and thought of love: they are precisely the same in value. The idea of value is an invention. At its best a sick joke, and at its worst an inexpressible sorrow. Many times in the past twenty-five years I have been called a "nature poet." I'm grateful to anyone who takes the trouble to read something I have written, of course, but wish to say also, quietly but insistently, that if I am a nature poet, then the understanding of nature which I have suggested here is fundamental to my work; it is, literally, the foundation. I think it can be seen in most of my poems, except that readers are predisposed to overlook it. Naturally, like most people, I am prone to changes of mood; at any given time (but aren't they all "given") my cheerfulness in the face of existence may be more or, usually, less than at other times. But at all times my perception of what exists, the whole or a part, is of the absence of intelligence, except for the weak, insipid, tedious, petulant, and inadequate intelligence of human beings. But to say this merely on my own behalf would not be enough to justify writing it here. I believe I speak for a good many others. Elsewhere I have explained my aversion to the lovelessness, arrogance, and egomania of Henry D. Thoreau in his book called Walden. I won't recapitulate the argument here. But it is worth noting that many readers, though five women for every man, have told me that they understand my view and share it. They see the connection between Thoreau's so-called Transcendentalism, i.e., his flight from reality, and the violence and irresponsibility of the American frontier, which are now in a fair way to becoming the national way of life. My view is not extreme; on the contrary it is a middle ground between Thoreau's expropriative, solipsistic vision of nature and the systematic disdain we find, for instance, in the work of a European like Jean-Paul Sartre. Yet Americans have been so brainwashed by continual subjection to Walden that my moderative tendencies seem actually out of line. It isn't that when you pick up the book review section of the Sunday New York Times you will find that easily half the reviews emit a Waldenesque smell; it is rather that a great number of those who are reading the reviews will, once they put down the paper, go out on Sunday birdwalks with all of Walden's snobbery and righteousness and sentimentalism crammed in their heads. I believe no other book in English has been more widely read by the American middle class, by millions and millions of comparatively well-heeled and powerful people. It is a touchstone even for those who work with nature-scientists, forestry professors, veterinarians, state fish and game administrators, and so on. The one class of country people who have not read it is the farmers and farm workers, though they too have been affected by it from a distance and derivatively. Everyone had been affected--and infected. We need a national antitoxin.

That's what a small band of us is trying to provide. We are profoundly attached to nature, our lives are dominated by it and we write about it, we write about flowers, birds, the differing intensities of color in autumn, the venation of a locust's wing, about the greatest manifestations and the least (which are, in fact equivalencies), but we do so clear-sightedly. To the mass of the literati we say: Have the kindness to understand what we are trying to do, what we are actually writing, before you make pronouncements about it. (The "favorable" pronouncements are often as silly as their opposites.) Cling to your Thoreauvian TV if you must, to Walt Disney and John Wayne--those twins!--to the National Geographic and "Miami Vice." But please refrain from criticizing us in ignorance. Our number is small, but it is growing, and we have young, vigorous leaders, people like Audre Lorde, George Dennison, John Ashbury, Grace Paley, Cid Corman, June Jordan, Leo Connellan, Ray Carver, Edward Hoagland, and others, as well as some though not all of the essayists who write about specific matters of environmental understanding in the pop magazines, people as diverse in style and temperament as any you could choose, but they are clear-sighted. They know what the earth is and what it means. If we are to find a way to proceed beyond the violence that is crippling us now in every sphere, beyond the egomaniacal sentimentality that cripples us just as much, the main intention of these people and others like them must prevail.

***

A number of women of my generation or earlier have told me that they were knowledgeable about the facts of sex and reproduction when they were children--five or six years old, say--but that they then repressed this knowledge so completely that later, when they were adolescent and necessity required them to rediscover these facts, they suffered an emotional trauma. This was an aspect of the general difficulty women have always had, but especially during the Victorian age, as it is called, and the time while the influence of that age continued in American civilization--as in some respects it continues even now--an aspect, but only one, of the difficulty women experienced in growing up in a sexist society. Probably in our so-called open society today most young girls are spared this kind of repression and trauma. Which is an important topic, but not what I want to write about here. Instead I want to say that I understand clearly how such strange repression and trauma can occur, though most young people today would find it unimaginable, because I experienced the same things with respect to my knowledge of personal death. When does a child become aware of personal death? Some psychiatrists argue that for infants the experience of birth itself may be an experience of death, of the destruction of reality, which I have no trouble accepting. At the very least it must be an experience of radical vulnerability. But it occurs so early that we cannot consciously remember it happening; we think we were born with it. Thus I can't tell when my knowledge of personal death first came to me, but I do know from certain corroborative thoughts and images that if I did not have it "always," I had it well before the age of three, when my family moved from Waterbury to Woodbury in Connecticut. I know further that it was associated with the person of my father, the stranger who waited for me outside the womb. What I cannot know--one of the billions of things--is how long it took me to move from my virtually instantaneous knowledge of my own death to the inference that he, the stranger, would also die, and would die before me.

All our lives we are the accomplices of Time, our mortal enemy. It is the treason against ourselves that we cannot resist.

Though they are there in my mind, these memories are shadowy. The fact of repression is not. Of course I don't mean I completely repressed the facts of life and death, which would be impossible. But their urgency, their immediate and felt relationship to my personal existence, their enormous capacity to frighten me--these were "forgotten." And my parents did everything they could to abet this. One of the events of my childhood that now seems perhaps the most extraordinary of all was when I was told of my grandmother's--my father's mother's-death. This was when I was eight or nine years old. I had known her well. Although she and my grandfather lived more than fifty miles away--a real journey in the twenties; by car, when we were lucky enough to have the use of one, it took three or four hours, and by train more than that and a considerable wait to make a connection at Brewster--I saw them often on holidays and in the summer. I knew my grandmother as a kindly old lady with gray hair who wore shapeless dresses and black, lace-up shoes, a woman who was recessive in her household, did not talk much, spent her time baking pies and frying doughnuts, but who was friendly and welcoming and imaginative in her relationships with children. She paid attention to me. She told me stories and thought of things for me to do. When I was told of her death, I grieved. But not deeply nor long, because my grief was dispelled almost immediately by a sense of mystery operating on many levels.

I was told of her death not only after she died but after her funeral and burial. Yet she had died in our house. She had lived in our house for some time before her death, I don't remember how long, perhaps a couple of months, bedridden with cancer, cared for by my mother and father and hired nurses. Our house was not a mansion by any means; it was a poor man's house with seven small rooms. Yet I never saw my grandmother in her final illness, I was not permitted to go into her room. I was unaware of her death, I was unaware of the removal of her body, I had never even heard any suspicious noises, and the whole episode was kept from me until after her funeral by what must have been an almost inconceivably elaborate subterfuge, in which my grandmother herself, in her final suffering, must have concurred.

That was Victorianism. Death was taboo in our house. So was sex. These topics were never mentioned. I don't mean that they were casually omitted in a mutually acknowledged understanding, such as one can find in many homes today; probably in almost any home some topic--the father's birthmark, the mother's addiction to soap operas--will be unmentionable. But in our home death and sex were so systematically ignored that they could not exist. Our mutually acknowledged understanding was that if either of these topics were spoken of, some great catastrophe would ensue, reality would be shattered. When I was much older, in my mid-thirties, living for a few years with my parents because I was acutely ill and had nowhere else to go, the three of us were playing Scrabble one night--a game I soon despised--and I made the word venery. "What does that mean?" my mother asked. I had uttered only the first fragment of a speech-sound in response when my father, blushing beet red, broke in, "It means the art of hunting deer." Later I looked it up in the unabridged dictionary, and by God he was right--as he was so often when it came to questions of language: I had plenty of occasion to marvel at his vocabulary. The "art of hunting deer" is a secondary meaning. But here was my mother, a woman in her fifties who had been married for years and had borne three children, yet who, in America and in the fifties, could not be "subjected" to a largely archaic and in a sense technical, respectable term that in its primary meaning signifies fucking or sexual lust in general. (Etymologically they are two separate words, both spelled venery.) This is the degree of repression my father suffered from all his life, which he imposed on the rest of his family. What it meant was a peculiar shallowness in the quality of family experience, which I think was common in lower middle-class English homes during the Victorian and Edwardian periods, and in American homes that imitated them, resulting in all kinds of trivial and disguised and absurdly unnatural behavior.

Children were "Brownies," who lived forever. Sprites and fairies inhabited the woods. Santa Claus was the intimate friend not only of small children but of adults. The extent of such fancies is nearly unbelievable now. I had to pretend a belief in Santa Claus long beyond the time when I had been disillusioned, even until I was twelve or thirteen years old; in fact we never came to an open agreement that Father Christmas was a fantasy. The adult family was almost as deeply trapped in what my father might have called--if he had known the jargon of criticism--"necessary fictions" as the family of children had been.

All this was accomplished without resort to a religious base. My father had seen angels, but he was a proclaimed atheist. My mother's efforts to give me and my younger brothers at least some grounding in low-church Episcopalianism were smothered by my father's radical rationalism. Of course I did not discover until long afterward that this combination of rationalism and materialism with fantasized spirituality was deeply rooted in English Romanticism and post-Romanticism, from Shelley to Morris to Swinburne and that my father, past the middle of the twentieth century, was still living in a watered-down pre-Raphaelite, Blakean (as in Songs of Innocence--his favorite poem was the first one in that book), Yellow-Bookish era. A spiritual element existed in our life, but it had no footing in the real cultural and historical place of the family, and hence was perceived by the children as tenuous and even anomalous.

Two books that were imposed on me when I was a child were Alice in Wonderland and Charles Kingsley's Water Babies. I loathed both of them. I knew this at the time and did everything I could not to be affected by them, even to the extent of hiding the books. (Destruction would have been unthinkable.) But only much later did I come to see that my loathing was a consequence of stifled fear, a profound mortal terror. To this day I cannot take pleasure in fantasy and have resisted such authors as Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.

As for the trauma, the necessary rediscovery, it came later in my adolescence than I would now have expected, and I don't know how to account for that. I was a freshman in college, seventeen years old. Perhaps this is substantiating evidence of the degree of repression I had undergone. I was a student at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. I was living in a boarding house on the western edge of town, a large house with a pillared verandah next to a big magnolia tree, but it was a shabby house that badly needed painting and repair. This was in the depth of the Great Depression. The landlord was a peddler of cheap jewelry, a sharp dresser with a battered sample case who went from door to door in little towns, from farm to farm in the country. I remember once or twice when he sat with us, the students, in the evening, brushing his thinning hair with a silver-backed military hairbrush and telling us how this benefited the scalp and stimulated the growth of new hair. His wife was a drab woman. She was thin and had straight black hair that fell untidily around her face, which looked ravaged by work and anxiety; she wore old dresses and sweaters with holes in their elbows. They lived in the back of the house, I think in what had originally been the servants' quarters, and I slept in a small room, not much more than a closet, where I could hear them through the wall. One night she asked him if they could make love. I can't remember what I remember is her whispering, which nevertheless expressed urgency. Her gist was clear enough. ‘No," he said, "I don't want to, I'm too tired." From fucking all those farm women, I thought, after you've sold them pieces of trash for more money than they ought to spend. And then immediately I thought: I am going to die. Not casually, I'm gonna die someday like everyone else; but rather, I, this self, this focus of identity, all I have, all I am right now--this will be annihilated, I will become extinct. In my bed I bolted upright; my eyes smarted, my heart thundered, my breath was labored as if my own throat were strangling me. Plenty of times before I had been afraid, and as I know now all my life from an early age had been governed by hidden anxiety, but this was different. It was terror and panic. I made no sound, I did nothing but lie down again in the bed and pull the covers over me, but I was out of control. I did not sleep that night. And to tell the truth, during most of the thousands of nights since then I haven't slept much either.

Why this happened on that particular night is not hard to understand.

***

Woodbury the town in Connecticut where I lived from age three to thirteen, stretched for several miles along its Main Street, which was--and still is--the old U.S. Route 6 that joins Provincetown, Massachusetts, to the west coast. In the twenties it was a big highway; I thought living next to it was rather significant, though I couldn't have said of what. From our steps that led down the bank to the road, my friend Ralph and I watched the passing cars for hours, dozens and scores of different makes, which we could identify and upon whose qualities we held complex opinions: Dusenbergs, Stutzes, Pierce Arrows, Franklins (air-cooled cars with funny-looking hoods), Studebakers, Dodges, and so on, down to the lowly Model Ts that we called Tin Lizzies--when one went by we routinely hollered, "Get a horse!" Fairly often we saw cars with out-of-state markers, as we called the license plates; occasionally we saw a car from far away, from Florida, Colorado, or even California, and this was cause for rejoicing in our limited lives.

Like most towns in New England, Woodbury was extensive. Woodbury and North Woodbury, with perhaps three miles of Main Street between them, were the principal foci; they were fully independent and had their own post offices and town administrations. But the school district incorporated both of them. Other early settlements had been absorbed by the two towns but still were separate communities and had their own names, such as Pomperaug, Middle Quarter, Hotchkissville, the West Side, Sherman Hill, and so on, connected by many gravel roads and by the river and its system of tributary brooks. Other names were important too: the Green, the Dump, the Dam, the Blacksmith's, the Iron Bridge, the Indian Grave, the Quarry, the Cliff. This last was part of a granite ridge that lay parallel to Main Street and east of it. The Masonic Temple stood on top of the cliff; just at the point where the Indian maiden had jumped to her death in despair for her love of a white settler. Every town in New England, and for all I know in the rest of the country, has an Indian maiden in its mythology, and the meaning of these hapless women in American culture could not be charmingly extrapolated, I'm sure.

Farther back, on the highest point of the ridge, stood the Fire Tower. It was an open structure of steel girders and struts about eighty feet high with a railed wooden platform at the top, then a roof over the platform and a wooden pole rising from the center of the roof. I don't know what the pole was, perhaps a flagstaff or a support for a radio antenna, more likely just a decoration; the fact is that I never saw the fire tower manned. I suppose during times of drought the town or the state may have posted someone to keep watch, but I don't recall ever seeing anyone up there who looked like a fire-watcher, and the tower was clearly visible from Main Street. What I do recall is that every boy in Woodbury who was worth his salt had to have his initials carved in that pole, which was six-sided, not round. It meant climbing to the platform, standing on the rail, hoisting oneself out, up, and over the edge of the roof--eighty feet in the air--then hanging on with one hand and using one's jackknife with the other. And then, of course, getting back down. What folly for anyone. For a boy already afflicted with the acrophobia that would become pathologically extreme a few years later, it wasn't foolish, it was crazy. Nevertheless I did it.

No doubt by now if that tower still stands its pole is etched and over-etched with hundreds of initials. Which means that hundreds of boys have looked at that sloping roof in terror; they have looked death in the face and defied it. For what? Vanity. Yet perhaps it was not a bad thing for boys to do.

I was scared up there, and I remember my fear, but I remember also how beautiful the town looked from the tower, especially in the fall. Such an intensity of color--red, orange, yellow--rising from the woods and hills, from the great maples that lined the roads and shaded the houses. The October sky, brilliantly blue; the October air, its effervescent freshness. On a Saturday afternoon one could see from the tower scores of thin, blue columns of smoke rising from the town, spreading out at a certain elevation below the ridge-lines of the hills. The townspeople were burning their leaves. In those days we felt no remissness if we burned the leaves instead of composting them, and the smoke with its piquant smell was no pollution. On the contrary it was a sign of seasonal change, of ritual change, always welcome. The labor of summer was over, the harvest completed, the cows were in the barn (or soon would be). It was a time to put on our worn flannel shirts and old woolen sweaters raveling at the elbows, so comfortable, conformable. In our family we wore old clothes from necessity, but with a kind of gratification too, derived in part from ordinary Yankee feelings of thrift, but in part also from something more indistinct and perhaps especially important to the Carruths--a knowledge that we were common folk and that the common values, including those of common suffering, were worth noticing.

Even during the affluent twenties, Woodbury was a poor town. No one was starving, though a few families lived on the edge of it, especially in winter, those pitiful families whose genetic resources in the back country had dwindled over centuries. (Woodbury was first settled in 1636.) Many of the

farms were too small, stony, overworked, and infertile to be productive. Some of these, especially north of town, had been taken up by Lithuanian refugees, who were struggling to make a foothold in America. Their children, with unpronounceable, unspellable names, came to school in tattered clothes, the boys in drab vests and the girls in more colorful ones, both sexes with strange crude haircuts and their stockings falling down. The rest of us shunned them. Children are not just cruel, they are barbarous. But in truth, if it makes any difference, the strangeness of the Lithuanians, not their poverty, was what made them alien to us. How remote and isolated Woodbury was--no Italians, no Jews, no Portuguese. The one French-Canadian family, the St. Pierres, had been there for several generations; and the one black family, the Fords, had descended from northern slaves freed before the Revolution. No, the Lithuanians, three or four families, were our foreigners, whose children were called snot-nosed as a matter of course.

But not in October. Who could be xenophobic in the midst of that glory? Autumn was a time of good health and clear thinking, so it seemed to me. People died in winter, spring, summer, but not in autumn. Autumn was beautiful, fleeting, touched with the premonitory sorrow that I somehow came at an early age to recognize as the fundamental quality of all existence. The trees, the stones, the stars: all were consummately beautiful, and all were condemned to mutability.

Perhaps the best of autumn was to sit on the cool grass at the end of afternoon while the piles of leaves still smoldered and eat concord grapes taken in ripe clusters from the vine that sprawled on the arbor of cedar poles my father had made for it.

***

When I began to smoke in earnest I can't remember. It was well before I was thirteen, which is when my family moved from Woodbury to Pleasantville. I know I experimented with tobacco when I was five or six, stealing from packs of Lucky Strikes my Uncle Max left lying around the house. I can remember sitting in the sun on the hill that sloped down from our back fence, lighting cigarettes and blowing the smoke out in gusty huffs, studying the way a cigarette looked in my hand. I can remember trying to chew a pinch of my father's pipe tobacco. By the age of nine I was picking up butts from the street, saving them in the fold at the waist of my heavy sweater. My friend Ralph, who lived across the road and was a year younger than I, was a smoker too; we snagged butts and smoked them together in the loft of his family's barn, which was not used for storing hay; or in the woods. I can remember smoking in the icehouse that was near Sullivan's Pond. I can remember being taught to inhale smoke by an older boy in a gravel pit off toward the eastern edge of town; he took a drag on his cigarette, opened his mouth to show me the smoke, then breathed it down into his lungs. He handed me the cigarette and I tried it. Of course it made me dizzy, but I pretended I didn't feel a thing. Which, ever since, is what I have pretended generally.

I remember buying cigarettes at the drugstore by saying they were for my uncle. I remember when the druggist, having been alerted by some busybody, told me I couldn't have any more. I remember sitting on the girder of the steel-truss bridge over the Pomperaug River, thirty feet above the swimming hole, with Margaret Shean, a freckled, sexy-looking, intelligent girl from my eighth-grade class at school, beside me. We were in bathing suits, as we called them then; I was smoking and had a pack of Camels in my hand. Margaret was Irish and Catholic--she went to my school because Woodbury had no parochial school--and a little prim, and she was nagging me in a covertly flirtatious way, which was the only kind of flirtation twelve-year-olds could imagine in 1932. "Why don't you throw those cigarettes away?" she said. I turned my hand over and dropped the pack down into the river. It floated away. What an unusual and romantic thing to do!--that’s what I told myself, and Margaret put her hand on my wrist. I can bring back to my mind without effort the sensations of her touch and the gratification and excitement and mystery I felt as a consequence of what I had done. But I'm sure I had got my hands on some more cigarettes, one way or another, before the sun went down.

Incidentally, the image of that pack of Camels falling toward the water, falling flat and without turning and hitting the water an instant later with a little splat, remains vivid in my mind for another reason. Why didn't I pitch myself after it and dash out my brains on the rocks below? At the time I don't believe I was tempted, but now, after fifty-five years of phobic, including acrophobic, conditioning, I am retrospectively--and powerfully--tempted. The vision, as vivid as anything in my memory, of that pack of cigarettes, which had been a part of myself, falling toward the water seems to draw me after it and makes me gasp every time I think of it. I suspect I have thought of it every day since it happened.

I loved to watch people smoking. The farm boys at the diner could drag in such riches of smoke from their unfiltered Chesterfields and Old Golds that it came out in ropes and loops from their mouths and nostrils. The local businessmen would light up their Luckies by striking kitchen matches, which they kept in the side pockets of their suit coats, with their thumbnails, then blow out the match with a long straight plume of smoke. Another of my uncles, who talked loudly, would smoke his Camels in a paper holder with a goose-quill tip, like FDR's, and he would talk and exhale smoke at the same time, so that the smoke came out every whichway, as if it were the ectoplasmic embodiment of his language. Mostly women didn't smoke in those days, but sometimes I saw a college girl from Vassar--in those years we often spent weekends at Dover Furnace, New York, not far from Poughkeepsie--who smoked or pretended to, dressed in a big sweater and short pleated skirt with her hair bobbed and a huge necklace swinging on her nearly breastless front. But such girls smoked effetely, holding the cigarette between thumb and index finger like a European, puffing the smoke out without inhaling it, batting their eyes. I scorned them. In the winter when my breath was visible I loved to blow out vapor as if it were smoke, using a twig or a pencil for a cigarette, and I studied the different shapes I could give my "smoke" by changing my mouth and the tilt of my head. In those years smoke meant more to me than marbles, hockey, my solitary reading and writing, or the glimpse of a girl's underwear when she was putting on her arctics, as we called overshoes. I was an addict before I had smoked five cartons of real cigarettes, five ounces of Prince Albert or Edgeworth. I was sold on smoke from the very beginning, the way some kids are sold on training for the Olympics or giving a recital in Town Hall at the age of thirteen.

Of course my family hated the idea of my smoking and rejected it absolutely. This was part of the whole mind-set of Carruthian secular and neurotic puritanism, as was the fear of talking about it, of talking about anything that might be charged with negative feeling. So the fiction was maintained for years, all during my adolescence, that I didn't smoke. I smoked out the window of my bedroom. I smoked when I went walking at night in the quiet streets of Pleasantville. I smoked behind the school with my friends or at the swimming pool in summer. By the time I was fifteen I had been thoroughly shanghaied by both cigarettes and pipes, a condition my family at last acknowledged when I went to college a couple of years later. By the time I was twenty-five I was knowledgeable about the grades of Havana filler, binder, and wrapper, East Indian and African blends, cigars from Connecticut like Muniemachers, Kafkas, and Judges Caves, pipe tobaccos such as white burley, bright leaf, Cavendish, perique from Louisiana, Latakia, and Turkish and Macedonian varieties whose names I no longer remember, etc. But mainly I smoked Camels, two or three packs a day. At age forty I gave up cigarettes and for about fifteen years smoked only pipes (twenty a day, mostly Granger Rough Cut) and cigars (two or three a day if I could afford them), and then gradually in my late fifties I succumbed to cigarettes again, though now the filtered, "low-tar" kinds. Today I smoke usually two packs of cigarettes a day, five pipes, and one or two cigars.

In other words I smoke all the time. Only rarely do I encounter a smoker like me. To smoke twenty pipes a day, as I did for years, one must live with a cindered mouth, a mouth no better than a charcoal brazier. To smoke as many cigarettes as I do one must cough continually, wheeze and pant, accept constant inflammation of lungs, throat, nose, etc. The pain is considerable. At night, when I go to bed after a day of smoking, I often have such pain in my chest, such difficulty with breathing, that I become truly frightened and dream about suffocation, the death I fear most. And of course everyone knows now, though we did not when I was young, about the hidden damages, cancer, emphysema, heart weakness, clogged arteries--the deaths that smoking brings to us, 370,000 a year in America. I am writing this on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first surgeon general's warning printed on cigarette packages; this news on the radio is what has impelled me to put such a wretched history into words. Now for twenty-five years I have been reading that forecast of my own death! And I believe my addiction is more profound today than it has ever been.

Every morning when I get up, no matter how rotten I've felt the night before, I reach for a cigarette automatically, and smoke five or six while I have my coffee. If I don't do this I begin immediately to feel a great psychic itch, untranslatable into any language, that prevents me from working or doing much of anything. I have no doubt whatever that this addiction is mostly "psychological"; it is in my head, so involved in my personality, like the innermost cog of a machine, that I am dysfunctional without it. The nicotine is unimportant. The symbolic and attitudinal significance of smoking is everything. My life depends on it.

A painter whom I particularly admire and whose work seems to me close to my own in poetry is Vlaminck, especially in his later paintings of French farms and villages. He was also a musician who played in clubs and dance halls and a competitive cyclist, a tough and independent guy. I have never seen a photo of him in which he wasn't smoking a cigarette, pipe, or cigar. He was a smoker like me. Maybe that's part of the reason for my attraction to his work, though certainly only a part. He was a damned good painter.

What is the reason for this addiction? Do I still get pleasure from smoking? Not much. Since the Cuban embargo, almost thirty years ago, I have never found a cigar I enjoyed as much as the double claro, candella Havanas that used to be common, and my favorite commercial pipe tobacco, State Express from England, was discontinued some time ago. Cigarettes give me almost no sensual enjoyment at all. No, the reason lies far back in childhood, I'm certain of that, though it's still impossible for me to distinguish all the causative elements clearly. In part I admired my father and his "literary" ways, and he was a pipe smoker; in part I hated him and resented the alienation he forced on me and all our family. Cigarette smoking was a way to cross the immense barrier between the Carruths and the rest of the world, which I wanted to do more than anything. I wanted to be "out there" with the others, away from solitude and fear. I never made it and never will. Precisely how this dynamic knot of attraction and repulsion evolved over the years and became an ineradicable component of my being, is unknown to me. I doubt anyone could figure it out except in gross, uninteresting terms. But I know it is there, close to the heart of my psychopathological life, creative and destructive, a strength, a weakness, a function of the basic energy that has always driven me.

***

The Rome Theater in Pleasantville probably resembled small-town movie houses in the 1930s all over the country. It had been built a decade or so earlier. By 1936 it was worn and shabby; it offered double features, bingo, giveaway chinaware, anything to attract audiences. Admission was fifteen cents for matinées and twenty-five in the evenings. I went as often as I could, perhaps once a week, and did not care greatly what movies were showing, with the consequence that now my memory is overladen with names, faces, and images of all kinds from the popular films of that era.

But sometimes I went furtively to a door in the back of the building. It opened off a slotlike alley. The other side of the alley was a concrete wall. Trash barrels. Broken furniture. Many shadows. When I was certain no one could see me, I slipped through the door, then up a steep, dingy stairway that brought me to another theater hidden on top of the one below. This secret theater was dark, small, filled with cigarette smoke. The seats pitched downward toward the screen at a sharp angle. The whirring of the projector could be heard distinctly, and the coruscant beam of light that shot down through the smoke to the screen was bright and straight.

Perhaps the audience numbered thirty or forty. No more than that. I remember little else about them. And what I remember of the films is only that they were different from those shown in the public theater down below: more serious. No sentimental comedies or tawdry musicals. I have the impression they were westerns, which my parents disapproved, but also that they were about real moral and metaphysical issues, probably with a political slant. They may have been a kind of super-newsreel, news raised to the status of myth, for newsreels were often what I liked best when I went to the movies. At any rate they were not, though one might have expected it, pornographic. As I sat in the dark and watched, my feelings were fear and excitement mingled together, a sense of growing confidence which I nevertheless knew might turn out to be false. I also felt pleasantly alone. I was aware that the others scattered among the seats were experiencing similar feelings.

Maybe after all it was a kind of pornography?

Now I have a clearer if still faint remembrance of those others. They were all men. They were older than I. The projector’s light reflected dimly from white shirts and here and there from bald heads and eyeglasses. They sat mostly apart from one another or In groups of two and three, and in differing attitudes--some lounging, some bent forward toward the screen.

This dream began when I was about fifteen and continued until I was in my forties.

Auden wrote somewhere that the invention of photography was the worst of the disasters of technology. I don't recall exactly what he meant. Probably he felt that photography blurred the distinction between his primary and secondary worlds, as he called them, the worlds of reality and imagination, and since this distinction was important to him, photography--the preservation of reality outside of time, which had been a function of the imagination through all earlier epochs--was troublesome. I agree that keeping this distinction in mind is important, but not that the distinction itself means much. In fact the primary and secondary worlds are interfused, and we live in a fluidity of consciousness. What happens inside and outside a camera is merely a simplified analogue of what happens inside and outside a human head.

Nevertheless a filmed image, especially of a person, is a mystery. Not a puzzle; it can be rationalized easily. It is a variable awesomeness, sometimes poignant, sometimes frightening. Only rarely is it joyful. How can that person who is dead, or who is even twenty minutes older, be there? Jung emphasized the similarity, conventionality, and recognizability of archetypal images because it suited his purpose to do so, but individuality is what makes those images powerful. A burned-out ranch may be the sack of Troy, but it is still a burned-out ranch. That man in the newsreel running and dodging down the hillside, that Spanish Republican caught at the instant when the bullet smashes his heart, that death in its individual actuality forever: this is the mystery and awesomeness. And this, aside from the simple symbolic representation--the womb, the initiation, the secret identity--is what my dream was about.

***

When I was ten or eleven I had a BB-gun, a standard Daisy "air rifle," as they were called, although they were not air-powered but spring-powered, ordered from the Sears Roebuck catalogue and paid for with money I had earned. It was the only gun I've ever owned. (Gun, from the medieval Latin feminine name Gunilda, applied to a mangonel or stone-throwing machine, though I don't know what to make of that--or maybe I do.) I shot and killed two living creatures with it. One was a medium-sized green frog by the edge of a brook; it died immediately. A bubble formed on its back and grew larger and larger until it burst; then a second bubble, a third, etc. The other was a chickadee on a branch of the maple outside our attic window. I shot from well back of the window and in the expectation that I wouldn't hit the bird, and at first I thought I hadn't, for like the frog it didn't move. Then slowly--almost as if thoughtfully--it tilted forward from its perch and fell to the ground. I ran down the two flights of stairs, retrieved it, and buried it.

Both these episodes sickened me.

Once I also deliberately shot my younger brother Gorton point-blank. He was wearing a heavy, stiff, horsehide jacket that had once been mine. I was certain the impact of the BB wouldn't be felt through that thick leather--although if I was certain why did I try it? Gorton's face turned red and he began to cry--he was about six or seven at the time--and I could see he wasn't putting it on; he was stung. And no doubt shocked by my perfidy. So was I.

I was, or became, a first-class marksman. In the army I was given a Thompson submachine gun, which I'm glad I never had to shoot except on the firing range. I was also given a little medal for superior marksmanship with carbine and rifle. I had always been able to ring the swinging bell at the shooting gallery, ten times for the ten .22 short-shorts you could buy in those days for a quarter. Many years later when I was fifty and my son was about ten and had his own BB-gun, I picked it up one day and shot a small twig sticking up through the snow about twenty-five yards away. It quivered slightly when the BB struck it. The Bo was astonished, but I wasn't. I knew could do it. Even so I was pleased.

Yet I hate the damned things. I always will, and I hope I’ll never have to shoot another gun in my life, not even a BB-gun.

I remember in Woodbury an old, unused shed that stood on the ridge back of Pomperaug Road, beside the path to the river and under a hemlock tree. The wooden walls and door were weathered colorfully, all the shades of gray, silver, and brown that old soft-wood boards take on, with traces of ancient red paint still intermingling. One day I stood away from it and shot a pattern of copper-coated BBs into the door, and I can still see in my mind the points of new metal gleaming against the antique background, an effect that pleased me at the time. I think it still would. The particularity of it: vertical boards with knots and splits in them, square rusty nailheads, shadings of color, lichen, and then the design of the new copper BBs, a circle with a tricuspid in it. Particular, related to part, particle, partisan, partner, and parse--all pretty good words.

***

Stephen Spender visited Chicago while I was living there. I don't remember exactly when, but during the time I was active on the staff of Poetry, roughly between 1947 and 1950. His visit had something to do with Poetry, probably with raising funds, since that is what invited celebrities are invited for. What else? Most of the people connected with Poetry were partial to celebrities, but if they wanted one for private purposes, they were more likely to invite Governor Stevenson's ex-wife or Potter Palmer's granddaughter.

I had no part in entertaining Spender; that was the province of the poetocracy. A huge bash was organized, which I later travestied in my novel, Appendix A, but I remember almost nothing of it now. I was no doubt drunk. As for Spender, my impression is of a man taller by a good deal than myself, handsome, wavy hair, a good workmanlike British accent, an unpressed suit, a pleasing manner, etc. But the main point is that Spender was indeed a celebrity, one of the best-known and best-liked poets of that time in the English language. The names of Auden and Spender went together as inevitably as Laurel and Hardy. They were not only the young lions, who had baited Eliot successfully; they were the immediate and powerful influence on the foremost young American poets of the generation just before mine--Karl Shapiro, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, and the other left-leaning poets who had begun to publish just before World War II. Auden's Collected Poems of 1945 and Spender's of 1942, which was titled Ruins and Visions, were on the shelf of every poet and every serious reader in the country, and they were well worn. I still recall the dust jackets on both books. Spender seemed to me then a literary giant, as he was, a man almost infinitely beyond my reach, and although I must have shaken his hand and may have tried for a moment or two to hold up one end of a conversation with him, I'm certain that my anxiety, which with a figure as exalted as Spender could not have been much allayed by gin, would have kept me as far away from him as I could politely get.

Many years later Spender gave a reading and talk at Syracuse University, and I introduced him. We chatted a little beforehand, but not much. Our main chance to talk was at breakfast the next morning, before I took him to his plane. We ate sticky pastry and drank coffee in the Something Room at the Hotel Syracuse downtown. In my introduction the night before I had said that in reviewing the letters of Wyndham Lewis I had learned that when Lewis went blind Spender was the first person who volunteered to read to him. "I have reason to believe," I had said, "that Mr. Spender cared no more for Lewis's rotten fascistic ideas than I do. But in those days a community of letters existed, to which one was admitted solely on grounds of talent and devotion, and within it a mutual respect or even loyalty that traversed ideological disagreements." Spender picked that up at breakfast. "You know," he said in that accent I like so well, though the majority of people who speak it are royal pains in the ass, "you hit it exactly--that business about the community of letters. If it hadn't been for that, how could we have stood Eliot?"

What surprised me most was Spender's appearance. Here's a man in his eighties, I said to myself; remarkably fine-looking and vigorous, flying all around the country, giving readings and lectures almost every day. How does he do it? And I must have hinted something of the kind, because at one point he looked at me quizzically and a little sharply, his coffee cup in his hand, and said: "I'm only seventy-three, you know." Jesus! Only eleven years older than I. I was surprised; I was floored. In Chicago he had been as far beyond me as the stars. And here we were, two old men together, at bay, so to speak, before the immense pack of our pursuers.

Well, that's romanticizing, of course. What we were actually was something else: two elderly men eating a third-rate breakfast in a third-rate restaurant in a third-rate American city--what could be more commonplace? And we were enjoying it too, Spender as much as I. It was the kind of meeting that evokes a quick sense of kinship with someone you will almost certainly never see again and to whom you feel no obligation beyond the agreeable one of being ordinarily decent. It was a pleasure. At his reading Spender had been at pains to separate himself from Auden. At one point he even said he had not met Auden until...well, I'm not sure when, maybe 1937. I had just read Chamberlain's biography of Auden, which contains a photograph of the two, a snap-shot, taken at a time well before the date Spender mentioned. Why? Why such misremembering? At breakfast I told him how grateful I was to him for publishing some of my poems in Encounter at a time when I needed encouragement. "I like those poems very much," he said immediately and rapidly. Clearly he didn't remember them at all, any more than I remember 99 per cent of the poems I have chosen as an editor over the years. No doubt the reasons for such misremembering are easy to understand in general and easy to forgive in particular; still I do my best, not always successfully, not to let them affect me.

In fact I think a good deal about these niceties of relationship between ordinary egotism and the awareness of pure subjectivity that all artists need. Spender's accomplishment on his own, as poet, critic, and editor, is creditable and good. The miserable outcome at Encounter, when it turned out that the magazine had been secretly financed through a front by the CIA, overtook him precisely because he is a good man. It was a classic case. He dealt with it honorably. I hope his poems and his reputation will endure for a long time, though that's in the lap of the gods. The best and nearly only thing one can do for the gifted poets one knows is to wish them good luck, as I do.

***

Kenneth Burke was short in stature, maybe a couple of inches shorter than myself, but sturdy, straight-backed, a good face: handsome and rugged with graying hair and steel-rimmed glasses. He wore a rumpled gray suit, etc., and looked the typical intellectual of the 1940s, although in many respects he wasn't typical at all. To my mind his critical writing is the most independent, honest, and useful of that period; more reasonable than Winters's, more original than Ransom's or Blackmur's, and far more agreeable in manner of intellect than Edmund Wilson's. His writing was awkward, difficult to follow, but it was mind-work right there on the page, pushing itself always harder, ambitious for its ends but modest in itself; none of the mock humility of Eliot or Tate. Furthermore his ideas, deriving from the socially oriented criticism of Parrington but enriched by the writerly insights of the New Critics, prefigured many of the attitudes of the poststructuralists of the past two decades, and not only prefigured them but articulated them more fully and reasonably than the younger critics recognize. As far as I know, they don't acknowledge him, or when they do they dismiss him as a mere "humanist"--that dirty word, applied by every generation to the previous generation.

I met Burke only once, at a party on the south side of Chicago, I think at Harvey Webster's apartment in 1948 or 1949. I had fortified myself beforehand, as usual, but at the beginning of the party I was still very tense. I found myself on a sofa beside Burke. He chatted, I listened. I tried to act as if I were comfortable, as I supposed the editor of Poetry should, while the party began warming up and getting noisier. People standing in clusters, looming above us, talking loudly, etc. Burke leaned toward me and said: "I wrote a poem this afternoon. Would you like to hear it?" I said: "Of course." (What else?) He recited it in a low voice directly into my ear, and I didn't catch a word. Not one. But because the poem was brief, because the occasion was social and cheery I assumed the poem was funny, some sort of epigram, and I laughed. Immediately Burke drew back. He looked at me with shock, indignation, and injury.

I had blundered. I saw in him instantly the soul of the devotee, as I had seen it so often in all kinds of people. Burke took his poems seriously, even if no one else did. And in truth they weren't great, I think, though I haven't looked at them for many years.

I accused myself bitterly. What stupidity! Here was a person I would have liked to know, to be friendly with--if circumstances permitted--someone I admired genuinely, i.e., for his work. It was more than that; it was the mind revealed in the work, the intellectual exuberance, which for me remains the most attractive quality of that era. How I miss it now, surrounded as I am--we are--by apathy and mediocrity. But my timorousness, unrelenting from infancy until this moment, had caused me to offend Burke, so that I had again lost the chance I wanted to know my own kind; and because I was so good an actor, like most anxious people, and could disguise my fear in suavity--though not real suavity, just the alcoholic kind--Burke did not conceive why I had done it. Laughter in the face of a beautiful poem. It was unaccountable. I remember nothing more from that party. No doubt I either got drunk or left early and then got drunk. That was how it was.

***

It seems to me I can remember the look of each bookcase in the Woodbury house, and in the Pleasantville house too, and the exact place of every title. I saw them often enough. But of course I can't remember them that well, and in my mind now, fifty years later, I see only fragments through a mist, the lower dark corner of the bookcase at the top of the stairs, the second shelf of the one with the glass front in the living room. They held dingy old books mostly, which my father had bought for nickels and dimes from the Salvation Army, part of his relentless self-education. The Poetical Works of A. Pope, Mr. Britling Sees It Through, Adventures in the Andes, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Old Wives' Tale, History of the Conquest of Peru (3 vols.), History of the Netherlands (6 vols.), etc.

I looked into these books often and read what I liked here and there. Sometimes a book like Bulfinch's Mythology would hold me spellbound and call me back again and again, in which case I was always a little surprised, because the general air of dilapidation about those books somewhat repelled and frightened me. A few books were so utterly fusty that I never touched them.

I remember one book on the bottom shelf of that bookcase at the top of the stairs. You couldn't miss it: there it was, dead ahead, as your eyes rose above floor level when you were climbing up. I saw it thousands of times. The title on the spine was:

NERVOUS

NESS

Another ghastly morality novel, I thought to myself every time, about some ghastly forlorn girl of the moors named Ness. And hadn't I already at age thirteen read all of Scott, Cooper, Irving, Dickens, and even some of Hardy and Meredith, etc.?--and had enjoyed them too, though sometimes the enjoyment was an effort, a kind of dutiful effort. Enough, I said. I would read Tarzan of the Apes and the novels of Zane Grey in the public library on Wednesday and Friday afternoons, sitting under a big round table. I smell the dust and oil of the old wooden floor to this day. Never did dare bring such books home; they weren't explicitly forbidden, but I knew they were "cheap" and "not the right reading matter for an intelligent child," as my father would have said. Once when I told him I had read a book of poems by Robert W. Service and had memorized a couple of them, he looked at me with patient condescension and said--but of course I don't remember the words. I remember the look.

Years later when I was in my thirties and was again living at home with my parents, I pulled that book from the shelf at the top of the stairs and sat on the step to look at it, still thinking, since I am literal-minded and not quick-witted, that it was a novel entitled Nervous Ness. I saw at once, of course, that it was a book of pre-Freudian practical psychology; the hyphen which had originally divided the title had been worn off. How many hands had held that book? I had no idea, but I was touched by the thought. I was myself ill at that time, unable to exist in the world, and I was thinking a good deal about my parents, especially my father, and my relationship with them. My father was ill too--I think I had known it intuitively since childhood--but he had hidden it all his life, and had found ways to live around his phobias, to exist on the edges of them. But he had not hidden his illness from himself. He had bought this old book and probably had read it. I thumbed the pages, trying passages at random, passages that seemed to me both ludicrous in their concepts and urgent in their sincerity. Had the book helped my father? I couldn't see how. But who knows what will help another person who is desperate enough?

I remember another time ten years earlier, when I had been in psychoanalysis in Chicago for a couple of years. I was on a holiday visit with my parents. At the dinner table I referred to myself, I don't recall in what connection, as "neurotic," as all young people did in those days; the word was

commonplace. At once loudly and indignantly my father said: "You’re not neurotic!" I shut up. I could see how deeply shocked he was. For him, like many of his generation, neurosis was equivalent to madness. His shock lasted a long time, and although later on, when I was hospitalized and then for considerable period lived in total seclusion, he grew used to the idea of a neurotic son, I think he never overcame the feeling that I was therefore crazy and dangerous. One time when he visited me in the hospital, I became angry enough over my continued confinement to show it, which was rare for me. I punched a wardrobe and splintered the door-panel. My father ran from the room. He accosted the first attendant he found. "The boy’s in bad shape," I heard him say, his voice shaking. Well, it’s true, I was in bad shape, but not the way my father meant it. Punching that door--in effect punching my father, which I could never, never have done--was a very sane thing to do at that moment. None of the hospital staff complained about it at all.

I wonder if my father ever punched a door.

Books. Lots of books. My childhood was surrounded with them. They reposed there on the shelves in their umbrageous hundreds. I believe I thought, when I was a young child, that they were alive, or had been alive, or were ghostly presences talking among themselves behind my back. At any rate I knew they were important, fusty or not, and in some way menacing. That knowledge has shaped my life.

***

One time in the late sixties I had to obtain some arsenic. It had been prescribed by a doctor and it had to be in a suspension. I went out on a Saturday morning to the local druggist, but he couldn't do it. He would need to order the medicine, he said, and it would take some days to get it. I went to a pharmacy in a nearby larger town. The druggist there said the same thing. "A suspension is not an emulsion or a solution," he added, by way of condescending professional mystification. "I know," I said. "I worked in a drugstore when I was a kid. And in those days a pharmacist could compound a suspension right there in his shop." He was not fazed, nor was any other druggist in northern Vermont, from Burlington to St. Johnsbury, from Montpelier to Newport. In half a day or more I drove my pickup over the whole region. But I failed.

When I reached home, a strange car with Connecticut plates was in front of the house. I was not greatly in need of visitors at that point, but I went into the kitchen quickly, and there at the round oak table was Mark Van Doren. I recognized him at once from his photos on book jackets. The woman next to him, I knew, must be Dorothy, his wife. My wife Rose Marie, who was sitting with them and had served coffee and kuchen, began to introduce us, but already Mark and I had shaken hands warmly. And then, after I had poured myself some coffee at the stove and we all had sat down again, I learned how extraordinarily kind some older writers can be. Mark recited to me by heart a quite long passage from the second section of my poem called Journey to a Known Place.

At that time, as earlier and later, I scarcely thought of myself as a poet at all. I was living mostly in seclusion, though beginning to get around more than I had during the previous fifteen years. My work was largely, say 95 per cent, unconnected with my poetry, and much of it was outdoors in the company of people who considered me a laborer or mechanic, never a writer--at least it was never openly acknowledged among us. For long periods I forgot I was a poet. I needed visits (usually in summer) with my few friends who were writers, like Denise Levertov and Adrienne Rich, to remind me of my real function, to revalidate me. When Journey had first been published in 1961, I had been living in Norfolk, Connecticut, only a few miles from Mark's home in Falls Village. At the suggestion of James Laughlin, my publisher and friend, I had sent Mark a copy of the book, and had received a cordial and generous letter in response; I had said to myself that I should call on him, I had even driven a number of times past the house I thought was his--I never found out if it was--and tried to hype myself into stopping; but I was too shy, I couldn't do it. Then seven or eight years later he and Dorothy were there in my own kitchen, two hundred miles north of Connecticut, at my own table. I don’t know if other people can understand the quality of that experience for me. It was astonishment, almost incredulity. It was the gift of unexpected faith, the opening of the heavens. I choose these words with care, for although I have no conventional religious belief, I think I know what those have felt who have witnessed miracles.

Mark liked my poetry. The visit, the reciting of my lines, could mean nothing else. And I always liked his. The work of people like Van Doren has always moved me in a special way, people talented, intelligent, devoted, and humane--Archibald MacLeish was another--who have written superb, unimprovable poems, but whose work does not place them in the first rank

and is perhaps in danger of being forgotten. Because the place of such poets in our consciousness is fragile, I hold them dearer than the titans, who can take care of themselves, and do. Mark was not a great poet, as the term is commonly understood, but he wrote a few great poems. And he was a great teacher, a great human being. Many others who knew him better than I, especially those who were his students at Columbia, as diverse as Thomas Merton, John Berryman, and Allen Ginsberg, have said the same thing.

After that visit Mark and I wrote brief letters back and forth, nothing high-powered or literary, just little notes of encouragement, bits about birds and trees--that sort of thing. Then Mark died. I exchanged a few notes with Dorothy, and then she died too. I felt the awful steadiness of the turning wheel--poets working, aging, dying, being replaced--the inexorability of it and the pathos. These were nothing new in my life, of course, but perhaps it was then, when I was in my late forties, that they began to enlarge themselves in my awareness exceedingly, as they have ever since.

As for the arsenic, our local druggist ordered it and eventually we got it. Not that it made much difference.

***

Once in a poem I called it the "blue house in the guttering chestnut forest." In fact it was painted gray with a bluish tint, and although some American chestnut trees still survived when I was a boy, we had no forest. The house was a farmhouse originally, plain and simple, built early in the eighteenth century, sided with clapboards. The roof was a modified saltbox. It had wide pine floorboards inside, an enclosed staircase, small-paned windows; some of the glass was original, and had wavy, rainbow-colored patterns in it, with the maker's initials scratched in a corner. The immediate surroundings--we owned four acres--still resembled a farmyard, the "north field," a grassy expanse with a knell and a hollow, the "orchard" on the southeast, a plantation of eight or ten apple trees. The house was on a little hill, thirty feet above the road, and the front yard sloped downward to a steep bank. It had two immense sugar maples, whose roots ran along the surface and whose foliage shaded out the lawn, which was no more than wispy tufts of grass.

Beyond our property lay other fields, growing up to sumac, willow, birch, and locust. I don't know who owned them.

The original barn, across the road, was owned by a family named Fray, who had a somewhat more modern house, probably from about 1900, next to the barn. Ralph Fray, a year younger than I, was my closest friend. He was a strong, stocky boy, more than my match at wrestling, and a good-looking boy as well, with dark hair and brown eyes. The Frays believed they had Indian blood in them, as most rural New Englanders of that time did, and in spite of the fact that the idea of the "noble savage," having filtered down through who knows how many layers of romantic consciousness, was widely popular at that time, I see no reason to doubt that this was so.

My own people came, on my father's side, from Scotch-Irish stock, two brothers, John and William Carruth, who were refugees from King James's Ulster Plantation--to which they had been forcibly removed from Dumfries and where they had learned to starve as well in Ireland as they had in Scotland. They settled in Massachusetts in 1710. Other Carruths emigrated later to other parts of North America. The family here is larger than one might expect; many times I have found Carruths in local phone books all over the country. My own branch has no Indian blood, as far as I know, but over the generations it has absorbed plenty of English, Dutch, French, Scandinavian, etc. I don't know what real value resides in the notion of "nativeness," probably not much, but for what it's worth the Carruths, like the Frays and millions of others, are native Americans, if only because they can't be anything else.

Our house was supported by its chimney, the same principle of engineering used in many skyscrapers, the frame suspended from a central stem or core. My memory probably is distorted, but when I envision the cellar of that house, I see a chimney ten-feet square or more, occupying much of the space. It was made of rough stone and mortar, and the great hand-hewn beams, with the marks of the broadaxe on them, perhaps twelve-by-twelve-inches, passed through the chimney walls in both directions, north-south and east-west. I think those four great timbers carried the whole weight of the house. The outer walls of the cellar were made from field stone without mortar and bulged inward. They were firm enough, they kept the earth from falling into the cellar, but clearly they did not support much weight. That chimney tapered as it ascended through the first and second stories, then in the attic became an ordinary brick chimney. For several years I slept next to it, sharing the attic with a colony of bats. At night the bats sailed back and forth over my head; by day they clung to the inside of the unplastered split-lath of the north gable. Red squirrels came in sometimes too, and in the big maple outside the window orioles nested in summer and tanagers flittered. I liked all these creatures. Indeed, I liked all wild animals, and some of my favorite books were by John Burroughs and Ernest Thompson Seton. But once when my father picked a green snake (Liopeltis vernalis) out of a lilac bush and was bitten on the thumb, I thought he got what he deserved.

When I was a soldier in Italy, the lizards there crept and ran all over our tents and mosquito bars. It was common to wake up in the morning and see, first thing, a lizard fifteen inches away, peering into one's eyes. Outdoors the lizards, which looked like miniature dinosaurs with ridged spines and bulky shoulders, played fighting games in the grass, often close to my feet when I sat under an olive tree, fierce games, though I never saw any injury beyond the loss of the detachable tails. If I lay down with my eyes at grass level and watched the lizards, I could see the rampaging dinosaurs and great ferns of the Mesozoic era. In the American west, the Rockies and Sierras, I have myself played games, mostly strife-of-the-eyes or who-can-be-dead-the-longest, with rattlesnakes. The snakes always won. Once near Buck-eye Flat in the Sequoia National Forest I came suddenly on a massasauga stretched out and sunning itself on a bank. I stood still. We looked at each other, green eye vs. black eye, for as long as I could stand it, maybe fifteen minutes, and during much of that time a newly hatched white lacewing walked waveringly up and down the length of the snake's back. The snake did not move a muscle; seeing it made my own back itch. Finally I turned my head for an instant, and the snake was gone.

When I was younger, I had a small bedroom on the second floor, with one window. The floor was humped and wrenched, almost convulsively. A couple of the wide boards were warped upward a good six inches above the general level. My father was a fine carpenter, and he had restored much of the first floor of the house, but did not get to the second before we had to abandon it. He had truly astonishing patience; I never saw him express the slightest irritation when things went wrong. My own experience, though I have worked a good deal with hand tools, is just the opposite. Nothing infuriates me more quickly than a rusted bolt that snaps its head off under the pressure of my wrench, or a board mismeasured, an eighth of an inch too short for the space it's intended to fill. I have the impression that my father never misjudged a bolt or mismeasured anything, and that all his boards were sawn exactly right.

In that small bedroom on the second floor I used to wake at five o'clock A.M. or earlier, often I think at three-thirty or four o'clock (insomnia has been with me lifelong), and I would lie in bed and read until the rest of the family got up. My father had taught me to read when I was four. He used an old primer, which he probably bought for a nickel at the Salvation Army in Waterbury, and the lessons were a half-hour every morning before breakfast. I learned quickly, and in my boyhood I read many, many books, for which I'm thankful now. But in those years it seemed to me that my father's instruction had merely placed me ahead of my class in school, and for a while--until I learned to play dumb--I was segregated from the others on that account.

***

When my wife and I and our infant son moved to northern Vermont and settled in a location that seemed at that time remote, we did so because we had to. We'd have preferred to live farther south where our friends and relatives lived. But we had little money and little income, and our search for a place we could afford, which would also be immediately habitable, was unsuccessful in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and southern and central Vermont. We kept heading north, calling real estate agents who were listed in a guide published by the Vermont Development Council. After we crossed an imaginary line from Burlington to Montpelier to St. Johnsbury, real estate values declined remarkably. The north was at that time poor country, shabby, a region of marginal farms and small towns that looked worn out. Three miles into the hills from one such town, on a dirt road next to a brook, we found a five-room house and eleven acres of land, which we bought for $5,800.

We hoped we could afford it. We paid $3,000 down--all we had--and took a fifteen-year mortgage for the rest. Our monthly payment to the bank would be $27.54, and we thought we could manage that. We felt lucky and greatly relieved to have found a place where we hoped to live on our meager resources. For a while this had seemed impossible. Indeed it would have been impossible a few years later. When we settled in northern Vermont, land was selling for $25 an acre, but not long after we arrived an influx of well-to-do people began and land values were inflated by 1000 per cent in less than a decade. Extreme northern New England was the only part of the northeast that hadn't already been exploited. If I'd been smart--but I never am--I'd have borrowed money and bought a thousand acres, and today I'd be a yuppie.

Our new home was adequate, but no more. The house had no central heating, but a kerosene pot-burner in the living room and a wood-burning range in the kitchen; in winter we kept warm, though the two rooms upstairs couldn't be used for anything but sleeping. The water supply was a siphon-fed line from a spring located on a neighbor's place some distance down the road. The kitchen had one tap that gave a thin flow of water into a cast-iron sink. We did our laundry, including the child's diapers, in the brook, which was icy cold. About thirty yards from the house was a cowshed, in effect a one-cow barn, nine-by-nine feet, with a stall and stanchion and a hole in the wall, covered by a leather--hinged flap, through which to throw the manure. I put in a window, took out the stall and stanchion, laid a new floor, boarded up the interior walls, installed a small box-stove from the junk store, and the cowshed became my workplace for the next twenty years, giving us what amounted to an extra room. On wet days it always smelled of cow. At first I worked by lanternlight after dark, but then I ran a line from the house and gave myself electricity. It was a dusty, sooty, shabby, and extremely cramped place to work, but before long I became attached to it, and I still think of it fondly. Then before the first winter came I put a cattle trough in the cellar of the house to hold water, fixed up a pump and pressure tank, and bought a secondhand hot-water heater, so that we could have a washing machine and take baths without heating the water on the stove.

Over the years we made other improvements. I rebuilt the kitchen, and put in a new sink and new plumbing, though we always used the woodstove for cooking and heating. I hired a local person to install a new bathroom and a modern septic system. I built bookshelves. We repainted the woodwork and repapered the walls. All this took a long time, many years, because we were so busy with the daily routine that we could seldom take time for anything extra. And we continued to live poor, as country people say. We bought our appliances secondhand and our clothing from the church rummage sales. I learned to make all my own repairs; I became a country mechanic, plumber, electrician, and carpenter. After a while I even learned to sweat a copper fitting as neatly as a professional. I learned to repair my cars, even to the extent of complete engine overhauls. I cut, split, transported, and stacked ten cords of firewood each summer to run the stoves in the kitchen and cowshed during the winter; this took thirty days a year. I did evening barn chores with a neighboring farmer in return for milk. I built a woodshed, a chicken coop, a duck house. I made a big garden, 160-by-200 feet, in which we raised enough potatoes, corn, squash, green vegetables, root vegetables, etc. to feed us for a year; at first we canned them, but later we bought a secondhand freezer and froze them. We picked wild berries and ate fiddleheads and lamb's quarters. We kept a small flock of hens for eggs and meat, also ducks and geese, and we occasionally went in with friends to raise a pig or a cow, or we bought them cheaply from neighboring farmers. The one thing I did not do that poor country people usually rely on--and this may have been a mistake--was to hunt and fish. I had no liking for blood sports. But we gratefully accepted venison, rabbit, trout, and perch from friends and neighbors.

All my life I have been a compulsive worker, but I've never worked as hard at any other time as I did during this period in Vermont. Usually I worked in the woods and fields or in the garden, or did errands and repairs and house chores, during the daytime, especially in summer when the big garden always needed attention, and then worked in the cowshed at night. I wrote book reviews for newspapers and literary magazines, I read and copyedited manuscripts and wrote ad copy for book publishers, I did rewriting and ghostwriting--at one time I had more books on the market with other people's names on the title pages than books of my own. I did anything I could and accepted every assignment that came to me, always afraid that if I turned one down the editors would cross me off their list. Once I was the sole staff of the monthly newsletter of an occult book club on Long Island. But I was no good at selling myself, and could not go down to New York to seek jobs from the editors and publishers there; I had to do everything by mail. Nor could I turn out the kind of material that would be acceptable to high-paying magazines. I tried, I even had an agent who urged me to give him things to sell to Holiday, Harper's Bazaar, etc., and who suggested topics and approaches, but it just wasn't in me; after a while I quit trying. Consequently my income from my editorial hackwork was low. In the 1960s I averaged $3,000 or $4,000 a year before taxes, gradually rising to around $10,000 in the later 1970s when I was doing regular stints for the Chicago Daily News, Bookletter, and Harper's. In some of the bad years we had emergency grants of $500 from PEN or the Author's League, which helped immensely; I never knew who was responsible for them, but to this day I'm grateful. And other grants, fellowships, and prizes were helpful too. But by 1979, I was worn out, and my son was at the university. The System had snagged me after all; I needed more cash than I could earn, even though by that time I was spending eighty or ninety hours a week in the cowshed during the winters. Always before, when I'd been asked to teach at universities around the country, I had declined, because I knew I couldn't face a class of students, but in the fall of 1979, apprehensively, I went to work at Syracuse University. The semimonthly paycheck was a blessing. I knew nothing about teaching, of course, but my editorial and literary doctoring skills were useful in the creative writing program, and gradually I became comfortable in my new profession.

The truth, as readers of my work know, is that I've suffered all my life from chronic psychiatric disorders that were acute during my thirties and have been slowly and painfully overcome in the years since then. The decade before I moved to Vermont was spent in almost complete invalidism, including a long spell of hospitalization and a longer spell of reclusion. When I remarried at the age of forty, I was well enough to shift from reclusion to seclusion, but I still could not do what literary people normally do with their lives--work in offices or classrooms, live in a city, use public transportation, go to theaters, etc. So I couldn't earn much money and I needed a quiet and private place to live. That's why I found myself in the backcountry of northern Vermont with a young wife-who was a refugee from eastern Europe and had been cheated of her education by the war; during the following years she obtained a high school equivalency diploma and bachelor's and master's degrees--and an infant son. When our friends in the counterculture of the 1960s, many of whom had come from Bethesda or Greenwich and had nice little independent incomes, praised my wife and me for living in "voluntary poverty," we laughed.

When did I write my poetry? Usually at the tag end of the night, three or four o’clock. Occasionally I could steal a day for myself. But always I had to be sure that everything else was squared away--deadlines, chores, errands, fieldwork, maintenance, reviews, hack editing--before I could turn to my own writing; that was part of my compulsiveness. Or was it simple necessity? When the roof leaks you’d better fix it. When your wife needs something, you'd better get it for her. I learned to write fast and revise with lightning speed, like a newspaper deskman, which at one time and briefly I had been. I admire and envy my friends, people like John Haines and Galway Kinnell, who can spend months or years on a poem and can put their own work ahead of everything else. I can't do it, and perhaps this, as much as matters of principle, is what has influenced me to believe that artists should not be given any more consideration than other people: there's nothing sacred, or even all that special, about a poem. Though I owe much to Ezra Pound, I rebel against his idea of the poet as philosopher king, which seems to me both dangerous and a concomitant, if not a cause, of his foolish politics. Once in 1965 I was able to give myself a whole month. I don't remember how this came about, but I wrote "Contra Mortem," a poem in thirty parts, doing one part a day for thirty days. (Later I found the wonderful epigraph from Lao-tzu, which fits so well.) This poem remains my personal favorite among all the poems I've written, though not many share my feeling. Later in the seventies and eighties I was granted a number of residencies at Yaddo, the artists' retreat at Saratoga Springs, where I could put everything else out of my mind. Much of The Sleeping Beauty was written there, and many other poems and essays as well.

But voluntary or not, the life of poverty we lived in Vermont is what we would have chosen anyway six months after we settled there. This is what is important. It was a hard life and we could have benefited from more leisure and less financial anxiety--which were factors in the eventual separation of

my wife and me--but it was in the fullest sense a rewarding life. And it was a possible life, nothing like poverty in the ghetto or in some ruined part of the world. Winters in northern Vermont are long, cold, and snowy, but we stayed warm in our banked and caulked little dwelling even when it was thirty or forty below, snug in our bed with all our clothes on and heated stones for our feet; I learned to love the winter, the cleanness and clarity of it, in spite of frostbite from the bitter wind and backache from shoveling snow. And this kind of adaptation occurred in every aspect of life there. What those years and that place afforded me was an opportunity to put everything together, the land and seasons, the people, my family, my work, my evolving sense of survival (for when I'd been in the hospital the doctors had told me I'd never again have anything like a normal life), in one tightly integrated imaginative structure. The results were my poems, for what they're worth, and in my life a very gradual but perceptible triumph over the internal snarls and screw-ups that had crippled me from childhood on. How gratifying it was! The process had begun before I went to Vermont, of course, with changes in my perception of myself and the world that turned me inside out and upside down, and it has continued since I was forced to leave (forced because no school in Vermont would hire me), but the time there was crucial. And I'm not sure I could have done the same thing to the same degree anywhere else.

In 1974, I think, I was awarded the Governor's Medal for Excellence in the Arts. Only one a year is given. No money is attached to it. But the ceremony in the governor's office in Montpelier was the first public occasion I had taken part in for twenty-five years, and that meant a great deal to me. Then having the recognition of my adopted state meant a great deal too. I still like that medal better than any other prize I've won. in 1978 at the age of fifty-seven I gave my first poetry reading, helped and supported by friends, in a small art gallery above a bank in the town of Chelsea. It was a big occasion, all the more since what had precipitated me into psychotherapy the first time, when I was twenty-five, was a poetry reading in Chicago that I ran away from. Then in 1982 I gave a reading at the Library of Congress before a quite large audience. It was a fantastic private victory. I wanted to tell some one about it, but no one was left in my life who had known me well when I was twenty-five. In the motel I wrote a note to my first wife, who was probably astonished to get it.

A life of hardship that was nevertheless possible was the luckiest thing that could have happened to me in my middle age. If I didn't choose it, I quickly acquiesced in it. And in a way I did choose it because the instincts that were pushing me pushed me in that direction. My grandfather, whom I admired greatly and after whom I was named, had established himself in the Dakotah Territory in 1885, and had lived there and written poems and stories there, in spite of similar hardship. I don't think I was consciously following his example and in fact his life and mine have been distinctly different, but that strain of Carruthian stubbornness and adventuresomeness was somewhere in me, buried and hard to find. In the end it saw me through--with lots of help from others along the way.

The young people I encounter today, mostly graduate students in the creative writing program at Syracuse, have nothing like this in their lives. In general they are too young to have it. But what worries me is that they don't recognize its value, they are aimed in the opposite direction, not toward the difficult but toward the easy. Everything in their upbringings and educations has trained them to seek the easy way, which is now the American way. Our lives are supposed to be "fun" and not much else. And for my young students the easy way is teaching; as quickly as they can they want to get their degrees and find niches in the academic world which will give them semimonthly paychecks in return for the least possible effort and discomfort. My friends, don't do it. Not when you're young, not even when you're middle-aged. It isn't because there's something intrinsically wrong with academic life, though I think now, as opposed to forty-five years ago when I was a grad student at the University of Chicago, this may be the case, but because it's too easy. You believe your writing can be a separate part of your life, but it can't. A writer's writing occurs in the midst of, and by means of, all the materials of life, not just a selected few. And if your life is easy, your writing will be slack and purposeless. I am generalizing, of course, but my main drift is sound and important. You need difficulty, you need necessity. And it isn't a paradox that you can choose necessity, can actually create necessity, if you seek the right objectives; not the great metaphysical necessity, but your own personal necessity; and it will be no less inexorable because you have chosen it. Once you are in it, your writing will be in it too.

Think of what Tom McGrath and Toni Morrison and Patrick Kavanagh and Cesare Pavese and Robert Frost have done with rural poverty. Compare their work to poems and stories about life in the academy. The latter are nearly all weak and foolish. Why? Because life in the academy is too easy. The authors of poems and stories about it do not react from it, they accept it, they go with it--they are conformable; whereas good writing is almost always against something. They take the values of the academy for granted.

Yet has not the corporate structure of education done us as much harm as the corporate structures of manufacturing, selling, and thought-control? Myself, I think the aspect of necessity that helps the most is physical, and I don't mean jogging or tennis. Country people, primitive people everywhere, are healthy because their lives force them to be healthy. I don't mean they always eat the right foods or refrain from smoking, drinking, etc. I suppose most of them also take the easy way if they can. But artists who choose necessity do so in an act of intelligence, and intelligence will still be with them after their choice. Hard necessary physical work is the best aid to composition I know.

Maybe on the other hand the best part of necessity is loving. Young people who tell me they will never marry, never have children, worry me even more than those who say they want to teach. My son David, whom I call the Bo, was central to everything I did during those years in Vermont. He was growing as I was regrowing. Because his mother was often working or going to school, but also because I wanted it, we spent a lot of time together. My love for him and his for me infused all my work. I can't imagine that work without him--or his mother too. We were a loving family. I know many great artists have worked without this element in their lives, e.g., Van Gogh, Emily Dickinson; this was their hardship. But obviously they’d have been better off personally if they’d had it, and I’m not convinced that if they had had it, their work wouldn’t be just as good as it is. For me, loving and being loved were necessities. My responsibilities to others did not make me feel less responsible to my work, as young people fear. On the contrary, the point of my life was to combine the responsibilities, to make them go together in one passage, one congeries of enactments, one passion, in spite of the stresses induced by lack of time and money. This was possible. It was done. Naturally it didn’t last forever.

Well, there are many kinds of necessity. A discussion of the possibilities in particular lives would be useless. But I believe nothing worth much ever came out of easy necessity, and I believe this is true on all levels and in all spheres. It is something for young artists to bear in mind. Voluntary poverty is not such a bad idea.