immoral.

I was a boy divided in two. One part of me dwelt in a fanciful realm
of his own weaving, and the other part was a commonplace and protesting
inhabitant of a world of lessons, disappointments and discipline. My
instincts were not vicious. Ideas bubbled up within me continually
from an apparently inexhaustible spring, and the very strength of the
longings they set in motion puzzled and troubled my parents: what I
seem to see most distinctly now is a young mind engaged in a ceaseless
struggle for self-expression, for self-development, against the inertia
of a tradition of which my father was the embodiment. He was an enigma
to me then. He sincerely loved me, he cherished ambitions concerning me,
yet thwarted every natural, budding growth, until I grew unconsciously
to regard him as my enemy, although I had an affection for him and a
pride in him that flared up at times. Instead of confiding to him my
aspirations, vague though they were, I became more and more secretive as
I grew older. I knew instinctively that he regarded these aspirations
as evidences in my character of serious moral flaws. And I would sooner
have suffered many afternoons of his favourite punishment--solitary
confinement in my room--than reveal to him those occasional fits of
creative fancy which caused me to neglect my lessons in order to put
them on paper. Loving literature, in his way, he was characteristically
incapable of recognizing the literary instinct, and the symptoms of its
early stages he mistook for inherent frivolity, for lack of respect
for the truth; in brief, for original sin. At the age of fourteen I had
begun secretly (alas, how many things I did secretly!) to write stories
of a sort, stories that never were finished.

He regarded reading as duty, not pleasure. He laid out books for me,
which I neglected. He was part and parcel of that American environment
in which literary ambition was regarded as sheer madness. And no one
who has not experienced that environment can have any conception of the
pressure it exerted to stifle originality, to thrust the new generation
into its religious and commercial moulds. Shall we ever, I wonder,
develop the enlightened education that will know how to take advantage
of such initiative as was mine? that will be on the watch for it,
sympathize with it and guide it to fruition?

I was conscious of still another creative need, that of dramatizing
my ideas, of converting them into action. And