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 this need