d even depressing neighborhoods--Eighth Avenue, for
instance, about which he later wrote a story, and a very good one ("A
Quiet Duet"); Hell's Kitchen, that neighborhood that lies (or did), on
the West Side of Manhattan, between Eighth and Tenth Avenues,
Thirty-sixth and Forty-first Streets; Little Italy, the region below
Delancey and north of Worth Street on the East Side; Chinatown;
Washington Street (Syria in America); the Greeks in Twenty-seventh and
-eighth Streets, West Side. All these and many more phases of New York's
multiplex life took his full and restless attention. Once he said to me
quite excitedly, walking up Eighth Avenue at two in the morning--I was
showing him some rear tenement slums in the summertime--"God, how I hate
to go to bed in this town! I'm afraid something will happen while I'm
asleep and I won't see it!" That was exactly how he felt all the time, I
am sure.

And in those days he was most simple, a very Spartan of a boy. He hadn't
the least taste for drink, lived in a small hall-bedroom
somewhere--Eighth Avenue, I believe--and took his meals in those shabby
little quick-lunch rooms where the characters were more important to him
than the food. (My hat--my hat is in my hand!) Intellectually he was so
stern and ambitious that I all but stood in awe of and reverence before
him. Here, I said to myself, is one who will really do; let him be as
savage as he pleases. In America he probably needs to be.

And during this short time, what scraps of his early life he revealed!
By degrees I picked up bits of his early deprivations and difficulties,
if such they might be called. He had been a newspaper reporter, or had
tried to be, in Kansas City, had worked in the college restaurant and
laundry of the middle-West State university from which he had graduated,
to help pay his way. Afterward he had assisted the janitor of some great
skyscraper somewhere--Kansas City, I believe--and, what was most
pleasing to me, he in nowise emphasized these as youthful difficulties
or made any comment as to their being "hard." Neither did he try to
boastingly minimize them as nothing at all--another wretched pose. From
him I learned that throughout his youth he had been carried here and
there by the iron woman who was his mother and whom he seemed to adore
in some grim contentious way, smothering his comments as though he
disliked to say anything at all, and yet describing her at times as
coarse and vulgar, but a mother