| I don't know how I became a writer, but
I think it was because of a certain force in me that had to write and that
finally burst through and found a channel. My people were of the working class
of people. My father, a stone-cutter, was a man with a great respect and
veneration for literature. He had a tremendous memory, and he loved poetry, and
the poetry that he loved best was naturally of the rhetorical kind that such a
man would like. Nevertheless it was good poetry, Hamlet's Soliloquy, Macbeth,
Mark Antony's Funeral Oration, Grey's Elegy, and all the rest of it. I heard it
all as a child; I memorized and learned it all He sent me to college to the state university. The desire to write, which had been strong during all my days in high school, grow stronger still. I was editor of the college paper, the college magazine, etc, and in my last year or two I was a member of a course in playwriting which had just been established there. I wrote several little one-act plays, still thinking I would become a lawyer or a newspaper man, never daring to believe I could seriously become a writer. Then I went to Harvard, wrote some more plays there, became obsessed with the idea that I had to be a playwright, left Harvard, had my plays rejected, and finally in the autumn of 1926, how, why, or in what manner I have never exactly been able to determine. But probably because the force in me that had to write at length sought out its channel, I began to write my first book in London. I was living all alone at that time. I had two rooms -- a bedroom and a sitting room -- in a little square in Chelsea in which all the houses had that familiar, smoked brick and cream-yellow-plaster look. |