## II Unease in the First River

If I were to read of a man having the kind of
experience I am going to describe, I would want to
know something of his earlier life so that I might see
how he came to the main event. So here in this chapter
I will set down certain facts that had, I am sure, a
vital bearing on what was to come. I will try as it
were to draw the zigzag line of my rise towards the
Second River.

In my nineteenth year I had a kind of moral
awakening. Strong feelings suddenly came into my life -
feelings of human worth, feelings of right and wrong,
and "ought" became my strong word. Every situation
presented itself to me in terms of a sharp contrast
between the way people did live and the way people
ought to live. I found myself with a standard. By it
I measured myself and others, and all were wanting. So
in my immature way I became a critic of life and was
set moving away from every familiar thing and towards
a life I could not name or picture to myself except to
say that it would be more real, more adventurous, more
growing than anything I saw in the world around me.

Human beings have worth. I felt this deeply. People
ought to have dignity and realness. Ought to, but
haven't. I felt this keenly. Something is wrong with
people. They don't measure up. Yet they can measure up.

2

Can, but won't. Their besetting sin is a moral laziness,
a looseness of character and will. They don't care.
They take the easy way. Feeling power in me, I cared.
Feeling power in me I scorned taking the easy way.

Look at them, I'd say to myself or to the one
friend of my own age who shared my feelings. They are
good people, fine people - but what do they do? They go
to college. They take the usual courses. They graduate.
They find a job. They settle into the routine scheme
of things. And that's the end of them.

Most of the jobs I saw seemed to me to be dull
jobs. Office work, government jobs, teaching. Even law
and medicine, as I saw these professions practiced, seemed
unpromising. Most of the routines seemed deadly routines.
Most of the people seemed to have folded up. That wasn't
life. That wasn't living. That wasn't being a human
being. I wouldn't do it. I vowed I wouldn't. I'd find
something else. I'd discover another way.

I was outspoken. I showed what I felt. I went to
extremes. Moreover, some of my good moral force was
diverted to swell my egotism, to boost my feeling of
superiority, my sense of personal power. And, as I failed
to discriminate between the good use and the misuse
of the power that had come to me, I was in no position
to check the misuse. For good reasons and for bad reasons
I wasn't pleasant company.

I withdrew from the activities of my own age

3

group. More than one person turned to disliking me. Most of them thought I was queer, if not crazy. And so there came to be a rift between me and what had been my world, the and rift widened.

A

Fortunately for me, I continued liking people. Though I judged and condemned them, though some of them turned against me, I continued liking. Many faults I had and still have, but hate was not one of them. I've never been a hater. I've liked. Whatever I've thought of them, whatever I've said of them, however antagonistic I may have been at times, underneath it all there was a never failing caring for my own kind. I dare say it was this basic good will that sustained me through the troubles I made for myself, through the troubles that were made for me, sustained me and acted as my saving grace. But for it, many a time I was "fit to be tied". But for it, many a time I doubtless would have been tied.

The upshot of it all was this. Viewed negatively, viewed from the point of view of ordinary life, I began to misfit. Viewed positively, seen from the standpoint of developing life, I began to break from the moulds of what had been my life up to this time. I began to differentiate, outwardly as well as inwardly. My individualization was given a strong push forward. I was started on the difficult road of those who are dissatisfied with the ready-made, who are ready to try

4

out new ways, yet who have no early genius for any one
field of creative enterprise. Had I known in advance
how rough that road was to be, how long, how uphill
and unending, it is probable that I would not have had
the courage to take it. I might have been foolhardy
enough to plunge ahead; surely I would have lacked the
intelligent daring.

I was in the last year of high school when these
events took place. Naturally they influenced my choice
of a college and the courses I would take. I picked
a university far from the beaten tracks of the people
I knew. I signed up for studies unlike those pursued
by anyone around. Agriculture, scientific agriculture
was what I selected.

When the time came for me to go away, I set off
for that distant university with a feeling that I was
making a clean break with my past life and was on the
move at last to the life and adventures I wanted. And
I was doubly fired. Since I scorned making good in the
dull terms of the world, I burned all the more to make
good in my own terms. And I ran smack into my first
big set-back.

In no time at all it became quite clear to me
that I was not prepared to profit by those classes in
agriculture. I was wasting my time and my money, and,
what was worse, was undermining my self-confidence,
trying to do it. It took longer, but all too soon it

5

was also borne in on me that the kind of life I wanted
was not to be found, by me, at that college. I sort of
collapsed and had all I could do to stick to it to the
end of the first semester. Whereon I hauled down my
flag and returned home, feeling I had had my face
slapped.

After a rather miserable period at home I gathered
my forces and set off again, this time to a college
nearer home. Again much the same thing happened. I
seemed to have built up a pattern that repeated itself.
Off I'd go, only to be thrown back on myself. Doubt
crept into me, doubt of myself, doubt of my judgements,
doubt of my values, of my dreams and visions. If I
didn't look out I'd not only fail at my high life but
I'd flunk even ordinary life, the life I had so rashly
scorned.

At the third college, or was it the fourth? At
any rate I did eventually find a place that seemed to
suit me. I got into my stride. I did well in my studies.
My horizon broadened. I come together again in myself
and once more felt in touch with an unconquerable something
that was at the very core of me. And then - War, the
World War, crashed into my small world.

Europe was at war. The United States had gone in.
A draft law had been passed by Congress. Soon millions
of men of my age would be snatched from their private
lives and hurled into the maelstrom. With such things
happening and about to happen, it seemed utterly

6

meaningless to continue at college working for a future
that might never be. Besides, all of a sudden the
thing hit me and threw me into such conflict that I
couldn't study. I quit.

There was but one matter about which I was clear.
The so-called moral issues of the war moved me not in
the least. I didn't believe, and I couldn't work myself
up to believe, that all the right was on the side of
the Allies, all the wrong on the side of the Central
Powers. It seemed to me that it must be that some
ghastly mistakes had been committed by both sides, and
that millions of ordinary people were being dragged
in to bolster the opposing sides, to fight and die
for - what?

In other respects I was confused, and, as I have
said, in conflict. I couldn't believe it was a war of
right against wrong, I couldn't quite credit it that
we were fighting to make the world safe for democracy.
On the other hand, I did feel, and feel more and more,
that it was a great and terrible adventure, the
adventure of the age. And part of me wanted to get into
it as an adventure. And part of me shrank from the
horror of it. I wanted to be in it, yet I couldn't,
I simply couldn't bear the thought of my killing men.
That someone might kill me was not a thought to be
passed over lightly, but it took second place to the
certainty that I would have to kill others, if I
went in.

7

Of course, it wasn't altogether up to me. In fact
it wasn't up to me at all. I'd be drafted. Well, said
I to myself, that will be that. The day came when I
was called. I was examined, and rejected. I was rejected
because of physical defects - which was ironic, in as
much as I had been in athletics all my life.

Thereafter I made several attempts to get into
non-combatant services, and when none of these would
have me I found myself, once again, footloose.

To return to college was out of the question. I
was still in too much turmoil. Then what to do? This
question began to plague me. What to do? This question
hounded me. How simple it would have been had the army
taken me. How simple it would have been if, to begin
with, I had not gone off half cocked in quest of "real
life".

The world, plainly, was a tougher nut to crack
than I had thought. I, evidently, had less force and
fewer possibilities than I had estimated. I was not a†
all sure I was a match for what I was up against. But
what, precisely, was I up against? That was the baffling
thing. The world? Yes. Myself? Yes†. But what specific
things prevented me from doing what I still felt I could
do, from finding what I still felt I could find? And
what exactly was it that I could do? What exactly was
it that I could find? Of all the questions I wrestled
with, the last two, I felt, pointed to the heart of

8

my difficulties. If I could answer these, the others
would be cleared up.

I began searching. I felt a new gravity in my life,
a danger as well as a challenge. My situation, I felt,
was not yet desperate, but was becoming so. The dis-
ruption of the world through war had a counterpart in me.
I was threatened with chaos. For several years I had lived
a broken life. For several years my best energies had
been turned back upon myself, and had to some extent been
bottled up. Now I could sense in myself a host of dis-
cordant desires and thoughts, and a temptation to fly
into anything and everything indiscriminately. As never
before I had to keep hold of myself, and again and again
remind myself of my purpose, and point my life in
an earnest quest. There was no telling when I would find
what I sought, but, so it seemed to me, if I could but
hold myself to searching I would thereby achieve some
measure of continuity and singleness and keep myself
from going off the deep end.

So I looked. So I tried. I tried this. I tried
that. Not this. Not that. I got jobs. I quit jobs.
I rejected, and was rejected. Not this. Not that.
not
My knowledge of what I did want increased by leaps
and bounds. My knowledge of what did not want me similarly
increased. My recognition of what I did want, and of
what wanted me, remained closed.

I went here. I went there. I knocked about. I

9

thrashed about. Not here. Not there. Nowhere could I
come to rest.

In my high moments I had vision. As from an elevation I'd look down and see the ends of what men ordinarily seek. I'd know those ends were futile. With ever increasing depth I'd know those ends did not measure up to the worth and dignity of the life of human beings; and in this knowing my own covetous desires would be as though burnt away, and with renewed power I'd feel my drive, my longing for the unnamed real.

In my low periods I'd be on the verge of folding up. That worst of all worms would eat at me - frustration, defeat, the slack will and weakened heart that is ready to cry failure. I'd feel so lost to myself that I'd doubt I'd ever find myself. I'd feel so broken that I couldn't believe I've ever been mended. I'd feel so lost in the world that I'd tell myself I would meet every accept the smallest place where I could fit in, and some little work that I could do well.

As a matter of fact I did try for a small place. But I was not to be let off so easily. I had started on a way. I had to continue. I had to continue on that way, regardless of my wish.

How does one keep going? One does, but how?

There is visible help. People help people. People helped me, or I would have perished. There must be invisible help too. The beatings a human being can stand,

10

the mystery of human endurance is not to be entirely
explained by the factors of which we are aware.

I had started out to attain a greater life. Now
I couldn't stop. I couldn't turn back. I had to go
on, even though what I actually found was that I was
increasingly out of life, on the sidelines, in a
pocket, in a pit which contained none of the reality I
sought but many brutal facts against which I had to
throw up guards.

I had set forth to gain freedom. I had to go on,
though I knew I was becoming more and more entrapped.

I had begun by feeling, "I am right. If the world
disbelieves what I believe, if the world believes what
I disbelieve, the world is wrong." I could not now
reverse it. I could not now act on the belief that I
was wrong and the world right. I had to retain a basic
belief in myself and my way, even though I was forced
to realize that there was something very very wrong
with me. There was a double wrong. Plainly the world
was out of joint. It became stark clear that I too was
out of joint. But I had to go and up, for there was no
unity, at any rate no unity to be found by me, on the
lower levels.

I was in the rapids of the Relentless Stream. There
was no turning back. If I allowed myself to slip back,
I was done for.

The Relentless Stream! It was that. There was no

11

let up. Its currents became more powerful and swirling.
I swam and I sank. And where was it taking me? Where was
it taking the millions of people caught in it?

This life. This life wasn't our proper life. This
life wasn't the life of human beings. I did not fit
in it. Who did? It was not fit for me. For whom was it
fit? I had seen many men, all kinds of people, in all
walks and conditions. I had made many friends and come
to see inside them. I had yet to find the person who
in his heart would say that this was his proper life,
that he really did fit into it, that it really was fit
for him. People knew the truth. People knew they did
not really belong in this life, and that this
life did not really belong to them. People knew
they were as orphans cast adrift in an alien medium.
But who lived out this truth? Very few. Very few,
because few believed there was a real alternative. Very
few, because few were convinced that another life is
possible. To the questions - Is a change possible?
Can there be a different life? - the collective experience,
and mass-beliefs, said No.

And so. And so there was an undeclared but very
potent conspiracy among the people of the world. People
conspired with people to make a surface show to the effect
that they were making the best of an inevitably bad
lot. People conspired with people to hide, each from
himself, and all from all, the certain knowing that they

12

were misfits and _should_ be misfits in this world-as-it-is, in this life-as-it-is. Even in private life, but particularly in public life, every one put on a "glad face". Those whose inner face of anguish shown through were condemned as "poor sports" and left alone. Those who smiled all the time and most successfully lived the lie that All is Right were rated high and much in demand. Out of all of this arose a mass-suggestion compelling everyone, except the very weak or the very strong, not simply to act as if, not merely to make believe, but actually and as thoroughly as possible to _make_ himself accept and adjust to a life that really did not agree with him, and never would. And so, by living a lie, and by doubting deliverance through truth, people locked themselves in their wretched plight.

When I saw things this way I was fired to go on. Deep within me, and whatever the evident evidence to the contrary, I would know I was on the right track.

Even so, it continued as before. Try this. Try that. Not this. Not that.

I climbed small hills and plunged into abysses. I built. I left fall, or wrecked. I loved. I forgot. I was intense, or nothing. Now and again I'd be of some real service to others. More often I was selfish, the more so the more desperate my personal needs became. I was honest. I also bluffed. Indeed I came to be more of a bluffer than I knew. I struggled with myself.

13

I indulged myself. By turns I was sensitive and incredibly callous. Some of the things I did make me wince even now when I recall them. I hurt myself and I grew. I grew and outgrew. I outgrew friends and occupations, places and interests, and passed on.

Throughout it all I had more fun and good times than one would gather from this sketch. Who will say that my days of happiness were not as important, developmentally, as my days of suffering? I do not believe in the sad faced school of saints. On the other hand I do believe in suffering because purgation is necessary, and suffering is the fire that melts and makes clean.

During the broken chaotic period, the four years stretch after I left high school, I lost or had stripped from me most of the beliefs and no few of the ideals with which I had grown up. One by one my illusions departed and, though I was not aware of it, there was some danger that I would come to a stop and become arrested into disillusion, mistaking disillusion for reality.

Each loss made necessary a painful readjustment. Some losses were compensated for by the discovery of more realistic and more valuable attitudes. Each stripping away occasioned something of an inward revolution and an opening of my eyes to a new view of the world around. Most of these new views, when they first came to me, were anything but hopeful; they were

14

rather grim. What fairy tales I had been told about
life, what myths about America, what nonsense about
the world. A good deal of my bitterness was due not
so much to my finding what the world actually was as
to my discovery of how I had been systematically
duped by what passed for education.

Of all my loses none was as devastating as the
crash of my belief in the existence of God. I will not
attempt to detail this experience. Those who have
suffered similarly will understand the agonized depths
of the simple statement that my belief in an anthropo-
morphic God collided with the facts of natural science
and the theory of evolution. Over night as it were
I found myself in a Godless universe. Over night I left
behind me the vague but reassuring over-world of
Diety and felt myself flatfooted and abandoned, an
accident among accidents, soul-less among the soul-less,
an animal pushed back upon his own devices in a merciless,
and, worse, a meaningless struggle for survival. I
was as a man with a rope around his neck, and the trap
sprung. For days and weeks I did not give one goddenn
whether I was fit to survive or not.

What was left? What remained of the young fellow
who had so boldly set out to live his life according
to his values? I am not sure. The wonder is that any-
thing was left. Yet, something remained. The wonder
of it! Something remained and remained intact, an

15

irreducible nucleus around which new beliefs, if not a
new man, could be built.

I hit bottom and began coming up.

A month or so after I lost God I found my mind.
My mind, not merely some thoughts or ideas or a mental
interest, but my *itself* itself, as a center of functioning,
suddenly awakened. I had force of mind. I had power of think-
ing. I came alive in the world of mind and began a passionate
exploration of this new world. I adventured through science,
was not
philosophy, history, literature. This *was* studying, as in
college. This was complete living on the intellectual plane.
This was growing, expanding, contending with the fundament-
al questions, drawing near to the best findings of mankind
through the ages, coming abreast of great men and great
minds, feeling them as my companions.

In time I came upon books, and upon people in daily
living, who aroused what nowadays would be called my social
conscience. I became concerned for human society. Through
socialism I came to see the social world, and the problems
of this world, in a new light. And I saw something to
live for, something worth working for, a place at which I
could put my shoulder to the wheel. And, seeing it, I tried
to do it. In this case, as in others, I was true to one of
the few virtues I possessed, that, namely, of endeavoring
to put my *ide* into practice, *to* live what I believed. I
worked as a worker, lived among the people, experienced
what the rank and file are up against, and shared their
vision of a new social order.

16

Socialism held me for a year and more. My concern
for the social condition of the world's masses remained
in force longer. But neither was I to stop here. I began
to pull away. Again my familiar pattern became operative,
and to this good cause I found myself saying - Not this,
not that. I had to move on.

The plays of Bernard Shaw came into my hands. This
was a lively experience. It was rather important too.
Shaw wittingly prodded me to cast out my sham once and
for all, and to be candid at whatever cost. Shaw un-
wittingly gave me a taste for his kind of writing and
persuaded me that I too might be a dramatist. For the
first time in my life I sat down and tried to write
"literature". I didn't get very far, and I am sure it was
a good thing that before very long I turned against
that particular venture. But the seed of writing had
been planted.

I was searching again. It seemed to me that I had
tried practically everything a man could try except -
why hadn't I thought of it before? Music! I had to
laugh at myself, but I was serious too. Music, x of
all the arts, had been my first love and the strongest.
From boyhood I had loved music. When things moved me
my first impulse was not to put them into words but
into songs that I composed as I went along. It just
might be that I had it in me to become, no, not an
instrumentalist, but a composer. Surely it was worth
a trial. And I had no inhibition whatsoever about

17

giving anything and everything a trial. Why not music?

As a matter of fact I did give myself a go
at music. Also as a matter of fact, for reasons we need
not go into, I gave it up.

What next?

It was coming to be a joke. My friends, my family,
I myself, were becoming a bit dizzy with all my ins and
outs and changes. But it was far from a laughing matter.
I had spent my money, and other people's too. I had
spent my energy. I had spent my life. And where was I?
What did it all amount to? Experience, yes. But my kind
of experience had no value in the marketplaces of the
it
world. Did I have any value for me, or for my friends,
or for anyone in any world? I couldn't keep on at this
rate. I simply couldn't.

Then a good thing happened. Two good things. Three
good things.

I came upon the writings of Walt Whitman. I came
upon the writings of Goethe. It was in the writings
of the these two, different as they were in some respects,
and in books written about them, that I found the
mysterious connection I had been seeking. I found it,
and I felt a deep and happy response. I had found
it,
and I knew I had found it. Yet, had you asked me
precisely what it was, I couldn't have told you. I
couldn't have put it into words.

And then, as though things were at last shaping up

18

for me, I discovered modern native literature and began making personal contact with some of the living writers of America - Lew is Mumford, Lola Ridge, Waldo Frank, others. At one and the same time I came to myself, met with people who were to have lasting meaning for me, and found entrance to what I felt to be my the sphere of life in which I belonged. A new world opened, the world of human values, cultural values, and the art of writing, a world at hand, connected vitally with the America of my experience.

Had it not been that seasons of adversity had somewhat sobered me, chastened me, rubbed me down, I doubtless would have felt great personal triumph in this happy turn of events. I might have felt I had come through, once and forever, that my ordeals were over, that a permanent victory had been won. As it was, I felt thankful to the God who presumably did not exist, and thankful, too, to the people, ~~relatively few~~ who by their steadfast belief in me had given me spiritual support. And, I seemed to discern, in this life that was ~~supposed~~ said to be accidental, a hidden pattern, an order deeper than the chaos, and a destiny for individuals.

As for the specific ~~unique~~ events of my good fortune, my appraisal was moderately level. I felt, and this decisively, that I had come out of the woods in which I had been groping; that I had climbed and had reached, temporarily at least, a plateau of some kind, and my past efforts and difficulties were

19

justified; that, whatever came to pass, I would not
ever fall back into just those woods. Now I knew the
direction in which to move. Now I knew what I wanted
to do.

I began writing. Rather, I began learning to
write. I settled down to one thing as never before in
my life. It wasn't easy. In fact it was very difficult.
I had difficulty keeping my body still.
I had been a "rush-animal" for so many years that my
body wanted to pull away from every chair I put it in.
Mind wanted one thing. Emotions sometimes wanted what
mind wanted, sometimes wanted what they wanted, some-
times wanted what body wanted. Body had strong bents
of its own. How to gather these three parts of myself
into a working unit?

I had difficulties of other kinds. Speaking came
easy to me. All my life I had been fluent and released
in speech and could, on the whole, say exactly what I
wanted to. The attempt to write tended to tighten me.
When I tried to open the door to what was inside,
either nothing would come out or out would come a rush
that no words of mine could possibly put down; and,
when I did put something down, nine times out of ten
it wasn't at all what I wanted to say.

I felt I had something to say. I felt full of it,
fertile with it, and under pressure to get it out. I
had a feeling for words and rhythms and word-patterns,

20

but, a discrepancy plagued me. My life-experience so
far exceeded my ability to write that I wondered if any
amount of practice would ever enable my craft to catch
up. My experience, besides, was disorganized. It was
of
so disorganized that I often despaired, becoming able
to organize it in writing, or in any way, no matter
how long and hard I tried.

Nevertheless I worked at it. I worked day and
night, month after month, feeling that my very life
depended on it. This, I felt, was my last opportunity.
It was the last thing I would ever try. Either I would
succeed in this, or -

So I applied myself to the task at hand, with zest,
encouraged, discouraged, with determination and more
power of will and ability to discipline myself than I
had known I possessed.

My desire for excellence, thwarted in outward
living, turned full force on my writing and made me
resolve that no work of mine would leave my hands until
it measured up. I was quite prepared to work along and
alone indefinitely, until I was sure within myself that
I had something worth publishing.

Several years passed. Manuscripts accumulated,
papers as varied in their content as my life had been
varied.

Meanwhile, deep within me a seed was germinating -
the kind of seed, I have come to believe, that Great Life
plants in the core of every human being. This seed, it