Duke University - Chanticleer Yearbook (Durham, NC)

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I will—can only—answer for myself, by attempting to explain briefly but truthfully my discovery of my own work, its nature and function in my life, per- haps in the life of the world. I was the son of parents who, like most Americans at the time of the Great Depression, suf- fered profound humiliations—economic and, thus, emotional—which were inevit- ably filtered through their screening love to me, their first child, born in the black winter of 1933. Yet though I was faced in my early years not with actual poverty but certainly with the threat of poverty (the Depression continuing into the Sec- ond War) and though my father (a small-town North Carolinian with only a small-town high-school education) hoped that I would want to study medi- cine, I have no memory of ever wishing to be anything but an artist. At first, a painter; then a musician. But when I had tried and proved to myself that my gifts for painting and music were insufficient; that whatever my ambitions, I could not implement them, then (in my last years of high school) I began to write—poems, stories, novels. Through all those years of IS

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more permanent than other people. A craft, a skill may—given good health— last a man all his life; very few friends, wives, sons, daughters will prove as en- during. Age, disease, death—and worst, disloyalty—exist and will in time win all that we love. The hardest shield for our- selves will be our work, if we have troubled to discover and master and com- mit ourselves to some rewarding work. But our selves also exist and are as frail, vulnerable as any other person we may have loved. Yet it is ourselves which will remain true to us longest of all. All our weaknesses—our vanity, greed, dis- honesty, cruelty, fickleness—will accom- pany us closely to our graves. What shield is there then against our own loyal flaws? What may free us from ourselves, our final enemy?—work, perhaps only work, the daily commitment to a task which will demand from us full and strenuous exercise of our strongest selves; our com- prehending, foreseeing, order-creating minds, our miraculously complex physical competence. . So work frees a man. Yet I have only spoken negatively, denyingly of the things work frees us from. The difficult but necessary question remains—what things can a man’s work free him for? 17

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school and college I worked naturally, almost unthinkingly, never seriously won- dering why I was painting, or, finally, writing. Yet since college had given me freedom to choose, I had chosen for my- self an education likely to feed my wish and ambition (the study of language, literature, history, art, religion, anthro- pology, psychology)—had chosen without seeing that the wish to become an artist was more than a wish, more than a bent, more than a choice made for me by elimination of all I could not do. What 1 had not seen was that my wish was a need, forced on me apparently by two large forces—birth (gifts, talents) and environment—and it was only towards the end of my formal education (and largely I think, through the gathered weight of comprehensions and failures which comprised that education) that I came to understand that what I had wanted was what I had needed, that my wish was work, that most of my educa- tion—my life—had been a process both of creating a need for my particular work and of preparing me for it. But why is the writing of fiction my work? 19