Duke University - Chanticleer Yearbook (Durham, NC)

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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

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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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