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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 A complete answer would require total understanding of my needs and motives, an understanding which I do not have. Yet this much at least is true. I have worked for twelve years now in the soli- tude necessary to a writer, then subjected by work to the judgment of an unpre- dictible, often uncomprehending public so that I might, first, understand (or at least examine and set in order) the threatening mysteries of the world, of my fellow human beings and of myself; second, that I might communicate my understanding, however, inadequate, to other human beings as baffled and en- dangered as I by all the controllable and uncontrollable mysteries of the universe, God, human nature. 21