IT must have been about this time that my own imaginative life began to take form. Having listened to the tales told by my father, I wanted to begin inventing tales of my own. At that time and for long years afterward, there was no notion of writing. Did I want an audience, someone to hear me tell my tales? It is likely I did. There is something of the actor in me.
When later I began to write I for a time told myself I would never publish, and I remember that I went about thinking of myself as a kind of heroic figure, a silent man creeping into little rooms, writing marvelous tales, poems, novels—that would never be published.
Perhaps it never went quite that far. They would have to be published sometime. My vanity demanded that. Very well—I had died and had been buried in some obscure place. In my actual physical life I had been a house-painter, a workman in a factory, an advertising writer—whatever you please. I had passed unnoticed through the throng, you see. “I say, John, who is that fellow over there?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve seen him about. He looks like a movie actor or a gambler to me.”
You see, I dreamed of something like that—dead and buried away—and then one day a man is snooping about in a garret in an old empty house. He finds a pile of papers and begins looking them over, lazily, without much interest. But look! “Hello here! Say, here is something!”
You get the notion. I’ll not go into it further. It might have been a good card had I found within myself the courage to play it, but I didn’t.
As to that first tale of mine and its invention. It grew out of dissatisfaction with my father and a desire to invent another to take his place. And professional jealousy may have had something to do with it. He had been strutting about long enough. “Get out from under the spotlight for a time, daddy. Give your son a chance to see what he can do,” I perhaps really wanted to say.
It was fall and father had taken me with him to do a house-painting job in the country. The year was growing old and bad rainy weather had come. Perhaps we could not finish the painting job we were about to begin, but, as father had explained to the farmer who had just built a new house, we could at least put on a priming coat.
If the worst happened and we lost a good deal of time, waiting about—“well,” said father winking at me, “you see, kid, we’ll eat.”
The farmer came for us in the early morning, driving in a spring wagon into which was to be packed the ladders, pots and other materials of our trade, and by the time we had got to his place the rain, that had persisted for several days, began again. The carpenters were still at work inside the house, so that nothing could be done there, and father went off to the old cabin in which the farmer and his family were living until the new house could be finished. He would spend the day gossiping with the women folk or perhaps reading some book he had found in the house. The farmer had a barrel of hard cider in his cellar. The day promised to be not too depressing for father.