Although my father died several years ago, my mother is alive, and now in her late eighties. In the sixty-five years of her life in this country, she has seldom left the kitchen, yet she knows more about the human heart, about human weakness and suffering, and about human caring than I shall ever know. She is gentle and kind, and her adage to me since childhood has been: Keep out of mischief—as sound a bit of wisdom concerning conduct as you are likely to find anywhere, not excluding Spinoza.
It was an alive neighborhood, populated by people of mixed origin, although predominantly Jewish. There was plenty of activity on our street: kids practicing on horns, playing fiddles, playing games—mostly baseball and peg and stick. Peg and stick may require a bit of explanation for the present younger generation. To start the game, it is necessary to steal a broom. This is always done with the confident expectation that this article is something your mother will never miss. Cut off the handle, so you have a stick about twenty-two inches long. Also cut a seven inch peg. Now go out in the street and with your penknife make a hole in the asphalt. In summer the pitch is tacky, so this is no problem. Stand by the hole and, using the stick as a bat, knock the peg down the street. Then mark the hole by putting the stick in it. Your opponent must now take the peg, wherever it lies, and toss it toward the stick. The place it falls is marked, and, of course, as the turns go around, whoever gets the peg closest to the hole wins the point.
But most of all there was an awful lot of talking—on the streets, on the corner by the delicatessen, and among people sitting on their front porches. Talk ... and lots of laughter. And there were great good times at home, especially in the evenings when my father told stories of his sojourn in Europe, or his adventures in America, or his day-to-day experiences at work.
I was the youngest child in a family of six children, and my life revolved around such matters as dogs, reading, and poetry. I had my own dog, but I also caught every stray dog in the neighborhood, washed and defleaed it, and anointed it with cologne (causing a great rumpus when discovered by one of my sisters from whom the cheap scent had been appropriated). My poetical labors were not properly appreciated by my sisters, either, who would collapse into gales of laughter when I interrupted their bathroom sessions of beauty culture to read them my latest verses.
My father built me a study in the basement and I set up a program of studies for myself: chemistry one week, physics the next, then mathematics, philosophy, etc. It was a wonderful thing until I blew the place up in the course of my chemical experiments. This ended my career in the physical sciences.
One summer I painted our house—a complete exterior paint job utilizing only a one and one-half inch brush. It took me from June to September, and finally the neighbors were complaining to my mother about the way she was working me. They didn’t know that I was in no hurry to finish the job. It was not only a labor of love so far as the painting went, but I was spending my time up there in a glory of memorizing poetry and delivering noble dissertations.
I was seldom seen without a book, and nobody regarded this as particularly odd, for the sight of young people reading on the streets, on their porches, on a favorite bench in Douglas Park was common. It is not common today. The only wonder is that I never toppled off a curb or got killed crossing a street—one read as he walked and paid little attention to the hazards of city living.
Furthermore, nobody told us, in school or elsewhere, what a child between the ages of nine and twelve should be reading and what he should read from twelve to fourteen, etc. We read everything that took our fancy, whether we understood it or not, from Nick Carter to Kant and Penrod and Sam to Joyce. And when we became infatuated with some writer, we stopped barely short of total impersonation. When I read that Shelley had carried crumbs in his pocket, I started to do likewise and practically lived on breadcrumbs for days.
All of us who grew up in the Depression years on the West Side remember vividly the men out of work and the soup kitchens going on Ogden Avenue; houses and apartments becoming crowded as married sons and daughters moved in with their families. People stayed home and listened to the radio: Wayne King playing sweet music from the Aragon Ballroom and Eddie Cantor singing that potatoes are cheaper, so now’s the time to fall in love.
I went to school with the heels worn off my shoes and sat in class with my overcoat on because there were two holes in the seat of my pants. When the teacher asked a question, I would reply with a sermon. I spent my days fuming ... I hadn’t found myself. One day I encountered the works of Schopenhauer and felt I had at last arrived at an idea of life on a highly negative plane. A short time later I presented my whole schema to a friend, who blew it up completely.