There are times in a life when a word or a gesture, a song or a scent, can instantaneously send you back to a moment in the past. It could be a brief, benign moment: the certain way you turned your head to see a birthday present, or the first time fresh rain dripped in your mouth. It can also be a profound moment, catastrophic or triumphant, that you will never forget, that pops up unexpectedly in memory from time to time. The past is a dream world of events that are remembered with varying degrees of perspective.
I find I remember minute details of some things, yet am hazy on the larger episode of which they are a part. I remember faces better than names, always have, so some of the names in these pages are not the names of the people they represent. I remember lawyers better than faces, so some of the names in these pages are not the names of the people they represent. For the most part, these reminiscences are presented affectionately, but as with anyone’s youth, mine contained heroes and villains, and I have no desire to get a phone call from a disgruntled eighty-year-old villain who denies his villainy. I have spent a fair amount of time speaking to people who lived those days with me, who reminded me of events I had forgotten and the fine points of ones I remembered. I am surprised at how much remains in my memory. Yet there are reasons why I chose to write about these particular pieces of my life, even if I was not conscious of them. Each of them underlines the basic influences in my youth, among them: humor, love, sex, music, ethicalness, and fear. It is surprising to me in reading these stories how unsure of myself I was, how afraid I was of risk and rejection, and how intensely everything was felt, large and small. This intensity is one of the mixed blessings of being young. Mellowing, it seems, is one of the meager compensatory blessings of being old.
The book concerns events that happened to me from the ages of nine to twenty-five. It is by no means a comprehensive autobiography, but rather an account of events that stand out in my memory, that have a chronology all their own. During the concentrated personal investigation of my past that the writing required, I relived the events in my mind, sometimes painfully but mostly joyfully, in amusement. I fell in love again, got angry again, laughed again, felt the pride of achievement and the sting of failure as if it were yesterday. From a distance, through the gauze of time, I can see how trivial some of my problems appear now. But to a young person, his place in his social universe is crucial to happiness and function, and patience is a notion that must be gradually learned. These difficulties were certainly not trivial when they occurred; in fact, they were the overriding realities of my young life.
I received a fine education at Alfred University and had a wonderful time, though my account of that four years contains some agony as well. There was the broadening exhilaration of living in a community of smart, ambitious young people, with their vivacity and laughter, in a rural setting so different from my home. Unfortunately, there was also the cruel actuality of institutional bigotry. Alfred today is an excellent school where those onerous elements of college life are long past and forgotten, but they took their damn time about it, and that’s the way it was when I was there. I remember with particular fondness my introduction to acting, especially the contribution of C. D. Smith and Ronald Brown, who had an abiding love for the theater and started a spark in me that has never been extinguished.
There are several accounts in these pages of relationships with girls and women with whom I was in love and in lust. It is my intention not to titillate but to communicate the excitement that sex held for me and its importance in my life, which has evidently been considerable. Though I by no means set out to write a treatise on how sexual mores have evolved, it struck me how clearly this plays out in the book, and how radical the change was by the end of the sixties. I wonder at our naïveté and desperation, those of us who lived on the hazy line of mutable moral attitudes: one foot in the nineteenth century and the other in the twentieth.
My narratives of romantic love, for me that rarest of conditions, were the most emotional for me to remember. Looking from the present, despite some heartbreak, I am grateful for having undergone its rigors, as subsequently I have met many a person who has, unfortunately for them, never been in love. I am certain today that despite my youth, I was truly in love in those instances, so there is no need for revisionism here. I am also convinced that loving and being loved in return is as high an achievement as any that one can attain in life, and worth preserving, though making it last is the tricky part.
There are a number of comparisons in the book between situations in my life and scenes from movies: “I felt like I was in a Gene Kelly musical.” Perhaps I use them as a reference because, to me as a child, movies were glamorous products of imagination and talent in which problems got solved and people were happy. There have been moments in my life when I thought, This is just like a movie, a case of life imitating art, which imitates life to begin with. Maybe such thinking makes a happy episode seem more momentous, or a tough spot more manageable. At times the judgment is made retrospectively. When I hurt my thumb in the mechanism of an M1 rifle and howled with pain, I didn’t think of a funny scene from a Laurel and Hardy army movie then, but I do now.
As far as my parents are concerned, they did their best to provide security, and there was no doubt that they loved my sister, Rhoda, and me very much. Good people, idiosyncratic people. My father takes it on the chin here a bit. He was a powerful personality and a gifted comedian who meant well, but he had a tremendous amount of anger in him. He underestimated the effect on his wife and children of his temper, made all the more frustrating by his consistent myopia about others’ approaches to life. Whatever our faults, the Kleins engaged one another, made one another laugh, were never boring. Reticent we were not: We went for the laughs; we fought for time at the dinner table. It is far from coincidence that such a family would produce an individual who makes a living by his imagination. I want to thank them and a host of others who played a part in my life. If you played a part in my life and went unmentioned, please forgive me, as the Academy has asked me to limit the number of people I may thank.