10

Introduction to Motivation

Motivation, reduced to its simplest definition, means why.

Motivation is that which prompts a person, or a character, to act in a certain way. Every action has a reason. Indeed, nothing ever happens on earth without motivation.

As a writer, you must constantly ask yourself why a person or a character acts as he does. You must determine the motivation.

How is this possible?

First, let’s consider this.

All living characters have a certain universality about them. Human beings, let them be Greek, Roman, German, or American, are basically the same. Only the veneer—their customs, ethics, or social conformity—makes them appear different from each other. Their basic emotions and drives, such as hunger, fear, love, hate, devotion—are universal. Individuals feel them in different degrees of intensity. Emotions create motivation. A good place to begin the study of motivation would seem to be with ordinary people.

But who is ordinary?

The obvious answer is, a person who looks and acts the way the majority do. If he is too handsome or too tall or too short, too fat, or too thin, he is not ordinary. The ordinary person is one who can lose himself in a crowd without attracting any special attention or interest. You look at ordinary people on the street and promptly forget their faces as though you had never seen them.

But actually, even the ones who can lose themselves in a crowd aren’t ordinary. On the contrary, they are probably hypersensitive about their nondescript appearance. And to be hypersensitive isn’t in the least ordinary. They probably curse their fate for their sameness, just as a man whose eyes are too close together curses that physical affliction. These nondescript persons may develop a fearful inferiority complex when they observe that others almost look through them. At all costs, they want to be noticed—by someone, somewhere, sometime.

How can they attract attention? Plain or drab-looking people accomplish this by their ingenuity, cleverness, eagerness to please, or their generosity. Great men and great women have come from their ranks.

Why should this be so?

Frustration and disappointment more often than not are the incentives to achieve something great. On the other hand, those who are very good-looking sit back complacently, amused, feeling quite secure in their appearance.

Then perhaps these good-looking people are really the normal ones.

No. If this were entirely true, then they would always remain deficient in those attributes which can make an average-looking person great.

It is obviously foolish to think that all attractive persons necessarily lack the qualities to be outstanding in some higher endeavor. They, too, have all the qualities that make others outstanding, but since they achieve acclaim, praise, even adulation, without special effort, their ability to achieve something worthwhile in the mental sphere may be go unused. On the other hand, if an extraordinarily good-looking person is a thinking human being, he may believe that he has achieved certain prominence or attention only because of his attractiveness and not by any special effort on his part.

Consequently, these good-looking people can also develop devastating inferiority complexes. They may wish to live down their good looks and prove to the world that although they happen to be attractive, they still can be as intelligent and resourceful as others who are outstanding in their field.

Almost all those who draw attention in a crowd and also those who are rarely noticed want to live down something they consider undesirable for their complete well-being.

It seems reasonable, therefore, to draw the conclusion that there are no “ordinary” people.

Motivation moves silently behind all the personal turmoil that exists. Motivation is the culprit responsible for all that has happened and will happen.

As a writer, if you are introspective (and I trust you are), motivation is usually obvious in yourself. But frequently it is exceedingly difficult to detect in others. Because of this, the lack of it is one of the main reasons why plays, stories, and novels fail.

Every character must have a past, a present, and a future. And in terms of these three dimensions, each one must talk, move, act, and grow. Characters who represent only the present, without any past and future, are straw men. Remember this. The Present is the child of Yesterday and the father of Tomorrow. In constructing believable characters, these three are indivisible elements.

All writers must gain a working understanding of these elements if they wish to succeed in their chosen field by design rather than by accident.

It is true that many one-shot successes are achieved by writers who do not consciously know why their characters behaved as they did. The reason is simply that the writer happened to stumble upon people he knew intimately. This close proximity to his characters supplied all the complicated mechanism that he needed for his writing. He knew them and knew the motivations that made them do what they did.

But these are the writers whose second, third, and fourth novels, plays, and stories never fulfill the promise offered by their first and single success.

If it were possible, and it is, to analyze and finally split the atom, I assure you that it is possible to chart the course of a good piece of literature or theatre before it is written.

Good writing is impossible without sound motivation.

All types of motivation, conflict, rationalization, exaggeration, boasting, lying are nothing but instruments for man to protect his hard-earned importance. For his hallowed ego, he builds bomb-proof shelters in case mankind shall die in a terrible holocaust. Whether he perishes or not, he will insist on an inscription on his tomb in giant proud letters—“Don’t Disturb, I’m Still Important.”

ENVIRONMENT

The sources of all motivations are the physical make-up of a person and his environment. His sensitivity or his brutality, his attitude toward himself and toward the world is shaped by the above-mentioned two sources.

Let me test this to see if it is true.

Some time ago I read a newspaper account of how Paul, an eleven-year-old shoeshine boy, innocently caused a death. It is a pitiful story.

Paul’s father had been killed in an accident. His widow was left with three children and was without funds. Paul decided that shining shoes would bring in more money than running errands or delivering newspapers, so he built a wooden box and selected a busy corner not far from his home. He thought he was ready for business. He was ready, all right, but the fellow whose corner he had innocently taken had different and violent ideas.

When he arrived and saw a stranger in his usual place he attacked without asking questions or giving Paul a chance to explain. Paul resisted at first, but finding the other fellow too strong for him, broke away and ran. In the ensuing chase the other boy was run over and killed instantly by a truck.

This was the story I read. What follows is the result of my imagination.

The investigation into the death of Robert Remeto, age thirteen, took almost three weeks, but Paul was cleared of guilt. It was established beyond the shadow of a doubt that Robert had been crushed to death by a truck as he was chasing Paul.

Not long afterward, Paul appeared once more at the same subway station with his shoeshine box. The best place was just beside the candy store, a strategic position for catching the eye of a prospective customer. This had been Robert’s envied spot, and after his death the next in line, Chico Marossa, a dark, lanky boy, took it over as his rightful legacy. He was tough, and the others readily accepted him as the arbiter in all their disputes. On the morning when Paul reappeared on the scene, he took his position before the candy store, naively assuming that with Robert dead, the place was open. He put his shoeshine box on the sidewalk and stood behind it, leaning against the red brick wall, ready for business.

He had come back to the same place instead of going elsewhere because, he told himself, he already knew a few of the boys in the neighborhood. The real motivation was that he knew he neighborhood better than any other. If worst came to worst, he could escape pursuers more easily on familiar terrain.

As the day wore on, the other boys who lived nearby looked at him with amazement and moved on without saying a word to him. This kid had caused the death of Robert Remeto, the toughest guy around, and now he had come back for more. The boys’ eyes held fear and respect, both powerful deterrents from being chummy with him. He is dangerous, they thought, and left him alone.

Paul watched the boys’ guarded faces and knew there would be trouble again. He started to shiver inside. He felt as though millions of ants were crawling all over his body.

“Shine, Mister?” he cried, and didn’t recognize his own voice. It was husky and throaty. “Shine? Shine, Mister?” No one was passing just then, but he hollered anyway. It showed courage. It said to the boys, “I’m here to stay! What’re you gonna do about it?”

He remembered his mother’s tearful eyes when he had left in the morning, begging him to take care of himself. He had promised and hurried away, afraid he might burst out crying. He felt like crying right now. He wanted to bury his head in her ample bosom, as he had done many times before. She loved him, and in sheer tenderness she used to squeeze him to herself. Paul was so happy at such moments that he wanted that feeling to stay with him the rest of his life.

Whenever he thought of this strange emotion toward his mother he was ashamed, but there was something brave in this feeling. He was challenging these boys right now because of it. A quiet voice within him said, “You could go somewhere else,” but he knew that to obey it would be cowardly. It would mean betraying the trust of his mother.

“Shine? Shine, Mister?” As he looked up, he saw Chico Marossa, the roughneck, the boy whose place he had unknowingly usurped, standing before him. The boy’s dark face became darker as he looked at Paul. Paul gasped as he missed a heartbeat, and in that breathless moment he decided he would not run away even if he must die. He cried his defiance once more. “Shine, Mister?” Then he looked deliberately at Chico and said, “Do you want somethin’?”

Chico felt like smashing Paul’s nose but he had been present at the funeral of Robert, his best friend. He had seen the peace of eternity on the yellow face. And now, as he looked at Paul, he recalled sickeningly that this skinny slob was the cause of his friend’s death. Chico shivered as terror started to rattle his legs. A nameless fear gripped him and, without answering, he walked away with his shoeshine box.

* * *

I have always wanted to see how “environment” influences people, molding them into new shapes. It is the undisputed, ruthless, uncompromising Caesar of man. I’ve always wanted to know whether man submits or fights against the tyranny. What chance has he to escape from its bondage? What weapons can he use against this paralyzing “influence of environment”?

I think I know Paul quite well. I’ll try to build a background for him. I know he defied a cruel beating because of his love for his stepmother. She gave him what he had never had before—his role of savior of her other children, his self-respect, his awakening of manhood, the need for making money, the fascination of seeing the world, the always exciting, new, and sometimes grotesque panorama of experiences he calls fun, and finally, greater security.

Right now, Paul is a nice boy. He is brave at the moment because cowardice would bring hunger, shame, and loss of the adoration of his brothers and sisters and the tenderness of his stepmother.

He is really frightened, but the boys on the street are afraid of him. Robert, the tough guy who wanted to kill him a few weeks ago, now by his death is protecting him from further attack. The memory of this untimely death is a monument to Paul’s invincibility. The conception of death is actually vague to these boys. It doesn’t mean dissolution, dust to dust, as far as they are concerned. They know the boy is dead and buried, but the important thing is that Paul made it impossible for him to come back to his usual haunts. Because of him, Robert is in the cemetery, and the boys remember how they hate to go near a cemetery, even in the daytime.

There stands Paul, with the mysterious and invisible “influence of environment” all around him. Although it can’t be seen, it is working on him constantly. He is standing there, up to his neck in environment. Environment does not consist only of people. It is also houses, the streets he lives and walks on. Even gasoline fumes are part of it.

Environment is everywhere. It is the gray sky, and it is a stuffy apartment on the fifth floor of a tenement. The crying babies, the cursing mothers, the drunken fathers also belong, and perhaps they build a horror against squalling babies with eternally dirty, runny noses. I must remember the food Paul eats, his father, and his real mother, the grocery-store flat where he was conceived and then born, everything living and dead, all the noises he ever heard, all the smells he ever smelled, the lights and shadows, and the bedbugs in the beds, for all these are environment. Even the dreams that he dreamed, the thoughts he thought, are a part of the whole and of him.

So there stands Paul, with his shoeshine box, and he would never believe it if someone were to tell him that he too is a part of environment for others. But he is, and slowly he realizes that the boys are genuinely afraid of him. This realization takes time, of course. At last Paul lets go of fear and gradually starts to expand. His face loses its hunted look. His breathing becomes normal. He starts to talk more freely to the boys, and later, when he sees they are still afraid of him, he becomes more authoritative.

Paul has no way of knowing that the transition in him was brought about by the influence of his environment. The environment never said to Paul, “From now on, you can bully these boys. They are afraid of you.” It never talks. Its ways are the most subtle on earth. It is not even a whisper or a shadow. It speaks without speaking. It grows in you as the grass grows, soundlessly.

Without knowing how it happened, Paul developed an appetite for money, easy money. He came to know certain types of people intimately. There was a fellow, for instance, who weighed three hundred pounds if he weighed one. When Paul shined his shoes, the big fellow couldn’t see them because of his enormous belly. Paul laughingly thought it was just like an umbrella; you could hide under it and never get wet in a downpour, not in a thousand years.

He was fun, this guy Rudolpho. He liked to laugh, and Paul was fascinated watching the way that jelly started to shake, as if someone were tickling it from the inside. All that fat would suddenly jump into the air, as if it wanted to find a new place for itself right under Rudolpho’s chins. Then it seemed to fall down to his very knees, then up again and down, up and down, as if it had a separate life of its own.

Rudolpho was in the numbers racket. He hated moving around to see all the people he had to see, so he began taking Paul with him to do the leg-work. Paul was willing because Rudolpho was generous. For a couple of hours’ work he would give him one, two, sometimes three dollars, depending on his mood and intake.

Rudolpho lived on other fellows as a louse lives on living things, and he tried to chisel for himself on the side. His job was taking bets and paying out on the rare times that some lucky bastard hit the right number. But Rudolpho wasn’t satisfied with his take, and slowly tried to build up a clientele for himself. He knew that if he got caught by the big fellows he might be taken for a ride, but thought that since he acted decently to the people he dealt with, they would never give him away.

But there is always a leak somewhere, and one day when Paul went to Rudolpho’s two-room apartment on West 110th Street, he was surprised to see the door half open. Rudolpho was a very cautious man. He had a chain and two Yale locks on his door and he would never, not even for a second, leave it open. His door was in a dark hallway just off the stoop, in a half-empty, condemned house, a firetrap if there ever was one. He had lived there alone for many years, cooking and cleaning for himself. He lived in constant fear.

Paul felt uneasy, seeing that half-open door. He pushed it cautiously and called out, “Rudolpho, are you there?” There was no answer. The shades were down, and it was almost black in the room. Paul stepped in and called again, but at the same instant he saw Rudolpho sitting in the middle of the room at a table, staring at him.

“You bastard,” Paul said out loud, laughing. “You wanted to scare me, didn’t you?”

He went to the behemoth and started to give him a friendly poke in the ribs, but stopped, startled. He saw that the grin on that face was frozen. On the white shirt was a zigzag of dried blood. Rudolpho was dead, all right, and the spectacle of him sitting there, looking at Paul with sightless eyes and grinning, was the most ghastly thing he had ever seen in his life.

Environment is only a part—a very large part, to be sure—of ready-made motivation. In fact, environment is like a big, comfortable bed, waiting for us the moment we are born.

However, as our mental horizon widens, our environment becomes uncomfortable, but fear of the unknown still keeps us glued to the now-despised but familiar places.

Without environment, no one can create a living, three-dimensional character.

THE STORY OF AN UGLY MAN

This will be the story of an ugly man who killed because he thought he was ugly.

In the previous part, we were witnessing environment in action. Now motivation again will help environment and its twin brother, physical make-up, to mold, or rather twist, a human being into a grotesque shape.

The following is an excerpt from a local newspaper:

WIFE-KILLER SURRENDERS
MOST BRUTAL MURDER IN THE ANNALS OF OUR TIME
WIFE’S FACE UNRECOGNIZABLE
HE DID IT, HE CLAIMS, BECAUSE HE LOVED HER

“Guy Smith was arrested last night for the brutal murder of his beautiful wife, Anne. Mr. Smith’s arrest came as a complete shock to the community. He was known as an even-tempered fair-minded citizen, member of the local Rotary Club and generous supporter of many worthy and charitable causes.”

Then the paper went into the gory details of how they found Mrs. Smith’s mutilated body, what time the murder occurred, how Mr. Smith surrendered to the police. He was calm, serene, police reported. The fact is that Mr. Smith called the police himself. Then, with the utmost self-possession, he sat down in a rocking-chair and waited for his arrest.

Smith was not only willing to admit the murder but explained to the astonished district attorney how he had planned to kill his wife. This confession made the murder a premeditated one and Smith a candidate for the electric chair.

According to the psychiatrist, Smith was absolutely sane and responsible for his act. They pointed out to him that he had the legal right not to answer any questions which might implicate him, but Smith almost eagerly volunteered to give all the information which would help him to be executed as quickly as possible. In prison he was not even downhearted. He was jovial, seemed absolutely relaxed, as if he had no care in the world

Why should a seemingly healthy person wish to die? The normal reaction is to evade punishment, even if one has committed a crime.

How did all this transformation come about? His physical make-up was a very strong motivation in making him morbidly sensitive. He wasn’t deformed or disgustingly ugly. He was just not the type one would call good-looking. His face was shallow, his nose broken, and his eyes always looked inflamed.

No, he wasn’t exactly ugly, but unfortunately he thought he was, and this conviction of his made him what he became: a killer.

This man Smith was a tolerably intelligent man, but when he compared himself to others the result was very disheartening. His hypersensitivity and his unruly imagination made him see things that weren’t there.

Who knows our limitations better than ourselves? To know how little one knows is a bitter pill for a sensitive person to swallow. Smith knew how limited he was in his profession. He was an accountant, a freelancer. Furthermore, he was painfully aware that as a human specimen he could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be called an Adonis.

His constant fear of losing his beloved wife made him kowtow to her, which, after a while, made him actually repulsive to her. His politeness and his eagerness to please increased, if possible, instead of diminishing.

This self-abasement went so far that it gave Mrs. Smith physical anguish to be near him. He was good twenty-four hours a day, and his behavior made it harder for her to tolerate him. She planned to leave him. He, on the other hand, sensing that his value was decreasing at an alarming rate, desperately tried to recoup the esteem he had lost through the years.

He began giving her expensive gifts, which he could not afford until he started accepting bribes to falsify income tax returns. He tried to transform himself from a middle-aged man into a young, vivacious one. He started to prance around, flirting with young women, making himself utterly ridiculous. His plan to make his wife jealous was so transparent that instead of being angry she actually encouraged his escapades, thinking that perhaps this way she could get rid of him sooner.

His expensive gifts were not appreciated. His wife felt an even greater need to escape. The tension grew between them, yet neither uttered a word about what was uppermost in their minds. The unbearable atmosphere had to explode, shattering all the make-believe, lies, and hypocrisy.

At last the truth came out—she wanted a divorce. And for the first time Smith consciously was pushed toward murder. For the first time he thought his wife should be dead. This thought was not born of frenzy. It was a logical step and he, in horror, was repelled by it almost the moment it was born. In the first split second that this idea came into being he knew that with her death he must die too. And he was not ready for that ultimate decision—yet.

The idea of killing someone is much more satisfying than that of seeing oneself as a corpse. This understandable love of life makes cowards of us all. Smith tried to figure out how he could stay alive. In his desperation he lost the last shred of human dignity. He begged, he threatened. Nothing mattered any more. He fought only for the humiliating privilege of being near her.

Did she allow it? She did, for various reasons. First, she really pitied him. Still another reason: since she told him that living with him was out of the question, she felt free to go out with other men, hoping Smith would reconcile himself to the inevitable.

And the most important reason of all: before leaving him she intended to collect half the price of their home—a six-family house in which she was part owner.

Smith was originally a kind, mellow man. The thought of murder must have grown slowly in his head. What kind of provocation must have exploded in his mind to have forced him to make that last fatal step, which ended not only his victim’s life but his own?

Smith had asked only one privilege, that she let him stay. Feeling sorry for him she agreed, and with this act she started a chain of reactions which culminated in her death.

Again, the provocation must have been great. Strange men would come to his house. This was betrayal in his eyes. What right had she to defile his house?

Perhaps she never entertained the idea of bringing men into the house, but her actions may have suggested that she did.

He felt he could not go on thinking these thoughts. It was worse than the punishment promised to the blackest sinner in hell. But still he hoped she would come back to him. Why?

How in heaven’s name would a man like Smith think, even for a moment, that everything might turn out for the best? Was there any possibility of this? None at all. Then why did he delude himself with false hopes? For a very good reason! This hope must have meant more to him than marital happiness—more than anything in the world. It meant his life.

This woman, when she met him, had made him believe that he belonged: that he was as good as anyone else or better. She made him believe in human dignity. She gave him the all-important feeling that he was wanted, that he was important, really important, and now she was ready to destroy all of the self-confidence she had built up in him.

This catastrophe had to be prevented at all costs. To him, her desire to leave meant deceit, betrayal. When they first met, she had lied to him about his prowess and his looks. Now a divorce would certainly make him the laughing-stock of all who knew him.

Divorce had much more significance to him than to others. It meant, in this case, that he would be left unprotected in the midst of a hostile world. Divorce meant losing the one thing that kept him alive—the security of marriage.

If she had lied to him when she said he was good, then his own previous estimate of himself was correct, and later it was conclusively proved that he was an inferior person who had no right to live.

Mrs. Smith’s request for a divorce at this stage was to him tantamount to a polite announcement, “Look, Smith, you have lived enough; it is time that you lie down peacefully and die.”

A divorce meant death to Smith. That is why he became desperate. He fought for his life, and when he lost hope of saving it, he killed—in self-defense, according to his topsy-turvy reasoning.

Smith was not insane. I would not be interested in him if he were. But I become increasingly excited as I observe him sliding irrevocably into desperation and chaos.

Whether one has a physical handicap or not, the important thing is what the individual thinks of himself. If he feels he is not exactly a bargain, it is very hard to make him think otherwise.

The second most important motivation for human behavior is our own physical make-up.

Without experiencing in childhood humiliation, neglect, and abuse, or love and tenderness, no person can be a totally distressing pessimist or a smiling optimist.

A three-dimensional human being is not only influenced by his environment but by his physical make-up as well.

This man Smith must have had more than his share of humiliation in childhood to feel as he did about his looks.

Every living soul is eternally searching and fighting for security—the touchstone, the kernel, the important source of all human emotion and conflict.

Even the noblest of all human emotions, mother-love, springs from the knowledge that a woman’s future life is insecure until her offspring are alive and propagate her kind to the end of time. Through her children a mother expects to achieve immortality, security even after death.

Bad judgment is not necessarily the result of ignorance, but if you put a case under scrutiny you will find that the person with bad judgment usually was ignorant of the subject concerning which he used his bad judgment.

A young woman of, say, twenty-five, works with a young man. She’s good-looking, he’s not. She has an almost perfect figure; he is paralyzed from the hips down. She’s a stenographer, he’s a young lawyer. They marry. The fact is, she proposed marriage and chased after him, and not he after her. Why?

For your information, here are the facts. The man was a young, struggling lawyer without any money whatsoever, and a cripple to boot. Why did she choose him for marriage instead of waiting for a healthy man with a more substantial background? Why? What was her motivation? From a distance it seems that her action was against all common sense. She was not in love with him, so what in Heaven’s name was her reason?

Here is the motivation. The girl came from a very religious and conservative family. She had a widowed mother who worked hard to earn a living and support her only child. She took in washing and their two-room apartment was in perpetual confusion. Wet and drying clothes hung all over the place. According to her standards even to talk about sex was evil; to practice it without marriage would bring eternal hell-fire to the sinner. The girl, to escape this monotony, poverty, and ignorance, did have affairs, first with one, then with many other men.

It was a desperate revolt against her drab life. She felt guilty and remorseful but she had no strength to stop. Life offered very little to her. She managed to finish high school without learning much. She was a good girl, really. She loved and helped her mother, but only through her secret excursions into sex relationships with men could she keep her sanity.

When she met the cripple in the office his unashamed admiration for her made her decide to marry him. She believed that a normal man would never forgive her indiscretions, while this one would be happy just to have her as his wife. She knew she would be secure with him, that he would worship her.

There’s your motivation.

Ask your friend why he married his wife. Or ask the wife why she married your friend. They may look at you with a smile and with great condescension say: “Because we loved each other.” But ask them further: What is love? Oh no, they won’t be embarrassed because, you see, they know all the answers, as most people do, and they will give you the bromide—love is a physical and spiritual attraction. People have heard this question and answer so often that they repeat it without questioning its validity.

If you want to understand motivation and want to write good stories or plays, you had better reject such insipid surface explanations. Love is much more than physical or mental attraction. It is more than compatibility—although these are part of the whole. Love is my firm belief that my beloved is absolutely devoted to me and this devotion gives me confidence in myself and in my future. I want to emphasize this point. Physical attraction plus compatibility plus the importance of being important plus the belief in this person’s absolute loyalty add up to love; in short, love is security.

No, you don’t have to accept my definition of love, or of anything else. You can formulate your own definition. You should anyway. You might as well know that rejection of a theory you disagree with is, if nothing else, a sign that your imagination is in working order. But remember that there is no guarantee that imagination will always carry you in the right direction. Slavish acceptance of tradition just because it is ancient can be as harmful as misdirected imagination.

Some writers just waddle along like a fat goose on top of a manure heap, pecking industriously away for some thought morsels someone dropped carelessly. Such writing necessarily shows poverty of mind. Such an author kills a wife in his story because of a great discovery: the husband was jealous. You can look in vain for the host of motivations that swarm around, and for that which started the chain of events which at the end culminated in murder.

The new girl in the office was delighted with the woman office manager, who turned out to be not only charming but encouraging, and actually helped her to do her job in the proper way. She was surprised. She thought there must be a catch somewhere. No superior had ever been as solicitous as this one. The office manager was young, about twenty-eight, very good-looking, and had poise and good manners. Everyone loved her—including the two bosses. In fact, the younger one was “going after” her full blast. Why, then, her humility? Why wasn’t she swell-headed as the managers in other offices usually were?

The new girl was very much intrigued with this strange behavior. Why did she behave as she did? Why all this goodness? And this woman’s attitude toward all the personnel in the office wasn’t just a passing fancy, she found out. Girls who had worked for her for years assured her that she was always the same.

Why? Here is the answer.

When she was eighteen she had been caught with her parents and two brothers in a fiery inferno as their house burned down. The four others died a horrible death. The doctors considered it a miracle that she remained alive. She lived and with much plastic surgery became once more a presentable young woman who could go out and earn her living. There are always exceptions, but most of those who have come into such close proximity to death as she did learn to look at life differently from those whose lives have not been marred with horror.

Since I am talking about motivation, this brings to my mind the curious phenomenon of a man who was a coward one day, and a death-defying hero the next. I wondered what could have made him act that way.

Cowardice, as I see it, is not a permanent state. It changes with circumstances and with the moods these circumstances create. A man may walk down the street not thinking of anything special. Suddenly he sees a woman crossing the street directly in the path of a speeding truck. The driver apparently doesn’t see the woman, and the woman, deep in thought, doesn’t hear the rumbling of the deadly monster rushing toward her.

There is no time for deliberation. He may spring forward under an impulse and pull the woman out of the way—although he may be crushed instead.

The time between recognizing the situation and deciding whether he should help the woman or not might require no more than a fraction of a second, but a thousand pictures of his past and present life will flash through his mind with the rapidity of lightning. In this infinitesimal time it will be decided whether this man will act in a cowardly fashion or heroically.

What causes him to feel ready to risk exchanging his life for that of an unknown person?

Scientists say that before the uranium atom splits, it first turns into plutonium. In the case of our man, no matter which decision he makes, a preliminary mood must be created. And in such an emergency it must happen swiftly. The material must be in him, ready to explode or fizzle out. What is the mood? What are the ingredients which have the power to overwhelm him to such an extent that in his “mood of exaltation” he is suddenly ready to sacrifice his life—when at other times he is just a plain, ordinary coward?

What is the definition of cowardice? The Century Dictionary says: “Cowardice: want of courage to face danger, difficulty, opposition; dread of exposure to harm or pain of any kind.”

Accepting this as correct, we ask why this man should create a mood for himself which will make him brave and, in consequence, possibly cause his own death. The answer is that he is powerless to create any kind of mood. The ingredients in him decide the result beforehand; necessarily it must have been in him to start with. He has nothing to do with the final decision.

If he happened to have a mother who, for some reason or other, neglected him in childhood, he might have grown into adulthood with a bitter taste in his mouth against women. And if, to top this, he had had an unfortunate love affair, was betrayed, perhaps, his resentment might have grown to such proportions that he later married for one unconscious, single purpose—to take revenge on the sex which had humiliated him and made him feel unimportant.

The above conjecture might be only one of the many reasons that, while not deliberately making him condemn that woman to die before the onrushing truck, yet might make him hesitate for the split-second longer that would spell death to her.

Remembered experiences from the past will create a predetermined reaction and these, in the final analysis, will decide whether he’ll appear a coward or a hero to those witnessing that particular scene.

The man who acts like a coward today may be a shining example of bravery tomorrow, for some other reason.

Motivation not only fascinates us but it is the very essence of all great writing. Nothing ever happened or ever will happen without sound motivation.

What a miraculous spectacle it is to see the blood on its tireless, unending travel under our skin, carrying oxygen through the entire body. But to show through your imagination and motivation how a pregnant thought can grow into determination, how determination crystalizes into action, is as miraculous as anything human ingenuity ever produced.

To motivate is to instigate; to incite to action; to induce to reason; to stimulate. Motivation can spring from many sources. One can be inspired by love, or spurred to action by hate; fanaticism will move one even to sacrifice one’s life. Love for fame or for wealth are powerful instigators for action.

The basic source of all human emotion and all conflict is the eternal unquenchable thirst for security—in short, for self-preservation.

MAN OF GOD

Let me suppose that I see a jumble of headlines on the front page of my daily newspaper. I wonder which of the headlines will have the greatest attraction for readers . . .

GEORGE MCCARTHY, 60, ELOPES WITH TEEN-AGER. Since I know myself better than anyone else I would, mentally at least, shake my head and say, “The damned old fool!” and read on, scanning the other headlines to find what might interest me more than an idiot who married a nineteen-year-old. MR. P., COMPTROLLER OF X. CORPORATION, ORDERED BY JUDGE . . . “ Who cares?” NINETEEN NEW NATIONS ADMITTED INTO UNITED NATIONS . . . “Nice, very nice!” I nod with approval. ELECTRICAL WORKERS ON STRIKE . . . “ Good Lord—now our bills will be higher again!” MRS. GILBERT SAND SHOOTS SLEEPING HUSBAND . . . “The bitch!” I cry noiselessly, and with a silent prayer I hope that my little woman will never do that to me (not in my sleep, anyway); on second thought, I am absolutely sure she would not, because she is not the type.

DEACON DESERTS FAMILY FOR CHOIR GIRL, 15! John Smith, deacon of Holy Saints Church, a devout believer in the Scriptures, father of seven children, runs off with a fifteen-year-old girl, a singer in the church choir.

I am sure that other readers, like myself, will take time to read this story, which promises to be exciting. A deacon of a church! Boy oh boy! A father of seven children. You silently say, shaking your head, “The old hypocrite! You can’t trust anyone anymore.” You may go on reading other headlines, but your mind will come back to John Smith, I am sure.

Why? The first headline was about McCarthy, an ordinary human being, but the deacon of a church is not. He is special. Why is he so special? First of all, to sin is a common occurrence among ordinary people; the mortal flesh lives ready for perdition. But it is hard to believe that a superior man, like a man of science or a preacher of the gospel, is not made out of a finer clay than ourselves.

I am a sinner, but I would lose faith in mankind if I could not find a nobler man than myself. So a deacon who, preaching God’s Laws, forgets the most elementary rule of decent living, leaving behind a wife and innocent children, commits an even greater outrage than murder. This man Smith, because of his actions, destroys hundreds and thousands of families’ trust in themselves and in their fellow men.

I am interested in this story and I want to probe further. Was John Smith a contemptible hypocrite? I find that he was not. he was fanatical in his religious zeal, the Holy Terror of the small town where he lived.

He was like an avenging angel to all who showed the slightest inclination to stray from the tenets of their faith. Many a woman had reminded her erring husband of the saintly John Smith, beseeching him to follow this shining example.

I learn that he is forty-nine years old, tall, very lanky and might once have been a handsome man but for his pockmarked face. He had rather distinctive light blue eyes of great intensity. Many people remarked that his eyes had an unusual power of which he could be proud. He frequently looked in the mirror to see what was so unusual about them, but he could never discover anything special. The fact is that he was puzzled about his eyes and he disliked them. He often thought them colorless and watery.

When he was young he helped out in his father’s store, but he was very unhappy about it. The store was dark and dingy; the merchandise was haphazardly thrown about on the counters in a crazy jumble. If this was good enough for the Senior John Smith, it should also be good enough for Junior.

John Smith, Jr., in his youth was a very shy person. His pock-marked face looked repulsive to him and he thought that it was repulsive to others. In high school the attractive girls who were his schoolmates dated others, but they always politely turned him down. His appearance was the least of the reasons that the girls refused to be seen with him. To put it simply, he was below-average in intelligence.

He thought that the teachers hated him for some unknown reason and purposely gave him the most difficult problems to solve. He was bitter, and since he was healthy and physically robust, he antagonized his teachers and fought his classmates over the slightest misunderstanding. The other boys found him a dangerous adversary and left him strictly alone.

He slowly withdrew into himself. He had been attending church every Sunday, but now he started to listen to the lectures with great concentration. He liked to hear about a better world where the Good will go and be loved by God for all eternity. At this same time he started to take more interest in the store, where he worked after school, and for the first time he found that his father, instead of scolding him, found words for praising him. But the transaction from youth to maturity was not simple.

He could not absorb his lessons in school and was not promoted. He felt acutely the embarrassment of towering like a giant among the younger girls and boys in his class. He looked more like a grown man than a student.

Not long before his graduation he walked up to an attractive girl, a classmate of his, and started to talk to her. She was embarrassed to be seen with this backward boy but, being a sensitive young thing, could not insult him by refusing to walk home with him. As they passed through a deserted street, John suddenly grabbed the girl and started to rip her blouse open. The shocked girl was so stunned by this unexpected attack that she was petrified and unable to move to defend herself.

For the first time he could remember, he saw the bare breast of a woman. The small but firm shapes, with the rosy nipples, almost drove him into such madness as to make him rape her on the spot. He felt the heat of her body penetrate through his hands to his very bones. His eyes blurred. He was about to attack her when he thought he saw a blinding flash of light and heard the words, “Leave the girl alone!”

He knew then that it was God Himself, saving him from committing a hideous crime. He recoiled and started to back away from her, babbling incoherently, “No . . . No . . . No . . . I did not mean that—please forgive me . . .” and ran away, crying and throwing wild words into the air.

At last, breathing heavily, he slowed down to a trot, and then to a walk, staggering as if he were drunk. He made sucking noises with his mouth, and looked back from time to time to see if someone was following him. When he saw a policeman ahead, he hid in a doorway. When he finally arrived home he was delirious. His mother immediately called a doctor but John closed his bedroom door and refused to open it. He was lying in bed with his clothes still on. He could still see the beautiful, tantalizing bare flesh of the young girl. He wanted to touch her flesh again and his fingers tore into the pillows.

He was genuinely sick and stayed in bed for weeks. He was ashamed to re-enter his life as if nothing had happened. He was also afraid that he might be arrested, and, as remorse convulsed him, he began to feel sorry for his father. He was sure that if his father should find out what had happened the shame would kill him. It was unthinkable that the girl had not reported the horrible incident. John was really sorry for that shameful episode, but the memory of the girl’s nakedness remained vivid.

Later, when he went back to school, the girl was there, but she never gave even the slightest indication that anything had happened between them.

Young John Smith lived in mortal fear, driven by his guilt. He asked forgiveness of God, and he believed that the terrible burden of his abominable act slowly became lightened by the merciful God. His religious fervor became so satisfying that he felt happier than ever before in his life.

He decided that during all of his life God had been testing him. His repentance was so pleasing to his Maker that the feeling of guilt was slowly evaporating from his heart. At the age of twenty-five he started to study the Bible in earnest. He thought that he understood the Bible better than his own father, who was quite maniacal about it. They had feverish arguments, interpreting incidents in it according to their own understanding. He spent more and more time in church doing things that others left undone.

One day, in a blinding revelation, he suddenly saw the multitude of people in the streets, neglecting their immortal souls. He stopped still in the main square of the town and started to talk about salvation. He described the eternal joy of the believer in Jesus. He became so overwhelmed with his own fervor that he almost fainted under the compelling power of his own oratory.

John Smith was on his way, facing his destiny. He had found his mission in life; he saw with absolute certainty the goal of his life; he knew at last where he belonged. He had chosen God. Of course he had trouble with the church. The elders forbade him to make a spectacle of himself as he was not an accredited speaker for the church and they claimed that his irresponsible statements brought disgrace rather than honor.

John Smith, Sr., passed away and young John took over the store. Since he was happy only when he was preaching before a crowd, he rented an empty store nearby, obtained a permit to preach, and in no time had a large following. He was hard, as adamant as one can be, toward organized religion, driven by a deep-rooted hatred of those who had treated him as their inferior.

A few years passed by, and among his faithful followers he found Miss Clara Moriarty, a big-bosomed young woman approaching thirty. Clara Moriarty had seen life in the raw, sleeping with many men, in different beds. She was a waitress and, because of the treasure-house of her rich experience, she came to the conclusion that John Smith was probably the only man living who would be faithful to her. She therefore decided to marry him.

She attached herself to him with the idea that she would be a modern Magdalene. She became his shadow. One night she confessed some of her sins to him and he, in turn, embraced her with the understanding and love of a forgiving father.

A few days later, he asked her to marry him. She, in turn, begged him to give her a day to think it over. He did this gladly, but Clara was afraid that by the next day he might also think it over, or forget that he had ever proposed to her. However, she really needed that day to get rid of a ruffian named Pete, who had been coming to see her whenever the spirit moved him.

Clara and John were married and—miracle of miracles—Clara became a faithful and dutiful wife and mother. Those who had known her in former times thought that John Smith must have been a hell of a good lover to limit her insatiable female appetite to one man. Whatever the reason for her fidelity, the children that came year after year must have contributed a great deal to tying her down.

I have no desire to trace John Smith’s tortuous road to sainthood. In short, however, his name became a by-word for decency and high moral standards. He also prospered in his business and turned any surplus over to charity for those who deserved help the most. He organized a choir that was accompanied by trumpets, and they made quite a stir whenever they appeared on a busy street corner.

One day John found a mousey little girl in his choir group who had two given names—Harmony-Olivia. She was not more than fifteen years old, the daughter of a crippled father and a mother who could hardly move because of advanced arthritis. The poor child was always hungry and somehow one day John noticed her eyes as she watched a girl in the choir who was eating a sandwich. His heart went out to this miserable creature. He took her hand and without explaining anything brought her home to Clara to feed.

Clara was angry. She claimed that she had enough hungry mouths to feed on the pittance he gave her for the table. John was not in the habit of arguing with his wife at any time. He just looked at her. On such occasions his watery blue eyes miraculously darkened, and there appeared in them a murderous fire. She kept quiet then and did what she was asked to do.

Clara had never forgotten her own miserable childhood. Since girlhood she had been driven from job to job, from city to city, looking desperately for a place where she could stop running. She had become very tired when she found John Smith and realized that this man could be her salvation. She could never forget to be grateful, and often compared this decent, God-fearing man with those selfish men in her life who only used her for their pleasure and left her without a second thought when they had had their fill.

Harmony-Olivia became a frequent guest in John Smith’s house—in fact she became a very useful member of the household, helping with dishes and the hundreds of other small chores around the house. She followed him like a faithful dog. He was her personal god.

She brought food packages home to her parents and they, too, felt some peace of heart because she was protected from hunger by this godly man. They could never stop admiring him and they prayed fervently for his immortal soul.

John Smith, the evangelist, had one great sorrow in his so-far blessed life. All of his children were boys. Not one little daughter, not one lovely little girl-child ever clambered onto his lap and threw her tender little arms around his neck. He craved tenderness, and his family, instead of loving him, were actually a little in awe of him because they saw him so often at the service, haranguing and throwing angry Biblical quotations at the heads of the congregation before him, threatening them with hell-fire and damnation if they did not live up to the Scriptures.

John Smith, with all his worshipping crowd around him, was a very lonely man, and there was no one to whom he could unburden his heart.

The time came when Clara was always fidgety and nervous. It did not occur to John that his abstinence from sexual relations with Clara might have made her edgy. She had had her share of conjugal bliss, but for two years now since she had become pregnant with her youngest child he had explained to her, as kindly as he could, that he had no desire to bring forth more children into this suffering world and it would be sinful to continue their sexual relationship.

Clara had been angry for the first time in their fifteen years of marriage. She had argued that it was her right to sleep with her lawful wedded husband, but he was adamant. Clara, therefore, had lately begun to have very inflammatory dreams which left her limp and tired the next morning. She was tempted to take a lover, but was afraid.

Little Harmony-Olivia’s help became more and more important around the house. In fact, she worked so late that it became dangerous to let her go home alone to the old tenement where she lived. So she moved in and became one of the family.

I am stopping here to evaluate what I have done so far. A man need not have a face covered with pockmarks to feel inferior. There is no man on earth who does not feel subconsciously that there is something vital missing from his makeup. Inferiority manifests itself in a million different ways. I think John Smith would regard his disfigured face as a handicap and ignore his mental deficiency.

He turned to religion not necessarily because he was intellectually limited but because religion was around him in his home environment and easy for him to use to his advantage. He was as strong as a bull and brutal enough when he decided to go after what he wanted. He believed implicitly in his own faith, and had sublime confidence in himself through his conviction that whatever he wanted was approved by God.

A strong man who has acted independently for many years and suffered no catastrophic consequences will become convinced that his decisions are always right.

This man, then, is one who must develop from Pole One, which in his case is respectability, even nobility, to Pole Two, dishonor. The step-by-step transition, or trans-polarization, is considered by professional writers the most difficult part of creating in words.

Let me show you how John Smith goes from decency to dishonor—but I must warn you that the following transition is not the only one possible. The interpretation of a character depends on the individual writer’s intelligence and imagination, his personal philosophy, and even his blood pressure! No two people will ever interpret a subject in exactly the same way. A fictional character’s growth will be influenced by the talent and character of the writer.

Now if the background I drew for John Smith is a good one, I can trace his psychological growth.

As a child he fought with his classmates and teachers and then withdrew into his own thoughts. What these thoughts were, as more and more he moved into adolescence, are not hard to surmise. Nature saw to it that he thought about sex; his lack of friends kept him from the speculations, bull-sessions, explorations, and substitute athletics which supply a measure of relief to the boy who is accepted by his group.

By the time he was a young man, though still in high school, his sexual desires were a constant torment, increased by pornography found in used-book stores, masturbation followed by guilt, and his own fervid imaginings. When he found himself alone with a young girl for the first time, his control slipped. Fortunately, a combination of circumstances sent him rushing away from her so that rape was averted. Surprise at his own behavior, combined with the girl’s obvious terror, the fact that they were outdoors and it was only afternoon, and the nervous shock that he later interpreted as the voice of God threw him into reverse, so to speak.

The nervous illness that followed gave him plenty of time to consider not only the excitement of sex but the grim results if one is caught taking it by force. Remember, he can’t imagine a woman wanting him; to enjoy sexual activity with a woman he must risk the punishing disapproval of God and man. His deep desire is for admiration, not loathing.

Ashamed, afraid, he accompanied his family to church as was customary, but at last he found a ray of hope. He directed all his thoughts and emotions toward religion, and sure enough, his guilty terror slowly diminished. Religious fervor replaced sexual fervor. Moreover, this was the time in his life when he was through with the frustrations of high school. Working in the store brought approval from his father, and working in the church brought approval from the community. John had achieved some importance, and he was able to fight the hungers of the flesh which might wreck his new status until he was twenty-nine—and a complete celibate.

Then Clara came along. He was excited by her obvious sensuality and might well have rejected her had she not had balancing qualities for him. For one thing, she was a repentant sinner who worshipped him; how could a godly man turn from a Magdalene? For another thing, she made no secret of her desire to marry him; his pockmarks in no way repelled her.

With the sanction of the church, John indulged in his lust for his wife until they had had seven children. The wild excitement of the first months of marriage had not lasted once sexual release became a matter of course for him, but it wasn’t until the birth of the seventh child that John knew he was sick of his wife.

Clara was recuperating from childbirth. John had not gone to bed with her for several weeks. When the older children were born, he had felt his deprivation keenly and increased his prayers until he could resume the marital relationship. This time, however, he had felt fine—full of energy, spiritually clean. He had seen Harmony-Olivia in the choir and paid no special attention to her before; now she seemed to him the purest, holiest, most virginal creature in the world. He spoke to her and her shy adoration made him feel closer to his God.

He realized that he didn’t think about God at all when he was with Clara. She had appealed to the bestiality in him. Why, when he came to think of it, her sinful past had undoubtedly taught her tricks to quicken the desires of the innocent male. The very thought of returning to her bed was repulsive and, when Clara eventually made an issue of it, he announced the termination of their sexual relationship on the purest of religious bases.

Even after Harmony-Olivia was living in his home as mother’s helper, John’s thoughts of her were aesthetic. She was a thin, timid child who made him feel saintly. Not even the much-put-on Clara considered her a rival. But one particularly humid summer night, John wandered through the house unable to sleep. Harmony lay on the living-room couch, which served as her bed. She was asleep, naked above the waist. Her virginal breasts smiled up at him like white flowers. Suddenly he began to cry and ran out of the room.

For days thereafter he relived the experience. Harmony was so maddeningly different from the ripe Clara in every way; she was young and pure, and she was beyond sin.

One day John Smith found himself quite alone in the house with Harmony and, overwhelmed by her presence and her submissiveness, asked her if she was happy to be near him. Harmony burst into tears as she replied haltingly that he had given her heaven on earth, and that from ow on, and always, her life belonged to him.

Slowly and gently he embraced the loving little girl and, at the moment that he touched her, he experienced a sensation he had never dreamed existed. In turn, Harmony-Olivia, the unspoiled little virgin, when she felt his strong arms around her, sprang to life, threw both arms around his neck and clung to him with an iron grip. Her little body melted into his, and they stood transfixed.

Clara happened to come into the room just then, and for a moment she just stood there, looking as if she had been mesmerized. Then, with a hoarse bellow she gripped Harmony’s yellow hair and yanked her away from John with such force that Harmony hit the floor with a heavy thud and lay there as if dead.

John threw himself to his knees and started to lift the half-conscious girl in his arms. “Monster!” he cried, facing Clara with naked hatred in his eyes. But Clara could not be shaken off with a sharp word. She bent down and tore at Harmony, pummeling her. Harmony regained consciousness and ran out of the house to save her life.

I shall stop here and see what possibilities I have here to further develop my story. (1) John subdues Clara and lets Harmony escape. (2) Another possibility—that John, in his fury, might pick up some heavy object and with one savage blow split Clara’s skull. I select the first possibility and let Harmony escape because it offers more.

Harmony escapes, and Clara and John, after a terrific row, make peace for the time being. But Clara suspects that John is deceiving her with Harmony and she threatens him with exposure if he does not leave that young hussy alone.

If he were to have killed her in his outburst of anger the story would have been finished. But with Harmony escaped, and John intimidated by threats of exposure, I’ve created suspense wondering what he will do next. Clara watches his every move while he—spouting the Scriptures—threatens all sinners with hell-fire and damnation! Evangelists of this type always have an angry, unforgiving God behind them.

Clara hounds Harmony and her miserable parents, threatening them with exposure. They are ready to leave town, but when John realized what has been happening, he is forced to make a quick decision. For fear he might kill Clara in another overheated argument, he elopes with Harmony.

DEACON RUNS AWAY WITH A FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL, the headlines shriek. John Smith was a violent man and his end would be violent also. He escapes with the girl, and under the disguise that he is traveling with his daughter, they actually live together as man and wife.

He keeps her in bondage, hides her, and tyrannizes her, becoming fearfully jealous. Harmony at last sees that her god has feet of clay and wants to go back to her mother. John knows that if she escapes from him he cannot watch her twenty-four hours of the day. He implores her to stay with him, but Harmony’s mind is made up and she insists she wants to go home. John knows. of course, that she can go home, but not he—not even if Clara would be willing to forgive him. He knows many of his followers would never forget. John and Harmony wrangle for days until, in a violent quarrel, he kills her, walks into the police station and gives himself up.

In a sketchy way this shows the inevitable end of a man who was possessed more by sex than love of God. John Smith, the protagonist, was ruthless enough to force conflict throughout, to the bitter end. This conflict stems from his uncompromising attitude, his suppressed desires and, above all, his real fear of sex, which had culminated in that shameful attack on an innocent schoolmate, throwing him into a religious frenzy. The remorse over this unfortunate act had kept him a celibate to the ripe old age of twenty-nine, when he met the voluptuous Clara, who had affected him with such force that even her confession about her past brought compassion and, at last, hope for fulfillment.

Magdalene of the Bible must have played an important part in his impressionable mind, and he had compared himself with Jesus, who had also forgiven these sins. This mental state was logical enough to fall into a pattern necessitating conflict. The resolution of murder is inevitable.

Harmony’s saintliness so overwhelmed John that he could not extricate himself from his bondage. For John, to defend the helpless Harmony became an act of sacred duty; she was to him a saint and innocence incarnate. Always fanatical about everything, Harmony became so important to him that he imagined that he was defending not a woman but a symbol of God.

John Smith was no better, or worse, than any of us. He interpreted happenings according to his own understanding, and naturally tried to show his acts in the best possible light. I do not believe for a moment that he was a hypocrite. He was, rather, a fanatic who believed that everything he did was just. This is just one version of John Smith, but of course there may be other versions.

You might show him not as a fanatic but as a true hypocrite, whose clandestine affair with Harmony corrupts not only the girl but her parents and everyone around them. Since such deceit can seldom be kept secret for long, a widening circle of acquaintances would become aware of his defections. The whole situation would be thrown into the open one day, and his followers, in their righteous indignation, would force him to leave town.

Still another version would be his having an affair with Harmony, who is not saintly but conniving for her own ends, and wishes to be his wife. She becomes pregnant and demands that he get a divorce from Clara. Of course John knows that Clara would never agree to this. This version would also open up many unholy roads that would carry John to his own destruction.

Now let’s look at the growth and transition. John is caught up in the web of his own contradictions, and it is vital for him to extricate himself if he does not want to be destroyed. The ensuing struggle creates a rising conflict.

THE GENEROUS MAN

I suppose people would be justified in wondering why a jealous man behaves like an idiot when actually there is no valid reason for his jealousy. But very few people would ask the seemingly stupid question as to really why a generous man is generous. People think the answer is simple: a man is generous because he is understanding, kind, and loving.

We would say happily Amen, and add that, in a nutshell, a generous man is generous because he is good. Period.

I’m sorry, but we can’t dismiss this tremendous problem as simply as this. Of course, I’m not talking about people who have only occasional outbursts of generosity. Waiters and taxi drivers can tell which customer is a poor man and which is not because a poor man in such circumstances seeks to make an impression.

A generous man is different from the extravagant tipper. His generosity is not sporadic. It is as steady and uninterrupted as breathing. It is a principle with him. It is a sacred concept to live by.

Here is a case history. I’ve known this man and I am absolutely sure many of my readers know someone like him.

They called him good old Charlie. The funny thing is, he wasn’t old and he wasn’t Charlie.

He wasn’t a day over forty and his name really was Edward, although no one used it except his family. He was six feet tall, bent a little, and his skin was grayish but no one noticed it because of the almost perpetual smile on his face.

He was the kindest man imaginable. He always had a good word for everyone and good old Charlie had never, not even once, complained that his friends could remember. It seemed his life was paved with contentment, peace, and happiness.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. His wife Maria was a fine, gentle woman but sickly. She lost patience easily but she never raised her voice or nagged him. She just looked. But in that look was compressed all the horror of Dante’s Inferno.

The money Charlie earned was just enough to take care of their modest four-room apartment in the West Bronx and their two growing boys, Eddie, ten, and Paul, eight.

One Friday evening, pay-day, his wife Maria was in the living room, her blue-veined hands resting in her lap. She looked old and very tired.

 

CHARLIE (enters with a cheery hello but Maria gives him only a tired stare): Anything wrong, dear?

MARIA: Have you got your pay?

CHARLIE (with his usual exuberance): A strange thing happened as I came up from the subway . . .

MARIA (irritated): I know. Someone was waiting for you. And in trouble, wasn’t he?

CHARLIE: Now wait a minute! This is really a tragic case, Maria. I bumped into Dave . . .

MARIA: I know. They’re all tragic cases. And they all need money.

CHARLIE: Are you being sarcastic, Maria?

MARIA: I’m too sick and tired to be sarcastic. How much did you give him?

CHARLIE: Why don’t you listen first to what happened to him?

MARIA: I only care about what happens in this house. Today, for instance, I had no food to give the boys. I had to send them over to your Aunt Millie to be fed.

CHARLIE: For heaven’s sake! You shouldn’t have done that!

Everybody will hear about it!

MARIA: What else could I do? How much is left of your pay?

CHARLIE: David’s really had it hard this time.

MARIA (not listening): The store closes at six. Please give me whatever money you have. I’ve got to have food for dinner, Ed.

CHARLIE: Oh dear, you’ve just made up your mind not to listen.

MARIA (with a sudden gasp): You didn’t give him . . . all?

CHARLIE: Don’t be angry with me! His wife needs a serious operation immediately. It’s a tumor. The doctor said that to postpone the operation would jeopardize her life!

MARIA: In short, you gave all your week’s pay to Dave?

CHARLIE (miserably): You seem to think I did it purposely just to aggravate you.

MARIA: No, Ed. I’m sure David’s wife needs that operation. Also there are countless other wives and kids who need operations, or shoes and overcoats, or money to pay their rent or buy food. That’s it, Ed, food. You happen to have a family, a nice family, I would say, but you go around helping everyone in the whole world but your own.

CHARLIE: You’re very unfair. You’re bitter, my dear. In my place you would have done the same.

MARIA: No, Ed. I would think of my family first. Whenever I hear someone telling me what a wonderful husband I have, I want to say no, I have a very weak, miserable man for a husband.

CHARLIE: Maria, what are you saying?

MARIA: The truth, Ed. The bitter truth. You’re not good . . . you are a coward. You want the whole world to think how wonderful you are, and you’re ready to sacrifice your wife and children for this. (angrily, shrilly) What’s wrong with you? Why do you have to be so humble all the time? What wrong have you done that you crave the approval of others so much?

CHARLIE: I have never done a wrong thing in my life.

MARIA (with a sigh of resignation): I know, I fell in love with you for that. A wonderful, good man. Real security, I thought. A man who would always be loyal. But now . . . I hate the sight of you. (She stands up, ready to walk out.)

CHARLIE (frightened): Maria, please! People will hear you!

MARIA: I’m leaving you now, Ed, before we all starve to death.

CHARLIE: Maria, I promise before the Almighty God, I’ll never again give a penny away. From now on I’ll live only for my family.

MARIA: You’ve promised once too often. I can’t trust you any more. (She goes, but stops at door.) Do you know that except for your own family, everyone calls you Charlie? They took away your name, your money, and now they’ll take away your wife and sons.

CHARLIE (stops her): I won’t let you go, Maria. I love you too much! If you go away I might as well die. . . .

MARIA: All right then, tell me what is wrong with you, Charlie? What’s wrong?

CHARLIE: Ed! Call me Ed! Please, Maria, don’t humiliate me. My name is Ed.

MARIA (looks at him pityingly): You came from a poor family—so did I, like millions of others, but we’re not crawling. We stand on our own feet and fight back. What’s wrong, Charlie? What’s wrong with you?

CHARLIE: Don’t call me Charlie. I won’t allow anyone to call me Charlie from now on. I warn you, Maria.

MARIA: All right, you’re not Charlie. But who are you then? Tell me, what makes you such a coward?

CHARLIE: I don’t know. I never could be like others. I just love people, that’s all—and it makes me happy when they love me.

MARIA: Everyone wants to be loved—but not as much as you do.

 

P.S.: The ending of this sketch is, of course, not conclusive. It would take years of abuse and ridicule for Charlie to reach the point of doing something rash. The above is merely a synopsis rather than gradual character growth.

It is more than possible that Ed, after years of soul-searching, might have died without knowing the real reason, the motivation, for his excessive generosity, which was so simple—he wanted to belong to the human race.

Or perhaps he realized that he hadn’t any sort of talent that could make him an outstanding person, even just enough to be noticed, so he did what was the easiest thing for him—to try to please others and help them when they needed help.

People are eternally looking for someone on whose shoulder they can cry out their troubles—and Edward, the good old Charlie that he was, found this pleasurable instead of tiresome. Somehow he always felt better after he had listened to other people’s woes.

He was a real Samaritan. He knew when he did a good deed. But of course he never thought he was doing it because he wanted to be important. His metabolism seemed to work better and his blood pressure seemed just right whenever he helped people with money or with sympathetic advice. He actually lived to help. It became a necessity, like breathing. It might have been even more important to him than having sexual relations with his wife.

A man who craves recognition that much must be a lonely man, a man who, even if he is married, is not important enough to his wife or his children. Ed was not really lonely and he was loved, but over the years Maria soured because of the neglect resulting from her husband’s preoccupation with helping others. Perhaps she was an extremely capable woman and Ed didn’t feel that she needed him. Perhaps she made him feel inadequate. Whatever the reason, helping others was the only way he knew to be important before himself and before the world.

A writer getting hold of a character like Ed can write a play or a novel about his contradictions if he is truly three-dimensional. It is vitally important to remember that to change or even modify character is almost impossible because to give up generosity, for instance, would be to live without a purpose.

No one decides in his youth whether he really wants to be a hypocritical, a vindictive, or an over-generous man. There are inborn characteristics in all of us, and it depends on our physical make-up and our environment what direction we shall take in the future.

Motivation must be as evident in your creative writing as the nose on your face.

Motivation for man serves to build an enduring, all-embracing edifice called importance for his safety. But the important façade is not immune to a constant bitter attack. Man, like the spider, is forced constantly to reinforce, to repair, even to rebuild his damaged edifice.

 

LOVE: THE FIRST STEP TOWARD SKEPTICISM

The young have no conception of what real love is. They love as they eat—by instinct. They need more security, much more, than grownups do. The young are like our ancestors were millennia ago, wandering upon the earth, crisscrossing tracks over territories, tasting fruits which might be poisonous. And had the fruits been poisonous, our ancestors might have died. If they had recovered, they would have been wiser for the experience.

The following is the first serious encounter of two youngsters with merciless reality. On the surface it seems to be a childish little affair—but it is not. It is full of sinister implications.

A girl of sixteen and a boy of nineteen sit in the girl’s living room, petting. Her parents are at the theatre.

 

THE GIRL ( just for a moment comes up for breath; she can hardly talk): John . . . now behave yourself. Wait . . . let me alone! Let me talk first. Do you really love me? Honest, do you?

THE BOY (very excited, he considers her question immaterial and tries to resume his interrupted love-making): Don’t talk now.

THE GIRL (considers the boy’s actions ungentlemanly; demands an answer): You have to tell me. Do you love me? Oh, John. Please, John. Oh no! First tell me! (She fights off another desperate attempt on the part of the boy to reach her.) Not until you tell me. Do you? Do you?

THE BOY (his determination to carry on undaunted is broken by the iron will of his adversary): Okay, I love you! Are you satisfied?

THE GIRL: How much?

THE BOY: Now don’t start that again! Don’t be silly!

THE GIRL: I’m not silly. Say it. How much do you love me?

THE BOY (wants to get it over with): More than anything? Okay?

THE GIRL: What is anything?

THE BOY (considers this last question of hers sheer cussedness but tries to answer, although he really doesn’t know how): Anything must be everything. Right?

THE GIRL: That’s no answer. You don’t want to tell me because you don’t really love me.

THE BOY: Your folks will be home in no time. Don’t waste time talking.

THE GIRL (crying): But I want to be sure. I want to hear it. You can’t kiss me if you don’t say it.

THE BOY: I love you, I love you, I love you! A million times I love you . . . forever and ever and . . .

THE GIRL is at last convinced, now she knows she can be sure of his love, and with an upsurge of ecstasy clings to her young sweetheart.

 

What does the above episode signify? Naked fear. Fear of the unknown is always with us. One feels the urge of awakening sex with conflicting emotions. Desire with fear throws girls into a dilemma. What will happen if? Do I miss something if I hold back? Am I a coward? What if I become pregnant? The decision is hard, especially for a teen-ager who has spent sleepless night after night imagining what every girl must experience sooner or later, until a strong, demanding male comes along and helps her to make a decision.

He will promise the sky, the world, the universe. His touch will make her blood run wild. She wants to believe, wants to be possessed, but what if... There are men who cannot be trusted, she has heard. She wishes to God he would take her against her wishes—the responsibility then would rest on him and not on her. She could stand being a victim instead of a person who wanted all this to happen to her.

But the boy relies on his eloquence to convince her that he would never hurt her; that he will stop whenever she wants him to. Just one kiss, a small little kiss can’t harm her, can it? She admits it can’t, and so opens the way for just a little kiss. She is kissed, but he will not stop there—he knew that beforehand, and she really hoped he wouldn’t.

She is thrilled as her body is awakened, but panic grips her at the same time. What will happen to her after it’s over? She feels she is in danger and pushes the man away, even though she’s almost paralyzed. She wants her lover to be strong and persistent, yet when he is a feeling of guilt wells up in her. Can she trust him? Does he mean what he said? Fear ripples through her again and almost extinguishes her desire to experience the intoxicating feeling that only sex can give.

“Tell me you love me, love me!”

She is frantic to hear that he would do anything for her, even die for her, but he’s too excited, too near the climax and can’t think of a thing but his overwhelming emotions. She beats him or scratches his face just for a scrap of encouragement. Tell me you love me!

In a vision she sees what the future could hold for her: shame. She might become pregnant. She sees her mother’s distorted face . . . her father’s silent, accusing eye on her. What are her friends going to say?

All these and a million other horrors crowd her mind and make her force her lover to say things, endearing things, to her. She knows that the little words “I love you” of themselves really mean nothing, yet they give her the courage to go on, and make her forget her danger. For the first time she can exult in unleashed passion and experience the joy the poets sing about.

And after the first exultation, the first passion, she feels she belongs only to that one man for the rest of her life. She clings to him, the first man to know her so intimately. And at that very moment, when she could be the happiest person in existence, comes the cold, never-to-be-forgotten humiliation of her life.

She wants him to stay with her, to wait for her folks to come back, feeling that from now on her allegiance belongs not to her family but to this boy who has possessed her. And then he claims he must go. He’s sorry but he cannot stay one moment longer. He must attend to a very important affair that cannot wait. It is annoying, he says, but he’s sure she will understand because she is very intelligent.

She cries, she begs. Nothing can move him and he leaves. She has heard so much of man’s inhumanity and infidelity and now at last she’s confronted with it.

Let’s suppose that he really has an important appointment. Still she feels their love-making was of such tremendous importance that it must supersede all else for the moment.

She has now made her first fundamental mistake concerning men. To him the occasion wasn’t that important. He had experienced the same sensation many times before. He also knows he must be very careful with these silly creatures. They think if they let you make a little love to them, you belong for the rest of your life to that one girl. What nonsense! Run while the running is good.

One thing is certain: they are afraid of consequences just as the girls are. Another girl, who has already gone through such an experience, knows disappointment and, to a degree, humiliation, but she may feel that the competition is too keen and she must offer more to the man if she wants to keep him. Such rationalization will lead her to still more humiliation.

The girl who is left after her first experience feels she’s been betrayed. She will not wait up for her parents to come home but in solitude, in her own bed, she’ll relive her fearful and at the same time exciting experience—and with the great tolerance that only a woman has the capacity for, will try to understand her boy friend’s hypocrisy and his transparent excuses as to why he had to leave so abruptly.

It is interesting to read an article by a noted psychiatrist, Frank S. Caprio, on “The Biology of Love.” “Seven million American women,” he writes, “admit they find sex unsatisfactory or even physically distasteful.” No wonder, after such experiences.

Another noted psychiatrist, O. Spinger English, states: “One marriage in ten has a satisfactory sexual relationship.” What a horrible picture that is!

A girl, in her innocence, takes it for granted that when she lets a man penetrate the sacredness of her body she can trust him forever. A crude awakening to reality will be hard to forget.

It is possible that such memories could ruin a marriage that is consummated many years later? Of course not. We never do a thing for one reason. Success or failure of a marriage never depends on one or two disappointing episodes. We should always first take into account all of our childhood memories; then the inherited characteristics, the mental or physical illnesses in the families, the broken homes, promiscuity, neglect, poverty, and many personal phobias of the people involved.

If one could eliminate painful experiences, it would not necessarily make a person happier.

Never experiencing an upset stomach or headache or any kind of pain, or living without frustration would render a human being a freak, without compassion for others, and in the end he would die of a sickness of which he was never aware.

Disappointment, painful or not, is a necessary evil. One person will be wiser from it, while another will be crushed, never to recuperate from the blow.

Survival will depend on intelligence, perseverance, health, inherited characteristics, upbringing, and a good, healthy family life—but it would be a miracle if the aftermath of her first disastrous affair did not leave a girl with a healthy skepticism. Will such a dose of skepticism harm a young girl? Not at all. Just the opposite. Often it is the first step to maturity.

II.

Young people don’t know that their little game of mutual attraction is a trap that Nature devised to catch the unwary. Nature has no interest in whether the participants are intelligent or stupid, beautiful or ugly. Her goal is to make them cohabit in order to carry on the race.

Only Man has the capacity to reason, to plan, to foresee, while all other mammals instinctively select the strong or the beautiful to carry on their species.

Love is the gravitational force in orbit with life. Love is physical and mental attraction, plus emotional security.

Love includes begetting offspring and fighting for their safety. The sex urge is part, a very big part, of love; it is really the “life urge” camouflaged as sex. When the last shimmering desire for sex is snuffed out, that man is as good as dead.

Depending upon our physical and mental make-up, our idea of perfection shifts to conform with the latest excitement in our lives. A picture of an actress may impress us so strongly that our attachment to a previous ideal evaporates.

In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare demonstrates how swiftly youth can change from complete worship of one person to adoration of another.

Romeo was so madly in love with Rosalinda that without hesitation he risked being killed when he attended the same party as she. Then he saw Juliet and, in the upsurge of new ecstasy, his great love for Rosalinda dissolved into thin air.

To adults this supersonic speed must seem ridiculous but in reality it is the most natural thing in the world. (Romeo was not more than sixteen.)

Youth goes through this kind of metamorphosis, from one state of mind to another, almost by the hour. Every little seemingly insignificant episode adds to or detracts from a precious concept of his life.

Of course the years of adolescence are considered the formative ones. However, the formative years never stop but merely slow down as we grow older. When we arrive at the ripe old age of twenty, our likes and dislikes are more or less formed. We claim that by now we are attracted only to a certain type of the opposite sex, but this “certain type” usually fluctuates according to place and circumstance.

So far we have not really arrived at an absolutely rigid stand, but there always is a day when all this happy philandering will be changed. Someone appears on our horizon and our search is abruptly terminated. We are going to feel with absolute certainty that the right person has at last arrived.

Why this should be the right one, the one and only who could make us sublimely happy, is not clear as yet, but the terrible need to be near this person is unmistakable.

The strange and almost grotesque thing in this affair is that the person who causes the blood in our veins to boil may not even remotely resemble the type we always professed to love before.

What could have happened?

What magic has this stranger wrought upon us to overcome our natural resistance?

Real love is not an overnight affair, when, after one or two disagreements all hell breaks loose and sobering disillusion follows. No, real love is made of much stronger stuff than that. When you find it you will feel that at last you have found a haven which will protect you even if all the calumnies of the world were to fall on your head.

Love is the most desirable, the most precious thing life can offer us.

How can we recognize real love which endures hardship? How does it look when it is genuine? The answer is that love is physical and mental attraction plus emotional security.

Many people will resent the statement that real love is based on security. If we ask them what they think love is, they have a ready answer.

“It is to give without ever thinking of security.” Of course we might go overboard in giving without ever thinking of security, but when we do, it is because subconsciously we have been reassured that our love was appreciated and returned in kind.

Love, real love, is a conscious emotion; it is not a blind devotion. Real love rarely goes on the rocks, because the people involved know what to expect from each other. They aren’t blind: they are aware of the pitfalls of being in love and are prepared for the best and for the worst.

Love has the magic power to make the lowest of men become the most important men in the world.

WHY WE FALL OUT OF LOVE

To discover the invisible nuances of the mind is the eternal quest for the creative writer. I hope this section will contribute useful observations to those interested in the subject. Why do we fall out of love? What an idiotic question. Any fool can answer that one.

Reason one: nagging. Reason two: lack of appreciation. Reason three: being taken for granted. Reason four: wait . . . let’s stop here. Being taken for granted seems to me the worst one. A friend of mine, a very nice gentleman, told me not long ago that he had a dream. The most awful dream a husband and father could have, especially if it is close to reality.

Here it is, as it was told to me. (It is strange that dreams always imitate Ionesco or Beckett or any of the daring men on the flying trapeze.)

A room with lots of wild kids running around, and a woman busying herself. A man unobtrusively sneaks into the room. (He is the father and husband.) Everyone is there but no one seems to see him. It is as if he were invisible. He walks on tiptoe, surreptitiously takes off his coat, sits down in a corner, and commences to wait. Meanwhile the children start to crawl all over him as if he were a piece of furniture and he acts exactly like a piece of furniture. Not a word out of him, no movement of any sort. Mother calls the children for supper. They eat, while the man still waits. He’s the breadwinner, of course, the father of these brats and the faithful husband of this woman. Obviously they take him for granted. The man timidly indicates with his hands that he is hungry. Nobody notices him. The woman offers more and more to the children and finally what the children do not eat she scrapes into a bowl which she disdainfully throws before the man. He eats gratefully, hungrily, noiselessly. Slowly the wife and children disappear from the room, leaving the dirty dishes on the table, and the man who was taken for granted stands up, gathers the dirty dishes, washes them and puts them away, and then begins to make the bed. When he finishes making the bed he gets an old blanket, full of holes, puts it under the bed, and crawls after it. The wife enters, takes off her clothes, climbs into bed and turns off the light. There is a moment’s silence.

 

HUSBAND (from under the bed): Goodnight dear. (no answer; sotto voce as if praying) The Lord is full of compassion and gracious; slow to anger and plenteous in mercy.

WIFE: Who’s there?

HUSBAND (from under the bed): Your beloved husband. “Hear ye, Hear ye, for as the Heaven is high above the earth, great is His mercy towards them that fear him.” I am cold here, Martha. (He shivers so that the bed above him shakes.)

WIFE (cries out in anguish): Nagging—always nagging! This mental cruelty is getting on my nerves.

HUSBAND: You used to allow me to sleep in bed once in a while. (he shivers)

WIFE (irritated): Stop shivering—you worm!

HUSBAND: I’m sorry, dear! Martha, may I say something?

WIFE: No!

HUSBAND: I’m afraid you’re taking me for granted.

WIFE: Always whining—always sorry for yourself.

HUSBAND: It’s very cold here.

WIFE: Shut up!

HUSBAND: Yes, dear.

WIFE: I think the only solution to this misery of mine is a divorce. (silence) Why don’t you answer? Didn’t you hear what I said? (no answer—she is getting angry) Speak up, you miserable creature, when I’m speaking to you. (Now she is infuriated—she jumps out of bed.)

 

I’d better stop right here and let someone else finish this story. There could be as many endings as there are writers. You will find endless characters in the coming chapters all suffering the deadly malady of misunderstanding, incompatibility, indifference and imbecility.

Saltpeter, sulphur, and charcoal make gunpowder. Take any part of it away and the remainder is harmless. H₂O means water, the composition of hydrogen and oxygen. Leave out one or the other and that which was before is no more.

Love is possible because it is based on absolute trust, and trust means security against the whole hostile world.

But precisely how does one start to fall out of love? Does some great disappointment start the avalanche? Possibly. But more than likely the process was started by something small.

Disappointment or loss of confidence in a partner is enough to start a slow transformation which will result in mistrust, and mistrust is a sure sign that love has started to wither. The sorry fact is that many broken marriages were foredoomed even before the prospective partners laid eyes on each other.

People usually conceal their real characters during courtship. They are inclined to be more generous, more broadminded, more understanding and more tolerant, but six months or a year later the sweet tune of courtship no longer sounds so sweet. Confronted with the hardships of everyday living, the couple faces hostile currents which require iron determination.

The false façade each one presented during courtship has by this time started to crack, and disappointment necessarily must follow.

Have you ever heard the expression. “So-and-so died suddenly. The poor fellow wasn’t even sick, just dropped dead.”

What a short-sighted statement that is. No one ever dies suddenly, except in an accident. Sickness may be harbored within us for months, even years, without our having the slightest suspicion that we are actually dying all the time.

It is the same with love. One day you realize, with stark horror, that you have been living with a person who is repulsive to you. You can’t understand for the life of you how you could ever have fallen in love with such an individual. It seems utterly fantastic that once upon a time you thought of him or her as the most “gorgeous and angelic” person who ever lived.

Is there a formula which can tell you when love starts to wither and will ultimately die? There’s no such formula in existence, but there are telltale symptoms, and very obvious little signs which foreshadow things to come. Here are a few:

Lack of appreciation	Lack of tenderness
Annoyance	Rudeness
Nagging	Belittling
Uncompromising attitude	Humiliation
Sarcasm	Stinginess
Regimentation	Being taken for granted
Indifference	Abuse
Fault-finding	Tardiness

There are many more indicative signs but we feel that the above are enough to remind you that what was once burning love began to be not so burning, then became tepid and finally downright cold.

These little, seemingly inconsequential symptoms are unnoticed, disguised first as very mild, polite annoyances. How is it possible for them to grow with such supersonic rapidity, almost overnight, into barbed-wire naggings and not only irritating but poisoned sarcasms? Can you guess what will happen next?

Look at the list. There you can see clearly the almost mathematical progression to hatred.

Let us take a young couple as an example, and see how great love can turn to hate.

These two young people fell madly in love. The girl was twenty-two and the boy twenty-five. They were sure that not even in history books could one find such undying love as theirs. It was heaven on earth. They defied their parents and eloped. Of course both of them were forced to work, although the girl had done nothing but attend college before she married. The boy was a clerk in an advertising firm. Evenings they were tired but happy. They enjoyed and loved every minute of their married life—at first.

On arriving home from work the boy would throw his clothes all over the place. It was sheer pleasure for him to do this because all his life he had had to be meticulously tidy. His mother was fanatical on this score.

There’s a cruel but prophetic saying, “They were so much in love they had to marry to cool off.” This “cooling off” came to pass quite early with our young married lovers.

After awhile the young wife became sick and tired of having to get up an hour earlier in the morning to pick up all the things her high-spirited spouse had scattered about. At first she was ashamed to mention this to him. He, on the other hand, was highly amused.

“This is fun, isn’t it, honey?” he chuckled one morning as his little wife crawled under the bed to find his cuff link.

“It’s not fun for me,” she announced irritably.

This mild outburst was a real shocker to the young husband, so much so that he almost forgot to breathe. Then he sat down and whined piteously, “Don’t make me feel married so soon! Don’t ever use that tone with me again!”

“All right, I won’t,” she answered truculently, and crawled back into bed to doze for the rest of the precious minutes before she had to get up.

Being an inexperienced husband, he readily believed his wife’s promise, and thought she would never use that accusing and irritated voice to him in the future.

She remained her same sweet self but started to insist, at first mildly and interspersed with beguiling kisses, that he should be more considerate and let her sleep in the morning, instead of asking her to find his wrist watch, his pocket comb, or his keys.

He began to realize slowly that something was amiss. He inquired quite acidly whether their honeymoon was over.

“What has my wanting to sleep a little longer in the morning got to do with our honeymoon?” she asked.

“Everything,” he snapped at her. “If I can’t have a wife who keeps a tidy house . . . we might as well call it quits!” he finished unreasonably.

“You mean divorce?” she asked breathlessly.

“I didn’t say that.”

“My hearing is absolutely normal. You said we should call it quits! What else does that mean if not divorce?”

“You’d better grow up, child.”

“I’m not a child,” she cried. “I’m a married woman!”

“Physically yes, but . . .”

“Say it! Say it! I’m . . . I’m just. . . .”

“Just naive.”

“I know something else is on your mind. You want a divorce, don’t you?”

“I do not!” he shouted angrily. “What I meant, and I said it quite distinctly, was that we should call a halt to these nonsensical arrangements.”

“They’re not nonsensical!” shouted the little woman. “I want to sleep and from now on don’t you dare wake me up to find your stupid socks for you.”

“Who’s stupid?”

“I said your stupid socks!”

“Don’t be a coward. Tell me you really meant to say that I’m stupid!”

“Okay, you’re stupid,” echoed the bride. “Are you happy now?”

That same night, however, their differences were overcome by their physical desire for each other.

A few months later they were invited to a party. The man, as usual, was ready and rarin’ to go, but the dear little woman was still in the throes of those innumerable last-minute finishing touches which usually burn up the waiting male.

“Be a darling and find my white chiffon scarf for me,” implored the young wife.

But her husband, still smarting from the rebuff two months earlier, remained seated and undisturbed.

“Did you find my scarf?” she asked a little later.

“No, my dear,” he answered with the utmost calm. “I didn’t.”

“Didn’t you look?”

“No, dear.” His voice had a studied indifference.

“You didn’t?” This was uttered in a high falsetto.

“No, dear. You told me not so long ago that I should look for my own things. You should do the same, dearest.”

She gave him a venomous look and started to undress.

“Go to the party by yourself,” she announced after a breathless silence. “I’m staying home.”

“Are you sure, dear?” he asked politely.

“Positive.”

“All right, then I’ll be off. Good night, darling. Happy dreams. . . .”

And he really left.

When he came home he found the bird had flown. She was nowhere. No note, no wife. His first impulse was to burst out crying, because he really loved her. But somehow he remembered that he was supposed to be a man now, like his father. He had to be determined and strong.

He knew where she was—at her mother’s, of course. And he was sure that she was waiting for his call, or for him to rush there to bring her back, begging for forgiveness. She could wait, he decided. He knew he must be determined so, with a heavy heart, he went to bed. He had nightmares. He was frightened out of his wits, but in the morning he was more determined than ever to resist the urge to phone or go for her.

With every passing hour he felt something heroic within his chest. He had survived the first night and now he knew he would live through the second one. She would know in the future who was the head of the house.

By the fourth day he was miserable, wretched, and triumphant, all at the same time. He was on the verge of throwing in the sponge when his mother-in-law walked in unexpectedly.

She asked innocently, “Where’s Annabelle?”

“With you, of course,” he answered placidly. Now he knew that the hour of triumph had arrived. He felt drunk with power.

She conceded the fact, not by answering directly but by quite heatedly striking out in a different direction.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, letting that poor girl eat her heart out. Have you no feelings? Go right to that phone and call her!”

“Why can’t she call me?” he wanted to know.

“You’re supposed to be a gentleman,” she retorted acidly.

“That’s true, and she’s supposed to be a lady.”

“You want her to come back, don’t you?” she demanded.

“I didn’t send her away,” came the defiant answer.

Beginning to get very red in the face, she asked pointedly, “Do you want to end the marriage?”

“Ask her. I’ll agree to whatever she wants.”

“Even to divorce?” she asked incredulously.

“Whatever she wishes. If a divorce will make her happy, then I’ll give her one.”

“All right, but come and take her home first.”

“No. I didn’t send her away and I won’t bring her back.”

“You stubborn fool!” she cried, and charged out of the house.

Two hours later the door opened noiselessly and Annabelle came in. He pretended to read. Slowly she went into the bedroom and hung up her coat. She came back and looked at him, waiting for him to speak.

After an interval, as he was still immersed in his reading, she spoke first. “I’m home dear.”

“That’s nice,” he said politely.

“Can I sit down?” she asked tremulously.

“Why, of course.”

Annabelle sat down in his lap. “Do you mind?”

“Of course not.” And suddenly the strength he had so heroically nurtured broke its bonds and he started to cry.

“For Heaven’s sake, don’t ever leave me!” he begged.

“I won’t, darling,” she promised, and they melted into a trembling, loving huddle.

And yet, ten years later, almost to the date of their wed ding anniversary, they really did get a divorce.

What is behind this forbidding word “incompatibility?” Could people resolve their differences if they reasoned with each other? I think not. It often has nothing to do with understanding or reasonableness.

Let us look into one or two cases of incompatibility and see why the marriages were doomed to fail.

One young wife needed ten hours’ sleep and stayed in bed until late in the morning, whereas her husband, a living dynamo, was wide awake after four or five hours’ sleep. During the first year of their marriage it was fun to kid her about being a “sleeping beauty.” But a couple of years later he became annoyed, then angry, then sarcastic, because in the late afternoon she was much livelier than he was. At night she was energetic, the life of the party, and at the ghostly hour of four in the morning was still going strong, as if she never intended to stop. They would go to bed, and he would be up at his usual hour, but she wouldn’t stir until nearly noon. Finally he decided she was lazy. As a matter of fact, she was not. It was simply that her body required more sleep than his. However, his argument was that if she went to bed earlier, she would still have her ten hours’ sleep but awaken at a reasonable hour in the morning, thoroughly refreshed.

She tried this but couldn’t fall asleep until the wee hours of the morning, and when she got up she was only half-awake for ages. She struggled for months to break the habit until, exhausted, she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She loved her husband and desperately wanted to please him, but her body simply refused to respond to the requirements of this demanding man. Finally they arrived at the point of “incompatibility.”

There are people who function best in the afternoon and evening hours, whereas others are at their best in the early hours of the day. When two such opposites marry they are, through no actual fault of their own, incompatible.

This is only one facet of incompatibility. Another is the inability of some husbands and wives to play “follow the leader.”

In society, equality is the most admirable concept by which to live, but in a partnership or marriage it will never work. You may dispute this statement if you like, but if you look around and see a happy partnership, friendship, or marriage, you will find that one of its members is the leader and the other the follower.

You are free to call this undemocratic behavior, unreasonable and degrading, nevertheless it is a necessity for harmonious co-existence. It is possible to have leadership without tyranny, as in the case of the brain, which first takes into account the physical condition of the body, then condenses and crystalizes the conflicting emotions, and upon arriving at a conclusion, gives the direction to move, to be outraged, to run from danger or fight back, depending upon the particular necessity of the moment.

When two people are dependent upon each other and their destination is the same, the leadership of one will not necessarily be ominous, nor will it compel dependency or slavery for the other.

Love is trust. Trust cannot be forced, it must be earned. Trust automatically places each person on the position of becoming a leader or a follower for the mutual benefit of both.

There is nothing degrading about this unconscious or conscious selectivity between two people which delegates one to leadership. They both can function for the benefit of each other if they know just what position they are going to fulfill in their future.

The trouble starts when two individuals with a virulent superiority complex are carried away by physical attraction and decide that they are madly in love.

In his book What Is Science? (Simon & Schuster) Erich Fromm states, “A man who is constantly bragging, boasting, belittling others, is perhaps aware of himself as a masterful superior person. What he’s not aware of is that in reality all these feelings of power and superiority are only compensations for the very opposite. Deep down inside he feels weak, helpless, childish, and the very moment when he tells us, ‘Look here, what a great guy I am,’ he’s really praying: ‘Don’t let them find out that I feel like a helpless child.’”

If both parties in a marriage happen to have the same compulsive superiority complex, each will fight tooth and nail to save it. Among such people compromise is impossible. Each will forever try to jockey for a better position to prove his mastery over the other. Incompatibility will be the result.

It is truly wonderful when young couples say and feel that their love is the most sacred, the most genuine, in the history of man. The awakening of true love is the most thrilling experience in life.

Courtship is the time for a couple to get to know each other and find out how deeply each feels for the other. It is not an easy matter to detect meanness when it is covered with honey, but preliminary work must be done before one can trust or be trusted.

Lust and ignorance, for instance, are greatly responsible for people falling out of love.

Lust erupts like a volcano and dies out as quickly as it came. Real love is more controlled and, if it is cared for tenderly, can live and thrive for a lifetime. Tenderness is the touchstone of love. Of course, I don’t mean to imply that love is just sunshine and honey. It requires tact, understanding and tolerance to smooth out the rough edges of living together. Two people can live with genuine love without bruising each other too much.

But when ignorance masquerades under the guise of love, it will erupt almost immediately and will be followed by recriminations, regret, and bitterness.

If a man shows signs of being frugal or, in plain English, stingy, during courtship, you can take it for granted that after marriage he’ll be a holy terror where money is concerned.

Stinginess is really fear of tomorrow. To look ahead in order to avoid poverty is commendable foresight, but who can live with a person who is afraid twenty-four hours a day? Such a man stifles almost all manifestations of living. He knows only one virtue . . . to be safe. All other things are verboten.

If a frightened person happens to fall in love with one who is similarly attuned, there’ll be a perfect unity between them. But should a spendthrift happen to fall in love with a frugal person, their awakening will be horrible.

Frugal	—	Spendthrift
Healthy	—	Hypochondriac
Trusting	—	Liar
Honest	—	Dishonest
Vulgar	—	Refined
Conventional	—	Unconventional
Skeptic	—	Believer
Flirt	—	Retiring
Shiftless	—	Systematic
Oversexed	—	Undersexed
Materialistic	—	Spiritualistic
Sloppy	—	Meticulous
Moral	—	Immoral
	etc.

There are countless more of such wrong combinations one must watch for, but let these few suffice for the time being. There are those, for instance, who have an absolute passion for music or sports or the theatre, and whereas the mate may really like any one of the above, he can’t understand why his beloved should consider those things the very essence of life.

Now if one of the parties feels that the other is simply insane to be so madly in love with his own field of recreation and therefore starts a campaign or crusade to stop this great devotion, there will almost invariably be an obdurate and fanatical resistance.

Millions of couples stay together even after great disillusionment because of a sentimental and economic attachment to each other. But staying together and tolerating each other through force of habit is not love.

Let me define again what constitutes love: It is physical and mental attraction, plus emotional security.

Staying together when love is only a memory may be justified for the sake of convenience, or simply through a fear of loneliness. But why is it that a simple disillusionment can disturb people so much that many actually become ill over it? Why make such a fuss over such a small thing?

First of all, there is nothing small about being disillusioned. It means that our judgment was terribly wrong. We believed, we trusted, and we loved a person who turned out to be something other than that for which we had bargained.

To have trusted a person with your love—more, with your life—and to have the object of your admiration turn out to be something objectionable, evokes fear for your safety and your life.

Falling out of love is a major catastrophe, but fortunately it’s very rarely fatal. Love is like the celebrated Phoenix: it will arise from its ashes and live again. With great caution we will start out to look once more for that one really great, redeeming, compensating emotion that makes living not only tolerable but a prolonged joy and ecstasy.

To love and be loved is the height of achievement. It is the greatest thing life has to offer.

It is the pinnacle of being important.

LOYALTY

There are many inspiring stories and plays hiding under the lofty concept of loyalty.

Here are a few.

Long, long ago a soldier was arrested for some kind of crime. The King thought he should be punished by death. The young soldier, who had been a brave and loyal subject, begged the King to be allowed to go back to his home before he was executed to say goodby to his elderly parents. He promised faithfully that he would be back in a week, in time for the execution.

The King laughed, saying he was not such a fool as to be taken in by such an empty promise, and the soldier was surely not such a fool as to come back to die.

But a friend of the condemned soldier stepped forward and said: “Your Majesty, I trust him. I will die in his stead if he breaks his promise.”

Astonished by such blind trust the King answered, “I want you to know that if he fails to come back you will certainly die in his place!”

And the good friend said confidently, “I am not afraid. He’ll be back, your Majesty.”

The condemned soldier did come back, and the King was so impressed by the friend’s sublime trust that he pardoned the soldier.

This is the kind of loyalty that poets like to write about.

Such loyalty need not be a fairy tale, either. It can exist when two or more people’s interests so bind them together that life without the other seems impossible.

We must inspire loyalty.

And now here is a very strange kind of loyalty. Once upon a time there lived a couple so much in love that friends and even foes admitted that there was never such love on earth before.

By a strange misunderstanding, the young husband was arrested on a flagrant accusation that he was a spy for a foreign country. He was found guilty and it seemed that he would be executed in the shortest possible time. The young and beautiful wife was naturally overcome with grief, and as the execution neared she vowed that the same day her beloved husband died, she would follow him into eternity.

I have heard many strange stories about great love, when a man or a woman have declared that they could not survive the death of their beloved, and yet somehow managed to find someone who was ready to heal the wound and make them realize that after all, life is stronger than death, and they have managed quite happily to live to the end of their days.

There is always an exception to the normal. In this case, the soon-to-be bereaved woman meant what she had vowed. She knew that she would be loyal to her husband to her last breath.

But a very strange thing happened. The day before the execution, a very important personage representing the government appeared before the inconsolable young woman and told her that he had unquestionable evidence in his hands proving that her husband was innocent. And, to put it as bluntly as possible, he asked her if she were willing to entertain him for one single night in exchange for her beloved’s life. He solemnly promised—nay, swore—that her husband would be free in a few days.

And now her loyalty came through with flying colors and proved to be 100 percent true till death. Clio, the immortal historian, has something to record for the ages. The young woman flatly refused the man’s immoral proposition. She was ready to let her husband die rather than break her vow.

Then the unexpected happened. The very next day her husband was released. Of course there was joy, but only a Homer could have described the scene. The man was cleared completely, and they could have lived happily forever if the foolish woman, in a moment of exaltation, had not told him how her loyalty had been tempted but how nothing on earth could have induced her to be unfaithful to him.

The man’s strong arms stiffened around her body, then pushed her away as he asked incredulously, “You refused to save my life?”

“I was loyal to you,” she answered haltingly, frightened by the strange coolness in his voice.

The man was violent, and without a word . . .

No, I won’t finish this story either. I’ll leave it to your imagination. As you see, there are loyalties and loyalties!

What is loyalty really—not in glittering words but in reality—is it something that never changes? Is it anything that defies the erosion of time? The Sphinx and the pyramids, built to endure for eternity, are crumbling. A great metropolis, over whose streets swarm teeming millions, was once the bottom of an ocean, and in time to come will revert to an ocean bed which, in due time, will become a metropolis, and so on until this agonized earth explodes and is swallowed up in the fierce furnace of the sun.

“Everything is changeable—only change is eternal,” goes the saying. It may be true that everything is changeable but loyalty. Isn’t it indestructible? It must be, because if it is not, where can man pin his hopes for the future?

Shall we state the terrible truth that even loyalty is subject to the inexorable law of nature? We must say it because it is true! It changes as much as everything else.

Does it mean, then, that absolute loyalty never—but never—existed? Foolish question. It was and will be in existence as long as there are men who deserve it.

This attribute can live only in the warm and loving presence of another loyalty. Alone, it withers and dies of loneliness.

Where does one get more love and loyalty than from one’s own parents? They actually are ready to give their lives that we should live.

Is that loyalty?

In a certain way it is.

It seems that we did not make a clear-cut definition. Let us start all over again. Loyalty should exist without any taint of selfishness or material gain. It should be as pure as the freshly-fallen snow. If we wished to emulate a sophist, we might well claim that no snowdrop could be pure because it is touched by the air—the atmosphere being full of miasma, germs, and filth.

No, there is no such thing as absolute purity in nature. Consequently, mother-love, too, must be more or less tainted by selfishness and self-interest.

It is still a noble feeling to love our offspring. We wish our son to succeed for his own and for our sakes. If he becomes an outcast, we would still help him, but deep down in our hearts we would be humiliated and ashamed that he failed us so miserably.

Why should parents expect anything from their offspring? It would be most unnatural if they didn’t. If they did not believe and hope that their child would be special, they might not be so eager to produce one.

“My son, my son!” we dream . . . “He’ll be the best of them all, of course.” Since we always think that we are the focal point of the universe, naturally we think and believe that our offspring will be—should be—outstanding. Of course we have some sneaking doubts deep down in our hearts, and we pray: “Almighty God, if not outstanding . . . we are ready to settle for a healthy body and healthy mind,” the two greatest gifts for which a parent can pray.

“My child.” What sweetness is in those words. You are ready to protect him with your very life. And why not? This is not just any child. He’s your very own, the continuation of yourself, past, present, and future. He is really you! The realization that through him you reach into the future, that you are being represented in successive generations perhaps to the end of time, this alone creates an emotion which surpasses even love. What you protect through your child is yourself. He is the epitome of life—your life. It is the highest goal for which to live. Why shouldn’t one be loyal to one’s self?

But life plays tricks, dirty tricks on us. Our beloved son is arrested for rape and murder. It is inconceivable! No, not our son! But our son confesses. There’s no mistake about it. He’s a murderer. But it can’t be! There must have been brutality used against him to force him to confess. There was none. Our son says there was no brutality.

All right. Then he may be shielding someone. That’s it! He’s shielding someone. He’s willing to die. Our son is willing to die for someone he loves. What heroism! What sacrifice! But he says that he isn’t shielding anyone. What then? It is conclusively proven that he is guilty of first-degree murder of the most hideous sort.

What now?

Then he must be insane! Of course. He is insane. (And we are sure, of course, that this didn’t come from our side of the family!)

God Almighty! Help us!

Can you be loyal to an insane boy? You can’t help it, for he still represents you, although your faith in the future is somewhat shaken. But do you still love this criminal? Unfortunately, this criminal happens to be you. And being you, you would like to abandon him, but how in Heaven’s name can you abandon yourself? So you stand behind him because, although you may hate yourself, you’ll still try to salvage whatever you can from the wreckage.

If anyone thinks for even a moment that we are trying to be cynical about loyalty, he is mistaken. We bemoan our fate whenever loyalty, for whatever reason, goes on the rocks.

Usefulness gives birth to loyalty—but usefulness cannot be one-sided for long. The moment one realizes that the other party has stopped contributing his share, loyalty slowly shrivels up.

Does all this sound cold-blooded and calculated? It is merely factual. It is a natural process, like growing old.

Religion is something else again. Religion offers a helping hand to those who believe, and even to those who stray and come back only when they are in need.

Religion also has its mortal enemy and fights desperately to remain alive. The Church offers faith in a better world after death to all those who believe and are loyal to her, and hellfire for those who do not.

Loyalty in all strata of society acts for the same reason, that is, self-preservation. We do not think we have discovered a startlingly new concept when we point out that loyalty is a simple, reciprocal act in return for services rendered.

How about loyalty to our country? The country of our birth is usually the most sacred. We are born and intend to live and die there. Doesn’t she deserve better treatment than a mere individual, organization, or even a church?

A country is like a fabulous mother, with millions of children. However, as long as one child is better off than another it is impossible to demand from all of them the same devotion. We can tell the poor, the neglected one, that he is obliged to be grateful just for the privilege of being alive. The poor and neglected one will not accept this as gospel truth, and in his bitterness might turn against us and even against his own mother when the pain, the neglect, the humiliation becomes unbearable.

We can preach to the hungry one till doomsday that turning against one’s own mother or one’s own country is the height of perfidy. Hungry people understand only one word: food! They will turn away from their mother or country without hesitation if someone else offers to fill their empty stomachs.

It is sheer madness to believe that a tortured man will keep his mother’s or his country’s name sacred because one brought him into this world and the other let him live to hunger without hope. Hungry people feel loyalty to no one.

The man who is robbed of the privilege of becoming important in his own esteem or in the society in which he lives, is a dangerous man. The importance of being important is second only to self-preservation.

HATE

R. A strange feeling came over me yesterday.

A. Tell me.

R. Something was gone from my life. Something very important.

A. What for instance?

R. Hate.

A. Do you mean to say you can’t hate anymore?

R. Only God knows how I enjoyed hating an ex-friend of mine.... You see . . . once upon a time we were very close friends, schoolmates. I helped him in every way possible. I gave him money to go into business, and he became rich. He met his wife, a wonderful woman and a good mother, in my home. What else shall I tell you about him? I was not only a friend but also his adviser in all his financial matters, a father and mother rolled into one. In short, I was one of the family.

A. What happened to this beautiful friendship?

R. A poem.

A. I don’t understand.

R. He wrote a poem.

A. What’s wrong with that?

R. He never wrote a damn thing before. The fact is—he was not interested in literature, let alone poetry. He didn’t give a hoot for books or for the theatre. His life was sports and nothing else.

A. Then he wrote a poem. And this one poem broke up a lifelong friendship?

R. Yes, it did, and I am convinced he did it on purpose. You see, I happened to be the editor of a weekly literary magazine. He arrogantly threw that stillborn idiocy called a poem on my desk and demanded that I publish it in the next issue. No preliminaries, no apologies, just ordered me to take that thing without even reading it first, and give it a prominent place in my magazine. The audacity, the offhanded way of ordering me around, made my blood boil. “What the devil do you know about poetry?” I demanded after I had glanced through his scatter-brained nonsense. “I know as much as you do anytime!” he came back insolently, his voice as sharp as a razor blade. The poem was not only atrocious, but it didn’t even make sense.

A. Of course you were harsh with him.

R. What do you think?

A. Then you started a fight.

R. He asked for it, so I gave it to him—good.

A. You felt insulted?

R. Of course I felt insulted. That illiterate moron dared to ask me to put such nonsense into my paper.

A. Have you found out why he acted as he did? No doubt there was a provocation. The question is, why?

R. Yes, I thought a great deal about it—I hated his guts—until yesterday.

A. What happened yesterday?

R. Suddenly I saw the whole picture. I, the benefactor, the wise, the generous man, had been walking in and out of his life like an infallible demi-god. I remembered rudely interrupting him in the middle of a sentence like an intolerant grouchy old father who will not stand for the slightest contradiction from his son. I remembered seeing him flush with anger at things I said and his wife gently nudging him so he wouldn’t oppose me. And that poor guy had tolerated me in his home for, let me see, twelve or thirteen years. His tolerance and humility would have been a shining example to Job.

A. And now you’ve stopped hating him?

R. Let me put it this way. With the persistence of a fanatic, you’ve been hammering home the point that all of us, out of sheer necessity, build a front for ourselves. I had enjoyed hating that moron so long-when suddenly it hit me. “Gosh, that poor sap would have been justified in kicking me the hell out of his house. After all, he’s entitled to be king in his own home.” I decided to stop hating him, but hate is like a nice plaything—hard to give up.

A. But if you know that your friend was more than justified in provoking you. . . .

R. I’m sure you know the answer.

A. Perhaps, but I’d like to hear whether you know it.

R. I was proven wrong and, as you know, we never like to be caught in the wrong. All right, my mistake was in being overbearing and boorish—but I am sure there was plenty of reason for it. He made plenty of mistakes and like a good father-protector, I was on the job . . . .

A. Now you are rationalizing.

R. Why should I take all the blame? I am absolutely convinced that if I hadn’t stopped him in many of his crazy investment schemes, he would have lost his shirt.

A. Do you believe all this?

R. Not necessarily. I try to do only what everyone would in my place, minimize my mistakes and prove that the other fellow deserved what he got. Period. I know, don’t tell me . . . my front again.... My lousy importance has to be kept intact at least before myself, even if I lose face before the world.

A. The question is whether you hate him or not.

R. I see his point now and I wonder if he can see mine.

A. What is your point?

R. That I make him see that I only wanted to help him. He should understand that my role of a protecting father sprang from his accepting the money from me to start his business.

A That’s true, but it’s also true you constantly reminded him that he was in your debt and would remain there until you are dead. What a cruel prospect! You actually refused to let him grow up, or think for himself, until his resentment became a cancerous growth and he decided to cut you out of his life, whatever the cost might be.

R. Yes, yes, it must have happened that way.

A. Since he waited so long to get rid of you, it shows that his affection towards you was real. I believe that he loved you and tried to please you, but you stubbornly refused to let him alone. You wanted to choke all initiative in him to death. Is that right?

R. Of course not. Now look, let’s stop this nonsense. I told you I’ve stopped hating him. But I can’t help rationalizing and justifying myself.

A. I see that. Rationalizing is our last line of defense. How about your two sons? Why did they leave you? Would you care to tell me?

R. It’s hard to admit that one is wrong, but the rationalization of what actually happened between me and this ex-friend of mine tore away the subterfuge of self-delusion and I can’t blame the other fellow any longer.

A. What are you trying to say?

R. That I was an overbearing father to them too. They hate my guts. I wanted them to come into my business but they had different ideas. The fact is, as I see it now, they just wanted to go away from me as far as possible.

A. You are a modern man, you should have known....

R. Yes, I should have—but I didn’t. I see now that every living man starts early to build himself a world of his own. He wants to be the king of his world and resents anyone daring to step into this secret territory. No trespassing is allowed.

A. Yes, this is true.

R. He may have all the degrees a college can bestow, but he is still liable to forget that everyone has as big a dose of ego and self-respect as the next fellow, and will never tolerate any belittling or benevolent attitude toward him. We may as well learn that we had better talk to every individual not as an inferior but as an equal.

Now at last it has penetrated into my thick skull that my sons left me because I looked upon them as my private property and not as individuals.

The strangest phenomenon, it seems to me now, is the awareness that in all strata of society there is nothing greater in a man’s life than The Importance of Being Important.