I SHIPPED OUT on the Polestar a second time, a planned one-year voyage from Newport News, Virginia, to Naples, and then a shuttle run carrying oil from Bahrain, Arabia, to the Naval station on Okinawa. However, the Navy changed our orders three times, and we ended up circling the globe in ninety-one days. When I signed off the Polestar, I said good-bye and good riddance to my seagoing medical career.
During six more voyages on other ships, I never once mentioned to any of the captains that I was first aid expert. Then, finally, after eighteen months of sea duty, I signed off my last oil tanker on December 6, 1946, with a Certificate of Continuous Service and a letter under presidential seal from the White House.
To you who answered the call of your country and served in its Merchant Marine to bring about the total defeat of the enemy, I extend the heartfelt thanks of the Nation. You undertook a most severe task—one which called for courage and fortitude. Because you demonstrated the resourcefulness and calm judgment necessary to carry out that task, we now look to you for leadership and example in further serving our country in peace.
I went back to my parents' home in Brooklyn where I planned to live while I continued my college education.
My first day home after my discharge, Mom made a large dinner, and invited relatives and guests to celebrate my sister Gail's ninth birthday and my return. The nineteen-year-old prodigal son, my parents assumed, would now go on to become a doctor. I hadn't yet gotten up the courage to tell them I had already fulfilled my promise by practicing medicine aboard ship, and I had no intention of continuing premed or going to medical school.
After dinner, I headed down to my cellar library for a novel to read in bed. But as I opened the door—even before I took the stairs down—I sensed something was missing. Where was the smell of wet coal?
I turned on the light and saw that my bookshelves, books and all, were gone. I tasted panic in my throat as I walked quickly to the alcove behind the steps. The coal bin was gone, and the old furnace had been replaced by an oil-burner.
No books. No coal. No toys in the bin. All the real things were gone. I wanted to dash upstairs and ask my parents, "Why?"
But it wasn't necessary. I understood. They had decided I was no longer a child. I had left as a seventeen-year-old surrogate to their dreams and they had gotten rid of my childish things. They could never have known that their son's ideas and memories and dreams—things he would use to make himself a writer—would always occupy the hideaway beneath the cellar steps.
At breakfast next morning, I told them I had already tasted a doctor's life, and like Maugham and Chekhov and Doyle, I had failed at it. I was not cut out to practice medicine. I was going to become a writer, I said, and now I had to leave Brooklyn to do it.
My mother wept and my father walked out of the room.
I moved from my parents' apartment to an inexpensive furnished room on the west side of Manhattan, in the neighborhood called Hells Kitchen. "What money I had left from my service pay would have to support me while I wrote my first novel. It was about a seventeen-year-old purser's adventures at sea.
The novel was rejected by a dozen publishers. The last one had left a reader's coverage behind in the manuscript. By mistake? On purpose? Only two lines remain in my memory. The critique began: "It isn't as bad as some unsolicited manuscripts, but it's not good enough..." And the last line: "The basic story is good, but it is all on the surface and the characters' motivations are never too clear."
Like most writers, I took solace in the opening and closing phrases, putting the two buts out of my mind.
I reread the novel and saw how amateurish it was, how much I had to learn before I could call myself an author: how to get beneath the surface, how to understand a character's motivation, how to revise. I put the manuscript aside, knowing I would have to find another profession to support myself while I learned how to write.
Many writers began as reporters, among them Twain, Hemingway, and Stephen Crane. Well, why not?
A few days after my novel was rejected, I went to the New York Times building in Times Square, and asked to speak to the publisher. Only now do I realize how presumptuous it was of me to approach Mr. Ochs without an appointment or introduction, how amazing it was that I actually got in to see him, and how generous it was of him to give me the time.
"I'd like to start as a cub reporter," I told him, "then to become a foreign correspondent."
"Has that always been your goal?"
I squirmed as I searched for the right words. "Well, not exactly. My real goal is to be an author."
He nodded gravely and turned a framed picture on his desk to show me a photograph of a young man. "I'm going to tell you the same thing I told my son," he said. "In the immortal words of the famous journalist and author Horace Greeley, 'Go west, young man. Go west.'"
I suspected that Mr. Ochs interpreted Greeley as advising young would-be authors and journalists to hone their skills and seek their opportunities away from New York, somewhere in the minor leagues.
I thanked him for his advice, but I didn't follow it. Instead, I enrolled in a summer-session journalism course at NYU. I sat in a crowded lecture hall for two weeks before I realized that I would have to devote all my time, energy, and single-minded striving to become a good reporter. Using words constantly in newspaper work, I realized, would leave me too tired to create fiction at night. I dropped the course, got bade part of my tuition, and searched for another career that wouldn't interfere with writing.
I applied to Brooklyn College, which, at that time, was free for those whose high school records showed a B average, or who achieved a B or higher in an admissions examination. Unfortunately, I had been a C+ student. In high school, my English teachers had always given me A for creativity and D for grammar and usage. But I placed high on the entrance exam, was accepted for tuition-free admission, and resumed my college education at night.
I was still trying to decide what profession might leave me energy and time to write. I enrolled in an introductory psychology course and found the subject matter fascinating, the instructor stimulating. I was surprised to learn that he was a lay psychoanalyst—not a psychiatrist with an M.D.—and that with only a Master of Arts degree he had developed a clinical practice.
Here, I decided, was my solution.
As a lay psychoanalyst, I would be able to set my own hours for therapy sessions and charge reasonable fees for helping people deal with their mental problems. I would learn about peoples' motives, and come to understand their conflicts. And I imagined how that would help me create believable characters—living, suffering, changing characters—for my stories and novels.
As Faulkner said in 1950 when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature: "...the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat ... leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed..."
Instead of exploring "the human heart in conflict with itself," I decided I would write about the human mind in conflict with itself, and psychology would be my path. I declared it my major.
I took a daytime job selling encyclopedias from door to door. I hated the cold-calling, high-pressure selling, but I was good at it and the commissions stopped the hemorrhaging from my savings account.
During this time, I took psychology, sociology, and anthropology courses, but the more courses I took, the more disillusioned I became. Not about the subject matter, but with the professors. Except for that first instructor who had inspired me, I found most of them dull, pedantic, and pompous, and their research trivial.
In my senior year, I confided some personal anxieties to my advisor, a professor of Psychological Tests and Measurements. She gave me the Rorschach test, and as I responded to the inkblots, a memory flooded my mind.
...I see a little first or second grader sitting at the kitchen table doing his homework, dipping a steel-nibbed pen into a bottle of black ink, and scratching cursive letters in a black-and-white-marble covered notebook. As he nears the end of the page, the boy's hand trembles. He presses too hard on the pen. A blob of ink flows down the nib, and before he can lift it from the page, an inkblot drips onto the paper.
He knows what will happen. For the third time that evening—after two errors and now one inkblot—a hand comes out of the shadows, over his shoulder, and rips the page from the notebook.
"Do it over," his mother says. "It has to be perfect."
After the Rorschach, my advisor, the professor of Tests and Measurements refused to discuss the results, and never spoke to me again. I thought of going to another Rorschach specialist to find out what those inkblots had revealed, but I decided I was better off not knowing.
Years later, I satirized some of my psych professors in "Flowers for Algernon." Digging up that old homework inkblot memory, and my mothers hand tearing out the pages, I transformed my frustrating Tests and Measurements advisor into Burt the tester whom Charlie Gordon frustrates with his responses to the inkblots.
Writers get even.