Our teacher, who has been described by others, who did not know her quite as well as I did, as a “stern lieutenant,” directed frequent outbursts of rage against the uncomprehending children in her charge. I remember the tightly focused thunder in the woman’s voice, and her face reddening with the ferocity of a Luther. She was not entirely of one complexion. Sometimes she would take me aside, sit me down, and then put into beautiful primary-school-teacher’s longhand pages and pages of stories that she encouraged me to dictate. Though I was terrified of her, she was the only secretary I’ve ever had. Nonetheless, because of a habit of defiance inconvenient for an eight-year-old, I was anything but her favorite. (I was never anyone’s favorite. Had I been, you would not be reading this.) She punished me in ways both traditional and innovative, and I got quite used to her slapping me around and picking me up by the ears: they are still attached to my head because I never failed to grasp the hands that lifted them (and neither would you). My epiphany came when, sick of my recidivist insolence, she picked me up and threw me bodily into the book-storage closet. A pile of new books, shiny and congruent, broke my fall and did not stop falling until the sound, momentous and defining for all who are imprisoned, of a latch falling and a bolt moving into a strike, after which came a silence that in memory seems to have been, above all, clear. There I was, staring up at blue sky and swollen white clouds progressing past a high rectangular window. Much later, she opened the door and asked if I were sorry. As I had nothing to be sorry for and said so, my imprisonment was elongated.
I came to know that closet fairly well, and to read most of the books in it, many of which were obsolescent elementary-school texts from the twenties and thirties. But I could have done without the books entirely, because I took my sustenance from the window, and could stare at it as long as necessary, particularly when it brought the entertainment of clouds. This was not new to me. As a smaller child, I was left in my room on Central Park West for most of the day with nothing but the window. My father spent half his time in London and my mother had a career to which she attended without guilt after her psychoanalyst (as she called him, though he was probably a psychotherapist) told her that the important thing was not the quantity of time spent with me but its quality. He may have been the first person actually to have said this, which would be quite a distinction.
These conditions, among others, may have had something to do with the development of a “literary” sensibility (something of which, though I have never claimed it, I have often been accused). The essence of this is—in listening to one’s own heart and defending what one loves—a devotion to things in their truth, which in turn makes it impossible to bend to currents of fashion or opinion. As much as it is joyous and its own reward, it also wears you down. Had things been different I might have become—and I may have been happy being—a dentist, a croupier, or an investment banker, but now the only thing for which I am fit (or, according to some obviously insane critics, not) is to sit alone and write things down on paper. What else might anyone have expected of a seventeen-year-old who chose to stay immobile on the platform of a Swiss railroad station for as many hours as he had years, and there remain happy and content? Or of a college student at twenty, whose idea of seeing Rome was to settle down by a fountain and watch the stream of water for six unbroken hours? The normal sociality that people enjoy, I find to be torture so exquisite that I sometimes imagine my heart will burst. I dug in my heels when I was two, and other than when required to professionally, I have never been to a party—except once when I slipped in the tenth grade, and, finding myself dancing with a girl literally from Pleasantville, was so euphoric that I had to leave lest I become normal.
Except as part of work (or in a crisis such as a battle, earthquake, or fire), in the presence of more than two people who are not members of my immediate family I slowly begin to disintegrate. I don’t like that, and what I like even less is when some people put me in such a position despite knowing from experience that I can’t tolerate it. Nonetheless, they do it repeatedly and enjoy and condemn my failure, while they are quite willing to make allowance for thieves, murderers, and publishers. They will with weepy compassion forgive someone who beats them silly or kills for cigarettes, but they will not forgive me when all I want is not to be in the room.
When, however, you are compelled by the laws of the state to attend school, enter the army, or do jury duty, you must be in the room. And as you age, stronger compulsions come into play. Unless you are an heir or heiress you have to make a living, and even in the solitary professions times will arise when you must depart from your isolation and deal with people in numbers. When you have children, you must support them. You cannot shrink from this, or from teacher conferences or birthday parties. If you are a writer, you more or less have to go on book tours. Even Margaret Atwood, a woman who when unharried knows no bounds in the ferocity of conviction, and yet
