enterprise. Certainly the license that Yetta (we were soon on a first-name basis) had given me meant that this important problem would soon take care of itself. The salmon-hued walls seemed to acquire a wanton glow, and I vibrated with inward pleasure. And a few days later I took up residence there, warmly anticipating a summer of carnal fulfillment, philosophical ripening and steady achievement in the creative task I had cut out for myself. My first morning--a Saturday--I rose late and strolled over to a stationery store on Flatbush Avenue and bought two dozen Number 2 Venus Velvet pencils, ten lined yellow legal pads and a "Boston"pencil sharpener, which I got permission from Yetta to screw to the frame of my bathroom door. Then I sat down in a pink straight-backed wicker chair at an oaken desk, also painted pink, whose coarse-grained and sturdy construction reminded me of the desks used by schoolmarms in the grammar-school classrooms of my childhood, and with a pencil between thumb and forefinger confronted the first page of the yellow legal pad, its barrenness baneful to my eye. How simultaneously enfeebling and insulting is an empty page! Devoid of inspiration, I found that nothing would come, and although I sat there for half an hour while my mind fiddled with half-jelled ideas and nebulous conceits, I refused to let myself panic at my stagnation; after all, I reasoned, I had barely settled into these strange surroundings. The previous February, during my first few days at the University Residence Club, before starting work at McGraw-Hill, I had written a dozen pages of what I planned to be the prologue of the novel--a description of a ride on a railroad train to the small Virginia city which was to provide the book's locale. Heavily indebted in tone to the opening passages of All the King's Men, using similar rhythms and even the same second-person singular to achieve the effect of the author grabbing the reader by the lapels, the passage was, I knew, to say the least, derivative, yet I also knew that there was much in it that was powerful and fresh. I was proud of it, it was a good beginning, and now I took it out of its manila folder and reread it for perhaps the ninetieth time. It still pleased me and I would not have wanted to change a line. Move over, Warren, this is Stingo arriving, I said to myself. I put it back in its folder. The yellow page remained empty. I felt restless, a little goatish, and in order to keep the curtain drawn down over my brain's everhandy peep show of lewd apparitions--harmless, but in relation to work distracting--I got up and paced the room, which the summer sun bathed in a lurid flamingo light. I heard voices, footsteps in the room above--the walls I realized were paper-thin--and I looked up and glared at the pink ceiling. I began to detest the omnipresent pink and doubted gravely that it would "wear" on me, as Yetta had said. Because of the problems of weight and volume involved, I had brought only what I considered essential books with me; few in number, they included The American College Dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, my collection of John Donne, Oates and O'Neill's Complete Greek Drama, the Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy (essential to my hypochondria), the Oxford Book of English Verse and the Holy Bible. Iknew I could eventually build up my library piecemeal. Meanwhile, now to help summon my own muse, I tried to read Marlowe, but for some reason that lilting music failed to stir me as it usually did. I put the book aside and moseyed into the tiny bathroom, where I began to take inventory of the articles I had placed in the medicine chest. (Years later I would be fascinated to discover a hero of J. D. Salinger duplicating my ceremony, but I claim priority.) This was a ritual, deeply rooted in the soil of inexplicable neurosis and materialistic urgency, which I have gone through many times since when vision and invention have flagged to the point of inertia, and both writing
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