We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
Melvyn's periodic attempts at rebellion were spasmodic, frenzied, like a chained animal that gathers strength over a period of time for a frantic struggle for freedom. And those attempts, in chronological order, are the story of his youth.
LATER — years later — when, in retrospect, he found time to assemble the reasons for what he was, for what he had become, he could remember many things that directly or indirectly had
influenced him. The Macon house, furnished for comfort but not stylized. The big piano. Music his father made which frightened him, but which the Professor continued to play as an experiment because this new upstart composer named Igor Stravinsky might one day amount to something. His bed. which had fences around it. A verse which began. "Now I lay me down ..." and had no meaning, but which he was forced to learn and repeat as a requisite for being tucked in. Moving to Nashville. Tennessee, then. A new house, a new bed: but the same piano, the same music, the same verse. School. Teachers in blouses and long straight skirts and knots of hair piled high with things Mama said were "rats." The never-to-be-forgotten cynicism about teachers and the sanity of teachers, therefore. Church, and the stained glass crucifixion from which he could never take his eyes, although the violent scene made a knot form in his stomach. . . .
The church had hard pews and a minister
whose face and voice you couldn't forget. You asked mother about him and also about the pictures in the church and she explained that these things were God. They were frightening and uncomfortable, so you slipped away from His House one Sunday morning and betook yourself on your six-year-old legs to the more congenial corner drug store where, with your nickel for the collection, you purchased and drank soda.
And you were caught, and returned to the Father's House, and later to your own house, where you were spanked, which was bad. and talked to with tears, which was worse, and put to bed. which was escape. And. after that, you gave God His due — respect and a nickeL But you wondered.
There was being eight, finally, and going to Germany for a year. School in Germany, and confusion. Where before there had been a striped flag, and "I pledge allegiance" — there was now a being named Wilhelm. who was either God or the president And none of the kids knew English. You ate heavy, different food and watched magnificent parades in which men with spiked helmets marched stiffly, like lifeless mechanical men. down the street. All of them stepped too high with one leg only. And you were just getting used to all this when suddenly you were back in Nashville once more, and Germany was a colored patch on a map. and you were an American again.
There was being eleven, and a clearer conception of things, so that moving to Toronto, (Continued on page 74)
17