THE HAND THAT FED ME
25
for WPA. What a wonderful summer of self-discovery! Believe me,
chaos is the mother of knowledge. It's a distinguished family: indo–
lence, poverty, frustration,
seediness-these
are the blood relations
of that little monster, Mr. Knowthyself. I shall never again be afraid
of turning myself inside out, like an empty pocket- what treasures
of lint and fuzz! Do you follow me, Ellen? I mean to say, it is some–
times a good thing to shake yourself out, and go around unhappy–
you lose most of your delusions. A happy man takes a great risk–
of believing that he is what he seems to be.
Well, I was forced to go on WPA; forced outwardly, that is, for
inwardly I went as a free man. I knew what to expect. My friends
("my generation" as it became fashionable to call them) were all
on one cultural project or another. I would go on the Writers' Project
and fill out a time sheet as well as any one else. All such matters,
which are done with only half a will, are called ways of keeping body
and soul together; actually, they are ways of keeping them apart.
That is, you do what you do, and you don't have to worry about
undergoing any changes. WPA was a great social invention, it was
refrigeration on a mass scale. It took us as we were, and froze us as
we were; it preserved us, it kept us from decaying. But what's all
this? I merely wanted to say a few things it was impossible to say
when we walked out of the relief station together, and I find that I
am overdramatizing myself.
I hadn't thought there would be such a long line at the C.R.A.
office, so many Negroes, Poles, old men. Not a single applicant for
the Writers' Project among them. It is so much better to
be
an unem–
ployed writer than an unemployed anything-else that I felt especially
sorry for them. An unemployed plumber, for example-a man who
is
starving because there are no toilet bowls for him to
fix.
There is
something so pathetic in that! A writer, at least, is always writing.
Whatever happens, he records
it.
It
begins to rain-he says to
hin1-
self: it is raining. He walks down the stairs-he says to himself: I
am walking down the stairs. He is always writing in
his
head, and it
does him good. But what good does it do a man to go around fixing
toilet bowls in hi-s head? Pig misery! So there I was, looking at the
men around me and recording them, putting down their coughs, their
leanness, the dirt, the stubble on their faces, and meanwhile thinking:
here am I, a writer, this is me, etc., etc.
