268
DAVID BRONSEN
the scene in
Call It Sleep
in which David Schear! lamely denies his
being Jewish to the gang that is threatening him is an objectification of
the same thing.
The characters in the novel have a cohesion of their own, but to
really understand them you have to go through the characters and back
to the author to find out what was motivating and disturbing him. I
needed empirical reality for the sake of its plausibility, but I took off
from it on a tangent. In other words, I was working with characters,
situations and events that had
in
part been taken from life, but which
I molded to give expression to what was oppressing me. To a consider–
able extent I was drawing on the unconscious to give shape to remem–
bered reality. Things which I could not fully understand but which
filled me with apprehension played a critical role in determining the
form of the novel. The father in the novel is a powerfully built, men–
acing person given to uncontrolled violence. My own father, who served
as a model for this figure, was basically an impulsive little man with
poor judgment, and perhaps a little unbalanced. He did not beat me
often, but when he did he went crazy. Because I felt I could be over–
whelmed at any time by forces that were constantly threatening me,
it became necessary to change this little man into someone capable of
real destruction. Violence is associated as a rule with great strength,
and to the mind of a child an adult seems to be seven feet tall.
I worked with polarities in expressing the subjective reality of the
little boy in the novel. I am referring to the personalities of the mother
and father, as well as the characters of the mother and her sister.
Actually, my own mother was the source of both of these contrasting
female figures. I abstracted one side of my mother, rounded it out and
created an aunt who in most respects is the antithesis of David Schearl's
mother. The presence of Aunt Bertha seemed to give an aesthetic jus–
tification to the character of the mother as well.
My parents were hopelessly mismatched, and their life together
was marked by furious quarreling. My mother, who felt profoundly
cheated in her husband, could never bring herself to express the full
force of her feelings against him until late in life, when an outbreak
of paranoia tore down all her reserve. In her earlier years she turned
all her attention
to
me. Since at that age I could hardly have any re–
course to depth analysis, the Oedipal fixation that took hold of me
was
to keep me firmly in its grip.
I made use of a number of incidents out of my childhood experi–
ences, but recast them in a manner that is just as revealing of the au–
thor's frame of mind and his hindsight as it is of the character of the
little boy. The critical episode in the novel of thrusting the milk dipper
