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DAVID BRONSEN
Although I had given up being a writer and accepted the idea that I
would have to work for a living like everybody else, I still felt that
anything remotely touching on my former interest - and that included
advertising as well as clerical and office work - was repugnant to me.
So I gravitated to machineshop work and became a precision grinder.
That entailed doing the high precision finishing work on a variety of
cutting tools, dies, fixtures and jigs. The machinists who carried out the
earlier parts of the operation left me only a few thousandths of an
inch to take off. The ordinary machinist does not care for such slow
and demanding work, but I had always been interested in mathematics,
which was necessary for the required calculations, and I came to like
the work. In time I was classified as A-Ion the basis of the skill I
acquired.
For six years I plied that trade and regarded myself as a machinist.
During those years, perhaps because it had been the scene of my frus–
tration, I developed a distaste for New York. I wanted to get away
from anything that reminded me of my past as a writer. But leaving
New York is a two-fold undertaking for a New Yorker. First of all he
has to decide to make the break, having always looked upon New York
implicitly as the only place in which he could live. Then he has to
decide where he is going. In 1945 I finally made the move and took
the family to Boston.
Fifteen years passed before I was to return even briefly to New
York. I discovered then that it was no longer my New York. I had
been so versed in the city, I could see the little detail that spoke for the
whole, and had developed an expertise in conning the place. I went
back to visit Ninth Street and the East Side, the neighborhood I had
known and identified with, and discovered the whole area had become
Puerto Rican. The great spirit that had once vitalized that stack of
bricks was gone. Nevertheless, I was moved by nostalgia the first time
I went back there; perhaps there was a touch of symbolism in my "re–
turn." But now I would like to see everything there bulldozed down
and some fit habitations erected. My response to prowling through Har–
lem was markedly different. You experience nostalgia
if
you are aware
of a former identity which has been displaced or replaced. I never had
that kind of tie to Harlem, only the feeling that I did not belong.
After working in Boston during 1945 and 1946 I decided that was
not the right place for me either. I found an inexpensive farm in
Maine, not the one I am living on now, but in Montville, and the
price of twelve hundred dollars included the house and barn. The one–
hundred-ten acre farm described a ribbon a couple of hundred yards
