For all these reasons, it was difficult to admit, even to myself, the stirrings of an urge so fantastic and impractical as the desire to write. It would only have confirmed the worst suspicions that my people had of me—suspicions, I fear, which had begun to eat into my own opinion of myself. Consequently, the first admission I made to myself was evasive. I told myself that I wanted to go into journalism. Now, looking back at it, I can see the reason for this decision clearly enough. I doubt very much that I had, at the age of twenty, the burning enthusiasm for newspaper work which I thought I had, but I managed to convince myself of it because newspaper work would provide me with the only means I knew whereby I could, in some fashion, write, and also earn a living, and thus prove to the world and to myself that I was not wasting my time.
To have confessed openly to my family that I wanted to be a writer would have been impossible. To be a writer was, in modern phrase, “nice work if you could get it”. In the Joyner consciousness, as well as in my own, “a writer” was a very remote kind of person. He was a romantic figure like Lord Byron, or Longfellow, or—or—Irvin S. Cobb—who in some magical way was gifted with the power to put words together into poems or stories or novels which got printed in books or in the pages of magazines like the Saturday Evening Post. He was therefore, quite obviously, a very strange, mysterious sort of creature who lived a very strange, mysterious, and glittering sort of life, and who came from some strange and mysterious and glittering world very far away from the life and world we knew. For a boy who had grown up in the town of Libya Hill to assert openly that he wanted to be a writer would have seemed to everyone at that time to border on lunacy. It would have harked back to the days of Uncle Rance Joyner, who wasted his youth learning to play the violin, and who in later life borrowed fifty dollars from Uncle Mark to take a course in phrenology. I had always been told that there was a strong resemblance between myself and Uncle Rance, and now I knew that if I confessed my secret desires, everyone would have thought the likeness more pronounced than ever.
It was a painful situation, and one which is now amusing to look back on. But it was also very human—and very American. Even today I don’t think the Joyners have altogether recovered from their own astonishment at the fact that I have actually become “a writer”. This attitude, which was also my own at the age of twenty, was to shape the course of my life for years.
So, fresh from college, I took what remained of the small inheritance my father had left me, and, with an exultant sense that I had packed my secret into my suitcase along with my extra pants, I started out, boy and baggage, on the road to fame and glory. That is to say, I came to New York to look for a job on a newspaper.
I did look for the job, but not too hard, and I didn’t find it. Meanwhile I had enough money to live on and I began to write. Later, when the money ran out, I condescended to become an instructor in one of the great educational factories of the city. This was another compromise, but it had one virtue—it enabled me to live and go on writing.
During the first year in New York I shared an apartment with a group of boys, transplanted Southerners like myself, whom I had known in college. Through one of them I made the acquaintance of some artistic young fellows who were living in what I swiftly learned to call “The Village”. Here, for the first time, I was thrown into the company of sophisticated young men of my own age—at least they seemed very sophisticated to me. For instead of being like me, an uncouth yokel from the backwoods, all rough edges, who felt within himself the timid but unspoken flutterings of a desire to write, these young gentlemen had come down from Harvard, they had the easy manner of men of the world, and they casually but quite openly told me that they were writers. And so they were. They wrote, and were published, in some of the little experimental magazines which were springing up on all sides during that period. How I envied them!
They were not only able to assert openly that they were writers, but they also asserted openly that a great many other people that I had thought were writers—most dismally were not. When I made hesitant efforts to take part in the brilliant conversation that flashed around me, I began to discover that I would have to be prepared for some very rude shocks. It was decidedly disconcerting, for example, to ask one of these most superior young men, so carelessly correct in their rough tweeds and pink cheeks: “Have you ever read Gals-worthy’s Strife?“—and to have him raise his eyebrows slowly, exhale a slow column of cigarette smoke, slowly shake his head, and then say in an accent of resigned regret: “I can’t read him. I simply can’t read him. Sorry----” with a rising inflection as if to say that it was too bad, but that it couldn’t be helped.