Under The Open Sky - My Early Years My Early Years

UNDER THE OPEN SKY THQ OPE N SKY My Cjarly Years BY MARTIN ANDERSON NEX6 AUTHOR OF PEIXE THE CONQUEROR TRANSLATED FROM THE DANISH BY J. B. C. WATKINS 9 3 THE VANGUARD PRESS NEW YORK UNDER THE OPEN SKY reaching the age of sixty, I have more and more often been asked when I was going to write my autobiography. At first I was annoyed that I should be thought old enough for that I myself had no feeling of having reached the memoir stage. My links with the past have always lain in the unconscious it is the present and the future that live in me conscious and alert. I have, of course, vigorous roots in the past, but I have always felt that they nourished and strengthened me best when they were allowed to work in conceal ment. Moreover, when a man is in the thick of the battle, where it is raging fiercest, and when he has a boy of a year and a half bouncing about under his desk like a freshly pumped up rubber ball, he is not much disposed to turn his mind backward. Surely, too, there was enough known about me already. I have written a goodly amount, and the critics have always energetically maintained without paying much attention to an occasional mild protest on my part that the content of my work is mainly auto biographical, slightly remolded, of course, to meet the require ments of fiction. Now this is not altogether true for even where I have used material from my own life, I have lied quite grossly, have been forced to lie in order to get on speaking terms with people at all. I have often had to laugh when people have complained of my crass realism if they only knew what the reality was like If I had described the episodes in question as I actually experienced them, I should have beenhissed perhaps stoned out of existence. But it might be rather tempting to do this, to set up the stark reality beside the picture of it. Thus, without wishing to, I drifted along, until one day I found 3 I had become reconciled to the idea of surveying my whole life entire. But then, I thought, I will permit myself for once to tell the naked, unvarnished truth, Now that I am well started, however, I am forced to ask myself what the truth really is. For I have met with sundry truths in my lifetime, perhaps hundreds The number of truths is infinite and when we have met them all, then perhaps we have truth itself. But it is infinitely far off Perhaps the only way for the individual to arrive at the truth is to create it for himself by lying, to invent it, or let others invent it for him. The truth about Father and Mother, for example surely that should be obvious to one who was begotten by them, who grew up under their eye, and who lived the most wide-awake time of his life, his childhood, together with them day by day. And yet there is no problem more complicated than that of judging between them I simply cannot do it. Now the one is in the right in my mind and now the other, and generally it is Mother. But then sometimes I have to side with Father it depends upon the mood of the moment, and that, in turn, upon the particular situation which is uppermost at the time and dominates the memory. And the older I grow, the harder it becomes I think I know more about Father and Mother today than when they were alive, more, indeed, than when I had them constantly before my eyes. But their life together is as much a mystery to me as ever. Of myself, with whom I have had to do battle now for sixtythree yearsj I know still less. There I can find nothing at all to call the truth, however I look at it not even the fragments of truth will answer. When I was young, ah, then I knew to a T who and what and how I was now I am entirely at sea. There is, I am ashamed to confess, something about this state that appeals to me. The uncertainty about everything is in itself attractive to the mind the world becomes larger, life becomes richer...