AT EDEN we remained for a single year; for, with salaries of qualified teachers still rising, we found that, in making a change, we could better ourselves by four hundred dollars a year; and, for the moment, nothing counted but our earnings. We moved to Rapid City where, incidentally, my work was lighter than at Eden, and where my wife occupied the position as principal of the public school.
     I must touch on three points, my health being the first. Though now and then I had a minor set-back, I held out wonderfully well as far as the spine was concerned. But as if to make up for that, another serious trouble declared itself. As was mentioned in its proper place, I had, at the age of fourteen, undergone an operation for Otitis Media. From that age I had lived to be fifty without further suffering from that source. Now suddenly my ears began to plague me again; and there developed an ever-increasing deafness. It was this deafness, in conjunction with other things, which shortly forced me to abandon all further thought of class-room teaching. It is a most distressing handicap to me today.
     There was something ironical about it; for, before accepting the position at Rapid City, which called for a university degree, I had at last regularized my standing. When, after writing on the third-year examinations at Gladstone, I had left the town and returned to the pioneer districts in the bush-country, where my second period as a writer was to begin, all academic aims had yielded

place to literary ones. I knew, of course, that the Department of Education at Winnipeg would have allowed me to go to Rapid City without the degree; but it was repellent to me to ask once more for a favour. Besides, I considered the examinations as a mere formality. On very short notice, seventeen days, I went to Winnipeg to write on the fourth-year course, with German and French as majors. I passed with first-class honours. The heads of both departments, Professor Osborne of the French and Professor Heinzelmann of the German department, strongly recommended me to go on to Chicago or Harvard and to get my Ph.D. But I considered such proposals as being beside the point. I had never desired academic honours for their own sakes; and I had to consider the loss of time as well as the expense which such a course would involve. The irony consisted in this that, for eight years I had filled positions requiring the degree without holding it; and now that I held it, I was, within two years, to be forced by my deafness to give up teaching!
     Secondly, I received, at Rapid City, late in the summer, the by-now-no-longer-expected proofs of Over Prairie Trails; and in the fall of that year, 1922, the book appeared in print. The first thousand copies were sold within two months; but, unfortunately, the second edition could not be got ready before the New Year; and accordingly, owing to the peculiar conditions of book-selling in Canada, it fell flat.
     The publication had far-reaching consequences for my life as a writer; above all, it brought me a number of new friends who were of my own mentality, who encouraged me, and with whom I could discuss my work. I became acquainted with the Wesley-College group in

Winnipeg, notably Arthur L. Phelps, Dr. Riddell, and Watson Kirkconnell. These were followed, somewhat later, by the late W. L. Grant of Upper Canada College, Dr. W. J. Alexander, the dean of the teaching of English literature in Toronto, and Carleton Stanley, Professor in McGill University, later president of Dalhousie University.
     Thirdly, just before leaving Eden, we bought a Ford car. With that purchase began a chain of developments which has not yet reached its end and which, in retrospect, seems to me to be the most disastrous departure I had ever made in my life. If I were to give a separate title to that part of this record which deals with it, I could only call it Externalization - meaning the externalization of a life which, so far, had been concentrated on the realization of purely internal aims. It meant the temporary degeneration of all my powers; and I am only just recovering from it, when, quite, possibly, it may be too late.
     Once before, at Virden, when I furnished our house, I had done what might have led to such an externalization. Two circumstances, which in themselves had seemed misfortunes, had in reality saved me. Firstly, the furniture had been bought on the time-payment plan which, except in the case of essentially externally-minded people, is bound to lead to its own collapse; and the purchase was immediately followed by a long and trying illness.
     Here is the point. People like myself should never allow themselves to be side-tracked into material ambitions; which, of course, does not necessarily mean that they should be or remain poor. It should be their only aim to live in conditions which require a minimum of energy and mental distraction for their upkeep. My wife saw this quite correctly when, in 1928, she proposed that

we go to the northern end of Lake Winnipeg, there to live among Indians in the wilderness. Why we did not do so will appear in due time.
     Naturally, the disastrous consequences of the new departure did not show at once.
     On my shelves stood scores of manuscripts awaiting either publication or a final revision to fit them for the press. They, or some of them, for I did not consider all of them worth troubling about, were sufficient to keep the publishing mill grinding for a good many years. Among them was some of my best work - Settlers of the Marsh, for instance, which was still in its three-volume form. By this time I had changed my mind about Hamsun's Growth of the Soil; it no longer appeared to me to be one of the eternal books; nor did its ultimate aim any longer seem to be the same as mine.
     Consequently, Settlers of the Marsh was once more taking possession of me. It was in that year, in the summer of 1923, subsequent to our first year at Rapid City, that I finished my work on it, apart from the ruthless cutting-down it received two years later.
     Since a measure of detail may throw some light on the story I have to tell, the story of a conflict between material and spiritual things, I will add a brief account of how I came to take the book up again.
     We had, in our car, gone to a small, unfrequented, but marvellously fine-sanded beach on Lake Winnipeg, south of the little town of Matlock, there to spend the holidays at small expense in the company of a copse of willows and the waters of the great lake. We had two tents, one for sleeping, one for every other purpose of the simple life; and, in addition, of course, we had the Ford car.

     For the moment it was, our aim to do nothing that was not implied in the day-to-day tasks of campers.
     For a week or so I was kept busy putting together, out of drift-wood, a rustic table and a bench or two. We took our daily swims in the lake; we had long walks along the neighbouring beaches, north and south; and we explored the bush that skirts the lake. All of which involved a minimum of mental exertion. Our fireplace was a sheltered nook on the crest of the beach; and at night we used to light huge fires there, ten, sixteen feet long; and when the flames had subsided, we used to sit about in deck-chairs, irradiated by the ruddy glow of the embers, and to enjoy the peace of interstellar space. Even the thought that that peace was no more than the effect of infinite distance from the seat of fierce and fiery revolutions contributed to our contentment. Our nearest earthly neighbours, too - who were Indians -were a mile and a half away. It is in itself characteristic that what happened should have happened under such circumstances.
     One day, while going about my tasks, in the most leisurely way, my mind began to revolve about that book, Pioneers; at first in a detached, almost ironic way, as if it barely concerned me any longer; as if, indeed, it belonged among the other follies of my youth. I had been at work on that book since 1917, during the fall and winter of the long drives over prairie trails; and in 1920, in that marvellously fruitful spring, I had worked it out. As of its own accord, that spring, its "pattern", as I call it, had emerged. But even then one scene had defied me - the scene between Clara and Niels which, in the later, published version, occupies pages 231 to 244. I had seen clearly what these two people had to say to each other

when, at last, they stood face to face on the rock-bottom of their human nature; but somehow I had failed to see just how they would say it. It may be simpler if I say that I had been afraid of tackling that scene.
     The novel reposed, strangely - for did it not look as if I had had a presentiment? - in the back of the Ford car, tied up in a bundle. I thought of how it had worked itself out, slowly, inevitably; for the central figure, Niels Lindstedt, reached far back into the past, to a summer day when, in some little lake in Nebraska or South Dakota, I had had a swim with a young Swede who, for some reason or other, confided to me that, up to the day of his recent marriage, he had not known of the essential difference between male and female. In 1920 I had fitted the whole story together, setting it into the panorama of the Manitoba bush settlement between Glenella and Amaranth, or between Gladstone and Falmouth. I remembered, and smiled at myself, how feverishly I had worked; how I had been impatient at the necessity of eating and sleeping; how I had again wished to be able to project the whole vision as it were by a single flash of lightning struck out of my substance by some divine steel; for landscape, characters, destinies, they were all there, but still hidden by the veil which could be lifted only by slow "creation".
     And suddenly, here at the beach . . . I don't know what manner of imp it was that, after a week or so, jumped at my throat and threatened to throttle me unless I set to work, then and there, without further delay and excuse, and wrote that missing, central, pivotal scene.
     Consider the raw injustice of the thing. For years I had been absent-minded, forcing myself by a sheer effort of the will to attend to my daily tasks; for years

I had been unable to enjoy the beauty of any landscape, for in every scene I had set eyes on I had looked only for what was relevant to the setting of my book; for years I had, in every person with whom I came into contact, not excluding wife and child, reacted only to what referred to the human world inhabiting the bush-country of Manitoba as I had "created" it; for the landscape as it lives in this novel and in others, and its human inhabitants as well, were mine, were the product of my mind; yet, to me, they had become more real than any actuality could have been. For years, yes, decades, every figure in this novel, as in others, had, from day to day, sucked my life blood to keep itself going, leaving me limp as a rag, making me a bore to others and a burden to myself.
     And here, at last, I had shaken off all that; I had bought a car, I was having a holiday - the first that could be so called in thirty years; shortly I should again be engaged in doing part of the work of the world; and I was trying to lay in a store of strength and courage to carry on for another year.
     But this imp that whispered to me proposed to throw me into the furnace and burn me to a cinder, in order to distil my blood and infuse it into two creatures who had no right to exist on this earth except what right I had myself bestowed upon them.
     The trouble was that, after all, I had given them birth in my mind and, therefore, power to dispose of my substance. I had, scores of times, gone through the same experience before, and so I knew that no protest would avail; it was best to give in without further struggle.
     Henceforth, every morning after breakfast, taken in a sort of wistful and apprehensive silence, I withdrew behind a willow-clump on the beach-crest where I had as

much privacy as I had ever had in a study, except that startled birds and furtive small mammals intruded; for at any human intruder, those of my camp not excluded, I scowled fiercely. "Come within compass of my eyes, and you do so at your peril; if looks can kill, you are as good as dead." And thus I wrestled with the Lord, trying to force him to delegate to me His power of giving life.
     When, after three or four hours, I emerged, I was good for nothing; I was a mere fragment of a man, fit only to be put to bed; and when, after weeks of effort, towards the end of our stay, I came out to be my ordinary self again, I was mild once more, it is true, gentle, and ready to eat from the hand of my wife; but I had lost weight instead of putting it on; and I was less fit to do a year's teaching than I had been when we had started our holiday.
     But the scene was written; the last link in the chain of that novel was forged; and, for a year or two, there was satisfaction in that; though, today, I no longer ascribe so much importance to the scene as I did at the time; others seem more vital to me; but the book as such "stands".
     The interlude cost me my holiday; but I think of it with regretful longing; it was to be the last but one time in seventeen years that I felt I had done what I was meant to do. The experience was to be repeated only once: when I wrote certain parts of The Chronicle of Spalding District, as I shall ever call that book, in spite of the publishers. It was to be, so far, the last but one time that, in my work, the miracle happened by means of which the words, which were my tools, transcended themselves and became entities of their own.

***

     And then I went back to my last year of teaching; I did not, of course, know that it was going to be the last. The fact is that, during that year, I felt as if I were fighting a desperate struggle against drowning in the ever-mounting tide of deafness.
     Just a word about that deafness, for many people with whom I come in contact fail to see what an affliction it is.
     In company with a single person, I can still carry on a conversation, provided the person speaks with reasonable distinctness and sits with the full light on his face; for I have developed a marvellous skill in lip-reading. The worst trouble is that I cannot distinguish direction of sound; so that, when several people are engaged in talk with me, I never know who is speaking and therefore cannot focus my eyes on his lips. It will be readily understood how impossible, in these circumstances, classroom work must become. Often, even when I hear the sound of speech, I hear it only dimly; and, not having seen the lips of the speaker, I reconstruct, out of blurred fragments, what may or may not have been said, ex-post-facto.
     My wife and I often laugh about it; for I may sit in company, and people may think they are carrying on an interesting discussion with me; they are often surprised at the readiness with which I agree when they unfold heterodox views; they are even delighted; and it has come back to me that I have been quoted as endorsing views with which I disagree to the point of violence. The fact is that I nod obligingly to almost anything that is being said; or I utter a few non-committal words which are fastened on to as implying agreement. When it is imperative that I should understand, or when laughter follows something that has been said, so that I wish to share in the laughter, I simply look at my wife; and to

everybody's surprise and, sometimes, embarrassment, my wife, taking care that I see her lips, repeats what has been said. Invariably, in such cases, there is silence all around - not the silence of attention - and I catch every word. As for music, I have learned to appreciate the radio; for I can glue my comparatively sound ear to the loud-speaker; and I can turn on the volume. It has been found necessary to remove the radio to a room from which sound does not carry throughout the house; for otherwise all conversation elsewhere would have to cease, drowned out by the thunder of the machine which, as a rule, I turn on twice a week. Until two years ago when I got my radio, I had not heard any music for decades.
     Thus, even an affliction can be the source of fun.
     Watching, then, the progress of my deafness with a sort of humorous fascination, I was all the more intent on making the most of my remaining powers. I have hinted that the purchase of the car was a violently new departure for us; and I half anticipated that it would prove a disastrous one; it, too, I watched with humorous fascination.
     Then, it may be asked, why the car?
     In order fully to understand the matter, one must have lived, as an "intellectual", in a small western town. In some respects Eden was worse than any other place we had ever lived in. Our house, supplied by the school-board, for they had at last realized that they could not keep a principal unless they housed him - was little better than the shack in which I had lived before. There was no yard to speak of; there was no lawn of any description, its place being taken by a patch of foul weeds. The by-ways of the district were muddy whenever they were

not dusty; the highway had become unsafe for the pedestrian through the ever-increasing motor traffic. We were as much prisoners in our house as we had been at Ashfield before we bought the pony; worse in a way, for at Ashfield there had been a yard and, around it, the woods.
     And . . . the brutal fact is that we had the money now; though, of course, we never thought for a moment of buying anything but the cheapest car we could get. Above all, we both needed holidays; and that meant the ability to go away, for days or for weeks. It was the time when camping became fashionable. Tourist-camps had not yet become the abomination they grew to be a few years later; besides, the car could take us beyond their range, into the wilds.
     But the mere fact of possession had its influence and bore its fruit. Our eyes were focused on material gain.
     Faced with the necessity of giving up my position by the end of the second year at Rapid City, what was to take its place in supplying us with a sufficient income? The years were rolling around; even my wife was in her thirties now; soon, soon old age would be upon us; what was needed was money.
     When Over Prairie Trails and The Turn of the Year had appeared, I made, urged by my wife, a new attempt to get other books published. Before I did so, I tested them out by letting a few of my new friends read this or that, or by reading extracts to them or in public.
     For I had become extraordinarily diffident with regard to all work that had been finally written. When I first conceived a book, I felt perfectly sure of myself; confronted with the written page, I was assailed by doubt. It was true that the two books so far published had met

with nothing but applause from the people whose judgment I valued.
     But these were essays dealing with the landscape and the weather of Manitoba. So far, not one of my novels had been tested; and I hesitated over them. I did offer A Search for America to McClelland & Stewart who had printed the other two books; they promptly declined. Besides, I believed what they said, namely, that they had lost money on me; I did not want them to lose any more. According to my wife, I had given them, by this offer, an opportunity to cover any hypothetical deficit; they had allowed that opportunity to slip by.
     There was one explanation: while my essays had found their small public, my narrative was perhaps not, was most likely not, sufficiently compelling to put itself over. I still, fondly, believed that publishers knew what they were doing when they decided to accept or decline.
     At last I wrote to Arthur L. Phelps, asking him to read a few chapters of the Pioneers in manuscript. He did and applauded. It was he whom I asked because, under the spell of Over Prairie Trails, he had undertaken to write an introduction to The Turn of the Year. My hesitation was over the question whether my characters were alive, or came to life, in the book. He answered with an emphatic affirmative.
     I made a clean typescript of Volume One; and even then I hesitated.
     Characteristically, when it came to making once more a definite offer, I offered Macmillans the Search, still in that manuscript made within ten days at Ashfield. They declined. On my part, this was something like a subterfuge; for I still believed - and I believe today - that, artistically, this was my weakest book and would, therefore,

stand the best chance with the public; whereas Pioneers -in which, so far, Niels Lindstedt's tragedy occupied, comparatively, a very much smaller space than it did in the later abridgment - went, in my opinion, too deep into human nature to strike a publisher as a good risk; like Ibsen's dramas it refused to stay on the stage and came out, beyond the footlights, into real life.
     The book was too real, too true. In that land of the imagination, where matters work themselves out to more valid conclusions than in real life - if they didn't, the Weilses and the Hogbens would be right; there would be no justification for art - I had described exactly what happened, no more; but even in that fuller form it was, in Shaw's phrase, an unpleasant novel. Personally, I thought it a great book; personally, I loved it as a beautiful thing; but . . . To this day I am not quite sure that it conveys to others what it conveys to me. If it does, nobody has ever said so.
     But Phelps' striking reaction encouraged me; and, giving A Search for America up as a dead loss, I at last sent Volume One of the Pioneers to Macmillans. It came back with the effect of instantaneousness. A letter accompanying the rejection stated that no book of the kind stood a chance in Canada. This from Macmillans!
     Whereupon I went to work slashing the book to pieces and reducing it to its present one-volume form.
     Then, having at last given up my position, I ran amok. Once more I made six clean copies, typewritten this time, of every book I considered finished. My wife had faith in all of them. Nothing, according to her, was needed but that they should be offered to the right people. Ultimately some publisher would "take me up", in bulk, as it were; and the public would awaken to my merits.

     I made a long list of publishing firms, hundreds, thousands perhaps, in the United States and in England; and henceforth we made it a rule never to worry over rejections. The manuscripts went out and came back; sometimes there were several in a day; and everyone received a new wrapper of brown packing paper - I bought a whole roll of it! -and then it went out again. We never allowed a manuscript to remain in the house for more than twenty-four hours unless a Sunday intervened. We must have spent hundreds of dollars on postage; but then, up to the summer of 1924, we had been making three thousand four hundred dollars between us; and we had never changed our style of living. We had savings at last; and my wife insisted that I should devote myself entirely to writing and to the task of placing my work. In academic circles my existence as a Canadian writer was slowly being acknowledged. My time was bound to come, according to her.
     We spent another summer in our camp on Lake Winnipeg, this time in undisturbed leisure; and yet shadows gathered about us. I was fifty-two years old; my life was lived. My wife's salary as principal of the public school in Rapid City had been raised to thirteen hundred dollars; and on that we could subsist.
     Then, in the fall of the year, I had my first invitation to speak to an audience of men of letters.
     Instead of giving an address or lecture, I made up my mind to read from unpublished work, selecting for the purpose one essay dealing with some aspect of literary criticism; one short story, Snow, later to appear in Queen's Quarterly - February, 1932; and the scene of what was now Settlers of the Marsh which had been written two years before on the beach of Lake Winnipeg.

     The audience was small; but it so happened that Lorne Pierce, the editor of the Ryerson Press of Toronto, was present. Like myself he is deaf; but he must have understood enough to be curious. After the reading, he asked me for the manuscript of Settlers and invited me to have breakfast with him next morning, at the Fort Garry Hotel.
     When I met him there, his first words were, "I had a very bad night, owing to that confounded book of yours." He had started to read it after going to bed and had found it impossible to lay the book down before he had finished it.
     He asked me to leave the manuscript with him; he would see what he could do with it. Briefly, the outcome was that, in the summer of 1925, George Doran printed the book in New York; and the Ryerson Press handled it in Canada.
     Its publication became a public scandal. Libraries barred it - London, Ontario, forming an honourable exception; reviewers called it "filthy" - W. T. Allison, over the radio; Lorne Pierce nearly lost his job over it; people who had been ready to lionize me cut me dead in the street.
     As a trade proposition the book never had a chance; what sale it had was surreptitious. I resented this; it was the old story of Flaubert's Madame Bovary over again. A serious work of art was classed as pornography; but with this difference that the error, in Flaubert's case, increased the sales; he lived in France. In my case, and in Canada, it killed them. Above all, of course, it was before the time when sex novels had become the fashion; and the problem of the book had not been treated with that levity which was shortly to make Aldous Huxley's early

work so sweeping a success. The book vibrated with the horror at the abuse of a natural instinct which converted desire into lust.
     During the summer, however, the prospect of seeing at last a novel of mine appearing in print had, for the moment, had an effect on me similar to that of the acceptance, by McClelland & Stewart, of Over Prairie Trails.
     Between the dates of the acceptance and the publication of Settlers of the Marsh, the whole of The Chronicles of Spalding District came into being. I have to speak of it once more at this point.
     I have explained at some length how, in the fall of 1894, the central figure of Abe Spalding had come to me; how later, in 1912, the saving of his great crop had been added to his story; how, in the spring of 1913, I had made the observations which were to result in the description of the "great flood" coming down from the Pembina Mountains; and lastly, I might add, the death of Charlie had been added when, at Eden, I witnessed from the window of my class-room, a scene enacted on the road coming down from the Riding Mountains, in which a pupil of mine was crushed under the wheels of his load of wheat. Even the seduction of Spalding's daughter Frances and the development of Abe's character which was begun by it had had their origin in actual happenings witnessed. Nothing of all that had been written down; but by this time it formed part of the novel as it lived in my mind:
     Abe Spalding had at last lived his life; yet something had to set me on the way.
     Before I could write the book, Abe Spalding would have to die; and I had to see what became of his work after death.
     From this it might seem as though the book were a

patch-work compounded of episodes taken from actual life. It is not; in every case the actual happening merely released in me certain reactions which led me on. As far as I was concerned, it was rather as if, in what happened, I recognised what had already happened to Abe Spalding. Nothing of what I witnessed was used directly or in a literal sense.
     I am emphatic about this because self-styled critics have ascribed to me as a person opinions and emotional reactions which were Abe Spalding's. It is ever so. When a process of observation or analysis leads a writer to trace a given philosophy of life - in this case, the philosophy which is based on moribund moral judgments -critics assert that philosophy to be the writer's, the more cogently so the more convincing he makes its manifestations. I am, of course, not talking of real critics; with very few exceptions I have not met them. One "critic" exclaimed, after reading the book, "Here is a hero after Mr. Grove's heart!" I wondered who had told him that; for I believe I have hidden myself fairly well.
     What I wish to underline is precisely the fact that, in Abe Spalding's career, as given in my book, there is not one episode, not one opinion arrived at by him, not one feeling released in him, which, properly speaking, had anything to do with myself, beyond the fact that I laboured to understand them. With the building-up of the story I had, consciously, no more to do than I could have with the growth of a tree in my fields. I have tried to explain this in an article published in the University of Toronto Quarterly; but, as far as I know, there has been nobody who had ears to hear.
     It is for that reason that I feel I must insert what follows; for, strangely, the very thing which set me to

work at the task of writing - which was also the thing that completed Abe Spalding's story in my mind - never found its way into the book. Abe Spalding's death, and what followed after, was necessary in order to round off his life before I could write it; but for the story of the district as I had conceived it it [sic] was irrelevant; and in the finished work it is never mentioned.
     One day in the fall of the year a friend of ours, a real-estate and insurance man in town invited me to accompany him on occasions when he went driving through the country to see new "prospects" or to collect premiums. I was glad to do that; for I was always curious with regard to the past of any district I lived in; and he, having been born and raised at Rapid City, was full of the lore of the country. As a rule, when he alighted to do business. I remained in my seat in the car and waited for him.
     One day, however, we stopped in the yard of a place the very magnificence of which lured me to stroll about among the buildings. Inside of a rustling windbreak of cottonwoods, still green, enclosing a four acre yard, stood two vast and imposing barns painted white; to the east of them stood an equally imposing house built of red brick.
     I wanted to see more of the place. To my surprise I found, when I opened the horse-barn, in a building capable of housing fifty or sixty head, two sorry nags lost in the vast expanses like the proverbial needles in a haystack; and in the cow-barn, where I counted a hundred and twenty stanchions, with automatically-filling water pails and a battery of milking machines, I found one single scrub cow, Holstein as to colour, Jersey as to size and conformation, looking miserable and forlorn where she stood humped up. As Dr. Johnson would have said,

she was ill-bred, ill-born, ill-nurtured, and ill-kept; and no doubt she was soon to be ill-killed, ill-dressed, ill-cooked, and ill-served.
     When, in a mood of profound depression, but also of a finally-aroused curiosity not to be denied, I entered the magnificent house by the back door, following my friend, I found there a numerous family of tenants crowded into a single room which served at once as kitchen, dining, living, and sleeping quarters. In the other rooms, towards the front of the house, as many as I could look into through open doors, the floors of quartered oak had been ripped out, presumably to provide kindling and fuel.
     This farm was in the Riding Mountains, north-west of Rapid City, two hundred miles or more from the district of Morris - which, in my mind I had already come to call Somerville and where, for decades now, I had located Abe Spalding; but in my imagination the place transferred itself to that locality, just as my meeting with the man had transferred itself from Saskatchewan to Manitoba.
     Once more the sight of all this decay behind a magnificent exterior had done something to me. I was profoundly moved. I was no longer at any concrete place near Rapid City in the Riding Mountains; I was in a vastly more vivid world where facts had meanings and became truth. It was as if I had received at once a revelation and a shock. All I saw jumped, as it were, into place, in that world of the imagination, as the tesserae of glass in a kaleidoscope fall into ever-changing patterns when you rotate the tube.
     "Abe Spalding is dead!" I said to myself. "I have stumbled on the place which was his and which has been handed over to shiftless tenants because his aging widow

has moved into a town similar to the one from which she had come."
     When my friend and I were sitting once more in the car, he tried to tell me the story of that farm; but I did not listen; my deafness helped me; but I remember to this day the effort I made not to look at his lips.
     Once more I wish to call attention to the fact that nothing of all that I had seen and inferred went into the book as it came to be written and ultimately printed under the title Fruits of the Earth. That is the rule with me; actual conditions and actual happenings merely help to set off the processes of creation.
     That night I began to write Abe Spalding's story.
     And here is another point which I wish to make. So long as my life remained one of the imagination only, there always came a point at which, if the central figure of an evolving story-context was vital enough not to fade from my world, I had to write that story whether I wished to or not. I think it should by this time be abundantly clear that in this, the writing process, there was never the slightest thought of publication; there was never any thought of a public. "Nobody but a blockhead," says Dr. Johnson, "ever writes save for money." I am that blockhead.
     And here is a second point. I always dread the writing; not merely because it involves an enormous nervous strain and a drain on my own vitality; it is much more important that, by writing the story - necessary as that process may have become - I have to take leave of the figures involved in that story. They cease to be living beings to me; they lose their "freedom" as it were; they cease to develop. But I cannot help myself. Even today, as I am writing this record, I should much rather

go and hoe my corn or watch the cows in the field; I would rather do anything but write, more especially if, by doing something else, I might make a few much-needed pennies. But I also know that, unless I do as my inner needs dictate, I am letting myself in for serious trouble. For those figures of mine will not stay down; they won't let me rest or sleep; they want to be born into death. For what my writing does for them, as far as I am concerned, whether that writing be successful or not, is not so much to give them birth as it is to give them burial. They were born long ago; they have lived their lives almost in spite of myself; and now they want to die. Though there are a few deluded people - as there should be - who assert that only after these figures have died to their creator can they begin to come to life in the minds of others. It is a curious fact that I have never re-read a book of mine once it was printed.
     In this record, I know, I am dying to myself.