I learned to read when I was four. My parents would go out to gatherings of friends. Two, three or sometimes four nights a week there would be—I hesitate to call it a party—music and dancing, that was it.
My 16-year-old brother was sometimes stuck with babysitting the brat. He wanted to keep my hands out of his goldfish bowl and his terrarium, and keep my hands off his balsa wood planes. And he found that if he read to me and moved his finger along the line, I would sit beside him and stare at the page.
Now he was not about to read children’s books: he was reading me fairly adult novels. I don’t know when I made the connection between the words he was saying and the symbols on the page. But one night my parents came home, he stuck the book back on the shelf, and I wanted more. So I pulled the book down and struggled through to the end. ‘White Fang’: that was the first book I ever read, if you want to call it reading. I did get a sense of the story.
When my brother found out that I could do this, he started to supply me with books because that would keep me quiet. When he got guilty about letting me take books off my parents’ shelves, he would bring me a book for a 10- or 12-year-old. My great uncles also supplied me with books, so I had a great clutch of pre-World War I boys’ books.
I did think about writing when I was very little. But writers didn’t seem to make a living in the United States as writers. All sorts of fellows wrote books but they all had something else they did for the money. That’s the way it seemed. And those who did, lived in Cuba or the South of France or Italy. I might have been precocious but I wasn’t so sure about moving to Italy. . .
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