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Unteachable optimist that she was, she drew hope from every glint of gravity in my nature, every possibility of dealing with me as an equal. I didn’t want to think about the look on her face when I turned up at her door with some tomfool story about the ship sailing without me. Where else, then? My brother Geoffrey and I were good friends. He might have been open to a visit except that he was in England, doing graduate work at Cambridge on a Fulbright fellowship. His good luck; my bad luck. My father was also unable to play host at just this moment, being in jail in California, this time for passing bad checks under the name Sam Colt.
    I had to join my ship. But I stayed where I was. People with dogs began to appear on the beach. Old folks collecting driftwood. When there was no longer any chance of meeting my shipmate I got up stiffly and walked into town, where I ate a jumbo breakfast and pondered the army recruiting office across the street.
    T HIS WASN’T a new idea, the army. I’d always known I would wear the uniform. It was essential tomy idea of legitimacy. The men I’d respected when I was growing up had all served, and most of the writers I looked up to—Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, James Jones, Erich Maria Remarque, and of course Hemingway, to whom I turned for guidance in all things. Military service was not an incidental part of their histories; they were unimaginable apart from it. I wanted to be a writer myself, had described myself as one to anybody who would listen since I was sixteen. It was laughable for a boy my age to call himself a writer on the evidence of two stories in a school lit mag, but improbable as this self-conception was, it nevertheless changed my way of looking at the world. The life around me began at last to take on form, to signify. No longer a powerless confusion of desires, I was now a protagonist, the hero of a novel to which I endlessly added from the stories I dreamed and saw everywhere. The problem was, I began to see stories even where I shouldn’t, where what was required of me was simple fellow feeling. I turned into a predator, and one of the things I became predatory about was experience. I fetishized it, collected it, kept strict inventory. It seemed to me the radical source of authority in the writers whose company I wanted to join, in spite of their own coy deference to the ugly stepsisters honesty, knowledge, human sympathy, historical consciousness, and, ugliest of all, hard work. They were just being polite. Experience was the clapper in the bell, the money in the bank, and of all experiences the most bankable was military service.
    I had another reason for considering this move. I wanted to be respectable, to take my place one dayamong respectable men. Partly this was out of appetite for the things respectable men enjoyed, things even the dimmest of my prep school classmates could look forward to as a matter of course. But that wasn’t all of it, or even most of it. My father’s career, such as it was—his unflinching devolution from ace airplane designer to welsher, grifter, convict—appalled me. I had no sense of humor about it. Nor, for all my bohemian posturing, did it occur to me to see him as some kind of hero or saint of defiance against bourgeois proprieties. He had ruined his good name, which happened to be my name as well. When people asked me about my father I sometimes told them he was dead. In saying this I did not feel altogether a liar. To be dishonored and at the end of your possibilities—was that life? He appalled me and frightened me, because I saw in myself the same tendencies that had brought him to grief.
    The last time I’d lived with my father was the summer of my fifteenth year, before I went back east to school. We were taking a walk one night and stopped to admire a sports car in a used car lot. As if it were his sovereign right, my father reached inside and popped the hood open and began to explain the workings of the engine, which