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The details of his army life need not interfere with this quickly sculptured hint of his birth. He emerged from the lustreless workshop of the army with the patient bitterness of one whose dreams have become the blundering slaves of a colorless reality. For some time he wandered about the country, in a stumbling dance with various kinds of manual labor—cotton picking, wood chopping, factory work. At intervals he engaged in little thefts, such as the money from a drunken man’s pockets, the purses of rooming-house landladies, and articles from the counters of shops, and used them for a week or two of leisure in which he wrote of nightingales inebriated with the fragrance of lilac bushes, or dawn robbing the hills of their favorite shawl.

His role of desultory sneak-thief failed to cause within him the slightest shame or self-reproach and he felt that his longings were using trivial weapons in a furtive manner merely to protect a secretly delicate bravery within him.

“I don’t care whether the world is filled with poets or not,” he sometimes said to himself. “If it were, I might want to be a carpenter or a clerk then and make that my form of rebellion. I don’t know. But the world wants to be filled with carpenters and clerks, and it’s not as fair as I am. The unfairness makes me angry and I strike against it.... You must guard your only reason for living. All that I want to do is to keep on writing, and since no one cares to pay me for this kind of work I’ll have to arrange for the payment myself. When I do hard work during the day I’m too tired to write at night, and the only way in which I can get leisure time for writing is to steal. If this is evil, it’s been forced upon me. Of course, I’d much rather steal out in the open; but that would instantly bring me to jail. No, this complicated game known as a world is unaware of my existence and I must be equally absent-minded in my own attitude.”