On a different tangent I believe I would have liked to be a comic strip artist, but my feeble efforts at drawing and painting ensured that wasn’t going to happen.
    Later the movie business crossed my path and I remembered that I had always wanted to make movies, but now I discovered that actors were unbearable people and I had no time for them. Hitchcock and John Ford remained unthreatened.
    It went on like this. I hated clerical work, so here I was a clerk. I had never wanted to be a soldier so that was what I became.
    And, eventually, I became a writer. I can assure you my various English teachers would have been mightily astonished to hear about that.

“Please,” I begged her, “don’t be frightened, but I must tell you that I don’t like my life. I don’t like what I’ve done with it. I don’t like what I am. I don’t like the way I live. I don’t like my home, darling—please, it’s nothing against you, I lied. I feel in a trap here, a trap that opened when I had my auto accident. Many times I’ve thought that wasn’t entirely an accident. Maybe I was just trying to get out of the trap that way because I didn’t know any other way to get out of it. I think that auto accident was a success. It gave me a breather, a little trip to another country, a few quick minutes to think for the first time in my life.”
    Then I stopped because I could see in her eyes no understanding, even the fading of the desire to understand. Only terror! “Evans,” she said, “let’s be sensible, dear. Tell me, what do you want now?”
    Here was a book that described exactly what I felt, even though it had nothing to do with my life. Set in the wealthy world of American advertising executives, nevertheless it could not have expressed what I felt more clearly. The Arrangement, by Elia Kazan—a man reviled for co-operating with the McCarthyists—is also about emasculation. This time the hero is stifled by a successful career, a good strong marriage, and all the trappings of achievement in a capitalistic world. He enters what will come to be called mid-life crisis. The only way out of the trap is suicide but he bungles it. The only way to stay out is to fake a nervous breakdown, which gives the book a very funny middle. He then is able to get away with dropping out and becoming a hippie. Very perceptive stuff in 1967 by a man who had established himself as a top class film-maker. This is the only novel of his I’ve read. It’s a beauty.