I found many women were working off the same kind of thing I was. They were getting back at squadrons of men, and would go to extraordinary lengths to play out their grudges. Sometimes I thought they actually preferred breaking the marriage laws in their own beds. And if an infant, the fruit of the union, slept peacefully through it all in a gaily painted cot at one side, or even in bed with us, I got a special charge out of it. It proved what I needed to have proved twice over.

Don’t get mad at me. I’m not really worse than most of you. Admit it. Besides, I’m penitent now. And faithful.

There was a long stretch of my life, unhappily, when I was not able to be faithful to anyone, not to a single woman, not to the best woman I’d known, my first wife, Molly. I used to assert—this was my rationale—that I was faithful to her in every way except sexually (actually I was), and I used to say that those “other ways” were the important ones. Did I believe that? I did.

His apartment was dark, and it did indeed look as if a life had just ended there. Over two great slugs of Scotch, I asked and he told me what had happened to the “big” athletes of our day, men I’d admired who’d had jobs on Wall Street waiting for them after they graduated. But their scores “downtown” had not been winning ones. Then he told me about himself. He’d had a job waiting for him when he left college, and over the years had risen to just below the top. But vice-presidents in the world of finance are listed by the dozen. Now he seemed terribly alone and wanted me to stay on when I said I’d better leave. I saw that he could not be envied and that there was nothing to “tear down.” What I felt for him was sympathy and a kind of brotherhood.

I can recall nights that spring when at two or three in the morning, dead drunk, I’d be leaning across the sill of my open window and crying in great, coarse-throat jags. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. Despite my new interest in the backstage crafts, I was living a life without satisfaction and was given to black silences or murderous rages. I’d go to a party, behave sullenly, then leave to be alone in my misery. I was a vagabond in the city, wandering its streets at night without purpose or direction. Lovers passing left me sick. One night I dreamed I was born again, good-looking. My scalp itched constantly; I was convinced I would soon be bald. I passed out at a party from a bellyful of bathtub gin and woke at dawn lying on a garbage dump, five miles south of town. I was nearing the end of a road; you might have thought me beyond saving. I needed luck. Soon.

Molly had made up her mind in the first days of our acquaintance that I was gifted and bedeviled—and the man for her. She made it her duty on earth to encourage, protect, support, and—in the end—tolerate me in whatever I did. It nearly killed her, but she did not waver from her self-imposed duty, not once, not ever. From the day we became lovers until the day she died, in 1963, I was—and our four children became—Molly’s whole life. I was never again to know a love so unwavering. I was luckier than I knew. Did I deserve it? I don’t ask that question.

Now don’t believe what follows. Don’t believe that the month of May, which had already passed, and which is my favorite month because it is the burst of spring and the time of hope and promise, was three months long that summer, that it was May all summer that summer. The air of the place that May was sparkling and bright, as effervescent as soda. The camp twinkled with the games and the mischief of eager young artists. Don’t believe that all the sounds that long, long May were mellow and intimate, that there were no voices raised in rancor or rage, that everyone liked everyone else, that the directors, when they spoke, never spoke that eloquently again, or that the buzz of the actors eating supper together was never again as congenial. Don’t believe, if you are determined to be realistic, that there was an aura over all the people as they arrived, one that enlarged their talents and filled me with longing to become one of them. All that is how I remember my first summer with the Group and why I quickly made up my mind that no matter what it took in work and devotion, I’d hold on until I’d proved myself and become one of them. I had a passion at last.

At his classes in the technique of acting, Lee laid down the rules, supervised the first exercises. These were largely concerned with the actor’s arousing his inner temperament. The essential and rather simple technique, which has since then been complicated by teachers of acting who seek to make the Method more recondite for their commercial advantage, consists of recalling the circumstances, physical and personal, surrounding an intensely emotional experience in the actor’s past. It is the same as when we accidentally hear a tune we may have heard at a stormy or an ecstatic moment in our lives, and find, to our surprise, that we are reexperiencing the emotion we felt then, feeling ecstasy again or rage and the impulse to kill. The actor becomes aware that he has emotional resources; that he can awaken, by this self-stimulation, a great number of very intense feelings; and that these emotions are the materials of his art.

I sat at the feet of Lee and Harold, literally; wrote down everything they said. Harold opened my eyes to the importance of theatre in a society, that it had an obligation, particularly in our time of national emergency, which was to voice the concerns of the people in the audience. Theatre, he said, was not just a pastime between supper and bed. In the twentieth century, it must serve a purpose close to what it had in the pre-Christian Greek world, as a “pop” religion. It had to be an awakening and a reassurance for the masses when they saw their own dilemmas acted out.

YOU MUST be wondering about my strange way of telling a story, constantly shifting around, twisting back and forth in time even though my life has been lived as yours is being lived, in a progression of days. What I’m doing is unraveling a great tangle of twine, found in an old basket at the bottom of a dark closet. There are many strings, balled together. I pull on one; it yields, then binds. I pull harder; it gives a little more, bringing up with it another string, of another size, color, and texture. So the strands of my life intermingle; they cannot be separated into a succession of “and then I dids.” I can only offer you various lengths extracted from various times in the jumble of my days, none completely free of all others, none unattached. Recounting bare events explains little; meanings come from connections—and from endings. Associations, turning up like the dummy card in stud poker, bring triumph, regret, and understanding. The links of meaning are always more relevant than those of time. For this reason, events that took place fifty years ago stand out vividly in my memory, whereas I can’t remember what I did last week. I do not hope to untangle the whole ball; it is snarled and knotted and mildewed by time. To know it all … Whoever has? Who can?

I’ve often thought: Oh, if I could only have looked ahead and seen the consequences of what I was about to do. But the evidence of the cost of each step into the unknown—what might be gained, what lost—was all there, just below the surface. I didn’t look long enough or hard enough, or I didn’t dare look at all.

I’m such a man. I’ve always felt in danger. I’ve never felt totally secure, even when I was most successful and every author wanted me to direct his new play. I’ve thought affluence uncertain and praise temporary. I am obsessively aware that money in the bank leaks, that it shrinks. I don’t trust the state—whichever state. Do you? Really? I fear authority. I don’t believe that those who exercise it will continue to be friendly. I trust authority—to be unfriendly. I feel I will be apprehended as much for my thoughts as for past deeds and omissions. I’ve done nothing for which I might be arrested, but that doesn’t seem to make any difference.

Even today, when I’m modestly affluent and recognized as a man of some achievement, I will be driving along or walking the streets or sitting at dinner, and suddenly I’ll find myself in the grip of a fantasy in which I am defending myself—actually speaking the words, trying to wash myself of guilt. The police have me! I protest my innocence. I contest their accusations. The actors I’m working with are questioning my directions. I slam into them, challenging them with my reasons. My wife, the present one, who loves me entirely, or the one before her, who loved me less, is accusing me of some marital misdemeanor. True or false? Either way, I fight off the accusation. It seems I am constantly defending myself against an accusation of one kind or another. And I’ve been doing it all my life.