AS IV’E passed through the episodes of my life, I’ve tried to understand my behavior and explain it to you and so to myself. But at this point in my history, I cannot account for what I was doing. The explanation, if one can be found, is beyond my reach. From the time I found that Waterfront and East of Eden had made me one of the most respected men in my profession and that I could choose among unlimited opportunities, I began to behave in a manner I can only describe by saying that I was two men alternately within the same man, with two needs, two “souls”—one black, the other “normal.”

I was enjoying a double life, seemed to want respectability and general esteem while, sometimes on the same day, even within an hour, I was being driven by irrational emotional needs to behavior that was shameful. No, that isn’t true. The remarkable fact is that I felt no shame, did not believe that what I was doing was out of the ordinary or in any final sense reprehensible. I was not burdened with a sense of mortal sin, and what I was doing, since it defied understanding, needed no justification. Being determined at this time to deny myself nothing, I plunged on. I was lawless.