"I Joined A Union"

I joined a union, many union before I was done (and I'm not done yet), and more or less happy at last, in a miserable sort of way, I batted about in dangerous cars drunk on rum-flavoured milk-shakes and round-wine biscuits. I batted about with the boys—and with the girls. Oh, the girls— before whom all the values of money and a purely vestigial morality, came so soon to grief. I did not so much drift from job to job as rush in a fever of excitement, a fever of hope, from one unskilled and unending chore to the next.

"I have collected officers' dirty dhobi from a thousand quayed-up ships: I have trafficked in suburbia's dirty linen. I have roasted coffee and gutted fish and mixed mountains of curry powder on a concrete floor with a square mouthed shovel. I have packaged sweet smelling herbs. I have can ned pork and beans, sitting before a primitive machine, in a spray of tomato pulp. I have dug, delved, clipped and pruned: I have driven buses, taxis, trucks; and in a dark, peaked cap played chauffeur to someone's pomp and wealthy circumstance. I have stood at the tradesman's entrance of a thousand stately homes. Insecurely horsed, I have driven cattle to slaughter. I have greased cars and painted houses, punched hole in metal sheets, and filled in holes punched in metal sheets; sheeted up merry-go-round horses at the closing of the fair

"To what purpose? It is called experience; it is common to all, it is earning one's keep …

"Somewhere at this point, and under an impulsion not part of the subject here, I sat down at a kitchen table in a boarding house room to write a short story, A hard-fingered larrikin, a wide boy in leather jacket and trousers with 24-inch bottoms, and even, for all I can remember, in black shirt and white tie, with hands the colour of coffee. I sharpened a pencil, opened an old school pad and began— on the downward path. And just at this point the dying slave, the white walls of Tunis, the breaking square, came into their own

"The problem, or so I see it now, was a problem of relation; of establishing that connection. Of establishing a connection between that eternally moribund slave [and the wild ferry-rides of His youth]; between the white walls of Tunis [and the blazing bonfires that so impressed him in youth]; between the factories, the girls, the laundry, life and art