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it now and not next year it will come out one way, and if I could have forced my fat, heaving body to begin this a year ago it would have been a different story then. And it's possible that I'm lying without knowing it. Or telling the truth in some weird, symbolic way without knowing it, so only a few psychoanalytic literary critics (there are no more than three thousand) will have access to the truth, what “it” is.
    So there is tension, all right, because I couldn't begin the story by stating:
One morning in January a yellow Cadillac pulled up to a curb.
And I couldn't begin the story by stating:
He was an only child.
(Both these statements are quite sensible, by the way, though I could never talk about myself in the third person.)
    And I couldn't begin the story by stating:
Elwood Everett met and wed Natashya Romanov when he was thirty-two and she was nineteen.
(Those are my parents! It took me some time to type out their names.)
    And I couldn't begin the story with this pathetic flourish:
The closet door opened suddenly and there he stood, naked. He stared in at me and I stared out at him.
(And that also will come to pass, though I hadn't intended to mention it so soon.)
    All these devices are fine and I offer them to any amateur writer who wants them, but for me they don't work because … I'm not sure why. It must be because the story I have to tell is my life, synonymous with my life, and no life begins anywhere. If you have to begin your life with a sentence, better make it a brave summing up and not anything coy:
I was a child murderer.
    My readers, don't fret, don't nibble at your nails: indeed I was punished. Indeed I am being punished. My misery is proof of God's existence—yes, I'll offer that to you as a special bonus! It will do your souls good to read of my suffering. You'll want to know when my crime took place, and where. And what do I look like, this fat degenerate, dripping sweat over his manuscript, and how the hell old am I anyway, and whom did I kill, and why, and what sense does it make?

2
AN INCIDENTAL HISTORICAL NOTE
    Let us cast our minds about through history and see what precedents I have. A child murderer is discussed in two oblique and strangely elusive passages in Hardyng, in the second century of our era: a child of eight who must have accomplished something monstrous but who passes by silently, nameless and damned. What a loss!
    Then there is a monograph by the historian Wren, on the Nietz-schean “eternal return,” which judges that grave concept (justifiably?) as nonsense but goes on to speculate, with a whimsy I admire, on the repetitions, throughout eternity, of the bizarre crimes of this
Peter Lully,
a child of tender years who butchered his five brothers and sisters, including a baby in his cradle and, because it bothered him, the family's shepherd dog as well. No motive is given, of course. We children are always denied sensible motives by the adults who write up our crimes. (I say “we” though I am no longer a child. My soul is a child's soul, however.)
    Then there is the well-known, rather tawdry incident reported in a letter of Flaubert to Louise Colet, in which he remarked—with a savagery absolutely unfound in other of his smooth, rather phony correspondence—of the French peasant child, also nameless, who pushed his grandfather into the fire and swatted him with a broom so that the poor man could not escape. The senseless, barbaric cruelty is what caught Flaubert's attention, but I ask, is it really senseless? Barbaric, yes, and cruel to a degree that makes me want to retch, but senseless?
    In literature we have a few incidents, none of them first-rate: the allusion in a lesser Chaucerian tale of a child warrior (though that's beyond my interest), the allusion in
Macbeth
to Lady Macbeth, as a child, wantonly doing away with a “blessed babe,” no doubt a sibling, and Stendhal's exasperating references to a certain irrevocable crime of Julien's, committed when he was