My mother came to my rescue. At her urging, my father agreed I might have a try, on condition that I also find some sort of useful work. For my part, I had no idea how to find any sort of work--or, in fact, how to go about being a poet. For more than a year I had been writing long into the night and studying verse forms to the scandalous neglect of my homework."
1 Besides writing, Alexander read books, especially hero tales, and Greek and Celtic mythology. "Since my family traditionally distrusted public libraries--like banks, government buildings, and other official-type structures best left alone--I scavenged our home collection, a wondrous compost of the wildest conglomeration of gems and junk; Shakespeare and Warwick Deeping; Melville and Marie Corelli; something called The Little Leather Library; plus a few blurry volumes in imitation morocco, given as inducements by a local newspaper trying to raise the number as well as the cultural level of its subscribers. What came to hand one day was a badly scuffed red buckram school reader.
"Whose it had been I still do not know. My sister disclaimed ownership. It could have been discarded by a lodger (we sometimes took them in those days).
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