For a long while the family regarded me in a special manner; my mother informed me sharply that from then on she was going to handle me with kid gloves. I was told that I was going to be watched. Well, the accusation upon which I built the emotional structure of The Man Who Lived Underground did not deal with biscuits. But it was something, if you see the relative sides of the two situations, almost as horrible as stealing biscuits. I believe that the man who has been accused of a crime he has not committed is the very person who cannot adequately defend himself. There is really no way in which he can convincingly defend himself. His shocked and outraged attitude toward the charges throws him into an emotional stew which makes him blind to what he is being accused of. Every word he utters can be used against him, for he is trying not so much to refute the charges as he is trying to fight for his status as a human being, trying to keep his worth and value in the eyes of others, just because he is innocent. The first thing an innocent man feels when he is accused is that those who know him have let him down. Because he is innocent, he does not really know the terms of the accusation. In order to deal with the charges or accusation adequately, he must wrench his mind loose from his innocent way of thinking and begin thinking cunningly and craftily, begin to think in terms that he never dreamed of before, guilty terms.

When I see or hear a person offer a quick alibi for something he is supposed to have done, I at once have my suspicions that the man is guilty. Of course, all readers of detective stories know this. A man who shows up as a witness in court and says:

“I was thirty-six feet from the scene of the crime . . .”

He is asked:

“How do you know that it was thirty-six feet?”

The smart and cynical answer is:

“You cluck, I measured it because I thought you’d ask me.”

Of course, the cynical answer does not negate the psychological indications that some guilt is there when a man can explain too much too readily, that is, when he is too innocent. You’d better search a too innocent man.

While writing The Man Who Lived Underground all of these ideas played in and out of each other; the basic concept of my grandmother and the feeling of guilt that she seemed to have in relation to life, her retirement from the world while living in the world. All of the images and symbols in the book are but improvisations upon this underlying, steady beat in the bass, just like a jazz player improvising when he is playing his trumpet. I did not ever know what image or symbol was coming next; my feelings guided me from one phrase to the other. In that sense one can say that The Man Who Lived Underground is a piece of jazz prose writing, that is, if you are not afraid of the word “jazz.” I’m not.