My grandmother had deep-set black eyes with over-hanging lids and she had a habit of gazing with a steady, unblinking stare; in my later life I’ve always associated her religious ardor with those never-blinking eyes of hers, eyes that seemed to be in this world but not of this world, eyes that seemed to be contemplating human frailty from some invulnerable position outside time and space. It may be that she had been religious so long that the physical structure of her body, her emotional reactions and reflexes had become somewhat conditioned by her staunch faith.

Religion as such never deeply interested me; I have never felt it deeply enough to be swayed to believe, for my sensibilities were too much claimed by the concrete externals of the world I saw. (At the age of twelve or thirteen I did try to feel some of the things I’d heard in church, but I never could.) From the earliest time I can remember, I longed for happiness here and now, in the form of feeling with the feelings of my body. Yet, I think I understood with my mind the feelings of the religious happiness that surrounded me as I grew up. But I was too sensual for Protestant religion; perhaps some other form of religion might have snared me; I don’t know. . . .

What fascinated me about religion was its manifestation in the personalities of others, especially when those manifestations related to me in one way or another and had something to do with my life. For example, when I ran away from home, I was completely baffled by the harsh and implacable attitude which my parents and grandparents held toward me; I felt that somehow they loved me, but in their loving me, they were determined to take me by the throat and lift me to a higher plane of living and, in lifting me, I knew that they would surely strangle me to death.

My grandmother was a rebel, as thorough a rebel as ever lived on this earth; she was at war, ceaselessly, militantly at war with every particle of reality she saw. In her way and according to her light, she strove to transform the world; she fought the world, she attacked it. . . .

I repeat that The Man Who Lived Underground did not stem wholly from my memories of my grandmother; without my knowing it, the vast, sprawling symbol of her life sank deep down into me and became associationally united with many other experiences. I shall try to enumerate as many of these experiences as I can remember, but I cannot do so in the exact sequence in which they occurred. For who can tell the boundary lines between experiences? How can one tell when one experience ends and another begins? I remember the objective order in which these experiences happened, but the full significance of each experience did not impress itself upon me as I endured it. In many instances, to my delight or dismay, it was not until years had elapsed that a supposedly new or alien experience would, for one reason or another, doff its stylish clothes and reveal itself as an old experience in disguise. Sometimes these new experiences would be with me for ten years without my ever suspecting that my reaction to them was influenced or controlled by attitudes and conditionings implanted in me by my grandmother.