Listening times without number to these expressions of folk utterance, they gradually stamped themselves upon my mind; the realization of them did not come in the order in which I’ve named them and my grasp of them was long and slow in the making. In fact, many of them did not occur to me until I was in the actual process of writing The Man Who Lived Underground.

I might pause to speculate just why it is that blues and jazz and swing music possess this intensity, why such an ordering of materials produces such effects. I really don’t know. One critic comments that it is because of its collective nature, that, in a blues song, the participants are never called upon to stop and discuss what makes their songs sad, or why there should be a constant beat in the bass. These songs were handed down through tradition and the singers and musicians simply take all of that for granted. Another critic claims that the strong beat in Negro blues and jazz music, the heavy, melancholy throb, stems from centuries of oppression. It may be, I don’t know.

Anyway, it can be explained in other terms, terms of a technical nature, which are more likely to be acceptable. The moment one takes, in an effort at expression, a terrible lot for granted, and then proceeds on the basis of that as one’s basic mood, to improvise, one creates an intensity. And it is that kind of an intensity that I tried to get into The Man Who Lived Underground. The first pages of The Man Who Lived Underground deal with a nice, honest, Christian Negro boy walking along a street, going home to his wife who is about to give birth. He is picked up by the police, beaten, tortured, and charged with a horrible crime which he did not commit. This accusation served me functionally as the basis which I could take for granted. That is, the guilt theme served as the steady beat upon which I proceeded to improvise, as freely and recklessly as I wanted, all of the images and symbols that my mind could conceive. I had the feeling while writing that anything that happened to come into my mind would fit. No matter how seemingly alien the items were, I could push them into this new frame of mind and give them a meaning which they did not otherwise have.