AFTER SEEING A MOVIE about entering the forbidden tomb of a pharaoh, he wanted to be an Egyptologist. Next he wanted to be an astronomer. Searching the sky for stars alone at night through a telescope was a job he felt he could not fail at. His third ambition was chemistry. Each Christmas he received a progressively more elaborate chemistry set. Just as he was about to get the last one, which came in a hinged, wooden box and cost twenty-five dollars, he began collecting chemicals piecemeal from druggists. Because of his youth most druggists would not sell him poisons or corrosive acids, but he finally found a sympathetic druggist who would even order for him chemicals not in stock. From sulphur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate he made gunpowder, with which he lit bright fires on his window sill and in his bathtub. He then made nitrocellulose, a relatively powerful explosive, which he packed into glass tubes and when his parents weren’t home detonated with paper fuses. He bought a book on explosives, which explained how to make nitroglycerine, and although he had the necessary ingredients and equipment he lost his nerve because of a warning in the book that nitroglycerine goes off by itself if impure. His favorite experiment, which he performed for friends, was a demonstration of spontaneous combustion. He would pour a few drops of glycerine onto a mound of potassium permanganate, and within a minute or two the mixture would smoke and burst into flames. One evening when his parents were sitting in the living room he put the glycerine and potassium permanganate into a small screw-top bottle, locked the bottle in a steel box, put the box close to his parents, warning them not to touch it, that it would soon explode. It did, the box hopping a few inches off the floor. His father was angry but said only not to pull that little trick again. Shortly afterward he put potassium permanganate and glycerine into a corked test tube and dropped the tube onto the awning of the grocery store two floors below his room. The awning caught fire, and he was seen by the grocer trying to extinguish the fire by pouring pans of water from his window. That evening his father wrapped up all his chemicals to dispose of on the dumb-waiter next morning. He rose at dawn, undid his father’s package, and salvaged his most prized chemical, an ounce of mercury, which he liked to manipulate on a flat surface, watching it break into tiny balls and recombine into larger masses. In the last two years of grammar school he delivered oratorical pieces and performed in plays for the parents of students. He got so much credit for this that he searched out collections of poems and prose passages intended for recitation. Learning and saying these gave him a sense of verbal harmony. In his third year of high school he wrote a realistic description of his fellow students, how they smelled bad, squeezed pimples, masturbated; the composition was a great success. Also, for a girl he had fallen in love with he wrote poems, which she said she treasured. By the end of high school he had decided to be a writer. When he told his father that this was his ambition his father said that he would have to pick something more practical if he wanted to be sent to college. He lied and said in that case he would be a teacher. For a time he considered being a photographer but realized that his gratification came from unflattering pictures he took of relatives and friends (he even used special darkroom techniques to deform pleasant portraits). He had no success as a writer until he wrote comic stories about his marital difficulties. They seemed to be even-handed caricatures of his wife and himself; his wife, however, understood that she was being represented as an inadequate woman and he as her victim. While he was writing his first novel he suspected that for him the point of literary composition was vengeance and an extension of his childhood interest in explosives. Some years after the end of his marriage he fell in love. The experience so loosened his feelings that he hoped to write warmly of people, but he still has pity only for himself and a strong sense of grievance against others. Eventually he will understand that most people have as hard a time in life as he. He will try to make literature from this understanding, but he will not be able to.