imagine the emotion

It is possible to imagine the emotion with which, following the failure of his crucial production, he greeted the significant day. Sud­denly, and for the first time in a life filled with creative activity, he must have known himself to be an old man. People no longer under­stood him or, what was worse, he had gone beyond understanding them. There was no prospect of rising to a higher peak than that from which he had fallen. Every new attempt would be at best an effort to re­capture a lost eminence. His wife, an actress, had remained in California to further her own career.
Alone, he went to the seashore, brooding. He had every reason to believe that his show was over.
But he had financial obligations. His possessions and his very con­siderable fortune had been either confiscated by the Nazis or frozen be­cause of the war. He was urged to revive a production which had been an outstanding success abroad. His name had great drawing power, and many people stood ready to back him in this venture. He let himself be persuaded.
Yet this was only a technical resurrection of showy craftsmanship which he was undertaking to produce. From his point of view it was bare of creative art; it was to be done only for the sake of money. He was a proud man. He was tired; he had no wish to resume the battle. He had abdicated.
When he went to make the telephone call, to set the date for those rehearsals which he surely wished might never take place, the conflict within him had doubtless reached its climax. The dog fight was really unimportant except that, being an expression of hostility, it kindled his own hostile impulses which otherwise he had been able to control. Any ordinary occurrence, a loud voice in the street perhaps, might have pre­cipitated the spasm. It might have come upon him during the night, or during rehearsals or at any stage in the preparation of the production. The emotional setting for illness was ripe.
The prospect of giving his talents to a work without creative possi­bilities was the death knell of his creative instinct. Significantly, the destructive drive thrust its dynamic power against those centers in the brain where are located the skills of gesture, of motion, of speech, (hose very skills which had been the medium of this man's genius. Modern psychoanalytic psychology has gathered a wealth of evidence lo convince us that the choice of the organ or organs to be attacked by illness is not accidental, but is related to the whole personality.
Now we can see why elementary speech lessons upset him; he had lifi-ii the acclaimed master of speech, skillful with every nuance. Now wo understand why the test of his writing threw him into a black de-i>irssion. His whole life had been devoted to the arts of communication nl uk-as. Now he could communicate neither by speech, by gesture, nor liy I lie written word.