新视角研究生英语一2 The_roots_of_my_ambition

2 The roots of my ambition

My mother, dead now to this world but still roaming free in my mind, wakes me some mornings before daybreak. "If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a quitter."

I have heard her say that all my life. Now, lying in bed, coming awake in the dark, I feel the fury of her energy fighting the good-for-nothing idler within me who wants to go back to sleep instead of tackling the brave new day.

Silently I protest: I am not a child anymore I have made something of myself. I am entitled to sleep late. "Russell, you've got no more initiative than a bump on a log ."

She has hounded me with these battle cries since I was a boy in short pants.

"Make something of yourself!"

"Don't be a quitter!"

"Have a little ambition."

The civilized man of the world within me scoffs at materialism and strivers after success: He has read the philosophers and social critics. He thinks it is vulgar and unworthy to spend one's life pursuing money, power, fame, and - "Sometimes you act like you're not worth the powder and shot it would take to blow you up with."

Life had been hard for my mother ever since her father died, leaving nothing but debts. The family house was lost, the children scattered. My mother's mother, fatally ill with tubercular infection, fell into a suicidal depression and was institutionalized. My mother, who had just started college, had to quit and look for work.

Then, after five years of marriage and three babies, her husband died in 1930, leaving my mother so poor that she had to give up her baby Audrey for adoption. Maybe the bravest thing she did was give up Audrey, only ten months old, to my Uncle Tom and Aunt Goldie. Uncle Tom, one of my father's brothers, had a good job with the railroad and could give Audrey a comfortable life.

My mother headed off with my other sister and me to take shelter with her brother Allen, poor relatives dependent on his goodness. She eventually found work patching grocers' smocks at ten dollars a week in a laundry.

Mother would have like it better if I could have grown up to be President or a rich businessman, but much as she loved me, she did not deceive herself. Before I was out of primary school, she could see I lacked the gifts for either making millions or winning the love of crowds. After that she began nudging me toward working with words.

Words ran in her family. There seemed to be a word gene that passed down from her maternal grandfather. He was a school-teacher, his daughter Lulie wrote poetry, and his son Charlie became New York correspondent for the Baltimore, Maryland, Herald. In the turn-of-the-century American South, still impoverished by the Civil War, words were a way out.

The most spectacular proof was my mother's first cousin Edwin. He was managing editor of the New York Times. He had traveled all over Europe, proving that words could take you to places so glorious and so far

from the place you came from that your own kin could only gape in wonder and envy. My mother used Edwin as an example of how far a man could go without much talent.

"Edwin James was no smarter than anybody else, and look where he is today," my mother said, and said, and said again, so that I finally grew up thinking Edwin James was a dull clod who had a lucky break. Maybe she left that way about him, but she was saying something deeper. She was telling me I didn't have to be brilliant to get where Edwin had go to, that the way to get to the top was to work, work, work.

When my mother saw that I might have the word gift, she started trying to make it grow. Though desperately poor, she signed up for a deal that supplied one volume of "World's Greatest Literature" every month at 39 cents a book.

I respected those great writers, but what I read with joy were newspapers. I lapped up every word about monstrous crimes, dreadful accidents and hideous butcheries committed in faraway wars. Accounts of murderers dying in the electric chair fascinated me, and I kept close track of last meals ordered by condemned men.

In 1947 I graduated from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and learned that the Baltimore Sun needed a police reporter. Two or three classmates at Hopkins also applied for the job. Why I was picked was a mystery. It paid $30 a week. When I complained that was insulting for a college man, my mother refused to sympathize.

"If you work hard at this job," she said, "maybe you can make something of it. Then they'll have to give you a raise."

Seven years later I was assigned by the Sun to cover the White House. For most reporters, being White House correspondent was as close to heaven as you could get. I was 29 years old and puffed up with pride. I went to see my mother's delight while telling her about it. I should have known better.

"Well, Russ," she said, "if you work hard at this White House job, you might be able to make something of yourself."

Onward and upward was the course she set. Small progress was no excuse for feeling satisfied with yourself. People who stopped to pat themselves on the back didn't last long. Even if you got to the top, you'd better not take it easy. "The bigger they come, the harder they fall" was one of her favorite maxims. During my early years in the newspaper business, I began to entertain childish fantasies of revenge against Cousin Edwin. Wouldn't it be delightful if I became such an outstanding reporter that the Times hired me without knowing I was related to the great Edwin? Wouldn't it be delicious if Edwin himself invited me into his huge office and said, "Tell me something about yourself, young man?" What exquisite vengeance to reply, "I am the only son of your poor cousin Lucy Elizabeth Robinson."

What would one d …… 此处隐藏：6693字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……