No, I find nothing to contradict, for, the existence of this story
having been recalled to my mind by a friend, the details of its birth
and its attendant circumstances remain for me completely forgotten, a
dark, blind-spot on the brain. I cannot remember the houses in which
the writing took place, the view from the windows, the pen, the table
cloth. At a given point in my life I forgot, literally, all the books
I had ever written; but, if nowadays I re-read one of them, though I
possess next to none and have re-read few, nearly all the phrases come
back startlingly to my memory and I see glimpses of Kent, of Sussex, of
Carcassonne--of New York, even; and fragments of furniture, mirrors,
who knows what? So that, if I didn’t happen to retain, almost by a
miracle, for me, of retention, the marked up copy of “Romance” from
which was made the analysis lately published in a certain periodical,
I am certain that I could have identified the phrases exactly as they
there stand. Looking at the book now I can hear our voices as we read
one passage or another aloud for purposes of correction. Moreover
I could say: This passage was written in Kent and hammered over in
Sussex; this, written in Sussex and worked on in Kent; or this again
was written in the downstairs café and hammered in the sitting room on
the first-floor, of an hotel that faces the sea on the Belgian coast.
But of “The Nature of a Crime” no phrase at all suggests either the
tones of a voice or the colour of a day. When an old friend, last
year, on a Parisian Boulevard said: “Isn’t there a story by yourself
and Collaborator buried in the So & So?” I repudiated the idea with a
great deal of heat. Eventually I had to admit the, as it were, dead
fact. And, having admitted that to myself, and my Collaborator having
corroborated it, I was at once possessed by a sort of morbid craving to
get the story re-published in a definitive and acknowledged form. One
may care infinitely little for the fate of one’s work and yet be almost
hypochondriacally anxious as to the form its publication shall take--if
the publication is likely to occur posthumously. I became at once
dreadfully afraid that some philologist of that Posterity for which one
writes, might, in the course of his hyena occupations, disinter these
poor bones and, attributing sentence one to writer A and sentence two
to B, maul at least one of our memories. With the nature of _those_
crimes one is only too well acquainted. Besides, though one may never
read comments one desires to get them over. It is indeed agreeable to
hear a storm rage in the distance and rumble eventually away.
Let me, however, since my Collaborator wishes it and in the name of
Fun that is to-day hardly an echo, differ from him for a shade as to
the nature of those passages of time. I protest against the word:
quarrels. There were not any. And I should like to make the note that
our collaboration was almost purely oral. We wrote and read aloud the
one to the other. Possibly in the end we even wrote _to_ read aloud the
one to the other: for it strikes me very forcibly that “The Nature of a
Crime” is for the most part prose meant for recitation, or of that type.
Anyhow, as the memory comes back to me overwhelmingly, I would read
on and read on. One begins with a fine propulsion. Sometimes that
would last to the end. But, as often as not, by a real telepathy, with
my eyes on the page and my voice going on I would grow aware of an
exaggerated stillness on the part of my Collaborator in the shadows.
It was an extraordinary kind of stillness: not of death: not of an ice
age. Yes, it was the stillness of a prisoner on the rack determined
to conceal an agony. I would read on, my voice gradually sticking to
my jaws. When it became unbearable I would glance up. On the other
side of the hearth I would have a glimpse of a terribly sick man,
of a convulsed face, of fingers contorted. Guido Fawkes beneath the
_peine forte et dure_ looked like that. You are to remember that we
were very serious about writing. I would read on. After a long time it
would come: “Oh!... Oh, oh!... Oh my God.... My dear Ford.... My dear
faller....” (That in those days was the fashionable pronunciation of
“fellow”.)
For myself, I would listen always with admiration. Always with an
admiration that I have never since recaptured. And if there were
admirablenesses that did not seem to me to fit in with the given
scene I could at least, at the end of the reading, say with perfect
sincerity: “Wonderful! _How_ you do things!...” before beginning on:
“But don’t you perhaps think....”
And I really do not believe that either my Collaborator or myself
ever made an objection which was not jointly sustained. That is not
quarrels. When I last looked through the bound proofs of _Romance_
I was struck with the fact that whereas my Collaborator eliminated
almost every word of action and eighty percent of the conversations by
myself, I supplied almost all the descriptive passages of the really
collaborated parts--and such softer sentiment as was called for. And
my Collaborator let them get through.
All this took place long ago; most of it in another century during
another reign; whilst an earlier but not less haughty and proud
generation were passing away.