I write that much and look at it, and wonder whether, after all, this
is any fair statement of what I am attempting in this book. I’ve given,
I see, an impression that I want to make simply a hotch-potch of
anecdotes and experiences with my uncle swimming in the middle as the
largest lump of victual. I’ll own that here, with the pen already
started, I realise what a fermenting mass of things learnt and emotions
experienced and theories formed I’ve got to deal with, and how, in a
sense, hopeless my book must be from the very outset. I suppose what
I’m really trying to render is nothing more nor less than Life—as one
man has found it. I want to tell—_myself_, and my impressions of the
thing as a whole, to say things I have come to feel intensely of the
laws, traditions, usages, and ideas we call society, and how we poor
individuals get driven and lured and stranded among these windy,
perplexing shoals and channels. I’ve got, I suppose, to a time of life
when things begin to take on shapes that have an air of reality, and
become no longer material for dreaming, but interesting in themselves.
I’ve reached the criticising, novel-writing age, and here I am writing
mine—my one novel—without having any of the discipline to refrain and
omit that I suppose the regular novel-writer acquires.
I’ve read an average share of novels and made some starts before this
beginning, and I’ve found the restraints and rules of the art (as I
made them out) impossible for me. I like to write, I am keenly
interested in writing, but it is not my technique. I’m an engineer with
a patent or two and a set of ideas; most of whatever artist there is in
me has been given to turbine machines and boat building and the problem
of flying, and do what I will I fail to see how I can be other than a
lax, undisciplined story-teller. I must sprawl and flounder, comment
and theorise, if I am to get the thing out I have in mind. And it isn’t
a constructed tale I have to tell, but unmanageable realities. My
love-story—and if only I can keep up the spirit of truth-telling all
through as strongly as I have now, you shall have it all—falls into no
sort of neat scheme of telling. It involves three separate feminine
persons. It’s all mixed up with the other things....
But I’ve said enough, I hope, to excuse myself for the method or want
of method in what follows, and I think I had better tell without
further delay of my boyhood and my early impressions in the shadow of
Bladesover House.