Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have
created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have
created--nothing. That is because we are all queer fish, queerer behind
our faces and voices than we want any one to know or than we know
ourselves. When I hear a man proclaiming himself an "average, honest,
open fellow," I feel pretty sure that he has some definite and perhaps
terrible abnormality which he has agreed to conceal--and his
protestation of being average and honest and open is his way of
reminding himself of his misprision.
There are no types, no plurals. There is a rich boy, and this is his and
not his brothers' story. All my life I have lived among his brothers but
this one has been my friend. Besides, if I wrote about his brothers I
should have to begin by attacking all the lies that the poor have told
about the rich and the rich have told about themselves--such a wild
structure they have erected that when we pick up a book about the rich,
some instinct prepares us for unreality. Even the intelligent and
impassioned reporters of life have made the country of the rich as
unreal as fairy-land.
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.
They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them
soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way
that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.
They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are
because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for
ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us,
they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.
The only way I can describe young Anson Hunter is to approach him as if
he were a foreigner and cling stubbornly to my point of view. If I
accept his for a moment I am lost--I have nothing to show but a
preposterous movie.