To offer a volume of short stories to the countrymen of Edgar Allan
Poe and O. Henry is an operation which requires nerve. According to
my publisher it also requires "a foreword" which I find, after
consultation with the dictionary, is the same thing as a preface.
Now to write a preface to one's own book seems to me about as
embarrassing a task as any author can be asked to undertake. It is
like standing outside the front door calling the attention of
indifferent passers-by to the more attractive features of one's own
house. They managed things better in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries when for a comparative trifle some great artist like John
Dryden was cheerfully prepared to furnish a flattering introduction
to the work of any author on the simple understanding that he was not
expected to read the volume in question.
Not possessing the pen of Dryden, and being additionally handicapped
by the fact that I have read the accompanying stories, I find myself
very much at a loss how to fulfil my publishers' request. Desperate
situations demand desperate remedies, and I will, therefore, tell the
truth. I wrote these stories in order to satisfy an inward
craving--not for artistic expression, but for food and drink. I took
a great deal of trouble over them, and if they are not good they are
at least as good as I could make them. I should not, however, have
had the audacity to offer them to the American public in book form,
except for the fact that they have sold well and are continuing to
sell well in England. The most curious phenomena occasionally repeat
themselves, and it is with a wistful hope that something of the sort
may occur in the present case that I venture to launch the _Scandal_
on the time-honoured trail of Columbus.