Remembering George Moore’s denunciation of prefaces, I felt that what I
wanted to say here could be best expressed in a letter to you. Although
you are a little older than I, you belong essentially to the same
generation—those who spent their childhood and adolescence struggling,
like young Samsons, in the toils of the Victorians; whose early manhood
coincided with the European War. A great number of the men of our
generation died prematurely. We are unlucky or lucky enough to remain.
I began this book almost immediately after the Armistice, in a little
Belgian cottage—my billet. I remember the landscape was buried deep
in snow, and that we had very little fuel. Then came demobilization,
and the effort of readjustment cost my manuscript its life. I threw it
aside, and never picked it up again. The attempt was premature. Then,
ten years later, almost day for day, I once more felt the impulse
return, and began this book. You, I know, will read it sympathetically
for many reasons. But I cannot expect the same favour from others.
This book is not the work of a professional novelist. It is,
apparently, not a novel at all. Certain conventions of form and method
in the novel have been erected, I gather, into immutable laws, and
are looked upon with quite superstitious reverence. They are entirely
disregarded here. To me the excuse for the novel is that one can do
any damn thing one pleases. I am told I have done things as terrible
as if you introduced asides and soliloquies into your plays, and came
on to the stage in the middle of a scene to take part in the action.
You know how much I should be interested if you did that—I am all for
disregarding artistic rules of thumb. I dislike standardized art as
much as standardized life. Whether I have been guilty of Expressionism
or Super-realism or not, I don’t know and don’t care. I knew what
I wanted to say, and said it. And I know I have not tried to be
“original.”
The technique of this book, if it can be said to have one, is that
which I evolved for myself in writing a longish modern poem (which
you liked) called “A Fool i’ th’ Forest.” Some people said that was
“jazz poetry”; so I suppose this is a jazz novel. You will see how
appropriate that is to the theme.
I believe you at least will be sympathetic to the implied or expressed
idealism of this book. Through a good many doubts and hesitations and
changes I have always preserved a certain idealism. I believe in men,
I believe in a certain fundamental integrity and comradeship, without
which society could not endure. How often that integrity is perverted,
how often that comradeship betrayed, there is no need to tell you.
I disbelieve in bunk and despotism, even in a dictatorship of the
intelligentsia. I think you and I are not wholly unacquainted with the
intelligentsia?
Some of the young, they who will “do the noble things that we forgot,”
think differently. According to them, bunk must be parried by
super-bunk. Sincerity is superannuated. It doesn’t matter what you have
to say; what matters is whether you can put it across successfully. And
the only hope is to forbid everybody to read except a few privileged
persons (chosen how and by whom?) who will autocratically tell the rest
of us what to do. Well, do we believe that? I answer on your behalf as
well as my own that we emphatically do not. Of course, these young men
may be Swiftean ironists.
But, as you will see, this book is really a threnody, a memorial
in its ineffective way to a generation which hoped much, strove
honestly, and suffered deeply. Others, of course, may see it all very
differently. Why should they not? I believe that all we claim is that
we try to say what appears to be the truth, and that we are not afraid
either to contradict ourselves or to retract an error.
Always yours,
_Paris, 1929_ RICHARD ALDINGTON