I wrote the first three chapters of this book in Paris in 1928 when I was eighteen, and soon after the events recorded; at that time I wanted to compose my own Confessions of a Young Man à la George Moore, and felt I simply could not wait, as Moore did, for the onset of middle age. The rest of the book was written in the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal during three months of the winter of 1932-3, when I was awaiting a crucial operation, and I used such notes, taken on the spot, as were spared from the holocaust mentioned in the final chapter; by then my intention was altered, and all I desired was to record, and in a sense relive, a period of great happiness. After barely surviving the operation I turned away from my youth altogether. I did not look at the manuscript again for thirty-five years.
I have changed very little of the original. The revision amounts to the occasional improvement of a phrase and, in the case of the first chapter, the excision of some particularly fatuous paragraphs; also, for reasons of discretion I have given several characters fictitious names. Nothing else has been altered or omitted—in spite of a temptation to suppress or at least soften many passages that expose the youthful memoirist in all his flippancy, hedonism and conceit. And after all, why change any of this? This young man is no longer myself: I hardly recognize him, even from his photographs and handwriting, and in my memory he is less like someone I have been than a character in a novel I have read.
J.G.
Foster, Quebec
October 1969