I Wrote my first novel when I was seventeen. I am now sixty-two. In the intervening years I have published over forty books. They fill two library shelves. I sometimes survey them wistfully. They were written with high excitement and delivered to their publishers with heady hope: presented to the public in shining covers and advertised glowingly in the Sunday Press, they enjoyed, one or two of them, a brief, bright summer of approval; then one by one they went off the market. Of the books published before 1956, only three are still in print, two of them precariously. My only novel that has been consistently in circulation is the first I wrote—The Loom of Youth.
I do not expect that any of its ‘between-the-wars’ successors will be reissued. They dealt with problems that the world has solved or shelved, with situations that could not arise today, with a way of living that has vanished and with characters who were the product of those problems, those situations and that way of life. Occasionally, a sociological novel will survive as a museum piece, as a picture of a period. But I make no such claim for stories like The Balliols and Kept. I console myself with the reflection that not only many pleasant but even certain noble wines lack longevity, particularly those of Burgundy. And, in my devotion to the grape, I have always been a Burgundian rather than a Bordelais.
Yet even so a writer is reluctant to accept forty years of authorship as the pouring of so much water through a sieve. Are all those titles tombstones? Can nothing be rescued? A novel is a substantial piece of merchandise to salvage; a novel is complete in itself, it must be presented as a whole; but might there not be scattered among my twenty miscellaneous books stray passages and chapters that could be extracted and placed in a different setting? Had I not more than once filled a book with make-weight material so as to get two or three favourite pieces between covers? Might it not be possible to compress a dozen books into one or two, finding in each one something of contemporary appeal?
Rereading some of my old books with this in view, it did seem to me that the stories that have been assembled here, possess a certain undated homogeneity. The first was written in 1920, the last in 1952. They deal with different periods and places, with the First World War, with the London of the 1920s and the 1930s; with the Far East and the Caribbean, with second war counterespionage. But they have this in common: they are told in the first person singular. They are not autobiographical. Their ‘I’ is the observer and the recorder. But they are intimate in the sense that there is a direct contact between the author and the reader. I have always enjoyed writing in this way, feeling myself linked with the traditions of my craft, at one with the storytellers of the Orient whom I have seen in Marrakesh and Baghdad taking their place in the Bazaar, with their audience squatted round them on their haunches. That is why I chose this title for the book.
The story told in the first person obeys an established literary convention. The author tells his story as though he were recording an actual event, or series of events, of which he was the witness, but he is not giving evidence on oath in a court of law. The episode, the anecdote that he records did not necessarily happen in just that way, at just that time, in just that place and to just those people. He selects, invents and rearranges; recreating a personal experience in a special pattern. The reader recognizes this. He knows that he is being offered a piece of fiction. At the same time, he expects the self-portraiture involved in this kind of story to be exact. For that reason I have prefaced the various sections of this book with a few autobiographical details. I do not know whether the young man who wrote the first story in this book at the age of twenty-two is a very different person from the man of fifty-five who wrote the last, but I do know that the circumstances of his life were very different; I felt, therefore, that it would make the reading of these stories simpler, if I explained at various points what those circumstances were. These notes are printed in italics.
A.W.