Thou hast committed –
Fornication: but that was in another country,
And besides, the wench is dead . . .
I dislike burdening a book with a preface; but in this case, I think, a few words of explanation are necessary. The Goose Cathedral forms the third volume of what may loosely be called a ‘trilogy’ – though the chronology is not consecutive, and each book can, I hope, be read independently of the other two. The present volume, like its two predecessors, is neither entirely fictitious nor entirely autobiographical; by way of apology for this hybrid breed, I can only say that, as a method of composition, I happen to find it useful. To force my material into novel form would involve a Procrustean distortion of the theme which, for me at least, would make the book pointless, and not worth the bother of writing. On the other hand, ‘straight’ autobiography is ruled out for more obvious reasons – the law of libel being one. I have tried to solve these problems by presenting a blend of fact and fiction; but here a new difficulty arises, for certain personages and episodes exist on the border-line between truth and phantasy, and are consequently liable to cause confusion.
Let me, therefore, make it quite clear that the only sections of this book which are substantially ‘true’ are those which deal with the narrator’s childhood (and even here a number of fictitious characters and incidents are interpolated); the remainder may be regarded, for all practical purposes, as ‘fiction’. In so far as I have drawn on ‘real’ people, I have borrowed only certain aspects of their personalities: such characters as ‘Esmé Wilkinson’, ‘Miss Bugle’, ‘Bert’, etc, are composite constructions whose relation to the world of reality is so remote as to be negligible. As for the ‘narrative’, I can say only that it is, like the characters themselves, a composite affair: such things have happened, within my own experience, but in entirely different circumstances and (let me hasten to add) ‘in another country’. I have used the town of Folkestone as my mise-en-scène merely because I happen to know it; and I should like to assure all residents of (and visitors to) that salubrious resort that the somewhat scandalous events which I describe as having taken place there occurred (in so far as they ever had any ‘reality’) in a totally different milieu.
The ‘Goose Cathedral’ itself does, indeed, exist, much as I have described it; but all reference to its past, or present occupants are entirely fictitious. ‘Greylands House’, Folkestone, was a real school (though I have changed the name) but exists, thank goodness, no longer. As for the ‘I’ who tells the story, it may be assumed for convenience (as Proust allows his readers to assume) that the narrator’s Christian name happens to be the same as the author’s.
j.b.