MY DEARS, –
It was whilst looking up at the criss-cross of beams in the roof of your tall studio that the form of this book was thought out. Micky had admirably bandaged up my unfortunate foot and you had given up that room to me and there I lay looking up and thinking of Henry James who had been born only a few yards away. So, as I go through these pages I seem to see that criss-cross in your gracious old house and the literary form of the work is inextricably mingled with those Cubist intricacies.
You will say that volumes of memories have no forms and that this collection of them is only a rag-bag. It isn’t really. The true artfulness of art is to appear as if in disordered habiliments. Life meanders, jumps back and forwards, draws netted patterns like those on the musk melon. It seems the most formless of things. One may know that one has lived a life of sturt and strife and will probably die by treachery in the approved Border fashion. But if one is to set down one’s life – for which there is only one excuse – one should so present the pattern of it that, insensibly, it in turn, presents itself to your awareness.
The excuse for setting down one’s life on paper – the only excuse – is that one should give a picture of one’s time. I believe that hardly anyone – and certainly not I – so lives that his personal adventures whether on the high seas or in criticism can be well worth relating. But certain restless spirits roll, as the saying is, their humps into noteworthy cities or into the presence of human notables. So, if one can keep oneself out of it, one may present a picture of a sort of world and time.
I have tried to keep myself out of this work as much as I could – but try as hard as one may after self-effacement the great ‘I’, like cheerfulness will come creeping in. Renan says that as soon as one writes about oneself one poetises a little. I don’t think I do. On the other hand, being a novelist, it is possible that I romance. For about as long as the lives of the two of you young and gallant things together I have gone about the world looking for the person of the Sacred Emperor in low tea-shops – or in such lofty places as your studio. I have seen some Emperors – and not a few pretenders. These and the tea-shops of the Chinese proverb I have tried to make you see. If you sometimes see my coat-tails whisking round the corners you must pardon it. My true intent is only for your delight. Had I the cap of Fortunatus you should not see even so much of me or my garments. The Chinese proverb I have mentioned says that it is hypocrisy to seek for the person of the Sacred Emperor in a low tea-shop; they are cynics those fellows – or pessimists. There is really no other pursuit in life. Our geese must be swans.
So this is a novel: a story mirroring such pursuits. If that pursuit is indeed hypocrisy that is the only hypocrisy in this book – but this book is all that homage paid to virtue by one who errs. Where it has seemed expedient to me I have altered episodes that I have witnessed but I have been careful never to distort the character of the episode. The accuracies I deal in are the accuracies of my impressions. If you want factual accuracies you must go to.… But no, no, don’t go to anyone, stay with me!
I don’t know how much of my writing you have read. It is probably little enough; you have better things to do and be. But it is certainly more than I shall ever read of my own. I am one with the struggling millions who cannot read me. So, if you have read me at all, you may here find things I have written before. Please don’t mind that. Often enough it is unconscious: at my age one does repeat oneself and, since I possess practically none of my own books I cannot refer to them to see what I have written before and I should not have the patience to read them if I had them. But in a number of cases I have done it advisedly to keep the thread of the novel together. Thus one chapter is reprinted from a long forgotten book of mine that was never published in America and part of another is reprinted from a book that was never published in either England or the United States. If I could have rewritten these chapters better I would have done so. As I did not think I could I have let them stand as they were. In certain cases I have here modified details of stories that I know I have told before. That is because in their original form I had to deviate from factual exactitude because I was afraid of hurting feelings. The versions here printed are nearer what actually happened.
So, humbly, gratefully and affectionately, I subscribe myself your mirror to my times. This was begun to the tune of the agreeable noises of West 12th Street and to the taste of the admirable Caribbean confections of your Antiguan cordon brun. It finishes to the rhythm of the sirocco in the ears of sweet corn that I can see agitated in front of the Mediterranean azure. When I have written my name hereunder I shall grill myself an ear or two for my supper. That is pleasure enough. But if the South Wind would change to the West it might over the Atlantic bring you two sailing. That surely would be the proudest sight this poor old mirror has now to reflect and – whatever may be the case with tea-shops – I should surely against the sea of Ulysses see on my terraces sacred and Imperial Personages.
F. M. F.
Cap Brun,
14th July 1931