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When we remember, at least, we are all artists. I try to remember 1924. And I know that whatever we are or profess to be in our active, present lives, magnificent or ordinary, even bestial, broken, and dull, we are by right of vanished lives, structures of memory underneath, and these are in some ways like works of art, although secret. Memory selects, distorts, organizes, and by these, evaluates; then, fixes! This is the artistic process, except for that final step beyond process which makes of the work an object capable of life and meaning outside ourselves, independent. But the operations of memory are our very selves, and are always taking independence from us. Thus our future is our past.

I begin in this unpromising way because what I have to write is founded on an exercise of memory, and memory can betray us as smilingly as a treacherous friend; I know, for I have told this story—have tried to tell this story before, and in the very telling it has somehow slipped away from me, so that it has never quite come out in the way that it should, and I am still determined that it can. And further, I begin in this way, reader, to give you that fair warning which is your right. I am, as you will see, an honest man; honesty, indeed, has been my profession: I have been paid to be honest. Being honest, I recognize at the outset that the deepest lies are those that we do not intend, those that we do not really know we have committed. Or think of it in a different way—like Joseph Conrad, when he wrote that “A meditation is always—in a white man, at least—more or less an interrogative exercise.” Certainly some of what I have to write here is meditation, and unless that were in part a matter of self-questioning, I should probably have no urgent desire to tell it.

Yet I am not a central character. I am less important in this story than any of the others. The others are, chiefly, three: Daniel Ford—you know the name; his wife, Milly—you know her face; and Freddie Grabhorn, their friend. The other woman, the incomparable Josephine Drew, who, as the chief witness for the State necessarily received a good deal of attention from the press and is therefore likewise known to the public, is not really a character in their story, although she is prominent in mine. I am only Grant Norman, once their friend. Of these, Dan, who was the weakest, was the best, and the center, surely, and it is surely Dan whom I wish to vindicate.

His difficulty was that common one, the difficulty of vocabulary. He had no other way of describing his act, and the way he took was wrong, simply wrong. When, almost at the beginning of his trial, in one of the few strong moments of his adult life, he said, and said so tritely, “Yes, I did it. I did it because they betrayed me; she—my wife, after all, and he—our friend”; when he said that before a crowded, gaping courtroom, he eliminated forever the possibility of establishing in its real terms the disastrous record. The defense attorneys, who had some idea of the true situation but not, I think, a very clear one, found themselves helpless in a net of clichés, and in the end they let the clichés stand; for the truth, the real nature of the betrayal, recited in a courtroom before that panting audience, would have given them less ground on which to rest Dan’s case. Like all human motives, which necessarily grow into abstractions, honor has meaning for most of us only in its baldest, dreariest terms, and those were the terms that Dan’s lawyers finally employed. Yet Dan’s was an intricate cuckoldry!

We think in patterns, in neat and recognizable and largely factitious forms of experience, and we impose these ready-made forms on events in order that events may be comprehensible to us; and this is the particular vice of the law, of judges, attorneys, and juries, and of their fellows, the habitual spectators, those anonymous persons who haunt and color criminal trials with the crude enthusiasm of religious fanatics. These are the black and white squares by means of which temporal justice can alone be made to seem, perhaps, an order; but they have little to do with human motives or with that absolute justice that some men are satisfied to think exists in another realm, and toward which anarchy, dissatisfied, aspires in this one.

Hence it was in no way surprising that the whole thing should have been recorded in the legal annals of this state as a commonplace sex crime, the simple triangle and one sick mind, and that Dan, a really harmless though profoundly dishonored man, should have been judged for his offense in the terms of this state, appropriate to his offense as it was understood. And yet his trial explained nothing, justified nothing. If this had been the conventional triangle, the catastrophe would have been very different: for that, Dan could not have found the strength to be so drastic. It may, therefore, be worth trying to straighten out the record, not, certainly, for any legal reasons—legally, Dan’s offense would have been the same, or worse because less explicable, and his motives of no importance except to that audience intent on verifying its assumption that man is both base and comprehensible—but for the human reasons. It may be possible to piece this story out so that it makes some sense on that more subtle and, psychologically, more violent level that alone can explain it.

For, to begin, these were subtle people—Milly, with her anfractuous pride, and Freddie, with his not quite simple jealousy—subtle in the way of the most profoundly immoral human beings, those who live alone in the involuted tower of willfulness; Dan, a weak man, subtle as a demonstration of the twisted forms that deterioration of the will can take. Of myself I need say nothing: the fact that, as this situation developed over the years, I had almost completely dropped out of the relationship, attests to my fundamental simplicity. But in the beginning we were all friends, and to understand—even for me to understand—what happened to our friendship and their love, it has been necessary to say as simply as possible these things.