Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.
–MANSFIELD PARK.
NOTE
The action of the story takes place in the near future.
Foreword
TO ANTHONY POOKWORTHY, ESQ., A.B.S., L.L.R.
MY DEAR TONY,
It is with something more than the natural deference of a tyro at the loveliest, most arduous and perverse of the arts in the presence of a master-craftsman that I lay this book before you. You know (none better) the joys of the clean hearth and the rigour of the game. But perhaps I may be permitted to take this opportunity of explaining to you, a little more fully than I have hitherto hinted, something of the disabilities under which I have laboured to produce the pages now open beneath your hand.
As you know, I have spent some ten years of my creative life in the meaningless and vulgar bustle of newspaper offices. God alone knows what the effect has been on my output of pure literature; I dare not think too much about it – even now. There are some things (like first love and one's first reviews) at which a woman in her middle years does not care to look too closely.
The effect of these locust years on my style (if I may lay claim to that lovely quality in the presence of a writer whose grave and lucid prose has permanently enriched our literature) has been perhaps even more serious.
The life of the journalist is poor, nasty, brutish and short. So is his style. You, who are so adept at the lovely polishing of every grave and lucent phrase, will realize the magnitude of the task which confronted me when I found, after spending ten years as a journalist, learning to say exactly what I meant in short sentences, that I must learn, if I was to achieve literature and favourable reviews, to write as though I were not quite sure about what I meant but was jolly well going to say something all the same in sentences as long as possible.
Far be it from me to pretend that the following pages achieve what first burned in my mind with pure lambency ten years ago. Which of us does? But the thing's done! Ecco! É finito! And such as it is, and for what it is worth, it is yours.
You see, Tony, I have a debt to pay. Your books have been something more to me, in the last ten years, than books. They have been springs of refreshment, loafings for the soul, eyes in the dark. They have given me (in the midst of the vulgar and meaningless bustle of newspaper offices) joy. It is just possible that it was not quite the kind of joy you intended them to give, for which of us is infallible? But it was joy all right.
I must confess, too, that I have more than once hesitated before the thought of trying to repay some fraction of my debt to you by offering you a book that was meant to be ... funny.
For your own books are not ... funny. They are records of intense spiritual struggles, staged in the wild setting of mere, berg or fen. Your characters are ageless and elemental beings, tossed like straws on the seas of passion. You paint Nature at her rawest, in man and in landscapes. The only beauty that lights your pages is the grave peace of fulfilled passion, and the ripe humour that lies over your minor characters like a mellow light. You can paint everyday domestic tragedies (are not the entire first hundred pages of 'The Fulfilment of Martin Hoare' a masterly analysis of a bilious attack?) as vividly as you paint soul cataclysms. Shall I ever forget Mattie Elginbrod? I shall not. Your books are more like thunderstorms than books. I can only say, in all simplicity, 'Thank you, Tony.'
But funny ... No.
However, I am sure you are big enough, in every sense of the word, to forgive my book its imperfections.
And it is only because I have in mind all those thousands of persons not unlike myself, who work in the vulgar and meaningless bustle of offices, shops and homes, and who are not always sure whether a sentence is Literature or whether it is just sheer flapdoodle, that I have adopted the method perfected by the late Herr Baedeker, and firmly marked what I consider the finer passages with one, two or three stars. In such a manner did the good man deal with cathedrals, hotels and paintings by men of genius. There seems no reason why it should not be applied to passages in novels.
It ought to help the reviewers, too.
Talking of men of genius, what a constellation burns in our midst at the moment! Even to a tyro as unpractised as myself, who has spent the best creative years of her life in the vulgar and meaningless bustle of newspaper offices, there is some consolation, some sudden exaltation into a serener and more ardent air, in subscribing herself,
Ever, my dear Tony,
Your grateful debtor,
STELLA GIBBONS
WATFORD.
LYONS' CORNER HOUSE.
BOULOGNE-SUR-MER.
January 1931–February 1932.
