PREFACES
For years my consciousness of this small piece of collaboration has been very vague, almost impalpable, like fleeting visits from a ghost. If I ever thought of it, and I must confess that I can hardly remember ever doing it on purpose till it was brought definitely to my notice by my Collaborator, I always regarded it as something in the nature of a fragment. I was surprised and even shocked to discover that it was rounded. But I need not have been. Rounded as it is in form, using the word form in its simplest sense—printed form—it remains yet a fragment from its very nature and also from necessity. It could never have become anythingelse. And even as a fragment it is but a fragment of something else that might have been—of a mere intention.
But, as it stands, what impresses me most is the amount this fragment contains of the crudely materialistic atmosphere of the time of its origin, the time when theEnglish Reviewwas founded. It emerges from the depths of a past as distant from us now as the square-skirted, long frock-coats in which unscrupulous, cultivated, high-mindedjouisseurslike ours here attended to their strange business activities and cultivated the little blue flower of sentiment. No doubt our man was conceived for purposes of irony; but our conception of him, I fear, is too fantastic.
Yet the most fantastic thing of all, it seems to me, is that we two who had so often discussed soberly the limits and methods of literary composition should have believed for a moment that apiece of work in the nature of an analytical confession (producedin articulo mortisas it were) could have been developed and achieved in collaboration!
What optimism! But it did not last long. I seem to remember a moment when I burst into earnest entreaties that all these people should be thrown overboard without more ado. This, I believe,isthe real nature of the crime. Overboard. The neatness and dispatch with which it is done in Chapter VIII was wholly the act of my Collaborator’s good nature in the face of my panic.
After signing these few prefatory words I will pass the pen to him in the hope that he may be moved to contradict me on every point of fact, impression, and appreciation. I said “the hope.” Yes, eager hope. For it would be delightful to catch the echo of the desperate, earnest and funny quarrelswhich enlivened those old days. The pity of it is that there comes a time when all the fun of one’s life must be looked for in the past.
J. C.
No, I find nothing to contradict, for, the existence of this story having been recalled to my mind by a friend, the details of its birth and its attendant circumstances remain for me completely forgotten, a dark, blind-spot on the brain. I cannot remember the houses in which the writing took place, the view from the windows, the pen, the table cloth. At a given point in my life I forgot, literally, all the books I had ever written; but, if nowadays I re-read one of them, though I possess next to none and have re-read few, nearly all the phrases come back startlingly to my memory and I see glimpses of Kent, of Sussex, of Carcassonne—of New York, even; and fragments of furniture, mirrors, who knowswhat? So that, if I didn’t happen to retain, almost by a miracle, for me, of retention, the marked up copy of “Romance” from which was made the analysis lately published in a certain periodical, I am certain that I could have identified the phrases exactly as they there stand. Looking at the book now I can hear our voices as we read one passage or another aloud for purposes of correction. Moreover I could say: This passage was written in Kent and hammered over in Sussex; this, written in Sussex and worked on in Kent; or this again was written in the downstairs café and hammered in the sitting room on the first-floor, of an hotel that faces the sea on the Belgian coast.
But of “The Nature of a Crime” no phrase at all suggests either the tones of a voice or the colour of a day. When an old friend, last year, on a Parisian Boulevard said: “Isn’t there a storyby yourself and Collaborator buried in the So & So?” I repudiated the idea with a great deal of heat. Eventually I had to admit the, as it were, dead fact. And, having admitted that to myself, and my Collaborator having corroborated it, I was at once possessed by a sort of morbid craving to get the story re-published in a definitive and acknowledged form. One may care infinitely little for the fate of one’s work and yet be almost hypochondriacally anxious as to the form its publication shall take—if the publication is likely to occur posthumously. I became at once dreadfully afraid that some philologist of that Posterity for which one writes, might, in the course of his hyena occupations, disinter these poor bones and, attributing sentence one to writer A and sentence two to B, maul at least one of our memories. With the nature ofthosecrimes one is only too well acquainted. Besides,though one may never read comments one desires to get them over. It is indeed agreeable to hear a storm rage in the distance and rumble eventually away.
Let me, however, since my Collaborator wishes it and in the name of Fun that is to-day hardly an echo, differ from him for a shade as to the nature of those passages of time. I protest against the word: quarrels. There were not any. And I should like to make the note that our collaboration was almost purely oral. We wrote and read aloud the one to the other. Possibly in the end we even wrotetoread aloud the one to the other: for it strikes me very forcibly that “The Nature of a Crime” is for the most part prose meant for recitation, or of that type.
Anyhow, as the memory comes back to me overwhelmingly, I would read on and read on. One begins with a fine propulsion. Sometimes that wouldlast to the end. But, as often as not, by a real telepathy, with my eyes on the page and my voice going on I would grow aware of an exaggerated stillness on the part of my Collaborator in the shadows. It was an extraordinary kind of stillness: not of death: not of an ice age. Yes, it was the stillness of a prisoner on the rack determined to conceal an agony. I would read on, my voice gradually sticking to my jaws. When it became unbearable I would glance up. On the other side of the hearth I would have a glimpse of a terribly sick man, of a convulsed face, of fingers contorted. Guido Fawkes beneath thepeine forte et durelooked like that. You are to remember that we were very serious about writing. I would read on. After a long time it would come: “Oh!... Oh, oh!... Oh my God.... My dear Ford.... My dear faller....” (That in those dayswas the fashionable pronunciation of “fellow”.)
For myself, I would listen always with admiration. Always with an admiration that I have never since recaptured. And if there were admirablenesses that did not seem to me to fit in with the given scene I could at least, at the end of the reading, say with perfect sincerity: “Wonderful!Howyou do things!...” before beginning on: “But don’t you perhaps think....”
And I really do not believe that either my Collaborator or myself ever made an objection which was not jointly sustained. That is not quarrels. When I last looked through the bound proofs ofRomanceI was struck with the fact that whereas my Collaborator eliminated almost every word of action and eighty percent of the conversations by myself, I supplied almost all the descriptive passages of the really collaborated parts—and such softer sentimentas was called for. And my Collaborator let them get through.
All this took place long ago; most of it in another century during another reign; whilst an earlier but not less haughty and proud generation were passing away.
F. M. F.