This book is not the work of a professional novelist. It is, apparently, not a novel at all. Certain conventions of form and method in the novel have been erected, I gather, into immutable laws, and are looked upon with quite superstitious reverence. They are entirely disregarded here. To me the excuse for the novel is that one can do any damn thing one pleases. I am told I have done things as terrible as if you introduced asides and soliloquies into your plays, and came on to the stage in the middle of a scene to take part in the action. You know how much I should be interested if you did that—I am all for disregarding artistic rules of thumb. I dislike standardized art as much as standardized life. Whether I have been guilty of Expressionism or Super-realism or not, I don’t know and don’t care. I knew what I wanted to say, and said it. And I know I have not tried to be “original.” The technique of this book, if it can be said to have one, is that which I evolved for myself in writing a longish modern poem (which you liked) called “A Fool i’ th’ Forest.” Some people said that was “jazz poetry”; so I suppose this is a jazz novel. You will see how appropriate that is to the theme. I believe you at least will be sympathetic to the implied or expressed idealism of this book. Through a good many doubts and hesitations and changes I have always preserved a certain idealism. I believe in men, I believe in a certain fundamental integrity and comradeship, without which society could not endure. How often that integrity is perverted, how often that comradeship betrayed, there is no need to tell you. I disbelieve in bunk and despotism, even in a dictatorship of the intelligentsia. I think you and I are not wholly unacquainted with the intelligentsia? Some of the young, they who will “do the noble things that we forgot,” think differently. According to them, bunk must be parried by super-bunk. Sincerity is superannuated. It doesn’t matter what you have to say; what matters is whether you can put it across successfully. And the only hope is to forbid everybody to read except a few privileged persons (chosen how and by whom?) who will autocratically tell the rest of us what to do. Well, do we believe that? I answer on your behalf as well as my own that we emphatically do not. Of course, these young men may be Swiftean ironists. But, as you will see, this book is really a threnody, a memorial in its ineffective way to a generation which hoped much, strove honestly, and suffered deeply. Others, of course, may see it all very differently. Why should they not? I believe that all we claim is that we try to say what appears to be the truth, and that we are not afraid either to contradict ourselves or to retract an error. Always yours, _Paris, 1929_ RICHARD ALDINGTON NOTE