No doubt it had been intermixed with a great deal which nobody could conceivably enjoy. From the beginning my books had been strong irritants to many of their readers,--it might be that their manner was annoying, indeed, as Dr. Canby put it, "to all warm-hearted people." In any event there were my scrapbooks bulging with "reviews" by persons who appeared to have written in seizures of incoherent rage, without ever having discovered precisely what they were angry about. These chattered denunciations had begun with _The Eagle's Shadow_: and no book by me had since failed to evoke them in respectable volume.... _The Cords of Vanity_, in fact, had seemed to unhinge all power of self-control and self-expression in well-nigh everybody who wrote about it: the scrapbooks which contained the press clippings relative to this novel suggested just the corybantics and mowings of a madhouse. The people who had at most length and most bitterly denounced "such a book as _Jurgen_" did at least base upon understandable ground their claims to be heard with respect,--this ground, of course, being that their judgment had been kept healthily uncontaminated by their abstention from reading _Jurgen_. Nor was time outmoding this frenzy. _The High Place_ seemed to have aroused in sundry quarters much the same quality of inexplicable or, in any event, of unexplained fury. There was no doubt about it: the instinctive reaction of many, many persons everywhere to each one of my books--even, as it seemed, without reading them,--had been the instant, unreasoning response of a reputable business-man or of a bull to the Soviet flag.... And that had not been pleasant. Apart from those who went about thus incommunicatively raging, had been the pitilessly explicit. These had, indeed, been tirelessly explicit in their exposure of my auctorial crimes and defects. Nobody could pretend to remember all the literary vices which I had practised nor all the contagions in which I had been detected, but every one of these infamies had, as I recalled it, been competently exposed, over and over again. I was both knave and imbecile, whose "mannered" writing was mere kleptomania; I had, indeed, no sort of natural endowments once you excepted the singular nastiness of my feeble mind: such were the facts that had been quite regularly deplored, now I thought of it, for the fifth part of a whole century. And when the press clippings came in next week, somebody would, I knew, still be regretting these facts. I could have little doubt that for the rest of my life I would be continually encountering these regrets.... And that, too, was not pleasant.