Broken Necks/Preface

I have never before allowed myself the intimacy of a Preface. I have never felt sufficiently sociable toward readers to address them informally behind the scenes.

I feel no more sociable now. But Mr. Covici, who already has many sins on his head, cajoles me. His telegraphic insistences woo a Preface out of me against all my inclinations and better judgments.

There must have been a time when Preface writing was an honest delight; when readers were charming and worthy persons. So it seems from the genuflections and caresses lavished upon the Dear Reader in the prefaces of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Perhaps the authors of that time were a more graceful and sociable crew. But I doubt it. I choose to believe that the people who once read books were, as a whole, once worthy of the literary mannerisms with which they were saluted on the opening of a volume.

An honest modern author about to play host to his reader, about to step into the vestibule with a hand of welcome and induct his reader into his work, must pause and shudder. There are so many fools reading books. Particularly modern books.

I doubt whether ever before in the history of literature has it been so cursed with reading. I mean false reading, empty reading, vanity reading, bounderish reading; in short, reading inspired by almost every motive except love, understanding or intelligent curiosity.

From all I have heard said and seen written about my own work it is obvious that two-thirds of my readers are simpletons—at least literary simpletons. They are people so intricately unfitted for any sort of cerebral stimulus, so congenitally obtuse and unmental that their praise is an even greater irritation than their censure.

I am not alone in my excitement. I have heard authors complain, not, as the cynical reader may think, of attack, of ridicule or of being ignored, but of ‘‘popularity.’’

They, like myself, have no objection to selling books, nor to being read, nor to making money, nor to becoming famous. But to be read by people who have no idea what you are writing about or what they are reading; to be read by people in whose hands a book is as incongruous as a mirror in a blind man’s room, is to grow sour toward one’s ‘‘success.’’

The fungus-like growth of literacy in our Republic, responsible for all this horrendous book reading, can be laid to various sources. The most prolific source is Education. Art of any sort seldom survives in an educated country. The more people we teach to read the more bad books must be written to satisfy their parvenu appetite. And it is for some reason an aesthetic law that an audience grown too large and too active will drag the arts of its day down to its level.

If this does not appeal to you as true in the matter of literature, observe our music. With the popularization of music in the United States has come its death, creatively. Music was never so prevalent and never so worthless as in our Republic today.

There is also the modern book publisher. When books are advertised as liberally and profusely as so many two-dollar hats is it any wonder that the same sort of people will buy them? Advertising will sell anything in our Republic. It sells books and the sole person actually benefited by this is the publisher.

I feel certain that a good percentage of people who buy my books buy them because they are misled into buying them by advertising. To these I apologize. I never intended them to read what I write more than they ever desired to be annoyed by it. They, no less than I, are the victims of the commercialization which has overtaken the distribution of books and they suffer no more than I by it.

There is also to consider the inferiority complex which usually distinguishes the Neanderthalish soul of ademocracy. The simpleton of today, not content with his simplicity, must read books and masquerade —among other simpletons, of course—as a man or woman of culture. To seem cultured has become, paradoxically, as important in our Republic as to appear intolerant, moralistic and otherwise half-witted and American. On all sides one hears imbeciles boasting of the fine books they have read and the fine music they have listened to and giving voice in the same breath to notions and obsessions so dull, so infantile, as to reveal that their souls have never thawed to a melody nor their minds ever opened to an idea.

And there is also the lust for romance and other dream escapes which burns in the hearts of a taboo-ridden people. Your moralist cocainizes himself, as a rule, by prodigious injections of magazine fiction. He spends about a third of his waking time reading about kisses and embraces, properly chaperoned by the editors of the innumerable fiction periodicals of the nation.

From this he stumbles upon novels. He grows adventurous and buys books whose titles he has seen commented on. Whereupon, without taste, without curiosity, without intelligence, he immerses himself in books, wanders pathetically through labyrinths of books whose meanings, purposes and very words remain mysteries to him.

There is a huge tribe of these readers who grow duller with every idea they encounter, who skim through thousands upon thousands of pages of literature with the same abstraction to be noted in idiots who sit tying countless knots in a piece of string. This apathy is peculiarly American.

In pondering on the various nuisances among readers I have almost forgotten several distinctly modern phenomena, that is, phenomena which are less than fifteen years old.

For one, it is obvious that the squealing set up by one pack of fools that modern books are erotic has attracted another pack of fools whose major interest in reading is the hope of running across erotic passages.

I have noted that the simpletons who squeal over the obscenity of modern literature and the simpletons who rush to the book stores to buy only obscenity are members of the same lodge. They are both people whose normal stupidity is shocked by any deviation from the platitude in which their souls are buried. They are both creatures of malformed and boorish instincts which they have sugar-coated with ideals peculiar to all stupid, cowardly and dishonest natures.

The difference in them lies only in that the first species cannot tolerate the nausea it feels in the presence of anything resembling truth, gayety or mental activity; and the second species is able to transform an identical nausea into a sort of physical titillation.

My books are read also by a befuddled tribe of unloved wives and unloving husbands, who hope to find arguments in my work with which to harass one another; by obscene old maids, who often manage to ease their libido under cover of denouncing me; by pontifical dolts, who really wish to ascertain if literature is going to the dogs (I supply them with affirmative thunder) ; by well-wishers, forever on the lookout for signs of my decay and mental collapse.

For whom then can one write a Preface? To whom may one say welcome without worrying oneself over aesthetic compromise?

I am certain I know the names and addresses of nearly three-fourths of the intelligent men and women who read my books. I have at one time met them, received letters from them or read their comments—pro and con in the press. I would say they number in all about fifty. This I consider an excellent public.

There are relatively few people capable of digesting more than a dozen books in their lifetime. There are even fewer capable of understanding a single imaginative or lively work did they devote their entire energies to the study of it.

The generation which preceded us recognized this fact and made no bones about it. Indeed, it was inclined to boast of its illiteracy and inclined to look upon omnivorous readers as sissies.

I have no doubt but that the authors of that day hungered for a wider public and bewailed the limits of their fame and influence. Had I lived in their day I would, obviously, have joined them in their laments.

As it is I turn to the thought of the Fifty whose interest in my work I find flattering and charming and offer for their consideration these tales written mainly ten and twelve years ago. They will, I am certain, smile tolerantly upon some of their more obvious faults, remembering that they were the product of the first violences of youth. And it is my hope that I will seem to these readers to have lost none of the exhuberance, tactlessness and delight in words which are to be found in these first tales of mine.