I have modified the grosser passages but have not obliterated them because they are an essential part of the book. It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster – the period of soya beans and Basic English – and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language, which now with a full stomach I find distasteful. I wrote with a zest that was quite strange to me and also with impatience to get back to the war. This was extended by a sympathetic commanding officer, who let me remain unemployed until June 1944 when the book was finished. In December 1943 I had the good fortune when parachuting to incur a minor injury which afforded me a rest from military service. I am less happy about its form, whose more glaring defects may be blamed on the circumstances in which it was written. Its theme – the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters – was perhaps presumptuously large, but I make no apology for it. This novel, which is here re-issued with many small additions and some substantial cuts, lost me such esteem as I once enjoyed among my contemporaries and led me into an unfamiliar world of fan-mail and press photographers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |