I have begun many things but nothing have I ever completed. It has always seemed unnecessary or impossible, although at times I have tried to carry a piece of work through. On these occasions a restraining angel has held me firmly back. It might be better if what I have written, what I have said, were permitted to pass into oblivion with me, to become a part of scoriac chaos. It may not mean anything in particular; if it means too much, to that extent I have failed.
Thinking, however, of death, as I sometimes do, I have wondered if, after all, behind the vapoury curtain of my fluctuating purpose, behind the orphic wall of my indecision, there did not lurk some vague shadow of intention. Not on my part, perhaps, but on the part of that being, or that condition, which is reported to be interested in such matters. This doubt, I confess, I owe to you. Sometimes, in those extraordinary moments between sleeping and awakening—and once in the dentist's chair, after I had taken gas—the knots seemed to unravel, the problem seemed as naked as Istar at the seventh gate. But these moments are difficult, or impossible, to recapture. To recapture them I should have been compelled to invent a new style, a style as capricious and vibratory as the moments themselves. In this, however, as you know, I have failed, while you have succeeded. It is to your success, modest as it may appear to you, that I turn in my dilemma. To come to the point, cannot you explain, make out some kind of case for me, put me on my feet (or in a book), and thereby prove or disprove something? Shameless as I am, it would be inconceivable, absurd, for me to ask you to do this while I am yet living and I have, therefore, put my request into a formal clause in my will. After I am dead, you may search your memory, which I know to be very good, for such examples of our conversations as will best be fitted to illuminate your subject, which I must insist—you, yourself, will understand this, too, sooner or later—is not me at all.
When your book is published, I shall be dead and perhaps unconscious. If, however, as I strongly suspect, some current connects the life to be with the life that is, I can enjoy what you have done. At the best, you may give others a slight intimation of the meaning of inspiration or furnish guideposts, lighthouses, and bell-buoys to the poet who intends to march singing along the highroad or bravely to embark on the ships at sea; at the worst, I have furnished you with a subject for another book, and I am well aware that subjects even for bad books are difficult to light upon.
Salve atque Vale,
Peter.
This letter, I may say, astonished me. I think it would astonish anybody. A profound and enveloping melancholy succeeded to this feeling of astonishment. At the time, I was engaged in putting the finishing touches to The Tiger in the House and I postponed meditation on Peter's affair until that bulky volume could be dispatched to the printer. That happy event fell on March 15, 1920, but my anthology, Lords of The Housetops, next claimed my attention, and then the new edition of Interpreters, for which I had agreed to furnish a new paper, and the writing of this new paper amused me very much, carrying my mind not only far away from cats, which had been occupying it for a twelvemonth, but also away from Peter's request. At last, Interpreters was ready for the printer, but now the proofs of The Tiger began to come in, and I may say that for the next three months my days were fully occupied in the correction of proofs, for those of Lords of The Housetops and Interpreters were in my garret when the proofs of The Tiger were not. Never have I corrected proofs with so much concentrated attention as that which I devoted to the proofs of The Tiger, and yet there were errors. In regard to some of these, I was not the collaborator. On Page 240, for instance, one may read, There are many females in the novels of Emile Zola. My intention was to have the fourth word read, felines, and so it stood in the final proof, but my ambition to surmount the initial letter of Zola's Christian name with an acute accent (an ambition I shall forswear on this present page), compelled the printer to reset the line, so that subsequently, when I opened the book at this page, I read with amazement that there are many females in the novels of Emile Zola, a statement that cannot be readily denied, to be sure, but still it is no discovery of which to boast.
It was not until September, 1920, that I had an opportunity to seriously consider Peter's request and when I did begin to consider it, I thought of it at first only as a duty to be accomplished. But when I began searching my memory for details of the conversations between us and had perused certain notes I had made on various occasions, visited his house on Beekman Place to look over his effects and talk with his mother, the feeling of the artist for inevitable material came over me and I knew that whether Peter had written me that letter or not, I should sooner or later have written this book about him.
There was another struggle over the eventual form, a question concerning which Peter had made no suggestions. It seemed to me, at first, that a sort of haphazard collection of his ideas and pronunciamentos, somewhat in the manner of Samuel Butler's Note-Books, would meet the case, but after a little reflection I rejected this idea. Light on the man was needed for a complete understanding of his ideas, or lack of them, for they shifted like the waves of the sea. I can never tell why, but it was while I was reading William Dean Howells's Familiar Spanish Studies one day in the New York Public Library that I suddenly decided on a sort of loose biographical form, a free fantasia in the manner of a Liszt Rhapsody. This settled, I literally swam ahead and scarcely found it necessary to examine many papers (which was fortunate as few exist) or to consult anything but my memory, which lighted up the subject from obscure angles, as a search-light illuminates the spaces of the sea, once I had learned to decipher the meaning of the problem. What it is all about, or whether it is about anything at all, you, the reader, of course, must decide for yourself. To me, the moral, if I may use a conventional word to express an unconventional idea, is plain, and if I have not succeeded in making it appear so, then I must to some extent blame you, the reader, for what is true of all books, is perhaps truest of this, that you will carry away from it only what you are able to bring to it.
Chapter I
One of my friends, a lady, visited Venice alone in her middle age. It was late at night when the train drew into the station, and it was raining, a drizzly, chilling rain. The porter pushed her, with her bag, into a damp gondola and the dismal voyage to the hotel began. There were a few lights here and there but she had the impression that she was floating down the Chicago River in a wash-tub. Once she had reached her destination, she clambered unsteadily out of the black barge, wobbled through a dark passageway, inhaling great whiffs of masticated garlic, and finally emerged in a dimly lighted lobby. At the desk, a sleepy clerk yawned as she spoke of her reservation. Tired, rather cross, and wholly disappointed, she muttered, I don't like Venice at all. I wish I hadn't come. The clerk was unsympathetically explanatory, Signora should have visited Venice when she was younger.
A day or so later, the lady recovered her spirits and even her sense of humour for she told me the story herself and I have always remembered it. The moment it passed her lips, indeed, I began to reflect that I had been lucky to encounter the Bride of the Adriatic in my youth. Paris, too, especially Paris, for there is a melancholy pleasure to be derived from Venice. It is a suitable environment for grief; there is a certain superior relish to suffering there. Paris, I sometimes think, smiles only on the very young and it is not a city I should care to approach for the first time after I had passed forty.