There doesn’t seem much excuse for me, sitting under a little cedar tree at the foot of the Rockies, looking at the pale desert disappearing westward, with hummocks of shadow rising in the stillness of incipient autumn, this morning, the near pine trees perfectly still, the sunflowers and the purple michaelmas daisies moving for the first time, this morning, in an invisible breath of breeze, to be writing an introduction to a bibliography.
Books to me are incorporate things, voices in the air, that do not disturb the haze of autumn, and visions that don’t blot out the sunflowers. What do I care for first or last editions? I have never read one of my own published works. To me, no book has a date, no book has a binding.
What do I care if “e” is somewhere upside down, or “g” comes from the wrong fount? I really don’t.
And when I force myself to remember, what pleasure is there in that? The very first copy of The White Peacock that was ever sent out, I put into my mother’s hands when she was dying. She looked at the outside, and then at the title-page, and then at me, with darkening eyes. And though she loved me so much, I think she doubted whether it could be much of a book, since no-one more important than I had written it. Somewhere, in the helpless privacies of her being, she had wistful respect for me. But for me in the face of the world, not much. This David would never get a stone across at Goliath. And why try? Let Goliath alone!—Anyway, she was beyond reading my first immortal work. It was put aside, and I never wanted to see it again. She never saw it again.
After the funeral, my father struggled through half a page, and it might as well have been Hottentot.
“And what dun they gi’e thee for that, lad?”
“Fifty pounds, father.”
“Fifty pound!” He was dumbfounded, and looked at me with shrewd eyes, as if I were a swindler. “Fifty pound! An’ tha’s niver done a day’s hard work in thy life.”
I think to this day, he looks upon me as a sort of cleverish swindler, who gets money for nothing: a sort of Ernest Hooley. And my sister says, to my utter amazement: “You always were lucky!”