There is no more indecency or impropriety in The Rainbow than there is in this autumn morning—I, who say so, ought to know. And when I open my mouth, let no dog bark.
So much for the first edition of The Rainbow. The only copy of any of my books I ever keep is my copy of Methuen’s Rainbow. Because the American editions have all been mutilated. And this is almost my favourite among my novels: this, and Women in Love. And I should really be best pleased if it were never re-printed at all, and only those blue, condemned volumes remained extant.
Since The Rainbow, one submits to the process of publication as to a necessary evil: as souls are said to submit to the necessary evil of being born into the flesh. The wind bloweth where it listeth. And one must submit to the processes of one’s day. Personally, I have no belief in the vast public. I believe that only the winnowed few can care. But publishers, like thistle, must set innumerable seeds on the wind, knowing most will miscarry.
To the vast public, the autumn morning is only a sort of stage background against which they can display their own mechanical importance. But to some men still the trees stand up and look around at the daylight, having woven the two ends of darkness together into visible being and presence. And soon, they will let go the two ends of darkness again, and disappear. A flower laughs once, and having had his laugh, chuckles off into seed, and is gone. Whence? Whither? Who knows, who cares? That little laugh of achieved being is all.
So it is with books. To every man who struggles with his own soul in mystery, a book that is a book flowers once, and seeds, and is gone. First editions or forty-first are only the husks of it.
Yet if it amuses a man to save the husks of the flower that opened once for the first time, one can understand that too. It is like the costumes that men and women used to wear, in their youth, years ago, and which now stand up rather faded in museums. With a jolt they reassemble for us the day-to-day actuality of the by-gone people, and we see the trophies once more of man’s eternal fight with inertia.
Lobo
September 1st, 1924