“I haven’t read it.”
“She has made a replica of the eighteenth century novel, a suitably fantastic story about an English aristocrat and his bride who journey to the India of the East India Company and meet with bizarre adventures. It is what you would expect of a poet enamoured with the life of that glittering period. I wonder that Max Beerbohm hasn’t done it long before this. Or Aldous Huxley.”
“I see you have them both represented here.”
“Yes, the thought of them sprang from Mrs. Wylie’s book. I took down Huxley’s Crome Yellow and his Mortal Coils. From Max I wanted the books of his caricatures—Rossetti and His Circle and that other one he calls A Survey. My collection of Lost Patterns was begun, then and there. The idea of what would constitute a Lost Pattern was formed—I don’t say it didn’t enlarge afterward nor that it won’t enlarge or change shape again. But, essentially, I knew what I wanted.”
“Nobody knows what he wants,” I objected. “The thing is obviously impossible. You mean you knew that you wanted to add more books to the five you had assembled.”
“Any way you like.” Collestamore’s indifference was polite, but profound. “I began looking over the other shelves. The next thing I came upon was George Moore’s Hail and Farewell. We shall never have a writer like George Moore, not even George Moore.” I thought to myself: With that nuance, with a phrase like that, he is deliberately imitating Beerbohm’s prose; I had better take no notice of it. His next remark startled me.
“Literary style, distinction, in the enterprise I had embarked upon was of no consequence whatever.” And seeing that this wasn’t brilliantly intelligible, he continued:
“The thing was much deeper than that—the personal twist or wrinkle was what I was after, the fly in the amber. Not a perfectly preserved fly in the amber of a choice literary expression but a wriggling insect caught on the tanglefoot of unaccustomed words would do as well.” He was fast throwing grammar overboard in the effort to lighten ship and bring his thoughts to port. “I have not, as yet, come upon an illiterate author who deserves inclusion among my Lost Patterns, but I shouldn’t hesitate to put him in.”
“I see.” After a pause: “Here you’ve got George Meredith. He’s very nearly illiterate, don’t you think so? Sometimes literacy can go too far, as in Meredith and in Henry James, whom you’ve put alongside. Maurice Hewlett is another matter.”
“Well,” said Collestamore, “I stuck them in as a matter of course. Anybody would naturally have thought of them in such a connection. The things I really pride myself upon are my detections among these single and mostly more recent books. You take F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, or William McFee’s Casuals of the Sea, or C. E. Montague’s very fetching Fiery Particles, or Ernest Bramah’s Kai Lung’s Golden Hours, or Don Marquis’s Hermione, or Alfred B. Stanford’s The Ground Swell”—he was half pulling them out and letting them fall back, as he enumerated them—“and tell me if I have not shown both enterprise and catholicity.”