Chapter XII
PLACES TO GO
i
The book by Thomas Burke called More Limehouse Nights was published in England under the title of Whispering Windows. At the time of its publication, Mr. Burke wrote the following:
“The most disconcerting question that an author can be asked, and often is asked, is: ‘Why did you write that book?’ The questioners do not want an answer to that immediate question; but to the implied question: ‘Why don’t you write some other kind of book?’ To either question there is but one answer: BECAUSE.
“Every writer is thus challenged. The writer of comic stories is asked why he doesn’t write something really serious. The novelist is asked why he doesn’t write short stories, and the short-story writer is asked why he doesn’t write a novel. To me people say, impatiently: ‘Why don’t you write happy stories about ordinary people?’ And the only answer I can give them is: ‘Because I can’t. I present life as I see it.’
“I am an ordinary man, but I don’t understand ordinary men. I am at a loss with them. But with the people of whom I write I have a fellow-feeling. I know them and their sorrows and their thwarted strivings and I understand their aberrations. I cannot see the romance of the merchant or the glamour of the duke’s daughter. They do not permit themselves to be seized and driven by passion and imagination. Instead they are driven by fear, which they have misnamed Commonsense. These people thwart themselves, while my people are thwarted by malign circumstance.
“Often I have taken other men to the dire districts about which I write, and they have remained unmoved; they have seen, in their phrase, nothing to get excited about. Well, one cannot help that kind of person. One cannot give understanding to the man who regards the flogging of children as a joke, or to whom a broken love-story is, in low life, a theme for smoking-room anecdotes.
“Wherever there are human creatures there are beauty and courage and sacrifice. The stories in Whispering Windows deal with human creatures, thieves, drunkards, prostitutes, each of whom is striving for happiness in his or her way, and missing it, as most of us do. Each has hidden away some fine streak of character, some mark below which he will not go. And—they are alive. They have met life in its ugliest phases, and fought it.
“My answer, then, to the charge of writing ‘loathsome’ stories, is that these things happen. To those who say that cruelty and degradation are not fit subjects for fiction, I say that all twists and phases of the human heart are fit subjects for fiction.