No doubt it had been intermixed with a great deal which nobody could conceivably enjoy. From the beginning my books had been strong irritants to many of their readers,—it might be that their manner was annoying, indeed, as Dr. Canby put it, "to all warm-hearted people." In any event there were my scrapbooks bulging with "reviews" by persons who appeared to have written in seizures of incoherent rage, without ever having discovered precisely what they were angry about. These chattered denunciations had begun with The Eagle's Shadow: and no book by me had since failed to evoke them in respectable volume.... The Cords of Vanity, in fact, had seemed to unhinge all power of self-control and self-expression in well-nigh everybody who wrote about it: the scrapbooks which contained the press clippings relative to this novel suggested just the corybantics and mowings of a madhouse. The people who had at most length and most bitterly denounced "such a book as Jurgen" did at least base upon understandable ground their claims to be heard with respect,—this ground, of course, being that their judgment had been kept healthily uncontaminated by their abstention from reading Jurgen.
Nor was time outmoding this frenzy. The High Place seemed to have aroused in sundry quarters much the same quality of inexplicable or, in any event, of unexplained fury. There was no doubt about it: the instinctive reaction of many, many persons everywhere to each one of my books—even, as it seemed, without reading them,—had been the instant, unreasoning response of a reputable business-man or of a bull to the Soviet flag.... And that had not been pleasant.
Apart from those who went about thus incommunicatively raging, had been the pitilessly explicit. These had, indeed, been tirelessly explicit in their exposure of my auctorial crimes and defects. Nobody could pretend to remember all the literary vices which I had practised nor all the contagions in which I had been detected, but every one of these infamies had, as I recalled it, been competently exposed, over and over again. I was both knave and imbecile, whose "mannered" writing was mere kleptomania; I had, indeed, no sort of natural endowments once you excepted the singular nastiness of my feeble mind: such were the facts that had been quite regularly deplored, now I thought of it, for the fifth part of a whole century. And when the press clippings came in next week, somebody would, I knew, still be regretting these facts. I could have little doubt that for the rest of my life I would be continually encountering these regrets.... And that, too, was not pleasant.
What the reviewers had said did not, especially and eventually, matter. They were, in fact, to-day united in their abuse nowhere except in my scrapbooks: I alone had—now for some twenty years, and rather charitably, I thought,—been at pains to preserve their utterances. Otherwise, all of yesterday's Olympians had loosed their thunderbolts and had passed sonorously; and each demolishing of me was to-day as little remembered as was any other of that year's thunderstorms. To-day—if with a lessened frequency, from even loftier altitudes,—still now and then descended peltingly the onslaughts of young godlings. Yet to-day I still clung, somehow, to the belief that my intelligence and morals were not so markedly below the average as I was constantly assured. And, in the manner of those elder tempests, so likewise, I knew, must pass away the reverberant condescensions of the young, who were condemned as yet to appraise my book, and all books, in the light of their contrast with that masterpiece which youth is immemorially about to dash off on some vacant Saturday afternoon. For presently these godlings too would turn from the serious work of reviewing creative literature to the diversion of writing it....
And whatever any other formally empowered or free-lance commentator might futurely say, whether in print or conversation, about my stupidity and crass plagiarisms and self-conceit and futile pruriencies, would not, I knew, matter either, in itself. The one trouble was that all this maintained a clouded and sulphuric atmosphere in which I dubiously moved, so far as went the thoughts of so many dear, dull persons.... Meanwhile I had got the hearing which throughout eighteen years of unreason I had hoped to get, and had always believed to be imminent; and the book which I had written, in the Biography, was finished, more or less, and would for its allotted season remain. With the length, or, if you will, with the extreme brevity of that season, I had no concern: it was enough to know that the Biography was finished, and would outlast me.
§ 99
For that infernal boy had drawn from me the truth: I really had got out of life what I most wanted. I had wanted to make the Biography: and I had made it, in just the way which seemed good to me. To do that had been, no doubt, my play and my diversion, in the corridors where men must find diversion, whether in trifling with bank notes or women, whether in clutching at straws or prayer-books, or else go mad: and my enlinked deductions held as far as the chain stretched. But one link more was needed. For it seemed to me, too, that I had somehow fulfilled, without unduly shirking, an obligation which had been laid upon me to make the Biography. I was not, heaven knew, claiming for myself any heavenly inspiration or even any heavenly countenance. Rather, it seemed to me that the ability and the body and the life which transiently were at my disposal had been really used: with these lent implements which were not ever properly speaking mine, and which presently would be taken away from me, I had made something which was actually mine. That something was the Biography....
§ 100
And still,—with all the bright day gone, and with the deepest gloom of midnight also an affair of the past,—still, I seem not quite to have found that final link, not wholly to have completed my epilogue. Some word, as yet unthought of, stays needed to round off all....
Here then, upon this shelf, in these brown volumes which make up the Biography, I can lay hand and eye upon just what precisely my life has amounted to: the upshot of my existence is here before me, a tangible and visible and entirely complete summing up, within humiliatingly few inches. And yet, as I consider these inadequate brown volumes, I suspect that the word I am looking for is "gratitude." It most certainly is not "pride": and, as I hastily admit, nobody else is called on to share in my suspicion.