Fate Cannot Harm Me

By
J. C. MASTERMAN

To
R. H. D.
WITH GRATITUDE

Serenely full, the epicure would say,
Fate cannot harm me, I have dined to-day.

Sydney Smith

Introduction

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Footnotes

A Note on the Author

“Whether you're thinking of Aristotle or patent medicine, I'll tell you all about technique in four words. Get on with it.”

DENIS MACKAIL

Or, otherwise expressed, cut out the introduction. Experience, personal or vicarious, gives her warning, candid friends shake candid heads, the critic raises his all too cocksure and upbraiding voice. Indeed, indeed, I know the time-honoured rules; I know that a story, if it is worth telling, should be told straightforwardly—that it should proceed, crescendo, to its climax, spurning by-ways, scorning side-issues. I know that it should conform to a type—to a type, that is, that success has blessed and time hallowed and the cash nexus stabilized; I know that art lies in the concealment of art, that excuses and explanations are accusations; I know that the reader's attention is apt to flag if action and incident be too long delayed. My tale, such as it is, cares for none of these things. Better then, perhaps, to let it take its chance—to launch it without anticipatory defence, or, if you prefer the metaphor, to refrain from indicating to the Aeoli of criticism the shorn state of my literary lamb.

But sometimes temptation is too strong. “You put me in mind,” said Dr. Johnson to Miss Adams, who had suggested that the opposition of her parents might encourage her to marry a gentleman of licentious character, “you put me in mind of Dr. Barrowby, the physician, who was very fond of swine's flesh. One day,
when he was eating it, he said, ‘I wish I was a Jew.'—‘Why so?' said somebody; ‘the Jews are not allowed to eat your favourite meat.'—‘Because,' said he, ‘I should then have the gust of eating it, with the pleasure of sinning.'” The eighteenth century was not always over-nice in its choice of words or of illustrations, but it had a robust sense of truth in everyday affairs, and here, as on many other occasions, Johnson, in the after-dinner phrase of an eminent man, strikes, as it seems to me, “the happy nail upon its head.” For the plain truth is that breaking rules is fun, and the middle-aged and respectable have in this regard a capacity for innocent enjoyment at least as great as that of the youthful and rebellious. And if one rule, why not many? If hanging is the ultimate fate, then let the criminal have his money's worth; that literary lamb might as well be a sheep. “As his colleague the Professor of Pastoral Theology had once finely quoted in his Luther Commemoration Lecture, ‘Si peccas, pecca fortiter!'” Many a man in the street will echo the sentiments of Mr. Belloc's Professor.

This story, then, seems clean contrary to many of the accepted rules. The introduction is written—imprudently no doubt—not to conceal the faults of the story, but rather to suggest (beautiful thought) that the rules are sometimes wrong, or, alternatively, as the lawyer would put it, that they are made to be broken. Let me suggest the obvious criticisms, and then acting as
advocatus diaboli
, or, to be more accurate, as
advocatus mei
, I will suggest an answer in defence.

First, then, says the accuser, it is an impertinence to write an introduction which deals admittedly with the technique of writing a novel. Such things may be done by the established masters. Let them, if they will, blandly condescending, describe to lesser men how such things are done, how they weave their ingenious plots and mould their characters and how and why they choose and combine their imperishable words. But for you,
beginner, tyro, novice, neophyte,
decet silentium
. Write if you must, but spare us at least the reasons for your indiscretions. To which I reply, with submission, No. I remember a hole on a golf course to the playing of which I devoted much earnest though vain thought. I needed length, for from tee to green was two hundred yards or more—I needed height, for the ground rose abruptly in front of the tee. At length I asked a great player how the problem was solved by him. “Oh,” he replied,” I just take a spoon and lay the ball like a poached egg by the hole.” Or again with which hand do you lift the bat? With top or bottom, or perchance with both? Over that major problem, I dare surmise, the young spend sleepless nights and anxious days. But do the great masters ever give it a thought? Not they; with nonchalance they play the fluent and majestic stroke, and the ball speeds to the boundary. No, a hundred times, no; problems of technique are not for the great—godlike they think of none of these things. To worry over technique, to discuss it, to argue over it—that is the part of humbler men; it is a phase agreeable, tantalizing, provocative, above all young.

Pass on. Can you rebut the major accusations? This story does not conform to type; if it is indeed intended as a novel, that is to say as a story with a love interest, why all these excursions and aberrations? Why this lengthy tale of a cricket match, wholly irrelevant to the main issue, why these stories within stories? What more tiresome than those boxes of Chinese workmanship, which when opened, and not too easily, are found to contain within themselves other boxes of similar kind—and they in their turn others within them, smaller still and yet more useless and irritating? Your tale is like that. And why this tortuous method? Could not this story have been told straightforwardly, instead of concealing itself within another story? And, above all, why all these explanations and excuses? Answer all these questions, advocate of the devil, answer them if you can!

Well, it is true, of course, that the man or woman who buys a book wishes within limits to know what he is buying. He wishes to be stimulated or harrowed or excited or amused and he chooses his novel accordingly. If, after he has purchased, he finds himself fobbed off with something unexpected—a detective novel, for example, which is only a psychological study, or a tragedy of modern industrialism which turns out to contain passages of humorous writing—he feels himself illused. It is as though he had bought Quaker Oats from a fruiterer, or nuts from a butcher—good enough foods but not what his stomach craved at the moment. But to that quite natural desire on the part of his public the novelist ought not—again with submission—to pander too much. For it is the function of the novelist to generalize experience, to hold a mirror to life, and life does not happen like that. Even the unfortunate, oppressed by some major disaster, does not spend his whole time contemplating the wreck of his fortunes or the infidelity of his wife; even the lover, though traditionally supposed to be occupied exclusively with the subject of his love, is, in fact, usually found on examination to be able to spare some moments for the perusal of the latest detective novel, for the solution of a crossword, for animadversion on Hitler or Mussolini, or for a discussion of the best pair to open England's innings in the next Test match. And more, to the trivialities of life many apply themselves with even greater energy than to their work—and work better for doing so. No one can live permanently in the rarefied atmosphere of high endeavour or moral grandeur. Observe that statesman, charged with the destinies of millions—he is anxiously contemplating a graceful pirouette upon the ice; consider that business magnate, whose word affects the material fortunes of thousands—he dreams of the reduction of his golf handicap to a single figure; watch that professor, whose learning is world-famed—he chuckles over his
latest
mot
. Can you blame him? His
jeux d'esprit
will be remembered when his learning is forgotten. If, then, a novel is to be true to life it must, so it seems to me, leave sometimes the main stream, rest awhile by the bank, explore even an occasional backwater.

In the matter of method, too, I am unrepentant. This story is told, most of it, by one man to another over a dinner table; it might have been told, I suppose, directly to the reader. There might have been but one tale, instead of two, one within the other. For this obliquity, for this tortuosity of method I make two excuses. First, I see it thus in my mind, and as I see it so I must describe it. I see the dinner table and taste the wine, I smell in the later chapters the smoke of the cigars. That is the atmosphere of the story, and, if the story is worth telling at all, it deserves its setting. And secondly, this oblique method gives me the advantage—why should I conceal the fact?—of being able at need to jog my readers, of being able to call their attention to some point of interest without undue sententiousness, and without exciting, I hope, their immediate suspicion. The older writers had an easy way out of the difficulty which I here suggest. They used, they sometimes abused, the expedient of the “gentle reader.” Gentle. “Used in polite or ingratiating address, obs: except in a playful archaism as in ‘gentle reader.'” I quote from the
Oxford English Dictionary
. And then the examples, dating from 1542 to 1844. What a tyranny, and how long it lasted! But useful, invaluable to the literary craftsman! A burglar's jemmy could not be more essential to a burglar than his “gentle reader” to an Early Victorian author. With it he could direct the reader's attention whither he would, could indicate this and underline that. “Consider, gentle reader, the emotions of our hero at this moment!” “Pause, gentle reader, and survey the panorama which unrolled itself before the delighted eyes of our heroine!” How easy it all must have been! And yet at length intolerable!
I went once to the memorial service of a friend, prepared to think about him, to recapture some of the hours spent in his company, to recall his friendship and his charm. And before I could attune my mind to such thought, individual, personal, sad yet perhaps comforting, a bishop rose up and for twenty minutes told me and others what we ought to be thinking about the friend we had lost. Unbearable insensitive impertinence, against which every instinct rebelled! So, I surmise, somewhere about 1844 the reading public rebelled against the “gentle reader” and claimed to think its own thoughts. A tyranny was ended, but a need remained. Here I try to satisfy that need in some sort by the device of oblique relation.

And finally all these explanations and excuses. Once, a long time ago, I carried to my tutor at Oxford an essay, very lengthy and ingeniously planned. This I will do, wrote I, and so I will divide the subject, and thus I will proceed, and in such a way will I reach my conclusion. And the learned and wise man to whom I read it (for all Oxford tutors then were learned and some of them were wise) remarked at the end, “Too much scaffolding left up.” For an essay no advice could be better, but what of, say, a lecture? A different technique there. “Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell it them, and then, most important of all, tell them what you have told them.” That is good advice too. A novel, as it seems to me, is in yet another category. As a character in this book remarks, nothing obscures the truth so much as the attempt to cut a long story short; the art of the novelist is to make a short story long. The plain tale unadorned gives too often a false impression; the devious, suggestive, allusive method, may, if it succeeds, create a true picture in the reader's mind. But it must not be too difficult. After all, the primary wish of the reader is for recreation and amusement. Some of the scaffolding must be left standing, but not too much. Something must be
left to the intelligence and ingenuity of the reader, but his powers of interpretation must not be fixed too high. (Are not the clues in a detective story often too subtle and too well concealed?) Unnecessary mystification is tiring as well as tiresome. I repeat, the chief end of the novel is to provide enjoyment, amusement, recreation for the reader, not to provide him with intellectual problems.