I tried a political motive to give me suspense and set my scene in the Balkans of the nineteen-thirties—only to find that I had become enmeshed in intrigue. The picaresque was overwhelmed by chancellors, archbishops and the leaders of the proletariat. In fact I had created a credible state, but it had cost a quarter of the book to do so.
With Ruritania safely in the waste-paper basket, I began to suspect that I might again be doomed to the three-year period between the beginning of one book and the next. I would no more accept such a gap in major production than any businessman, and I stuck as firmly to my chair. Oil wells in Roumania provided some excellent chapters, but the book could not decide what it was about. Oil wells in Arabia would have been a more topical choice, if I did not lack the reporter’s trick of making superficial facts appear essential.
So it went on; and the angel would not be compelled unless I count as hers—for I did not know she had any interest in mere facts—the capricious and impatient suggestion that I should write my life while waiting for another less untidy. I doubted if it could be of interest, and still doubt—for there is no significance in what I have done, none of the famous among those whom I have met and little to commend my thoughts but their expression. Yet the pattern of my life, without any forced selection of incidents, fitted the convention of the picaresque and, though the last page could scarcely present my half-successful self as living happily ever afterwards, I had at least advanced from the professionless young rogue among the pimps of Bucharest.
What I have plainly in common with the hero whom I would have preferred to create is that I can look back on the past with geniality. It is not wholly due to reticence that I have left out the humiliations and the darknesses of the soul. Memory is an unconscious Christian, forgetting the few trespasses committed by others and the many committed by oneself.
If I have numbered like a witless sundial only the serenest or half-clouded hours, it is perhaps because I was always aware of enjoyment when I had it. Guilty I have been over and over again of seizing it, but never have the laws of life exacted the full price. I have been given great liberty to admire. I will not play the critic and find meaning in an individual when only a general richness of literary texture was intended; yet should construction demand an occasional minor character to taste and to give praise, I too may fulfil a purpose of that which wrote me.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 1958 by Geoffrey Household
Cover design by Drew Padrutt
978-1-5040-0815-0
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Against the Wind Page 23