I have been for long intensively preoccupied with the problem of the telling of what belongs to the story that is no exercise in telling resemblant suppositionally of truth told, but a story transcending the unrealness of the happening- content of all stories. This is the one-story that nullifies need of the intermediation of stories between human yearning for truth and the failures of human consciousness to sustain the mind in uninterrupted operation of the faculties that enact its function of truth. The theme of the one-story is adumbrated in the preface to the first edition of this book.
A little more as to 'Christmastime'! Just the other day I made a fresh presentation of the story to a pair of friends, and there came swiftly—the first ever!—a response of pleasure felt. Have times been changing? I have seen no signs of this. But two, and myself for a starter, project a line of possibility of infinite extension. Here we have a story burgeoning from the story of a story, and can leave the matter as being, happily, on a progressive course of determination of its own.
2
I must confess that I deliver this book with some misgiving as to the chances of its being read to an appreciable extent with a spirit matching the spirit of its writing and that I am of uncertain confidence even as to the pleasure with which it or parts of it will probably be read by some. These stories have integral belonging to my writings as a whole. But there has been little hearty response to my writings as a whole, and in some quarters the reception of them has been distinctly surly. Indeed, not many readers are likely to have more than a slight acquaintance with them, in the whole or in any considerable part. The intent inspiring them is not one of the characteristic writing motivations of the age—it is a rara avis among them. The stories do not preach their spirit or their point; and what I wrote in the first preface as to the principle behind them was vulnerable to being passed over as doting authorial rhetoric. What I write here prefatorily of the unmistakably serious can invite passing over as incongruous with a body of stories in which the touch of significance or sentiment is firmly kept a light one. Moreover, prefaces are easily regarded by readers as ceremonial encumbrances, to be read sometime, perhaps, or left unread with impunity as to the effect on reading enjoyment or profit. The republication of Progress of Stories cannot but have an effect of disconnecting it from the background of general meaning against which all my work is written, the other components of it being clouded in vague or ill-formed impressions. This meaning-accompaniment has presence in all the components—in some, very explicit presence; in Progress of Stories it is everywhere actively implicit.
The case is not that I begrudge pleasure-taking in the stories, but that the pleasure that I took in writing them, and that I hoped they would excite in the reading of them, was pleasure of an order related to the unities of human concern that I describe in the original preface as resting on the principle that (ultimately) there is only one subject, a subject impossible to change—or, using there also a different figure for a unified consideration of things, the principle that (ultimately) all conversation is all the same conversation. I have already indicated here that story-telling is for me the sympathetic pleasure- counterpart of truth-telling—a version of it at low-intensity appreciation of the necessity of an (ultimate) all-serious unity of concerns exercised in our telling one another what I have named the one-story to tell which is the total all-to-tell—the all-story, truth.
The one-story naming is an old naming of mine, begun in days anteceding the first publication of this book. It has happened that the name, the phrase, the conception, was in time seized upon by a greedy poet, for purposes not at all related to the matter of truth-telling, and used with a showy rhetorical effect that left a lingering impression. I am not uneasy about the possibility of challenge of my patent-title to the name. I am uneasy about the disposition to stories in the general human atmosphere of reading-expectation. The absence of the very conception 'truth' from the contemporary lists of the intellectually and morally useful conceptions has converted stories, and novels, into areas of intellectually and morally sophisticated reading-recreation in which pleasure itself becomes a ball losing its bounce in its being batted on from page to page, in each storybook. I recommend my one-story conception as an antidote to inclination to convert this book into such a recreation-area.
Do not, I beg of you, fall into liking any particular one or ones of these stories—or all together—too much. They neither will nor can do you any good but (if you let them do what good they can) that of stirring you to feel hungrily the void that all stories leave, which can be filled only by the story of us all, the compacted story of everything. Where to look for this story? It hangs—according to what I have learned from my experience—in the cupboard in our minds that all are afraid to look into, or, at any rate, to open wide—afraid for no good reasons, probably. I have tried to do some opening of mine, to wide (as in a little book The Telling, published thirty-seven years after Progress of Stories). But this is not a story for a single author's telling. And, should all come to engage in the telling of it, what is thus told could be no more than a self-confounding miscellany of near-truths unless every telling of it had the ring of truth, the ring of what is in truth all the same telling. I use this occasion as an appropriate one on which to offer a little account of my vision of what the fascination of stories, and the irresistible impulsion of some to tell them, is 'all about'. For a prefatory parting word to those launching themselves upon this book's course, in its new availability, I have kept a warning counsel that contains, as might a box of travel-aids for emergency-use, something to serve for cheer at the journey's safe completion.
Even in the youth of its existence, Progress of Stories was not an idyll of refuge from the harassments of self-accusations that haunt us in our knowing what we do not do, and are not being. It did not confer innocence, or bestow congratulations on innocence, forgive us for what we ought not to be forgiven. Along with having the measure of the ultimate, the book had, in its hospitable serenity, the measure of us—of the repetitive again and again immediately less than the ultimate right us. There was no laxity in it of softened judgement to look back to nostalgically. All the indulgences of us in it looked forward. We have gone a little forward from the book's first time, in the age-count of our matching and not matching of ourselves to what we ought to be, by all we know of the right and the wrong of things. The historical dates of this ageing reveal only the length of the time-progression from being nothing but our loosely assembled right-wrong, wrong-right, selves towards nothing ahead but a balance-sheet kept by us, with prognosticate discretion, continuously unsummarized. I make bold to suggest that the encounter between Progress of Stories and its readers of these times, given full scope as an occurrence of contemporary relevance, could produce some illumination of the spiritual date of us.
L.(R.)J.
THE STORIES OF THE FIRST EDITION
I: Stories of Lives
SOCIALIST PLEASURES
FANNY'S father was a Socialist. It was a town of fifteen thousand people, about a hundred of whom were Socialists, and her father had organized these into a Socialist Party. They rented an empty shop in a part of the town where rents were cheap, and the name was printed on the window in red with the arm and torch under it. Every month there was a box- picnic. Each family contributed a shoe-box full of hard-boiled eggs and sandwiches, and the boxes were sold at the picnic, care being taken that no family got its own box back again. The chance of getting better or worse than one's own box caused much joking and repartee between the families. The box-picnic was an important Socialist pleasure.
Another Socialist pleasure was winning arguments. Her father always had arguments with the men who came into their shop to buy the Capitalist newspapers and magazines. They were mostly Union men who worked in the clothes factories. It was possible to have arguments with them because people who worked on clothes were always intelligent, her father said. But her father always won the arguments. Socialists always won arguments. Union men were nea
rly Socialists and that made the arguments more interesting. They went on buying the Capitalist papers, and this was good for business.
"They have to pay me for their stupidity," her father would say. That was fun.
Fanny had a cat that she called Jenny. Jenny used to come into her bed at night and crawl under the covers. If Fanny moved, Jenny would bite her legs unkindly. She was a sad black cat with wild ways. When Fanny went to school in the mornings, Jenny would cry after her a little, but not much. The only really positive thing about Jenny was that she was a sad cat; though she had, indeed, wild moments. Fanny's mother used to say, "The way she looks up at you, even when she has had enough to eat, it would make your heart break." Fanny privately called her Jenny Heartbreak. Fanny herself would not have dared to feel sad about anything; sadness was not Socialistic. All Jenny's kittens were killed as soon as they were born; this may have been the cause of her sadness. But no one, least of all Fanny, wished her to be any different. Fanny and her mother and father saw everything as facts; and all facts were the inevitable result of economic determinism, no matter what kind of facts they were.
Fanny did not allow herself to be too fond of Jenny. Cats were not a Socialist pleasure. Fanny's family was a Jewish family, but they did not live as Jews lived or think of themselves as Jews. They were Socialists. Still, whatever was not Socialist was Christian. Cats were a Christian pleasure. She would tell her father and mother about the fun she had teaching her schoolmates politics and religion, but she never showed any enthusiasm over her cat. Nor did she talk to her schoolmates about her cat; that would not have been Socialistic.
Another private pleasure of Fanny's that was not Socialistic was Mansion Road. It was the only street in the town with a slope. It sloped very little, yet enough to hide itself from sight after the first few hundred yards. Fanny passed it every morning when, going to school, she had to walk out of her way to deliver several morning papers. There were no houses in Mansion Road itself. It was not quite a street yet, in fact. Fanny had no cause to walk up Mansion Road, and she did not approve of doing things without cause. But at night she often had wide-awake dreams about walking up Mansion Road, and what would happen. One of the things that Mansion Road made her dream of was wearing ear-rings. Some Jewish girls had holes in their ears and wore ear-rings, but she was a Socialist girl. Spanish girls in pictures also had holes in their ears with long ear-rings in them, but they were Catholics. Spanish girls went to bull-fights in fringed shawls. Pictures like this came out of Mansion Road, from beyond where one could see, when she dreamt herself to sleep at night.
Fanny won scholarships and went to a university, and in time became a professional psychologist. She worked in a government statistical bureau. Her job was to make studies of the kinds of books, films, theatres, games and sports that different kinds of people seemed to enjoy most, and to write reports that would be useful to Education. Psychology was the personal side of Socialism. It showed how Capitalism stimulated pleasures that did not really make people happy. Thus the people who spent most energy on having a good time were the least happy. Capitalistic display, not personal satisfaction, was their object. Of course, she could not point this out in her reports, since she was working for a Capitalistic government. But she could at least make the statistics show that people's pleasures had nothing to do with their real life. She loved her work. In her letters to her father she quoted interesting statistics. He was very proud of her.
Her colleagues and friends were all Socialists in one form or another; that is, they were scientists. She shared a flat with a woman who studied the mental disorders of professional entertainers, from circus people to musicians. This woman's theory was that entertainers were the victims of the public. She believed in community entertainment and enlisted Fanny's help in organizing social groups in which entertainment should be a co-operative act.
The only apparent survival of Fanny's childhood weakness for pleasures that were not Socialistic was a passion for having herself photographed in exotic costumes. She had many such photographs hidden away, which she sometimes took out to look at when she suffered from melancholy and could not sleep. In some of her photographs she wore ear-rings. She had never had holes made in her ears, but she bought ear-rings that could be screwed on.
One summer Fanny went to Spain with the woman with whom she shared her flat. It was hot, but Fanny's friend took many notes. They went to bull-fights. Her friend was interested in the psychology of the bull-fighters. Fanny liked the bull-fights themselves. They were one of the things that had happened along Mansion Road. Then a poisonous lizard bit Fanny on the back of her neck and she had to go to hospital. Her friend went home, leaving her behind. It rarely happened that lizards were poisonous or that they bit people. Fanny was secretly glad that it had happened to her. It had a weakening effect on the blood and the whole constitution. The Sisters treated her like a child. She would kiss their heavy crosses. She felt so confused. It did not count. She was very weak. The doctors seemed worried about her, as if her mind had been affected. It was quite true that although the bite itself soon healed she didn't want to get up or think about doing anything. Finally she had to go because her bed was needed. She got leave to stay in Spain until she should feel well enough to come back to her work. She took a house and engaged a maid who laughed a lot about nothing. She found a black cat and called it Jenny; it wasn't quite so sad as the old Jenny, which pleased her. In Spain Christian pleasures were almost the same as Socialist pleasures. People spent their spare time and energies in ways that did not make them forget the kind of people they were. They had a low opinion of themselves, and were proud that they were broad-minded enough to have it. That was a very Socialistic way of thinking. Spaniards also won all their arguments. Social occasions in Spain resembled dignified box-picnics. The playful and the serious sides of life did not contradict each other.
And so it happened that Fanny had holes made in her ears and wore ear-rings. She also learned to dance Spanish dances. When her leave was up she went home, but instead of taking up her old work again she opened a School of the Dance. In the School she was known as 'Conchita' and wore ear-rings and a fringed shawl. She did not renew relations with her old friends and colleagues. But the school was not a success—perhaps because it was a Capitalist venture, or perhaps because it was a Socialist venture. Fanny did not know. She decided that she would let things take their course. This was good Socialism —even better Socialism than consistent action. Consistent action was impossible in bourgeois phases of history. Thus people could not understand how Socialists could be Capitalists for the time being.
Fanny got a job in a cabaret called 'The Universe'. Besides herself there was a real negro, and an Armenian Jew dressed like a Russian Cossack, and a real Japanese girl; Fanny was supposed to represent a Spanish girl. They had to dance with the guests and improvise solo dances when no one wanted to dance with them. Fanny lied to the proprietor, saying that she was Spanish. She got better pay for being really Spanish. She felt Spanish in her philosophy. One night she had to dance with a real Spaniard. She confessed to him that she was not Spanish and begged him not to let the proprietor know.
"I won't," he said, "but you must tell me what you are. You are something."
"Why, I suppose I'm a Socialist pleasure-girl," she answered.
When Fanny got too old to be a pleasure-girl, she went back to her parents. They took a rational view of her peculiarities. "When she was a child she was always thinking," her mother said. "Now that she is grown-up she is like a child." Her father now owned a large, prosperous stationer's shop. He was no longer a Socialist: he was a Communist. Being a Communist meant knowing more definitely what went on in Soviet Russia than what went on in other parts of the world. There were no more arguments. All the arguments had been won—by Soviet Russia. Fanny was distressed to find her father so contented. He had got fat and sophisticated and now read books that in the old days he would have called Capitalistic Opium. Fanny felt herself old-fashi
oned beside him.
Mansion Road was really a street now. Fanny's father and mother had built themselves a house there, over the slope. But Fanny was resolved not to let her soul become infected with the insidious poison of Communist sophistication. She organized a club of not-young, not-old women who did not feel that their lives were over, though they were over. They rented a clubroom over a perfumery; the air was always scented, like a lonely ballroom after a party. They called themselves 'The Socialists'. No one seemed to mind or to think of them as a political organization. They used the arm and torch as their society emblem and as a crest on their notepaper. At their weekly meetings they discussed themselves and tried to discover new fields of emotional experience. Fanny gave a talk on the Spanish philosophy of life. The Spanish, she said, were a pessimistic people, and yet they vibrated. They were an old people, and yet they were not tired. It was not a matter of hope but of technique. One had to be both sane and insane, unhappy and happy. It was painful to be alive.
Every month they gave an entertainment for people who they were sure would not laugh at them. The members were supposed to dress and act according to their least sane instincts. Fanny, of course, always wore ear-rings and a fringed shawl and did Spanish dances. She was considered a successful example of Socialist technique. Other members sometimes behaved hysterically. Whenever a member made them feel ashamed of themselves they asked her to resign; many people had no need of emotional exercise. After each member had played her part and the vibrations had calmed down, dainty suppers in boxes were auctioned off, the proceeds going to a fund for establishing Socialist pleasure-centres in other towns.
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