Notes

Are there fifteen people in the world who will be afraid when they read this paragraph? No. That, in itself, is a comment on my insignificance. Are there fifteen people who will become uneasy on reading it? I think so. Almost hay my life is over and I have known many people. I know things about some of them which they would not like to see written down. Are you uneasy, S---? Or you, F--? Or you, my once dear T---? Why do I not spell out your names? Well, for one thing I have known more than one S-- in my life. If I can make two of you uneasy, then so much the better. For another, were I to reveal your disparate identities you would possibly band together in order to silence me. In these preliminary pages I wish to engage you singly, yet collectively, to reveal my identity to each of you in turn, yet to preserve a final anonymity so that none of you will be sure you are thinking about the same person. That is my strategy.

My second preliminary page is reserved for a quotation. Authors usually offer a quotation as a propitiatory rite in hopes that the wise saying of some great man will induce the reader a similar respect for the idiocies contained in the work which will follow it. My intention is not propitiatory. It is minatory. Here is my quotation.

"Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge." Paul Gauguin.

You know what I mean, don't you? Very well then, let us turn the page.

Acknowledgements

The author does not wish to express his gratitude to anyone. He has no reasons to be grateful. He does, however, wish to acknowledge that parts of his work have been provided him unwittingly by relatives and friends, enemies and acquaintances. The uses he intends to make of the facts, lies, rumors, scandals and secrets so provided shall be his own. He will attempt to make his own truth for, like Pilate, he knows only that truth is not the accurate rendition of facts. Was the man they crucified that Friday afternoon an obscure agitator who had made a small stir in Jerusalem? Or was he the son of God? We still have no facts. We have religions. Turn the page.

Some of you may have turned first to this page. Go back. I shall not reveal myself so easily. The name I have used on the first page of this work is mine, yet not mine. It is my `nom de plume`. If you do not believe that it is the name of professional writer you have merely to look up certain volumes of bibliography published in the United States and Great Britain during the past five years. I say this to warn you that these pages are written in the expectation of seeing them published. I am not writing from an asylum. I know you and you know me. These pages reached you postmarked with name of the city in which you were born. But I do not live there now. I merely had the letters sent from there as, shall we say, an `aide-memoire` to some of you. The postmark ensured that you would open the letter, for no other postmark can compete in authority with the place of one's birth. It is what we fled: it may, at any time, reach up to reclaim us.

So there is no error. Your name and address have been carefully checked and unless you are at the moment reading someone else's mail, you are one of the persons with whom I am concerned. Or let me say that you may be one of the persons concerned: the decision is yours. However I anticipate myself. So -- about the author:

I am that person you insulted. I am that person you forgot. I am the one you do not speak of, the person you hope never to meet again. I am the one you said something mean and spiteful about and I have heard what you said. I am that friend who fell out of fashion, whose reminiscences about old times you found boring, whose dinner invitation you did not return, whose address you did not keep. I am that person you never phoned back. I am that person you flattered then ignored, the one who rang your doorbell many times while you sat like a statue inside, hoping I would go away. I am the one whose footsteps you heard going down the stairs, who knew you were there and hated you for it. For you did not deceive me. Did you honestly think that people like me are ever deceived by evasion and excuses? Unlike the successful friends you now court, we are not busy; we plan each visit and depend on it. Perhaps you did forget our appointment. Perhaps you were out. But then, if you really forgot, is the not a far greater wrong?

I am that person you betrayed, I am the one who candied my faults, my shames, my fears. I am the one to whom you swore secrecy, whose confidences you promised to respect. But one night at a party when someone wondered out loud, when someone told a garbled version of the facts I had confided to you and someone else contradicted them, you who knew the truth, could not keep your mouth shut. You shook your head wisely at the talkers, took a deep breath and, for the moment's pleasure of having an audience, you told my secrets out. And then, having betrayed me once, you continued to do it. Two years later, all my shames and fears had been fitted into a repertoire of amusing stories to delight your new marriage partner. (Who does not know me; whom you did not even know when I told you whose private things.) You know what I am talking about, don't you?

I am the person who loved you. You said you loved me but behind my back you told others that you're merely 'fond' of me. Yet I am the one in whose arms you wept, the one who sat up all night with you, the one who helped you when things went wrong. It was comforting to have on display at that time for I so obviously loved you. I was the two ears, the tail and all four hoofs to hold aloft in the plaza while you waited for someone better. I am the one who walked away and did not look back, the one who hung up the receiver, the familiar voice which was never the same again. I can tell you now that I cried. I cried because you told me not to worry, that nothing was changed. I cried because I guessed then that you had already made your secret plans to leave me. I was right, wasn't I? Later, you remember, when it was all over and we knew it, you said you were trying to be honest. You said we were never suited to each other. You knew I would understand, you said. Did I understand? Do I? What would you think of you, if you were me? I know that you have been in and out of the place where I live many times. I know that you have been never phoned me. I know that you never will phone me.

Some of you, reading this, may decide it is not addressed to you. You do not know me from these pages. That is true. To some of you, I was a child. To you, my classmates, I address the following.

As a child I did not believe that I was clever. I feared myself to be stupid and cowardly and believed that I would be a disappointment to all who knew me. I read a great deal and like many unsure children I had a taste for tragic endings. But in my reading I discovered that, to fall from the heights of tragedy, heroes must first scale the peaks of achievement. In books, I searched for a suitable daydream. When I was fourteen we were asked to write an essay about our ambitions in life. I wrote all night. I was, for the first time in my life, inspired. (The first and last time of you except this work.) I wrote that I would become a great poet, that I would devote my life to the composition of a masterpiece and that, at the age of thirty, coughing blood in a last consumptive frenzy, I hoped to die, my fist still clean and unmuddled. This essay I submitted to my English master who, the following day, came to my desk, took my ear between his nicotine thumb and forefinger and let me before the class to read my essay aloud. Oh, what a fine foil I must have seemed for the exercise of his lumpish pedagogic wit, what a perfect victim with which to win amusement from a class of captive boys!

But the is dead now, my master. I can no longer hate him for his use of me as hunchback for his sallies. Nor can I hate you my classmates for the larger diversion you staged after school. Why should I? At the time, the incident seemed the greatest triumph of my life.

You may remember how a much larger audience assembled as I was dragged to the school drinking fountain, ducked under it and help until water ran down my spine, dripped into my trousers, trickled down my skinny legs to fill my socks and shoes. You may remember that, after my ducking, I was forced to read my essay once more. Your motives were just, I suppose. You wanted to knock the pretensions from under me, to teach me the session I have been too long in learning. But I learned nothing. Soaking wet, my clothes torn, I read my essay, but with pride now, screaming out that I would do everything I had promised in it. And all of you, watching my pale face and trembling shoulders, hearing the true fanatic in my thin defiant scream, all of you turned away, uneasy of me. Because of conviction -- even a wrong conviction -- makes the rest of us uneasy. For the first time in my life I had won. My own unsurely died and for the remainder of my years at school I grew in the wind of your disapproval. You doubts that day make me victim -- the victim I still remain -- of my own uncertain boast.

For I did not become great. I had no vocation for greatness. At thirty, instead of coughing blood, I bled rectally from hemorrhoids. I who boasted to you that I would never settle for the ordinary avocations you prosed have settled instead of failure. Yet in writing this I show that I have not even the dignity of a man who has accepted a fate, no matter how despicable. I am still unable to agree to my failure because on that day, when by your fear of me you gave me a taste of what greatness might bring me, my course was set, suddenly, haphazardly, yet with no possible alternative routing, towards a destiny I was not fit to accomplish. Oh, how I wish you had succeeded in drenching all my foolish hopes under the fountain. For who is more unworthy than a fool who boasts of talents he does not posses? Who more contemptible that the false artist posturing through life as he spews out his tiny frauds? What spectacle more truly defrauding that a would-be Rimbaud, covered in the vomit of sickly pastiche, crying out his genius and his purity from a mouth filled with rotten teeth? I am that man. Are you responsible for the monstrous impostor I have become? Not you alone. There are others.

I reveal myself to those others now. You are me peers. You are those who encouraged me, those who, sinning against uncomfortable truths, were always willing and eager to admit a new accomplice to the small smelly circles of your self-love and self-deceit. You are the members of cliques and coteries -- do not deny it for, of course, everyone will deny that he is the member of clique -- but let me describe you to yourselves and ask if you can were the shoe. You are the small uncertain talents of our time, ever ready to arrange a panel, lunch a critic, flatter a would be disciple, praise an enemy if he has the power to hurt you, betray a friend whose reputation you hear is on the fade. You are the readers of reviews, not of books, the hiders in your attics of pictures now said to have gone out of style. Must I go on? You know what I am talking about, don't you? I am one of you or was one of you until I lost my grip on the tiny fringe of the curtain we manually clutched to hide our falsities from the light of truth.

Truth. I cry out that word with fetid breath. Truth was to have been my redemption from the things that you and you and I and I have made of me. I am my own Judas. In Writing these pages I have once again demonstrated that I am not worthy to attempt the truth. I make you the confession now, that as I started to write I was at once deflected from the truth. Truth could wait, for, in the moment of writing, I knew it was money I sought. I excused myself by thinking that I can not write my work of truth until I have nougat money to complete it. And so I knew that if I could strike at the guilt in half of your hearts, some of you might send me small sums of money which would help me continue in this work. I excused myself by searing (falsely) that despite these sums of money I would not allow myself to be deflected from writing the truth about you: a blackmailer is under no obligation to keep his word. And so, by this muddled morality -- despicable, of course, but an important part of the truth about me -- I hoped to gain time to write a work so terrible in its truth that it would revenge me forever. But what is the truth I seek? On whom must I revenge myself?

On you who falsely flattered me? On you who did not love me enough? On you who scorned me? Can I hold you responsible for the man I was, the man I am, the man I will be? Which of us can tell who is at fault? I can only say that long ago your unwillingness to let me dream prevented for years my true awakening. I wonder what you would say if you could see me now. For that is the purpose of these preliminary pages. Before I begin to write this work I want to know that I am not, once again, mistaken in my purpose. I want to know if you have recognized me, if you remember me. Can you see me? Can you see the man who sits at a desk, trying with a pen -- that ludicrous weapon which conceit once forced into his hand -- to reach you across the waste of twenty years? Look, look and you will see me. Here I am. I am here. Can you see me now? Do you laugh? Or do you weep?