It was a mutual acquaintance who first suggested that I correspond with the author of this book—a man who, for reasons which will eventually appear obvious, shall remain anonymous. I soon, however, had cause to regret the correspondence. One dismal afternoon late in November during the darkest days of the Clinton oligarchy I received compliments of the U.S. Postal Service a heavily taped and misshapen cardboard parcel no bigger than a shoe box. After I had cut my way through all the plastic tape which held the ramshackle mess together, I found inside a stack of spiral notebooks tied together by a dirty white string. I also found a little note explaining the reason for this inopportune importunity.
Dear Mr. ——,
I am really sorry to intrude upon your good will and gracious hospitality, but I have no one else to turn to. I have taken the liberty to send you a manuscript of a book I wrote last Summer. It details the events surrounding a double murder which took place at the University of ———. Since I knew everyone involved in the case, including the victims, suspects, and the investigators, I considered it my duty to tell the world what really happened. The real story, as you shall see, is quite a bit different from what was reported by the congenital mendacity of the press. It is a story, moreover, which absolutely needs to be told, because it says so much about the spiritual and moral bankruptcy of our times—a subject you have discussed exhaustively in your previous letter.
However, if the book is ever to see the light of day, I need your help. I have finished the first draft of the book but can go no further. Half-way through I thought the book would undo me: well, it has. I feel as if my soul has been snuffed right out of me and all that remains is a protoplasmic puppet dangling at the mercy of habit and instinct. But it will take more than a puppet to prepare this book for publication. That is why I am turning to you. I know you still care about the “higher things” we discussed in earlier letters. I can't bring myself to care about them any more because, in the first place, it seems so futile and, in the second place, it is too draining.
If my book is ever to see the light of day, it will need your assistance. It cannot be published as it is: that much is certain. To begin with, I name names. This is very dangerous. I have access to information that is highly compromising to certain powerful individuals who would try everything within their considerable means to prevent me from letting the world see them as they really are. Because of the anti-egalitarian sentiments expressed in the book, most publishers would not want to touch it anyway. Opposition on the part of important forces within the ruling elite would seal the deal. Our only chance lies in deception. We must trick them into believing the book is fiction. Change all the names, suppress place-names, make the whole thing seem like a mere novel—that would be the thing to do. You may even want to write a preface denouncing me and the declaring the book to be the ravings of a very sick and demented mind which you have chosen to publish for “scientific” reasons, etc. etc. If Gass can get away with it in his atrocious The Tunnel, there is no reason you couldn’t pull of something similar. The irony of it would be precious.
As will be obvious as soon as you begin reading it, the book is in need of rigorous editing. I fear that in many places I have made a thorough hack job of it. M—— has told me you have finished you’re first book. He has even sent me some choice excerpts. Let me tell you, I found it altogether superb. True, we do not agree on everything; but I at least feel that you are a man and not a protoplasmic puppet. I know you have what it takes to prepare this manuscript for publication. No one else does. It would kill my wife to so much as even make an attempt at preparing the damn thing. And the rest of our acquaintances, including the ever-dutiful M——, simply do not have what it takes. That leaves you. Of course, it should go without saying: I would never think of insisting upon it. I leave the whole matter at your discretion. Think upon it and let me know. I will not hold it against you if you cannot go through with it. I am perfectly well aware of the great risks it would involve. There is no money in it and it could ruin you forever. Cultural elites in this country are extremely vindictive and cruel. They may never forgive you for taking part in the book. But the same is probably true of any book that is worthy of your talents. My advice is to think upon the year 2196. By then much of the present madness will probably have been forgotten, like a disagreeable dream we had during childhood. People will look back in wonder at the spiritual destitution of our age. They will be eager to have someone explain to them precisely what went wrong. Who else from our age can meet this demand except you and I?
yours sincerely, etc.
Can one imagine a more extraordinary request? I didn’t know whether to be outraged or merely flabbergasted. Certainly a man of no little arrogance, this correspondent of mine! And such tragic airs! Such pretentiousness! Think upon the year 2196 he tells me! What I really should have been thinking upon was how to tell him off. But—as I’m sure the reader has already guessed—I did no such thing. Out of fatal curiosity, I read those incendiary notebooks of his. Although at first I was not enthused, eventually they began to make an impression on me. The story he was trying to tell, though buried in reams of indulgent verbiage and reactionary digressions, was an important one. There was something vital in it, something disturbingly true and apocalyptic, which made me finally conclude that it ought to be told. As a preliminary step towards granting my correspondent’s request, I decided to check on the factual accuracy of his story.
In the main, I found the story to be factually veracious. The double murder it relates really did take place, and the local sheriff department was as corrupt as my correspondent claims. What I am less sure of is the individual portraits of the actors in the drama. My correspondent takes a lot of liberties when discussing the motivation and psychology of his actors. He proceeds with the confidence of an omniscient novelist writing about imaginary characters. But these are real people he is scribbling about, not the fabrications of his mind. He claims to have had “lengthy discussion” with many of the participants in the drama he relates, but even so, one may still wonder how he can know so much about what is going on in the souls of other people. Why, he even claims to know things which even they themselves haven’t a clue about!
I say all this by way of warning the reader against taking everything the author relates in this book as the gospel truth. What we really have before us is really not so much the presentation of the facts relating to the Wolf-Stimson double murder, but rather a highly individualistic interpretation of them. What’s more, this interpretation obviously comes from an individual whose point of view is entirely at odds with the sensibilities of the times. I actually think this makes it all the more interesting, for it adds an extra dimension to the story. If nothing else, it tells you something about the author; and however offensive his views may appear to all of us right-thinking persons, it still must be granted that he is an original, and as such deserves our interest, if not our respect. I will go so far as to say that I find him an utterly fascinating character—easily the most fascinating in the whole book. There is something droll about his insensibility to his own eccentricity. It is as if he takes his sanity for granted, concluding that everyone else must be mad. Indeed, the author’s gift for making even the most outrageous remarks appear sensible is one of the most amusing aspects of the book.
I am rather surprised that none of my friends or acquaintances who read the book noticed this quality in it. Perhaps they were to put off by the author’s aggressively unpalatable point of view. If so, it really is too bad. Why are we so stuck on reading and accepting only those books which convey the “right” point of view? Why do we feel so threatened whenever we are exposed to opinions out of harmony with those views which society deems acceptable and within the pale? What is it that we are afraid of? As for myself, I have never been afraid of an opinion, even when I have violently disagreed with it. What is an opinion but an idea? And why should I be afraid of a mere idea? An idea cannot hurt anybody. People used to be afraid of witches and spirits from the other world. Now they are afraid of ideas! Such is progress in human intelligence!
I have never understood why so many people will only read books they agree with. Why would anyone want to read a book which merely reiterates his own views? That would be senseless. I know what my views are. I do not need to find them in a book to know their complexion. In fact, I will go so far as to say that, while others refuse to read books they disagree with, those are the only kind of books I will read. There is nothing which plumes up my self-esteem so much as reading all the silly opinions of all those facile idiots who have the nerve to disagree with my own (obviously correct) views. Whenever I read opinions I do not agree with, instead of getting angry like most people, I merely smile and think how wonderful it is that I am not so great an ass as to believe in such nonsense. That is why I do not feel threatened, as so many probably will, by the views expressed in this book.
One persistent complaint made by those who have read the book is that the author is evil. One reader even went so far as to call him a Nazi! Such statements strike me as hysterical and absurd. Merely because someone dislikes democracy, egalitarianism, and industrialism and opposes liberalism and progress into the bargain does not make him a Nazi. Flaubert had similar views, but no one would accuse him of being a Nazi! The views presented in this book may be eccentric, but they are not evil. In editing the book, I have purposely avoided cutting them—not because I agree with them, but for the light they shed on the author’s character. My belief is that we should seek to understand our fellow men before we go about condemning them.
I think it is only fair to say that, in editing this work, I have made extensive changes. Not that I have changed any of the matter of the book, but I have made extensive changes in both its structure and its style. The book was obviously written with great haste. There are hardly any corrections and very few cross-outs. Worse, the author’s penchant for long, florid sentences and ornate turns of phrase tended to cause much of the writing to seem awkward and obscure. Nor did the author concern himself with holding the reader’s attention. Opportunities to create tension are in several places entirely ruined by the insertion of some irrelevant digressive tangent. It must be admitted that the author has no conception of the importance of crescendos in literature. I have tried to repair such defects whenever I could while at the same time leaving as much of the flavor of the original as possible. All of the most glaring awkwardnesses I have removed or rewritten, and many other passages I have moved around in order to create greater structural integrity.
Following the author’s advice, I have changed all the names of the individuals portrayed or even mentioned and have suppressed all place-names. The book should be seen, not as a mere factual expose of real events, but as an attempt to reveal the deeper realities behind those events. That such and such an event occurred at such and such a place is of little importance unless the deeper causes behind that event can be identified and elucidated. And if this means our author must speculate or guess or make conjectures, why then he will have to do those things and there should be no reason to make a fuss about it. He may, of course, in point of fact be wrong in his speculative guesses and conjectures, but that should not effect our judgment of his narrative. All descriptions of deeper causes, especially those involving questions of motivation, should never be assumed to be factually true. Even in those cases in which, say, the information related is based on private confessions (as is much of this book), one still needs to be extremely cautious, because ultimately no one can know why any individual acts as he does, including the individual himself.
Yet it hardly matters that this book should not in all respects be factually true. What is important in a book of this scope is not that it should be true factually, but that it should be true poetically. Even when an author ascribes to a real human being thoughts, feelings, or motives which, in point of fact, never occurred to that person, this does not mean that the author is wrong or that he has lied. If that thought, feeling, or motive could have occurred within the individual in question—if, in other words, the ascription of such thoughts, feelings, or motives tells us something substantial about that individual—then the author has in fact told us a kind of truth. The realm of truth is not the exclusive domain of the actual; the potential also has a share in that realm—and it may be the deeper share into the bargain. We should always keep this in mind when reading any history or biography which seeks to illuminate the depths of human nature.
