Unless the term “novel” has become too debased to apply, and if it means a book in which living characters are created and shown in significant relationship, this book is a novel. I do not want to suggest that the distinction of the book is primarily verbal, and still less that the astonishing language covers a vacuity of content. In describing Nightwoodfor the purpose of attracting readers to the English edition, I said that it would “appeal primarily to readers of poetry.” This is well enough for the brevity of advertisement but I am glad to take this opportunity to amplify it a little. For it took me, with this book, some time to come to an appreciation of its meaning as a whole.
What one can do for other readers – assuming that if you read this preface at all you will read it first – is to trace the more significant phases of one’s own appreciation of it.
I have read Nightwooda number of times, in manuscript, in proof, and after publication. One is liable to expect other people to see, on their first reading of a book, all that one has come to perceive in the course of a developing intimacy with it. I can justify this preface only in the following way. I have already committed two such impertinences 3this is the third, and if it is not the last no one will be more surprised than myself.
When the question is raised, of writing an introduction to a book of a creative order, I always feel that the few books worth introducing are exactly those which it is an impertinence to introduce. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1937. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
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