The Pose Novel - Page 2

_that_ what you aspire to be, that twopence-coloured
edition of yourself? Heaven defend you from your desires!

Yet there was a singular fascination in writing the book; to be in
anticipation my own sympathetic historian, to joy with my joys yet to
come, and sorrow with my sorrows, to bear disaster like a man, and at
last to close my own dear eyes, and with a swelling heart write my own
epitaph. The pleasure remained with me until I reached the end. How
admirably I strutted in front of myself! And I and the better self of me
that was flourishing about in the book--we pretended not to know each
other for what we were. He was myself with a wig and a sham visiting
card, and I owed it to myself to respect my disguise. I made him with
very red hair--my hair is fairly dark--and shifted his university from
London to Cambridge. Clearly it could not be the same person, I argued.
But I endowed him with all the treasures of myself; I made him say all
the good things I might have said had I thought of them opportunely, and
all the noble thoughts that occurred to me afterwards occurred to him
at the time. He was myself--myself at a premium, myself without any
drawbacks, the quintessence and culmination of me. And yet somehow when
he came back from the typewriter he seemed a bit of an ass.

Probably every tadpole author writes a pose novel--at least I hope so
for the sake of my self-respect. Most, after my fashion, burn the thing,
or benevolent publishers lose it. It is an ill thing if by some accident
the tadpole tale survives the tadpole stage. The authoress does the
feminine equivalent, but I should judge either that she did it more
abundantly or else that she burned less. Has she never swept past you
with a scornful look, disdained you in all the pride of her beauty,
rippled laughter at you, or amazed you with her artless girlishness? And
even after the early stages some of the trick may survive, unless I read
books with malice instead of charity. I must confess, though, that I
have a weakness for finding mine author among his puppets. I conceive
him always taking the best parts, like an actor-manager or a little boy
playing with his sisters. I do not read many novels with sincere belief,
and I like to get such entertainment from them as I can. So that these
artless little self-revelations are very sweet and precious to me among
all the lay figures, tragedy and comedy. Since the deception is
transparent I make the most of the transparency, and love to see the
clumsy fingers on the strings of the marionettes. And this will be none
the less pleasant now that I have so narrowly escaped giving this
entertainment to others.

I suppose this stage is a necessary one. We begin with ignorance and the
imagination, the