Tono Bungay

I write that much and look at it, and wonder whether, after all, this is any fair statement of what I am attempting in this book.  I’ve given, I see, an impression that I want to make simply a hotch-potch of anecdotes and experiences with my uncle swimming in the middle as the largest lump of victual.  I’ll own that here, with the pen already started, I realise what a fermenting mass of things learnt and emotions experienced and theories formed I’ve got to deal with, and how, in a sense, hopeless my book must be from the very outset.  I suppose what I’m really trying to render is nothing more nor less than Life—­as one man has found it.  I want to tell—­myself, and my impressions of the thing as a whole, to say things I have come to feel intensely of the laws, traditions, usages, and ideas we call society, and how we poor individuals get driven and lured and stranded among these windy, perplexing shoals and channels.  I’ve got, I suppose, to a time of life when things begin to take on shapes that have an air of reality, and become no longer material for dreaming, but interesting in themselves.  I’ve reached the criticising, novel-writing age, and here I am writing mine—­my one novel—­without having any of the discipline to refrain and omit that I suppose the regular novel-writer acquires.

I’ve read an average share of novels and made some starts before this beginning, and I’ve found the restraints and rules of the art (as I made them out) impossible for me.  I like to write, I am keenly interested in writing, but it is not my technique.  I’m an engineer with a patent or two and a set of ideas; most of whatever artist there is in me has been given to turbine machines and boat building and the problem of flying, and do what I will I fail to see how I can be other than a lax, undisciplined story-teller.  I must sprawl and flounder, comment and theorise, if I am to get the thing out I have in mind.  And it isn’t a constructed tale I have to tell, but unmanageable realities.  My love-story—­and if only I can keep up the spirit of truth-telling all through as strongly as I have now, you shall have it all—­falls into no sort of neat scheme of telling.  It involves three separate feminine persons.  It’s all mixed up with the other things….

But I’ve said enough, I hope, to excuse myself for the method or want of method in what follows, and I think I had better tell without further delay of my boyhood and my early impressions in the shadow of Bladesover House.