It was with some shame that my companion, Mario Soldati, and I moved out of the old City Hotel for the conventional comfort of the new luxury Paramount built up the hill behind the former police station where I used to come every day to collect my cables from the Commissioner. The old man would not have approved this change in Freetown, and I remembered the morning in the rains when he went out of his mind under the pressure of overwork, the strain of controlling corrupt officers, the badgering of MI5 bureaucrats from home. He was not a drinking man, but in his knowledge and humanity he was more akin to the inhabitants of the City Hotel than I was now. I had been spoilt for the communal douche and the bare bedroom. They treated me with great charity when I left, they gave me a warm welcome whenever I returned for a drink, but I felt the guilt of a beach-comber manqué: I had failed at failure. How could they tell that for a writer as much as for a priest there is no such thing as success?
1968
Footnotes
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Part II: Novels and Novelists
[1]
*1 The Complete Plays of Henry James. edited by Leon Edel.
*2 Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson. A Record of Friendship and Criticism, edited by Janet Adam Smith.
*3 Robert Louis Stevenson, by Lettice Cooper.
[2]
*1 The Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800, by J. M. S. Tompkins.
*2 The Polite Marriage and Other 18th Century Essays, by J. M. S. Tompkins.
*3 Hans Christian Andersen, by Signe Toksvig.
[3]
*1 La Pharisienne.
*2 The Woman Who Was Poor.
*3 Gilbert Keith Chesterton, by Maisie Ward.
*4 The Chestertons, by Mrs Cecil Chesterton.
*5 Pilgrimage, by Dorothy M. Richardson.
*6 King Coffin.
*7 Conan Doyle: His Life and Art, by Hesketh Pearson.
*8 The Quest for Corvo, by A. J. A. Symons.
*9 Conrad’s Prefaces to his Works, with an essay by Edward Garnett.
*10 Joseph Conrad and his Circle, by Jessie Conrad.
*11 Arnold Bennett’s Letters to his Nephew Richard Bennett.
*12 Rudyard Kipling. His Life and Work, by Charles Carrington.
*13 I was writing in 1934.
*14 The Summing-Up.
*15 The Cloak that I Left, by Lilias Rider Haggard.
*16 A. E. W. Mason, by Roger Lancelyn Green.
*17 Anthony Hope and His Books, by Sir Charles Mallet.
*18 Sick Heart River, by John Buchan, 1940.
*19 Edgar Wallace, by Margaret Lane.
Part III: Some Characters
[1]
*1 Recusant Poets, by Louise Imogen Guiney. With a selection from their work: Sir Thomas More to Ben Jonson.
*2 The Dramatic Works of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, edited by William Smith Clark.
*3 Titus Oates, by Jane Lane.
*4 John Evelyn, by Arthur Ponsonby.
*5 Life in a Noble Household, 1641-1700, by Gladys Scott Thomson.
*6 Granville the Polite: The Life of George Granville Lord Lansdowne, by Elizabeth Handasyde.
*7 The Poems of Charles Churchill, edited by James Laver.
*8 Anatomy of Oxford, an Anthology compiled by C. Day Lewis and Charles Fenby.
*9 One may safely now record his name—the questionably Reverend Montague Summers.
[2]
*1 West African Explorers, edited by C. Howard.
*2 Livingstone’s Travels, edited by Dr James I. Macnair.
*3 The Journals of Francis Parkman, edited by Mason Wade.
*4 Mexico: A New Spain With Old Friends, by Professor J. B. Trend.
[3]
*1 Further Extracts from the Note-Books of Samuel Butler, chosen and edited by A. T. Bartholomew.
*2 W. E. Henley, by John Connell.
*3 Annals of Innocence and Experience.
*4 Campden: xxxiv Engravings after Pen Drawings, by F. L. Griggs, R.A.
*5 Venus in the Kitchen.
*6 My life, by Havelock Ellis.
*7 Days with Albert Schweitzer, by Frederick Franck.
*8 Waiting on God, by Simone Weil.
*9 The Life of Ronald Knox, by Evelyn Waugh.
*10 Written in 1951.
*11 Now Pope Paul VI.
*12 Journal of a Soul: Diary of Pope John XXIII.
*13 Written in 1955
*14 Written in 1966.
[4]
*1 Written in 1940.
*2 October 1940.
THE HISTORY OF VINTAGE
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Vintage in the United Kingdom was initially created to publish paperback editions of books acquired by the prestigious hardback imprints in the Random House Group such as Jonathan Cape, Chatto & Windus, Hutchinson and later William Heinemann, Secker & Warburgand The Harvill Press. There are many Booker and Nobel Prize-winning authors on the Vintage list and the imprint publishes a huge variety of fiction and non-fiction. Over the years Vintage has expanded and the list now includes great authors of the past – who are published under the Vintage Classics imprint – as well as many of the most influential authors of the present.
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Collected Essays Page 37
