Collected Fictions

Начало книги

I inscribe this book to S. D. English, innumerable, and an Angel. Also: I offer her that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams, and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.

Preface to the First Edition

The exercises in narrative prose that constitute this book were performed from 1933 to 1934. They are derived, I think, from my rereadings of Stevenson and Chesterton, from the first films of von Sternberg, and perhaps from a particular biography of the Argentine poet Evaristo Carriego.* Certain techniques are overused: mismatched lists, abrupt transitions, the reduction of a person's entire life to two or three scenes. (It is this pictorial intention that also governs the story called "Man on Pink Corner.") The stories are not, nor do they attempt to be, psychological.

With regard to the examples of magic that close the book, the only right I can claim to them is that of translator and reader. I sometimes think that good readers are poets as singular, and as awesome, as great authors themselves. No one will deny that the pieces attributed by Valéry to his pluperfect Monsieur Edmond Teste are worth notoriously less than those of his wife and friends.

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