The Very Model Of A Man

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Re-reading one’s own novels after many years is always a fraught business, but when a novel has fallen out of print — The Very Model of a Man is the only novel of mine that has — and so crops up infrequently in conversations with readers or indeed with oneself, revisiting it can be perilous. My understanding of why this novel has been out of print is that, despite enthusiastic notices, it slipped between the cracks that can open when you change publishers: the second publisher having eyes only for new material, the first publisher not being quite done with the old. But what if a re-reading shows some other reason? What if it isn’t very good? Or what if — and this could be more painful still — it is too good? Has the world been denied a masterpiece and the author credit for it?

Long before I had published anything I was an avid reader of the prefaces Henry James wrote for the New York Edition of his works. Easier than getting on and writing was daydreaming about an eminence from which, in my later years, I would look back on all I had produced. James’ prefaces are elegant and, by modern expectations, difficult. ‘My clearest remembrance of any provoking cause connected with the matter of the present volume,’ is how he begins his preface to The Lesson of the Master — words which cannot be said to be obscure but are certainly orotund. We don’t speak of provoking causes today; we tell how we got the idea for a book. Though, of course, a ‘provoking cause’ is infinitely more suggestive than an ‘idea’.

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