Читать книгу Prelude to Waking - Miles Franklin - Страница 3

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AUTHOR'S NOTE

Table of Contents

Novels are sometimes prefaced by statements that the characters in them are purely fictional. Cunning clauses of similar import are inserted in publishers' agreements. Such precautions are, on the one hand, against certain epizoons, more delicately called blackmailers, who, aided by legal gymnastics, lie in wait for chances to batten. On the other hand the Law needs—when on the side of justice—to be furnished with powers to restrain the malicious who would make capital by ridiculing and calumniating their associates. However, those who ignore financial enterprises to indulge in fictional experiments in a field so remote and unadvertised as Australia need fear no plunderable accumulation of pelf, and I can therefore risk the consequences of declaring that the characters in this story are as real as that truth which is clearer in fiction than in fact. So:

The elder Giltinane contains a slight precipitate of my own father—on the lesser reaches of my inspired parent's character—and slightly more of a pioneer who told me stories of kangaroos in Queensland and of an Oxford Don he came upon on the way to Alaska.[See Author's Note to Up the Country.] A brother contributed a small facet for the sketch of the younger Giltinane. The Lady Courtley is taken, without subterfuge, from another of my choicest friends. Cobbler the Elder is derived from the followers of a housekeeper whom I once underwent; Cobbler the Younger is somewhat copied from an adolescent acquaintance, who degenerated before my eyes at one of the great Public Schools. The old Earl Montraven I met at a political tea party at Belsize Park, and the Great Editor at the Ladies' Athenaeum Club, where we were hostessed by a distinguished American author. Mrs Char Brindle is distantly drawn from the owner of a toylike farm in Devonshire, though he was far above dropping his aitches or calling the movies "flims". Mex Tarbuck is direct from the films, of which, during a parti-coloured career, I have so far seen at least a score of examples. Pamela Clutterbuck-Leeper resides in West End comedies and novels. The la ffollettes are familiar to a circle so wide and worthy that ridicule awaits any practitioner who, either for gain or vanity, seeks to impersonate them. Lady George beseeches me to withhold any clue to her lest the pirates of Mayfair, who, without compunction, hit below the belts of their friends to serve themselves, should bribe Alfred Dud and his invaluable spouse to forsake her service for theirs.

BRENT OF BIN BIN

Brunswick Square,

London,

December 1925.