Читать книгу The Blood Of The Martyrs - Naomi Mitchison - Страница 3

Books are never written only and entirely by their authors. There are always others who have helped to shape them. It will be obvious that this book could not have been written, or, with the same plot, would have been written very differently, a few years ago. Events shaped it, as they have shaped all of us and our works. Certain persons, also, have helped to shape this book, and to them I dedicate it: most of all, Lewis Gielgud. He and I planned and wrote together the play, As It Was In The Beginning, this book’s first cousin, as it were, and he will find here and there, his own words in the mouths of the people in my book; but he and I are such old and tried collaborators that each is welcome to the words and thoughts of the other. There were historians also who helped to guide and tidy this book, especially Martin Charlesworth, Guy Chilver and Margaret Cole; and there were friends who lived in the book with me while I wrote it, Rudolph Messel and others. And beyond and behind these known and certain and consciously collaborating individuals, there are other men and women whose names I may not even know; but my thought and imagination fashions and chooses and eliminates because of our mutual participation in events. There are Austrian socialists in the counter-revolution of 1934, sharecroppers in Arkansas in 1935, old friends in King’s Norton and new friends in Carradale: and the named and unnamed host of the witnesses against tyranny and superstition and the worship of the State, witnesses for humanity and reason and kindliness, whose blood is crying to us now and whose martyrdom will help to build the Kingdom which we all want in our hearts, and whose temporary manifestations in friendship and comradeship and collaboration give purpose and delight to our lives and deaths.