Bill James

Bill James, in his book POPULAR CRIME: REFLECTIONS ON THE CELEBRATION OF VIOLENCE, says a lot of provocative things, and some of them don’t make sense. And some of them have nothing to do with crime. After he said that top-level environmentalists routinely exaggerate the threat of things like global warming, I looked him up on Wikipedia to see if he has said anything else absurd. It didn’t take me long to find one (actually three): James defended Joe Paterno’s handling of the Jerry Sandusky incident(s), saying alternately that Paterno didn’t try to cover up Sandusky’s crimes, that it wasn’t Paterno’s responsibility to turn Sandusky in, and that he (James) didn’t think it unusual for grown men like Sandusky to shower with young boys, and so there was nothing shady or suspect for Paterno to have been suspicious about.

You would think that someone who says such ridiculous things would be wrong on most everything else, but I think James is often right in POPULAR CRIME. Still, for someone who parades himself around as a firm believer in common sense, in saying when the Emperor has no clothes, he sometimes just seems to come out of left field. And yes, that is an apt metaphor, because this is the Bill James famous for inventing Sabermetrics, a statistical analysis of baseball that purports to predict everything a baseball fan needs to know, which makes you wonder how bookies can still make a living, but somehow they do.

While James ignores facts when addressing things like Global Warming and Paterno, he does his best to ground other observations firmly in fact, although he doesn’t really use many statistics. Sabermetrics purports to take the aggregate of everything you can measure about a ballplayer and magically yield an absolute measure of that ballplayer’s worth to his team. I am not even a baseball fan, and I can see that this is a fool’s errand. How do you measure the stolen bases not stolen because a pitcher has a great pick-off move? How do you measure how many homers a number three batter hits because other teams can’t pitch around him, since the batter in the four spot is even a greater slugger than he is? How do you measure the ability of some players to elevate not only their own games come the playoffs, but those of their teammates?

You can’t, anymore than you can find an algorithm to choose the MVP. James loves those stats, though, and he puts put forth a system of scoring at trials that will regularize things by assigning points based on probabilities about different factors he deems indicative of a claimant’s guilt. He argues that this is a less hit–and-miss approach than we have now. He also says he realizes it is not workable. But he nevertheless presents it. What he doesn’t really address is the fact that the assignment of “points” is just as open to interpretation and abuse as the present system. Still, he does a good job of pointing out that the present system gets sidetracked by lawyers and legislators (who are often the same thing), so that truth and justice become casualties.

He also claims that seeing the problem of crime through the liberal/conservative binary, where the alternatives are (conservative) longer and harsher sentences or (liberal) a focus on prisoner’s rights that gives hardened criminals sentences that are too easy and short, misses the point. His solution is to focus on crime at its inception, and not when the criminals are so inured to the “life” you can’t reach them. Kind of like Giuliani did in NYC with his “zero tolerance” policy. Crack down on the little stuff and the big stuff won’t happen. I don’t know if that really works, or if it is just supported by statistics, which can be used to lie just as well as anything else, and maybe better, as they give the illusion of being sacrosanct. Still, James is wrestling with a huge problem, and he tries.

Somehow I think that allowing statistical analysis into the courtroom will result in the same kind of problem you have now in criminal insanity cases—experts contradicting each other. Even if you get the numbers right, you have to interpret what they mean, and that is a lot less cut and dried than the numbers themselves. Hence Mark Twain: “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.”

James doesn’t do much to analyze what relation Popular Crime--books, movies, TV, radio and newspaper and magazine articles—has with the popular culture that consumes it. You have the crime itself, sure, but what of our reaction to it? And how does that reaction become part of the culture popular media is trying to describe? What crime do we focus on, and in what way? Is public opinion driven by media coverage or the other way around? James doesn’t say, although he raises the questions. He does say some things, and some of them are interesting. He says that for different reasons the yellowest of the yellow journalism about crime started in the Gilded Age and ended with the Lindbergh kidnapping. It was largely a product of the penny press. He says a kind of yellow journalism reasserted itself with the case of OJ Simpson. He is mute on the question of whether our lurid obsession with crime increases the likelihood of that kind of crime being committed.

He’s got a lot of interesting stuff to say about American History, even if he doesn’t back it up with statistics. He depicts the early 20th century as a time when we were close to a civil war between the haves and the have nots. This is why we were fascinated with stories like The Stanford White Murder and Sacco and Vanzetti. He says Sacco and Vanzetti were not choirboys, but probably not guilty. James enthusiastically approves of the Palmer Raids, but at the same times condemns the rich of the Gilded and Progressive era for acting like pigs.

All interesting stuff. He points out that until 1980, there was no real concept of “serial killer”—those who repeatedly kill strangers—the received wisdom being that murderers always killed someone they knew. He says police forces were not always professional, and once, long ago, were even sometimes composed of guys who had prison records. James admits that the media can ruin trials, and he also takes to task those jurists who allow defense team motions to withhold evidence. And he says on balance that we are better off with an unfettered press than with a judiciary and bar acting in secret, since lawyers and judges have their own agendas, and those agendas don’t always coincide with justice. Yeah, Bill, but the media are always looking out for us, right?

One thing James doesn’t address is what I would call the folklore of crime. I read somewhere that kids are in no more danger today than they ever were, and that hitchhiking is no more dangerous than taking the bus! I would have liked to see old Bill look at this kind of thing more. What kind of political and social agendas are advanced when you have everyone thinking things are more dangerous now than in some golden long ago? James also doesn’t address gun control, the militarization of the police, the use of police to crush political dissent, and what it must be like to be a cop when everyone has a smart phone with a camera. James does say that Manson and the Symbionese Liberation Army helped sound the death knell of “The Movement.” No one can really say, but that’s an interesting thesis.

Where James is at his best is in digesting all the books there are on a particular crime and coming up with a convincing argument about the guilt or innocence of those convicted or exonerated. Here is a run-down of those cases he analyzes with convincing skill:

• Sam Shepard—innocent (and the inspiration for a great TV show in THE FUGITIVE)
• John and Patsy Ramsey—innocent
• Bruno Hauptmann—guilty
• Lizzie Borden—innocent (in spite of the gimmick in the TV movie wherein Elizabeth Montgomery commits the crime naked to avoid getting blood on her clothes)
• Sacco and Vanzetti—not guilty but still not very nice guys
• OJ Simpson—guilty
• Albert DeSalvo (who claimed he was the Boston Strangler)—innocent, but still a scumbag
• Leo Frank—innocent (and a victim of Anti-Semitism)
• Rabbi Fred Neulander—can’t tell, but not enough evidence to convict

James sounds a familiar note when he takes on the insanity defense, calling the traveling psychologists who testify for a price whores, and stating that Dan White and the infamous Twinkie Defense were the death knell of that defense. He also points out that a lot of serial murderers had prostitutes for mothers, are usually perceived as failures by themselves and those around them, and most often have trouble rubbing two nickels together (how do you find stats on those things?) Finally, and this is very interesting, as well as disturbing, James says serial killers usually don’t have a clear or identifiable motive for what they do, in spite of what profilers might say.

One other thing I would have liked him to address: Are police profilers charlatans? Not psychics-- we know they are charlatans. But are profilers nothing more than puffed up fortune tellers, feeding suggestive but basically empty predictions to a credulous audience? I suspect they are but would have liked to see an intelligent discussion about it.
Some more interesting contentions—murder rates in the US shot up between 1840 and 1885, and have yet to go back down. Motive, means and opportunity don’t count for much, as you can find tons of people in most cases who have all three. At one time the names of jurors were made public, they were routinely bought off by crooked lawyers, and rich bail jumpers were routinely allowed to escape justice by jumping bail.

James addresses the question of popular crime and culture by not addressing it when he says “crime stories embody the unusual, not the normal, and despite that they seem much the same across borders and centuries, and thus tell us more about human nature than the vicissitudes of culture.” That’s a pretty soft and squishy statement for a statistics man. All vague abstractions. What is this similarity in crime stories across cultures? And why does he oppose human nature to culture? Can’t the study of culture tell us anything about human nature, even withstanding those nasty and ill-defined vicissitudes? Bill is a big proponent on rating things on a scale of one to ten. I give him a 6.5 for this book.

© 2015 Mike Welch

When to Stop Collecting Things

Many years ago, so long ago that I've forgotten his name, so long ago that he called all the women in the office his "girls," though we ranged in age from thirty-something to sixty-something, I had a boss who collected tape cassettes of old radio shows. He was interesting in other ways, too. His five-minute rant on why he never ate chicken was breathtaking, and if I could remember it I would repeat it to you; it had to do with the quantity and toxicity of the chemicals the poor birds were stuffed with before they were offered for human consumption. The radio shows were particularly interesting to me, as a nostalgic child of the forties. They were harder to find in those days than they are now.

So when I came upon a source of them somehow—it might have been in Yankee Magazine, there was no internet—I naturally offered to pass on the information to Mr. Whatzisname. He smilingly declined. "Last year I turned fifty," he said. "I don't collect things anymore."

At the time I was not yet fifty, not even forty, and I collected things very happily whenever I had the money and the space. Sweaters. Dishes. Puppets. Musical instruments that I hadn't time to learn to play. The idea that collecting must come to an end in every life went over me like a bucket of ice water. It seemed tragic. I felt sorry for him.

Now I am no longer thirty, nor yet forty, nor even fifty or sixty, and I look at all the stuff I have collected over the years and think, not only is it time to stop, but it's time to get rid of a lot of it. Not the sweaters, of course. The moths take care of that. I can scarcely keep up with replacing what they spoil. Or the dishes. We have to eat off of something, and who wants to use the same old dishes day after day? But maybe the puppets. I haven't performed with puppets in almost thirty years.

My sister once bought me a set of Pelham puppets depicting Henry the Eighth and all his wives, collectible puppets whose strings are too short to make them good performers. At one time I was going to fit them up with longer strings and put on a show. I will not do that now. First of all I don't feel like it, and secondly it would ruin their monetary value. I can just hear the dealers on Antiques Road Show telling one of my descendants how much they would be worth, if only Great-Granny hadn't boogered up the strings.

In fact I would sell them today if I had a buyer. I have their boxes and certificates and everything. Furthermore I no longer think it's tragic to stop collecting what fascinated you once, not even tragic to lose interest in the passions of your youth. Not as long as you have new passions. I might have a passion for a stark and tidy living space, one where everything has a place and occupies it, preferably out of sight. I might go clean the kitchen now. Or I might put my feet up and listen to something from my record collection, which I will never weed, no matter how old I get.

© 2015 Kate Gallison

Executive Orders

I was going to write the skinny to the lineup of guys and gals who want to be the Nation's Chief Exec…

…excluding Dumpty Trumpy, who simply doesn't have the right shoe size to cross the threshold of 1600!

But Tom Clancy beat me to it!

In 1996… his inspiring novel Executive Orders… 874 pages

The wonderworker, who once sold insurance, sets out the rules: How to Be the Chief in the Oval Office… far better than all the university and wily beltway pols…

Some of you have read, learned and inwardly digested Clancy’s rules for the Big Chief.

I’d like to share with you some of my favorites written by this gentle giant…

1. “Every state on the Gulf feared Iran for its size, for its large population, and for the religious fervor of its citizens. For the Sunni religious, the fear was about a perceived departure from the true course of Islam. For everyone else, it was about what would happen to them when ‘heretics’ assumed control of the region…” P. 133

2. For how to behave as a new POTUS: “God, it’s like a narcotic, Jack thought, understanding just then why people entered politics. No man could stand here like this, hearing the noise, seeing the faces, and not love the moment. …He WAS the United States of America. He was their President, but more than that, he was the embodiment of their hopes, their desires, the image of their own nation, and because of that they were willing to love someone they didn’t know, to cheer his every word, to hope that for a brief moment they could believe that he’d looked directly into each individual pair of eyes so that the moment would be forever special, never to be forgotten. It was power such as he had never known to exist. This crowd was his to command.

“THIS was why men devoted their lives to seeking the presidency, to bathe in this moment, like a warm ocean wave, a moment of utter perfection.”

“What made him so special in their minds? …it was they who’d done the choosing… They thought him different and special and perhaps even great… but that was perception, not reality. The reality of the moment was sweaty hands on the armored podium, a speech written by someone else, and a man who knew he was out of place, however pleasant the moment might be…” P. 313

3. “America is your child. America is a country forever young. America needs the right people to look after her. it is YOUR job to pick the right people, regardless of party, or race, or gender, or anything other than talent and integrity.” P. 638.

4. And if any man or woman wavers on an unsteady decision — I urge him or her to read, learn and inwardly digest these lines:

“Finally, and I say this to all nations who may wish us ill, the United States of America will not tolerate attacks on our country, our possessions, or our citizens…

“Whoever executes or orders such an attack, no matter who you are, no matter where you might hide, no matter how long it might take, we will come for you.

“I have sworn an oath before God, to execute my duties as President. That I will do. To those who wish to be our friends you will find no more faithful friend than we. To those who would be our enemies, remember that we can be faithful at that, too.

“Let us recall the words of President Abraham Lincoln: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds… to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.” P. 872

Clancy ends the book with a quotation by Oliver Wendell Homes, Jr.

“It is now the moment when by common consent we pause to become conscious of our national life and to rejoice in it, to recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for our country in return.”

God bless our native land…

Thelma Jacqueline Straw, born in Massachusetts, of a Tennessee mother and a New Hampshire father… proud to be an American…

Death of an Expert Witness

PD James is a master of detective fiction. She even wrote a book about it called, appropriately enough, TALKING ABOUT DETECTIVE FICTION. And in DEATH OF AN EXPERT WITNESS, she follows her own rules to a T. That is, she gives you a closed circle of possible murderers, and directs us skillfully away from the truth without ever lying. Virtually everyone in this vicious circle of suspects has a motive, and James gives us all we need to know to solve the crime. I didn’t, and I don’t think most people could have, but I didn’t feel cheated at the end. It was there to be figured out, but by a more cerebral fellow than myself.

At the center of it all is her great detective Inspector Dalgliesh. He is quite a bright fellow, this Dalgliesh, and he carries the pain of having lost a child within him, and the daily pain of having to watch the brutal things people do to each other. James is pretty smart herself, is an intellectual writer (and I mean that in a good way). I wonder if the habit of plumbing the depths of human depravity is as taxing to a writer as it is to a detective.

Dalgliesh is more of a Holmes or Poirot than a Marlowe or a Sam Spade. He solves crimes not by insulting and punching and having sex with suspects until the whole thing unravels, but by piecing the puzzle of violent death together with a surgeon’s precision. He does have the keen sense of human nature that Marlowe and Spade have, and he knows how to get what he wants from an interrogation, becoming all things to all people in ways that always serve his purposes.

I think there are three kinds of murder mysteries: the kind where everyone has a motive (like this one), the kind where it seems that no one has a motive, and the kind where the only person who seems to have a motive didn’t do it because in reality there is one other person who secretly had a motive. In this novel, there are two murders, and the action is framed by the investigation of a third, which happens mostly offstage.

If you go to a job with people you don’t like every day, take heart, because you don’t, at least, work at Hoggatt’s Lab. The people there are petty and vindictive in the most extreme ways, and before the novel is over we will have seen bullying, serial adultery, a vicious custody battle, extortion, a brother- sister relationship that gets very, very close to the incestuous, a semi-psychotic child, a corrupt cop who is a red herring, and who sells cannabis seized as evidence to supplement his retirement, two murders, and more. Dalgliesh feels, as he wades into this cesspool, that he should have worn boots, then waders, then a haz-mat suit.

The men in this tome are often feckless milksops, and the women can be hard and cruel. But I don’t think there was a stock character in the bunch. Everyone’s a round character (to steal a phrase from EM Forster). The cruel show compassion, the stupid have flashes of insight, the cowardly show a little gumption every once in a while. And people’s motives are never tidy as they struggle with their demons, not wanting to give in to their darker urges (but they do, oh they do).

And through it all, James handles characterization and action with a tough and terse poetry. In the final scene Dalgliesh he visits a clunch pit, a kind of peat bog, an ancient place in a rough and ready rural place near the North sea called the Fens, a place that is kind of like a parking lot or an alley in the worst part of town you can imagine, but it is a beautiful and sunny day and for a moment he forgets that death carries life around in the palm of its hand, and we are forever in danger of it deciding, as if on a whim, to close it:

Even the discarded beer cans glinted like bright toys and the wastepaper bowled along merrily in the wind. The air was keen and smelled of the sea. It was possible to believe that the Saturday shoppers trailing with their children across the scrubland were carrying their picnics to the beach, that the clunch field led on to dunes and marram grass, to the child-loud fringes of the sea.

Dalgliesh can never forget the cruelty of the world for long, though. Every character in the novel is driven by unconscious or even conscious desires. Even Dalgliesh, who admits that the death of his son has hardened him. And yet, existentialist, nihilist or cynic (or all three) that he is, fully aware of the blind malevolence of the universe he inhabits, he tries to impose a rough kind of human justice on it.

The pit is the place of the initial murder in the book, and is a much more forbidding and foreboding place at night. When Kerrison, a kind of M.E., a British Quincy, arrives on the scene of the murder, he finds an rusted out old vehicle in which a dead girl’s body sits lit by a pair of arc lights: “Thus brightly lit it looked, to Kerrison, like some grotesque and pretentious modern sculpture, symbolically poised on the brink of chaos.”

And when he encounters the girl, he thought she had “the vacuous look of an adult clown…the body, still outwardly so human, looked an absurd burlesque, the skin of the pallid cheek as artificial as the stained plastic of the car against which it rested.” These brief passages carry a lot of punch per pound, and they occur all through the book, forming a backdrop, a mood, that you just can’t shake.

So, who is the murderer, or murderers? Take your pick from this litter of lunatic losers. I thought I had a lot of borderline, narcissistic, sociopathic types at my job, but this goes beyond even civil service! And the irony, of course, is that those at Hoggatt’s Lab are there to provide justice to society, while they deny it to each other. Something about James’s prose makes me think of her as a nice lady, but if she isn’t evil, she certainly knows what evil is.

© 2015 Mike Welch

Learning from the Masters: 101

Here I begin a series of blogs that I have been thinking about for a long time.   As I have confessed in these precincts in the past, I regularly reread the classics.  Often I find an author from the past, in the midst of telling his story will address the reader directly and talk about what he is doing and why.  The last one I have come across who got away with such shenanigans was John Fowles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman.  But that was nearly fifty years ago.  One cannot get away with that sort of the thing in the 21^st Century.  But these musings can be very instructive and consoling to the modern writer.  Readers will also find them amusing, I think, because they open a peephole into the way writers think.  Today I offer a preface to Arnold Bennett’s Old Wives’ Tale.  It doesn’t exactly fit my bill because it was an addendum, not part of the novel’s original text, but it sure speaks to me about what it meant to be a novelist a hundred years ago, and how similar it is to today—when it comes to inspiration and when it comes to pleasing one’s publisher and one’s readers.    

PREFACE

In the autumn of 1903 I used to dine frequently in a restaurant in the Rue de Clichy, Paris. Here were, among others, two waitresses that attracted my attention. One was a beautiful, pale young girl, to whom I never spoke, for she was employed far away from the table which I affected. The other, a stout, middle-aged managing Breton woman, had sole command over my table and me, and gradually she began to assume such a maternal tone towards me that I saw I should be compelled to leave that restaurant. If I was absent for a couple of nights running she would reproach me sharply: "What! you are unfaithful to me?" Once, when I complained about some French beans, she informed me roundly that French beans were a subject which I did not understand. I then decided to be eternally unfaithful to her, and I abandoned the restaurant. A few nights before the final parting an old woman came into the restaurant to dine. She was fat, shapeless, ugly, and grotesque. She had a ridiculous voice, and ridiculous gestures. It was easy to see that she lived alone, and that in the long lapse of years she had developed the kind of peculiarity which induces guffaws among the thoughtless. She was burdened with a lot of small parcels, which she kept dropping. She chose one seat; and then, not liking it, chose another; and then another. In a few moments she had the whole restaurant laughing at her. That my middle-aged Breton should laugh was indifferent to me, but I was pained to see a coarse grimace of giggling on the pale face of the beautiful young waitress to whom I had never spoken.

I reflected, concerning the grotesque diner: "This woman was once young, slim, perhaps beautiful; certainly free from these ridiculous mannerisms. Very probably she is unconscious of her singularities. Her case is a tragedy. One ought to be able to make a heartrending novel out of the history of a woman such as she." Every stout, ageing woman is not grotesque—far from it!—but there is an extreme pathos in the mere fact that every stout ageing woman was once a young girl with the unique charm of youth in her form and movements and in her mind. And the fact that the change from the young girl to the stout ageing woman is made up of an infinite number of infinitesimal changes, each unperceived by her, only intensifies the pathos.

It was at this instant that I was visited by the idea of writing the book which ultimately became "The Old Wives' Tale." Of course I felt that the woman who caused the ignoble mirth in the restaurant would not serve me as a type of heroine. For she was much too old and obviously unsympathetic. It is an absolute rule that the principal character of a novel must not be unsympathetic, and the whole modern tendency of realistic fiction is against oddness in a prominent figure. I knew that I must choose the sort of woman who would pass unnoticed in a crowd.

I put the idea aside for a long time, but it was never very distant from me….I was already, in 1903, planning a novel ("Leonora") of which the heroine was aged forty, and had daughters old enough to be in love. The reviewers, by the way, were staggered by my hardihood in offering a woman of forty as a subject of serious interest to the public…. I have been accused of every fault except a lack of self-confidence, and in a few weeks I settled a further point, namely, that my book…must be the life-history of two women instead of only one. Hence, "The Old Wives' Tale" has two heroines….I was intimidated by the audacity of my project, but I had sworn to carry it out. For several years I looked it squarely in the face at intervals, and then walked away to write novels of smaller scope, of which I produced five or six. But I could not dally forever, and in the autumn of 1907 I actually began to write it, in a village near Fontainebleau, where I rented half a house from a retired railway servant. I calculated that it would be 200,000 words long (which it exactly proved to be), and I had a vague notion that no novel of such dimensions (except Richardson's) had ever been written before. So I counted the words in several famous Victorian novels, and discovered to my relief that the famous Victorian novels average 400,000 words apiece. I wrote the first part of the novel in six weeks. It was fairly easy to me, because, in the seventies, in the first decade of my life, I had lived in the actual draper's shop of the Baines's, and knew it as only a child could know it. Then I went to London on a visit. I tried to continue the book in a London hotel, but London was too distracting, and I put the thing away, and during January and February of 1908, I wrote "Buried Alive," which was published immediately, and was received with majestic indifference by the English public, an indifference which has persisted to this day.

I then returned to the Fontainebleau region and gave "The Old Wives' Tale" no rest till I finished it at the end of July, 1908. It was published in the autumn of the same year, and for six weeks afterward the English public steadily confirmed an opinion expressed by a certain person in whose judgment I had confidence, to the effect that the work was honest but dull, and that when it was not dull it had a regrettable tendency to facetiousness. My publishers, though brave fellows, were somewhat disheartened; however, the reception of the book gradually became less and less frigid.

With regard to the French portion of the story, it was not until I had written the first part that I saw from a study of my chronological basis that the Siege of Paris might be brought into the tale. The idea was seductive; but I hated, and still hate, the awful business of research; and I only knew the Paris of the Twentieth Century. Now I was aware that my railway servant and his wife had been living in Paris at the time of the war. I said to the old man, "By the way, you went through the Siege of Paris, didn't you?" He turned to his old wife and said, uncertainly, "The Siege of Paris? Yes, we did, didn't we?" The Siege of Paris had been only one incident among many in their lives. Of course, they remembered it well, though not vividly, and I gained much information from them. But the most useful thing which I gained from them was the perception, startling at first, that ordinary people went on living very ordinary lives in Paris during the siege, and that to the vast mass of the population the siege was not the dramatic, spectacular, thrilling, ecstatic affair that is described in history. Encouraged by this perception, I decided to include the siege in my scheme. I read Sarcey's diary of the siege aloud to my wife, and I looked at the pictures in Jules Claretie's popular work on the siege and the commune, and I glanced at the printed collection of official documents, and there my research ended.

It has been asserted that unless I had actually been present at a public execution, I could not have written the chapter in which Sophia was at the Auxerre solemnity. I have not been present at a public execution, as the whole of my information about public executions was derived from a series of articles on them which I read in the Paris Matin. Mr. Frank Harris, discussing my book in "Vanity Fair," said it was clear that I had not seen an execution, (or words to that effect), and he proceeded to give his own description of an execution. It was a brief but terribly convincing bit of writing, quite characteristic and quite worthy of the author of "Montes the Matador" and of a man who has been almost everywhere and seen almost everything. I comprehended how far short I had fallen of the truth! I wrote to Mr. Frank Harris, regretting that his description had not been printed before I wrote mine, as I should assuredly have utilized it, and, of course, I admitted that I had never witnessed an execution. He simply replied: "Neither have I." This detail is worth preserving, for it is a reproof to that large body of readers, who, when a novelist has really carried conviction to them, assert off hand: "O, that must be autobiography!"

ARNOLD BENNETT

I have taken out a few sentences, but this is pretty much the whole preface.  I laughed out loud when I read “Neither have I.”  I hope you find it as amusing as I did.

Annamaria