TO AUBERON WAUGH

La Résidence des Fleurs, | Avenue Pasteur, | 06 Antibes. | 25 November, 1969

My dear Auberon,

Thank you for your amusing review in The Spectator, but I must protest against your statement that the CIA had employed a man full-time for twenty years to track down a stolen Old Master. As far as I can make out from reading the book he had been employed on this job for less than a year. You were quite right to guess the dénouement on page 16 – that was the page where I intended the reader to guess. I wonder where you got that idea about the CIA man.¹⁵

Affectionately,
Graham

P.S. Here is a technical point which may interest you as a novelist. I had to choose whether Pulling’s mother should be a mystery to him or to the reader or to both. I decided that there would be very little interest in the mystery, and it’s not a very important part of the book, if it remained a mystery to the reader. Therefore I hoped that the reader would guess on page 16 and there would remain the minor interest of when Pulling would guess. Pulling, in fact, of course, guesses long before he refers to her as mother at the end. He begins to realize the situation after the scene with Miss Paterson and in the prison cell he is mainly checking up on the dates to see whether his impression is a true one or not. Perhaps he would never have disclosed his knowledge if he hadn’t had the imperative desire to draw his mother’s attention after the discovery of Wordsworth’s death. Imagine how different the book would have had to have been if the mystery had been kept from the reader. The mystery would have loomed larger and larger and become much too important. Like in a murder story one would have had to have sown the tale with false clues. Unlike the detective story where the detective must be in advance of the reader, it was essential here that the reader should be in advance of the detective.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 818