November 1922

My name is Grindor, Clement Grindor, and it seems that I was once the son of a man who stood in the public eye. Paris with its carriages, its ladies and its thousand lights per second lay sweetly upon my brows like a garland of flowers.

Following the dollar O following the dollar I have learned three fashions of eating with the knife and ordered beer in four languages from a Hungarian waiter while following the dollar around the 48th degree of north latitude where it buys most there is the Fatherland

Man having created the concept of God The Creator, found himself unsatisfied. For despite the proven pragmatic value of this image, through which the fine arts of music and literature, of architecture, painting, and sculpture, together with the less fine arts of murder, thievery and general human exploitation, had been carried to great heights, there was still something unfulfilled: the impulse of curiosity in man was still hungry.

The thinning light Of afternoon Is over ripened wheatfields Shining to a thin skyline

It was indeed foreign type, — three printed sheets of ordinary notepaper, sewn together. It must have been printed secretly by some Russian printing-press abroad, and at first blush the pamphlet looked very much like a revolutionary leaflet. The heading read "From Stavrogin."

Certainly the modern English novel begins with that elaborate masterpiece, Tom Jones of Henry Fielding. And it seems to me that his genius is contained, on the whole, in that one book; in which he creates living people; the very soil is living. His hero is the typical sullen, selfish baseborn, stupid, sensual, easily seduced and adventurous youth, with whom his creator is mightily amused. The very Prefaces are full of humourous wisdom: copied, I suppose, from Montaigne.

Pile five leaves under each finger of your left hand — let each be a leaf you love. Then write on each a love-word — something tender;