I have quoted Quain's modest opinion of himself; naturally, that modesty did not define the boundaries of his thinking. Flaubert and Henry James have managed to persuade us that works of art are few and far between, and maddeningly difficult to compose, but the sixteenth century (we should recall the Voyage to Parnassus, we should recall the career of Shakespeare) did not share that disconsolate opinion. Nor did Herbert Quain. He believed that "great literature" is the commonest thing in the world, and that there was hardly a conversation in the street that did not attain those "heights." He also believed that the aesthetic act must contain some element of surprise, shock, astonishment—and that being astonished by rote is difficult, so he deplored with smiling sincerity "the servile, stubborn preservation of past and bygone books." ... I do not know whether that vague theory of his is justifiable or not; I do know that his books strive too greatly to astonish.
I deeply regret having lent to a certain lady, irrecoverably, the first book that Quain published. I have said that it was a detective story— The God of the Labyrinth; what a brilliant idea the publisher had, bringing it out in late November, 1933. In early December, the pleasant yet arduous convolutions of The Siamese Twin Mystery* gave London and New York a good deal of "gumshoe" work to do—in my view, the failure of our friend's work can be laid to that ruinous coincidence. (Though there is also the question—I wish to be totally honest—of its somewhat careless plotting and the hollow, frigid stiltedness of certain descriptions of the sea.) Seven years later, I cannot for the life of me recall the details of the plot, but this is the general scheme of it, impoverished (or purified) by my forgetfulness: There is an incomprehensible murder in the early pages of the book, a slow discussion in the middle, and a solution of the crime toward the end. Once the mystery has been cleared up, there is a long retrospective paragraph that contains the following sentence: Everyone believed that the chess players had met accidentally. That phrase allows one to infer that the solution is in fact in error, and so, uneasy, the reader looks back over the pertinent chapters and discovers another solution, which is the correct one. The reader of this remarkable book, then, is more perspicacious than the detective.
An even more heterodox work is the "regressive, ramifying fiction" April March, whose third (and single) section is dated 1936. No one, in assaying this novel, can fail to discover that it is a kind of game; it is legitimate, I should think, to recall that the author himself never saw it in any other light. "I have reclaimed for this novel," I once heard him say, "the essential features of every game: the symmetry, the arbitrary laws, the tedium." Even the name is a feeble pun: it is not someone's name, does not mean "a march [taken] in April," but literally April-March. Someone once noted that there is an echo of the doctrines of Dunne in the pages of this book; Quain's foreword prefers instead to allude to that backward-running world posited by Bradley, in which death precedes birth, the scar precedes the wound, and the wound precedes the blow (Appearance and Reality, 1897, p. 215). [1] But it is not the worlds proposed by April March that are regressive, it is the way the stories are told—regressively and ramifying, as I have said. The book is composed of thirteen chapters. The first reports an ambiguous conversation between several unknown persons on a railway station platform. The second tells of the events of the evening that precedes the first. The third, likewise retrograde, tells of the events of another, different, possible evening before the first; the fourth chapter relates the events of yet a third different possible evening. Each of these (mutually exclusive) "evenings-before" ramifies into three further "evenings-before," all quite different. The work in its entirety consists, then, of nine novels; each novel, of three long chapters. (The first chapter is common to all, of course.) Of those novels, one is symbolic; another, supernatural; another, a detective novel; another, psychological; another, a Communist novel; another, anti-Communist; and so on. Perhaps the following symbolic representation will help the reader understand the novel's structure:
With regard to this structure, it may be apposite to say once again what Schopenhauer said about Kant's twelve categories: "He sacrifices everything to his rage for symmetry." Predictably, one and another of the nine tales is unworthy of Quain; the best is not the one that Quain first conceived, x4 ; it is, rather, x9, a tale of fantasy. Others are marred by pallid jokes and instances of pointless pseudoexactitude. Those who read the tales in chronological order (e.g., x3 , y1, z) will miss the strange book's peculiar flavor. Two stories— x7 and x8 —have no particular individual value; it is their juxtaposition that makes them effective.... I am not certain whether I should remind the reader that after April March was published, Quain had second thoughts about the triune order of the book and predicted that the mortals who imitated it would opt instead for a binary scheme—
while the gods and demiurges had chosen an infinite one: infinite stories, infinitely branching.
Quite unlike April March, yet similarly retrospective, is the heroic two-act comedy The Secret Mirror. In the works we have looked at so far, a formal complexity hobbles the author's imagination; in The Secret Mirror, that imagination is given freer rein. The play's first (and longer) act takes place in the country home of General Thrale, C. I. E., near Melton Mowbray. The unseen center around which the plot revolves is Miss Ulrica Thrale, the general's elder daughter. Snatches of dialog give us glimpses of this young woman, a haughty Amazon-like creature; we are led to suspect that she seldom journeys to the realms of literature. The newspapers have announced her engagement to the duke of Rutland; the newspapers then report that the engagement is off. Miss Thrale is adored by a playwright, one Wilfred Quarles; once or twice in the past, she has bestowed a distracted kiss upon this young man. The characters possess vast fortunes and ancient blood-lines; their affections are noble though vehement; the dialog seems to swing between the extremes of a hollow grandiloquence worthy of Bulwer-Lytton and the epigrams of Wilde or Philip Guedalla. There is a nightingale and a night; there is a secret duel on the terrace. (Though almost entirely imperceptible, there are occasional curious contradictions, and there are sordid details.) The characters of the first act reappear in the second— under different names. The "playwright" Wilfred Quarles is a traveling salesman from Liverpool; his real name is John William Quigley. Miss Thrale does exist, though Quigley has never seen her; he morbidly clips pictures of her out of the Tatler or the Sketch. Quigley is the author of the first act; the implausible or improbable "country house" is the Jewish-Irish rooming house he lives in, transformed and magnified by his imagination.... The plot of the two acts is parallel, though in the second everything is slightly menacing—everything is put off, or frustrated. When The Secret Mirror first opened, critics spoke the names "Freud" and "Julian Green." In my view, the mention of the first of those is entirely unjustified.