Tono Bungay | Page 2

he began. I was, you might say,
the stick of his rocket; and after our tremendous soar, after he had
played with millions, a golden rain in the sky, after my bird's-eye view
of the modern world, I fell again, a little scarred and blistered perhaps,
two and twenty years older, with my youth gone, my manhood eaten in
upon, but greatly edified, into this Thames-side yard, into these white
heats and hammerings, amidst the fine realites of steel--to think it all
over in my leisure and jot down the notes and inconsecutive
observations that make this book. It was more, you know, than a
figurative soar. The zenith of that career was surely our flight across the
channel in the Lord Roberts B....
I warn you this book is going to be something of an agglomeration. I
want to trace my social trajectory (and my uncle's) as the main line of
my story, but as this is my first novel and almost certainly my last, I
want to get in, too, all sorts of things that struck me, things that amused
me and impressions I got--even although they don't minister directly to
my narrative at all. I want to set out my own queer love experiences too,
such as they are, for they troubled and distressed and swayed me
hugely, and they still seem to me to contain all sorts of irrational and
debatable elements that I shall be the clearer-headed for getting on
paper. And possibly I may even flow into descriptions of people who
are really no more than people seen in transit, just because it amuses
me to recall what they said and did to us, and more particularly how
they behaved in the brief but splendid glare of Tono-Bungay and its

still more glaring offspring. It lit some of them up, I can assure you!
Indeed, I want to get in all sorts of things. My ideas of a novel all
through are comprehensive rather than austere....
Tono-Bungay still figures on the hoardings, it stands in rows in every
chemist's storeroom, it still assuages the coughs of age and brightens
the elderly eye and loosens the elderly tongue; but its social glory, its
financial illumination, have faded from the world for ever. And I, sole
scorched survivor from the blaze, sit writing of it here in an air that is
never still for the clang and thunder of machines, on a table littered
with working drawings, and amid fragments of models and notes about
velocities and air and water pressures and trajectories--of an altogether
different sort from that of Tono-Bungay.
II
I write that much and look at it, and wonder whether, after all, this is
any fair statement of what I am attempting in this book. I've given, I see,
an impression that I want to make simply a hotch-potch of anecdotes
and experiences with my uncle swimming in the middle as the largest
lump of victual. I'll own that here, with the pen already started, I realise
what a fermenting mass of things learnt and emotions experienced and
theories formed I've got to deal with, and how, in a sense, hopeless my
book must be from the very outset. I suppose what I'm really trying to
render is nothing more nor less than Life--as one man has found it. I
want to tell--MYSELF, and my impressions of the thing as a whole, to
say things I have come to feel intensely of the laws, traditions, usages,
and ideas we call society, and how we poor individuals get driven and
lured and stranded among these windy, perplexing shoals and channels.
I've got, I suppose, to a time of life when things begin to take on shapes
that have an air of reality, and become no longer material for dreaming,
but interesting in themselves. I've reached the criticising, novel-writing
age, and here I am writing mine--my one novel--without having any of
the discipline to refrain and omit that I suppose the regular novel-writer
acquires.
I've read an average share of novels and made some starts before this
beginning, and I've found the restraints and rules of the art (as I made

them out) impossible for me. I like to write, I am keenly interested in
writing, but it is not my technique. I'm an engineer with a patent or two
and a set of ideas; most of whatever artist there is in me has been given
to turbine machines and boat building and the problem of flying, and
do what I will I fail to see how I can be other than a lax, undisciplined
story-teller. I must sprawl and flounder, comment and theorise, if I am
to get the thing out I have in mind. And it isn't a constructed tale I have
to tell, but