1970: Introduction
Arthur Frederick Blandy, D.Phil. (Syd.), sometime Fellow in Genealogical Studies
I have been asked—though by whom precisely I shall not presently recall; it may have been the publishers, or a man purporting to be one—to write a few prefatory remarks to this curious volume, The Little Book of Fitzartur Foibles, now finding itself, heaven help it, in print nearly seventy years after its first conception in the smoke-room at Mallard House. I recall, vaguely but with great conviction, that it had already been described then as “unfinished”. So much for progress.
It will, I suspect, strike certain readers—those who read with their eyebrows and not with their imaginations—that the work is uneven. Others, to show that they have read it at all, will murmur “over-intelligent,” while a small but no less tiresome contingent will call it “under-motivated”. They may even, in a fit of adjectival mischief, dredge up the worn-out trio: whimsical, discursive, or that most damning faint praise of all—self-indulgent. One must admire their industry. I, too, have been industrious in my time, though chiefly in polishing the Duke’s boots and occasionally his anecdotes when they threatened to become too recognisably his own.
Yet one cannot, as I have often said to no one in particular, account for taste, still less for criticism. It may, however, be that these estimable readers have simply missed the vital clue—as those unaccustomed to clues so often do. For this, ladies and gentlemen, is not a book to be understood—at least not in any straightforward sense. Fitzartur, and indeed the entire line of Mallardian Dukes, have never been troubled by the vulgarity of transparency. They spoke in riddles as they lived in riddles; their very portraits are enigmas disguised as oil paintings. To read them aright, one must learn to look sidelong.
Permit me, though I am no logician (merely a man who once knew where the silver was kept), to propose that The Little Book of Fitzartur Foibles is precisely as it must be. Its irregularities are not deficiencies, but inheritances: the hereditary lurch of the Mallard temperament, half genius and half distraction. Those who complain of incoherence must understand—it is the family style. Nothing in Mallard House ever ran in a straight line, not the corridors, not the accounts, and least of all the conversations.
I was, if memory serves—and memory, like the Mallards, prefers to be selective—a minor attendant in those days: valet, part-time librarian, accidental correspondent. The Duke’s habit was to dictate to whomever was within reach, often while standing knee-deep in the fountain or muttering over a misplaced chess piece. My task was to transcribe. Unfortunately, His Grace’s concept of sequence was not my own. Thus entire paragraphs were delivered in what he called “a temporal shuffle,” and the resulting text, even after all these years and revisions, retains that noble disorder.
So when the fastidious reader wrinkles his brow and pronounces the book whimsical, he pays, without knowing it, the highest of compliments. When the obtuse reviewer protests its self-indulgence, I would invite him to consider what other type of indulgence could possibly suit a Duke. Were the House of Mallard to have produced something lean, lucid, and disciplined, it would have been a national calamity—like a swan taking up clerical work.
Indeed, one might say that the Mallards never cared to be understood because they were never quite certain of having understood themselves. Their reign—if reign it may be called, for titles today are as threadbare as the tapestries they once guarded—was a long experiment in being misunderstood with grace. This book, then, is no aberration but a faithful continuation of that tradition.
You, dear reader, may feel lost from time to time. Take comfort. So did we all in Mallard House. I recall entire weeks in which even the Duke appeared to have lost sight of his own premises, in both the geographical and philosophical sense. Yet, somehow, order emerged—or, more properly, the illusion of order emerged, which is often all that civilisation requires.
Should you close this book and wonder whether its author has succeeded or failed, I would suggest that you have framed the wrong question. The Mallards do not succeed; they persist. Fitzartur did not write to explain, only to record the elegant entropy of his family and to hear, by echo, the sound of his own lineage unraveling. If you sense that refrain—half melancholic, half amused—you have caught, however briefly, the tone of the house and the habit of its masters.
As for me, I remain, as ever, unqualified either to praise or to condemn. I simply dust the words, set them straight upon the shelf, and step quietly out of the room. Should any confusion linger (and I pray it does), remember: confusion is the proper condition of anyone who has dined with a Duke more than once.
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