Preface

This book is not, in the usual sense, the work of an author. It is the work of many hands — some of them named in the contents, some of them named in no contents anywhere — and the work that I, its assembler, have done on their behalf is the work of a custodian rather than a writer. The materials gathered here came to me over a period of years and from a variety of channels. A short story arrived by post in an envelope with no return address. A memoir, written in an upstairs room in Vermont between 2003 and 2005, was donated to a university library in 2019 by the daughter of its author and was permitted, by her, to circulate; she read these pages, in draft, and made one small correction. A folder of leaked documents — some bureaucratic, some apparently genuine, some, in my own private judgment, neither — was left at my office in the autumn of last year by a woman who asked me not to identify her even to myself. There are letters here that were donated to a county historical society in the 1990s and that I obtained, by polite request, from the archivist of that society. There are postcards whose addressee preferred not to be named, although the addressee can be inferred. There is a transcription of an audio tape that has been in restricted custody for nearly four decades and that I will not say how I obtained.

Some of these readers will treat the contents as fiction. They are entitled to that reading. The book is composed of materials some of which appear to be fictional and some of which appear to be the records of events that did, by the standards of a record, happen. I have declined to settle the question on the reader’s behalf. It is not the editor’s part to tell the reader which sentences to believe. I will say only that I have considered the question myself, at length, over a period of years; that I have not arrived at an answer; and that I have come to consider the question secondary to the question of whether the materials, taken together, are doing what I take them to be doing — which is to describe, from a great many angles and in a great many registers, a structure that no single witness could describe from one angle alone.

The materials are presented in approximately the order in which I gathered them, which turned out, after some shuffling, to be also the order in which they read most coherently — although I will not pretend the two orderings were independent. A book of this kind is shaped by the hand that assembles it. I have tried to keep my hand light. The chapters are titled. Some chapters contain only one document; some contain a sequence. Where I have intervened, in the small editor’s notes that introduce certain documents, I have done so to provide provenance only, and I have tried to keep my own voice subordinate to the voices that follow.

I decline, here and throughout, to identify the editor by name. The reasons are partly practical and partly aesthetic. The practical reason is that several of the contributors asked, as a condition of their material, that the editor be unnamed; it would not be fair to them to honor the condition selectively. The aesthetic reason is that a book of this shape does not benefit from an authoritative custodian. The reader who needs to know who I am will not be helped by knowing. The reader who does not need to know who I am will be helped by my keeping out of the way.

A small instruction, then, before the first chapter. The book has a sequence and the sequence does some work — the easier chapters open the door for the harder ones, and the harder chapters earn the easier ones the gravity they need. But the connections that the book is most interested in are not the connections the sequence makes. They are the connections that the reader will make, in the reader’s own head, between a sentence on page eleven and a sentence on page two hundred and forty-seven. Those connections are not in the book. They cannot be put in the book. They occur only at the level of the reading mind that holds the whole of it at once.

Read in order or out of it. The connections happen in your head. The book accepts both readings.

— The Editor