The Aristos - A Self Portrait In Ideas

This book was first published against the advice of almost everyone who read it. I was told that it would do my ‘image’ no good; and I am sure that my belief that a favourable ‘image’ is conceivably not of any great human – or literary – significance would have counted for very little if I had not had a best-selling novel behind me. I used that ‘success’ to issue this ‘failure’, and so I face a charge of unscrupulous obstinacy. To the obstinacy I must plead guilty, but not to lack of scruple; for I was acting only in accordance with what I had written. My chief concern, in The Aristos is to preserve the freedom of the individual against all those pressures-to-conform that threaten our century; one of those pressures, put upon all of us, but particularly on anyone who comes into public notice, is that of labelling a person by what he gets money and fame for – by what other people most want to use him as. To call a man a plumber is to describe one aspect of him, but it is also to obscure a number of others. I am a writer; I want no more specific prison than that I express myself in printed words. So a prime personal reason for this book was to announce that I did not intend to walk into the cage labelled ‘novelist’. Aristos is taken from the ancient Greek. It is singular and means roughly ‘the best for a given situation’.

[From the Author's Preface to the second edition of 1968, as reproduced in the New American Library edition of 1970]