Doctor’s Orders or Why I Am Doing This

When I completed The Big Fisherman, a year ago, I announced that I would never attempt another novel, a statement that won for me the first applause I had ever heard from my more ruthless critics.

I was very tired. The long story had occupied my mind for five years. I was seventy-one, badly crippled with arthritis, sick-abed much of the time; and when, on the last page, Simon Peter died, I half envied him.

For a few weeks I rejoiced in my freedom. I had been out of one novel and into another for twenty years. There was nothing more that I wanted to say. Now I would have plenty of leisure to read many neglected books and write to many neglected friends.

But my retirement hasn’t been as much fun as I had hoped. I have had more time to reflect upon my aches and pains. I am restless and unhappy. It has been hard on my relatives too who have tried unsuccessfully to entertain me.

My physician now advises that if I don’t want to go to bed for keeps, to say nothing of the risk of driving my loved ones crazy, I had better get back to work: I must write something, anything! My family and my publishers have suggested a book of reminiscences.

It had never occurred to me that I might do such a thing. My life story lacks drama. I was never in battle, never in jail. I was never a crusader, never headed a movement, and was equally unskillful at swinging a gavel or a golf club. I was not an athlete nor much of a scholar. I never sought a public office and nobody ever suggested that I should.

If this writing should turn out to be a book; and if you should buy or borrow it, you cannot complain that you weren’t warned in advance that it was not written to entertain, educate, or inspire anybody. It is simply an exercise in occupational therapy. It is what the doctor ordered.

—THE AUTHOR