The Editor
The Outsider
There is a question I have found myself returning to while assembling this issue, which is: what is it about the outsider that we find so irresistible?
Not the outcast, note — the unwilling exile, the misfit who would rather be in. The outsider is a different creature altogether. The outsider has looked at what's on offer and decided, firmly and without great anguish, that it isn't for them. They are constitutionally unsuited to the inside. They do not so much break the rules as find themselves mildly puzzled that the rules applied to them in the first place.
This issue is thick with them. Roger Casement, the Anglo-Irish diplomat turned Irish rebel, who served the British Empire faithfully enough to earn a knighthood, then recoiled from what he had seen in the Congo and Peru with enough force to end up on a charge of treason. A man so thoroughly outside every category that he managed to embarrass both sides of the Irish question simultaneously. Alain Delon, who was so far outside the normal bounds of human attractiveness that his own country could barely account for him — and who spent a lifetime deploying that strangeness with cool deliberation, never quite letting anyone in, including the camera.
Then there are Henrietta Moraes and Molly Parkin, London's magnificent bohemians, who occupied the raffish margins of the capital's mid-century arts scene not as a lifestyle choice so much as a natural consequence of who they were. Convention wasn't something they rebelled against. It simply didn't occur to them to apply it.
What draws us to these figures in books, I think, is the same thing that draws us to them in life: the faint, guilty suspicion that they might be living more honestly than the rest of us. That the rules we observe, and the fences we stay inside, are a little more arbitrary than we let ourselves admit.
The books in this issue will not help you live more recklessly. But they might, at least, make the inside feel slightly less self-evident.