Foreword by Howard Nemerov
It must be ten or a dozen years now since Dick Moore asked me to
read this tale of a mouse and tell him--Dick, not the mouse--what
I thought of it, and, if I thought well enough, to use my immense
authority in the world of letters to help get it published.
I hesitated a bit--as which of us wouldn't, Reader, on being
invited to read an epic in five books written by a mouse in
trimeter couplets?--but if hesitation was the first response
curiosity was the next and wouldn't leave me alone; what did this
mouse have to relate that was so remarkable?
The first thing that I found on reading was that this mouse--who
must remain nameless for now, as his name is not revealed until
Book Three--was continuously interesting and wrote his trimeter
couplets as well as most, with a somewhat byronic ingenuity at
finding some of the most horrifying rimes yet known to mice or
men. Byron had done as ill and well as to match "intellectual"
with "henpecked you all" and "Euxine" (the Black Sea) with
"passenger e'er pukes in," and Moore's Mouse does quite as well,
or ill. Besides, this mouse had lived a life much more
adventurous and exciting and essentially critical than my own, a
quest for learning, love, truth and freedom prescriptive for the
growth of a mouse's mind and winding up, as other such journeys
have done, with life eternal achieved at last though as usual not
quite distinguishable from death, or dream.
The fact that I willingly offered my immense authority in the
world of letters to help get the poem published may not all by
itself be responsible for its having all these ten or a dozen
years remained unpublished; my powers, though great, are not all
that great. Indeed, as I remember it, it was only the mere three
publishers I thought my influence might be greatest with that
turned it down; were they men, we wondered, or mice?
But now the poem exists in the immortality of print, having
overcome even my help in making it to that state; imitating in
this respect, perhaps, the mouse himself, who in winning through
to a place among the stars successfully transcended (a) family,
(b) wife, (c) literary criticism, and (d) his Mouse, or Muse.
Reader, may you find as thoughtful a pleasure as I did, years ago
and now, in this tale of a tail about the sewers we build our
cathedrals on. If even a mouse may not merely survive but
prevail, what of ourselves? I think that we in the most advanced
society the world has ever known must acknowledge as deep an
affinity with the soul of a rodent as we did once before, when we
erected Disneyland upon the fortunes of a pair of mice.
Howard Nemerov
12 iii 78
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