Parrot and Olivier in America (56 page)

Look, it is daylight. There are no sansculottes, nor will there ever be again. There is no tyranny in America, nor ever could be. Your horrid visions concerning fur traders are groundless. The great ignoramus will not be elected. The illiterate will never rule. Your bleak certainty that there can be no art in a democracy is unsupported by the truth.

You are wrong, dear sir, and the proof that you are wrong is here, in my jumbled life, for I was your servant and became your friend. I was your employee and am now truly your progenitor, by which I mean that you were honestly MADE IN NEW YORK by a footman and a rogue. I mean that all these words, these blemishes and tears, this darkness, this unreliable history--although written pretty much as well as could be done in London--was cobbled together by me, jumped-up John Larrit, at Harlem Heights, and given to our compositor on May 10, 1837.

Acknowledgments

THIS NOVEL BEGAN when I read Alexis de Tocqueville's prescient
Democracy in America
. In the following three years I was nourished by a hundred other works, most notably George Wilson Pierson's
Tocqueville in America
, Andre Jardin's
Tocqueville
, and Hugh Brogan's delightful
Alexis de Tocqueville
, which was published just in the nick of time. The author's debt to Tocqueville himself will be obvious to scholars who will detect, squirreled away among the thatch of sentences, distinctive threads, necklaces of words that were clearly made by the great man himself. The very fanciful use I have made of these artifacts may not suit everyone, but as the world of Tocqueville seems to be filled with dissenting voices, it may not be inappropriate for a novelist to assume a minor place in the back row of that full-throated choir.

Naturally I read a great deal other than Tocqueville, and there are some who have recommended that I provide a bibliography, an instrument that seems as useful to the reader of a novel as a hammer is to a dolphin. Nonetheless I have posted a list of those books I remember reading while I worked. This is on my Web site at
www.petercareybooks.com
.

Finally, it is a pleasure to thank Frances Coady, Sonny Mehta, Ben Ball, Angus Cargill, Diana Coglianese, Meredith Rose, Lydia Buechler, Jean Marc Devocelle, Gabriel Packard, Vanessa Manko, Francoise Mouly, Ivan and Claude Nabokov, Lucy Neave, Ruth Scurr, Paul Kane, Patrick McGrath and Maria Aiken, Stewart Waltzer, Mike Wallace, David Rankin, Grant Hamston at the State Library of Victoria, and David Smith at the New York Public Library.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Carey received the Booker Prize for
Oscar and Lucinda
and again for
True History of the Kelly Gang
. His other honors include the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Born in Australia, he has lived in New York City for twenty years, where he is now the executive director of the Hunter College MFA program in creative writing.

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright (c) 2009 by Peter Carey

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.aaknopf.com

Originally published in Australia by Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Group (Australia) Camberwell, in 2009.

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Illustrations credits:
celerifere:
Mary Evans Picture Library;
Liberty Leading the People
by Eugene Delacroix,
Imagno/Getty Images; T. J. Maslen's map reproduced courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carey, Peter, date.
Parrot and Olivier in America / by Peter Carey. -- 1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59301-6
1. Aristocracy (Social class)--France--Fiction.
2. French--America--Fiction. 3. Voyages and travels--Fiction. 4. Master and servant--Fiction. 5. Male friendship--Fiction. 6. America--Fiction. I. Title.
PR9619.3.c36p37 2010
823'.914--dc22 2009047435

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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