This book, owing to censorship, which has a vogue in America as indiscriminate as all such enforcements of law must be, has been expurgated. Where such measures have been thought necessary, asterisks have been employed, thus making it matter for no speculation where sense, continuity, and beauty have been damaged.
That the public may, in our time, see at least a part of the face of creation (which it is not allowed to view as a whole it has been thought the better part of valour, by both author and publisher, to make this departure, showing plainly where the war, so blindly waged on the written word, has left its mark.
Hithertofore the public has been offered literature only after it was no longer literature. Or so murdered and so discreetly bound in linens that those regarding it have seldom, if ever, been aware, or discovered, that that which they took for an original was indeed a reconstruction.
In the case of Ryder they are permitted to see the havoc of this nicety, and what its effects are on the work of imagination.
Djuna Barnes
Paris, August 8, 1927
by BinstonBirchill