A Fox Inside Read Free

assured evocations of the landscape and ambience of the western United States. Both feature brooding self-invented men with shadowy pasts, complex private schemes, and obsessively guarded weaknesses. Both of these men marry women they consider passive and pliable, though in this they are mistaken. Both books feature a mother who is monstrous and domineering, a ‘boss lady’ who has an almost vampiric effect on her offspring. And both also have a sort of Nick Carraway figure: one who is implicated in the main drama yet somehow forced to watch it from one remove, unable to wholly influence events or prevent bad things from happening.
    Sir Geoffrey Faber did express a couple of small concerns to Stacton in respect of A Fox Inside : firstly that ‘there isn’t a single character in it whom I could bring myself to like’ and secondly that there was ‘perhaps too much promiscuity for our puritanical [English] taste’. Stacton didn’t counter the second objection, perhaps thinking, quite reasonably, that English tastes were in the process of changing; but his response to the second was assured, indeed jaded by experience: ‘The people in A Fox Inside are, alas, the people around me in my teens, and very tiresome they all were too, though not without a certain charm … [But] A Fox Inside does indeed explain why I don’t care for California …’
    If the novel does indeed propose that a touch of evil lurks behind the pleasing façades of the San Francisco Bay area, then this is only one of its accomplishments. Reviewing it in 1954 V. S. Pritchett found A Fox Inside ‘mysterious and absorbing’, and asserted that ‘as a mystery story with marked psychological perceptions this one grips and pleases’. It is only the first of Faber Finds’ 2012 Stacton reissues; and mystery stories would be onlyone of the forms through which Stacton expressed his restless, protean gift. But we hope the reading of it will encourage you to delve deeper inside this quite extraordinary body of work.
    Richard T. Kelly
    Editor, Faber Finds
    April 2012 
Sources and Acknowledgements
    This introduction was prepared with kind assistance from Robert Brown, archivist at Faber and Faber, from Robert Nedelkoff, who has done more than anyone to encourage a renewed appreciation of Stacton, and from David R. Slavitt. It was much aided by reference to a biographical article written about Stacton by Joy Martin, his first cousin.

To J. McC.
who taught me much as a friend
and more as a teacher

What we steal destroys us. Thus the Spartan boy,
proper without, but with a fox inside.
    G ERTRUDE B ELL

I
    S AN FRANCISCO , C ALIFORNIA , 15 TH March 1953. The clouds had begun to part, as the louvres of an observatory slowly part, to reveal a cold and sparkling sky. There was a crisp snap in the air, so that if you were at a great height you would have seen the world in its separate compartments. Far to the south, beyond the last barrier hills that protected the city, lay the more opulent suburbs, quiet under their trees. The city itself was a drenched grid of red and yellow lights, inimical and strange. North of the city, across the black waters of the bay, and at the other end of the high- swinging red lacquer bridge, rose the sullen bulk of Mount Tamalpais, a little legendary in that air. Its foothills fell sheer to the dangerous water.
    The city seemed to sleep. Only the angry electric eye of the prison island of Alcatraz patrolled the darkness. But to the north, on the other and ocean side of the mountains, the long coastal sandbars were cluttered with week-end shacks. There it was less quiet. Even so, there was merely the restless sobbing of the sea and a few noisy drunks loitering outside the shanty dance pavilions at Stinson Beach. Stinson Beach was lower middle class and sometimes wild.
    Farther north, and much more respectable, was thebrackish lagoon of Bolinas, the ocean swirling through a breach in its spit to snap at a dissolving cliff which rose