So much for Nazis and me.
If I'd been born in Germany, I suppose I would have been a Nazi, bopping Jews and gypsies and Poles around, leaving boots sticking out of snowbanks, warming myself with my secretly virtuous insides. So it goes.
There's another clear moral to this tale, now that I think about it: When you're dead you're dead.
And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It's good for you.
Iowa City, 1966
Editor's Note
In preparing this, the American edition of the confessions of Howard W. Campbell, Jr., I have had to deal with writings concerned with more than mere informing or deceiving, as the case may be. Campbell was a writer as well as a person accused of extremely serious crimes, a one-time playwright of moderate reputation. To say that he was a writer is to say that the demands of art alone were enough to make him lie, and to lie without seeing any harm in it. To say that he was a playwright is to offer an even harsher warning to the reader, for no one is a better liar than a man who has warped lives and passions onto something as grotesquely artificial as a stage.
And, now that I've said that about lying, I will risk the opinion that lies told for the sake of artistic effect. In the theater, for instance, and in Campbell's confessions, perhaps — can be, in a higher sense, the most beguiling forms of truth.
I don't care to argue the point my duties as an editor are in no sense polemic. They are simply to pass on, in the most satisfactory style, the confessions of Campbell.
As for my own tinkerings with the text, they are few. I have corrected some spelling, removed some exclamation points, and all the italics are mine.