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My uncle astonished me by losing his temper. "Damn it. George, you don't seem to see I'm serious! You're always sneering at Tono-Bungay! As though it was some sort of swindle. It was perfec'ly legitimate trade, perfec'ly legitimate. Good value and a good article.... When I come up here and tell you plans and exchange idees you sneer at me. You do. You don't see it's a big thing. It's a big thing.
That all this fine appearance was already sapped, that there were forces at work that might presently carry all this elaborate social system in which my mother instructed me so carefully that I might understand my "place," to Limbo, had scarcely dawned upon me even by the time that Tono-Bungay was fairly launched upon the world.
Tono-Bungay shouted at me from a hoarding near Adelphi Terrace; I saw it afar off near Carfax Street; it cried out again upon me in Kensington High Street, and burst into a perfect clamour; six or seven times I saw it as I drew near my diggings. It certainly had an air of being something more than a dream. Yes, I thought it over thoroughly enough.... Trade rules the world.
In The New Machiavelli, as in Tono-Bungay and other books, he tells the story of the rapidly evolving world in which his heroes have grown up; of the ever-spreading suburbs stretching out their tentacles north and south and east and west, of the mushroom houses which arose without order or system, of the changing system of education, the changing ideas towards parents everything spasmodic, growing, muddled.
She conceived a high opinion of Tono-Bungay and took it in all forms and large quantities so long as I knew her. It didn't seem to do her any harm. And she kept the girls going quite wonderfully. My uncle's last addition to the Tono-Bungay group was the Tono-Bungay Mouthwash.
Presently the rapid development of Tono-Bungay began to take me into the provinces, and I would be away sometimes for a week together. This she did not like; it left her "dull," she said, but after a time she began to go to Smithie's again and to develop an independence of me. At Smithie's she was now a woman with a position; she had money to spend.
As I turn over the big pile of manuscript before me certain things become clearer to me, and particularly the immense inconsequences of my experiences. It is, I see now that I have it all before me, a story of activity and urgency and sterility. I have called it Tono-Bungay, but I had far better have called it Waste.
'Mong other things, all our people would be out of work. Unemployed! I grant you Tono-Bungay MAY be not QUITE so good a find for the world as Peruvian bark, but the point is, George it MAKES TRADE! And the world lives on trade. Commerce! A romantic exchange of commodities and property. Romance. 'Magination. See? You must look at these things in a broad light. Look at the wood and forget the trees!
He produced a picture of two beavers with a subtle likeness, he said, to myself and my uncle the likeness to my uncle certainly wasn't half bad and they were bottling rows and rows of Tono-Bungay, with the legend "Modern commerce." It certainly wouldn't have sold a case, though he urged it on me one cheerful evening on the ground that it would "arouse curiosity."
But there are many threads in George Ponderevo's life that were not immediately intertwined with the Tono-Bungay career, and his love for Beatrice Normanby touches in quite another manner on the sex problem opened in Ann Veronica. In both these books the story is the essential thing, and the attack upon social conditions is relatively indirect.
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