Joseph Conrad was 38, more than halfway through his life, when his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, was published in 1895. He died in 1924 with more than 30 books to his name. A good enough rate of production, you might think. An astonishing one actually, if you are to believe him. ‘Full 3 weeks’, he wrote to his friend Galsworthy in 1911, ‘— no consecutive ideas, no six consecutive words to be found anywhere in the world. I would prefer a red hot gridiron to that cold blankness.’
The gloom wasn’t new: ‘The sight of a pen and an inkwell fills me with anger and horror.’ Or again:
I sit down for eight hours every day and sitting down is all. In the course of that working day of eight hours I write three sentences which I erase before leaving the table in despair.
As his friend Ford Madox Ford remarked with characteristic insouciance, ‘Conrad spent a day finding the mot juste; then killed it.’ Nevertheless the books got written; and it seems improbable that Conrad would have exchanged the struggle against which he inveighed for the facility that allowed Edgar Wallace to dictate a novel over a weekend. Still one feels he must often have resented Ford who would play a few games of patience and then reel off a couple of thousand words, with the same apparent ease that he engaged in conversation. Very good words too.
It’s a matter of temperament, I suppose. There are writers who would not be happy if the stuff came easily. They couldn’t believe it was any good. Suffering the agony of creation is for them a necessary part of the game. How Conrad must have growled if he read Trollope’s autobiography:
I finished on Thursday the novel I was writing. On Friday I started another. Nothing really frightens me but the idea of enforced idleness. As long as I can write books, even though they be not published, I think I can be happy.
And as for Wodehouse, Conrad would have howled, as he did when his gout was bad, to read this: ‘I love writing. I never feel really comfortable unless I am either actually writing or have a story going.’
None of this proves anything, which is always an agreeable reflection. The ease or difficulty of writing has nothing to do with the quality of the work. In any case, given that imaginative writers are by the nature of the trade liars, one should always greet anything they say about their work with some scepticism. William Faulkner for example spoke of the writer’s ‘dream’, and said, ‘it anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything must go by the board.’
Well, Faulkner is a great novelist, perhaps the greatest of American novelists, but when he speaks of this ‘anguish’, it sits ill with the impression his best work conveys, which is that you are listening to a story told in rambling but cunning style, going back and forward in time, by a man in a rocking-chair on the porch of his house with a jug of corn liquor by his side and a good cigar in his mouth.
For many it’s the getting down to work that is the problem. Few of us are as happily formed as Scott or Trollope, both of whom rose with the lark and got straight to their work (though Scott described his as his ‘task’). Some will do almost anything, pleasant or unpleasant as the case may be, in order to put off the moment when they have to settle at their desk and confront the blank sheet or screen.
Hemingway recommended that when you are working on a novel you should start the working day by reading over what you have already written, or the last few chapters at least. Good advice, this, especially the qualification, for you could scarcely expect Tolstoy to read over all there was so far of War and Peace before settling to write, say, chapter 55. In theory, and often in practice, reading what you have already written gets you into the mood, the right vein, and so enables you to continue. That’s fine if it reads well. But what if the prose seems leaden, the characters dim and the action slow? What do you do then? Blame it on your mood this morning and hope it may read better tomorrow? Or howl like a dog? Probably the best thing is to remember that at some stage in the writing of a novel, it has always seemed a mistake, but you have to keep on going and you may find, as you did in the past, that after all things come right.
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