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.
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