“For all you know that might have been the reason why I let Pip think that I hadn’t seen the blinking letter,” I said. “The poor kid was worried to death about it.”
“M’m,” said Constance. “I’d nearly believe it if you hadn’t said it that way. I can always tell when you want me to believe something that isn’t true, because you always put it in a round-about way.”
“Constance,” I said, “sometimes I think you are diabolically inspired.”
“I wish I were,” said Constance. “It would be useful when I have to live with a husband like the one I’ve got.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “perhaps if you were to tell me what improvements you would like effected in the old fashioned model you own at present, I might endeavor to bring them about.”
Constance thought deeply. At least, she pretended to.
“I ought really to have notice of a question like that,” she said at length. “It goes too deep to be trifled with. But I’ll do my best. I’d like a husband who was good looking, rich, amiable, never kept a secret from his wife, never let her believe anything that wasn’t true, and never arranged things so that she had to tell lies just to keep him in countenance.”
That kept me quiet for a long time.
Chapter XI
“You needn’t sit there,” said Constance, “trying to think out something funny to tell me about the kind of wife you’d like to have. If you do I’ll scream.”
There was that in her tone which showed me that matters were serious. I went round to her and tried to comfort her, but she shook me off.
“Please don’t, old thing,” she said. “Or I really will scream. Men always seem to think that when every blessed thing in the universe has been going wrong all day they have only to hold your hand or pat you on the shoulder or something to put it all right. Generally it only makes things worse. Mrs. Black comes and finds us in bed and acts hatefully all day; I get a letter which doesn’t belong to me; I nearly make a fool of myself with Kitty Fisher while you’re enjoying yourself up in town, and then when you come home and I want to quarrel with you, you nearly let me!”
I could only keep silent. There was nothing else to do.
“And then you stand there looking worried and dithering with your cigarette. Dear, if you don’t go right away from me and leave me to myself to get over my troubles in my own way something serious will happen. Go into your own room and pretend you’re doing some work or something, and I’ll sit here and do sewing and—and I’ll read The Light That Failed and cry over it and then perhaps I’ll be all right. Oh, go away, do!”
And so I went, and for lack of anything better to do I have been bringing this ridiculous diary up to date.
It is a good thing that at present I am not engaged upon a novel or anything serious like that; if I were all this trouble of the last week or so would have gravely interrupted the writing of it. People always seem to think that authors always lead the wildest and most rackety life conceivable, and then when they are not producing masterpieces they are getting drunk at the Café Royal. I have been to the Café Royal; I have been drunk at the Café Royal, but I neither make a habit of it nor find it any help in my work. In fact, drinking costs me twice as much as it does other people because not only do I have to pay for the drinks but they cost me about the same amount in after effects on my work.
The dithering women one meets at parties invariably change their expression when they hear that I write books. They picture me living in a Bloomsbury garret and think that in order to come to the party I have to go round and borrow a shirt from some more sensible fellow who does not write books. At any moment during conversation with me they either expect me to propose elopement or else to dispense with even this formality. They are obviously sympathetic toward Constance; of course, because I am an author I am unfaithful to her three times a week. It is a sort of sympathy which makes Constance feel like cutting throats. In fact, they are hugely disappointed when they learn that I live in quite a nice little flat quite nicely furnished, with a nice little wife, and that I positively dislike outraging elderly spinsters.
And yet there was a time, I do not deny, when it was useful to have a reputation which covered a multitude of sins. Even then the reputation had all it could do. Some of the folks who knew me in those days still try occasionally to tell Constance about them, and are shocked when she tells them that she has not the least desire to hear about my horrible past, and that she considers it the worst of bad taste to tell her about it. Four mad, hectic, joyous years following the war. Nowadays I am not so fond of staying up late.
From the Army I drifted into advertising, which is amusing if not dignified. And from advertising, I drifted into publishing, after a bitter period when I had to live on my books. Barabbas was a publisher. Regarding advertising there is a story told of a man who met an old friend whom he had not seen for a long time.
“Hullo, old man,” he said, “you’re looking prosperous. What are you doing now?”
The other glanced furitively from side to side and then whispered behind his hand.
“The fact is,” he said, “I’m in advertising, but I don’t want my poor old mother to get to know about it. She only thinks I’m playing the piano in a disorderly house.”
Nowadays I wonder whether there is any trade or profession which has no story to tell against itself, and which is only told by one member of it to another and only revealed to outsiders by base betrayers such as myself.
Nevertheless there is no profession which so fascinates while it exasperates as that of letters. The time is past when authors deliberately wore ridiculous clothes and could not let six words pass their lips without some reference to art and to their own peculiar temperament. Authors now look more like bank clerks—unintellectual ones—and their shabbiness, if they are shabby, is the result of circumstances, and not of choice. But for all that the wretched man who writes books is marked out from his fellows. When he is actually engaged upon one he is unhappy and highly self-contained, and when he is not he is unhappy because he thinks he ought to be writing another. The only time when he knows pure unadulterated happiness is when he is approaching the end of a book. When he knows that another ten days’ work will finish it off for him, and before he realizes that even in this book he has not said exactly what he wanted to say. In prospect, the last forty pages of any book are the best stuff that has ever been written, in that they are destined to say everything that has so far been left unsaid—at least, so the author thinks until he comes to read them over after finishing the book. Then he believes that they are unbearable nonsense, but he doesn’t mind very much because he is at last relieved of the task of turning out his daily thousand words. The uninitiated believe that the author suddenly has what they call an “inspiration” and that he rushes home and ruffles his hair the wrong way and plunges into a pile of manuscript paper whence he emerges a few days later pale with toil and with his digestion disorganized through an unvaried diet of black coffee and with the manuscript finished—a masterpiece.
What really happens is that the author finds himself turning over some germ of an idea in his mind until at last it begins to bother him, and until his incurable optimism (no one could be an author unless he were self-deceptive or an optimist) convinces him that there is in the idea the making of a good book. Then one black day he sits down and writes, “Page I, Chapter I” and the trouble starts. Then for months that idea haunts him and nags at him and frets him and presents itself to him in a hundred Protean forms, while every day he begins to loathe the book and the characters in it with a hatred which increases steadily.
Page one becomes page fifty quite quickly. But from there onward the pages seem to pass more slowly every day. Ten pages more when you have only done ten doubles the amount done and enables you to tell yourself that you have a fifteenth part of the book done where previously you had only one thirtieth, but ten pages more when you have done seventy does not seem to increase the amount done and makes no pe
rceptible difference to the fraction. It is only when the end is at last in sight that there is any relief from the bother of it all. So that the author’s temper grows steadily shorter and shorter until at last he becomes positively unbearable. Take the case of Bisgood.
Bisgood was (and for that matter still is) quite a good author in a sound, bread-and-butter sort of way. He has excellent working ideas on construction and on style, and he has fair taste. His novels are nothing striking but they invariably go into a third edition and bring him in a moderate income.
Now one day Bisgood fell in love, and, being a serious sort of fellow, he fell in love seriously. I was never able to see what attracted him, for Dorothy Hardcastle was just the ordinary sort of girl without more than two ideas; she had no money and her literary taste was perfectly deplorable.
One day I ran across Bisgood after I had not seen him for some time, and in the course of conversation I asked him how Dorothy was.
“She’s fine,” said Bisgood. But there was more to come, I could see. Bisgood hesitated a moment and then went on—“She’s started a novel.”
“Dear, dear,” I said.
One of the lesser trials of authors is that people they meet who wrote prize essays at school and that sort of thing are always casually saying that they think they’ll knock off a book or two to make a bit of money in their spare time, and could they give them a few tips on the best way to approach publishers. But that is not so bad as when they ask you to read their efforts. If you tell them the truth about them they are insulted, and if you take what happens to be the easy course and tell lies they promptly ask you for introductions to enable them to publish. So that I could see that Bisgood was in for a bad time if the girl he loved was starting to write.
“She’s got quite a good plot to work on,” said Bisgood. “The trouble is, of course, that her style is a little bit unformed.
I thought that not unlikely.
“I suppose you’re advising her about it,” I said.
“I am,” said Bisgood.
“And you’re finding it rather a strain?”
Bisgood lied loyally.
“Of course, I’m not. Dorothy is very receptive. All I do is to run through the stuff with her, and then when I find a passage that might be improved I point it out to her and talk to her about it until she sees what ought to be done to it. She won’t let me tell her straight out what to do. Says that it wouldn’t be her book if I did.”
“And is it only style that you discuss with her?”
“Well, sometimes we talk about the characters and discuss what they would be likely to do under given circumstances and that sort of thing—just what you would do with yourself when you are doing a book.”
“And do your ideas always coincide?”
“Well,” said Bisgood uncomfortably, “not always. One or two of Dorothy’s ideas about how people behave are a little—a little misguided,”
I had to leave him then, because I had an appointment, but frequently during the weeks that followed I ran across him.
“How’s Dorothy’s book!” I asked
“It’s getting along,” said Bisgood. Then in his desperate misery he would become confiding. “It’s worse than writing a book yourself, you know. Dorothy’s so confoundedly touchy about things. I have the devil of a time getting her to modify some of her opinions sometimes. You know what it is like sometimes when the characters of the book you are writing take charge on their own and do things you never dreamed of when you started? Well, it is like that, but worse, because generally when that happens you like the new turn the book is taking. And Dorothy and I talk about the book for hours every evening and all day on Sundays. I know that book as far as it’s gone inside out and backward, and I’ve lived with its blasted characters for so long that I know them as well as I know the characters in my own. I have to coax and plead and beg before I can get Dorothy to see my point of view in anything.”
“And has her style made any progress?”
“Of course it has, now that she’s done such a lot of this book. She’s able to write what she means now—you know, when you start you find yourself meaning one thing and writing another—and her style is—» well, it’s forming.”
“And you don’t like it now that it is forming?”
Bisgood was still loyal.
“It’s—it’s a bit flamboyant. Nothing really the matter with it, but it’s not the sort of style I could use in any book of mine.”
“Just as well that it isn’t your book, then,” I suggested.
That made Bisgood smile lopsidedly.
“Er—yes,” said Bisgood.
The next time I met him he was looking thinner and paler than ever.
“You’re looking a bit done, old man. Been overworking?”
“A little. It’s this dam’ novel of Dorothy.”
“What’s the matter now?”
“Usual thing. Argue and argue and argue. And it’s worrying me just as much as if it were my own work. I haven’t done a thing of my own since Dorothy started it. We’ve begun talking about the title now.”
“Really? What’s your idea?”
“I should like it to be called Grace Raydon. That’s the name of one of the principal characters.”
“And what does Dorothy say to that?”
“She won’t hear of it. She wants it called Passion and Pain.”
“Umph. Can’t say that there is any similarity between the titles. Have you finished it yet, then?”
Bisgood winced.
“No. Very nearly though. That’s the trouble.”
“What’s the trouble?”
“You see, when we were talking about the book before Dorothy started it, we had worked out a nice neat ending which I thought would do beautifully. It was unassuming and pointed in a vague sort of way, and left the reader wondering. Just the sort of ending that I like. But since then Dorothy’s had another idea. She wants to change the end right round and bring in all sorts of silly things like a marriage between two absolutely incompatible people—(We made them incompatible to start with, deliberately, for the sake of another part of the plot.)—and when I tell her that it would be sheer wickedness to condemn two people like that to live together for the rest of their lives she says that the sudden love which will spring up between them, because the man will impress his personality on the girl’s and make them one that way, will put all that right. It’s balmy, of course. I don’t think there is any surer way of making any girl of any character at all hate you than by impressing your personality on her. But Dorothy is very determined about it.”
“You’d better try impressing your personality on her. That would do good two ways—it would make her agree to end the book your way and at the same time it would show her what the process is like.”
Bisgood scowled at me in a positively petulant fashion.
The next time I saw him it was obvious that something more than usually unpleasant had happened.
“What is it this time?” I asked.
“Engagement’s broken off. Dorothy broke it.”
I tried to sound sorry for him, but my heart was not in it, and anyway Bisgood repulsed my sympathy on the spot.
“Don’t mind so much about the engagement,” he said, “I suppose that was inevitable, after a fashion. What’s worrying me is the book. It is entirely in Dorothy’s hands now, and she will be able to do anything she likes with it. End it how she likes, call it what she likes, publish it if she likes—if she can find any one brave enough. It’s irksome, rather. I’ve lived with that dam’ book for months and months now, and I’ve grown fond of it. That’s queer, really, when you come to think how you generally hate the thing you’re working on. It’s a part of me, and now Dorothy’ll start hacking it about. I suppose it’s because I’ve spent such a hell of a lot of trouble over the blighted thing that I don’t want to lose sight of it now. I miss it, somehow.”
Some months after I came across Bright Love, a novel by Dorothy Hardcastl
e, and naturally enough I read it. It was an amazing piece of fiction. It started soberly enough. Every few lines you could see Bisgood’s influence cropping out—he has a staid, sober, milk-and-water bread-and-butter style, tempering down the general flamboyant tendency of the book. Bisgood gets his effects by allusiveness, not by the sheer bludgeon work which I had to attribute to Dorothy. The general effect of the first three-quarters of the book was queer and stimulating and mixed—gin-and-bittery. And then, after having been held in check for all that time, Dorothy fairly let herself go. The end of the book went with a bang. One of the minor male characters, hitherto kept severely sat on, broke loose, displayed himself in his true colors, brought the brainy heroine to heel by a strong-hand mixture of three parts rape to one of seduction, and triumphed vigorously over every one else, so that the book ended in a blaze of glory that left one dazed and stunned and yet with an extraordinary feeling of satisfaction—it was so obvious that everything that hero did was possible to the mildest reader. After the pawkiness of the opening the end came as a surprise—a dénouement as effective as the ending of the first O. Henry story one reads. It was a sheer massed brutal attack upon the reader hitherto mildly interested, and it achieved its end. A perilous end to seek, but Dorothy had attained it in this case without too close an approach either to the Scylla of blatancy or the Charybdis of ineffectuality. Clearly the debt she owed Bisgood was considerable, for it must have been thanks to his painstaking development of her style that she was able to achieve such an effect.
I put the book down when I had finished it and said to myself:
“Holy Moses! If this concoction doesn’t sell thirty thousand in the next six weeks I’ll—I’ll try to write something like it myself.”
It sold more.
The six weeks were just elapsed when I ran into Bisgood, this time at a party.
“Hullo, Bisgood,” I said. “Bright Love seems to be doing well.”
“It seems like it,” said Bisgood gloomily. “The only thing I’m glad about is that the blighter who published it had at least the decency to cut the title Dorothy wanted.”
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