Adventures in Two Worlds

by A. J. Cronin

  The place selected for our preposterous adventure was Dalchenna farm, a small steading situated on Loch Fyne, a few miles from Inveraray, in the western Highlands of Scotland. And three weeks later, when all the details of the transfer of the practice had been settled and Dr Green, the new incumbent, was satisfactorily installed, we set out for this remote spot, the car jammed with our belongings, our two boys wild with excitement

  I will acknowledge that, with suitcases falling on my head at every curve, my mood was scarcely a confident one. Yet as we sped along, that fine June day, my heart lifted – after all, we had not had a real holiday in years. And when at last, after a twelve hours’ run, we reached the moors and mountains of our native countryside, I stopped the car and turned to my wife. Her glance was as tender as my own, and suddenly, forgivingly, she threw her arms around my neck. Lambs were frisking in the meadow, a stream fretted by the sunshine, rippled by the roadside, our children, released from the back seat, were gathering wild daffodils.

  ‘It’s wonderful to be back again,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘You’ll be well here, dear … well and strong. We’ll have a lovely time … And we’ll forget all about that stupid old book.’

  Part Four

  Chapter Thirty

  The Highland clachan of Inveraray, little more than a cluster of whitewashed cottages huddled about the castle of the Duke of Argyll, lies among a wild grandeur of mountains at the head of the lovely inlet of the sea which was once the haunt of that delectable fish, the Loch Fyne herring. But the herring, for no known reason other than that it is unpredictable in its habits, had some years before abandoned these waters, extinguishing a profitable industry, sending the trawler fleet to Lossiemouth and Fraserburgh, leaving the village in all its native solitude. Dalchenna farm, which I had rented, was some two miles down the lonely loch shore, and despite the remoteness of the scene, we fell in love with it at first sight. The farmhouse was a snug building, with nasturtiums and scarlet fuchsias climbing its grey stone walls; on all sides green meadows surrounded us; beyond were woods of alder carpeted with bluebells and mitred bracken into which, as we approached, a roe deer bounded; while above towered the heather-clad hills, source of a stream, filled with trout, that tumbled down in golden spate towards the loch.

  For the two boys, aged four and seven, who really had no recollection of anything but city life, the place was truly a wonderland. Barelegged and in kilts, they roamed the woods in company with my wife, climbed the hills, bathed, boated on the loch, fished in the stream, chased the rabbits, gathered shells and starfishes on the shore, helped Will, the hersdman, to milk the cows, and Annie, the dairymaid, to churn the butter. For the mother and her sons, the day was one long, perpetual delight – they grew brown as berries, ate like hawks, and slept like hunters. But for me, alas – for the poor parent who was the instigator of the scheme – the picture was somewhat different.

  Having emphatically declared before my entire household that I would write a novel – tacitly implying, of course, that it was the fault of every other member of the household that I had not written twenty novels – I found myself faced with the unpleasant necessity of justifying my rash remarks. All I could do was to retire, with a show of courage and deep purpose, to the top attic of the house, which had been at once selected as ‘the room for Daddy to write in’. Here I was confronted by a square deal table, by a pile of twopenny exercise books, a dictionary, and a thesaurus. Nor must I forget the pabulum prescribed by Dr Bennett and treasured in some suitable domestic background, for I am proud of that bland stimulus. Too often in the bad old days brandy has been the chief inspiration of novelists.

  It was the morning following our arrival. Amazingly, for that latitude, the sun shone. Our little dinghy danced entrancingly at anchor on the loch, waiting to be rowed. My car stood in the garage, waiting to be driven. The trout in the river lay head to tail, waiting to be caught. The hills stood fresh and green, waiting to be climbed. And I – I stood at the window of the little upstairs room. Wincingly, I looked at the sun, the loch, the boat, the car, the river, and the mountains; then sadly turned and sat down before my deal table, my exercise books, and my dictionary. ‘What a fool you are,’ I said to myself gloomily, and I used an adjective to magnify my imbecility. How often during the next three months was I to repeat the assertion – each time with stronger adjectives.

  But in the meantime I was going to begin. Firmly I opened the first exercise book, firmly I jogged my fountain pen out of its habitual inertia. Firmly I poised that pen and lifted my head for inspiration.

  It was a pleasant view through that narrow window: a long green field ran down to a bay of the loch. There was movement. Six cows, couched in the shadow of a hawthorn hedge, ruminated with steady rhythm; an old goat with an arresting beard tinkled his bell in search, I thought, of dandelions; a yellow butterfly hovered indecisively above a scarlet spurt of fuchsias; some white hens pottered about, liable to sudden excitement and pursuits.

  It had all a seductive, dreamlike interest. I thought I might contemplate the scene for a minute or two before settling down to work. I contemplated. Then somebody knocked at the door and said, ‘Lunchtime.’ I started, and searched hopefully for my glorious beginning, only to find that the exercise book still retained its blank virginity.

  I rose and went downstairs, and as I descended those white-scrubbed wooden steps I asked myself angrily if I were not a humbug. Was I like the wretched poet d’Argenton in Daudet’s Jack, with his ‘Parva domus magna quies’ and his Daughter of Faust, which, as the days slipped on, never progressed beyond that stillborn opening sentence: ‘In a remote valley of the Pyrenees … teeming with legends. ‘Was I like that? I carved the mutton glumly. My two young sons, removed by their nurse to a remote distance in order that they might on no account disturb the novelist, had returned in high spirits. The younger, aged four, now lisped breezily:

  ‘Finished your book yet, Daddy?’

  The elder, always of a corrective tendency, affirmed with the superior wisdom of his two additional years:

  ‘Don’t be silly. Daddy’s only half finished.’

  Whereupon their mother smiled upon them reprovingly:

  ‘No, dears, Daddy can only have written a chapter or two.’ I felt not like a humbug, but a criminal. Determinedly I called to mind the aphorism of an old schoolmaster of mine. ‘Get it down,’ he used to declare. ‘If it stays in your head it’ll never be anything. Get it down.’ So after lunch I went straight upstairs and began to get my ideas down.

  I could fill a volume with the emotional experiences of those next three months. Although the theme of the novel I wished to write was already outlined in my mind – the tragic record of a man’s egotism and bitter pride – I was, beyond these naïve fundamentals, lamentably unprepared. Most novelists who suddenly blaze into print in their thirties have practised their vice secretly for years. But I, until this moment, had written nothing but prescriptions and scientific papers. It took great determination to drive me through my inhibitions, like a circus rider through a paper hoop.

  I had no pretensions to technique, no knowledge of style or form. The difficulty of simple statements staggered me. I spent hours looking for an adjective. I corrected and recorrected until the page looked like a spider’s web; then I tore it up and started all over again.

  Yet once I had begun, the thing haunted me. My characters took shape, spoke to me, excited me. When an idea struck me in the middle of the night I would get up, light a candle – we had, of course, no electricity in this remote spot – and sprawl on the floor until I had translated it to paper. I was possessed by the very novelty of what I did. At first my rate of progress was some eight hundred laboured words a day. But the end of the second month I was readily accomplishing two thousand.

  For the next three months, through all that lovely summer, while the others enjoyed themselves, I remained chained to my desk. Despite their pleadings that I should take a day off, I kept myself on the rack relentlessly
, all day and part of the night, coming down late for my peptonised meals, answering the children absently, seemingly anxious only to get back to my private treadmill.

  Although at the time I maintained a stoic, a sphinxlike silence, I will now confess to the miseries I went through. There were redeeming moments when, carried away by what I had written, living with ray characters in the drama they were enacting, I dared to hope that I was doing something fine; but for the most; part I felt that all my drudgery was quite useless, that I was wasting my time in sheer futility.

  The worst moment came when I was halfway through the book, and the typescript of the first chapters arrived from a secretarial bureau in London. As I read the opening pages, a wave of horror swept over me. I thought, ‘Have I written this awful stuff? No one will ever read it. No one will ever publish it. I simply can’t go on!’

  I had the impulse there and then to throw up the whole project, destroy everything I had written. It was irresistible. I got up with a set face, took the manuscript to the back door, and flung it on the ash heap.

  When the news was known, a dire silence fell upon the house. At lunch, the very children were silent. I remember so well – it started to rain, a dank, Scots afternoon, and, scared by my scowl, my wife and the two boys left me without a word.

  Drawing a sullen satisfaction from my surrender, or, as I preferred to phrase it, my return to sanity, I went for a walk in the drizzling rain. Halfway down the loch shore I came upon old Angus, the farmer, patiently and laboriously ditching a patch of the bogged and peaty heath which made up the bulk of his hard-won little croft. As I drew near, he gazed up at me in some surprise; he knew of my intention and, with that inborn Scottish reverence for ‘ letters’, had tacitly approved it. When I told him what I had just done, and why, his weathered face slowly changed, his keen blue eyes, beneath misted sandy brows, scanned me with disappointment and a queer contempt. He was a silent man, and it was long before he spoke. Even then his words were cryptic.

  ‘No doubt you’re the one that’s right, Doctor, and I’m the one that’s wrong…’ He seemed to look right through me. ‘ My father ditched this bog all his days and never made a pasture. I’ve dug it all my days and I’ve never made a pasture. But, pasture or no pasture’ – he placed his foot on the spade – ‘ I cannot help but dig. For my father knew and I know that if you only dig enough, a pasture can be made here.’

  I understood. I watched his dogged figure, working away, determined to see the job through at all costs. In the silence I tramped back to the house, drenched, shamed, furious, and picked the soggy bundle off the ash heap. I dried it in the kitchen oven. Then I flung it on the table and set to work again with a kind of frantic desperation. I would not be beaten, I would not give in. Night after night, keeping myself awake by sheer will power, I wrote harder than ever. At last, toward the end of September, I wrote ‘Finin.’ The relief was unbelievable. I had kept my word. I had created a book Whether it was good, bad, or indifferent I did not know.

  With a sigh of incredible relief, I packed the manuscript in an old cardboard box, tied it with farmyard twine. Then, having found a publisher’s address in a two-year-old almanac, I dispatched the untidy parcel and promptly forgot about it. Like a man who has lost a heavy burden, I began to bathe and fish and row with the boys, to roam the hills and the moors with them, to behave once again like a normal human being.

  The days succeeded one another, and nothing happened. That nondescript package might well have disappeared forever into the void. By stem parental edict the subject was taboo in the family, and when the younger son inadvertently made innocent reference to ‘Daddy’s book’, he received the blackest of looks.

  In point of fact, I had no illusions – I was fully aware that aspiring authors acquire rejection slips more readily than cheques, and that first manuscripts usually come back a score of times before being accepted – if indeed they are ever accepted at all. My surprise and delight may therefore be imagined when, one morning in October, I received a wire from the head of the publishing firm which I had selected, informing me that the novel had been accepted for publication, offering an advance of fifty pounds, and asking me to come to London immediately.

  As we read the telegram, a stunned awe fell upon the farm living-room. Fifty pounds, cash down, seemed a lot of money, and perhaps later there might even be a little more, on account of royalties. Pale and rather shaky, I muttered:

  ‘Maybe, with luck and economy, I can make a living as a writer. Get the timetable and find out when the next train leaves for London.’

  Looking back upon the events which followed, it seems incredible, even now, how swiftly, how amazingly, from that uncertain moment, the flood tide of success was loosed. This first novel, Hatter’s Castle, written despairingly on twopenny exercise books, thrown out and rescued from the rubbish heap at the eleventh hour, was published in the spring of 1930. It was acclaimed by critics, chosen by the Book Society, translated into twenty-one languages, serialised, dramatised, and filmed. It went into endless editions, has sold, to date, approximately three million copies, and goes selling still It launched me upon a literary career with such an impetus that, once and for all, I hung up my stethoscope and put away that little black bag – my medical days were over.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  When, we moved south from Dalchenna it became necessary for us to find a house. Authors who arrive at sudden prosperity are often tempted to a way of life far beyond their means. But my native caution rejected all such boldness.

  ‘This may not last,’ I warned my wife. Instead of purchasing a historic mansion we rented a small apartment in a quiet part of London.

  However, with my second novel, our literary good fortune showed no sign of abating, and when my wife declared that the time had come for us to have a place in the country, I agreed. After some months of searching we were lucky enough to find at Sullington in Sussex, set well away from motoring roads and traffic, a Georgian rectory with great charm and character, an old-world walled garden, age-mellowed outbuildings, and a glorious view of the Downs.

  The house had been built of hand-quarried stone a century and a half ago by the vicar of Sullington, who had lived there with his wife for close on sixty years – a mere bagatelle in a district where centenarians are common as blackberries in the hedgerows. Rich, hospitable, and a decided ‘character’, the reverend gentleman was matched in amiable eccentricity, as the years advanced, by his lady. The pair were universally beloved. The vicar lived en prince – kept his carriage, ran his farm, and rode his own hunters to every meet for miles around. His wine cellar was the envy of the district, the delight of his friends, butler, and herds – for, if rumour did not lie, he doctored his sick cows on bottled college claret! As for his spouse, her charity was boundless. Disdaining the carriage, she mounted her tricycle and pedalled stoutly on her errands of mercy, a basket of eggs or a boiled chicken dangling from the handlebars, her only concession to increasing age and bulk being sixpence paid to the village boys to push her up the steep incline of Sullington hill.

  The property was now in the hands of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners and, after much formal negotiation, the sale was completed and we moved into our new home. Here, since the past few months had been somewhat trying, I looked forward to a period of relaxation.

  But if I had expected to enjoy a measure of seclusion, isolated by the privacy of my small estate, I was rudely undeceived. The new world in which I found myself was more frantic than the old. There is a penalty exacted by success, and soon I discovered how multitudinous could be the demands upon an author lucky, or unlucky, enough to occupy the public eye. Upon such a one come requests to open welfare centres, garden fêtes and charity bazaars; to speak at club breakfasts, literary luncheons, and gala dinners; to deliver ponderous anniversary orations on the birth of Burns and the death of Dickens; to lecture all over the country on Proust, Shakespeare, Shaw, Dostoievsky, and the function of the novel; to broadcast appeals for charitabl
e institutions, infant hospitals, and homes for aged mariners; to accept membership in a score of dining-out societies designed to propagate culture and cirrhosis of the liver; to sign books in department stores, preside at dull authors’ committees, inaugurate book fairs, make the commemoration address and give away die prizes at school speech days; in brief, to stand perpetually in the limelight in the public cause.

  Now at one time I might have been delighted to do these things. And no doubt for one who had, only a few years before, struggled in obscurity, it was flattering to be sought after by the great and the near-great, to have one’s mantelpiece crowded with important gilt-edged invitation cards, to be made life governor of a famous hospital, proposed for membership on important national committees, pressed repeatedly to stand as a candidate for Parliament, above all, to receive in shops, theatres, restaurants, and the public street that immediate recognition and obsequious attention which is the most subversive and most vulgar form of popularity.

  Yet lately a strange change had taken place in me. When I sat beside the Duchess of B—— at the County Annual Banquet I was profoundly bored and only maintained a pretence of politeness through a sheer effort of my will. At the Guildhall, when I got to my feet, after eight deadly courses – proceeding from turtle soup through the rich textures of turbot, quail, and haunch of venison – and delivered to an audience of pink-jowled, equally surfeited, city fathers, an oration on the need for morality in letters – a speech filled with platitudes, flavoured with humorous anecdotes well calculated to make obese bellies ripple with amusement, and ending in a high-flown peroration on the virtues of patriotism, religion, and motherhood which brought down the house in a rattle of applause, I knew only too well that I was behaving like a mountebank. I saw myself, with a sombre inner eye, as completely insincere, the betrayer of a principle I had never recognised before. It was a singular paradox. For years, driven by that thirsting and insatiable demon, that desire for success, implanted by my early penury, forced on by the less worthy dement of my personality, I had sought relentlessly, step by step, the golden apples of the Hesperides, gift of Earth to Hera, and now that the fruit was within my grasp, all ready to be plucked, I saw it suddenly as dross, a lure both tawdry and worthless.