Mrs Oliphant, of course, had no mechanical help of any kind, only keeping a small container of prepared ink into which she put a few drops of water, enough for each night’s work. On the other hand, she took for granted one great advantage of the nineteenth-century writer—that is, a constant supply of listeners. These were nieces, second cousins, friends’ daughters, some of them apparently living in the house and all of them ready to give their opinion when she wanted to read what she had just written aloud. That, I’ve always felt, would be of considerable help. But I can’t tell, it’s an experience I’ve never had.
Before I start on a novel I don’t need a synopsis of what is going to happen, but I do need the title, the opening paragraph, and the last one. Once I’ve got these, I can start.
In 1990 a book of mine came out called The Gate of Angels. It was one of those novels that start from a persistent, even obsessive, idea or image (the famous example would be George Eliot’s Silas Marner—she called it ‘a story which came across my other plans by a sudden inspiration, a sort of legendary tale, suggested to me by having once, in early childhood, seen a linen weaver with a bag on his back’). The image that stayed with me wasn’t—though they so often are—from childhood. It was something I saw on a visit to Cambridge, through the window of a bus, somewhere near Newnham. It was a tremendously windy day, and on one of Cambridge’s unexpected patches of green land there were cows moving about under the willow trees. The wind had torn great wreaths and branches off the willows and thrown them down to the ground, and the cows were ecstatic—they were prancing, almost dancing; they’d hoped all their lives to get at the trees and now at last they could. It struck me that in this orderly University city, the headquarters of rational and scientific thinking, things had suddenly turned upside down, reason had given way to imagination.
It happened that I had been wondering what exactly was meant by the term ‘Mach 2.’ I knew that it was a measure of supersonic speed and I thought it was named after a distinguished scientist, but I didn’t know who Mach was, and certainly didn’t realize that he was an opponent of Rutherford and the early atomic physicists because he considered that atoms were only a provisional idea; they were unobservables, and science shouldn’t be based on the unobservable, otherwise it was no better off than metaphysics, which asks us to speculate about the unseeable. While I was trying to think about this, with the image of the cows and the willow trees intervening, a novel suggested itself, turning on the problem of body and soul. The title would be The Unobservables. But the publishers, or rather their sales department, rejected this immediately as lacking not only in sex but also in human appeal of any kind. I changed it to Mistakes Made by Scientists, which I liked almost as much, but I was told, quite correctly, that it wouldn’t fit on the jacket and didn’t sound like a novel anyway.
On this one occasion, then, I had to work without a title. Still, my attempts to find out more about Ernst Mach (1838—1916) had put me into the right period—that is, the time just before the First World War when (in Cambridge in particular) there was a fierce debate between scientists and metaphysicians. I imagined Fred—representing the mind and reason, though only partly—as a young physicist during the glorious early experimental years at the Cavendish, and Daisy as a strong young woman training to be a hospital nurse. Of course, they wouldn’t be anything like precise opposites. To start with, both of them would be young and poor, though Fred’s would be the poverty of a shabby country vicarage and Daisy would come from teeming South London.
Daisy is a fearless survivor, a favourite type with the late-Victorian and Edwardian light novelists—W. W. Jacobs, for instance, or Barry Pain in Eliza. Men don’t disconcert these girls, nor do the regulations and prohibitions men make. In the following bit of dialogue Daisy is waiting her turn for an interview with the matron of a great London hospital, the Blackfriars. A notice painted on the inner door reads: ‘This hospital turns away more than a thousand applications a year from persons desiring to train as nurses. Every year perhaps 4 or 5 are accepted.’
Daisy was the last to be called. She looked with respect at the woman sitting on the other side of the desk. You had to struggle, perhaps fight and bleed, to get to a position like that. Matron was short, pale and pale-haired, as straight as though suspended from a hook.
‘You may sit down.’
She repeated from the application paper in front of her Daisy’s name and address.
‘You are nearly eighteen. Are you a single woman or a widow? If you are a widow, have you children? If children, how are they provided for?’
‘I’m single.’
‘And have you anyone dependent on you for support?’
‘Not now.’
‘You may call me Matron.’
‘Not now, Matron.’
‘But recently?’
‘There was my mother. She died in March.’
‘And that left you free to apply to enter the nursing profession, which of course would entail your living away from home.’
‘I suppose it did.’
‘So that her death has been release for you.’
‘No, I won’t say that, and I don’t say that. It wasn’t a release for her either.’
The matron appeared not to listen to this, but fixed her attention on the papers on her desk. ‘Your birth certificate. You’re too young, but the Governors have changed their policy about that to some extent. Vaccination certificate. Height?’ Daisy said she thought five foot six, without heels. ‘It’s not a matter of thinking,’ the matron said. ‘Educated at the Victuallers’ School, certificate of good conduct and application. Did you study Latin? Do you understand what I mean by enemata?’
Daisy did not, but said she was prepared to learn.
‘I don’t expect the girls who come to us to know anything. Now, are you strong and healthy, and have you always been so? Let me explain, in order to save time, that several of the applications today mentioned, apparently only as an afterthought, that they had rheumatic fever as children, which meant that if they were accepted here they might collapse and become a nuisance and an expense at any given moment.’
‘I’ve always been strong and healthy,’ said Daisy and beneath her put-on clothes she felt her physical self-respect extend and stretch itself, like a cat in the sun.
‘And your sight and hearing are perfect?’
‘Yes, I think so. I’ve never thought about them.’
‘You notice that I wear reading-glasses myself. I need them now, but as a probationer I did not need them. Have you any physical defects?’
‘What kind of defects?’ Daisy asked, a little troubled.
‘Any that I can’t see at a cursory glance. You may be subject to very heavy periods. You may be marked and scarred. Your spine may be crooked…Have you any tendency to pulmonary complaints?’ She looked up sharply. ‘Do you understand what I mean by “pulmonary”?’
‘Yes, it means to do with the lungs.’
‘Pertaining to the lungs. A sickly nurse is of no use to the profession. One might call her an enemy of the profession. Above all, though, we don’t want a weakly habit of constant complaint. As a rough guide, remember that while the average man is ill for four days a year, a grown woman must expect to spend one fourth of her life in actual pain.’
Daisy felt a rush of admiration. So far she herself had done nothing like her fair share.
This is the ‘catechism type’ of dialogue, on which Joyce declared he based his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where one side has the right answers and the other sometimes knows them and sometimes has to guess them. It’s also a confrontation where the reader is asked to have some sympathy at least with both sides.
A Few Remarks on the First Draft
At the beginning I see that I hadn’t really settled Daisy’s age (or even her height). The qualifying age for probationers at that time was over twenty, but that was too old for Daisy, who is going to act with the rashness and curiosity of a very young girl, so in the
text I’ve made the hospital (not very probably) alter its admission policy. I’ve done this as unobtrusively as possible, as readers are very quick to notice this kind of mistake.
1.20 The distinction between ‘lady nurses’ and ordinary probationers is characteristic of the early 1900s and I wanted to get it in somewhere, but this wasn’t the place to do it. The matron would have seen immediately that Daisy was ‘of the domestic servant class.’
1.28 ‘That was not quite true.’ The concept of absolute scientific truth—Fred, the physicist, holds it, and so does the matron—is totally different from Daisy’s. Her idea of truth is relative, and largely depends on her own convenience and the wish not to hurt other people’s feelings. This is important to the story, but it’s not the moment to hold up the dialogue.
1.41 ‘You should call me Matron.’ The matron ought to have said this much earlier. She detects the independent streak in Daisy and must make it as clear as possible from the beginning that there is no place for it in the running of a great hospital.
1.63 ‘(TEST here).’ A mistake. Quite out of place for Matron to make a random test at an interview, or indeed at any time.
1.65 ‘I need them now.’ I left this in because it’s not meant as a sentimental reflection, only as a warning to an ignorant girl.
At the end, however, as I saw as soon as I read it over, the dialogue goes completely to pieces. I got the question ‘Have you ever been present at a death or a birth?’ out of one of the numerous handbooks published around 1912—14 on the nursing profession. It has a certain force, but it’s wrong here, and so is Matron’s ‘my dear’ at 1.86. The two women must end, as they began, as adversaries who feel respect for each other, but nothing more (or less) than that. Daisy finishes ‘down,’ but not down and out. No one ever gets the better of Daisy except herself, or rather her own weaknesses.
All this seems like paying far too much attention to an unimportant passage. But as I’m a hopelessly addicted writer of short books I have to try to see to it that every confrontation and every dialogue has some reference to what I hope will be understood as the heart of the novel. As I’ve tried to explain, it’s about body, mind, and spirit.
from Novelists at Work,
edited by Maura Dooley, Seren Books, 2000
PART V
Coda
LAST WORDS
‘Old end-game lost of old,’ Beckett calls it, ‘play and lose and have done with losing.’ A human being is old when he has survived long enough to name, with absolute confidence, a year, one of the next thirty, which he won’t be there to see. Clinically speaking, during these last stages he is likely to lose his memory for recent events, his skill at problem solving, his power of abstract reasoning, and his ability to work with new and unfamiliar systems. (This will be partly because he can’t adapt to them, but just as much because he doesn’t admit the need for them.) What survives, if his body doesn’t let him down completely, will be word fluency, understanding, enthusiasm, memory of long past events.
This looks like a special providence for old writers. Story time can continue to the very end, even if they are reduced (as Shakespeare surely was) to playing the last games against themselves. The memory of distant events and atmospheres, in particular, will stand by them. ‘My mind,’ George Eliot found, ‘works with the most freedom and the keenest sense of poetry in my remote past.’ Middlemarch followed. But the writer’s memory is of a special kind. The opening of L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between—‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’—suggests that the return to childhood may not be consoling or even safe. At the age of fifty-eight Hartley felt himself compelled to go back there, putting it, however, a few years earlier than it really was, partly so that there would be no telephones and the small boy would be absolutely necessary to the lovers at the great house as a go-between, partly because the date 1900 would show Edwardian England at its deceptive ‘new dawn.’ There the narrator, as an ageing man, re-enters the old domain of half-guilty, half-innocent emotions, ‘ignorant of the language but compelled to listen.’
An old writer is even less likely than any other old person to be serene, mellow, and so forth. More probable are a vast irritation with human perversity, sometimes with fame itself, and an obstinate sense, against all odds, of the right direction for the future. ‘I detest the hardness of old age,’ Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, the year before her death. ‘I feel it. I rasp. I’m tart.’ But she added, ‘I walk over the marsh saying, I am I: and must follow that furrow, not copy another.’ This certainty, even if it makes the readers uneasy, acts as a call to order, even as an unintentional reproach.
Tolstoy wrote Resurrection at the age of seventy-two, ferociously and without warning, to raise money for a charitable appeal. By this time he treated all fiction, and his own in particular, with reckless injustice. He was, he said, simply the clown in front of the ticket office, grimacing in order to get the crowd inside, where they would learn the truth. They would learn from Resurrection that man-made law and punishment—but also man-made revolution—is useless and evil. The resurrection takes place now and on this earth in the individual soul of every man and woman, as soon as they begin to pity each other. Prince Nekhlyudov is serving on a jury when a prostitute is brought into the dock, accused of murdering her drunken client. He recognizes her as his aunts’ ‘half servant, half ward, the black-eyed, light-footed Katusha.’ Ten years earlier he had seduced her and left her pregnant. Now, when she is sentenced to exile, he follows her, trying to make reparation, from one convict camp to another across the breadth of Russia to Siberia. As readers we struggle alongside, knowing very well that Tolstoy cares nothing for our difficulties. The pages are crowded with characters whose names we can’t remember, some introduced almost at the last moment. We are lectured unmercifully, and there is nowhere to hide from Tolstoy’s indignation. But the old storyteller’s art still beguiles at one moment and then, at another, strikes like a blow in the face.
To finish it, Tolstoy worked day and night, violently resentful of interruptions. Boris Pasternak, whose father did the illustrations, remembered the glue sizzling on the range ready to mount the drawings while a uniformed guard waited outside to take them to the Petersburg train. Such was the urgency of the old man and his book. The fact that the secretary of the charity committee had second thoughts, feeling that they ought not to have accepted the profits from Resurrection because it aroused lust, shows that moral giants were in conflict here. Tolstoy replied with forbearance, but could have done so in the terms Joyce used about Ulysses—‘If Ulysses isn’t fit to read then life isn’t fit to live.’ So, too, could Thomas Hardy, meeting the attacks on Jude the Obscure (‘Jude the Obscene,’ Joyce’s brother, Stanislaus, called it, when sent out to buy it in Dublin). This powerful novel was the last of Hardy’s ‘ventures into sincerity.’ He had meant to call it The Simpletons—Jude being a simpleton to dream of a university education when he was born a stonemason’s son, and Sue, the ‘slight, pale, bachelor girl,’ ‘the intellectualized, emancipated bundle of nerves,’ being even more of a simpleton in trying to defy nature. For the first and only time (he was fifty-five) Hardy was writing about his exact contemporaries (when Sue leaves Jude she takes a steam tram). He had direct reforms, in education and in the marriage laws, to press for. But the book’s subject, as he made clear, was the ‘deadly war between flesh and spirit,’ which Jude is drawn into against his will, and which no reform is ever likely to alter. It was this, in 1895, which caused outcry. Hardy must have expected it, but he knew how to pretend to be astonished. Criticism of Jude, he said, completely cured him of any interest in novel writing. He had thirty-three more years to comment on the ironic and self-defeating business of living and dying, but he preferred to make his farewells in poetry.
Some late novels, however, have a note of leave-taking. News from Nowhere was one of the last books William Morris wrote, publishing it as a serial in The Commonweal in 1890. The subtitle is ‘An Epoch of
Rest,’ and although the rest is for the future inhabitants of England, the ‘Once Poor,’ I don’t think Morris would have chosen it if he hadn’t been getting on for sixty. He begins by looking at himself with kindly detachment as he comes back one night on the Hammersmith Underground, disgusted at having lost his temper at a socialist meeting. The party work is for equality, peace and fellowship, but ‘if I could but see a day of it! if I could but see it!’ When he wakes next morning, into the London of the twenty-first century, the builders and haymakers also see a day of William Morris. It is this that gives the story its pathos and tension. Morris is the guest of the future. He is treated with overwhelming hospitality, but, as he sees from the first, he is ‘other.’ His intellectual curiosity and interest in history make him an odd man out, and at times he gives the bright, contented people a touch of uneasiness, ‘making us feel as if we were longing for something we cannot have.’ The interaction between past and present follows him like a shadow. His journey up the Thames leads him to his own house at Kelmscott. It stands unchanged by the water meadows, but the garret bedrooms belong now to little boys, the sons Morris never had. And at Kelmscott, the journey’s end, he finds not that the vision fades but that the people of Nowhere can no longer see him. ‘I noticed that none of the company looked at me. A pang shot through me, as of some disaster long expected and suddenly realized.’
At the head of the last section of his James Joyce, Richard Ellmann printed a line from Finnegans Wake: ‘Quiet takes back her folded fields. Tranquille thanks. Adew.’ For Finnegan, the giant presence who sleeps beneath the city of Dublin, the wake is a resurrection as well as a funeral party, but Joyce, as he made an end of his book, felt exhausted, as though all the blood had run out of his brain. He calculated that the last passage, where Anna Livia runs out, ‘sea-silt saltsick,’ into the Irish Sea, fading into a murmur at the last, had cost him sixteen hundred hours of work since he started on his book. It had taken him fifteen years to find the words for the journey of the night mind, asleep and dreaming, which we all share between us. Two years after publication he was dead. He referred to the Wake as a monster and believed that in the course of it words had gone as far as he could take them. They had become ‘pure music.’ It may be for this reason that composers—John Cage, John Butler, Stephen Albert—have paid the Wake so much attention. But Joyce certainly never ceased to believe that speech is the distinguishing mark of human beings, and that things, too, have their language. Language and speech can both be reassembled, in Joyce’s own phrase, as a scissors-and-paste job, cut out and reassembled from everything he had heard and read, ‘engraved and retouched and edgewiped and puddenpadded’ to represent the truth even of the unconscious. The boldness of such an attempt at the end of a career, Gide thought, was more beautiful than the boldness of a young man. But Joyce, as always, was surprised that his readers didn’t laugh more at what, for him, had been comedy on the grand scale. Even in the final passage, where the river’s voice confounds sleep and death, he had not intended to be bitter. One might say, no more bitter than is necessary for a good Irish joke.
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